Day 3 of shoot: Baby, Come With Me

Friends (With Benefits) will stretch the boundaries of what kind of material can appear in a mainstream movie much the same way American Pie did. The middle of one sequence has an occurrence I will try to describe with as much care as I can muster. I am deliberately leaving out the beginning of this scene as well as its payoff, because if all goes well it will be water cooler conversation across the country the Saturday after Friends (With Benefits) opens. The middle part, of which I am about to describe the filming, sounds utterly disgusting. That’s all it would be, out of context. In context… well, I think when the movie comes out you’ll watch in mounting horror and disbelief, then laugh your ass off and miss the next three scenes while the theatre audience tries to regain its composure. Okay. Tell the kids to go clean up their room so we can have some adult conversation.

Remember, this is just the middle part. It is not wildly out of funny out of context, but this blog is a behind the scenes view of Friends (With Benefits). It’s about the filming, not about the story itself.

The script reads as follows: “HIS POV of the ceiling over their head, and the glob of creamy white fluid which hangs from the ceiling, just about to fall.”

The movie will merit a hard, excuse the phrasing, R. You can guess what the fluid is. Let me try to paint a picture of how I ended up seeing this scene filmed.

By 9 in the morning makeup and the production design team each had its own formulation of simulated man juice ready to, ah, shoot. Production design’s was labeled and refrigerated for safekeeping. Makeup had theirs displayed next their array of brushes and hairdryers. The concoction (sorry) used for this scene was by the production design team, so Alexis, the production design lead, had the unenviable task of somehow launching the viscous fluid in question to the ceiling, such that a single drop fell shortly thereafter.

The bedroom set it was filmed in is an absurdly small room in the attic of Gorman’s office, measuring perhaps six feet wide by eight feet long. Maybe less. When I got to the scene I found the bed occupied by the huge camera, flanked on each side by large men lying down in very back-unfriendly positions, carefully pointing the camera diagonally up at the ceiling. The camera and lens together could buy you a nice BMW or a couple of Toyota minivans, and ultimately they were cooped up in that bed for well over an hour. A big lighting rig took up most of the floor space in the room. Cables trailed into two rooms next door, one with the director and continuity person, another with sound (empty for this scene).

The AD, two electricians, and a lighting guy were there to do their things. On a couch in an adjacent room were the rest of the production design staff. Crowded into the doorway were the AD, a makeup person, and a morbidly obese documentarian (yours truly). There were also a couple of others who had invited themselves up because it promised to be an entertaining shoot. And it was, except for the guys operating the camera, the lighting guy, and poor Alexis. It was hot upstairs on any typical spring day, and nearly unbearable for anyone in a room that had been lit continuously by an array of gigantic movie floods.

By the time I made it upstairs there was an artfully placed glob of goo on the ceiling. It looked pretty good, but it just sat there, photogenic and inert. No drips. After a long wait an anemic droplet worked its way loose. “Too small” came the director’s voice from the next room with unnerving speed and certainty. Somebody stamped on the floor to see if anything could be dislodged. “No!” cried DP Adrian, who was one of the contortees on the bed. Stamping was bad for any number of reasons, perhaps most importantly that it would shake the camera. It might also soil the camera’s $35,000 rented lens.

Nothing.

Production designer Alexis carefully stood up on the bed and wiped off the offending material. They quickly altered the formula. She returned to the ridiculously overcrowded bedroom and readied herself to launch another gobbet. Nope. It splattered, leaving nothing for a good drip. Over the next hour and a half she tried a host of ingenious tactics to get the right effect. Pipettes, medical syringes, plastic spoon catapults—the bedspread was covered in simulated jism within minutes and every time it splashed on her she flinched. Although it was pretty much made out of hand lotion its alarmingly accurate imitation of the real thing seemed to drive her to distraction. Standing up on a bed, hands outstretched to the ceiling for prolonged periods, trying to squirt cinematic Jackson Pollock greatness on demand must have been uncomfortable as well.

And nobody but her own staff did a damn thing to help, because it was sidesplittingly funny and simply too easy to unleash a torrent of junior high school-level puns while barraging Alexis with unwanted advice from a dozen backseat drivers watching her every move.

It was one of the most entertaining hours of my life. It is teasily the worst footage I have shot during this trip. I couldn’t wear my DVRigPro, a bulky harness worn around the torso that stabilizes the camera, because I was already taking up way too much space in the hallway, space that should have been reserved for people who needed to be there, like Alexis’ crew. This left me pointing the camera awkwardly toward the ceiling, zooming in close so I could get a who’s your daddy-sized magnification of the counterfeit ejaculate. I wasn’t going through anything close to what Alexis and the camera guys were, and I was hurting big-time within moments because as people (incorrectly) predicted a drop was imminent, I would shakily pan from a face to the ooze while trying to unzoom manually. I was trying to stay out of the way and get good shots at the same time, not a promising technique.

Alexis grew increasingly irritated and told everyone off hilariously as she and her assistance stretched their considerable imaginations and throwing muscles to commendable extremes, but I don’t know how the story ends. At one point a failed launch left some, um, material on my lens. It had already been 13 hours filming and I was ready to collapse. I took my camera back to the hotel to clean its lens and write this entry. Maybe tomorrow I’ll find out what, well, came of the situation.