Sigh…
Ok, here’s the story and some sordid details of the making of “The Wait”, our unreleased, epic zombie pic that took four years to finally get shot in the brain enough to die. I’ve hesitated writing a lot about it, or its demise because of the fact that with so many people involved, and so much nonsensical drama over that long a period of time, someone’s bound to end up with hurt feelings. I’ll try to hurt peoples’ feelings in the nicest way possible 
After finishing “Revenge”, I was hot to get to the next project, but I was thinking something smaller. WAY smaller, mostly just so we could test out Ed’s new bitchin’ crane and dolly. But I wasn’t real wild after trying to come up with a hundred different scripts, and so I considered the fact that I had just finished a 500+ page manuscript entitled “Escape from the Dead”. I *loved* George Romero’s zombie flicks, and so I thought I’d take a sliver of the story, turn it into a screenplay, and then make a 30 minute test flick out of it, to try out new gear and lighting technique. Great plan! Small cast, short movie, minimal special effects… NOTHING can go wrong…
But that’s where stuff went wrong. The script was easy enough to fashion, and I went and snagged a lead actress, conscripting Nicole Schafer from “Revenge” to play Ashley “Ash” Welles, a stripper with a heart of gold, on the run from zombies and looking for her uncle Mike. I would play Air Force pilot Mick Scott, and Dan would play Mick’s brother Jake Scott. See? Cast of 3, simple location (Ed’s barn), and only some zombie makeup to do on a handful of extras. Super easy.
When we started shooting, everything was going great. Ed and I were doing tests for gunshot hits, working with the dolly and crane, trying out CG muzzle flashes, and so on. Everyone was excited to come out and work on it, and things seemed to be going great. It was at this point that Nicole had gotten us introduced to Mick (Real Mick, not character Mick), and he was to be the enormous, violent zombie I had to do battle with. This version of the production went on for about a month before Ed said those fatal words to me in the barn one day… “You know, you really ought to just make this a full movie…”
We really hadn’t done much pre-production, because of how short the movie was supposed to be, and because everything was so contained. There weren’t hundreds of heads to keep track of, or even dozens. No huge makeup budget, or need for public buildings, etc. But when we switched it up to a full length movie, and I was working on the script, here’s where I believe the fatal mistake was- we STILL didn’t do that stuff. I think because we were already in a shooting mode, we didn’t want to back off of that, and spend several more months going back to plan everything out. HUGE mistake that I think was the cancer that started right at the beginning, and killed it at the end.
More cast, more zombies, more sets, more guns, and more headaches were added to the flick, which now had a bloated 120+ page screenplay, bumped up from 26 pages. We brought in “Revenge” veterans Ryan Gass and Alex Solodov, as well as a bunch of new faces. Thus, we set about our unplanned, unprepared quest to make a zombie movie. I was producing, and Ed was going to direct.
But what followed were months and months of the pattern “Shoot- review- reshoot”, and that got old, expensive, and frustrating in a hurry. We did have our moments, and one of the things we were good at was finding great sets/locations that we could use for free. Ed was doing an adequate job of directing, but he doesn’t really like zombie flicks, and now I don’t blame him.
How big was this thing? We decided to do a night of zombies. We would just put out some ads, and anyone who came to be a zombie would be slapped up with greasepaint, and sent into the night to eat brains. We’d have numerous cameras rolling to catch the various scenes we wanted to do, and everything would be great. 130 people came out to be zombies, and we had lots of great crowd shots, including massive ones in, on, and around the fire station in Windsor Heights.
To say there were problems with cast and crew would be tremendously understating things, but here’s where I’ll use some discretion and play nice. Suffice to say, I ended up directing, and there were some major problems that led to numerous re-casts, as well as some material we couldn’t do. Eventually, we wound up with the cast that would be the “final” one, and we forged ahead no matter how many times the movie had been pronounced dead. Ironically, it was like a… wait for it….. zombie.
We just didn’t have any money behind it, and while the others felt like it was taking forever, and that they were spending too much time on it, I wish they could have seen how much time I was spending on it. In the mean time, some personal issues had managed to end my law enforcement career, so I was suffering a lot of terrible, painful things while trying to be anything/everything on the production. Tiring? Hell yes, it was.
So we had most of this thing shot. Damn near all of it, and so I had a roughly edited version, and cast/crew wanted to see it. I added some temporary music and some foley to make things livable, and brought the rough edit to the others to screen. The screening was brutal. Viciously brutal- and I took it pretty personal, considering the credits were like that cartoon where Bugs Bunny is playing baseball, and the announcer is reading off every position as “Bugs Bunny”. By the time we were done watching it, and everyone went home, I was so mad, I couldn’t even think straight.
Now, mind you, it was pretty awful, but when you’re the guy writing, producing, directing, acting, editing, and so on, when people laugh at it and tear it 17 new assholes, that makes you a bit bitter. My time, I decided, could be WAY better spent on things that were more joyous and productive. I didn’t need the stress and the headaches so that I could have to endure that, I reasoned. And if that’s what the cast/crew thought of it…
So I quit. I just contacted everyone and said I was done. I didn’t want to do it anymore. Now everyone was serious, and wanted to finish it. I was super, super hesitant to get one more video frame of it, to be honest. I knew it was a dog, and it WAS a dog for numerous, very good reasons. Still, it was our dog, and I just couldn’t shoot it. I made clear that we almost needed to start from scratch with the damn thing (*groan*, right?) But to my surprise, everyone wanted to make a good movie, and so most were ok with that. We lost two cast members, but I can live with that attrition rate.
It had to have money to give it legs, and we had to quell some of the personality issues with cast/crew. Eventually, when our efforts raised a pathetic $160, and we could not seem to get past some issues, Dan and I mutually decided that perhaps in the future we could revisit the concept, but now was not the time. It required money we didn’t have, to put out a zombie flick amidst what had become a virtual sea of zombie movies, TV shows, comic books, and so on.
In the end, there were just so many technical problems with it, I just could not see releasing it to a world-wide audience, and I know that pissed a LOT of people off. But from our perspective- OUR wangs are in the breeze, OUR asses are hanging out, OUR names are on the thing. It’s far from a decent representation of our work, and the technical issues make it unrecoverable. We used 8 different cameras in 4 years; from dying single chip vacation camcorders all the way to professional level units. Some scenes are missing sound which we never dubbed. The shots range from beautiful to awful, and some of it was hard to cut together. Some of it was impossible. The on screen chemistry between Nicole and I (sorry Nicole) was almost non-existent, and probably because of both of us, by the end, we just weren’t getting along and didn’t like each other very much. It’s telling that the one shot in the movie where she hugs me, she is shown from behind, and it’s a stand-in. But for this production, by that point, that seemed normal.
If this movie had been a quilt, based on how it looks and flows, it would have been a quilt made of iron, leather, and kleenex, stitched together with dental floss and soldering wire. That’s how uneven it is. Hopefully, if we re-visit the genre, we’ll do a better job. Sorry this one didn’t turn out very well.
