B008J4PNHE EBOK (8 page)

Behind him, the door—a prodigious oak piece cut to fit a Tudor arch—banged wide.

Sam lurched up, spun around, slipped on the gravel footpath, and fell on his back.

“Who are you?” Rick Savini crouched forward, holding a long knife with his wrist turned out to present the blade at a deadly, tilted angle. He wore a Brooklyn Dodgers home jersey and a pair of cutoff jean shorts. Sunlight spun along the knife’s edge. “And what the hell are you doing?”

“I’m Sam.” A hundred tiny shards of rock pressed themselves into the bare flesh of his back. “The director.” He scuttled backward on his palms. “We’re meeting today?”

“Sam. What have you done to my driveway?” Savini stopped at the foot of the porch but didn’t lower the blade.

“I patched it.” Sam got to his feet. “You had a bunch of holes.”

“Kid. Man.” Savini straightened. He gazed up at the overhang and took a deep breath. Without looking down, he sheathed his weapon in a belt loop. “I’m sure your heart was in the right place, it’s a sweet gesture and everything, but those holes. That was how I remembered which house was mine.”

In person, the actor appeared even more harassed than he did on the screen. His eyes were not so much sunken as withdrawn, dug deep into the sockets for protection, like soldiers in trenches. He looked as if he had spent the night crammed inside a glove compartment.

What a face!

Even as the blood was finding its way back to the tips of his fingers and toes, Sam found himself reflecting on how perfect Savini was going to be in the movie. And they had something in common: Sam used a pothole to remember where he lived, too!

“I’m really sorry about the potholes. I completely understand. Do you want me to dig one out?”

“Yeah, maybe. If it’s not too much trouble.” The actor thumped down on the step where Sam had been sitting before. “Ah, Jesus, it’s bright.” Puddles of reflected light oozed on the surface of the driveway, and Savini raised a hand to shield his eyes. “Fuck you, sun.”

“Not a summer person?” asked Sam.

“Not so much. You may have noticed, I have a delicate complexion. And allergies. I get headaches. Some of my ancestors were sewer rats. I don’t like how damn long the days get. It’s stressful.”

“Stressful?”

“The push and pull of it. You know, it can go either way: ‘Is this day gonna hang on for me a little longer?’ or ‘Is this day ever gonna fucking end?’ People go nuts in the summer. Serial killers? Most active in the summer. Look it up.”

Sam couldn’t help offering that he didn’t see the difference from the rest of the year. “There are always days that go on too long and days that you don’t want to be over.”

“Yeah, but the brightness of the summer makes the feeling more acute. And you’re young. I don’t expect you to understand. I’m pale and old. Summer and I have history.” Savini squinted from under his hand. “I thought you weren’t coming until the afternoon.”

“I wasn’t supposed to—but Rick, listen. You’re going to have to do the movie for scale.” Sam was standing in the direct light, the sun burning his already inflamed shoulders.

The squint tightened. “Pardon?”

“Scale. I can only pay you scale.”

“So, what, you thought you could, like, work off the difference in trade?”

“Sort of. I was also going to take a look at your roof. It’s pretty beat up.”

“You couldn’t just ask me?” Rick Savini flung out his hand as if to knock back Sam. He flopped on the porch and landed with a thump, arms thrown out. “What the fuck. Sam. Look, I liked your script okay. I thought it would be funny to play a part entirely in a bathroom stall. But this is just very fucking unprofessional.”

“I’m sorry,” said Sam.

“No, you’re not,” said Rick Savini. “It’s not even ten, is it?”

“Rick, I don’t want to be a prick about this, but you have to be in the movie.”

“No, I don’t. And you are being a prick.” The actor raised his head slightly, dropped it against the porch. He did it again and then a third time. It made the sound of melons being dropped on a counter.

“Please.” Sam realized in that instant how wobbly the ground had become. He took a deep shaking breath. The tears in his throat were, to his own astonishment, real.

But they weren’t enough. What Sam was feeling was want. What the part called for was need.

So he did what he had to. He thought of the worst, saddest, most horribly mundane moment of his entire life and broke his own heart all over again.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Playing on the single screen of the Memory Theater was
If You See a Vegetable, Kill It and Eat It.
It was a short film, set at a bus stop, costarring Sam as himself and, in her final performance, Allie as his mother.

“I am such an old lady,” she says, and yawns, tucking a loose tendril of gray hair behind her ear. “Pooped at one in the afternoon.”

He hops out, grabs his duffel from the pickup bed, and goes around to her window. Allie starts to roll the window down, but he tells her not to. “If we kiss, you might get your old on me,” he says.

She laughs, tells him he’s a little shit, to call when he’s there, to wear a coat. “And if you see a vegetable, kill it and eat it, okay? Now I’m going home to take a nap and dream old-lady stuff.”

“Okay, cool. I’ll have my people call your people.” He gives the window a knock and turns. The bus is already at the station.

“Please, please, please—” Sam sobbed.

“Don’t do that!” said Rick Savini. “Do not fucking do that! You’re taking advantage. You’re overstepping your bounds. You woke me up scraping your damn shovel. It’s not right.” The actor pointed a finger at him. “You know, I didn’t say anything about it when I agreed to the deal, but I knew your . . . Ah, shit. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt, kid. But this is not right. You were raised better than this, I’m sure of that.”

Sam broke the gaze. He wept. His flaming shoulders shook.

“Goddammit. Do what you want.” The actor lurched to his feet and went inside. The door slammed.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Sometime after noon, Sam happened to glance down from the roof and see Savini walking around. The actor, wearing a wide-brimmed straw sun hat, inspected the series of fills in the driveway, which were seamless except for the darker color. A minute or two later, he went back inside. A little while after that, he hollered for Sam to get his ass down if he wanted lunch.

More weary than nervous, Sam descended. He had told himself that he was absolved of shame, but this time, the verdict hadn’t stuck. He felt wrung out; he felt like he’d walked into something face-first.

They ate at a dinette in the kitchen, which had steel appointments and the hypersterility of an operating room. Central air snored faintly from the bowels of the house and made Sam’s damp shirt turn icy.

Rick Savini planted a cold whole chicken on a tinfoil server in the middle of the table, flipped Sam a paper plate and a packet of plastic utensils.

“I’m going to play the part straight. I’m in and out in a day.” Savini, standing at a counter, dismembered the bird as he talked, using his long silver knife to hack off the drumsticks and separate the body. “And you’re cutting out the part where Merlin takes a dump.”

“Why?” asked Sam. He could concede that it was obvious, but it was a funny part.

“Why?” The other man paused. “One, because it’s his office. Who drops a deuce in their office? And two, there’s a few things I don’t want to do on film, and pretending to shit is at the top of the list.”

“Okay,” said Sam, The logic of the former point was hard to refute; as to the latter, he guessed he could see where the actor was coming from.

“Super.” Savini stabbed three hunks of chicken and, with a finger, shoved them off onto Sam’s plate. “Leave the potholes filled. I’ll find a different way to remember my house.”

“Okay.” Sam picked at his cold wet shirt.

Savini knifed himself a piece of chicken and sat down. They ate for a while without talking. The meat was salty and gluey. Sam considered requesting pepper, but didn’t dare. Instead, he said, “I like your knife.”

“It’s a
Lord of the Rings
replica.” Savini sawed off another piece of chicken. “It’s Bilbo’s sword, Sting. I got it from
Flight Emporium
.”

“The airplane catalog?”

“Yeah. They have some tempting shit in those things.”

“Are you into those—swords?”

“No. I’m just a sucker for airplane catalogs. I fly so much for work. The stuff they sell, you don’t exactly want it, but you want to know if it works or what it looks like up close, you know? So I got this. And it is a real sword. I actually use it around the house quite a bit. The edge glows in the dark, so it doubles as a half-assed flashlight.” The actor cupped his hands around the tip of the blade to show Sam the flare of fuzzy blue light at the tip where some kind of glow-in-the-dark finish had been applied.

“So are those, like, elvish runes on the handle?”

Savini grimaced at the hilt. “I don’t know. Probably.”

Sam nodded. His teeth were nearly chattering, but his stomach had loosened. It was working out. Savini’s loquaciousness had encouraged him; the actor couldn’t hold a grudge. What Sam had done, it had been worth it, and the actor understood.

“You know, seriously, this isn’t how you’re supposed to behave.” Rick Savini took a deep, huffing breath. “Kid. I know you’re a kid, but—it isn’t.”

The half-eaten bird lay between them on the table, grisly flaps of skin peeled back, white meat hanging in ribbons. The unmarked steel surfaces gleamed, but only dully. They hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights.

“I know,” said Sam, and maybe he did, but not as well as he would learn.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Who We Are
filmed from mid-July to mid-August on the Russell campus.

On the first day of production, they did a table reading of the script with Sam subbing for Rick Savini—that was it for rehearsals. Rehearsals had never worked well in his career as a student director. Rehearsals seemed to solidify performances, to turn everything into dance steps, and to sap the tension. Worse, rehearsals gave the actors openings to suggest script changes. Sam supposed that he might have needed to be more negotiable if the actors were experienced, but luckily, that was not the case here.
He liked to walk through the blocking as briskly as possible, make sure the actor knew his marks, and get right into it. For the first couple of days of shooting, though, the performances were just so-so. There was too much tension, an atmosphere of fearful competition. Everyone seemed to be clenched, piling on the business, barking their lines, becoming weepy-eyed during brief, ironically intentioned exchanges about things like whether or not Captain Morgan was a real guy, or if vampires could contract herpes, and if vampires could contract herpes, were they totally up the creek, because how do you medicate a dead person, etc. Sam pulled an actor aside. “A little less,” he told her, and when that didn’t work, he said very softly, “Pretend you don’t give a shit.” Though this did seem to help somewhat, the actress cried off and on for the rest of the day. Then, in the scene where Brunson smokes meth for the first time, the actor who played the role, a hulking drama major named Wyatt Smithson, improvised a line; exhaling, he added in a stoned drawl, “Bite my bag, Republican America.” Without yelling “cut,” Sam shoved past the tech holding the boom, strode into the middle of the shot, and swatted the actor across the back of the ear with the rolled-up cone of pages that constituted that day’s shooting script. The impact produced a rubbery snap. The thirteen-odd people on-set went silent. (The composition of this group was typical for the shoot as a whole: three actors, nine crew members, and one stranger; there was Sam, the director; Brooks, the assistant director; the director of photography, Anthony Delucci; Professor Stuart in his official capacity as the script supervisor and his unofficial capacity as the jack-of-all-trades; Wyatt; Linc, the obstreperous and annoying actor who played Hugh; George, whom Sam was somewhat defensive about casting as Roger, Sam’s alter ego, because he was the handsomest of the actors, with a jaw that could have deflected bazooka shells; Quinn, universally known as “the Eskimo,” today in charge of a flag that was actually a sheet of black poster board; Elia, nicknamed “Toughie,” too petite (i.e., too anorexic) to lift anything or assist in the moving of anything weightier than a ream of paper, leaving her to handle the clapper and carry Sam’s Production Office, a three-ring binder of notes, receipts, and contracts, which she lugged by holding it tight against her chest with both arms and groaning a lot; Big Alex (also sometimes
referred to as “Straight Alex”), who on most days performed as the gaffer; and Regular Alex (also sometimes referred to as “Bisexual Alex” or “Al-experiment”), who usually handled the boom; the middle-aged makeup artist, Monica Noble; and a white-bearded maintenance man from the college who had wandered by and taken a seat on his toolbox to observe the proceedings.) Perched on the edge of a dorm room bed, clutching the smoking pipe, Wyatt stared at Sam. The director held his breath. The attack had been entirely instinctual; he had reacted not out of anger but out of alarm, as if Wyatt had touched a live electrical current and needed to be knocked loose. Sam was appalled by what he had done. He assumed that everyone would leave now, quit. But no one moved or spoke. Wyatt tentatively reached up to rub his red ear. Sam tucked the cone of pages into his back pocket. “Well, do you want to do it again?” The actor nodded his assent, and the director clapped his hands, said keep rolling, and hurried back behind the camera. Everything was better from then on; the actors’ fear seemed to be focused not on each other but on him. The performances became more restrained. They hit their marks and did what he wanted them to do with a minimum of fucking around. Sam didn’t care if the crew thought he was an asshole. The director was responsible. And if he was going to be responsible, then he needed to be responsible, no one else. It was an undeniable fact that no person alone could create a movie. Only the actors could perform what had been written; Monica had to make sure they looked right; the DP had to film it; the gaffer had to light it; and everybody else had to do everything else. As small a production as
Who We Are
was, there were dozens of moving parts. For the movie to come together, each individual needed to fulfill his or her special role. Sam couldn’t be everywhere, and he couldn’t do everything. Which was why he needed to convince them that he would hurt them badly if he caught them doing anything except what they were supposed to be doing. He made a mental note to assault someone on the first day of his next film, to prevent any time from being squandered. One morning they were setting up for a close-up of Linc, and Brooks suggested Sam apply a catch light, a soft light that was situated to catch a glimmer in the eyes of an actor. It was an effect that a seasoned ham hock such as Booth Dolan liked for the suggestion of vigor it produced. Sam considered it cheesy. Maybe it made sense for movies about Santa Claus or talking animals, but not
Who We Are
. “Because Hugh is really in his element, right? He’s got that shine, right, and he’s feeling it? That catch light, okay,
it emphasizes that,” Brooks said, scratching his head, nodding and grinning and leaning from foot to foot. His proximity made Sam itch. “Brooks: No. No catch light,” said Sam. “No?” said Brooks. “No,” said Sam. “Please?” said Brooks. Sam shook his head. “I’m sorry, Brooks, but I can’t. It would be corny and bad. Have you shopped?” First among Brooks’s daily chores was the shipping of the previous day’s reels to the film processor in the city; second was the purchasing and arranging of the crew’s daily repast. To this end, the AD was strictly mandated to buy only discounted sandwiches, discounted cookies, powdered lemonade, and those snack items that could be purchased in bulk, such as plastic kegs of stale cheddar puffs and infant-sized chip bags. Brooks said that he had done the shopping. “Good,” said Sam. “Now you need to go far away from me. Come back when you can be not irritating.” The AD scratched his nose and bit his lip and frowned, grinned, nodded, and dug some more at his scalp. He swung around on his heel and went weaving away, into the nearby woods, and disappeared into the shadows. A bill for $587.34 appeared in Sam’s apartment’s mailbox. A man named John Jacob Bregman, a special effects artist located in La Honda, California, had discovered his address on the Internet and insisted that Sam make reparations on behalf of his father. It seemed that Booth had contracted Bregman to make a high-quality latex nose for him—a very puffy nose with a hairy mole on the left nostril—but, following delivery of the organ, had failed to make payment. Sam’s father’s cell phone had been cut off, and Bregman’s attempts to contact Booth through regular mail had been returned to sender. “Do you know what painstaking work it is, Sam, to make a nose with a realistic mole?” wrote the artist. “I am sorry, my friend, but when the father does not pay, his debts must fall to the son. This is the oldest of civilization’s codes.” The accusation had the ring of truth: Booth was among acting’s foremost enthusiasts of prosthetic noses and rarely performed without one, and he was also among mankind’s least reliable beings. Nonetheless, Sam thought John Jacob Bregman was being a tad medieval with the father’s-debt-falling-upon-the-son stuff, not to mention presumptuous. He threw the letter away. When they were setting up the next morning, Brooks emerged from the woods. Sam did not ask if the AD had spent the night alone in the animal kingdom; it seemed better not to know. As they filmed the scene in which Rachel quietly slips away from Roger, passed out on a blanket in
the field behind the festival grounds, a family of squirrels trooped into the frame. They moved in a line, one by one, splitting a trail in the long grass. Sam whispered in the ear of his DP, Anthony Delucci, “Stay on the squirrels.” Anthony raised his head to frown at the director. It was not a pleasant sight, Anthony’s frown. The DP, though only twenty, was stout and balding, and had, likely due to the innumerable hours already spent behind a camera in his two decades, a bulging right eye that gave him the mien of a mad scientist’s halfwit assistant. Sam had toyed with the idea of performing as his own DP, but since he was already acting as his own producer and editor, he had decided to give the job to the very competent sophomore from Vinalhaven, Maine. The basics—the line of force and so on—were second nature to Anthony, and he was brisk in his business. In fact, he was probably better than Sam needed him to be. (For Intro to Film, the DP had made a short film from the perspective of a lobster gazing out at the restaurant doors across from its tank, seeing the people going in and out. Anthony had used plastic bags to create his own gels, dimming and coloring the lighting to a murky green tint; in order to give the lobster’s eye a subtle, irregular drift, he mounted the camera on a water bed. The camera’s weight caused it to sink and rise on the mattress. Though the short was totally static, it had been unnerving, to float there in the gloom and witness your killers passing by.) If there was a problem between them, it was primarily a matter of language. Anthony’s Maine accent was a babyish drawl. What he called a “two-shat” was actually a “two-shot.” When he asked “Befoh or aftah?” he meant “Before or after?” Sam was with him that far. What Anthony was saying when he referred to Brooks as “That cun-ed,” Sam felt in his heart couldn’t be complimentary but truly had no clue. However, the DP was, at least as far as Sam could understand, amenable to the director’s aesthetic strictures: that they use only a short range of medium lenses (28 mm, 35 mm, and 50 mm), and that as much as possible, everything be shot handheld—employing a tripod only in a couple of particular instances, and definitely no steadicams or dollies at any point. (Although his reasons for these limits were partly financial, Sam harbored a powerful distrust for lenses that explicitly warped spatial relationships, and he viewed wide-angle lenses as being especially wicked. Welles had used wide-angle lenses to revolutionary effect, but always for a specific purpose—in
Citizen Kane,
for instance, wide-angle lenses had added depth to
the images, which continually gestured at the depth of the mystery of Kane. Several directors had shot dramatic close-ups of Booth with wide-angle lenses for no appreciable reason except that it was striking, and on a big screen, this resulted in bringing him so close that you could count his nostril hairs. Besides being unpleasant, it was so jarringly unrealistic, it reminded a viewer in bold:
YOU ARE WATCHING A MOVIE
. That was why Sam was dedicated to shooting handheld and midrange, a position that Brooks fecklessly tried to argue him out of. Why, the AD wanted to know, was a movie somehow more plausible when the camerawork was shakier, because wasn’t the audience therefore more mindful of the actual filming than they were when a movie was made in a “movie-movie” style? “Like, it doesn’t make sense, right? If you don’t want to make it seem not like a movie, shouldn’t the camera be, like, not so present?” Sam explained that he was forgetting something crucial. “What was that?” Brooks asked. “I am the director,” said Sam.) “Moh?” asked Anthony as the squirrels moved along. “Yes!” hissed Sam. Anthony shrugged and dropped his head back to the eyepiece. The DP tracked the squirrels until they came to the base of an elm tree and set to work raiding a discarded bag of Cracker Jacks. When they played it back, this all seemed intentional, an echo of how Rachel’s attention is shifting from Roger. Better yet, on second viewing, it was apparent that they weren’t squirrels at all—they were gigantic fucking rats! These monster black rats had up and decided to take a broad-daylight foraging expedition. They were marvelous, these rats! Inquiries, requests, and pleas inundated the director. Sam didn’t have all the answers. He had most of them, though, and was good at faking the rest: “Yes, when she hits her mark”; “No, not yet”; “I think you already answered it yourself, don’t you?”; “That should work”; “If it means you’ll go away, Brooks, okay, you have my permission.” They were right on schedule. Julian Stuart, his vandyke so curled with pride that it threatened to double back on itself, had taken to wandering around crying, “It is happening! By God, it is happening!” at random moments of the day. Sam himself was so excited about what they were getting that he couldn’t sleep. On the first day of the second week of the shoot, he received the initial video transfers (the celluloid having been developed and burned to disc), and after they wrapped that night, he hustled to the film department’s editing suite to get started immediately. He edited until his hands started to shake. Too
restless to hold back, Sam maintained this routine, shooting all day and editing all night. When he was too jittery to continue editing, if he still couldn’t sleep, he watched television in his apartment. Booth was always on two or three channels, and Sam Dopplered between them. Of a particular night: on Channel 98 his father in his toga in
Devil of the Acropolis,
and on Channel 186, wearing a hawkish prosthetic nose as the “famed satanologist” Dr. Graham Hawking Gould in
Hellhole
. He issues warnings in both: about Spartan werewolves in the former and hellholes in the latter. Back and forth Sam went, sucked into them simultaneously, not sure why, and for once not willing to examine it or to search for an excuse. “It seems damned odd, does it not, Timon, to speak of ‘ethics’ while this foul beast roams the city, staining the agora with the viscera of the innocent,” ponders Plato, playing the peacock feather at the end of his fountain pen against his cheek. “By God, it’s the devil’s hole!” exclaims Dr. Gould, shutting a leather tome so savagely it belches a cloud of dust. Civilization was beset by threats! Sam frequently found himself chuckling. When the credits began to roll—Athens saved, hellhole plugged—he felt soothed, and could drift off into a couple of hours of sleep. But Sam’s check for the cable must have bounced; toward the middle of the second week of production, he lost all his channels except for the one with the Christian puppets. He largely abandoned sleep. He edited until he couldn’t anymore, and afterward, he walked around the campus until dawn. Out walking one night, Sam recalled how Polly had asked years earlier whether it was “some sort of Oedipal-type deal” that drove him to make films. The comment had pissed Sam off so much that he abruptly stood from where they were sitting and left her calling after him. It was about three in the morning when he remembered the instance. He found an unlocked Russell College security kiosk and called Polly. “It’s kind of late, dude,” she said. Sam told her to never mind that, did she remember what she said to him that time about the Oedipal-type deal? “I honestly have no memory of that,” she said. Sam told her to just listen: “This thing happened, with these rats . . .” It had been one of those moments; people were going to yell at the screen; they were going to cry out, “Those aren’t squirrels—they’re rats! Uh-oh! This is not a good sign!” Sam was aware that he was almost raving, yet unable to restrain himself. He wanted her to know that he was finally what he had always wanted to be, doing what he had always wanted to do. “I don’t