Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [97]
Each day we would load up and travel 40 minutes from Gold to this abandoned Air Force bunker located in the middle of nowhere. At the end of the day we would pack up and head back to Gold. There was no operational air conditioning in the building and on some days during the summer it would be over 110 degrees in the studio. There were portable air conditioning units that we brought in to direct at the actors in between takes so that the make-up would not melt off their faces. Yeah, this is the place where 90% of the Scientology Tech films were shot! Now, if we were shooting on location, we would usually have to get up around 3-4 a.m. so we could pack up the equipment and travel to the location, set up and shoot. Then pack everything up and travel back to the base.
For the TR#1 (Training Routines in Life) film, we had around 30 sequences that needed to be shot. Most sequences would take a full day to shoot. Mitch, the Director, had decided that about half of these sequences he wanted to shoot on location as opposed to in the studio. This meant that we had to stagger the shooting so that one day we would shoot on location, the next day we would shoot in the studio. This would allow for the sets crew to switch out sets while we were on location and so on.
Well, Dave Miscavige wanted to release the TR#1 film for Auditor’s Day and that was in September. It was the end of June, and based on how much time it would take to edit the film, get the music and final mix down done, he had arbitrarily decided that the film had to be shot by Sea Org day (early August). That gave us about a month to shoot 30 sequences. Every day that passed was a lost day and starting filming right away was a must. We began within a few weeks after location scouting, budgets and designs were all done and approved.
Our daily shooting schedule went something like this:
DAY 1 - We got up at 6:00 a.m. and left for Norton, we would shoot all day and got back to Gold around 10:00 p.m. We then had our meetings and went over the next day’s shoot, which was a location. We went home around 11:00.
DAY 2 - We got up around 4:00 a.m. to leave for Norton. Once at Norton, we packed up the gear and drove to our location. We shot all day and got back to Gold around 10:00 if we were lucky. Had our meetings, and went over the next day’s studio shoot. Went home around 11:00. At least we got to sleep in until 6:00 the next morning!
DAY 3 - Repeat DAY 1 schedule.
DAY 4 - Repeat DAY 2 schedule.
And so it went for a full month. By the time we got to the last week of shooting, crew were falling asleep standing up, driving, you name it. Most crew could sleep whenever we were traveling. But, as there were only five drivers and four vehicles, most of the drivers slept 2-5 hours a night on a good day. Some nights we returned from a location shoot at 1:00 a.m. and had to be at the studio at 7:00 the next day.
Well, we got to the end of the film and this is where things became a bit tricky. The end sequence of the film contains all the actors who appear throughout the entire film. So you had 30 plus actors who all needed to be available to drive out into the middle of nowhere and spend six hours on a set that was 100 degrees. Add to that, the script from LRH called for a camera move that was nearly impossible to achieve and had not even been done on the previous version of the film. This sequence was re-shot