24th
The Road Pt. 1
Hey Friends of Worlds Best Dad!
Sorry this’ll have to be short, we’re about to hit the sack before we’re back on the road early tomorrow. Please excuse any grammatical mistakes, we’re running on Red Bull and various other energy drinks.
DAY 1
Wantagh, NY to Mercer, PA
We got off to a great start on our first day on the road. Sailing thru NJ and all across the Delware Water Gap to shoot a quick scene before journeying further into PA Dutch Country where we secured our first real location - shooting a scene at the Dutch Pantry Family Restaurant. From there we headed on to our final stop of the night, a KOA in Mercer, PA where we thought the largest horror of the evening would be finding out we were in a dry county, but we had not yet shot the horrifying story of the Tailey-poe.
DAY 2
Mercer, PA to Michigan City Indiana
Umm.. We zipped up the road from our KOA to our first location, a long shot we hoped to be able to sneak into - the abandoned Belmont motel… things looked good and we found it quickly and even made friends with the local sheriff who said he had no problem letting us sneak in. We got in a couple of shots before getting busted by contractors and were kicked out (stay tuned, we’ll be returning here for more on the way back home). We continued on to our destination of Michigan City, Indiana, an idyllic lakeside town under the looming shadow of a Simpsons Style Nuclear reactor (of course thisll be in the film). We finished up the day shooting late into the night at Al and Sallys Motel, a ‘classy’ retro roadside joint, and made friends with Ben the self-proclaimed flat-foot-bare-foot hillbilly.
DAY 3
Michigan City to Des Moines, Iowa
First thing in the morning we unleashed our shiny rocket for a jaunt around town, before getting back on I80 and happening upon the Worlds Largest Fireworks store, whose owners were nice enough to lets us shoot a scene straight out of Supermarket Sweep. We then headed on to the depressed but friendly city of Gary, Indiana where we infiltrated our favorite location yet - an abandoned burned out church (see pics on website). More stuff was shot that day.. but I’m too tired to remember… I’ll get back to this later.. Oh yeah, we all hated the motel in Des Moines that night and Josh even slept in the van to make sure the drunks who like hanging out at motel parking lots didnt mess with our precious cargo.
DAY 4
Des Moines to Broken Bow NE
WOW. As soon as we got out of Des Moines things looked right up. As we stopped to get gas we lucked upon a Jerrys Kids donation drive run by the fire department and enlisted their help for our most flat out, adorable and funny scene yet. I’m not giving away any jokes..sorry. Some driving shots and 300 miles later we ended up in a cornfield filming Matt, Charlie and Dean taking a shower in those giant sprinklers they use to water those acres…
Ok, so Day 5 tomorrow… We’ll try to update this as often as possible.
Best,
The Crew
