Movie Madness

Last Monday was our busiest day ever as dog wranglers. Three feature film productions came together in the same 24 hour period to create the "perfect storm." We started the day on the set of Zombieland which I have described in an earlier post. We wrapped Zombieland at about 2 PM, just in time to hightail it down to Perry, Georgia about 2 hours south of the Atlanta metro area. We were handling two Belgian Malinois in a "quarantine checkpoint" scene for The Crazies, a remake of the George Romero classic. On the way to Perry we got a call from Rob Zombie's Halloween 2, which we had been working on for over a month. H2 was being filmed in Covington, Georgia, east of Atlanta. When Carol and I arrived at The Crazies, Ashley was waiting for us with three Malinois. Two of the three were narcotic interdiction dogs and wired for sound. The third was a retired police dog and much more mellow. Ashley had also brought Arko, the German Shepherd who was scheduled to play on H2 the next night. He had brought Arko on my instructions because we had a feeling his scene for H2 might get moved up. We were right, H2 needed him and we had to send Ashley and Arko along with the third Malinois back to Covington for a 2 AM call. Meanwhile, Carol and I waded through the 350 extras milling around trying to get fitted in military MOPP suits for the checkpoint scene. All the suits were filled with charcoal, which I suppose was an additional filter for biohazards, but made the suits even more uncomfortable. (The only biohazards we were going to encounter that night were easily cleaned up with a pooper scooper!) The gas masks had had the filters removed which also functioned to reduce the amount of condensation in the mask. This left us with fogged up lenses pretty much all night. It was freezing cold, miserably uncomfortable and really loud with helicopters buzzing overhead and a mob scene being orchestrated. This was not a glamorous bit of film work but I know it made a great visual. All in all, we survived the Perfect Storm!