The day that nothing went right!

O.M.G.!!! Yesterday was the most hilariously/disasterously crazy day I've yet to experience. Let me give you a shortened run-down:


-I wake up in order to get over to Burbank at 7:30 AM, where we're all going to meet up and carpool over to the desert location outside of Palmdale.

-We get a late start from there (8:00), and then have to stop for gas and breakfast, so don't really hit the road till 8:30.

-Driving along, I get caught between a semi-truck and the exit to Rt. 14 N that I need, and the 2 other cars make it without me....we go along trying to find an exit to turn around.....turn around and the on-ramp from this side of the highway has been closed.....we get off once again, turn around so we're now going the orignial way that we came from, make the exit this time and after a few more U-turns just for good measure, we're on our way again. (P.S. my car consisted of me and Randy, our lead actor. In the U-Haul was James, and in the pick-up truck was Mark)

-We get to the location late, only to discover it doesn't matter because the helicopter couldn't fly out that morning due to heavy winds. We wwre supposed to start shooting about 9-10, be done by 1, and call it an early day. The copter couldn't make it to us until 12:30ish :-0

-Durning our time waiting for the chopper to arrive, me, Randy, and James decide to check out the highway location in my car while Mr. Director takes a nap. We drive along and find to the highway easily enough. It's nice and we decide to drive back.....James makes the suggestion that we can cut through using Avenue M and get back to Base Camp. We go......and freakin Avenue M is an off-road wonderland!!!!! Seriously.....hills, rocks, broken down junk yards full of strange and interesting trash mounds. My poor baby Buick took the beating of a life time :-/ It was amazingly fun and adventurous, but had some scary parts thrown in where we got lost for a bit and scrapped up the bottom, etc. etc...... Truly Dukes of Hazard stlye :-)

-Got back to Base Camp. Agrued for 30 minutes on whether or not we should go to town for lunch before the chopper came. By this time, the chopper had come and it was off to the races.

-The Base Camp owner (Teddy), a really great guy from Poland, gave us a briefing on helicopter saftey (always exit the copter to the front so as not to die a bloddy death in the rear roter). We got in and off we went a flying :-D It was AWESOME! I <3 helicopters. The only downside was the terrible noise! There were only 3 pairs of earphones, and 4 of us, so I didn't get anything. The roters gave me a right headache, but I didn't care cause I was freaking filming a movie while flying in a helicopter in the freaking desert :-P WICKED!!!!

-Then.......the picture car (the pick-up that drove fine all the way out to this location) decided it wanted to die on us. This is not the first time it's died...it's an old car....but we're in the middle of the freakin desert, with a helicopter on rent and the clock ticking. We land the helicopter and I'm sent out with jumper cables, WD-40, and rope to try and help.

-After getting lost in the back roads of the desert again (this time by myslef) and driving over a good deal of glass and thinking I had a flat, I made it to the highway. They tied up the Buick to use as a tow. This was a mis-adventure in towing. I did get the pick-up moving, and they tried to pop it into gear several times, but it just wasn't having it. The hemp rope we had "popped" a heck of a lot more then the pick-up, so we eventually gave it up as a lost cause.

-As luck would have it, a friend of the helicopter pilot had stopped by to see how the movie shot was going. He was a mecanic with a tow in the back of his truck :-) We were all excited.....BUT.....as he pulled in to get into position to tow our pick-up, his own truck got stuck in a ditch and couldn't get out. The tow-truck needed a freakin tow!!! It was fate I tell you ;-p Lucky for us, a few minutes later, an even bigger truck came along (about half the size of a semi) and towed out our tow truck. The tow truck then towed out our pick-up and now the car is sitting dead back at Base Camp. Whoa!

-We packed up to leave for the day, as the sun was already going down, we had no picture car, and were all bloody exhausted anyway. After figuring out who rides with who, I took back James and Randy. We did stop at a nice place to eat called Steer and Stein. The food was alright, but it was food, and I was hungery. Julie (the other P.A.) and her son John also joined us for the dinner. Julie had driven up in a separate car, and had gotten lost for several hours trying to find our desert location.

-I dropped off Randy and James and continued on home. I thought it was very lucky that I had missed the rush hour traffic, cause the ride home was smooth.....then I got back home.....We have a gate gaurding our parking lot and you have to push a garage opener to open the gate. I pushed the opener, and the gate was open, however, another roomie from inside was taking out the trash to the dumpster, and had pushed the button inside the house to "open" the gate. Unfortunately, this action closed the gate, right on my rear driver-side door :-0 The gate is busted and my car has a few dents, scratches, and the door-fin-thing fell off. I used super glue and the clips to re-attach the door-fin-thing, but the dents and scratches are there to stay I'm afraid....and the gate is totally busted :-/ I really hope it isn't much to fix, cause I really don't want to get charged for something like that :-0 It is amazing to me tho, because 3 minutes after this happened, my land-lady Stella pulled up and got the story. Don't know why she was there in the first place, but I guess it was lucky, cause no one had to call her.


We're going to try this desert adventure again tonight, and see how it goes. I'm very tired, and as much as I love working on this movie, I'll be glad when filming is over and I can get back to a more human schedule. I think everyone needs a pick-me-up after yesterday. It truly was a waste of film and of a day (no matter how funny it was), so hopefully today we can get back on track and moving :-)

I am going to download the pics of these misadventures and do a big pic post for you soon. Right now I'm just soooooooooo tired. I'll try to get them up by tomorrow afternoon.