Liars and Lunatics :: Film Blog

One of the scenes in the feature film Liars and Lunatics had to take place in a dance studio.

We scouted several locations before we found the Dance Factory in College Point. We talked to the owner, Amy, and she got us a great group of kids to be in the scene.

It’s actually a flashback scene where James first meets Paige (she works at the dance studio). James comes in to one of her dance classes and proceeds to “help” teach her students… (except that James knows nothing about dancing).

We also had to shoot James standing on a busy street handing out tracts. So we populated the sidewalk in front of the dance studio with the parents of the young dancers. You can see some of them in the “filmstrip”.

P.S. This was one of our pizza days… The pizza delivery guy showed up in the middle of filming this sidewalk scene. He actually got into one of the takes, and we had to run after him to get him to sign a release form!

One of the things all the filmmaking books warn you about is this: Be sure to have good food on set. Simply put, that basically means “Don’t order pizza for lunch every single day of the shoot!”

Well, we took this to heart. Our production people actually did a survey of sorts to find out all the food allergies of our actors and crew.

We had people allergic to fish. We had someone who was allergic to onions. Someone else couldn’t eat white bread or white rice. Another person who could not eat red meat, but could each chicken or fish (or something like that). Yet another person didn’t eat cheese.

That made for a bit of a juggling act, but our catering people came through for us and worked out the details (hopefully accommodating everyone during each meal. At least, our cast and crew were gracious enough not to say anything and ate what they could.) 

As for pizza. Well, we only had pizza once as a meal for the film shoot. Okay, maybe twice. Or was it three times? It couldn’t have been more than three times! (we think…)