Yesterday
morning I got together with videographer Chip Scheuer and retired Watsonville
Police Chief Terry Medina to shoot a video trailer for my second Quill Gordon mystery, Wash Her Guilt Away. Along
the way, photographer Tarmo Hannula of the Register-Pajaronian, who I’ve known
for years, showed up to take a picture.
And
somewhere in the process I got to thinking, this must be what Howard Hawks felt
like when he shot a western with John Wayne. Let’s get together with some friends, head for the great outdoors, and
have some fun making a movie.
Of course
Hawks was paid handsomely to make his movies, whereas I’m paying out-of-pocket
for mine and doing it on a budget. I have to because a You Tube video trailer
is considered essential to book marketing in the digital age. I will say this
for making a video, though. It’s a lot more fun than applying for an ISBN
number for the book.
Shooting in the Great Indoors
Actually,
this video was shot in the great indoors, which if you’re talking about Howard
Hawks/John Wayne movies calls to mind Rio
Bravo. What we were trying to do this morning was recreate the interior of
a hunting and fishing lodge in an isolated mountain area of Northern
California, which is the setting for the book.
Had I but
funding enough and time, I would have taken a weeklong trip to the mountains to
scout for appropriate locations, rented a place for the day, and brought
everybody up there to shoot it properly. In the real world, I was reduced to
doing it on the cheap near where I live.
I
considered a few places to serve as the background for the interior of the
lodge, but it turned out the right place was literally under my nose. My Rotary
Club meets each week at the Watsonville Elks Lodge, which has a huge fireplace,
with the head of a mammoth elk mounted over it. The bar and its furniture are
of the late fifties, early sixties vintage that the lodge in my book contains.
We figured we could make it work by shooting carefully and atmospherically.
Ideally, we
would have had a rainy day, like the ones in the book, but no such luck. It was
bright and sunny, but Chip got around that by framing shots tightly and
focusing on the fireplace and building artifacts.
One-Take Terry Does His Scene
Having
stood up at numerous press conferences as police chief, Terry is a pro when it
comes to being filmed. He also did video training for city employees and earned
the nickname “One-Take Terry,” because when he stepped in front of a camera, he
generally got it right the first time.
We did more
than one take this time in order to provide different options, camera angles
and inflections when the film was edited, then Terry was sent on his way. Then
we shot the rest of the scenes and some footage to go with voice-over, and we
were finished in three hours.
When Hawks
and Wayne made the classic Red River
in 1947, they found themselves sitting on their hands for days because of heavy
unseasonable rains. My video has the opposite problem. We’re going to be
sitting on our hands until Chip can get out and shoot some rainy-day footage to
complete the project. In this year of California’s major drought, that’s a
stresser, but the Weather Channel is saying there’s a good chance of rain next
Tuesday and Wednesday. I certainly hope so; the show must go on.
