WHAT’S SO FUNNY:Making dollars from dimes

I’m still out of town, but I’ll be back in a few weeks, if not earlier.

I spent the last week in Beacon and Croton-on-Hudson, New York, watching a low-budget film being shot by high-budget professionals. I was the rookie writer.

As such, I was largely superfluous. Movies are about light and sound, cameras and set dressing, transportation and weather, acting and directing.

The writer comes in handy once or twice a day, when a new line is needed in place of one that doesn’t work. The rest of the time, his prime responsibility is to stay out of the crew’s way and not let his cell phone ring during a take.

The crew is professional and quick and has its own language, with phrases such as “checking the gate” to indicate a wrap on a scene or shot. They constantly carry equipment this way and that. The writer needs to be agile, in order to jump out of their way.

Independent filmmaking is about making a dime serve as a dollar, so there’s very little margin for such things as rain delays. Our first week was fascinating but long, with the shooting day twice lasting until 3 a.m.

The actors are asked to rough it. On two cold damp nights, stars Alan Alda and Matthew Broderick had to finish by running uphill over and over.

They also had a lengthy sit-down scene outdoors, and along with playing their characters they had to act 40 degrees warmer than they were.

The actors and crew have been unfailingly courteous to me, although some submerged feelings rose to the surface late on Friday.

The film opens by showing an old manual typewriter set on a pier, with fishing lines hanging from its letter keys down into the water. In one shot, a fish is supposed to pull on one of the lines and make a key whap on the page.

That’s not an easy shot to set up, and at 2 a.m., as I watched one of the crew carry a reflector down a steep slope to the Hudson estuary (the same treacherous slope Alda and Broderick had just ascended for the camera), I heard him say he would like get his hands on the person who wrote the scene.

He may have been kidding, but having seen how hard they all work, I’m surprised more crews don’t get together at the end of the shoot to beat the stuffings out of the writer.

I think the main reason they don’t is that by then the writer has discreetly faded from the scene.

As I say, I expect to be back home before too long.