A Cursed Episode of Scream Queens

During each season of TV we ever make, there’s one episode in which everything goes wrong. One episode that makes us want to quit the biz, curl up in to a ball, and die.

One episode…that’s cursed.

Welcome to Episode 2

Things started innocently enough. After elimination, the remaining contestants returned to their room, and we had some pretty good reality moments. Lots of hugs, especially between Sierra and Rosanna, who were becoming fast friends.

That’s pretty much the last moment of sanity we had this episode.

Maybe our first mistake was making this an episode all about “Evil.”

Witchy Ways

Jaime cooks up a wicked brew for our ladies.

The theme of the week was showing evil by playing horror’s “bad girl.” Jaime met the girls and announced that for this week’s first challenge, they’d be tackling a real classic: the witch.

The location was pretty cool. It was the old L.A. zoo located in what is now part of Griffith park. We were shooting in what used to be home to bears or lions or something (no one seems to know for sure.)

And here’s where the madness begins.

Giving Thanks?

We shot the day after Thanksgiving. Since we couldn’t afford to rent out all of Griffith park, there were people everywhere! Not the case when we scouted on a normal weekday, of course. (Note to self: apparently holidays are a bit busier than regular days.)

Thanks to picnics and screaming kids, there was no way to get a clean reverse shot of our actresses. Total mess, and more and more people kept showing up.

On top of that, we ran into a lighting issue that pushed us back another thirty minutes. With every moment that ticked by, our backdrop was turning into beach-blanket bingo. Not good for camera, and potentially a huge distraction for our actresses.

We asked nicely, but almost none of these post-turkey party-people were amenable to just “doing us a favor” and moving. After all, we looked like a big film crew with lots of money (if only they knew!) and they had prime picnic placement. We’d have to do better than polite pleading.

“What are we gonna do with all these people?

It wasn’t like we could start greasing palms with Benjamins, so we resorted to an age old bargaining technique: bartering.

We passed out food from the craft service table to convince people to move. A Diet Coke here, some Sun Chips there, “Ham and tater-tots if you could just move your family 15 feet that way, sir.”

“Oh, you’re a vegetarian? We have a veggie tray!”

“Twizzlers, anyone?”

It was one of the wackier solutions we’ve come up with in our day, but it worked. By the end of the scene we were only a little bit behind. Seemed we were out of the woods. Then came…

The Homa Class that Made Us Homicidal

The idea of the class was simple. John would teach our ladies that when playing evil, it’s all about the emotions, not about the words you’re actually saying.

For the most part, everyone was doing great. Until John got to one of the kindest, sweetest actresses on the show, Rosanna.

While the other girls worked with each other, John decided to sit down with Ro. She’s a terrific actress, and blew us away in her auditions, but the judges worried her acting was suffering under the pressure of the competition itself.

This is very understandable. We film long hours with our ladies, they have very little time to prepare, and expectations are high. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. John wanted to get Ro out of her head, and to a place that was real for her.

But after a few moments, she froze. John was trying to get her to say something, anything…and she just froze. In the control room (far away from the class and well out of earshot) we were on the edge of our seat, rooting for Rosanna at the monitors, “Come on Ro, come on! Say something!” Finally, she spoke, but it was clear she was struggling.

Now, we love all of our contestants, but anyone will tell you Rosanna is an especially kind person. Plus, through the audition process she’d done really good work. So we knew she had more in her.

Failing in John’s class is okay, as long as you listen to him and improve. But Ro never seemed to make it out of her head. One of our personal faves was shutting down, and we were hating it. We knew she had so much more in her, but it seemed like the pressure of the competition itself was getting to be too much for her.

A Bloody Mess

For the final director’s challenge, our ladies played a serial killer who liked her dead meat. We were lucky to get actor Trevor Wright, star of Tim Sullivan’s 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams, and appearing in David Fincher’s upcoming “The Social Network” to play across from our actresses (Thanks, Tim, for making that happen!)

One problem: we needed to slit his throat.

Biagio’s not feeling the knives.

The prop knife we had wasn’t playing on camera. It just didn’t look right. Someone (I think it was me) mentioned using a real knife, and then someone (I think it was Joke) pointed out we didn’t want to accidentally kill Trevor. An excellent point. So that idea was nixed.

We went through a bunch more options. It’s amazing just how bad a fake knife can look on camera. Too plasticky, too shiny, too goofy. We felt like the Dyson vacuum guy. 6,432 tries later, we had it.

A Second Chance?

In any good episode of TV, you have someone to root for. At this point, Rosanna was definitely the underdog, after her performance in John’s class. If she could pull it together, and turn out an awesome performance, she might be able to redeem herself. That would be a great story!

While she did much better in her scene than she did in class, she was still struggling. We all knew she was talented, including Tim (who’s publicly said he’d put Rosanna in any of his movies.)

But with such limited time to shoot, her lack of sleep, and having come off a very stressful Homa class, it seemed Rosanna’s acting chops were falling prey to the pressures of starring on a reality show.

Did Karlie Just Poison Herself?

Karlie licks raw meat.

Then, in an attempt to add some extra drama to the scene, Karlie goes ahead and starts licking the raw meat the girls were slicing. We all SCREAMED. I’m running around going, “Did she swallow that? Tell me she didn’t swallow that!” Needless to say, the medic was put on high alert. Karlie turned out fine (and it made for great TV) but seriously? Seriously?

On the Plus Side…

Gabby, who’d completely blown her director’s challenge the week before by getting lost in “Gabby Land” (a phrase coined by Tim) gave a great performance (later winning leading lady), as did Tai and Jessica. Most of the other actresses held their own. Sierra slipped back into some of her bad habits (acting like a porn star), and it was clear Tim wasn’t happy with her. It seemed Sierra and Rosanna were racing to the bottom…two girls we both adore.

Sierra and Rosanna support each other after the challenge.

Technical Difficulties

Since John and Jaime have to see the girls’ scenes edited (roughly) together in order to weigh in on who should stay and who should go, I was editing them at the speed of light on my laptop (seriously, you could see those Millennium Falcon jump-to-light-speed streaks around my head.) Just about done. Had given all the girls equal editing time to make it fair. Ready to show the judges. And then…

Out of nowhere, I get the “You are now running on reserve battery power” message. My eyes darted to the left. Yup, someone had accidentally walked away with my power cord, and in my deep “editing trance” I never even noticed it was missing. Just as I start looking around, the screen goes black.

I snag Joke’s power cord and plug in. Guess what? Turns out since I have the “big” Mac laptop and she has the “little” one, it wouldn’t bring my completely dead laptop back to life. Her adapter is smaller and less powerful. Works fine if there’s juice left. Fails miserably when there’s not.

With the Grand Ballroom quickly approaching, and John and Jaime waiting to watch, the edited scenes are sitting on my dead laptop.

Mad Dash

Everyone’s ripping through their bags searching for my “big” laptop plug. Never recovered it, but ten minutes later we found someone else with the same size laptop. Their adapter saved the day. (I bought a new adapter the next day and obnoxiously wrote BIAGIO all over it. Least it never disappeared again.)

Grand Ballroom

By this point, I was convinced the ceiling would cave in, there’d be a freak tornado in downtown L.A., or maybe a stray Electromagnetic Pulse would just render every piece of electronic equipment useless.

As it turned out, the worst part of elimination was seeing poor Rosanna sent off the show. Her eyes said it all: she knew she hadn’t been able to show us her best.

We Love Rosanna

For the record, Ro’s a great actress, capable of far more than she was able to show (we’ve witnessed her talent) and I hope we get to cast her in a movie down the line. As I write this, she’s filming on GLEE (a show with slightly more viewers than Scream Queens) and appearing regularly on Warren the Ape. You’re going to see a lot more of Rosanna, and we’re all rooting for her.

Was it a Cursed Episode?

Yes. Absolutely.

But while it made our life a living hell, The Curse of Episode 2 was downright deadly for Rosanna. She got the axe.

More Shocking Confessions Coming Your Way

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