Tales from the Film Set: The Shitter

With the release of my new book, I've decided to share some fun, interesting, informative and downright bizarre adventures from my years working in the movie business. This is one of the bizarre ones...

While directing a low-budget Vegas caper film called Dirty Dealing, our cast included fifteen very attractive young women. That is never a recipe for boundless sisterly love and feminine bonding. Some of the ladies got along with most or all of the others. Some didn’t. A couple were, quite frankly, world-class bitches.

One of the ladies we cast out of L.A. was an actress named Elizabeth Friedman. Her claim to fame was that she had appeared on a couple seasons of a reality show. She was quite proud of it and made sure we knew she was proud of it. At her audition, she expressed that she had a lot of fans (or was it 'followers') and that it would be a huge boon for the film if we cast her. Okay… whatever. We weren't fooled that her modest fan base was of any appreciable value, but she was pretty, put in a good audition and was okay with the nudity required for the role. So, we cast her.

We had frontloaded the bulk of the film’s nudity in the first two days of shooting. This was done for two reasons: First, in the film the ladies do a nude calendar so we had to shoot those scenes/photos right away so we could get the calendars made in a impossibly short time frame to have those props on hand later in the shoot. Second, you always shoot nudity at the head of the picture whenever possible as talent knows they can’t back out (and this is more common than you think). Once you’ve established an actor, if he/she refuses to do something later in the shoot… they kind of have you over a barrel. In fact, this exact same situation still arose later on this very production (I'll save that tale for a future post!). Fortunately, only one actress flaked out minutes before we shot her scene and wouldn't do the calendar shoot. It was a small role, so not a big deal and we had enough of the ‘Sin Pit Pussycats" to simply pass her lines off to other players. Several of the ladies, including Elizabeth, were nervous doing this part of the film. But the remaining actresses were all troopers and those two days of the shoot went off fine.

I heard some rumors a couple days later that Elizabeth had a bit of attitude. Not the only actress I heard that about and I left things like that to the other members of the production team. However, I saw this first-hand toward the end of the first week.

We had a scene with a lot of actors that took place in a back yard with a swimming pool. There were around 10 actresses in the scene, so they were instructed to come to set “camera ready” (this means they do their own hair and make-up for the most part – quite common in small films, especially when you have 10 performers and only 1 make-up and 1 hair person). The other actresses came to set camera ready… all except Elizabeth. When I heard my producer, Julie, confront her about this. Elizabeth made a comment like, “I’m used to people doing my hair and make-up. I don’t know how to do it!” That pissed me off, so I chimed in, “So, aside from the forty days of your life you spent on that reality show, you’ve never worn make up or done your hair yourself?” I didn’t wait for a response, but Julie told me it had the desired effect. If she hadn’t been fired from the show shortly thereafter, perhaps we would have found out if she had learned a lesson on that front.

The climax of this little drama came a couple of days later when I got a call from the head of housekeeping at the hotel/casino where we had put up the talent. It was a very awkward call that went something like this:

HEAD HOUSEKEEPER: Um, Mr. Hood, this is Maria, the head of housekeeping. We have a problem here you need to know about.

ME: What happened?

HEAD HOUSEKEEPER: Well, it’s with Miss Friedman’s room.

ME: Is she okay?

HEAD HOUSEKEEPER: As far as I know. She’s not there at the moment, but housekeeping just went to clean her room and there’s feces on the walls…

I don’t know how long it took me to reply to that, but those words were not what I was expecting to hear. In fact, if I had a hundred guesses as to what the problem was, I wouldn’t have even gotten close. What I was being told was so far outside my wheelhouse as to fucking blow my mind. After a long moment, I think she suspected that she lost me as I heard, “Mr. Hood?”

“Yes, I’m here,” I said, still assimilating. “You mean shit on the walls??”

“Yes, sir.”

Now, being a somewhat normal, rational person my mind was trying to come up with a logical explanation for this. “Is she sick,” was all I could fathom. I mean, no one shits on walls intentionally, right?

The lady very politely went on to explain the situation in more detail and express how there was no possible way the mess was any kind of accident. It seems there was enough of it and disseminated in such a way as to rule out accidental shittage in any of its myriad forms. I don’t know how many times I apologized, but even now there just really aren’t words to address situations like this that feel remotely adequate. I enthusiastically agreed to the “bio-hazard fee” they were required to charge me for the incident and threw in a few more apologies to go with it. I also sent over flowers to the staff to try to further mitigate my horror over having even a tertiary relation to this abhorrent act.

I called my producer, Julie, who was equally horrified. We proceeded to get Elizabeth on the phone and explained the situation and that we were firing her. She denied any knowledge of the incident and suggested at one point that perhaps the cleaning staff was lying (huh?). We weren’t buying it. She was done. We had to reshoot a couple scenes we already had with her. There are still a couple moments when you see her in the film. One of the other producers came up with the incredibly original nickname for her – “The Shitter”. The whole team, it seemed, was brimming with creative geniuses. Anyway, it stuck.

Over the following days, it came to our attention that there was a rouge, phantom shitter striking hotel rooms at random all over Las Vegas… No! Of course not!! But what we did hear was that Elizabeth had her boyfriend in town and from what the other ladies had to say, the guy was considerably unpleasant (“asshole” was invoked more than once). The rumor was that he was very unhappy about her being in the film, especially with her having a nude scene. Someone speculated that he sabotaged her hotel room to get her fired. If so, his tactic was a smashing success! To this day, no one knows who is responsible except the Lord of Poop himself/herself. I’m sure I’ll never know, so this will just have to go down as another one of life’s great mysteries.

Film Schooling by Christopher Robin Hood is now available on Amazon.com!.