Yesterday night, Emil the Director and I drove out on a mission.  We needed to leave the city limits to get spray paint to make stanchions for the museum lobby.  Stanchions, for those non-vocab people like myself, are the things that hold those ropes that make the maze for people to stand in line.

Mission 2 was pick up some styrofoam beanbag fill that Emil had ordered from walmart.com and had sent to their store in Niles.  We need the beanbag fill because we're pretending it's Ice-Melt.  We got there, found spray paint (not even locked in a cabinet!) and then came the hard part.  As only Walmart and the people of Walmart can, the next hour of our lives was spent in a line at customer service trying to get this beanbag fill.  Only two people in front of us, but we still waited for 20 minutes.  Finally we got to the front and asked if this was the place to get a "Site to Store" order.  Nope, we have to go to the next register over, where, of course, we wait again because the same person has been trying to solve some problem for the entire time we've been in line.  They finish, we ask again...  "Is this where we get a Site to Store pickup?"  "No...  the next register over."  We walk over.  The cashier follows us.  He pulls up the order and Emil signs for it.  The cashier leaves to go get the box.  We wait.  We tell stories from stupid-er years past...  The cashier returns with the box and suggests that we check to make sure it's OK.  Thank God we did...  The particles are at least 5 times too big; they're bigger than peas.  Giant peas...   not Ice-Melt.  "Why don't we just crush up some styrofoam?" I suggest.  Whatever, forget about it...  "We need to return this."  

So...  we get back in line.  But this guy can't find the product, can't figure out the order.  We can't return it.  We stand around for another 15 minutes while he tries this, tries that, throws away receipts, tries to find another barcode somewhere, it doesn't work...  on and on.  Finally a manager stops in and saves us, and Emil and I try to convince ourselves like the trip was worth it because we needed spray paint anyway.

The point is...  this "fake rock salt" is just one of a thousand prop issues to be solved.  This one, clearly, took up more time and effort, but in a production like this we have to solve a million problems like this.  It's a *production* and like making, say, toothpaste, it has inputs and outputs.  Unlike toothpaste, there are a LOT of inputs, most of them totally unique and completely necessary to produce one output.  One shot of hundreds of shots which, once edited and arranged, produce THE output...   the movie, King of the Dead.  It's really incredible how much time and effort goes into the planning, shopping, scheduling, arranging, calling, coercing, managing of all these elements that will eventually combine to make the movie.

Yes, this little piece was somewhat like drudgery, but for the most part it's exhilerating and fun.