July 11th, 10pm-5am EST
First off, what’s with the names these days?
Second, I just want to state for the record that I was DONE. I was wrapped on the film, and I had plans to catch a ride to the Buffalo Greyhound station and hop on an early Binghamton bus. Therefore, I was the only one at the table who had any business—
Well, let’s start from the beginning.
We’ve finished shooting for the day. While we’re phasing out, the new cast is phasing in, and there are complications with keys and rooms and medications, as well as issues involving special effects. Greg is grumpy and busy, a bad combination. There seems to be a sense of crisis hovering around the production. (Just for the record—this sense of crisis was absent during the two days of shooting with the Flashback-tors. Take that, New Generation!)
I deal with this muted panic the way I always deal with such scenarios. I excuse myself. Sephera, Wil and I hop in her car and truck on over to the Irish pub, repeating our debauchery from the night before. You can’t blame us. The food is good, the drinks are cheap, and it’s not too loud, not too quiet—it’s juuuuust right.
Sephera and I chose pints of Killians, while Wil stuck to his Jim Beam and Coke, and we discussed the various crises that had suddenly engulfed the set. There was an actor, staying at the Actor’s House, and it was locked, and the actor didn’t have the correct key, and his bags were inside, and he needed his bags. We had suggested to the actor, through John Renna, the production designer, that they all just head on over to Sangria’s, a great restaurant right around the corner from the Actor’s House, and just hang low until Greg and company could get the problem solved. Sandra, Marcos, Carlos and Eduardo were already there, so they’d have company. This solution did not suit the actor, who it must be repeated, needed to get to his bags. There was talk about breaking a window, a lock, etc.

Sephera had wanted to swing by the Actor’s House and see what we could do to help. I took more of a hands-off approach, and suggested that we could help best by staying out of it, and not adding to the general angst. To contribute to the smooth running of the production, all we had to do was take care of ourselves, and keep our noses clean.
Yeah, right.
At some point, we realized that Kealan, my character’s new possess-ee, was just down the street at the FX lab getting de-slimed. We gave him a call and asked if he wanted to join us. About two hours later, he showed up.
Kealan is the guy that pubs were made for. Irish, engaging, talkative, and a drinker, he took things up to the next level. And the next five levels after that. He started chatting up the bartender, the owner, the patrons. Soon, people were buying us drinks, strangers became best friends. The owner sat at our table and told us jokes and anecdotes about Buffalo Bob. It was incredible, magical.
It was also 4:15 in the morning. None of us were in a condition to drive. All of us needed to sleep, none more so than Kealan, who had a full day’s shoot tomorrow—make that today!
After a few aborted attempts to get everyone out of there, I finally succeeded. We staggered back to Sephera’s car. I was elected driver, based on the fact that I could still form consonants. We drove verrrry carefully to the Actor’s House. About a mile away, Kealan pulled out his key at the same moment as I hit a pothole, and the key flew out of his hand. We pulled over in front of the Actor’s House and searched, but could not find the key. It’s probably there right now, lodged in a black hole between the seat cushions. Kealan knocked, but the other actors were asleep and didn’t answer. Now Kealan contemplated breaking in—the Actor’s House would have the distinction of having been broken into twice in the same twelve hour period.
Finally, I herded everyone back to the car, insisting that breaking into a house at 4:45 am was apt to be misinterpreted by the police (although I’m sure Kealan would be able to charm the officers out of using live ammo.) We got back to Greg’s at 5 am, walking in as Greg was waking up. He wouldn’t look at us—a bad sign. We got Kealan set up on some couch cushions in the costume room, and I dozed for an hour before figuring out my transport to the bus station.
That’s how we keep our noses clean in Buffalo.

2:00 pm-9:00 pm EST

Around lunchtime, we started getting visits from the rest of the cast, people who would start shooting the main story the next day. Kealan, Jill and Lee all stopped by to check things out and meet us. This is the next generation of slime, my friends. They’re the actors that play the characters that our characters possess. Confused? Well, see the frickin’ movie when it comes out. I wish them luck and envy them—they get all the kick-ass scenes in the movie. The fights, the gross special effects, the slime oozing out of their pores. But they’ll have a hell of a time topping the work we’ve done so far.
Greg brought a few Slime City DVDs, and I was stunned by the number of people who wanted me to sign theirs. (I don’t think we hit double digits, mind you, but I don’t spend much of my life signing things.) It was a nice way to spend my lunch hour, pretending I was some kind of presence. One guy, Eduardo, had me sign three different DVDs.
Finally, it’s the last scene for us, the suicide scene. I dress up in my black outfit, with the disappearing and reappearing shoes, and sit down with Andrew so that we can figure out the knife. This is the knife gag (FX guys call their special effects “gags”) that I was shown by Rod the night I arrived, so there’s a certain closure going on. The knife itself is different, full of curves and holes—it feels almost organic, like bone. The tip comes off, so it looks like it’s really buried in my flesh, and the tubing runs up one side, so that when the knife touches my skin, the blood can flow. Andrew attached a whole set of tubes to my back, inside my shirt, nestled there with the sound guy’s wireless box. That’s a lot of shit to hide behind your back—but it was a fairly presentational scene, so no worries there.
While I worked with the knife, trying to familiarize myself with it, they brought in the rest of Flashback-tors and the extras. One of the extras, Eduardo, who had been a delight all day, gave us a bit of a scare when he sat on a prop cot, which ripped apart the second his ass touched it. Displaying strength and dexterity I don’t think I could match, he swung from the cot’s edge, upside down, by his knees, and easily let himself down through the center. This is a 58 year-old guy! It would have been a shame to start the last scene with a concussion. Good save, Eduardo!
When I began my speech, which starts as sort of an emotional farewell, one of the extras kept laughing, trying to suppress it, but laughing nonetheless. I guess I was too silly on the set.
While they shot the reactions to my speech, I got a look at the monitors. The black and white images looked incredible. While I half-expected the women to look that good, it still took my breath away. The huge shock, however, was Michael, the guy playing Roman the poet. The camera seemed to capture an anxious sadness in his features. It looked incredible. If the rest of the sequences look that good, we’re golden.

The knife gag went off beautifully. Then I was dismissed to get an appliance added to my arm that would simulate a deep gash. Andrew painstankingly stuck the latex wound on my arm, keeping up a great conversation while he blended the edges of the appliance into my flesh. I extracted a promise from him that he would be as solicitous with the other actors when he was taking the make-up off, and he assured me that that was part of the job. Great guy, Andrew. I got back on the set and fed the other actors their lines while the appliance dried. Then he poured blood on my wound, Greg got his shot, and I was wrapped, along with the rest of the Flashback-tors.
That was the end for me, but of course the crew and the incoming actors were just getting started. They had an early start on the train terminal set the next day, so they were busy loading up and getting out of the office building. There was a crisis at the Actors House and a problem with the slime guy make-up as applied to Kealan, and Greg was peeved. (He was using the letter “f” when he wanted to say “fuck” earlier in the weekend, but tonight abbreviations would not do—“fuck.”) There were some plans to visit a place called “The Snotty Fox” with Brooke, but we wrapped later than expected, and she was just going home to prepare for her trip back home. Sephera, Wil and I decided to go to the Irish pub we’d visited the night before. I bundled up my stuff, threw it in Greg’s car, gave everyone who wasn’t too busy a handshake or a hug (Greg doesn’t hug,) got in Sephera’s car, and we drove off into the Buffalo night.
And then things got interesting!

So, shoes on feet, I drive Greg to the set. We got there at 7:30, parked on the street, and walked in to the set. This was the first scene, apart from Lizzie’s solo prepping of the ectoplasm, that we shot on this set. This is where I talk to my followers, and Brooke gets some more info on my cult, and drunks the famous elixir. This is where I give my mini-schpiel.
This little pep talk originally began as a whim. Greg had e-mailed me the fictional book cover that my fictional character wrote, “Flesh Control.” I asked him if he wanted me to write an inside jacket cover blurb, and he said yes. A few days later, he asked if I could make the blurb a spoken word piece, and he created a slot for it in the script. Greg is one of those cool directors who’s open to ideas from the cast. Of course, he also likes to bust your chops. When I got on set, he discussed the scene by saying “Robert wrote this monologue for his character—frickin’ actors.”
I wrote it, I edited it—now all I had to do was learn it. Fortunately it was pretty straight forward, and Greg figured out a way to shoot it that required only one set-up, a dolly shot on me, then across to my minions, then ending on Brooke and Michael so they could do their scene.
The extras arrived en masse at about 8:00 am. For they record—they were coool! They all seemed to be friends of Michael, and had all come in homeless attire. One woman really went for broke, wearing a pillowcase for a skirt and dirtying up her skin with a mixture of chocolate and olive oil. Some of them were ultra-methody, which can be irritating for those playing lead roles (I’m talking to you, Mr. Bale!) but you really have to admire it in extras.
Around 10:00 am, we started shooting. We were able to do a few takes, as the camera move was a little complicated and there were all sorts of details to wrangle. I didn’t mind doing the schpiel 5 times over—I just felt like I was getting stronger and stronger. The extras were all focused, making great eye contact—one of them even shed a tear, although I think she was trying to suppress a cough. They were quiet as dead slugs while Brooke and Michael performed their scene. The support we got from them in this key scene (the first time we see the “cult”) was huge.
Next on the agenda—the orgy scene.