Not quite ready for primetime

Yesterday afternoon I helped one of our teens film a project for school. She wanted to do a short film about a hoodlum who turns his life around. The first several scenes involved our protagonist stealing and brawling and generally acting like a ne’er do well. I suggested enlisting the help of one of our neighborhood stores for a shoplifting scene. The teens were a bit skeptical, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.

I went next door to negotiate with the Mexicans. I knew some shopkeepers would be nervous about having a camera in their store, and also might be concerned about interference with their normal business. What hadn’t occurred to me for some reason was perhaps the biggest roadblock: I was asking to bring in a couple of teenagers and “pretend” to shoplift. This was obviously a delicate situation that needed to be explained carefully. The nervous looks they gave me let me know the communication gap was too wide to bridge here.

Time to try the corner store. I explain what we want to do: purchase some small snack item in advance, put it back on the shelf, film someone pretending to shoplift it and running out, with the shopkeeper yelling at him to stop. I get the nervous look again. I’m ready to move on, but he explains,

“I don’t care if you film here. You can film here, I just don’t want to be filmed.”

Simple case of stage fright. No problem. I just recruited our cook to play the part of the shopkeeper instead. I overpay by a few dollars for the small bag of chips we'll use as a thank you for his help and we film our scene. After we were done filming the inside and outside portions, I went back inside to let the man know we were done and thank him one last time for his cooperation. It was only then that I noticed he had spent the entire time wedged in a corner standing on a stool hiding behind a sign.

Man, that guy really didn’t want to be on camera.