Well the shoot was "interesting" to say the least. I used a towbar to tow an M151A1 jeep down there with my Blazer. It is tricky because you have to tie the steering wheel in the straight ahead position because it will go all the way to one side in a sharp corner and stay there and you will grind to a halt if you don't so it is not something for slipery roads!
I had a mapquest set of instructions and map, but we still got lost with me leading. I had another friend driving a more modern M35 deuce. The shoot was on Deer Island in Boston Harbor accessed from Winthrop. Well you can't get there from here! At one point. I had to take rte 1A south from the road I was one, but there was no access only rte 1A north. So we took 1A north and turned around in a shopping center. The deuce had fun and so did I with the parking lot slipery. I used 4Wd and then could not get it to come out of 4WD. Anyways, we finally got there and I could see why they choose this place. It looks like some place out of the movie Aliens! There are these large (75ft tall) tanks that look like alien eggs. Probably 20-30 of them. All the sewage treatment is done underground there. Mostly just the tanks sticking up. Weird looking. But the wind blowing across the harbor, probably 40-60 mph and the cold. Was it cold!!!! Well at least they eat very well! The catering was spectacular. I knew this from the movie I did back in the 80's. We finally moved the vehicles to the shoot location late in the PM. The extra actors arrived and sat in the Jeep and they issued fake guns to them. The practiced driving the car a couple times as the sun was going down. Mind you this was suppose to a dawn scene. Finally, Cameron Diaz came out of a side door between a couple of the "eggs", got into the car and drove down between the military vehicles, around the corner and dissapeared. That was it. After a few minutes, we were allowed to move the vehicles back to the staging area. We filled out a W9 and were off.
Anyways, I had serious reservations about leaving there after dark. As it turned out, my fears were well founded. I got lost, badly lost. Really lost. We toured Winthrop and East Boston. We toured a couple of neighborhoods that had peninsulars that extended in the harbor. We were on the wrong side of the harbor and I could not figure how to get back to the Boston side! We finally wound up at the Logan airpot Fed-Ex part, turned around and found the Ted-Williams tunnel. After that things went smoothly till I got to Derry and the turn onto the road where the guy who owns the Jeep lives on. The road was not plowed well and people were on my ass. Remember I mentioned about having the steering wheel tied? When I started to take the corner, the Jeep tried to go straight. It pushed the Blazer right into a snowbank and jacknifed the whole rig! I was lucky to be able to get it out and there is apparently no damage to the side of the Blazer. Phew!
So that was my day.....
Oh and my love scene with Cameron Diaz...
