 After a horrific three-week schedule, Cartel was unsatisfied with the coverage (while editing himself) and started shooting on weekends with a skeleton crew, cheap Friday-Monday rentals, scratch track sound, staged from his own home studio with movable sets and unpaid or deferment-paid actors while going without insurance or permits.Everything except lab and raw stock bills were bargained or bartered as filming labored for another two years, although there were weeks when nothing was filmed.Cartel also saved money by doing his own dangerous stunts that included taking a shotgun blast to his chest while wearing a cheap bullet-resistant vest; crashing through a glass window door; falling down a concrete cellar staircase; having a ‘stunt’ bottle smashed across his face, then doing a barroom fight scene with a very large bar patron he met the morning of the improvised sequence.