Santa Fe Week 9

11/11/21

Wow. Sure have been in Santa Fe for a good long while! I reckon nine weeks or so...

It seems the longer I stay here the harder it is to leave. Stuck? Not exactly. It's great being around Robert and Stephen. The weather, altho cold during the evening, is more or less terrific. Daytime is almost always blue skies and full sun. SF has over 300 days out of the year of sunny skies. What's not to love.

Shooting resumed this weekend! After quite a bit of near misses, I got Katie, Leigh and Ryan to all agree and meet at my brother's place and we knocked out another scene, finally!

"Katie & Johann"

All the talent were terrific. Backstory on gathering the actors. Katie, the marvelous cello player had agreed to do the shoot, but delays on securing other actors halted her participation and she went out of town for a while. Then, my brother put me in touch with Leigh, who I met at one of our favorite coffee shops. She agreed to appear, but I sensed it was not with complete enthusiasm . More of a favor. A grudging favor. A kicking and screaming favor. While pitching the scene to her, a young guy sitting nearby raised and hand and said, "I'm available!" and just like that, I had one more person to add to the scene, Ryan. Day after, Leigh texts me she's found a replacement for herself. Tells me her replacement is better than her. Sounds goods I say, I'll see her tomorrow.

And when tomorrow arrives, the day of the shoot, the morning of the shoot, with about an hour to go, the replacement bails out!

Leigh, driven perhaps by pangs of guilt, agrees to appear after all. And she was great! So was Katie. And so was Ryan.

As always, I had to work fast. I once again invoked my "Little-White-Time-lie" ( we'll be done in an hour!) and took nearly 2.5 hrs off the clock. I can always sense when the talent knows I've fibbed, when they start commenting out loud about the time it's taking, often in a playful manner that sometimes, sometimes, drifts into indirect tones of frustration lightly peppered with hints of anger. But this did not occur during the shooting of "Katie & Johann", thankfully.

Still see Tucson on the horizon as my next destination. But it's so close to Thanksgiving that I may just stick around for that singular American, great (gross?) display of gluttony. Already been invited to a dinner at a dear friend's of Robert and Stephen's.

Have talked/interviewed a few other people who seemed enthused about participating in "Wander Lost" but I'm not so keen on their participation for one reason or another, something I can't put my finger on. But I'm sensing that they may be flakes which = to an eventual waste of time. We shall see.

I spend an awful lot of time at the Starbucks parking lot, inside my RV, close enough to logon to it's public wifi. It's a public parking lot, but sometimes I get the feeling that I'm pushing it with the RV, which uses up every bit of a parking spot, and altho among the smallest of its RV type (Class C) stands out in size alone.

Now that I have shot 7 segments of Wander Lost, I have nearly 29 minutes of film, or over one third.

More later!