Film School (41 page)

I line up tours for Barbee at the Southern California organ donor organization. I get a UCLA transplant surgeon on board. And I write a background briefing book about the real world of transplantation.

One day, Julie asks me if it's worth the time and energy I'm putting into this. I'm still not being paid a cent for all my efforts. I won't be paid anything until CBS orders a script, and it's a script that I won't be writing. She doesn't understand any of this Hollywood stuff—it's so foreign and mysterious compared to the very clear-eyed world of medicine. It appears to her as if I'm working on some secret brew. I'm on the phone constantly and typing up material. Is it worth it?

To keep my wife happy, I'm also landscaping the front yard between calls. One day I'm dirty from yard work, my shirt off, and I'm in the process of moving several tons of decorative stones with a shovel. During breaks, I'm tapping out emails on my BlackBerry, my first acquisition since I got back from California. A neighbor walks over, asks me how school is going. I say, “Great.” He asks me what kind of school projects I'm working on. I lean on my shovel. “Well, I'm producing a show for CBS. We hope to get it on the air next year,” I say. I know I sound like a crazy man. It's all rather fun.

W
ith all the excitement and demands of the television show and my usual summertime duties at home, I'm giving short shrift to my duties as a codirector of a documentary. We're supposed to start shooting as soon as fall semester starts. I'm hoping Brent can jump-start us, but he's got other work going on the side.

I know this: I'm planning on continuing in film school. I intend to get my MFA, no matter what. If distance and having kids and a stroke and pancreatitis didn't stop me, neither will a television show.

When Barbee returns from vacation, she goes right into meetings with the people I've set her up with. I'm due back in L.A. about the same time. This time Julie's using the Suburban, and I've got her Pontiac—a teal-blue V8-powered rocket with leather seats, XM radio, and big, fat tires.

Another drive out to Los Angeles and thanks to my touchy pancreas I've sworn off caffeine, chocolate, and all liquor, beer, and wine, which makes me a dull boy. I drive through Wyoming, and it's gorgeous as I fly down the empty roads. The car is fast, and because I stop every hour or so to get the blood pumping in my legs (no more strokes on this drive), I'm constantly repassing a small handful of cars for much of the trip.

When I'm finally back in L.A., I get together with Carol Barbee. We meet at her office. She's very polite, very interested in the series, very smart. It's a little awkward for me—Barbee is doing the job I'd like to have. But her résumé is a bit longer than mine: in addition to JERICHO, she's been an executive producer on JUDGING AMY and SWINGTOWN, and she wrote for PROVIDENCE. I'm in graduate school.

She's very interested in my experiences inside the world of transplantation. I tell her a few stories. She is intrigued at the very fact I was hired as a coordinator. I tell her about my first night on the job, when a disgruntled surgeon from another transplant center called me a “radio disc jockey” in the OR. I also tell her how less than a year later, I saved the bacon of another large transplant center when I carried a heart back to Chicago when their surgical team was too timid to fly through severe weather.

We have a good meeting, and I cross my fingers. Carol is going to be the one writing the pilot. As I drive away, I realize my baby is now in her hands.

Luckily, we seem to be blessed. CBS does indeed like Carol Barbee, and our whole team. The network orders the pilot script in what Ted says is record time. First network hurdle crossed.

During the next four months, I'm working constantly. The documentary shoots every weekend. We struggle. Being a two-headed director means we move slowly because so many decisions have to be discussed beforehand, and every mutual decision takes time. And our timing is terrible. The same month we start filming, the California Highway Patrol decides to clamp down on speeding on the road. The word spreads quickly. Bikers avoid the Angeles Crest, but the additional police presence means we're watched constantly by the authorities. The police keep tabs on us and stop us repeatedly, asking for our permits, checking our driver's licenses, inquiring about my Minnesota license plates. To add to our woes, the Angeles Crest Highway travels across land overseen by the National Forest Service, and the local ranger station apparently decides it doesn't want us filming the dirty little secret of racing motorcyclists on the Crest. The station does everything it can to shut us down, to the point of asking the Highway Patrol to arrest us on sight, which they don't do, because we're not breaking any laws.

With all the attention focused on us, the size of our crew is a serious hindrance. We have Scott the cameraman and two producers and Brent and me and someone with the sound-boom. Instead of a stealth project, we clank into battle like Redcoats. And our footage suffers. We can't shoot from the side of the road for fear of getting arrested. We fail to get decent footage from riders' helmet cams. All we have is talking heads and some nice footage of the majestic mountains. Our street bike documentary footage has all the visual drama of MY DINNER WITH ANDRE. We keep hearing from instructors and classmates that they're not getting a sense of the excitement and danger the bikers keep talking about.

Many weeks into filming, and exasperated by our failures, I ask Scott the cameraman to ride on the back of one of the bikes to get a point-of-view shot during a group ride by some hard-core bikers. Scott is game. He likes shooting high-octane sports footage of skiers and boarders. I gear him up with a full-face helmet and my Red Wing boots and heavy jacket. I attach a short rope to the camera and secure it to Scott's waist so he can't drop the USC-owned equipment. I explain to the crew of bikers that I don't want any shenanigans, just mellow riding. As the bikers rev their engines and prepare to give Scott a taste of the Crest, Scott gives me the thumbs-up. I'm not overly worried. I spent my teen years riding passenger on my brother's motorcycles.

The police see us, as usual, and ignore the cameraman riding on a passenger seat. The biker he's with is excellent, and a commercial truck driver as well.

Later that morning, Scott returns. He didn't fall off or drop the camera, and no one crashed. We watch the footage. It's fantastic. We see bikes in formation, riders flitting between shadows, through the canyons, past blurry trees. We show it in class, and our instructors love it.
That's what we're talking about!
they say. Everyone in class is excited. But a few days later, the head of the USC cinematography department picks up gossip of the shoot and she blows a gasket. She says we broke school rules about camera operator safety. She wants my head on a platter. Then she ups the ante. She wants to kick me out of school. She wants to kick Brent out of school. She wants to kick Scott out of school. For long weeks, I spend time in discussions with Brent and Scott, both of whom are also caught in the web. The head of the cinematography department never meets with us, never finds out the details; she just hands down her edict. It's a big pile of academic manure. I plead guilty and apologize and explain exactly what we did but to no avail.

My antagonist has a reputation on campus as a bitter tyrant, as a man hater. She spent several years on a Marxist collaborative in her younger days, something she's proud of, and she apparently has a temperament well suited to be a commissar of . . . 
something
. Luckily, the drama ends when my documentary instructors, loyal to a one, wait her out. When she leaves for a trip to Africa, they vote to end the matter. The three of us will receive a lower grade, and we'll lecture incoming students about the importance of following the USC safety guidelines. And for the record, I will state clearly here:
Follow the USC Safety Guidelines! Do Not Do Stupid Things Like Asking a Cameraman to Shoot as a Passenger on a Motorcycle!
(I later had the honor of speaking to all new USC film students and explaining how I got into hot water and warned them to, yes,
Follow the USC Safety Guidelines!
)

In the midst of this little drama, I ask an old salt at USC who had worked in the industry for years (and who shall go nameless) if I would be facing the same results if I'd been a student twenty or thirty years earlier. “Probably not,” he says, shrugging. “A few decades ago, there were some students who took a vial of nitroglycerine out to the desert and blew up a car for a film. Really spectacular results! But so stupid. They coulda blown themselves up! Then there was the case of some guys who trucked in the remains of a small plane in the middle of the night and put the fuselage right in the middle of campus. They planned to film it in the morning, with smoke coming from it, but the TV news found out about it and reported that a plane had crashed into USC.”

I hear stories like this repeatedly from some of the other long-term faculty. My case brings out a lot of official headshaking and tut-tutting from the department, but several of the older faculty members privately pull me aside and tell me about
their
stupid exploits. In the end, I understand. USC has no interest in becoming party to a lawsuit or finding its name in the media. And the school has a very low tolerance for risk. When I worked as journalist, there was an understanding there'd sometimes be risks. I got sent to cover a refinery explosion that was still sickening dozens even as I drove onto the site; I climbed the exterior ladder of a construction crane 175 feet in the dead of winter without safety gear; I covered stories in high-crime areas. As a transplant coordinator, I flew in planes in awful windstorms and rainstorms. It was just what was expected.
Git 'er done
was the watchword. At USC, git
'er
done got me in deep doo-doo.

Meanwhile, my new dual life emerges. Gold and Barbee and others involved with the transplant series are happy as clams with me. Throughout the semester, I feed information to them. Barbee visits Cleveland and spends several days under the leadership of Dr. Gonzo. They each call me afterward and they're effusive in their praise. Dr. Gonzo says he worried a Hollywood type would be an arrogant jerk, but he says Barbee was a joy to work with. Barbee, for her part, says the trip was amazing. She watched an open heart surgery in the OR, and she says Dr. Gonzo will help her shape the characters in the script. She also went to Pittsburgh, where Dr. Thomas Starzl is a transplanting legend.

Meanwhile, the word is spreading around USC that I'm working on a television show for CBS. It makes life very interesting. Suddenly, fellow students I hardly know meet me on the sidewalks and want to talk. The gym, once a place where I rarely saw a film student, becomes a veritable film school hot spot. I could complain and say my privacy was intruded upon, but in reality, it's a great deal of fun. Like money, popularity is more fun to have than not have.

Like every other semester, I'm swamped with work. I'm planning to graduate after five semesters, so I'm overloading, again. I'm codirecting the doc, and I'm enrolled in a television production class in which we write and shoot a pilot episode (double-rich irony) and a film analysis class, and I'm sitting in on Casper's Hitchcock class. Because Brent and I never could find anyone to do sound for our doc, we're doing it, which means we go to sound classes, too. Our saving grace is that Brent and I had spent our 508 learning sound under Frank the drill sergeant, and we're both leaps ahead of the other sound students.

Busy or not, the time seems to fly by. CBS extends the length of the option, which gives me my first dab of money. I take the call while I'm in my television class. At the time, I'm wearing gloves and moving lights when The Agent calls. I duck out of class early, telling my instructor I've got to take a call from My Agent. It sounds so smarmy, so sweet, and so damn exciting. It's as if I'm a walking parody of the Hollywood name-dropper now. There's been a regular group of us lunching at the Jocketeria—it's Manny and Rene and an ebb and flow of others. When I join them late after taking the call, I tell them, “Sorry, boys, I was talking to
My Agent!”

The semester flies by. Barbee is working on the script, and buried in it. She's got less than four months to get up to speed on the topic and write an hour-long pilot and develop characters and a plausible season arc. It's a lot to do. I feel her pain as I race to finish class work. Film school is like Hollywood, or so it appears to me, in that there are periods of nothingness and then long stretches where you work your tail off. I'm so busy I don't have time to fly back to Minnesota for Thanksgiving, so Krause invites me to his house. I eat, I drink, I sleep, I play Monopoly with his son. Then I go back to USC and start working again the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

After a marathon of long nights tweaking the soundtrack, Brent and I finish the doc and we screen it on a bitingly cold and rainy night to a crowd in Norris that is smaller than expected. I'm so tired I want to sleep during the performance. The turmoil and politicking over our shooting from the motorcycle has taken its toll. The doc is good—dark and unexpectedly moody—and some bikers love it, and some hate it. I'm told that night my grade has been lowered from an A to a C+ to appease the safety gods. It's my worst grade by far in grad school. When it's done, I hardly want to celebrate, I just want to go to bed. Julie has flown out again, and the fatigue of the semester catches both of us by surprise. She's been a single mom in Minnesota for three full semesters now, and it's getting old. I'm working hard, and the fate of the transplant show is now in the hands of a woman I don't know well, and she's doing final rewrites on the script. In early December, there's a period of radio silence from CBS. I don't know how to interpret the quiet. Is it good news? Or bad news? There's a lot on the table.