May 21, 1996

Suddenly I'm starting to panic about all the movie chores that remain undone: casting, finding locations, crewing up, scheduling, budgeting, getting insurance. While I was supposed to be listening to a Stereolab concert tonight, I lurked in the back of Irving Plaza, making and remaking a rough schedule for the New York portion of the shoot, and racking my brains for possible locations. Terror seems to suit me, because I had came up with a number of good ideas by the time the lights went up.

The script contains a part written specially for my Uncle Bob, who has been asking me to put him in a movie for the last twenty years. Today my uncle bowed out of the project because of his knee problems. Somehow I am more bummed than is absolutely necessary. Three days ago I offered a small role to one of my aunts, who in her teenage years was prevented from taking a Hollywood screen test (possibly real, possibly bogus) because of her immigrant family's fear of white slavery. She turned my role down, saying that she wouldn't like the way she would look on screen now. Oh, well. Joseph Cotten's character talked about old times in THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS: "When times are gone, they're not old, they're dead."

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