DISTORTION - Pre-Production #11

It has been too long since my last post and there is good reason. Trying to tackle too much at the same time has been eating me alive. At this point I have been the Writer/ Director/ Producer/ Blogger/ Casting Director and much more for the past couple of months. I have ran the rehearsals, casting calls, location scouting myself. The rest of the crew that was supposed to be backing me up, has put in very little time with this production. AFTER DARK, killed them. This is readily apparent now. When ever Casting, rehearsals, reads have been scheduled.. I was told, I will be there and something has come up every time. The Production setbacks from the first film we were originally going to do, has sucked the enthusiasm right out of them. Ben Bachelder, my partner in crime is not to blame in anyway what so ever for the lack of enthusiasm from the rest of the crew. He just has his plate full to the brim right now and cannot give time to this project, like he would like to.

Talk about bad timing. Now that we have a cast set, that is energetic and ready to film, the crew is falling apart. NOW it is in my hands to replace crew with people who have the drive to get a production done. The final straw came when we were not ready to shoot, after just casting everyone, one week after the actors had received the scripts. I was not going to push the cast into filming, without rehearsals or even a read. No one was ready. the film has many hard roles that require a lot of emotions, choreography, and so forth to film. Since I pushed back the dates to get it right and not waste a ton of time on set getting performances right, the crew has faltered. They have no desire to get into the film now. I can't blame them a little, but I can when it comes to.. everything is in place now. We have rehearsed, I want a couple of more, just to nail down choreography and a couple of the very intense scenes. We should be ready to shoot within 30 days. Not a lot to ask.

It could have been sooner if I had back up helping me to arrange things, but it is not there. I will be posting on MANDY again, tonight to get two positions filled that are vital for our production. DAVE MARTORANO, has now been put in my ASSISTANT DIRECTOR position, simply because he has the vision, drive, and energy to get what we need out of our Actors and our script. Our vision is identical and so is our Passion to get this project right. We all know, that if done right, this could be a huge hit for us. I am proud to have him backing me up and moving forward on this production. I feel now that I am not working alone and this is not stressing me out to the point of fracture. The next couple of days you will see the difference it will make in the Blog site here. I will be able to get the four other video's up that are being edited right now, FUNNY STUFF, and there will be some detailed backgrounds on cast and crew.

So please stay tuned. Things are going to start barreling forward at a nice click now!

David Lytle
Mindworks Pictures