Christmas in July

PROVO — Anyone who thinks filming a movie is as simple as "lights, camera, action" needs to spend a day on a movie set.

The actors and actresses working on the feature film "Together Again for the First Time" spent most of their days in July on this north Provo set just "waiting around," said actor Blake Bashoff.

Creating a scene that lasts just moments onscreen takes hours on the set. Veteran character actor David Ogden Stiers said that getting everything to come together just right can be "bloody murder."

"You have to wait for the planes to stop flying overhead, the neighbors to stop blasting the stereo, the fly to get out of the room — and the reward is to check the gate," Stiers said. (For those who don't speak movie-talk, "check the gate" means make sure that no fuzz or hair or lint of any kind is in the camera lens. If there is, the scene has to be reshot.)

"As Orson Welles once put it, 'I act for free; they pay me to wait,' " Stiers said. "That just comes with the job."

Before the shooting even starts, the actors have to rehearse the scene several times to make sure they have it just right. Meanwhile, the director throws in his bursts of inspiration, which can completely change the scene and lead to even more rehearsing.

And before the rehearsing starts, the crew needs to set the scene — no easy feat in this case. The movie is set in Spokane, Wash., during Christmas. The old joke about Christmas coming in July has come true here, with everything from Santa and reindeer on the roof to fake snow being blown around by giant fans to mimic a blizzard.

Reed McColm, screenwriter and producer, said the hardest scene to create thus far was a nighttime, outdoor shot that included Christmas lights all along the street and snow falling around the family. Try pulling that off when, even at 2 a.m., temperatures rarely dip below 70 degrees.

The fake snow, which McColm describes as Cheetos without the color or flavoring, got everywhere, and the fans blowing it around were "ridiculously loud," and the actors sweated out the shoot in their winter coats.

"But it was pretty when it was done," he said. "Oh, was it pretty."

The actual filming in Provo started June 26 and continued through the end of July, but creating the film started much earlier, back in 1989, when McColm and Jeff Parkin, the director and a film-production teacher at Brigham Young University, were getting their master's degrees at the University of Southern California.