I just got back from one of the most positive collaborative experiences I've ever had.
So often I find myself trying to pick apart why a performance, theater experience, relationship, collaboration, whatever DIDN'T quite feel right, DIDN'T come off in a way that felt ideal. So often, the lessons I learn are negative lessons. It's important, yes, to draw what wisdom you can from moments of discomfort or disappointment...but it's equally important, isn't it, to identify/celebrate the times when everything feels like it goes RIGHT.
Long Story Short:
My friend and director, Marie Brown (who is directing Summer People at UT this fall) emailed me and my dear friend Erica about a month ago. Said she had some filmmaker friends in Boston who wanted to shoot a 10-minute movie. They had a location, they had the people, they didn't have a script: could we write one?
She sent us a description of the location: an old lakefront cabin in the Berkshires. Some other spots around the tiny town of Monterey, Massachusetts.
Three days later, we sent her 10-page scripts. Her friends chose one. Erica and I both worked on rewrites for it. They assembled a crew. Marie held auditions in Boston. I (I kid you not) IM'ed with a Texas-based friend on Facebook, and convinced him to get on a plane.
Two weeks later, we assembled for nine days. We shot on the porch, we shot IN the lake, we hiked to the top of a mountain with all our equipment for a day of shooting. Marie's baby was onhand, along with her mother (at one point) her husband (at another) and her best friend. Cari, Babs, and Yari Wolinsky, the film's producers, kept everything running smoothly. Everyone chipped in ideas about everything. The movie had TWO directors, Marie and Yari, and they managed to get along marvelously. I was there for rewrites (Erica couldn't make it), and worked with the actors (mostly through Marie). I bunked with our lead actress. Half of us played extras in the movie at some point. We had our actress jump in and out of the lake approximately three hundred times over the course of the week. Nearly every time, we had to dry her (AND her costume) between takes. Mark, our actor, looked like a frickin' Hugo Boss ad in his suit...in the water, and in a tree.
We were up at dawn, we shot all day, we pitched in where we could, we ate fabulous meals, we lived in ridiculously close quarters (literally sleeping on set), we watched the sun set over the lake every night, we kayaked, we swam between takes, we held bounce boards up for hours in bathing suits and fleeces, knee-deep in lake water, we taught Marie's daughter new words, we skinny-dipped, we napped when we could, and we ended our evenings curled up on the porch.
Hard work.
Heaven.
I could go on an on about the people, on and on about the beautiful shots we got. Of course, now the hard work (months in the editing room for Yari) starts. But for me, the last week will go down in the memory books as one of the best I ever spent. It made me think that my dream (Plays, Babies, Table -- the new mantra) might, just might, be a feasible reality.
I really lucked out that I got dragged into it.
The GOAL is to be the kind of person who can create the time and space in which that kind of experience can happen.
No comments:
Post a Comment