Empire of Light (2 page)

“Jason’s from Ohio.”

“Both states have four letters and mean nothing to me.”

Maal and Pan look out towards the Los Angles skyline in thought, as if regretting what has to be done next.

Maal finally says it.

“I need you to take this over.”

Oh, this is just great.

“You’re going to fire him?”

“Can’t do that. He paid his tuition just like we did. You just need to take it over.”

Pan thinks about it. “Naw, Maal. I can’t get down with that,” he finally says. “I’ve got my own projects to light, man. I’m not here to put my work on somebody else’s reel.”

“So I’m just screwed.”

“Calm down, dude. The only reason I didn’t help Jason with the first set-up was because I was too busy gaffing the tie-in. I’ll get him through it all okay and your video will look great. So give us all a break and chill with the
Survivor
alliance bullshit.”

Way to go, Pan. Tell that jerk, what for.

“I hope you’re right,” says Maal as they both stomp out their cigarettes and head back into the warehouse. “Nice work on that tie-in, by the way. I guess I owe Jason at least that. That’s the only thing he’s done right.”

“I wanna go home,” I mumble to myself.

After five minutes of this mantra, I suddenly notice that the din of noise coming from the set has died down to nothing. Did they really roll camera without me? I scramble up the loading dock and burst onto the set.

“What the hell?”

Empty…

It’s as if the rapture hit just as I was praying to Jesus that Maal die a horrible Ebola death.

I stand in slack-jawed silence, that is, until I hear murmurs coming from the direction of the power tap. I follow the twisting path of the black stingers, which lead me back to my crime scene. All eyes turn on me as I enter the room. There I find the entire cast and crew, including a pissed off Maal, and five grim members of the Los Angeles Fire Department. They’re all staring at the illegal power tap that up until six minutes ago was the only right thing I had done all day.

The dour-faced Captain looks too damn tired to hear any of my excuses. Is it really possible that I screwed up and managed to get us shut down on the first day of the shoot? I mean, come on. It can’t really go there, can it?

The Captain takes off his helmet and wipes the sweat from his brow.

“All of you, get the fuck out!”

***

Back at campus, I feel like that bible-belt runaway who was dumped on the corner of Haight-Ashbury at the peak of the Summer of Love.

How the hell did I get here?

The Cinematography Dean, Howard Edgerton, suddenly ambushes me with a flick to the forehead and yanks me into a doorway. After I’ve spent a month wandering lost around campus like an asshole, he finally acknowledges my existence. The guy reminds me of a retired Cary Grant, with his silver hair and argyle sweater. Edgerton looks like he perpetually lives on the 19
^th
hole, buying rounds for anybody who nestles up to the bar. And he talks fast, like he just stepped out of a Howard Hawks film.

“Well, well, well. Mr. Jason Tisse of the Buckeye state, home of the great Zane Grey.
Riders of the Purple Sage!
Tell me, boy, what manner of incendiary mischief have we dabbled in since matriculating to our fair campus? An illegal tie-in, you say? Atta Boy! But that’s such a complex means of manslaughter, isn’t it? I mean really, if you want to set people on fire, why not just dowse ‘em with a rich mixture of gasoline and sawdust and be done with it? You’ll have ‘em cooked crisper than mammy’s fried okra in no time.
Suppa’s on da table, babies
!” Edge says in his best Butterfly McQueen.

Does this guy not see that I’m black?

“However, if you’re done with the arson phase of your career, would you mind if I gave you a little advice?” he asks.

I nod.

“Rent a goddamn generator. I know, I know. How boooooring! But having a production shut down to save a few dollars? Well, it just smacks of being a bit of a dick-head. Doesn’t it?”

I nod.

“Good boy! Now before you go off and do something else stupid, look up a second year fellow by the name of Ernest Solomon. Tell him I sent you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Atta boy,” he says as he slips me a twenty. “Remember, only you can prevent forest fires.”

“Are you
tipping
me?”

He ignores my question, leaving me standing in the doorway as he strolls merrily away, hands in pockets and whistling
If I Only Had A Brain
.

AFI only accepts a scant thirty cinematography fellows a year, and to be honest, I was shocked as hell to get the call. I applied on a lark, yet I ended up snagging the very last spot—only after another cinematography applicant jumped ship to the producing program. Whatever. I’m already over this place.

But I track down Ernest at Edgerton’s suggestion anyway, ready to have a heart-to-heart about how to navigate the bullshit of the campus. Edge must’ve been busy making the rounds this morning because I find Ernest holding court on the stairs of the Warner Brothers building with at least five other AFI newbies. His sermon is peppered with clichés, but the guy’s so damn sincere it’s like I’m hearing ‘em all for the first time.

“Be patient. Don’t go for that brass ring until you’re ready.”

“It’s okay to screw up and make mistakes! That’s how artists grow.”

“The only people who make it in this industry are the ones that have to, so just hang in there.”

Ernest would be that detective who’d have you believing that confessing to a double homicide is the best thing you can do for your career.

But it’s the last piece of advice that really hits home. Before he drops this final pearl he looks around, as if he’s giving us the inside dope on a mare running in the fifth.

“Vittorio Storaro. Vittorio Storaro, study that man with an orgasmic intensity.”

Orgasmic? Whoops. That’s code for “drink the Kool-Aid,” folks. It’s then I realize that Ernest has been recruiting us newbies into a cult of light. And I am the first to offer up my cup for the magic juice.

The ensuing indoctrination is a blur. A full week of around the clock screenings at Ernest’s apartment, which is adjacent to the Seventh Veil Strip Club on Sunset Blvd. It’s a marathon of cinematic masterpieces fueled by coffee, Red Bull and the occasional lap dances from the nice girls next door (they’re working their way through college, you know).

By Monday my programming is complete.

I have seen the light.

***

Under the cover of darkness, beneath the giant oak trees of Griffith Park, a group of Cinematography Fellows at the American Film Institute drop the sacrilegious bomb and anoint famed cinematographer Vittorio Storaro as their lord and savior. They see him as a jealous profit, one who doesn’t tolerate any second-guessing of his belief system. So Don Vittorio gives them tangible proof that he is not to be screwed with. Five masterpieces of cinematography:

The Conformist (1970)

Last Tango In Paris (1972)

Apocalypse Now (1979)

Reds (1981)

The Last Emperor (1987)

Simply put, if you're ever blessed enough to finally see Vittorio’s light, you'll get the spirit and jump around the Los Feliz campus like Aunt Esther in an Alabama Baptist church. It’s that moment where you evolve from being a mere photographer and become a painter of light.

Born technician.

Born again artist.

For us, colors are not just various wavelengths of the visible light spectrum. Colors are mystical ingredients that when mixed right become a potion of seduction and enslavement. Storaro is the key. He’s Merlin, Moses and the Rosetta Stone all wrapped up into one.

The Bourgeois Pig coffee bar is the Church of the Cult of Light. It’s a cathedral full of Goodwill couches, pool tables and pretentiousness. We Fellows make camp in the Moroccan room, which looks like something out of
1001 Arabian Nights
with its long curtains hung to make you feel like you’re chillin’ in a tent, pitched deep in the North African Desert. It’s our chapel, and it’s decorated with the portraits of the artists we worship, the saints of our craft.

I know, I know… There’s some fucked up idolatry goin’ on up in here. Right? The Hollywood branch of the Church of Scientology is across the street. They won’t bring their children over here anymore. How messed up is that?

I share a table with Pan and this Directing Fellow from New York named Skylar who came out of the documentary scene. The two entertain me as I listen to them babble on about bullshit.

“Really? Your favorite sport is Little League Baseball?” asks an astonished Skylar.

“No. Just the Little League World Series,” says Pan.

“Why?”

“I like seeing ‘em cry.”

“What?” Skylar asks in disbelief.

“A couple of years ago, with the entire world watching, a ten-year-old Japanese pitcher got lit up by a walk-off home run in extra innings and lost the game. As the American player rounds the bases with complete unadulterated glee, the pitcher just crumples to the mound, man. He just collapses to the ground in a wet quivering mass of inconsolable grief,” says Pan blissfully.

“And you find this entertaining?” Sky asks.

“I laughed my fool head off. I watch it on YouTube at least once a week, the entire stadium on its feet cheering this kid’s humiliation…”

Pan fades off in reverie, no doubt re-living the incident within his baldhead as he stares down into his Blue Cream Soda.

“You’re a sick bastard, you know that, Pan?” says Skylar. “They weren’t cheering the loss. They were cheering the walk-off home run.”

“Not if you squint while you’re lookin’ at it.”

We’re interrupted by a few of the Fellows as they suddenly drag a dinner table into the center of the room, dressed with a plate, flatware and a fat bottle of Chianti. They exit, and then a shady looking character appears at the entrance of the room. Wearing knee length black boots and a cape, he swaggers into the room, tugging at his fake beard with his left hand, and fondling the handle of a sword with the other. The guy looks like he’s perpetually pissed. As a matter of fact, he looks very much like one of the portraits hanging on the wall.

“CARAVAGGIO!” the room cheers.

“Shut up!” he bellows back at us. ”And you!” he screams at a Fellow playing a waiter. “Bring me a plate of Artichoke Hearts!”

“
Si, Signore
. Fried or sautéed?”

Today is September 29th, the day Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was born. It’s one of the most important days in the Fellows’ calendar year. It’s sacred.

If Vittorio is our savior then Caravaggio would be our father in heaven. The alpha and the omega. He is the goddamn
man
. We worship this Baroque asshole of a painter who created a style of painting known as
Chiaroscuro
, a dramatic technique where the artist seems to carve his subjects out of blackness with a single light source. A technique we Fellows are desperate to master, student loan debt be damned; and we observe the day of his birth by recreating one of the several incidents on his long arrest sheet, known as...

The Artichoke Incident.

The waiter re-appears with a plate full of food.

“Your artichokes,
Signore
.”

“Wait,” Caravaggio says before the waiter can leave. “Which are fried and which are sautéed?”

“I don’t know. Why don’t you smell them with your big nose and find out?” the server replies.

“
What
?” Caravaggio yells as he leaps out of his chair and smashes the plate of hot Artichokes into the waiter’s mug, who then collapses to the ground, clawing at his face and shrieking in pain as if he’d been punched in the head with a bag of indignant bees.

Horrible acting job. Just horrible.

As Caravaggio regally settles back into his seat, the Fellows begin to sing his praise.

“For he’s a jolly good fellow! For he’s a jolly good fellow! For he’s jolly good felloooow! Which nobody can deny!”

A couple fools in cheap Roman soldier costumes march into the room and promptly arrest Caravaggio, causing the Fellows to whistle and boo in protest.

Ernest stands on a chair and begs for quiet. As he begins to speak, plastic cups filled to the brim with the cheap Chianti are passed around the room.

“It was Vittorio Storaro who introduced us to this artistic god, this crazed Italian painter who was cinematic centuries before cinema existed. If you like films like
The Godfather
or
Blade Runner
you have to like Caravaggio because it all began with him. He is
noir
. To say he was ahead of his time is an understatement. He bitch slapped time and left it bleeding in a dark alley of Rome.”