Our final day of shooting consisted mostly of chasing actors with cameras, my brief homage to Point Break. We also had our first and only company move — just two blocks, to a tiny medical clinic in Eagle Rock. One by one, we wrapped our actors, until we were left with just one regular and one guest star.¹

At lunch, I gave my sincere thanks to a crew I really enjoyed working with. I’d long taken it as a given that production is stressful, but this honestly wasn’t. Yes, we had a bit of padding in the schedule, but we weren’t dawdling. It felt most like shooting Part Two of The Nines: a small, nimble crew and the freedom of constrained expectations.

Now we move on to editing. We’re cutting on Avid, but I’ve been using Final Cut Pro to check out footage as well. So far, I’m a fan of the P2. If we were shooting multiple episodes, we would need to find a slicker workflow, but our dumping-to-MacBook worked fine for this.

I’d hoped to make it to the picketing at NBC yesterday, but the cold I’d been medicating for the past few days took over. In the age of the internet, being sick doesn’t keep you from working, but it makes it hard to muster enthusiasm for much. I’m alternating DayQuil and Diet Coke in hopes of attending the WGA meeting tomorrow night, but that’s on the bubble.

Talking with writers last night, there was widespread belief that the end of the strike is approaching. And yet it doesn’t feel like the end — or more specifically, it doesn’t feel like what an end is supposed to feel like. There’s a profound lack of closure. Bob Fisher will shave his strike beard. I’ll have beer with my Van Ness crew. But you can’t throw a parade when there’s so much work to be done.

It’s going to be brutal trying to get the town started up, figuring out which movies are still happening, which TV shows are going to try to finish their seasons. You know when there’s a big evacuation — fire, hurricane — and the residents are finally allowed back to their houses? It will be like that. The first few days will be just about finding out what’s still standing.

I have six features in various stages of production and development, all of which will need tending in the first few days after we get back to work. Three months is a long break. I haven’t read a word in these scripts, or jotted a single note. I’ve forgotten half the phone numbers I used to be able to blind-dial. So going from stand-still to sprint is likely be rough.

1. I realize how weird it sounds to call an actor in a short a “guest star.” The point is that if this were a series, he wouldn’t likely be in future episodes. ↩

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