THE BLURB: Location, location, LOCATION!!! Where you shoot your movie or TV show makes a huge difference. One surefire way to turn all your craftsmanship into pure crap is to shoot your movie or TV show somewhere it has no organic reason to shoot. For "Bordello of Blood", that location was Vancouver, BC.
Vancouver is a fantastic place to shoot a movie. It's a fantastic place to visit and live. I can't recommend it highly enough!
But, we didn't go to Vancouver for any of the local scenery, culture or because of its movie-making chops; we didn't go for a film-making reason whatsoever. The reason we did go was so our executive producer Joel Silver could screw over the IA, the union that represented our film crew.
Joel was in a never-ending war with the union. Pretty much everyone on our crew was an IA member but they worked on Crypt under a non-union contract. A few months before, the IA had struck the set of "Weird World", a TV movie we did for Fox. Joel had been looking for payback.
And, so, we shot Bordello in Vancouver - with an unfamiliar Canadian crew - instead of back in LA, with the same crew who'd worked on our show (and, many on the Demon Knight feature film) for years. Whatever monies we saved by not paying our crew its union wages, we more than made up for between all the mistakes, miscalculations, poor planning and overall crap decision-making that flowed directly from making Bordello outside of LA.
Like the script for "Dead Easy", "Bordello of Blood" took place in the South. But, whereas "Dead Easy" mostly took place in and around New Orleans (incredibly atmospheric), "Bordello" took place in a South that was completely generic. Actually, the entire rationale for even thinking it takes place in the South is the word "Bordello" in the title.
There's nothing in the script that says the titular bordello has to be in Sarasota or Savannah. I suspect we made it the South out of deference to "Dead Easy", a project we were all still mourning. Our decision to keep the movie in a Southern location while deciding to shoot up north wasn't based on anything.
I guess we figured that doing something for a poor reason beat doing something for no reason. Even our stupid thinking was stupid.
Meanwhile, our production team can't find any of the southern US locations called for in the script in Vancouver. Strangely, a northern, Canadian city doesn't look anything like the American south.
Our gung-ho but inexperienced (local) special effects team suddenly made us nervous by asking us how to make fake blood.
Then our boss - executive producer Joel Silver, one of the biggest action movie producers in the whole history of Hollywood - flies across the border from Seattle (where he's shooting "Assassins" with Stallone and Antonio Banderas) to visit. Except he doesn't bring a passport or any ID whatsoever.
And an international incident nearly breaks out.
What was it Bette Davis says in "All About Eve" - ""Fasten your seat belts it's going to be a bumpy night."? Yeah, what Bette said!
And we're only up to Day Three!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
