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Pete Jones - Let It Rain
It doesn't really mean too much if I tell you the rain day was the worst day in my moviemaking career, but the fact that it was one of the worst days ever for most of the crew does. Our decision to move to a cover set was probably an hour late, and the fact that my crew continued to work outside in this miserable weather all day while setting up the night shot weighed on me heavily. But the one thing you don't really see too much on HBO is how great this crew was and how supportive they were of me. I imagine it's difficult working as many films as most of them had and then having to deal with this contest winner and all of the extra cameras documenting our work. So I would like to just say thank you to all of them and tell them that they make Chicago proud.
The quality of the movie suffered because of the rain day. A shot that Biagi and I had set up to be a short dolly move that follows Joe and Pete O'Malley onto the baseball field had to be scratched and instead became a stationary scene in a car. The actors do a great job in the scene, but in a movie where there is a lot of talking, it's tough to lose a scene where there is movement, space, and beauty. Another scene that really lost its purpose was the scene between Pete and the rabbi where Pete tells the rabbi that Danny is not in heaven. I had envisioned this scene to be wide open with the innocence of baseball in the background, but instead this scene became somewhat stationary and closed when we moved it inside. A lot of people ask me if the movie we made is the movie I had envisioned. Well, we don't make the movie in my mind. And that is why, in my opinion, good movies, as much as I love them, can never be better than great books.
The major "plot" in this week's episode is the conflict between Pat Peach and Jeff Balis. Pat and Jeff were stepping all over each other and unfortunately if Chris Moore and I had better managed the situation, it would have never gotten as bad as it did. What the HBO show doesn't illustrate is how important Pat and Jeff were to "Stolen Summer." Pat's job was to make sure this movie came in on time and on budget without compromising the quality of the script, and he did that job well. What it doesn't show is that Pat was also my emotional crutch and the one person who had the experience on low budget films. It just frustrates me that a couple of bad minutes on a couple of bad days can be edited together to paint a bad picture of Pat. Because if the HBO show had decided to edit together a lot of great minutes from a multitude of great days, you would have seen Pat as I see him. A good friend who did a good job.
Balis! Nobody is more unfairly characterized than Jeff Balis. The man was a bulldog with the best grasp of how this movie should look and the intelligence, personality, and energy to get it done. He made mistakes (like all of us), but his mistakes were due to inexperience and his role being poorly defined. For some reason, the term "inexperienced" has a negative connotation rather than just being a fact. It's his first movie. The only thing Jeff Balis lacks as a producer is experience and if I ever get a chance to make another movie, the first thing I will do is to see if Jeff is available, and if he's not, I will wait until he is.
I know this column might seem sentimental, but I really do believe this and feel the need to fight what I view as a negative approach the HBO show took depicting the making of "Stolen Summer." We made mistakes and please document that and learn from it. But we had successes too. Unfortunately, you can only read about them in my column.
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