| Here
it is, the column you've all been waiting for. My gratuitous and
largely ignorable account of a day's shoot with The Gang and my son,
Ronin, as well as another scandalous behind-the-scenes look at the
shooting of the internet's Greatest Show. Working backwards from Zero Hour, Yuri had suggested we start at 10 AM. This of course is what Yuri and The Gang adorably refer to as "early". He also mentioned in the same email that Dustin would show up at noon to start shooting his scenes with me. I politely reminded Yuri that Ronin was really only good until 11:30 sharp, and that we of course never start on time, and didn't he want to start earlier? He didn't seem concerned since the PSA was a relatively easy script (as many others have been, that have subsequently taken several hours to shoot... incompletely), and that he was counting on Hillary and Dustin to arrive late. Pay attention, that pays off later. So I got to the park at 9:30 to let Ronin play for a while before we started shooting what I was calling "the movie" ("What movie is?" he would ask). Hugo and Brian arrived, and just as Hugo and I were giving up on The Rest of the Gang they arrived within spitting distance of On Time. Ronin was quite delighted to see Daddy getting into his (incomplete, bonus crackers if you guess which article of clothing was missing) Jimmy Scotch getup. When asked if he too wanted to wear a silly costume he said "No!" with the genuine confusion and disgust of someone asked to gargle with their own urine. He was similarly delighted to play with the "severed hand", though not of course when we wanted him to actually play with it for a shot. Yuri tried and tried to get him to play with the hand, but Ronin was quite positive that he was satisfied with the little toy binoculars. Yuri even reasonably suggested he play with both, which after due consideration Ronin also turned down (he said "nooooo, one toy", including the pointer finger raised in the universal sign for the numeral "one", in case Yuri was at all confused about how many toys Ronin wanted to play with). Overall it went remarkably well, he's improved far more than his father in the year or more since his last shoot for the show. He was very delighted to watch himself on the camera's LCD screen and giggled incessantly (and still does) when he watched himself sing "Old MacDonald". He was even OK with the occasional buddy lift by Hugo and Yuri when he needed to get up or down quickly onto or off of a high play structure. It was only when Yuri took Ronin's head on a shortcut through a monkey bar that Ronin decided he had reached the limits of his work permit. His exact words were "GO! GO!". That happened at exactly 11:30 on the nose, so it was time to go anyway. I got back at 12:30 after a quick bite at the homestead. Guess who arrived mere moments after me? Hillary and Dustin. Yuri knows nothing if not the punctuality of his own cast and crew. |