“Roll, roll, roll in ze hay.” - Inga, Young Frankenstein

I had it in my head that Jason Dohring had been one of the New Kids on the Block (obviously, he’s not an actor I’m very familiar with - Veronica Mars was never on my viewing schedule, but I may have seen him years ago in an episode of Boston Public). Thank God I looked him up before showing up in Burbank because it would have been very embarrassing to ask him to sing the chorus of “The Right Stuff”, when in reality, Dohring is probably too young to remember that nightmarish phenomenon.

Lucky him.

In Moonlight, his character, the vampire Josef Konstantin, has more in common with American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman than with the vampire Lestat.

In person, Dohring was was soft spoken as he fielded round-table questions while giving us a tour of stage 9 at Warner Bros. Studios. I think I need to take a cue from his Moonlight character the next time I do one of these set visits: develop a killer instinct. I’ve discovered that being polite and letting someone finish talking only gets you fifteen minutes of audio of other people asking questions.

I really don’t like being pushy.

Dohring seemed to be genuinely in awe of the history of the lot. “Just think,” he said, ” in this building [stage 9] they shot A Streetcar Named Desire and Rebel without a Cause. There’s so much history here. Even the lot, walking around feels like it’s got this space, it’s like a clean kind of artistic aura.”

Dohring describes Konstantin, as “not good, not bad, but a dark grey. [The type to] wear a $3000 Armani jacket while driving a Ferrari.” Somehow it’s fitting that a hedonistic, eternally 25 year old hedge fund trader is an undead creature that lives off the blood of others - it’s not much of a stretch.

Konstantin is also the type to keep hot, scantily clad women around his requisite sexy house for a mid-morning snack, talking about them the same way he might talk about wine.

Dohring thinks that Konstantin probably wasn’t always the decadent blood sucker he is in Moonlight and that his attitude and way of life is likely to have come about by his extreme old age. “You know so much about life and you’ve seen patterns of history repeat itself so many times that you know what’s going to happen before it happens,” Dohring says. “When you can’t die, what do you do? What kind of game would you have to sustain yourself. Apparently, chasing women and hording lots of money.”

I had what I thought at the time were awesome shots of Dohring in his character’s office, as well as shots of Mick’s loft and Beth’s apartment; however, it seems that in order to get a clear still image from a digital video camera you have to hold it on the subject for more than two seconds. And it helps if you hold it still. Jerking the camera around just makes things blurry.

Here’s another tip: digital doesn’t mean automatic. You still have to switch between indoor and outdoor lighting.

This may be common sense to some of you, but I’ve never warmed up to digital cameras and am much more comfortable using something manual that has actual film, like my 35 mm manual monster from 1970.

That sounded dirty.

I promise I will get to drinking blood in East L.A. tomorrow. Plus, a burned up corpse, abandoned medical records and Shannyn Sossamon. Yes, in that order.

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