The day before shooting started out strangely low-key, with me sitting at home with relatively little to do while Bill and Alex ran around the city gathering together the elements of the production. Linda Glasser, a Los Angeles friend who produced my last movie, and Duraid Munajim, the Montreal film student who's going to work as a camera assistant, both arrived here early in the morning, and I made my phone calls while the two of them sprawled on the furniture and recovered from their night of travel. In the afternoon, I finally got together with cinematographer Dave Park, just in from Florida; we chatted a while, then went off to look at some locations. I get the feeling that his visual instincts aren't quite the same as mine--I hope he won't be upset when he grasps the extent of my distaste for visual assertion.
Then the day went downhill in a hurry. The company who rented us lights threw in a lot of extra equipment, and Bill called us in the afternoon, worried that our truck was overfilled. When we got to our first location, the apartment of our friend Sue Raffman, we exhausted ourselves trying to unload the truck, and found out that only the smallest fraction of the equipment fit in her apartment. We could neither clear enough of the van to make our other pickups nor find a convenient way to store equipment at the location. By the end of the day, we were left with a jammed van and no time to set up tomorrow's first shot. Dave Park stayed cool through the ordeal, which was a help to my flagging morale. But I still have no clue how we're going to maneuver fifteen people and tons of equipment in that little apartment for two days.
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