Day 2 of shoot: Anyone Know a Camwhore?

Today started with a crisis, handled with aplomb by cast, crew, and producers. One of the key scenes in the movie involves a hot-looking webcam girl on a porn site who tries to seduce one of the male characters, who plays the webmaster of that site. It was one of the scenes to be shot today. Yesterday evening she backed out.

When you make a major investment in something, the question is not if something bad happens, but when. I think the sign of a naïve investor is that only positive outcomes are considered, and that failure is not given its due. The riskier the investment, of course, the more damaging that kind of naïveté can be.

It's not whether something will go wrong. It's how they handle what will go wrong.

You need to run the mental spreadsheet on it by running many scenarios with a multiplicity of outcomes. Not just: could it be a hit? but what if it flops? What if the producer runs off with our money? What if everything looks great but we’re asked for more money two thirds of the way through production? What if the distributor promises us money and goes out of business, leaving the movie in limbo? What if one of the stars decides to leave in the middle of the shoot? I did thought experiments on those and a dozen other possibilities before laying out enough cash to buy my kids’ grandparents in China a damn nice house. I hit Gorman with many of them during my initial interviews with him, and I’m sure I did not come off as the world’s greatest diplomat at that time. I would expect such questions if I were asking someone to hand over that much green, and so did Gorman.

Which is why I wasn’t the least bit disturbed by the time Webcam Girl made her little announcement. I didn’t know how the problem would be solved, but I knew it would be solved with a minimum of drama. And it was, within half an hour. The constraints were simple, if challenging. Beyond the unspoken assumption that Webcam Girl had to work at indie film wages and to be great looking, she had to be reliable, available, and good enough to be able to do the job without an audition. Actors know actors, and the stars who were here hopped on their cellphones and started calling their friends. Gorman remembered that Brendan Bradley had hooked up the production with an actress he had already asked to join the production. She had turned down the opportunity because at the time the role she was considered for would involve nudity. Ironically, the nudity was later written out of the part and, more ironically, the part of Webcam Girl never had any. Problem solved, not even a voice raised.

Note to my 17-year-old self: I’m on set with a bunch of hot women in bathrobes!

There is no justice. My prospects seemed bleak when I was 17. I was a fat, nerdy, socially maladjusted, repressed, lonely, unhappy adolescent in the second year of a college career that seemed pointless and was, in retrospect, an utter waste academically. Now I'm a fat, bald, socially maladjusted businessman & nerd when both are in vogue. But a wealthy fat, bald, nerdy, socially maladjusted businessman. Maybe not as rich as some of my ex-Microsoft friends, but enough that I can join the crew of an indie flick and work 3000 miles from home for the princely sum of... nothing. I often think back to those times when I look around the set of Friends With Benefits. Today another nude scene or three got filmed. Guy with guy, guy with girl, another guy with another girl. Mind you, I’m not around during the filming. The set is just too small. The scenes are shot in quick succession, so actors and actresses both spend a goodly amount of time waiting patiently and in various stages of undress (under comfortable-looking bathrobes) to be called upstairs. I’m sure this would have been titillating and on some level just plain exciting if my adolescent self could have been here.

Where was all that action when I really needed it? This is what goes through my head almost three decades later: these delightful, hardworking, seemingly unspoiled young women could be my daughters. If a bathrobe just happened to fall open while one of them was talking to me, I wouldn’t be thrilled. I wouldn’t even be secretly thrilled. I would be mortified. I would, I’m sure, be more embarrassed than they.

Sigh. These are the good old days. And the old me isn't here to enjoy them!