Well, dear readers, episode ten is finished, finessed, and sent, all three songs have their endings and have been recorded, and so that part of this is now done. Whew! I do have to go back into about four episodes to plant lines having to do with one of the characters’ peccadillos – just one line in each episode, as it pays off in episode ten. Very easy to do. I’m now trying to cool down the eighty-one-degree house. And I’m listening to the first of the eight Lorin Hollander CDs – the first two are just solo piano miniatures, so not that interesting, but the sound is very good – these two were originally on RCA Camden, their budget label. After that, he graduated to normal RCA with some really interesting repertoire. I also managed to watch a motion picture on Amazon Prime entitled The Presidio, from 1988. I saw it back then and was primed for it – after all, Peter Hyams directing – he’d made a couple of very good movies and more than a few terrible ones – and Sean Connery, Mark Harmon, Jack Warden, Meg Ryan, Mark Blum – all actors I like, save for Mr. Harmon, who was desperately trying to get off TV and become a movie star – didn’t work. I was appalled back then at just how inept The Presidio was – terrible script, good actors flailing away trying to be as good as the could be, action sequences that were simply repetitive, and on top of all that, it looked bad (Hyams is his own cameraman). But you know how sometimes these older movies suddenly look a whole lot better these days due to how much junk they’re shoveling out these days, especially this kind of film. So, was this one of those films that’s aged well? That answer would be a firm no, absolutely not. It is worse than I remembered. The script is so inept – it doesn’t know if it’s a murder mystery, a thriller, a father-daughter story, a cop loves daughter of father story, and it just keeps meandering all over the place, never spending enough time with any one storyline and therefore you care about nothing. Add to that that Mr. Harmon is such a smug actor that you want to just throw a pie at him, and then add that the “villain” is on screen for perhaps a total of five minutes. Great thrillers have great villains – it’s that simple. I may have to go to CVS after posting these here notes, even though I do not want to – but I’ve been out of allergy pills for two weeks and I’ve been fighting an allergy attack for the past hour. And now, Clair de Lune (Clair the Loon) is playing. That’s Debussy, you know.
Yesterday was a quiet day except for banging away on the piano for hours, trying to get those endings right. I did get ten hours of needed sleep, got up, answered e-mails, got all the endings right, recorded the three songs, then wrote the tag scene, after which I finessed the long first sequence, cutting half a page out of it. This episode will probably run a tiny bit longer than the other episodes (those will hopefully come in at around twelve minutes), but since it’s the season finale I think that will be fine if we go an extra two minutes. I sent that off to where it needed to go and the reaction to it was wonderful, especially to the three new original songs.
Then I moseyed on over to Gelson’s, got some sliced turkey, two onion rolls, some cheese, some shredded lettuce, an avocado, and some grapes. I came home and made one turkey sandwich with a little light mayo, cheese, shredded lettuce, and some avocado – for the second sandwich, I left off the avocado. I ate both sandwiches, which were very good and surprisingly filling. That was it for food, save for a few grapes a couple of hours later. The rest you know.
Today, I’ll be up by eleven or thereabouts, and then at one we begin our second rehearsal, which will probably go to three-thirty or four. After rehearsal, I’ll either go out to get something to eat or I’ll order in. Then I’m doing nothing but watch, listen, and relax.
Tomorrow is a ME day. I have to relax and rest my voice. Tuesday is our stumble-through, and then Wednesday we do our sound check and show. Then the rest of the week is trying to cast some more of the cameos – I just need commitments from the actors, then I can assign as I see what will be the best fit. We did cast the fourth regular, so all the regulars are now set. There’ll be some meetings and meals, too.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, be up by eleven or thereabouts, have our second rehearsal, eat, then do nothing but watch, listen, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s free-for-all day, the day in which you dear readers get to make with the topics and we all get to post about them. So, let’s have loads of lovely topics and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, happy to have finished all ten episodes of the new web series.