Mister Hugh's World of Randomness

Question: What are the three most important things to bring with you when making a movie in New York?

Answer: Loads of giant lights that look like something out of 'War of the Worlds', a big air-fan and lots of fake snow (regardless of whether it's actually snowing for real anyway).

This is based on an my experience of watching a movie being filmed about two blocks (5 minutes walk) away from Andy's apartment in the East Village (NY). The movie was 'Rent' which is apparently a modern update of 'La Boheme' set in the East Village in the 90's, about a group of friends dealing with life, love and AIDs. Sounds quite good, potentially. Anyway the bit they were filming was just a few seconds of outside scene showing the main characters meeting outside the Life Cafe (a famous(ish) bar in the East Village which just happens to be Andy's local - it's not called the Life Cafe any more though.

So they'd done up the building to look like it used to, and replaced the pedestrian crossing lights with the classic old DON'T WALK sign. That much made perfect sense. What bothered me a bit was the following:

1) Despite the fact that it had been snowing on and off all week, and was still doing so, they'd shipped in a giant fan and a big sack of fake snow (little bits of cotton-wool, basically), and had employed two people entirely for this purpose, one to throw handfuls of fake snow in front of the fan, and another to turn the fan on. Pretty High-tech, eh! And what was even bettter was the fact that they'd obviously swept up all the real snow lying about, and replaced it with an identical-looking covering of fake snow, the only difference being that the fake snow didn't stay put and had to keep being replaced. Great.


Check out the amazing fake-snow machine!


2) The whole street for a block or so, plus the nearby park was floodlit by loads of spotlights, from smallish ones to the aforementioned giant alien space lights. The lights were fed by a cunning system of cables which were carefully paced to trip up as many gawping passers-by as possible. Now it might seem reasonable to have some lights if filming at night, even if you're filming a night-time scene. Fair enough. But where they were actually filming there were only a few lights. About 90 percent of the ground they were lighting up was not even vaguely within camera-shot, and they weren't going to be filming any other bits in the same area

3) Seeing as they were doing only a few seconds of exterior scene, it was surprising that they needed 50 takes and about 4 hours filming (let alone set-up time). Basically the shot involved a group of people meeting outside a bar, greeting each other (no dialogue required; that was being put in later) and going in. Now i'm no actor, but it seems to me I could probably get that right first time. To be fair, from what we saw the actors did get it right, every time, and it looked identical from one take to the next. So why 50 takes?

By the way the above figures come from our conservations with the movie-type people who were stopping all the passer's-by walking through the set, and this being New York, getting all sorts of abuse (one guy who was clearly a drug-dealer claimed he had to bring medicine to his 'sick grandmother'; one wonders what kind of medicine he was talking about and in exactly what way his grandmother was sick). We got stopped, were very polite and English about it, and chatted to them until we felt too sorry for them and had to leave them alone. Apparently they were off to LA next to film another scene (even though the movie is set entirely in the East Village, which they were standing right in the middle of - hmm).

So anyway, I now understand why movies are so bloody expensive to make. End of rant, and apologies.