A satanic blood ritual in Long Island
At the end of March I traveled down to Long Island, out to Suffolk County, to act in a music video directed by Lawton Meyer. He is the young director whom I first met during the 48-Hour film project competition shoot in Poughkeepsie. We kept in touch, and some months ago I had acted in another video he had directed. Well, now, I am appearing in a video as a guy who performs a blood-soaked ritual to bring back his dead wife.
The video is for the metal band Pyrexia. One of the band's members, an extremely cool guy, Bas Ile, provided a wooded back yard where we could film. The plot of the video is a grief-stricken man (me) is desperate to bring back his lost wife. So, he performs a satanic ritual replete with a burning brazier, torches, an ancient book, a ritual knife and lots of drama. If you know anything about movies involving resurrection, you can guess that things go badly for my character.
To play this role, I was dressed in a big ceremonial cloak, and I had this brazier and these torches all burning around me in the dark of the Long Island night. I gestured about wildly and strove dramatically to call back my wife from death, and when she shows up, she's become a demon and she drives me insane and kills me. I had to take big gobs of stage blood and smear it all over my face and fall down gasping and grimacing in horror. All in all, great fun.
The ambiance of the scene was pretty much guaranteed. You can't go wrong with a dark night and a lot of fire light, you know? And as usual everybody involved in the shoot was great to meet and work with. Bas was, again, a very cool guy. Lawton is always a pleasure to work for, and I got to meet again the wonderful Catherine Veytia, the actress who played a woodland diety who drove me mad and killed me in the last video I shot with Lawton. Here, she played the demon wife who...drives me mad and kills me. We've found a niche, she and I.
I also met a wonderful make up lady with whom I had a long conversation about the wisdom of studying what you love in college as opposed to merely studying something you've no passion for but think is a sure way to a career. Our conclusion: study what you love. You don't live forever.
So, yes, a great time. There was one amusing feature of this shoot that I enjoy relating: no toilet. Bas explained I could not go into the house to use the bathroom because his family had dogs that might not allow me. So, he directed me to relieve myself in the woods. The wooded area to which he directed me ran between two houses. There was no foliage so early in the spring, so wherever I went in these woods the two houses might get an unobstructed view of my penis. I had to pick my location carefully. I found one tree large enough that it shielded my penis from view by the house on one side, and if I kept facing the tree and hunching over, the house on the other side could only see my backside, and my penis would be safely out of sight. I occurred to me as I relieved myself that even if they could not see Old Captain Love Torpedo, they could still probably figure out what, exactly, I was doing. It's not like people hunch by trees in the woods to study for law school.
But I managed my errand without anybody seeming to see me or my wiener. Later, while we were shooting, Bas directed me to stay away from exactly the part of the woods where I had relieved myself because the lady in one of the houses really hated when people walked around behind her house and she might come out and complain. So, I guess I lucked out. I guess she was watching TV or something and never looked out her window to behold my wiener.
This is the kind of information you need to know about film making.
If you want to learn more about Pyrexia and maybe check out their music, go to https://www.facebook.com/PYREXIADEATHMETAL/
And you can see more of Lawton Meyer's work at https://vimeo.com/user6921025 or on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf9dUSRxOtPZFvkkKXpoyag
Thanks for reading.
