Film and Television

Worldscreen has a short piece about FAST TRACK up 0n their site today, mostly cribbed from the studio press release.

I am back in Los Angeles for three days of casting on FAST TRACK…and to get my life in order before returning to Berlin again next week for most of the summer (shooting starts May 23). So, naturally, I am hammered by jet-lag. I went to bed last night at 9 and woke up at 3 this morning…though I am not worrying much about my odd hours. In fact, I can probably keep these hours until I leave without causing any real problems in my life and it gives me time to work on my next MONK book without much distraction. Plus I can keep in touch with the production team in Germany.

Being a TV geek, I am busily downloading shows from my Tivo onto my iPod to watch on my flight to Germany and in my free time there (did I tell you that I got my iPod back?). While I am away, I’m going to miss the finales of HEROES, BOSTON LEGAL, LAW & ORDER SVU and THE SOPRANOS…but they will be waiting for me at home when I return in August.

I’m not an expert in fashion or style, so I don’t always have the words to express how I see the look of the characters  in FAST TRACK. So over the Easter Weekend, I spent about 150 euros on magazines, bought some glue and construction paper, and started cutting out pictures with my daughter of fashions and styles I liked. Together we made up "style boards"  for each of the characters.  I also bought some architecture and automotive books and magazines to create style boards for the look of the cars and the "world."  It was  a lot of fun for us both and, when we were done, I must have had fifty boards.  I brought the boards into a day-long concept meeting with the director, line producer, production designer, and costumer designer. As it turns out, I must have done a pretty good job beforehand of explaining how I see the movie because the boards and examples they brought in closely matched what my daughter and I had come up with over the weekend. Even so, we filled the walls of  my office with their boards and mine and spent hours picking and choosing and refining the looks until we all agreed on what we were going for and what our color palette would be. We also watched clips of American and German films to refine what the style, lighting, and look of our film/pilot will be and that we want to convey to our director of photography…once we find him.

Tomorrow, I begin two days of casting for the German actors and then return to L.A. for three more days of casting to find our American actors. And then I have to quickly prepare and organize my life for living in Europe for the next three months more-or-less as I oversee pre-production, production and post-production of the movie.

It’s the Easter holiday here in Germany, so I finally had a day to sleep-in, relax, and get settled. Since the moment I stepped off the plane last week, I have been on-the-go non-stop, going from one meeting to another and, in some cases, one corner of Germany to another. Today is the first time I’ve actually felt "grounded," if you know what I mean. And best of all, my family is arriving tonight to join me for a week. I’m staying on Friedrichstrasse, sort of the Rodeo Drive of Berlin, and I if I lean just a bit this way and that, I can see Checkpoint Charlie and the Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz from my balcony.

The pre-production experience for me on FAST TRACK has been exciting, familiar and in many ways, brand new. It’s my job as the writer & executive producer to relay my vision of the characters, the look, the sound, and the "feel" of the pilot (and subsequent series, if we are lucky) to all the people working on the show…from the production designer to the stunt drivers.  That’s always a challenge but it’s even harder here, where the culture,  language and ways of making TV shows are different. Not only that, our points-of-reference (other TV shows and movies, for instance) are different, too. It’s a new experience for all of us on the show, but I’m working with some incredibly bright and creative people. I think they are beginning to see the show the way I do. They are also enthusiastically embracing a different approach to film-making, a "hybrid" of the American & German producing methods that we’ve created (I’ll go into that another time…there’s probably enough material there for a book!). It’s very exciting for me and, from what I can feel talking to them and just walking down the halls of the production office, it is for them, too.

Yesterday I spent five hours with our German casting director, looking at dozens and dozens of showreels to pick the actors we’d like to come in next week for auditions. The clips on the reels are all in German, so I am having to judge the actors based on emotions, expression, body language, charisma etc. I have to judge  if they are conveying character  through every tool BUT language, since I can’t understand a word they are saying.  I have to guess the context & story of the scene and try to judge how good…or bad…a job the actors are doing (although the reels are all in German, the actors we are inviting in all speak English).  And, of course, their credits mean nothing to me, too….they are all German TV shows and movies. It was another new experience…one of many that I have each day, which is what makes this project so special for me.