A Wing and a Prayer While Waiting to Start

Still waiting to start on the Gus Van Sant film, which should happen in the next day or three, and from then on it will be Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride until the day we wrap.  But I live for this kind of high riding excitement and thrill-a-minute work under the pressure of foreshortened prep time.

My only regret will be if we have to skimp on some important visual treatment because of deadlines.  Let’s hope we can keep up and do everything the production designer desires.  I haven’t met the DP or the director yet, but it is a strange kind of suspended wonderment, thinking of them out there, or up there, in the future of shooting this film.

I love the script, but that’s all I will say about it.

It’s going to be a long day for me tomorrow, getting everything out of mothballs for my kit, and cleaning up the mayhem from my last show.  I still have to find a missing regulator for my CO2 canister that’s been missing for months, and clean up a tint rack that repeatedly leaked all the colors of the spectrum into my footlocker.

My flip house is taking up all my time for the moment, and that has to get scheduled and autonomously running by the time I get swept away into filmmaking for the next two or three months.

And there is one more thing taking up my time for the past few days; a prayer that was answered:  my beautiful wild red tail hawk Tennerin has returned from his migration for the eleventh year.  He wasn’t due back for another week to three weeks, but I had been “feeling” him getting close to the house for several days.  So what if psychic connections aren’t scientifically validated (yet)—I was so sure of this feeling that for the past three days I have been heading outside the first thing every morning to stand on the edge of the deck and call to him.

At 8:00 am October 9^th I called out ”Tennerin!” and one second later he flew over my head.  I ran down to the meadow at the river bottom and talked to him while he cart wheeled in the sky above me, then I raced to the store and bought some beef (round steak, on sale), put some pieces of it on a log I had saved from the flooding the winter before, and looked for Tennerin in his favorite tree.   We looked at each other for a long moment, and just as he always does, he waited for my call, “Come on down, Tennerin!”, and he flew in, just four feet above the ground, wings held still and wide, coming in for a perfect landing, as if he had never been gone.

Life is good.  It will be hard to leave him for work every day, but we have the entire fall and winter together, and by Christmas I’ll be wrapped.

I have done a little filmmaking myself, extremely low budget (about $6.95 for the Hi 8 Sony video tape), and Tennerin is the subject.  Someday, Tennerin, I’ll make a real film featuring you.  However, right now any of my readers out there can see a video I put together two years back, in which Tennerin expresses his opinion of pasta from the Olive Garden.  It’s here: YouTube - My Wild Hawk Friend .  It is worse than amateurish, of course, but it was a labor of love.

I’ll fill you in on the first day of work on the film next Monday.