SAW 2 Diary #6 – FINAL ENTRY

Last Updated on July 28, 2021

SEPTEMBER 2005
SAW 2 PRODUCTION
JOURNAL
VOLUME #6 – THE FINAL ENTRY

NOTE: You can now e-mail Producer Gregg Hoffman with your
feedback directly by
clicking on his name in the top right of this box!

SAW
II OPENS, OCTOBER 28 2005!

I’m tired. Everything hurts. I’ve gained
10 pounds. I have 93,000 frequent flyer miles. I’ve produced 3
movies in 7 months. It’s over! This is my last flight on Air
Canada 793 from Toronto to Los Angeles.

It’s been a while since
the last of my SAW II blogs (note that it’s not “2”, it’s “II”
per the official Lions Gate decree) disgraced the virtual pages
of Joblo.com and Arrowinthehead.com, so I thought
I’d take a few minutes to update you all.

I left Toronto tonight just as we were
finishing up the sound mix on SAW II. Bousman has been bouncing
off the walls of the mix stage, yelling at anyone who would
listen that “my man Charlie Clouser busted out his ‘A’ game on
this score!” And indeed, Clouser has done it again and given
the film its signature raw, industrial, yet melodic vibe. The
one thing I noticed about this score versus the original SAW is
that there seems to be more guitar in this one than in the
first.

Also, he’s created a couple of new themes
to go along with the ones already familiar to the SAW army out
there. There is a soundtrack album coming out just before the
October 28^th release of the film, but other than end
title songs by Mudvayne and Queens of the Stone Age, the rest of
the source music in the film is blended almost organically into
the score, so you’ll have to be listening carefully to hear
Marilyn Manson, The Used and Puscifer (featuring Maynard from
Tool), among others.

After spending close to five months in Toronto – a GREAT
city to work in, by the way, and a great city to party in, especially in the
summer months – it was only fitting that Darren Bousman and I leave our good
neighbors to the north in style. In typical fashion, what started out as a
promising night, quickly became what we now call –THE STRANGEST NIGHT EVER.
Here’s a brief recap.

For several days, my man Bousman, who now has a modicum of
game with the ladies as a result of his 6 month stay in Toronto under the expert
tutelage of myself and my partners Oren Koules and Mark Burg, had been calling
me multiple times an hour talking about some party he got us invited to for
something called “The Suicide Girls.”

For those of you unaware of what the Suicide Girls are,
it’s a loosely-knit group of about 800 tattooed, pierced rocker and punk chicks
who do erotic photo sets on a website
(see it here) and travel around the U.S. and
Canada doing burlesque shows and creating mayhem. Personally, I prefer my dirty
girls to be…well….cleaner… but Bousman has a real fetish for the nasty rocker
type.

My plan for the night was simple – act as Bousman’s pimp, draw attention
to the fact that he directed the sequel to SAW to give him some cred, and then
stay close by in case he started saying anything stupid or inappropriate.

Bousman had been building this party up in his mind for
days and convinced himself he was going to meet “the future ex Mrs, Bousman” at
this event. We brought along our sound-effects editor Mark, who is quite
possibly the darkest, dirtiest most subversive human I’ve ever met, knowing he,
too, would enjoy a night of trying to pick-up filthy rocker whores.

So it was a sad sad day when we walked into the club and
discovered a half-filled room, about five bottom-of-the-barrel Suicide Girls and
a sad aneroxic-looking
waitress passing around shots of Jagermeister. The only
attractive girl in the place, who we quickly learned was a
lesbian, even stated as she watched three skanks dancing poorly
on the makeshift stage, “this shit is enough to make me hetero
again.”

I should have heeded the warning signs and
called it a night when Bousman spent about 30 minutes chatting
up a punked-out girl sitting on a bar stool before he realized
SHE HAD NO ARMS AND LEGS! (I swear on my children this is true)
But no, I was a man on a mission. Bousman wanted a dirty girl,
Bousman was going to get a dirty girl.

Needless to say, I immediately went into
back-up mode. Unfortunately, my back-up plan was on a
girls-only, “no cock allowed” night, so I began to get
agitated. How could we salvage this night? I did what any man
would do – suggested we go to a nearby strip club. If we
couldn’t meet dirty girls, we could at least pay dirty girls to
be nice to us!

We walked three or four blocks in the rain
to one of the high-end strip clubs in town. After the nastiness
of the Suicide Girls party, we needed to see some quality and
even on a rainy Tuesday night, there was no shortage of ladies
willing to relieve me of as many $20’s as possible. I smoothly
slipped the host/security dude a $20 and told him to put us in a
private room and send over three of the finest ladies he had.

Things quickly went from bad to worse.
After buying several rounds of drinks, the girl dancing for me
bailed when one of her regulars walked in. The girl Darren had
on his lap was nice enough to go out into the club and find me a
replacement. While Annie, the replacement, was cute as could
be, within moments she had cut her knee on a small shard of
glass embedded in the booth, and moments later began telling me
about a dream she had the night before wherein she apparently
grew a second asshole. Okkkkaaayyyy……

By now it was clear that the stars just
weren’t lined up right, but Bousman was in lapdance heaven and
who was I to deny him pleasure? He’d busted his ass for me and
made one hell of a movie. I owed him something. Just then the
door to the room opened and in walked a woman — at least we
thought it was a woman — who we now refer to as “Thor.” Thor
had the deepest voice I’ve ever heard on a woman and was
obviously drunk as hell.

She pointed at me and said “You need me to
dance for you.” At this point she ran across the room, shoved
Annie out of the way leaped into the air and slammed her knees
down on my thighs as hard as she could. Bousman and Mark then
proceeded to watch in horror as Thor repeated this slamming move
over and over for the duration of the song, then asked if I
wanted another dance!

I screamed in horror and ran from the room. A guy has got
to know when to wave the white flag. Clearly, it was a signal that it was time
to go home and start thinking about ideas for SAW 3 … or should I say “III.”
Yeah, that’s right. I said it. SAW III.

SAW II
OPENS, OCTOBER 28 2005!

READ
PART 5 OF THE SAW 2 CHRONICLES HERE

READ
PART 4 OF THE SAW 2 CHRONICLES HERE

READ
PART 3 OF THE SAW 2 CHRONICLES HERE

READ
PART 2 OF THE SAW 2 CHRONICLES HERE

READ
PART 1 OF THE SAW 2 CHRONICLES HERE

READ ABOUT THE ARROW’S STINT ON SAW II

VISIT THE OFFICIAL SAW II
SITE HERE