|
It's De-Luxembourg!Cynthia's Column April 2004 Now for Cynthia's Adventures making a TV movie in Luxembourg. First let's get past the surrealness of the fact that we were in Luxembourg at all. The working title is "Tenn/P.I." as in Tennessee Private Eye. As in Nashville? Why were we shooting a contemporary, urban American murder mystery in The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg? Which looks like The Sound of Music as opposed to Music City? Let's see those hands. That's right. Money. It is cheaper to shoot in Luxembourg than anywhere in the U.S. I took my 20-year-old son Nick with me. He is an aspiring screenwriter and for some reason I had never taken either of my kids to one of my shoots. Maybe I was worried about not seeming like a Serious Professional Writer with kids in tow. Maybe I didn't trust them not to punch each other and cost thousands of dollars in re-takes. This is my 26th TV movie to be shot and I suddenly realized if I waited any longer to take them, it would be too late. They wouldn't be kids anymore. Molly would have come, but she's 18, captain of her cheerleading team and they had State Finals. So it was just Nick and I. You know before you get there, that when you set out to do something as ridiculous as this (shooting Luxembourg for Nashville) things are going to go wrong. The Gremlins are going to get you. Because you're asking for it. And you know before you set foot in the Grand Duchy that before you get out of there it's going to cost a lot more than it would have if you'd done it right. It's the kind of trying to save money that always costs more money. We flew from Portland, to Cincinnati, then changed planes again in Amsterdam where we met up with real life P.I. Janice Holt, on whose life and cases the movie is based. And things started to go wrong right here. Our star Lauren Holly and her petite entourage was scheduled to meet us here and we would all be flying together for the last leg. But no Lauren. At the last possible minute, we got on and flew without her. We were met at Luxembourg airport by our driver, a tall thin Frenchman named Jean Charles ("Call me J.C." which we didn't. Who wants to say "J.C." when you can say "Jean Charles"?) And as we left the airport we couldn't help noticing that the entire country of Luxembourg was covered in several inches of snow. Gorgeous snow. Famous Dutch Landscape Painting Snow. But we can't have snow for this. Our first shot was in a cemetery. In Nashville. There cannot be snow. Jean Charles assured me that it would be gone in three days, by the first day of principle photography. No problem. But it was freezing with a stunningly icy wind chill factor and how is snow supposed to melt in this? As we drove in from the airport the landscape was gorgeous. Sprinkled with the usual castles. Did you see the movie of "Girl With The Pearl Earring?" Shot entirely in Luxembourg. If you go, stay for the credits at the end and you'll see Jean Charles listed as Transportation Captain. We cheered. The Luxembourgeoisie (That's a word. Really.) are so serious about luring filmmakers to their little Bourg that they've built a Replica Renaissance Venice complete with canals. In addition to Girl, The Merchant of Venice starring Al Pacino recently shot there. The film company had taken over most of the Luxembourg Hilton. Actors were flown in from London. The director, producers and three stars from L.A. The crew was from 15 countries and spoke three languages. In the lobby we were met by Katja who handed me a thick envelope containing a cell phone, plug adaptor for my laptop, shooting schedule, contact list and a call sheet. And a smaller envelope full of Euros. Called per diems. Walking around money. The first production meeting was the next morning at ten a.m. It turned out our flight from Amsterdam was the last one out. So Lauren Holly (along with her personal assistant and dialect coach) had to get a limo to drive them from Amsterdam to Luxembourg. Which according to them is five hours at a hundred miles per hour. ("Don't you mean 100 kilometers an hour?" "No, no" they assured me, gripping my arm, eyes wild. "The speedometer said 160!") And their luggage flew to some completely different European country. This is how it always starts. With the little things. The hotel room had many television channels. The BBC News in English, and the rest in French or German. Fortunately we never travel without books. The next morning at six a.m. the Hilton dining room was peopled entirely by our cast and crew nodding sleepily at each other at the breakfast buffet. Our Driver -- I love to say this phrase. Our Driver, Jean Charles, picked us up and took us to the production offices. Here I met the director, Jeff Reiner, for the first time. And our producers whom I had already bonded with through many, many months of being in the trenches, getting this war to the Western Front near Belgium. Everyone gathered for the first production meeting. I slipped Nick into a back corner. Everyone introduced themselves and explained their jobs. Casting. Set design. Location manager. First A.D. etc. When they got to Nick, he said, "Nick Mandelberg, Screenwriter's Assistant." Which got a laugh. And was the beginning of the crew's love affair with Nick. By the end of the day he'd been adopted by the casting lady who made him not only an extra, but the stand-in for the leading men as well. (Where he'd be at the center of every shot, watching the set up lights, sound and camera action around him. Nick had the best seat in the Duchy.) Several hours later Jeff, the director, suddenly shouted, "Hey! Where's Mandelberg?" Nick couldn't believe this. "Me?" And Jeff put his arm around Nick and offered him an internship with him if he needed college credit. Literally taking Nick under his wing. They brought in sandwiches and we worked straight through. The script meeting was in the Exec Producer's office. I slipped Nick into a corner so he could hear this meeting was which was only for the screenwriter, director and three producers. We went through the entire script and tried to figure out how to film it in Luxembourg in less than twenty days. The Pee Wee Football game was already gone, but now it turned out we didn't have enough time to shoot a kids soccer game or even a swimming pool. We ended up having the two kids playing with the dog while their grandfather videotaped them. The point of the scene is that our budding P.I. borrows a camcorder from her dad. This will work. And so it went. With Jeffrey diagramming the new locations. The house where the woman is murdered doesn't have a wall or a tree to climb. So he drew me a sketch of what we had. Shrubbery. French doors. And I re-choreographed the sleuthing to accommodate physical reality. Multiply this by thirty scenes. I had a lot of work to do. I stole our exec producer's printer right off his desk, then Jean Charles whisked us back to the Hilton, where Nick got the equipment hooked up, and I started revising like mad. Nick proved himself to be worthy of his Screenwriters Assistant title, proofreading everything before we handed it off to a Gopher to get it back to the production offices where it would be copied on yellow pages. Every day the newly changed pages are copied on a different color of paper with asterisks denoting what's been changed. The following days would see blue pages, green pages, pink pages and so on until the final script was a rainbow with almost no white pages at all. The first day of shooting we awoke to find that Jean Charles prophetic powers were right on. The snow had miraculously vanished. We arrived at the graveyard and my heart sank. The graves were all massive marble slabs 5X7 feet, standing ten inches above concrete paths. No cemetery in the United States looks anything like this. I mentioned this to one of the crew, who said, "Those gravestones look good." He pointed to three free-standing gray headstones. I said, "Those are Styrofoam," as I rocked one with a finger. "We brought those with us" And the funereal floral arranements made by a local florist were six feet high. Gigantic contraptions made from hundreds of rose blossoms. Costing hundreds of Euros. The only thing close to them in America is found in the Winners Circle at Santa Anita. So we had to lose them. Then Jeffrey arrived and started shooting. Tight telephoto shots from fifty yards away. All you can see of the gravestones is blurry shapes of the tops in the foreground. And it looks great. In the funeral scene, keep your eye open for the tall American kid standing somberly among the Luxembourgeoisie. He's mine. They had to add a family room to the character's house. European houses don't have such things. And a temporary roof, since their roofing materials look nothing like ours. Can you hear the ka-ching ka-ching? In the end it's the director that will save this movie from looking completely wrong. Jeff Reiner is a visual guy. He's an editor and a camera operater. Thanks to Jeff, every shot, is beautifully designed and executed. One scene, in a courthouse, has our P.I. waiting in a foyer, her lawyer comes out of a courtroom, they talk as they walk across the foyer, down a huge marble winding stairway, across the main lobby and out the front doors. It is all one continuous steadicam shot. Two minutes long. You don't often see this kind of thing in TV movies. How does the cameraman do it, you might ask? Walk backwards down a long and winding stairway holding a heavy camera perfectly focused on our two leads? He has a big guy right behind him, hanging onto him, making sure he doesn't miss a step. By the way, one more reason it's important to have the writer on site: As I arrived at these gorgeous, real marble halls, the bronze plaque on the wall said: "MUNICIPLE COURT." "Excuse me," I tapped the set decorator on the shoulder. "Municipal is spelled wrong." Within five minutes it was perfectly, seamlessly corrected. When they were ready to shoot the Big Courtroom Climactic Scene, after lighting the enormous space, wiring it for sound, filling it with Extras (all with costumes, hair styles and makeup), blocking rehearsed, actors ready to go, it turned out the prop photographs were not there. The whole trial hinges on photographs as evidence. The lawyer laying them out as evidence, nailing the guilty defendant in the witness box. And no photos. The whole deal had to stop dead and wait while frantic prop persons scurried off. See? One little thing can cost thousands. "Time is Money." But when this many people are on the clock, Time is Big Money. Another day was so difficult to shoot, (involving Lauren on the roof of a building at night, watching a scene in the high rise across the street,) that they didn't wrap until 2 a.m. Then SAG rules dictate that Lauren has to have twelve hours off. So she comes back the next day at 2:00 p.m. By the time she's out of hair and makeup, it's 4:00 p.m. And we lose the light at 5:30. This is how a movie gets behind. Days behind. After twelve days, Nick and I came home. (Being stranded overnight in Minneapolis due to wind shears doesn't even count on the list of things that went wrong.) The last two weeks, I've had calls almost daily from Luxembourg: "I have eight set-ups tomorrow and we can't physically get through them. Can you combine them down into four?" No problem. And when you run out of colors for pages (which means you've gone on beyond Buff and Marigold) you start the whole crazy rainbow over again. Tomorrow I'm flying to L.A. They have three days of pickup shooting to do. Things that don't exist in Luxembourg. A Goodwill Store. Kinko's. Winchell's Donuts. Next week Nick turns 21, and the only thing he wants for his birthday? A plane ticket to L.A. So we're off. I'm only sorry Jean Charles won't be meeting our plane. At the moment, the movie is titled "Caught in the Act." It's scheduled to air on Lifetime in May. My favorite thing about the whole crazy, stressful, hilarious experience? At the end of that first day of meetings, after doing a whole draft of changed pages, exhausted in the hotel room with no understandable television, Nick I are lying on twin beds, staring at the ceiling and he says to me, "Mom...I had no idea you were so important." That, right there, is the whole enchilada. Cynthia Whitcomb is president of Willamette Writers, and has had 29 of her screenplays produced. She is author of The Writers' Guide to Writing Your Screenplay and The Writers' Guide to Selling Your Screenplay. She teaches screenwriting classes at Portland State University.and through Willamette Writers. |