Weather changes shooting plans

Editor’s note: The producers of “Believe in Me,” a film about a 1960s Oklahoma girl’s basketball team’s run at the state title, will write a daily diary in the Clovis News Journal until filming ends in Clovis later this month.

We’re glad your drought’s broken, but wow! At 6:30 Tuesday morning we were standing at that day’s base camp at Ned Houk Park wondering just how badly we had misread our expensive weather reports. And then the heavens opened.

In a matter of minutes we decided to pull up stakes and get the circus on the move before we flooded out. Just us, our 110 people on the crew, and our 60 or 70 vehicles. We got away clean — except for one of our catering trucks, which had to be towed out. Two hours later we were in the gym at Portales High School ready to shoot interiors.

Our arrival was a surprise to the school too, where they had a volleyball game scheduled later that afternoon. We ended up shooting a crucial scene in the locker room next to the gym. The Portales volleyball team and the athletic director were very generous in stopping their warm-ups when we called “rolling” so the actors could do their work and we could get clean sound.

Unfortunately, that location switch and the weather reports for the next few days meant that we have had to juggle our schedule completely. So the church scene we had scheduled for Wednesday in Floyd looks like it will be pushed into next week — hoping for better weather then.

We came out here for the landscape but it’s proving hard to find the sunshine that will let us shoot it. Of course, it’s sunny now, as I write this, and the church would look beautiful under these skies, but I know that if we’d decided to keep our schedule, it would certainly be raining now.

If you were ready to join us for the church scene, maybe with a new hairdo, and were inconvenienced, please accept our apologies. We hope you can come Sunday to the Portales High gym for the first of our game sequences, and show your support (and hair and wardrobe) of our “Middleton” girls. We’ll be back in touch after our schedule gets its massage and realignment.