Filmmaker blog by writer / producer Georgia Menides

2/22/08 - Turtle Time

Chelonia Mydas (The logger head sea turtle) are an endangered species protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the US Fish and Wildlife Act, and the Florida Statues. These majestic turtles spend most of their life at sea, but each year from May to October, the females crawl ashore in the night onto local beaches in South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, and Florida to dig a nest and lay their eggs. Several weeks later, also at night, the hatchlings burst from their nests and immediately scramble towards the water. Moving quickly from nest to sea is critical for their survival.

On a natural beach, the moon over the ocean creates a lighter sea water horizon which guides the hatchlings to the water. Artificial lights, however, confuse the hatchlings and they wander inland instead, not knowing where the ocean is. Lost and disoriented, they soon die from dehydration, heat exhaustion, or are crushed on nearby streets.

Hundreds of miles of Florida’s coastline are suitable for sea turtle nesting. In effort to help this threatened species survive, all local governments strictly enforce the Sea Turtle Conservation code. Violators are subject to fines and imprisonment.

The above is lifted pretty much word for word from an ominous pamphlet tucked into the permitting booklet sent to me by the Collier County Film Commissioner after I called her to discuss our plans to shoot Still Green in her community. The pamphlet was from an organization called Turtle Time Inc and the next page listed exactly what these “Sea Turtle Conservation Codes” were. Each item on the list was basically a paraphrase of the same ordinance…from May 31st to September 31st there can be NO VISIBLE LIGHT on the beach between 9pm and 7am.

After reading this I immediately panicked. At that point, a good third of the script took place on the beach at night, not to mention the scenes that took place in the beach house at night, on the porch facing the beach, and a few scenes set at dawn or at sunrise. Clearly, there is no way to shoot at night without lights, and HMI’s certainly counted as visible light.

But it was a controlled panic. I took this to be a problem, but one with a clear and most likely, a simple solution, as surely every house, hotel, bar, and restaurant lining the beach of Collier County wasn’t turning off their lights at 9pm for half the year and bumbling through the night in total darkness. We’d already been to Naples twice when Freedom Park was in film festivals there, and some of the hottest hotels and clubs were right on the beach and were clearly not following this black out ordinance.

I called the commissioner, asking her for a more detailed breakdown of what “no lights on the beach after 9pm” really meant in practice and what people were expected to do to ensure that these baby sea turtles remained unharmed while their lives and businesses continued to operate. She explained that because of the Hurricanes, all beach front property was already equipped with Hurricane Shutters which, in these crucial months, were to be pulled down post 9pm so that all light was blocked from the beach. Lights could be on as long as the shutters were down. No problem.

As for what to do about actually lighting the beach at night, she admitted she wasn’t sure, as her position was a newly appointed one and that we were the first production company to film in Collier County since the establishment of the Collier County Film Commission. She had never encountered this problem before.

I asked her how dark it was by say 8pm during the summer. She said the sun normally set between 8:30 and 9, in other words, not dark at all. I asked her what time the sun usually rose. She said around 5am. This was not going well.

But she assured me a solution did exist and gave me the number of Mary, the head of Collier County’s environmental services department within the Florida Fish and Wildlife division.

There was a bit of animosity when I first spoke to Mary about our needs to light the beach, and an initial barricade of “I’m sorry, there can simply be no lights” had to be wedged through. But after about an hour of negotiating, I realized that she was actually quite nice and pliable. There was obviously a way around this rule, and the fact that I was calling her in the first place was indication that we were not a bunch of barbarians ready to crush all turtles that came into our way, and there was also the fact that we were about to bring a whole lot of love and magic, not to mention hundreds of thousands of dollars into Collier County. At the same time, she soon saw that we were not some multi million dollar enterprise who could just “come back after October” as she originally suggested. We were normal people like she was, trying our best do something really hard, and eventually, we came to the following agreement. Since most Sea Turtles laid their eggs in June-July, by September almost all hatchlings had already made it out into the gulf, so the later we shot those night beach scenes, the better.

Doug Spain had to be shot out by September 12th to shoot another film, so we couldn’t push back any farther than that, but I agreed to film all our night beach scenes during the last week of production, September 7-14. 

She explained that every morning, around 7 am, volunteers from Turtle Time Inc, who did seem to be the ultimate authority on the turtle laws, would walk the beach inspecting for turtle nests. If any were found, the area would be flagged. If this happened, we would not be able to shoot at night until the nests were hatched, no exceptions. But in reality, these endangered species were not just up and mating and laying eggs everywhere along the coast, especially all the way into September, and the chances of a nest appearing in front of 13225 Hickory Lane were rather slim. Assuming there were no turtles, we agreed, we would rig grip equipment and drape blacks all the way from the house to the edge of the water, giving us 100 feet to light and shoot in, but still blocking the light from any other turtle hatching along our beach. Although this was far from an ideal scenario, and the fear of a turtle nest’s untimely appearance the morning before our biggest night beach scene was giving both Andrea and I major nightmares, but we realized this was our only option.

Jon suggested that I go through the script and turn any night scene that could work as a day scene into day. Meanwhile, Andrea reshuffled her well executed production schedule which was already a complicated piece of work to now move all night beach shoots to the end of production.

We assumed then that this problem had been solved.

Our entire above the line crew are earth loving, environmentally friendly, Wal-Mart and McDonald’s banning, recycling, full respect to nature, type of people and none of us had an any intention of harming baby sea turtles, or any of the beautiful wildlife we had come to capture on film. That being said, we were going to shoot on the beach at night at all costs and certainly wouldn’t be stopped by town politics.

I sadly said goodbye to some of my favorite night scenes and realized that any filming at dawn would now be out of the questions as well.

I’d love to say I did this gracefully, or that I made any script changes gracefully and with perspective, but that would be a big fat lie. I was very much still getting accustomed to this harsh reality of production. As a writer, I was not ready for the fact that circumstances simply will change your script, and getting rid of a few scenes at dawn, as it turned out, was nothing compared to the script cutting and changing that lay ahead. Characters, lines, shots, even entire scenes that I’d once considered crucial to the story had to be altered or axed all together, and every time it happened, I would freak out.

I’d always been difficult about surrendering control over my scripts, and had even turned down several lucrative offers to sell them for this exact reason. Ever since the day in film school when one of my teachers let us read her brilliant script for Mr. Wonderful, which she had sold to Samuel Goldwyn, who had turned it into a pretty forgettable movie, I’d sworn to never let anyone but me control my scripts.

On the flip side, you can have your scripts remain intact perfect skeletons…as they sit on a shelf and collecting dust somewhere, but that isn’t what they are written for. They are meant to be a blue print for something way deeper and more collaborative. Seeing where Still Green is now, and looking back on all the elements which have turned it into the film it is, I understand that this part of process is actually beautiful even while it is heartbreaking.

The magic of filmmaking is in that marriage of the imaginary with the tangible that doesn’t exist in any other art form in the same way. There is an astonishing amount of energy that shapes a film, from the director, to the PA shopping at Salvation Army for your costumes, to some random organization like Turtle Time Inc, to the mating habits of a prehistoric creature that isn’t even aware you are making a film in the first place, every element; be it human, animal, vegetable or mineral, all adds soul and energy to the project. Filmmaking seems like proof of the entire theory that the universe can be broken down into energy and that it is all connected. It’s just easier to accept when it’s still just a concept.

In reality, I think the best thing you can do is pick your director as carefully as you would pick your soul mate because once you start production; you are no longer orchastrating the flow of this energy, your director is. If you choose to raise your own money and make your movie yourself, you surrender the paycheck in exchange for the luxury of at least being able to sit on set with a director who you trust and do everything you can to fight for your original vision. 

Jon is also a writer and unlike many directors, he always did his best to respect, if not the scene itself, the moment or theme the scene was written to achieve. Andrea is also a writer and she always did the same. As my boyfriend, Doug was somewhat obligated to fight a little harder for my original scenes than a producer normally would, but the reality was these conditions were tough, and they only got tougher as production went on, and the number one priority was, of course, finishing the film, not my words. Thank god I was surrounded by three people who never lost site of that because I lost site of it all the time. That being said, I would like to see Uncovered Production’s second film involve at least a few above the line crew with more experience than we did, because I am sure there were ways to shoot many of these scenes, they were just beyond our experience and know how.

At any rate, we thought we had solved the problem of Turtle Time Inc. We hadn’t solved a damn thing.

The day before we left for Florida, I faxed my paperwork to the film commissioner. She called me to say that everything was set for the few scenes we were filming in Collier County.

Then she asked me how the permitting process was going for the things we were shooting in Bonita Springs?

I said “What do you mean? Isn’t this paperwork taking care of everything we’re shooting in Bonita Springs (aka, EVERY scene we were shooting on the beach)?”

She explained that Bonita Springs was actually in Lee County, not Collier County and that to shoot on the beach there; we were going to need to go through an entirely different office. I asked what this meant in terms of the sea turtles, and of everything we’d done to be able to shoot on the beach at night. She said, that outside of Collier County, everything we’d done about the sea turtles, basically, meant nothing.

Maggie hadn’t realized that all our beach scenes were actually being filmed in Bonita Springs, and she warned me that this would most likely be a huge problem.

She also warned me that Turtle Time Inc was actually based in Lee County, where the organization and the town residence were exceptionally passionate about the sea turtles, to the point where they were referred to as “Turtle Tsars.” She offered to make the initial call to the head of the recreation committee in Lee County to “soften her up” I was not encouraged by the fact that she was going to need “softening.”

I asked who the film commissioner was in Lee County. She said they didn’t have one. No one had ever shot a movie in Bonita Springs before. This did not make me feel at all confident about this recreation director’s understanding of the plight of the indie filmmaker and felt a new ball of anxiety start to build in my stomach.

I asked her if she thought negotiating a way to shoot on the beach at night in Lee County was going to be as amicable as it was in Collier County, she laughed and said “Honestly, you might just not be able to do it at all”

On the way down to Florida, the recreation department head called me to, among other things, assure me there was no way to shoot on the beach at night. I told her that wasn’t an answer I was going to accept and surely there was someone I could talk to who would be as compromising as they were in Collier County. She gave me the number of the head “Tsar” of Turtle Time Inc.

Before I could even call Turtle Time, they were calling us, and you could tell by the sound of the Tsar’s voice that there would be no negotiating. Doug made the mistake of telling her that I’d already talked to Mary in Environmental Services and we’d worked out a compromise. She said she didn’t believe it and hung up the phone.

About ten minutes later, Mary called me, in a very different mood that she’d been in when I originally talked to her. Clearly, she had just been chewed out by Turtle Time Inc, and now told me that all the negotiating we’d worked out had nothing to do with Bonita Springs. I reminded her that when we’d talked about where we were shooting, I very clearly stated our address in Bonita Springs. She said that was an oversight on her part, but that she would not be able to help us out at all and that she resented our using her name to suggest that the conservation codes were negotiable. I asked her what she would do if she were me. She said she knew of a lake in Naples that was “De-Alligatored” on a daily basis where a lot of local children would swim and picnic and suggested perhaps we could shoot there instead. Hmmmm. Somehow, I doubted this kiddie-pool lake was going to work as the great Gulf of Mexico but I realized this conversation was going nowhere fast and hung up the phone.

Thus began what turned into a 5 week ugly stressful and often laughable battle to shoot on the beach at night, the details of which will unfold as these blogs continue.