Story #2: The 1-second shower scene
During the summer between sophomore and junior year, a guy I knew had the ridiculously ambitious idea of shooting a full-blown feature film with a skeleton crew over a 10 day shoot. It was a college dramedy (one of the things you'll learn in film school is that lots and lots and lots of college students make films about college, and I was as guilty as anyone else - with dorms and college buildings to shoot in, tons of college-aged free actors available, and life experience to draw from, it's just very easy and tempting) spanning the entirety of a girl's freshman year as she adjusted to life in the city and being away from home and dealt with school and money and roommate and friendship and romance problems.
Generic, to be sure, but all the same, doing a feature was a pretty damn ambitious thing to attempt for a 20-year-old with a total budget of about $2000. I had nothing better to do those 10 days and thought the script was amusing enough so I was happy to join in in the capacity of assistant director (herding actors, clapping the clapboard), key grip (lighting), and general crew (i.e. hauling heavy film and lighting equipment).
The lead was played by the director's girlfriend, who we'll call Amy, an acting student at the college. (Nepotism of a sort, sure, but very helpful nepotism - if you're a young nobody director who is paying a $0 salary, good luck getting someone to agree to do 10 consecutive 12-hour shoots without a pre-established connection.) She wasn't a drop-dead mega babe by any stretch, but definitely a very cute girl, dirty blonde, a bit willowy with an oval-shaped face and an impish grin maybe just a bit too toothy for Hollywood "hot girl" standards.
The director scheduled all the most difficult stuff for the first 3 days of shooting: Two days of exterior scenes in various Los Angeles locations, day and night (these days were really taxing), then one day of shooting in a college lecture hall with the 30 or so people we had gotten to agree to come in and be extras for a couple hours, shot in a way to attempt to make 30 people look like 200. After that, it was thankfully on to more controlled interior scenes from days 4-10.
On day 4, we were filming dorm room scenes, which were filmed in the dorm room of one of the director's friends who he thought had the best-looking room for the movie, with exposed brick on the walls, hardwood floor and light coming in from a window with a nice city view (versus the grey fluorescent-lit prison cells most of the dorm rooms actually were). One of the first things in the entire script was montage to be set to music of a series of one-second shots of the protagonist getting ready in the morning: Hitting her alarm clock, getting out of bed, brushing her teeth, in the shower, picking out clothes in a towel, putting on makeup, eating breakfast, out the door, all that stuff. We knocked the ones that were in the bedroom out quick, then into the bathroom, and we filmed Amy brushing her teeth for a few seconds.
Then it was on to the shot of her in the shower.
Now, shots of women in showers can be done in a few ways. If you're going for an R-rating, the woman can just be naked or topless in there and you can film as you please. If you're going PG-13 or PG, then what works best is for the actress to get in there in a swimming suit and roll the straps down, just down over the shoulders if you want a PG-rated shot from top of shoulders up, or, if she's comfortable with it, down a little past the tops of her breasts so you can get a more PG-13 shot that includes a little cleavage. The idea for this shot was something in the PG/PG-13 realm.
Amy had known she was doing a shower scene, and she and her boyfriend/director had brought her bikini over to wear for that exact purpose. The shot was storyboarded as her washing her hair in the shower, shot from shoulders up. She came out of her changing room in a pink bikini, ready to go. (And she looked good already, with her smooth pale belly and long legs and B-cup breasts, though I tried to be polite and not stare.)
But then a problem quickly emerged: The bathroom was small and cramped, and the idea for the shot, close-up on her from the shoulders up with the shower curtain open as if the shot was in the shower with her, was just not possible without getting water on the nice HD camera and risking water damage. There is pro equipment for that, yes, but we didn't have it, and the camera was borrowed from the college and worth twice the budget of the entire film put together, so risking that just wasn't an option. (Amy is sitting on the bathroom counter in her bikini, just kind of watching while the director, me, and a few other guys debate all this. There were more crewpeople, but they were back in the bedroom/common area, not needed for this "quick" shot that was now taking twenty minutes.)
So, on to option number two: Just film through the shower curtain. Director asks Amy to get in there and on her mark, and turn on the shower, she does, and we close the curtain. The problem is quickly apparent - the curtain IS see-through, yes, but not AS see-through as we would need for the purpose of a one-second shot that was just a close up of her head. It just kind of looked like a vaguely head-and-shoulders shaped, flesh-colored blur, and would have looked bad and been visually unintelligible in a one-second closeup.
This leaves two options: One, go out and buy a clear shower curtain, which would have been a total waste of extremely limited budget money for a one-second shot. Or two, film from further back, from the open doorway, which gave a much wider frame and made it much more visually obvious that we were looking at a shower in a bathroom, no matter how blurry what was inside the shower curtain was. We set the camera in the position for this shot, and it looks great (we have to adjust a couple lights to get them out of shot, of course), with one obvious problem: Amy's pink bikini is CLEARLY visible inside the shower.
The director and the cameraman quietly confer for a moment (they were best friends, I think, I was more of the outsider). Director: "Hey Amy?" Amy turns off the shower and opens the curtains. "Uh huh?" she asks. He tells her that we are filming from further back, and though we can't make out many details in the shower, we can see her bikini, and asks if she can take it off. (Here's another benefit of the star being your girlfriend: Can you imagine the awkwardness of asking such a thing otherwise?)
"Well, um..." For a second I'm sure she's going to say no and we'll just cut the shower from the script. "Sure, I guess. If I can see the footage and veto it if I don't want it in the final cut." The director agrees that this is fair. She closes the curtain again, I (and the other, I believe, 4 guys in the bathroom) see her turn, pull her bikini top off over her head, toss it over the curtain, then bend over as she takes her bikini bottoms off.
Now, as said, the curtain was definitely somewhat opaque. Inside, Amy was clearly flesh-colored and woman-shaped, with the shape of her ass fairly clearly visible as she stood side-facing, the shape of breasts and a hint of ass crack just barely visible, and nipples and vagina not visible at all (I suspect she was shaved). No doubt, we were all now a few feet from a cute naked actress, who was dating one of the guys in the room. "Should I turn the shower on?" "Yeah." She does. "Just start acting like you're washing your hair, and we'll film for about twenty seconds to get what we need, ok?" "Ok." "Action!"
As the director called action, she visibly angled herself just a little away from the camera - not facing her back straight on by any means, but just about 30 degrees away, before she started showering. Obviously trying to keep her breasts and vagina out of the final cut, no doubt, but the joke was maybe on her a little bit - her ass and ass crack were way more visible than her nipples and vagina would have been had she just stayed sideways! Not that I said anything, of course, but make no mistake: While blurry, this film now officially contained a shot of the protagonist's ass.
After about twenty seconds, the director calls cut, asks camera if we have what we need, who says that we do, and the director tosses Amy the bikini and tells her she can turn the shower off and put it on and then we can move on. I watch her blurry form bend over and put the bottoms on, then put on the top and step out, dripping wet. Then we moved on and filmed for the rest of the day and 6 more days after that, during which she did do some clothed kissing with a male costar and did one short scene in a bra and jeans, but there was no more nudity.
And that's the story of how we spent half an hour getting one second of footage. Good thing the rest of the film didn't go at that ratio, or we'd still be filming today.
In the end, the film came together quite nicely. Generic college story, sure, and obviously ultra-cheap with amateurish production values, but I genuinely enjoyed it when the director screened it for the cast and crew. It came out too short for general feature film standards - like 71 minutes, I think? - but I think the director went and did a 2-day shoot of additional scenes a few months later to get about 15 minutes of new scenes and get it to more proper length, though I was not involved with this shoot (too busy with other stuff at the time) and actually never even saw the 86-minute version.
But yep, the 71-minute version that got screened to me and about 50 other people (including Amy herself in the front row) included, a couple minutes in, that 1-second shot of Amy standing in the shower, blurry but clearly naked, her ass and a dark smudgey line that was her ass crack visible angled towards the camera. She looked good!
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