Mark Allen

Grindhouse sweet grindhouse? So the boxes had barely been unpacked in our new house – when Jim and I got this strange, official-looking notice on our front door. It was sealed in plastic and looked like some government notice. It turns out it was from a film scouting company and said that Mary Stuart-Masterson and her production company were interested in looking at our home as a possible location for Stuart-Masterson’s first-directed film called “The Cake Eaters,â€? which starts shooting this Summer. We called the number and talk to the scouting company. Then a few days later Mary Stuart-Masterson and a total Hollywood clan of cinematographers and camerapeople and assistants and assistant’s assistants and assistant’s assistant’s assistants and city-types with cell phones grafted to their heads came to our home. Everyone was very nice and inquisitive. They looked it over and loved everything about it and thought it was perfect, discussing shots and certain scenes and measuring the light and length and widths of a few rooms and the porch using these weird computerized measuring things. They loved the toilet in the living room and talked about working it into a scene, as well as a lot of our other furniture. Mary Stuart-Masterson was totally cool and funny… real sharp – noticing my Dead Kennedy’s albums, and laughing about Jim’s paintings. So then later Jim and I talked to a bunch of people who have dealt with this kind of thing and the legal angles, compensation, etc. Our landlord got involved (who’s a friend of ours and has been through this). We had to negotiate compensation from them and everything, work out the number of days, get legal advice, take stuff we had to sign to lawyers, and then sign it, and blah blah blah. We learned a lot about what to ask for and what to look out for and what to expect. A week or so later, it’s action: our house is going to be used as a set in the film! Weird huh? I kept telling friends I’d send them pictures of the new house, now I’m just going to tell them to go see the movie when it comes out. The story is a quirky drama about two families that have all this weird stuff happen to them when one of their estranged sons re-appears.

The film has Bruce Dern in it (gasp!) and also stars Jayce Bartok, Aaron Stanford, Thomas Cavanagh, Kristen Stewart, Elisa Pugliese and Elizabeth Ashley. The film is actually shooting in various places all over town. It’s so weird to leave the “world� of New York City and escape to the country… only to have that world not only reach out it’s tentacles and find you and knock on your door, but move into your house. I can’t wait to be interviewed on the red carpet while Jim and I are wearing our holographic scramble suit (with live birdcage hat) outfits, which we have decided will be our Oscar ceremony ensembles, which we will obviously have to pick out when we are inevitably nominated for an Oscar category that will doubtlessly be created; “Best Owners of a House Used As a Set in a Film,� once the academy is totally blown away by our dazzling house in the film’s background.

The location manager told us that she picked our house because the character that lives there is a single mom in a small town who’s kind of poor and down on her luck at the moment, and she doesn’t have time to keep up a big house properly… so our house was “…perfect.� Then she went on to to assure us at one of the meetings that even though our house was a little run down that the crew would treat it with just as much care and respect as if it were a nice house. The location manager is Jim and I’s new best friend. We joked that it would be funny if they used CGI animation in post-production to make our house look even more destitute. During one of their visits, I asked how “overgrown� they wanted the grass in the lawn to be. Mary said about seven days growth would be great if we could manage it. So now we just have to remember to cut the grass seven days before they start shooting… which will be the first time we’ve cut it since we moved in.

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