Hell in the Making
This blog post covers the time after I was screwed over by the theater producer, had the tv crew pulled out from under me and how Mr. Hell was actually shot.
The important thing here is for the most part, Paul Mendoza was the driving forse behind getting Mr. Hell on the stage. For the most part, I left the two of them alone and let them work out the direction amongst themselves. That being said, all the physical humor in the piece is my direction.
The one good thing that did come out of the producer screwing me over was it also screwed over my cast.
At this point I should somewhat switch gears and briefly discuss, “the best of all possible talk shows,” which also went up and had both Paul and Robin, myself, and three others in the cast. It was that piece and Mr. Hell, which got the producer interested, with a short piece by Paul along for the ride.
So, gritted my teeth, managed to borrow a Sony video Hi8mm, (something better than VHS, but before MiniDV) and began the process of bringing my cast back together. It is somewhat impossible to imagine a world without $120 HD cameras, but I assure you it once did exist.
Along the way during the theater production, I established a certain reputation when I “stated” to one of the other director’s that I would physically remove him from the theater if he behaved in a disrespectful manner to my actors ever again. That wasn’t the way I phrased it, and it was generally known I was some sort of crazy martial arts guy, having taken a “black belt” and thrown him 15 feet across the the stage into the stage wall, which thankfully didn’t break. All in good fun, you understand.
Anyway, the problem with “Talkshow” was it dealt with relationships, and over the course of the production, it managed to destroy every relationship except one. One night, one of my actor’s had a melt-down on stage after his fiance left him.
As you can imagine, I was much more enthusiastic about getting this one shot than Mr. Hell. So I borrowed the camera, set a day, the basic plan was to shoot Talkshow in my apartment and if there was time – at Paul’s insistance, Mr. Hell. Somewhat crazy, but achievable.
Then, the day before this was supposed to happen one of the female characters, who played my character’s slutty, cheating girlfriend bailed. This as you might imagine, was the one relationship survivor(technically one and a half, but who’s counting) One reason her relationship survived was because her man got to sit every night front row, and watch her masturbate a microphone. The actor’s in the other shows set their watch to it and would come running in during rehearsals to watch her stroke the thing.
Robin wanted to quit at this point too, for a variety of reasons, but fortunately during the early rehearsal process, when they were going through their “warm-ups” and generally goofing off, I asked, “are we all warmed up? That’s nice,” and then casually threw a kick above my head against the beam I was standing next to. After that they arrived on time ready to work.
So Paul and Robin arrived and since it was the two of them, they agreed to come at night, which meant I now had to light the thing, not so easy in those days. And I was used to studio cameras and had never used this camera until it was in my hot little hands.
So I put the airplane set together, lit it from below and above with standard bulbs, and that was pretty much it.
I shot one rehearsal, then one wide, one close on Robin and then one on Paul.
I shot the last scene from above and then the cut-aways, the fist, the tongue, the finger, etc. I did a complete run through on each take with the plan through editing to create the illusion of a three camera, television shoot. I think the entire shoot took less than three hours, so technically, I could have shoot both plays in a day.
I originally edited them by transfering the original to four S-VHS tapes and cutting on two, high-end, linked, consumer decks. No idea what happened to that edit. Mike Keneally who saw it without knowing its source said, “what is this poison that escapes from my screen?”
Many moons later, I figured out how to build my own computer and transfered Mr. Hell into glorious digital. There in languished for several years, kinda exactly like the Ring…until I was hired to write a screenplay because someone remembered Mr. Hell and sought me out.
And then, easy access video internet appeared and suddenly there was a place for Hell that simply did not exist before, so here we are.
I think I mentioned this before, but this edit came about after I shut down my mum’s house and suddenly had some time on my hands. I cut it in about a week, on Vegas 9, with the intention of getting back to it in a month or so.
In my other video life, I shoot kitty rescue videos, but my subjects were infected with ringworm, and not everyone is willing to get into a cage with these kittens, so down with the camera(couldn’t bring it in), and up with the Hell edit.
Then my mum took a turn for the worse.
By the time the dust cleared, I had exactly three days to sit down and put together a sound-track, correct, and publish this to the web. Looking at the calendar, my mum has not been dead a month, so all in all, this has been a positive thing to throw myself at.
