Saturday, March 14, 2009
No One Expects the Spanish Inquisition
Ah, the joys of renting. So one Wednesday during production, Dex and I arrived home from the day jobs to discover a notice from the property management company, informing us that they would be dropping by on Friday to inspect the premises.
Of course, many people in San Francisco have to clean up a bit before the landlord drops by. There's that pot stash that probably shouldn't be sitting on the kitchen counter, or those whips and chains that are perhaps better stored under the bed than over it, or that collection of HIV medications that are none of the landlord's damn business, and so on. Everybody has something in their abode that they'd rather not share with people with the power to evict.
For Dex and I, that was the Satanic Death Pit.
We'd built the Satanic Death Pit for the movie, of course, in the space occupied by our bed before we moved it to the kitchen. The Satanic Death Pit contained five faux granite pillars, one scarlet altar, various burgundy tapestries and one blood-inscribed stone pentagram, all of which had to be hidden from the prying eyes of the landlords within 48 hours, to say nothing of many lights, stands and tripods scattered throughout the apartment. Oh, and several sheets of 4' by 8' styrofoam, standing by in case of a set emergency.
The faux granite pillars presented the greatest challenge: They were too big to hide (say) under the bed, too tall to fit in the narrow unoccupied space in the attic, and too strange to just leave casually in the corner of a room. In the end, we decided the least weird thing to do was to stack the pillars horizontally, turning them into a tacky gay headboard, replete with draping burgundy fabric. We then had an object large enough to hide the styrofoam sheets behind. The light stands and tripods, when collapsed, easily fit inside the bottommost pillar, and the actual lights fit snugly under the bed, on top of the now out-of-sight blood-inscribed pentagram.
It actually didn't look that bad. I worked from home that day, to prevent the building inspectors from brushing the headboard and causing the whole fragile edifice of lies to collapse, but they only glanced at the room through the door, complimented me on my good taste, and asked about the four indentations in the floor of the kitchen. Heh heh. Ahem.
After the building inspectors left, we had about 12 hours to convert the bedroom back into the Satanic Death Pit for our shoot on Saturday. In retrospect, it would have been far easier to convert the Satanic Death Pit into a Naughty Play Dungeon, as the building inspectors of San Francisco are probably used to that sort of thing, but live and learn. ¶ 2:48 PM
Ah, the joys of renting. So one Wednesday during production, Dex and I arrived home from the day jobs to discover a notice from the property management company, informing us that they would be dropping by on Friday to inspect the premises. Of course, many people in San Francisco have to clean up a bit before the landlord drops by. There's that pot stash that probably shouldn't be sitting on the kitchen counter, or those whips and chains that are perhaps better stored under the bed than over it, or that collection of HIV medications that are none of the landlord's damn business, and so on. Everybody has something in their abode that they'd rather not share with people with the power to evict.
For Dex and I, that was the Satanic Death Pit.
We'd built the Satanic Death Pit for the movie, of course, in the space occupied by our bed before we moved it to the kitchen. The Satanic Death Pit contained five faux granite pillars, one scarlet altar, various burgundy tapestries and one blood-inscribed stone pentagram, all of which had to be hidden from the prying eyes of the landlords within 48 hours, to say nothing of many lights, stands and tripods scattered throughout the apartment. Oh, and several sheets of 4' by 8' styrofoam, standing by in case of a set emergency.
The faux granite pillars presented the greatest challenge: They were too big to hide (say) under the bed, too tall to fit in the narrow unoccupied space in the attic, and too strange to just leave casually in the corner of a room. In the end, we decided the least weird thing to do was to stack the pillars horizontally, turning them into a tacky gay headboard, replete with draping burgundy fabric. We then had an object large enough to hide the styrofoam sheets behind. The light stands and tripods, when collapsed, easily fit inside the bottommost pillar, and the actual lights fit snugly under the bed, on top of the now out-of-sight blood-inscribed pentagram.
It actually didn't look that bad. I worked from home that day, to prevent the building inspectors from brushing the headboard and causing the whole fragile edifice of lies to collapse, but they only glanced at the room through the door, complimented me on my good taste, and asked about the four indentations in the floor of the kitchen. Heh heh. Ahem.
After the building inspectors left, we had about 12 hours to convert the bedroom back into the Satanic Death Pit for our shoot on Saturday. In retrospect, it would have been far easier to convert the Satanic Death Pit into a Naughty Play Dungeon, as the building inspectors of San Francisco are probably used to that sort of thing, but live and learn. ¶ 2:48 PM
