JUNE 18, 2006
FORBIDDEN FRUIT, PART I

Since I directed "Forbidden Fruit," I thought I'd say a few words while wearing this other hat. As I mentioned in my Blog, the season opener was the last to be shot. This is unusual, to say the least. I'll go into why later in the season, as this would give away too much too early on.

Directing the last episode of the year, as my producing partner Robert Petrovicz likes to say, is like being the last piggy to the trough. You basically don't get a chance to fix any mistakes. Directing the last episode that also turned out to be the season opener was even rougher.

In some ways, you can say the premiere episode is the most important one, because it really sets the bar, the tone for the entire season. In some ways, it was better for me to do it because I would've been stressing, anyway, even if it hadn't been me directing it. So it saved some other poor sap the grief.

And, since I was the one who was going to be overseeing the editing and the locking of the show, it was nice to be the one who had to live or die by my own mistakes -- or victories. Better to blame me than someone else. And I knew that there weren't going to be any pickup shots, and I knew what ultimately makes my partners happy (network, studio, Lloyd Segan, and Tommy).

To make matters more complicated, we actually shot the season finale right before we shot this last/premiere episode. This made it pretty confusing for everyone, especially the actors. Again, I was gonna have to be there to help explain it anyway, even if I wasn't directing, so this kinda saved a step and cleared up continuity.

For me, having just recently been married the year before, planning the wedding episode was actually really easy. I was just "yes, I want this, I want that." I think everyone was surprised how much I knew about weddings and how specific I was about certain things ... even silly, actually, when I was correcting wardrobe or set dec on outfits or flowers arrangements. My wife would have been proud.

The snakes, though ... That's something else. I do not like snakes. I made sure we shot those scenes very quickly and got all the coverage we needed from long lenses.

Actually, it was kinda fun and I learned a lot about snakes. Of course, I made sure we had non-poisonous snakes that look like just like green mambas. (It's the black mamba that's featured in "Kill Bill 2" which was unavailable, BTW, but since the movie "Snakes on a Plane" was shooting in town, we went with the green mamba.)

Our snake wrangler, Luis Javier (also from "Snakes on a Plane" BTW) was really great, but in a couple of scenes ... well, there are two stories:

1) When we were shooting the wide shot in the warehouse scene where the snake dealer is taking the venom out of the snake (the closeups we did later as insert shots) ... that snake got away!

Suddenly, the whole crew was chasing him (or her, I really don't know which) around the smaller stage set of The Dead Zone. We finally ended up catching him but, of course, I was pretty much out of the building! The instant it got loose I just yelled "Cut!" and I was gone. But they didn't hear me yell "Cut!" so they just kept filming.

We have a lot of nice footage of the whole crew -- and especially the camera department -- trying to catch this snake. You can see me running away in the background.

2) The other snake story that makes me laugh ... We ran out of time at this one location where the wife of the lead guest star (the reporter's pregnant wife) gets bitten by the snake in a vision at her house. We didn't have time to get the closeups of her being bitten or the snake traveling in the garden. So we basically just got all the wide shots and I knew that I could just grab some close-ups when we got back to the stage on my next day with the Splinter Unit B camera.

When we got back to the stage, we reset the garden out in our office sound stage parking lot and shot a lot of the details of the snake moving around. This takes a while; snakes do what they want to do.

I was directing a scene inside and had set up the snake unit outside and would go back and forth during lighting setups. Then it came time for the actor to be bitten in the face by the snake. What we did was put snake bite marks on her face for these closeups and then, later in CG, would remove the bite marks for a couple of frames before the snake came in and bit her, so that the marks looked like they appeared.

But, obviously, you can't have a real snake bite an actor (even a method actor!), so I told the props department to get me a snake and paint it green. I had the assistant camera guy with this fake little rubber snake -- it's basically going back to film school or B movies, but it worked -- and said "look, guys, all I need it for is like a 3-frame cut."

So, we got a little fake green rubber snake with a wire hanger through it and we just kinda poked at her with it. We have all this really great footage of my focus puller poking this wonderful actress in the face with a fake painted rubber green snake over and over while having her react in horror over and over again. It was brilliant and silly and it worked of course.

I'd go: "Okay, that's great. Now, pan onto her again! And ... poke her with the snake! And ... again and action! Poke her again and action..." He just kept poking her with the snake and she had to scream. It was very funny. We couldn't stop laughing in between "action!" I think that was my favorite moment directing this episode, she was a trooper and when I said "Cut!" she grabbed the snake and chased me for a bit. Movie magic...

(continue reading the "Forbidden Fruit" Production Blog)