Then we shot the school room scene where Darryl realizes one of his students is a better writer than he will ever be – at least until (at the end of the movie) he is inspired by Amelia Phillips to be a more honest and courageous man.  One of my favorite scenes and PG did it even better than I imagined it in my head – which is why writers of plays and movies need actors.
I love actors, though I’ve heard that a few of them are neurotic.

After lunch, the HOOPS ENCOUNTER.  A one on one game, 10 buckets, make it-take it.  The Chrises take the opportunity to play some serious roundball.  Lot of earned sweat—both could have played at the park in the old days with Steve Katz, Jules Demchick and me.  Cheerleaders in the background, coached by Camille Portillo (Marcelle Bowman), Jack’s young admirer, whose underwear Jack tears off with his teeth (Yep.) and flings out the window of Camille’s speeding car…only to be discovered minutes later by the suicidal Darryl seconds before his motorcycle runs out of gas and he sees an old RV in the distance, where unbeknownst to him, a gun has gone off and killed Jack Phillips, whom Darryl beat in that one on one game at school, so that when Jack arrives home, he takes his fury out on his wife Amelia.  Not as convoluted as it sounds.

Today’s schedule is stopped by a monsoon rain at the moment I’m writing this, with Chris McD., as Jack, mostly dead.  The rain will put us behind, just as we had caught up.

I try not to loath nature, as I’m pretty sure it has no feelings for me or regrets.

My latest?  An Xbox 360 console and this wonderfully addictive little G-rated masterpiece of a game called 'Gears of War 2'. Ok, so It's not G-rated in the least, and it's anything but peace stirring.  It's a 3rd person shooter game set post-apocalypse on the planet of Sera, and the humans are being exterminated by a band of wily and witty aliens called the Locust Horde.  It drives my brain wild, this game;  playing it online gives me the rush that only head to head combat can. I've always relished competition, and like the matrix, when you begin to see the mind of the other, it is such a rush.  Similar to my addictions past;  the torturous game of No-Limit Hold Em Poker, and online Backgammon.  Needless to say, after finishing our fourth full day of filming on Saturday night, I played Gears of War 2 until 8 am this morning.  Seriously.  And now I'm stuck with my Sunday evening feeling like my Sunday noon. 

In truth, I'm not much of a blogger, which I'm sure, by now, you can tell.  I did a lot of writing when I was in my college years, most of which are collections of poems based on sections of time in my life.  Blocks of existence that somehow seemed to relate to each other as I developed into a person on this great and mysterious earth.  The subjects ranged from heartbreak to drugs, music, vampires (which I still adore to this day), dogs, the roles of the sexes, golf clubs, fists, blood, and women.  The style was all my own.  What I tended to concentrate on was my relationship to these things, as if they were real right there on the page.  Similar to paint on a canvas- the task being not to represent, but to create something wholly its own, which you could smell, taste, see, and hear.  An article or object or item with presence and in the present.

I felt great excitement in the process.  The science of it. Testing and trying.  The investigation and the economy and the need to be EXACT.  Things that don't necessarily go together, but by placing them next to each other, a new thing is born at their edges.  It is here, in the investigation, that my desire and impulse for art rests.  And it's always magical and elusive.

I have written since those days.  Two plays and a short film, mostly concerning youth in some way and the subject of growing up.  Boys becoming men.  Always men.  Female characters never the protagonists, but for those male protagonists IN my stories, of course, the women always the goal and the guides.   Funny that I now find myself here in Las Cruces, NM... Playing 'Darryl Tripp' in Mark Medoff's film, REFUGE.  A 'manchild' learning how to shed some more of the child. 

My impetus to share these thoughts comes after having read Mr. Medoff's blogs.  In his expressions of gratitude and praise, I see the same kindness, work ethic, and brilliance I've come to know in him these past 7 days.  I'm reminded of the same in Linda Hamilton.  Two fine people and fine artists, cut from a similar cloth, searching relentlessly, both in their own ways, I think, to find the sparks that happen when the words on the page become the life on screen. In the faces of everyone on our crew, our production staff, and the Medoff family, we share this common intent.   I find it inspiring that goodness and gratefulness still exist.  And that hard work for a common goal binds us in the best of ways. 

This is my very first attempt at sharing my world over cyberspace.  I feel scared and human, afraid to put it out there.  But I'm playing Darryl Tripp and he's a budding writer.

That pretty much makes me a budding writer. 

So here we go....

Wake at ten, go to The Bean for coffee with daughter Jessica Medoff Bunchman, son in law, pianist Michael Bunchman, and their dog Charlie. Head feels like swamp zoo – crocs and snakes pushing each other around, trying to get comfortable in cramped space.
Yesterday we shot a wonderful scene at COAS bookstore:  Linda, Chris Payne G., Gracie Marks (age 7), and Jessica Medoff Bunchman (soprano). COAS is an amazing place:  shelves of books – hard and paper – going north to south, rows upon rows. And, oh yeah, it’s air-conditioned.

Idea of a mother singing to her child following a ballet recital, among the shelves, looking for a series of children’s books written by my friend Lorenzo Liberti, is two-fold:  the child in tutu and taffeta is Amelia long ago, before her dreams foundered. The tiny ballerina’s mother, singing “Nessun Dorma,” first amusingly then magnificently (at Amelia’s insistence), is a reminder to Amelia, here in her darkest hour, that there is beauty and innocence in the world.

Several times, watching a take on the monitor – the subtle interplay among the actors – I thought: “Heartbreaking.” I am interested to see how, cut together, in its place in the chronology of the movie, if the scene will rise to the moment I imagined in my head, on the page, and think I saw live yesterday afternoon.

Pre-dusk we moved base camp to Free Student Parking at New Mexico State University. There we staged a scene with a police car coming out of nowhere, seemingly about to pull the RV over. Inside, Amelia says, “If that cop stops us, I’ll hurt him.” The cop follows them, checks their plate with dispatch but is called to an emergency. Lights flashing he pulls out, rides some seconds next to the RV, looking up at Darryl and Amelia, both laughing fake laughs to assure the cop they’re having a great time, and then speeds away.
My brain was sodden, just pre-swamp zoo; First A.D. Laura Medina had to explain the logical progression of the scene to me and remind me where it falls in the script. Four days of shooting parts of scenes out of sequence and I momentarily left my senses.

We shot the chase live into the dusk. Then we shot the dialogue – a complicated 3-way scene among Amelia, Darryl, and Darryl’s fiancé Helen (she on speaker phone accusing him of running away with another woman). The dialogue is fast and overlapping and The Dave (soundmeister David Wheeler) asks me to try to get the actors to cut each other off in the clear so we can do the overlapping ourselves in post; but, the actors are roaring through the scene (Lena Georges, who will play Helen, doesn’t arrive for a week, so one of my acting student, Jennifer Perry, fills in) and I don’t want to impede their impulses. The Dave says he’ll make it all work.  I believe him – which is why he’s The Dave and I’m not.

Then we do the cop car pulling abreast and speeding away “poor man’s.” The RV sits still, the actors do their lines, Reuben shakes the camera to simulate the RV on the road, crew operate lights that simulate passing cars.  The police car pulls abreast, doing so at 5 miles an hour, sits for a 10 count, officer looking at RV passengers, Amelia and Darryl laughing, then “speeds away” at 5 miles an hour.  On replay, to Reuben and me, it looks like RV and police car are moving along briskly.Dare I say that moviemaking is not so much a cheat as an illusion? Why not.  It was 1:30 AM and we were toast.

Now, it’s Sunday, 1:00 PM and I need to get dressed to shoot Meredith Miniat as the Police Dispatcher this afternoon. Indoors. At the air-conditioned NMSU Police Station.

That aside, I am reminded over and over again how grateful I am for my life in theater and movies because of the sense of family that develops among everyone on the set. Everyone.

Gaffer Mitch Fowler asks me periodically each day how my day is going and tells me (at least three days in) that his day is going great if mine is.  There is something so invigorating to me about an attitude like that.  I tell him the same goes for me:  I am good if he is.

We shoot in the bathroom of the RV for the first time.  Chris Payne Gilbert makes the tiny space one in which he lives a large life – and a few times with DP Reuben Steinberg IN THE BATHROOM with him.  Two tall, lean guys making a confined space into a universe.

I am reminded a dozen times today how amazing Chris and Linda Hamilton are – how altogether THERE they are.  We are aware, the three of us, what a gift it was for them to come four days early so we could rehearse.  We know a lot as we approach some scenes that are out of order or, far more challenging, mere parts of scenes that we shoot but can’t complete until Chris McDonald arrives next week to play Jack (being doubled dead at the moment by RV owner Jack Malone or by a foam dummy that Production Designer Stephen Hansen has rigged).

Part of the overall concept of our shooting strategy is to juxtapose the vastness of the geological arena (the Earth, basically) to the tiny world of these two people, Amelia and Darryl – thus the confines of the RV, today especially the bathroom.

I must express my admiration for the way Linda handles herself.  She knows the name of every person on the crew; she does not go and hide in her trailer.  She is around the hub of activity (wherever the camera and accoutrements are). Interesting lunch scenes today and a few days ago at Lorenzo’s Italian Bistro one of our rehearsal days.  People recogniz her at Lorenzo’s; she stops, she sits, she chats and poses for photos.  Today, we have lunch in the small FBO restaurant at the also small Las Cruces Airport.  Second day there.  Word is out:  Linda Hamilton is here.  Descended upon, she is remarkably gracious.  (I have always told my girls that it costs nothing to be polite.  Linda reminds me that I have always said that and to be damn sure I follow my advice myself.  I told Chris Payne Gilbert that if he saw/heard me getting cranky and short-tempered to say, “Reminder.”  He “reminded” me once this morning.  I put on my straw hat, went out and around to hug a few people sweating their rear ends off for our collective venture, to spread some warmth.

I haven’t advertised it but there will be no possessory credit on this movie: A Mark Medoff Film.  Those credits alienate me when I see them on screen.  Because this process of making a movie is so much a collaboration that to attribute it to one person seems not only ego-maniacal but short-sighted.  “Wow, the a-hole thinks he made the movie by himself!”  I don’t think that.  Starting with my producing partner Ginger Perkins to the high school kids hustling for twelve hours a day to perform the most mundane but essential tasks, the movie is the sum of our individual parts.

We finish at dusk, literally at a fork in the road where Production Designer Stephen has built a roadside grave for Amelia to stare at, dead Jack in the back of the RV, Darryl handcuffed in the bathroom.  She looks both ways (to bastardize Robert Frost:  two roads diverged in a purple desert/And sorry I could not travel both…).

She chooses and heads into the dying light.  And we head home where my wife Stephanie has decided to start feeding the late-night team using the library of our house as the production office.  Producer Ginger, First A.D. Laura, Second Marissa, Ginger’s daughter Lara and Ginger’s protégé-become-film-exec Ray Simmons (who has come from LA just to help Ginger get set-up) have been working late into the night.

We sit down to eat en famille at our dining table.  Granddaughter Gracie Marks, who works tomorrow with my youngest daughter Jessica Medoff Bunchman, the opera singer, models some ballet outfits for her character.  All of us at the table are an avid audience and we help the seven year old make a costuming decision.  Make-Up/Hair goddess, Pepper Gallegos, setting up for tomorrow, wanders in from another room in my house being used for hair/make-up and wardrobe; Stephanie get her a plate and utensils.

Stephanie has made chicken parmagiana in two batches:  one for the normal people and one for the gluten free dieters, her husband (me) and First A.D. Laura.  We allow ourselves a little red wine or other alcoholic beverage.

I am not called until 3 tomorrow.  I can sleep until I wake, catch up on e-mail, go to the gym, not wear a hat.

Jack and Lisa drive their RV, our Hero RV, up the switchbacks to the hanger where a cropduster painted to look like a ravenous shark sits.  Jack and Lisa are both nurses.  It’s a comfort to me to see that the RV has made the journey to the location and that the two of them are ensconced with us for the day.

The efficiency of the army is startling, a reminder of both how rigorous movie-making is and what a privilege it is to be part of an enterprise driven by united dedication.  Team sport.

It’s hot outside, in the low 100s most of the day, and hotter inside the RV when Reuben and Mitch Fowler and their crew set up a few lights and Linda Hamilton and Chris Payne Gilbert climb in to do some acting, and Soundmeister Dave Wheeler lays down on a side couch with his boom and Reuben shoulders the Red camera and I cram into the back with my monitor and Laura Medina, our First A.D., conducts us all like a string quartet plus a few.  Roll sound.  Roll camera. And…action.

There are first day glitches, but all in all, great, challenging, often amazing fun.  Frustrated as I feel on occasion because I want a process that can’t go faster to go faster, I look around at the amazing energy of those making it possible for the actors to act and for me to throw down a ball of mercury, shove it around, recollect it, throw it down again…and I am moved in a way that takes it breadth from a combination of gratitude and wonder.

Linda and Chris, strangers a week ago, have a rapport to go with their giant acting abilities that make for a set streaming less with heat than with generosity and willingness to go anywhere they can divine the script beckons.

Outside, between takes and new set-ups, I’m aware of Ginger, my producing partner, turning an un-air-conditioned building into a home for the day, the hanger into a shady lunch room, her phone often to her ear, preparing for tomorrow and the next day, as she, herself, vacuums and hauls food, and, as is her gift, makes everyone feel cared for and respected for coming to our movie shoot.

We do some “poor man’s process” – that is, the actors are in the RV pretending to drive but in fact Rueben and his First A.C. Orlando Martes are shaking the camera a little to make it look like the RV is moving.

After lunch, we do drive and talk (analogous to walking and chewing gum simultaneously), and we answer the big question about whether Soundmeister Dave can get good and usable dialogue with the RV’s engine running.  Yes.  I don’t understand half of what Dave tells me about what he can do to noise, but I trust him and know he knows that a movie driven by dialogue has to be audible and discernible.

Laura raps us at 6:30.  Going around to thank everyone, I sense from each a sense of pride in living through our first day, ending with hugs and all of us still speaking to each other.

Get home at seven something after dropping my two extraordinary actors off at Meson de Mesilla (see link).  At home, my oldest daughter Debra has saved me dinner.  Now that I can sit down, I eat standing up.

Go briskly through 47 e-mails that have accumulated since 5 AM.  There is one from my former student and dear friend, the writer-director Edward Stone.  In part he says:   “i just wanted to send you all my hopes for your shoot. i always keep in mind that i have no control over what happens after a film is done...so the only pleasure i can count as my own is the pleasure of the moment to moment of making the film, making the art with others...All rowing in the same direction is the reward.  Have a great time...and take time to appreciate it while it is happening.”

Yes, and so I did – and so I will, sitting in my kitchen at 5 AM, writing this as I await my call to Day 2.

Linda Hamilton and Chris Payne Gilbert arrive today (they are driving together from L.A.) -- hopefully by noon so I can begin rehearsal with them this afternoon before myriad other activities are scheduled: meetings about schedule, wardrobe, "beauty" shots, camera and make-up tests; driving practice (RV and ATV) for Linda and Chris.

There aren't a million details, though it seems that way.  Ginger guides us through the maze of challenges, large and larger:  the unions (SAG, WGA, DGA), housing, locations, vehicles, catering, psychotherapy; she is one of the great pro talkers and, as such, can talk to and befriend virtually anyone.  A great gift in a business where normal citizens can quickly become resentful of the self- importance of moviemakers.

First A.D. Laura Medina and Second A.D. Marissa Macias deal with the same not-a-million details everyday.   Laura replaced my nephew Brooks Medoff as First A.D. only a week ago; having worked together before, Laura and I were able to skip the getting-to-know-you part of the director/First A.D. relationship and leap into the work. Like Ginger, Laura is a master logician and tactician.  Young Marissa has managed the morass of names and locations and i don't know what all she has in her notebook with the agility of someone far more experienced in feature moviemaking.  Laura will be the perfect teacher for Marissa and her Production Assistants (P.A.'s).

Ginger has ordered me to let them handle everything unrelated to directing the movie.  So yesterday I canned peaches in the morning, painted the house in the PM. Actually,  I stared at the script, at the schedule, made notes, tried (as ordered by Ginger) to quit screwing with the script, at least until I hear the actors read it.

I have been practicing going to bed at 9:30, turning off the light at 10 PM, and trying not to get up for good at 4:40 (no clue what my body is thinking about that precise time) but at 5:30-6:00.  Though storing up sleep isn't really like stocking up on nuts for the winter.  The necessary energy will be there when we start shooting because there is no alternative to possessing the necessary energy.  Every day.  Fact is, even at my advanced age, I will have the energy of several twenty year olds once the gates open and the race is on.  Though, reminder to self:  SIT DOWN WHENEVER POSSIBLE.  Back and leg aches are inevitable, as it is very hard for me to sit while everyone around me is on his/ her feet, breaking respective rear ends to get the set ready to shoot.

Tonight Linda, Chris, Laura, my family (all three girls and their families are here) are going to Meson de Mesilla (the beautiful B&B where our out of town teamers and investors are staying) for dinner and fireworks.  Tomorrow, Monday, Tuesday I hope to get in good hunks of time rehearsing.  My experience in movie-making is that real rehearsal, the sort we do as a matter of course in the theater, is rare.  Often what is billed as rehearsal with the actors turns into conversations between the director and D.P. about where the camera is going to be.  I plan to have no one in the morning rehearsals in my house but the actors and me.  (Though grandchildren will have free rein to come and go.  Children are good to have around rehearsals, in theaters, on sets.  Very important for them to see how people doing what Poppy does concentrate and collaborate; conversely, for the moviemakers, children remind us that we are not entirely sacred, just professional pretenders.)

Monday-Tuesday Reuben hits the road without the First Team Actors to collect shots inside and outside the RV, on highways and byways.  We have a three-part environmental progression for the movie:  high desert to farm land to cityscape.  Wednesday, we put Linda and Chris in the RV and start recording scenes.  Much then depends on Dave Wheeler, Sound Mixer extraordinaire, to tell me whether the vast amount of dialogue I've written is comprehensible against the engine noise of the Hero RV.  (We can't afford a process trailer large enough to haul the RV, but we do have alternative ways of getting clean dialogue for those scenes where Linda or Chris is actually driving the Hero RV.  Dave also tells me not to worry -- he can perform magic with new software to minimize engine or other noise.

Lotta dialogue.  Big risk.  Need fabulous actors to go with fabulous sound mixer.  Both Linda and Chris come from the theater; they have probably forgotten altogether and long ago how to mumble dialogue.

When I was offered the opportunity to work on REFUGE as the 2nd Assistant Director, I was beyond thrilled.  I knew it was going to be an amazing experience and that I would learn so much.  Let’s just say “learn so much” is a serious understatement.  Getting a fast paced crash course in feature filmmaking is more like it.

I consider myself a very organized and detail oriented person; it’s one of the reasons I want to be an AD and producer.  But the number of details that go into making a feature length film like REFUGE is shocking!  It’s great and fun but shocking.  You need to be able to think of everything and anything all at once.  The on the job training that I’m getting from Mark, Ginger and Brooks will last me through-out the rest of my career.  A career that, thanks to REFUGE, is starting sooner than later.

Many of the jobs I have been asked to do include driving.  I’m measuring the distance from base camp to a location, looking for locations or driving to meetings.  All of this driving has made me realize something I’m a bit embarrassed about.  Even though I have lived in Las Cruces for all 24 years of my life, if a street is not connected to University Avenue, Solano, or Lohman…I have NO idea where it is. It’s shameful and I don’t really know how that has happened.  What should be 10 minute drives are usually 25 for me.  I use one the familiar streets and roam around till I find what I’m looking for.  Since an AD’s job requires her to be as productive as possible, I decided this routine was counterproductive and have changed my ways.  Let’s just say that Map Quest and I have become friends.

Brooks, our 1st AD, has explained that once principal photography begins, some of my duties will include making call sheets, handling tons of paperwork, organizing the PA’s, and on larger days, wrangling all of the extras.  I have to admit that I’m excited about working with the extras.  As a former Peter Piper Pizza hostess I thrive on the energy of large, loud and rambunctious crowds.

One of the reasons I love movies is because you can get lost in the story, take a break from your world and enter another. Nothing…I mean nothing pulls me out of a movie like an extra staring right into camera smiling, or an extra walking across frame when she’s clearly not supposed to.  It is going to be one of my goals to make sure this never happens and to make sure that Mark never has to yell at an extra because he or she is ruining his shot.  It may turn out to be a hefty task but I think I’m up to the challenge.

Now I obviously consider myself very lucky to be working on this film but even luckier because everyone I have been in contact with has been great.  Every phone call I have made has been met with a friendly voice on the other end.  Since I was born and raised in Las Cruces, I knew our town is a great supporter of the arts and full of friendly people. To see it put into practice is wonderful and makes me proud to come from this community.

Though I now live in Los Angeles, California, I have been spending a lot of time in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and it’s like being back in Meadow, Texas for me.  I am again reminded, after living for most of my adult life in large cities abroad and across the US, how wonderful it is to be embraced by such generous and thoughtful people who want me and the film I’m working on with Mark Medoff, REFUGE, to be a success.  Conversations with people in Las Cruces whom I’ve never met often start with, “What can I do for you?” and they don’t back off when I actually tell them how they can help! 

Of course it doesn’t hurt that I’m working with Mark Medoff who, along with his wife Stephanie, are residents of Las Cruces and have given so much to their community through the years.  But the extent to which people are willing to share whatever they have with us for the film is amazing and beyond what many across the country might be willing to do.  Men and women who own and run their own companies and other good citizens of Las Cruces are loaning us vehicles, their homes and business properties, food, equipment, their time and expertise, and are even accommodating our crazy requests and time schedules.  We are getting discounts and trades and gifts and helping hands all across the valley. 

The folks of Las Cruces remind me every day how good and decent and generous people can be and are.  No one has asked for anything from me in return for their many kindnesses.  They’re just happy to be able to help.  And I’m sure it wouldn’t surprise anyone that these same hard working and talented people helping us with REFUGE are helping others every day and without a lot of pomp and circumstance and front-page coverage.  Las Cruces feels like my home from those years when I was growing up and everyone took care of each other: a refuge.

We’re keeping a list of all these fine folk and they and you will see their names in the movie’s screen credits.   They are important people, so pay attention.  REFUGE wouldn’t have had a chance in the world without them. 

It will be known hereafter as “The Hero RV,” the movie-making appellation for not a champion or Superman vehicle so much as a vehicle of vital significance.

Long ago, when Phil Treon and I started working on what is now REFUGE, the Hero vehicle was an Airstream trailer and the project was called AIRSTREAM.  We realized there would be copyright issues with that title so we renamed the project RV.  Then Robin Williams made a movie of the same name, so the project became REFUGE, a much better title, if less blaring in telling an audience what the movie was going to be about – or at least be told inside of.

In the last several months, as my producing partner Ginger Perkins and I began to put together the myriad elements to make our Ultra Low Budget feature, the search for the right recreational vehicle was high on our list of things to get for as little as possible. 

(My first producing experience, the movie HOMAGE in 1994, my partners and I had the good fortune to hire a Unit Production Manager named Rae Reynolds.  Early in the process of putting together those myriad elements, we were going out to negotiate an arrangement for an important location.  I asked Rae what we should offer for the location.  He said, “Always start with ‘free’ and work from there.”)

Six weeks ago, there was a feature about three movies prepping to shoot in the Las Cruces area in the Las Cruces Sun-News and Las Cruces Bulletin.  In the section about REFUGE, I mentioned that we were looking for an RV.

I heard from a man named Jack Malone, who is a flight nurse with considerable acting experience when he was younger.  We began an e-mail correspondence across town.  Without demanding a role in the movie, he offered his RV to us for the shoot if we liked it. 

Jack had recently bought the RV and it was being rejuvenated at Bogart’s Auto/RV Repair on Valley Drive in Las Cruces.  Jack was going to Paris but we were welcome to go look at the RV.  My production designer, the renowned sculptor Stephen Hansen, and I went for a look.

The RV that Jack bought and was resuscitating is a Classic 1976 GMC recreational vehicle, which for you Ken and Barbie fans out there is the one fashioned as the “Barbie Star Traveler.”  Stephen and I loved the look of the vehicle and found the irony of Amelia and Jack Philips living in a Barbie and Ken mobile irresistible. 

I took Director of Photography Reuben Steinberg out to Jack Malone’s backyard to have a look.  Jack had been kind enough to leave the RV unlocked (Yes, in Las Cruces you can still do that.  Jack also left a mountain bike leaning up against his back porch.) and we spent some time blocking out scenes and shots, assuring ourselves we could shoot comfortably in the vehicle – so long as nobody was in it but Reuben and the actors (though there are a few scenes where I can hide in the bed area with Jack (Philips, the character, who is dead there, not Malone, the RV owner).

On June 3, Jack Malone returned from his vacation in Paris.  On June 4, we met at The Bean (owned by Costume Designer Mary McGinn, mate of DP Reuben).  Jack (the RV owner, not the character) is 54, looks 45, with the features of a Native American Irish Italian.  He has great presence and I immediately cast him in a role in the movie in my head. 

On June 5, DP Rueben and I made an appointment to meet Jack – with the RV – at The Bean for a test drive.  Jack called to tell me he’d be a little late – he was having trouble elevating the rear end of the RV with air to get the butt off the ground (Reuben and I were concerned about some dips were we going to ask Jack to drive over on the west mesa of Las Cruces).  I told Jack not to try to park in The Bean’s small, packed-with-cars-and-motorcycles gravel parking lot for fear we’d never get out.  Jack parked across the street in front of Andalé (one of our terrific Mexican fare restaurants). We chatted in The Bean, had good coffee, crossed the street to the Big Fella.  Maiden voyage.  Months of waiting to hit the road in the Hero vehicle.

Big Fella wouldn’t start.  I brought my car across the street.  Hooked up jumper cables.  Click, click.  

Jack told us he’d only driven the RV once since he bought it, but it had started right up at his house and had come across town without complaint.  Jack tried to fire up the generator to kick-start the battery.  Generator wouldn’t kick over.

On a budget such as ours, we can’t afford to have a driving day planned, say, and find out we can’t drive the thing we’re planning to drive on the planned driving day.  Though not much given to panic, I did contemplate whether a movie dependent on a moving vehicle was a mistake I, as the writer, could remedy.  Could the only means of conveyance to Amelia Philips, as she takes it on the lam after accidently killing her husband Jack, be…comfortable flats or orthopedic sneakers? 

Jack called Bogart’s.  In your town, you’d wait hours, maybe days for a mechanic to leave where he was and arrive where you were stranded with your dysfunctional vehicle.  Chad from Bogart’s was there in ten minutes. 

Loose wire.  Massive relief on part of movie-makers and RV owner/dad who wants his RV’s audition to be successful.  

Just to be safe, I drove my car; Reuben, with the viewfinder and a camera, rode with Jack.  We headed upward to the high desert west of Las Cruces on I-10.  Got off at the Las Cruces Airport, headed west on the frontage road, then north onto the Coralitas Ranch and deep into vast, magnificent desert (see photo above). 

Reuben, Stephen, Ginger, and I had scouted the two lane blacktop road for a good fifteen miles northward.  The road had many flood control dips.  We were concerned whatever RV we got would not be able to navigate those dips.  I slowed at the first dip, put on my hazard lights to remind Reuben to warn Jack that he might be about to lose the undercarriage of his vehicle.  I watched in my rearview.  Was elated to see the RV take the dip with 18 inches of clearance. 

There was a fork in the road we wanted to reach, a point at which Amelia would stop the RV and make a decision about which fork to take.  (“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --/I took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference.”  Robert Frost, “The Road Less Traveled.”)  

Reuben will shoot from a high point – east or west depending on where the sun is when we are there on The Day.  The fork moment will be a nice moment in the movie for Amelia as well as a beautiful shot of the Las Cruces surround.  (Part of our shooting strategy is to juxtapose vast landscapes to the claustrophobic scenes in the RV and just outside the RV when the vehicle acts up several times and forces Amelia and her hostage, the young high school English teacher and self-defined failed novelist, Darryl Tripp, to stop at various sites in Amelia’s run from the law.) 

I got out of my car; Reuben hopped out of the RV.  We patted the vehicle like a horse, cooed to it as if it had just won a big one at Ruidoso Downs. 

I called Ginger.  Back in Los Angeles, dealing with myriad other details that were not nearly as much fun as driving around the high desert on a lovely June morning, she was grateful not to list “Find another RV” on her to-do list. 

We had our Hero.

At some point, Phil graciously told me I could go wherever our screenplay lead me. Twenty-five drafts later, it still resembles what Phil and I started with, though a major plot threat -- a female sheriff chasing our two main characters -- went away twenty-four drafts ago. I focused myself on the story of two lost souls, Amelia Philips and Darryl Trip, she a hospice nurse in her forties, he a young high school teacher in his twenties. Each arrives at the abyss on the same day, and on that day, happenstance throws them together into a very small, at first collapsing, universe.

I've always felt I had the ability to find humor in my characters in difficult situations, so there is in the serious journey Amelia and Darryl go on for 22 hours a great deal of humor that comes out of who each is and how each reacts to the other in their nearly untenable situation. Her husband is dead in the back of their RV; Darryl's bad first novel is stinking up a stationery box in the front.

There have been a nauseating number of older man-young woman movies over the past couple of decades. Having been radically feminized by one wife and three daughters, I have calculatedly written major roles for women in my theater pieces since 1980. My film experience had been that most studios and independent producers don't want movies with a woman above the title.

REFUGE is an entirely independent film. I mean, my partner Ginger Perkins and I are independent of everyone except the several friends who have made this movie possible. We are shooting at a very small cash budget, living off the favors of friends in Las Cruces, NM, who have provided every, single location to us for nothing.

Though we are still looking for a small cash infusion, we are making a movie with a woman at the center -- and a woman in an age range often considered by Hollywood standards to be "over the hill" -- playing opposite a young man who is just on the edge of his celebrity breakthrough. We don't feel self-righteous (not yet, at least), but we do feel good about the movie we're going to make and its potential to appeal to an adult audience interested in a movie built on character relationships.

It Hollywood it always helps to play the game whereby your movie becomes a promise of Such-and-such MEETS Such-and-such. If you've seen the opening of Robert Altman's brilliant THE PLAYER, you know what I'm talking about. If I thought it would help bring us that last infusion of cash and were pushed to the wall to offer one of those analogies, I'd say REFUGE is NATURAL BORN KILLERS meets THELMA AND LOUISE. But not -- because it is its own hybrid of the 36 plots (what my mentor told me at 19 was the total number available to a writer).

There are real joys for me in this process of preparing to tell a story for screen media: Ginger Perkins and I have been friends for almost forty years. We have worked together in theater, film, and academia. Our cinematographer, Rueben Steinberg, is the son of two of my closest friends in life, Phyllis Frelich (for whom I wrote CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD and four other plays) and Bob Steinberg, my alter ego and one of the finest set designers in my experience. My brother's son, Brooks Medoff, will the First Assistant Director for me for the second time. Our production designer, Stephen Hansen, is a world renown sculptor and has been my go-to person on questions of logic and continuity, as he claims by having to waste time reading my script over and over, he doesn't have to work in his studio. Doing at least part of our music is JD Hinton, who was co-composer of the movie Ginger produced and I directed called CHILDREN ON THEIR BIRTHDAYS, based on the Truman Capote story.

[CHILDREN ON THEIR BIRTHDAYS was a PG13 movie, a family movie. It opened and closed very fast, as we did not do big business our first two weekends. First weekend business remains crucial in the movie business (You know the one that goes: It's not called Show Art, it's called Show Business), so, frankly, we're hoping that this website and periodic blog may help us not only dig up some more cash, but prep and interested audience to get out of their homes and to a movie theater near them when we first open a year or so from now.]

We are in the casting process right now. We saw fifty wonderful young actors this past week. Our Darryl was there as well as his fiancée, Helen. Helen is an assistant D.A., living in the southwest but having recently left Brooklyn. As fiction will have it, the day Darryl is kidnapped by Amelia, Darryl and Helen are having an engagement party -- which Darryl misses. Trouble ensues.

We are after our ideal Amelia. We are close to having her. Once we have her, we'll cast the rest of the players. We'll keep you posted.