A Short History of Production

On my list of priorities over the past few months, blogging has been pretty far down there.  Since my last update we've gone through a month of pre-production, a month of production with a crew of around 50, and now we've entered a post-production phase.

We started shooting downtown Wilmington, doing our best to make little edited slices of it look like New York City.  Then we moved to a "Brooklyn Apartment," a house in Wilmington that our art department turned into a brownstone walk-up. Bryan Greenberg and Emmanuelle Chriqui were in those scenes and I knew immediately that we had something special going on. Their incredible chemistry made the scenes sing, and it gave me the confidence I needed to really start working with the actors as they showed up on set.

The director with Emmanuelle Chriqui and Bryan Greenberg

On day three, Linda Lavin joined in quickly followed by Kathleen Rose Perkins, Rebecca Dayan, Benjamin King (a comic treasure, if you ask me) and Harris Yulin. The pleasure for me on the set every day was watching what these actors did with the words on the page and with each other.

The actors and crew worked very long days to get this done on time and on budget. There were days we reported on set at 5:00 AM and didn't leave until late at night. The Wilmington-based crew maintained an incredibly upbeat attitude throughout. Any thoughts of blogging about the shoot disappeared when I collapsed at night.

Wilmington is now wrapped, and editing has begun.  This weekend we're shooting a few final scenes in New York, including one scene in Brooklyn Monday morning that I've been looking forward to since I first wrote it in the script.  More on that later, as well as some pictures from the NYC shoot.

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