| Now how hard do you think it is to find a house with a pool in Florida? Well, when the scene consists of a bikini-clad chick being strangled by a Coppermasked Madman, people don't tend to invite you right into their pools- especially when we told them that we'd be attempting to film underwater as well! It sounds pretty bizarre! Well, for some of our problems we took the old TRUTH OR DARE route of filming as much as we could at one place. Joel D. Wynkoop found an older motel in Fort Pierce, Florida, and talked to the owner about shooting a movie there. He was very receptive, and Joel and I met with the owner together to iron things out. The motel was private property and had insurance, so that was no problem as long as we weren't using explosives. We ended up shooting 60% of the movie at this motel. We agreed upon a price of $60.00 per day for anything within reason that we needed, and promised to put up any out-of-town actors we brought in at the motel as well. We used the manager's motel apartment for one character's home, a hallway for the police hallway, a big empty room was dressed for the police interrogation scene, the back lot and surrounding streets were used for the road scenes, and they closed off one of their big public restrooms for us one day for the crucifixion scene! Not to mention we put up out-of-town actresses Kathy Kay Kurtz and Lara Gorlin at this same place. We got a lot of cooperation from the motel at first, getting the manager's apartment pretty bloodstained in the process. We also entered into a standard location contract, and it was a good thing, for it didn't take long for them to tire of us after a few weekends! But we got the job done, created some excitement for the owners )putting them in cameos as well- always a perk for getting things) and everyone was happy in the end. Another motel let us use their dining room area after closing for free just so they could see a movie being filmed! Again we made use of more motel rooms and R.M. Hoopes offered us use of his new apartment for some talking scenes! Franklin E. Wales and his wife were real troupers in this one! In addition to providing us use of their home for his character's long (L-O-N-G) and brutal death, they also made sandwiches for us in the middle of shooting! These are the kind of people you want involved in your project - those that are passionate about the whole process. Production coordinator Jeff Allen eventually got us into a friend's house with a pool, and another production coordinator named Bill Cassinelli persuaded his parents to let us use THEIR pool, so we ended up with two pool scenes! But this took a lot of persistence- it took over eight weeks to line up the first pool! People just didn't seem to want to cooperate, but we stuck to our guns in keeping what we could of the sequence in the movie, and again, with tricky editing, pools were added to homes that didn't have them! In the end, the script was mutated a bit, but I came away with some of the vision intact. And only having $60.00 a day location is pretty no-budget in my book! For the warehouse conclusion, we ended up going back to the same warehouse where Joel worked... since we had already used it in ENDANGERED SPECIES, we used the south end of the warehouse as opposed to the north end we used in the other movie! In addition, we used Joel's house for another exterior and my apartment for an exterior where the Coppermasked Madman was prowling around. These scenes were at night, and I almost got arrested for breaking into my own apartment while filming those scenes. Sometimes it's cool to inform the local police when you're doing low-key stuff on your own property... | | |
