September 5th 2004 Lights, Camera, Action!

I spent the afternoon working with Todd Bieber and Juliana Brafa on their newest movie, All is Normal. My biggest duty was making sure the talent didn’t get killed by pass vehicles, and driving around an old Mazda MPV so Todd could do chase-cam work on Juliana. It’s certainly not the most glamorous work in terms of film, but you’ve gotta start somewhere. I’d love to someday work with film—my long-term goals right now are to graduate from Bucknell with a B.A. in English and then study Dramatic Writing at NYU—but, of course, I know that I can’t just write one film and suddenly become a blockbuster-quality film director. I’m going to have to work to get there, and being a production assistant for a talented duo of independent filmmakers seems like as good a place to start as any.

The filming took place at the Little Mexico Campground, which is in Dry Valley, which is outside of Winfield, which is outside of Lewisburg. We’re definitely talking rural central Pennsylvania here. In fact, we’re so rural Pennsylvania here that I can’t fathom how the campground got the name “Little Mexico”. We’re nowhere close to Mexico, or any urban area with a high Mexican concentration. I guess that didn’t matter to the campground’s founders, though. Anyway, I saw a lot of fairly interesting people at the Little Mexico Campground, including an old man driving by on a moped with a bicycle horn while smoking a cigarette. I also saw a crusty old man smoking a cigarette in a junky car with the license plate “PLEAZUR”—so ladies, if you’re looking for some good old-fashioned pleasure, I know a guy who’s willing to give some out.