I just finished Day 4 of prep on Scandal Episode 512. There’s not much I can tell you because it’s all, you know, hush hush. Basically, we’ve been scouting, talking to the writers about scenes, walking the sets, figuring out the best and least healthy snacks to eat in between meetings and scouts.
In addition to snacking and, oh, the amazing privilege it is to direct an episode on a big show, it’s really great to be able to shoot at Sunset Gower Studios, historically the home of Columbia Pictures. Columbia was one of the original studios from Hollywood’s “Golden Age” so all the stages have names of the movies and television that shot there in years and decades past. There’s even a building named after famed production manager and one of my AFI professors Abby Singer – so famous he has a film term named after him – “The Abby” a.k.a. the second-to-last shot of the day.
So if you’re a film nerd like me, working on the lot in Hollywood is as good as it gets. This is the view every day coming to work. Hard to beat.
