La Turista Loca

I got to see the rough edit of Vegas Schmegas on Saturday (a rough edit means that there are still incomplete elements like music or segments still missing) but it can give you an idea of how a project is coming together. It looks great, Mark and Jon did a killer job editing. But it's running a little shorter than we would like. So we needed to add a couple of sketches. Now it's been a while since I wrote the original episodes and I knew we needed to incorporate more "Vegas" into the show (it is titled "Vegas Schmegas" after all.) But permits are expensive...okay, permits are cheap, insurance is expensive and we have already spent our insurance budget. So it's time for a little 'guerrilla' filming.

We came up with the idea that Jimmy Germano and I would pose as tourists and just improv about what we saw and did, and film it hand-held with my consumer video camera so that we wouldn't draw attention. Now we aren't the first film crew to do this. I saw a short film at a festival called "Flip" that took place in Las Vegas. They filmed all over the place. During the Q&A after the movie I asked the director how he got all the location permission and he told me he didn't (I don't think I'm breaking confidence here since he told the whole audience.) So whenever the guys would say "we can't film there, we don't have permits" I would think that since other people did it, why couldn't we? I don't want to break any laws but until the pilot is purchased, it's a moot point. When the pilot is purchased, it will either be sold as a 'concept', meaning what we filmed will never be shown publicly, or we will make more episodes with someone else's cash, in which case we can re-shoot those scenes with permits. So legally, we are covered under the same laws that cover any other tourist. Ethically it might be a gray area, but I'll just add that to my list of things I feel guilty about.

So last night Jimmy and I became "Gina and Dominick from Teaneck, New Jersey". I wore a Las Vegas t-shirt and those cheap plastic beads that they hand out at Mardi Gras (all the casinos give them away too.) It was pretty funny the way our crew handled the filming. Jimmy and I wore lav mikes (a wireless microphone pack you wear on your person with the wires concealed) which were connected to the big camera for sound only, the camera in Mark's backpack and he was listening to the sound from his iPod earphones so that if you saw him you would think he was just some guy listening to his music. Kelly walked ahead of us shooting still photos of us while Charisma strolled along with her consumer camera capturing us from a wide angle. We looked like random tourists who didn't know each other. Jimmy and I used my camera to capture our improv.

We filmed at the Fremont Street Experience. Fremont Street used to be just that, a street, kind of a main drag through downtown. My dad used to cruise Fremont during his high school days. But as "The Strip" became more of where the tourists went, downtown casinos fell out of favor. So they turned several blocks of Fremont into a covered, traffic-free area with lots of kiosks for shopping, street entertainers and the world's largest big screen on the canopy overhead where they play hourly music tributes and videos. It's like a big, permanent street fair with stores and casinos and gambling lining the way. It was definitely a great place to make fun of. People walk around with these giant "yard long' drinks or drinks in huge plastic footballs and act crazy. It's like Disneyland on acid.

Now I love improv and I have no problem looking like an ass in front of total strangers. I used to do an interactive dinner theater and found that the more obnoxious I got, the more people liked it. So that's how I was last night. And we had so much fun. I even had a crowd of people clapping for me at one point and taking pictures. (I am in so many tourist photos I should charge!) We even filmed inside one casino (I know it's a no-no but no one stopped us and I doubt many tourists know you aren't supposed to film inside if no one tells them). And we won $12.50 in a slot machine. All of this footage will have to be mined by the wonderful editor that Mark is to even know if we got the two to four minutes of comedy gold nuggets we need. The idea is to have whatever is funny go into a segment where it's the blog of a couple of tourists on their Las Vegas vacation. I think it will be pretty funny if it works. And I can't wait to go to the Strip to film there too.

But I want to put out there for the hundreds of people on Fremont Street last night that if you saw some crazy lady in a purple Vegas t-shirt who was loud and obnoxious and making a complete ass of herself and her 'husband'...it was an act. I'm an actor. I'm a normal person who does not usually dance in the middle of the street. I don't, as a general rule, make suggestive comments about shrubbery, ask strangers where the obtained their alcohol or loudly comment on other women's breast size. I usually am the girl no one ever notices. So I wasn't drunk or insane. It was an act.

But all the other people exhibiting the same bizarre behavior? Those were tourists.