Last Thursday’s record high 84 degrees recorded at Islip got me reminiscing to a friend about a very, very low-budget feature film I worked on as location manager in the late 1980s. There is little that I remember about the plot other than it might have been a romance that hinged on the climate turning upside down. I don’t even recall the film’s name or if it was ever released.
A scene that has stayed in my mind was shot at a girlfriend’s house in Princeton, N.J. Guests at a Christmastime beer party sweat through their soaked T-shirts amid a surprise heat wave. Other parts of the film could have been set during a summer freeze or locusts descending, but I am not sure now all these decades on.
We shot a tornado scene in an East Village vacant lot that required a small dog flying through the air. Needing something soft for the dog to land on off-camera, I volunteered to go into the squat next door to look for some foam or a pillow. Carefully making my way up the rusted stairs, I met a junkie who would rent his mattress to us for a dollar or two. After dragging the mattress down the stairs and setting it out in the vacant lot, his works fell out of a hole in the side. I tucked them back into the hole when we were done with the scene.
I haven’t gotten around to looking for the records, but it seems to me and some people I have asked that even the wind has changed. It seems we now have as many hard westerlies as we do winds from the east. This, too, could be more evidence that the climate is changing all around us.
Another day on location was in Far Rockaway, where a mobbed-up real estate agent let us use an abandoned boarding house. We got power for lights somehow after the agent jimmied an electric meter and did something quickly inside. As nuts as the filming was, it was the thing about the weather that struck me as most odd of all. The reversed seasons and wacky weather seemed so implausible at the time, in about 1988. It doesn’t now. Was the writer-director prescient? I wish I knew. He was right about what was to come, at any rate.