There is a cliche in low budget, everyone working for free, film making; Pizza is something you can feed everyone with for cheap, but shouldn’t. The flip side of this is the idea that if you feed everyone well they’ll forget they’re giving you days of labor for essentially nothing. On our movie we didn’t serve pizza, we did do sub sandwiches one day, but circumstances sort of allowed/required it.

Every super low budget film ends up spending a good deal of their budget to feed the crew, and ours was no exception. We had a fair assortment of decent snacks for folks to munch on throughout the day and had bought a ton of basic deli meats and breads to manufacture an easy midday lunch, which my mom and my aunts wound up making and bringing to set everyday. So that was OK to keep folks satisfied part of the day.

But I had an exceptional ace in the hole as far as the daily meal went (all of our shooting days would range from late morning to middle of the night, so the meals were all evening meals). That ace was Dennis. He is a man I’ve known my entire life, as he’s been good friends with my old man since well before I was born. He is ostensibly retired these days, but some years ago turned a love of BBQ, and cooking in general, into a small catering business. He has a commercial like kitchen in his house, which just happens to be about a quarter mile from my house and just minutes away from all our sets and locations. He also has a large dining area that could easily accommodate the 20 to 30 people we were feeding every night. And to boot everything he cooks is damn delicious.

Along with Dennis I had aunts and cousins providing desserts, all out of the goodness of their heart. All of this amounted to a couple things, beyond the food being tasty. It made it cheaper than it might have otherwise been. Dennis didn’t get paid on the deal, he figured up cost on the actual food bought and that’s what came out of the budget. I believe there were even a couple instances where he bought stuff, didn’t exactly track it and just ate the cost out of his own pocket. One of my cousins owns a restaurant and provided one evening’s meal, and didn’t charge me anything. It’s no joke that those savings helped us be able to afford stretching out the production to extra days of shooting.

A second, and more impactful, added value was what the evening meals did for morale. With Dennis’ closeness to my family and a lot of my family being involved it made our crew meals feel like large family dinners. Sure the days were long and stressful, but sitting down at the long tables in back of his house was a good respite for all involved and helped bring everyone together, I think.

As stressed as I was about so many aspects of the shoot I was never concerned about the food. Dennis, my mom and the rest of my family are well versed on how to serve dinner to a big group, and virtually every single cast and crew member talked up the meals a number of times. So much so that for our last pick up weekend of filming when my lead actor showed up in the morning the first question he asked, wasn’t what scene we were gonna be doing or what set we were starting at, but what was Dennis cooking that night. The answer was pork chops.