On the other hand, do you know what's great about eating breakfast at 5:30 in the morning? Yeah. Still nothing.
Our shooting day started at 6:30AM. This was my view for most of the day:
I get to spend all day with a group of people staring at me through a windshield and judging me. And that big-ass light sunburned the right side of my face. It's as glamorous as you thought.
At least I was inside the car. They had it mounted on a trailer, and the truck was towing us around to make it look like we were actually driving. (They won't let me drive for real, because the 1st Assistant Director is a friend of mine, and he knows better.) The temperature was below freezing when we started this morning. But these guys were thoughtful enough to actually start the car, and just let it idle on the trailer while we were shooting. For legal reasons, I'm not supposed to tell you what kind of car we were filming in, but its initials are FORD FUSION. With seat-warmers, y'all. Which may be the greatest automotive invention since ever. Those poor guys were freezing their butts off, and within an hour I had a profound case of swamp-ass.
See the guy with the overgrown pubic hair on his head? That's our director, Murray. He's wearing that shit PROUDLY, you guys.
Anyway, when you're doing a shot of this kind, you need to block off a pretty good stretch of road to film on. Which means you need police escorts to block off both ends of the road. I'm pretty sure we had every cop on in Sealy (3) on set today. It kind of made me feel important; like the president, except not being black and everybody hating my guts. (If you don't laugh at that, you're probably racist.) So we find this long stretch of a Farm-To-Market road, and we start shooting, and after a little bit I realize that we're right in front of a Walmart Distribution Center, and they have rigs trying to get on that road every three seconds or so, and they are just happy as hell to have us out there, shooting our commercial and blocking everything off like we're making the next Jason Bourne film, the one where Bourne is middle-aged and clinically depressed and has to wear reading glasses.
At one point I tried to be friendly to a passing trucker. I didn't do the universal honk-your-air-horn move, because that is uncool. Instead, as he whizzed by us, I yelled out the window, "I Heart Walmart!" Except with the wind and the road noise I'm pretty sure it came out sounding like "I FART BALL TART!" Based on the look he gave me, I'm almost certain that's what he heard.
I don't even know what a ball tart is.
Tomorrow we're shooting at the actual gas station, which should be fun. Because the only thing harder than keeping Walmart trucks out of your shot is people.
Stay tuned...
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