Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Smoochy Lives!
Today I took a couple of hours off of work and headed over to Maple Leaf Gardens to see Erika working on the set of Death to Smoochy. Took Vanessa along so that she could see her mom at work. Ironically, the best day to take Vanessa over to see her mother at work is on a day when Erika's not too busy, so that she can pay some attention to her daughter. This was one of those days -- not much location sound recording was going on, largely what is known as "playback" -- so I whisked Vanessa away after she had finished her nap and located Erika in the stands on the West side of the building on the lower level. I was quite startled by the scene that greeted me as I walked up the aisle to ice-side. All of the remaining scenes now being shot in Maple Leaf Gardens (as I understand it) have to do with the big finale ice-skating scene. Draped down from the ceiling were large Nazi banners, surrounded by a fog of dry ice and shafts of light striking down on a bunch of skating kids attacking and be-deviling the Smoochy character (played by Ed Norton). A very odd scene to just walk into. Courtesy of my wife, I've read the script, so I at least knew what it was all about and could put it into context, but still, it was pretty warped. ;-) It took me a few minutes to realize that the booming voice coming out over the stadium's loudspeakers was director Danny DeVito. There he was, a short man sitting behind the view-screens along with a coterie of others watching what his cameras were shooting, and effectively directing the chaos that was swirling about around on the ice. There were about a half dozen or so shoots, often from different camera positions, of the young, skating, brown-shirted, swastika-bearing kids circling around Smoochy and poking and bopping him with the Nazi flags they were carrying. Like I said, you have to understand the context to make any sense of why the heck they were doing this in the first place (and I'm not tellin' ;-) There were lots of kids and their parents in the stands, and during scene changes Danny DeVito would get up and tell a really bad joke to entertain the kids. (Sample: "What do you call a fish with no eyes?" "Fsh!" Much groaning from the parents/laughter from the kids in the stands ensues.) Vanessa soaked all of this up. She was fascinated by watching the kids skating, the camera-work going on, the music (Wagner's Ride of the Valkyres), and of course her mother telescoping her boom pole and shouting "Soundspeeeed!". Erika took Vanessa over to meet various people as well, including the director, introducing her as "this is my baby". Everybody thought she was cute, and she was all smiles, clearly having a good time. I met the sound recordist Erika is working with on this film, along with her cable puller. While in the "sound lounge" (in what used to be the ice-side Doctor's office) I also managed to get a peek as to what some of the cameras were actually seeing as the feed displaying the video playback of the scenes that had just been shot. Safe to say this is going to be a pretty whacked movie -- should be fun to see! One of the things that will stick in my mind was just how fascinated Vanessa was by everything, looking all around and going "what's that? what's that?" and clearly having fun. May well have to head back there -- I understand that the shoot will be in Maple Leaf Gardens for another week or so. Besides, I didn't get to see Robin Williams during my time there. ;-)