IntoNoRes+

The Layover: Miami
Crew blog by Claudia Woloshin, Producer

Filming The Layover in Miami in mid-July was bound to bring with it some challenges. I figured it would be hot and humid and sticky and sweaty.  And it was all of that but oh so much more…

To start things off, my crew and I had all just gotten back from shooting in Hong Kong a couple days earlier—so there was still the inevitable jet lag to muddy the waters.

Obviously jet lag and sleep deprivation can be rough— but when it turns into a slightly hallucinatory out of one’s brain type of lightheaded lunacy —things can also become deliriously funny. Add some scorching Miami summer heat beating down on that scrambled up Hong Kong time zone brain—and suddenly we all needed Miami Caribbean cocktails and fast! 

So granted it might have been this disoriented state of mind that made us find our Miami crew so absurdly hilarious…or maybe they truly were just an odd but lovable motley bunch—sleep deprived brain or not.  Either way, we found a lot of much needed comic relief from their quirkiness…and I thought it would be only right to immortalize bits of their wonderful strangeness here. 

Our crew breakdown or cast of local Floridian characters (some names have been changed to protect identities that may or may not be running from the law) goes like this…

Leading the troops were our two amazing Director’s of Photography—Mo and Vanessa who though both exhausted and jetlagged, still always behaved like champions (or was it warriors?) and kept shooting—pretty much NON-STOP for six days straight. When they weren’t they spend most of their spare time inventing coconut water and rum cocktails (yum!). 

Then heading up the rear but crucial back of the crew were our Miami local hires that we’d never met before but whom we were about to get to know really well.

The role of the Production assistant/PA is of course an indispensable addition to the team— and a good one is a friggin’ Godsend. And in Miami, we were lucky enough to have two of them instead of the original plan of just one. Since we didn’t have an Assistant Camera person with us but still had lots of camera gear to contend with as we were shooting on the new F3 cameras with actual film lenses that were delicate, extremely expensive, (so had to be watched carefully) and heavy. So the second PA was ostensibly hired, to help lug around and watch over our pricey equipment.

PA numero 1 was the wonderfully eager and effusive Paul… Although green and still had a lot to learn—he was just what we needed—full of endless energy and always looking to help in whatever way he could. Talking a mile a minute he sometimes took wrong turns while driving us around, but this was probably only because he was so excited to be talking about his beloved Miami.

PA numero 2 position was filled by Daniel S. — he also said we were welcome to call him ‘Grumpy’ (for realz). So be it—‘Grumpy’ at first was suitably living up to his nickname and while filming at the Jai’ Lai’ game he never once smiled and promptly demanded a raise or threatened to quit the show. I admitted he might not be up for what we needed him to do. I mean we had A LOT to film with Tony in two days and even more after he left us so we weren’t resting much. Add the 300 percent humidity that day and this was hardly a cushy gig. He assured me that since he’d served in the army this shoot was ‘nothing’. It must have been true since he dressed in army fatigue type of clothing with lots of pockets everywhere and carried emergency supplies of peanut butter packets with him wherever he went. I guess the reasoning was that if we got stranded on the beach somewhere with jelly and bread but no peanut butter—we’d know Grumpy at least always had our back. For some reason (maybe it was telling him the other PA Paul would be in charge of all camera gear—and not him—he would now only be in charge of driving us around and distributing peanut butter if and when needed) Grumpy started to become decidedly less grumpy as the days went on and more of a good time. By day 3 he was showing off his skills as a ‘navy seals ’ type of navigator. He knew the city inside out and was a huge time saver in helping us avoid the headaches of getting stalled in Miami traffic. Another thing about Grumpy that was memorable was that he loved to tell us tales about his failed relationship endeavors while weaving through Miami traffic lanes. There was the first date that went sour (for reasons he didn’t seem to comprehend) after he took her to a film that turned out to be a porno (he swore he didn’t know when he bought the tickets) and then he followed that up with taking her on a trip to the Miami Museum of Sex where (for reason’s still mysterious to him) she rudely ditched him while he was admiring the exhibit.

Finally, there was Linda— our local ‘fixer’ extraordinaire… who it turned out was really better at eating things and finding us delicious places to eat and film in then necessarily ‘fixing’ things when they went wrong in the field. But that said, she’s a food writer by trade (very talented one) and not a production person so who could blame her really? Luckily, she works in the food writing biz as she always seemed to be ravenously hungry (though have no idea where she fit the food as she was so thin) and often and in the middle of filming from the car she’d plead for us to pull over immediately so she could eat something—“I need a banana please”.

Even if we had some growing pains along the way, after six days of shooting together we were like one big sweaty dysfunctional family; happily seated around a bar commiserating over mojitos—‘Grumpy’ relaying a story about how a dolphin in the Miami sea saved him once and Linda having stopped looking for bananas and food trucks was sweetly sipping wine instead.