I have an off day today. It’s strange to suddenly put on the breaks once you are in the full swing of things. D’Onofrio and Erbe are the ones that should have a day off. I cannot begin to tell you ho much dialogue the two of them have to remember each day. I would go so far as to say that Vincent D’Onofrio has memorized more dialogue than anyone in the history of television. Ten years of pulling cases together is a lot of words. I woke up this morning wondering where every one is shooting today. One of the fascinating things about shooting on location is how much you are like a conquering army. Before you get there, someone and their entire department (locations) has to comb through the city of Manhattan or Calgary or Atlanta and find someone who will accept money to allow a film crew in their house. Then you need to secure permits for taking over five or six blocks that are adjacent to that house. Then you need to find acceptable places to film outside too. You need to find a park and a street and a flower shop and a place to tow a car around with actors in it acting like they are driving. All of these locations take permits and cost money. Once all permits are secured, someone has to go in and make sure the house is safe from the hundreds of pairs of boots and shoes that will be invading it over the next ten days. Valuables are photographed and removed. Police tape is strung up across doorways no one is to pass through. Cardboard is laid out and taped to the floor so no actual feet ever actually touch the ground inside the house.

Then the tanks come in. In this case trucks. Camera trucks. Wardrobe trucks, electricity trucks. Trailers for actors. bathrooms for extras, vans that shuttle the actors and crew back and forth from the trucks and trailers to the set move through the streets like ants. All of these streets also need to be scouted out and permitted weeks in advance. There will be many, many men and women carrying heavy things up and down your sidewalks as you leave for work in the morning. They will be there when you come home. There will be a crane in the middle of the street with giant lights on it that will shine through windows at night making the inside of the house look very cool and mysterious. You see hundreds of man hours and hundreds of people go into finding a place to shoot and then actually shooting it. One last thing that I almost forgot: All of those hundreds of people showing up on your street to film and take over and not litter or shout…WHERE WILL THEY ALL PARK?

Yes, that detail is also not overlooked. Usually about five blocks away in a high school or church parking lot you will see seventy cars or so that have never been there before. Those are ours. We will now need vans to take us from the parking lot to the trailers where we work and back again in the night time when it is all finished for the day. Someone will stay behind and make sure there is no scuff marks or damage done to the house and they will clean up all the tiny pieces up tape that may be stuck to the floor where the cardboard was. They will make sure there is no litter and make sure that there are no crew members asleep in a private room. When all of this is completely finished. The entire production moves to it’s new location across town where the war machine is already up and running while you sleep.

jj