I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell

One of the things I have had to learn on this movie is how to cooperate, collaborate and delegate. Never in my life have I ever worked on anything that had so many people so involved, and had so much out of my control. Granted, these are all my people that I picked out, that are all following my vision, and they are all very capable and I trust them, but still–letting go like this is not something that comes naturally to me.
As much as I have tried to be a good leader and not micromanage, I have failed in one aspect: The strip club scene. It can’t just be right. It has to be perfect, because there is no scene I care more about than the strip club scene.
When discussing locations, I have been totally fine with everything the director and location manager found, except the strip club location:
“No. This isn’t good enough. It has to be better. It has to be the Valhalla of strip clubs. Find something else.”
When discussing the music, Nils and Sean and the music supervisor spent an hour nerding out about all these stupid hipster bands and oldies and all this bullshit I could care less about. After I could take no more, I stopped them, and looked the music supervisor right in the eye:
“There is only one scene where I truly care about the music. The strip club scene. It has to be perfect. When they walk in, I want [song redacted]. I want the titties bouncing right to the baseline. There will be about five more song played in that scene, and I want the five greatest strip club songs ever as those five. I don’t care about the rest of the movie, but that HAS to be right.”
Casting extras is such a shitty and boring job, there is a separate casting director just for extras. But this isn’t good enough for me. I sent this email to Joseph Middleton last week:
“I think we have talked about this, but the one scene where I REALLY care about the extras is in the strip club scene. We need at least 20, maybe 25 really hot stripper/porn star looking women to be background
in that scene, and I do NOT trust us to cast that locally. If we need 25 background strippers, we can probably cast 10 locally, but I want to make sure the majority are super-hotties we bring in. I will not accept anything less that the best for that scene.”
It’s not that I don’t care about the other locations or the other music or the other extras. I absolutely do. But I trust that the team I have assembled will get that right without me micromanaging them.
But there are certain things you just can’t delegate or leave to chance. Naked titties are one of those things.
Comment and discuss.