Nice Diggs

So today was super-productive. Heavy on the great, light on the terrible. Despite the subject matter. You may remember that in my second weekly update I mentioned auditioning Curt Rose. I didn't tell you what part he'd be getting, though some of you probably guessed. But if it wasn't clear then, his reappearance with a shaved head should be a dead giveaway now.

"Is it Lex Luthor? I think you guys might not be doing this right..."

That's right, today we finally knocked out our biggest missing chunk; Oscar Diggs, the great and terrible Oz himself. We got an early start at 7:30 this morning, which was actually a half hour later than it was supposed to be. We had more packing to do than we had time-budgeted for. But it didn't phase Curt, who met us at the storage facility and was very enthusiastic about getting started as quickly as possible.

And also vaguely threatening.

We spent the first half of our five hour block working on a single scene. This was the moment when our heroes discover Oz for what he is. It's a massive dialogue sequence with five characters, and between Dorothy, Scarecrow, and Oz it's now been my least favorite scene to shoot three times in a row. Curt was a trooper during its filming, though, having to spend the entire time huddled on the floor.

In contrast, my favorite stuff was by far the three scenes in which he gives the Oz trio the things that they think they want. Curt logged a lot of prop mileage in that one. My favorite prop didn't even completely exist until last night. That being a creation of Sean's, which he dubbed "Mega-Chester." What is it, you ask? Our frequent readers may well guess. It's an unholy monstrosity, a plus-sized version of the original Scarecrow puppet.

Here's a taste. That is entirely too much head.

Why do we need this behemoth when we already have the existing puppet? Well, Dorothy is being scaled up in the movie, to give the appearance of an Oz populated by little people. Since Dorothy interacts with the puppet, that means she's the only human he's to scale with. But not the only human he needs to interact with. In order to ensure that the grown-ass men who need to deal with Scarecrow look to scale, we were gonna need a bigger puppet.

We didn't just use it with Curt, either. Once we finished with him at 12:30, we went over to Lloyd Adams' property. He's the man who's allowing us to use his one-room schoolhouse for Kansas photography. But he also has a barn that was perfect for our needs today. We used it to knock out part one of the Scarecrow flashback, featuring our dashing day-players; writer Sean Gates and poster artist Jeremy Bertz.

"That sure is a purty mouth... That you painted..."

This shooting flowed smoothly, especially considering that it's one take that lasts about a minute, and has a lot to choreograph. Once that was wrapped, we did one of the silliest things we've ever done. We pulled off the highway and guerrilla-filmed Sean and Jeremy in their ridiculous costumes in the middle of an empty field. We don't actually need it for the movie, I just wanted to publicly shame them.