Worming Up

I wonder if this ever happened to Alfred Hitchcock.

So, there we were, across the street from the United Nations, where a scene from “North by Northwest”—one my favorite Hitchcock films--was shot.

I was the director now, having signed up for The 48 Hour Film Project, where a team writes, shoots and edits and submits a film in, well, 48 hours.

Only we were contending with a massive worm that was wriggling its way toward the park bench that we had planned to use in our scene.

What would Hitch do?

I ws here at my sistet's urging, after she told me that a colleague of hers was participating in the competition and looking for a crew.

Immediately, I cranked up the excuse machine: I don’t time for this, I don’t know how to shoot a film—the usual crap.

Now bear in mind, I’ve been promising to work on more film sets every single year for the last several decades, so I could get the knowledge and confidence I need to shoot a film of my own.

Of course, I was totally ignoring the elephant in my brain, which was roaring, “hey, schmuck, if you work on this film shoot, you’ll have more film experience, won’t you?”

I signed up and after checking the call sheet, I saw the only position I could even remotely handle was director--the writer's position was filled--even though the only film directing I ever did was nearly a decade ago, when I took a directing course at the School of Visual of Arts.

September in the Rain...

However, the class was conducted under extremely safe conditions where I shot one scene indoors.

Luckily, Anne, our producer, had vast filmmaking experience and promised to back me up.

I got up before dawn on Saturday, trekked over to Manhattan and met up with crew. I was under the mistaken impression that we were going to have decent weather, after Friday’s deluge, which saw parts of Brooklyn getting up to 7.4 inches of rain.

I was getting messages from family members in Los Angeles and Denver, asking me if I was okay, which, thank God, I was.

The rain decided to stick around an extra day, so that we were slowly saturated by an endless drizzle.

The rain is probably brought the worm out into the light of day and directly in our path. Nevertheless, we ready work around it until a couple of guys came up the street rolling a crate and we had to wait for them to pass.

One of the guys noticed the camera and the boom mike—which were pretty hard to miss—and made a comment.

“Your turn to shine, worm,” he said.

We got a laugh out of that, the worm disappeared into a crack in the sidewalk, and we eventually finished shooting. I was so tired by the end of the day I just wanted to make like a worm and crawl into bed.

I’m putting together a list of what I liked about my behavior on Saturday and what needs work--including be more assertive on set. But first and foremost, I really liked that I did this in the first place.

I have a lot more to learn about filmmaking, but like the worm near the UN, it’s my turn to shine.