Shoot Stories: Thieves and Villains

This is the first in a series of blogs I'll be posting from time to time. Ridiculous things happen on our shoots sometimes (usually due to outside cirucumstance and/or third parties...), but all you ever get to see is the interview. Some of those stories are too good not to be told.

This isn't so much a "shoot story" as it is a "driving story," but it's mildly ridiculous nonetheless. In September, Naomi and I ended up taking a road trip to Chicago with Thieves and Villains. I forgot to tell my roommates I was even going until the day before. One of my roommates asked me how we were getting there. I said, "We're driving there with one of the bands we're shooting...we met them the other day, they seem ok." She gave me the same look that she gave me in college when I told her I'd hitchhiked to class because it was snowing and we lived really far from campus. She asked who we were staying with, and I told her "This guy...a friend of a friend. We haven't actually met him though." She blinked and said "Yeah, I'm not feeling so good about Chicago."

We left work early to head to Suffern to meet up with the guys on Thursday night. We drove for a few hours, stopped to sleep, and started driving again in the morning. After a long day of driving and multiple stops, we were an hour or two outside Chicago. It was quiet until Sergio asked us, "Were you nervous taking this trip with us?" We laughed and said no. He went on to say, "Because me and Justin were talking about it, and we definitely could've killed you guys in your sleep. " Our laughter turned into nervous laughter. I was hoping my roommate wouldn't say "I told you so" to my corpse when we were found buried behind a motel in Pennsylvania.

But wait. There's more. Stopping every few sentences to clarify that they WOULDN'T have actually done it, they revealed that they'd discussed at length exactly how they would've gotten away with it. "At first we figured we couldn't do it because we already talked to our manager and told him we'd picked you up, but then we could just call him back and say we were kidding, and you'd decided not to come," they explained. "But then we thought, 'what if they texted their roommates or something?' So we'd have found your cell phones and looked at all your sent texts, then just texted them again to say you changed your minds and headed back to New York."

I think the most ironic part of this whole story is that, as we were pulling up to our friend-of-a-friend's condo, we mentioned to them that we hadn't actually met him yet. All of a sudden our would-be killers didn't want to leave us there because they were convinced that HE was going to kill us.

Oh, and for the record, their proposed murder weapon: sock full of quarters.

I also wanted to clarify that this story is meant to be hilarious, not creepy. OK, a little creepy. But I wouldn't be posting it if we weren't all pals. Thanks, Thieves and Villains, for not murdering us EVEN THOUGH you totally could've gotten away with it!

Road trip video, in case you missed it: