PART FIVE
Picking up the pieces...
I spent several weeks dealing with the fact that my "one shot at trying to bust into the business" had just fallen to pieces. What would I do? What do you do next when everything that can go wrong, does go wrong?... You find a way to get back up and doing it again.
We had talked about another attempt to shoot the film a year from September... it was now August. My mom called me from Maine and told me about work there. Suddenly I started realizing that the scenery ideas we had originally conceived for AMNESIA looked the way they did because it was based on the landscape of my childhood in Maine. I remembered rivers, forests... even a waterfall. I felt myself drawn back to the state. Within a couple weeks the right amount of paint jobs became available for us to visit Maine and see if it was possible for us to move there. When I mean visit I'm not talking about something glamorous... but a family of four driving late at night from Michigan to Maine. We drove at night because that was the best time for the kids to stay asleep so we could get as many miles behind us as possible. (I don't recommend night driving.)
We stayed at my mom's house in Maine while I checked out the work situation. There was more work there than in Michigan and things started to fall into place. I was offered another paint job back in Michigan which would pay me just enough when I finished to move the family to Maine. We returned, I did the job, and we returned to Maine.
Within a week of being in Maine we were looking for a place to move into. We went to look at the first place, a house with 3 acres of forest land in Orland, Maine. As we drove down the road the house was on I noticed a house with a windmill... just like was in the script for AMNESIA... We found the house number for the place and it ended up being only 2 houses down from the house with the windmill. I had a good feeling that we found what we were looking for... We did.
We moved into the house and I started to work at a local boat building place an hour away. I had tried to get a hold of Andrew for months before moving to Maine, but somehow I was never able to. A month into moving in to the new place I received a phone call. It was my mom who told me she had received a phone call from Andrew. I called him, we talked, I convinced him to come to Maine and live in the basement of the house. This way it would cut down on our budget and help us to focus on making the movie.
Andrew showed up just as I had put in my notice to the job at the boat factory so that we could do paint jobs together. By doing paint jobs together we could schedule the shooting right after a big job and be able to make the film and survive at the same time... atleast that was the idea.
We found many of the different locations, including this old wooden building on the outskirts of Bangor, Maine. We drove by it once when I was lost, looking for Walmart. (Walmart happened to be the other direction). I saw the wooden building, this old colonial style church building, the type you see in movies about the Revolutionary War. And it fit the look. In the film, there was a old colonial church building with an old cemetary in it, paint peeling, etc. This building fit everything we were looking for and it was in the country.
I lined up my brother again to act in the film and help us with the camera and other equipment. I also roped in another cameraman, someone we had met while doing "test" shots the last summer. I talked with a few other old friends from my "Maine years". Everything seemed to be moving forward, except we had no equipment, no leading actress, and I still wasn't able to convince the owners of that old church building to let us shoot on their property.
Andrew and I lined up the biggest paint job I had ever had. It was suppose to be able to be completed in 2 weeks. It would be enough to buy most of the equipment. I was told that when we finished it, someone had another possible one lined up as well. With summer in full swing we would be able to make alot of money for the film...
That's when things started to go wrong...
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