The Making of Gigi - Pt. 5 - "We Need a Hooker"

When we looked into casting the hooker for this episode, we thought about several types - large ones, ethnic ones, disgusting ones - but in the weeks leading up to the shoot Josh had been on location with an actress who he thought would work perfectly. Her name was Brit Morgan, and damn was he right.

She had all the elements we needed for this character. She was gorgeous, yes, but after we got her through wardrobe and hair & makeup she was the perfect definition of hot mess. Disheveled and grubby, yet you still might pony up some change to "scare all over her tits."

Brit and I sat down to discuss her character and I could tell right away she was the right woman for the job. We thought up three distinct voices for the hooker - one was her "selling voice," the breathy, sexy tone she uses to lure in her johns; second was her "normal voice," the voice she falls back on when Gigi's antics catch her off-guard; and third was her "coked-up voice," the amped up, crazy bitch she turns into after blowing lines of coke in the bathroom to get ready to do her duty. Brit moved between these voices flawlessly and brought new things to the table that we had never dreamed of, including the "strange rubber ducky" Gigi finds in her purse…

Approaching the element of drug use for Gigi has always been fascinating for us. He's already so confused without the drugs that putting any in his system just ramps up the ridiculous. And ecstasy is a tricky one, because we didn't want Gigi to start petting the hooker and actually enjoy the experience. So we went with the bad trip. And although I'm still waiting for the first YouTube comment to declare, "Ecstasy doesn't give you those type of visuals," I'm happy with how the double exposure came out and feel it accurately portrays what must be going through that poor foreigner's mind.

It was our last day of shooting so we had to hurry through much of the pickup shots of Gigi stepping on the ketchup. I kept muttering to myself, "Goddamn these writers giving me more f*cking fake blood to work with." It was the only episode where re-shoots were genuinely needed after the fact and luckily our prop master Jason came through for us weeks later with matching carpet to recreate the motel room floor in my garage.

Oh I almost forgot - Gigi throwing the vase at the wall almost took out our co-star. Watch the take that made it into the final cut. Kudos to Josh for doing his best Tim Lincecum impression...

The Making of Gigi - Pt. 4 - "Pocket Aces!!"

I've realized that I said this would be a 6-part series, but really its going to be around 12 parts. I wanted to describe each episode as its own part. I have the power to do that through the blog-master license I received at the BMV a while back.

After the first half of the pilot shoot day was spent at Rosa's in her bathroom (you see? I'm even jumping back in time. Blog-master license) we high-tailed it over to a garage where my brothers and I lived at the time on Abbot Kinney in Venice. The beauty part about shooting in this garage was that we didn't need to dress it up at all. It was packed full of shit we just moved aside to make space for a poker table and plopped in our actors.

Luckily the area of action was all centered around the poker table so it made our shotlist fairly simple. But the continuity issue with the playing cards was a whole other unforeseen issue. Our props master Aaron was racing around picking up discarded, tequila-soaked cards while Tyler and Marcus did their best to remember which cards they had in their hands each round. It was madness. Speaking of Marcus, what an amazing find.

Kevin knew Marcus Nel-Jamal Hamm from work and brought him to audition for the part of Lonnie. We needed someone imposing but who wouldn't over play the comedy of the role, we needed someone to be REAL. He won us over in the audition and proved to be the right choice on the day, playing Lonnie flawlessly.

Our props master Aaron had procured some fake pot that is supposedly safe to smoke for actors, but holy shit it felt like inhaling a burning broom that just had a witch's ass riding on it. Kudos to Kevin and Josh for taking it down take after take. Well done fellas.

By the end of the day we had two episodes in the can. Marcus, who was the only non-Nomad in the shoot, performed so well that we knew that if this pilot went to series, it wouldn't be the last time we saw his character Lonnie...

The Making of Gigi - Pt. 3 - "Donate Good God"

When we delivered the pilot to BBC Worldwide in July 2010 they wasted no time in finding MyDamnChannel.com as a partner to launch an entire season. Rob Barnett, owner of MyDamnChannel, proved to be an amazing visionary in the online world and saw great potential in this character. So a 10-episode season was ordered up, and we got to work scripting.

We'd been brainstorming several situations for Gigi to find himself in, so we each choose our favorite and split off in order to pen them individually. We found that the more extravagant the situation (ie. Gigi joins a cult, Gigi goes to jail) the least we felt it showed Gigi in the proper light. The simpler the situation was, the easier is it was for Gigi to slip up. We wanted the people he encountered to be normal and real, only to have their buttons pushed by the ignorance of Gigi and do something they might not normally do.

Episode 2, "Donate Good Cause" was the first that we felt hit the right tone. As the rest of us grappled to get inside Gigi's head, Josh turned in a spectacular script that would highlight the physicality of the character. Only problem - it involved spraying blood all over the hospital set.

I balked. Here we were, working with a decent amount of money to get through two episodes a day and he goes and does this to me. Let's get some fake blood that may or may not come off your skin between takes and spray it all over a set that we may have to paint over afterwards. He assured me that whatever we had to go through it would be worth it. And although I kept trying to put it in the "Let's save this for season two" pile, Josh's constant encouragement that it was doable won me over.

On the day we were getting along pretty good, knocked out everything we could from every angle before we let any blood fly. Then our VFX guy Paul hooked Josh up to a compression tank via a clear tube that would feed from under his shirt and out his rolled up sleeve. We made sure our blocking was such that he could pull the tube from the blood bag and stay seated while the blood flowed. Our first take was beautiful, absolutely beautiful. Everyone executed perfectly and I yelped out a sigh of relief rather than "cut." The second take, however, would not go over so well.

We only had one take per lens, so we moved from the medium to the close and did the wide shot last so he could really let loose on the wide take. Except during the close up Josh got blood all over his face, so we had to stop the take right in the middle, wait to clean him up, and then start over with a second take - schedule be damned!! We ended up getting three great blood flowing takes, although the closeup had an immense amount of blood in it - continuity be damned!!

For the exterior we had precious little minutes as the sun went down, and unfortunately I couldn't give Josh and Kevin enough time as I wanted to for them to play around with the Bum and Gigi interaction. All in, for the amount of production headache it could have been, I was really happy with the result. And if it wasn't for Josh's passion for this episode, this tremendous lead-off to our season would have never happened.