Magic Hours (5 page)

In
Escanaba in da Moonlight
, Daniels plays Reuben Soady, a luckless forty—year—old who stands in danger of becoming the oldest Soady in history to have never bagged a buck. The film—which is, incidentally, a comedy—details Reuben's efforts to kill a deer. Some will perhaps be unsurprised that the film is being independently produced. Even Daniels, in my interview with him, was quick to point out that he “doesn't hunt,” and that the film is really a love story. Let me say that, as an erstwhile Yooper, I am not especially fazed by the script's deer-murdering aspects, even though I do not hunt either. Hunting occupies an elemental chamber within the consciousness of rural Americans, for whom the semantic schism between
pig
and
pork
and
deer
and
venison
is harder to justify. More to the point, deer are the stupidest
terrestrial mammals the planet has so far known. They are essentially locusts with hoofs. When not eating or breeding, they like to launch themselves into traffic. If hunting in Upper Michigan were abolished, thousands of deer would starve during its brutal winter, and its highways would be a living obstacle course.

Reuben's nightmare, then, finds him before his mocking fellow Escanabans, all of whom chant “Buckless! Buckless!” and wave aloft signs that say things like “Da Buckless Yooper.” If the scene comes off,
Escanaba in da Moonlight
could mark the first instance in cinematic history of a central character being derided for his inability to slaughter a highly beloved constituent of the animal kingdom.

I mention the crowd problem to a unit publicist, who explains that tonight's filming is in direct competition with the Escanaba Area High School athletic department's Fan Club Fund Raiser across town. “It's a really big deal here,” she tells me. I nod, even though it is the first time I have ever heard of this Fan Club Fund Raiser. The Movie People hoped to counteract the Fan Club Fund Raiser by staging one of their own. By paying two dollars, each extra can sit on his or her oversized Midwestern keister and know that not only will they appear in the film, but their money will go to benefit the high school's athletic department.

This explains the mysterious presence of the high school athletic director himself, who ambles along the set's edge with a displaced air. He is a gigantic, yeti-like man well known for bullying the athletes he dislikes and granting unseemly quarter to those he does not. He is obviously feeling put out, and I feel a small pang of sympathy until I recall the inspirational leaflets he used to stuff in his players' lockers during football practice, each filled with nuggets of inadvertently chilling advice: “In matters of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim with the current.” I remember the final game of the catastrophic season I spent as a hapless nose guard for Escanaba's Catholic junior high
squad, the Holy Name Crusaders, a massacre commenced upon this very field. After being bulldozed by the opposing fullback, I walked to the sideline, removed my helmet, and fainted. It was my third concussion of the year. When the emergency-room doctor informed me I would never play football again, I nearly wept with relief.

The walk-throughs are done. The sun has set and the blue-black Midwestern sky is shotgunned with nebulae. Some gaffers are placing oval filters over the gigantic 600-watt HMI lights. As the crowd is hit with their celestial illumination, Jeff Daniels emerges from the stadium's adjacent locker room and walks across the field. Upon sight of him, the crowd lets out a small gasp that flatlines into courteous applause. Daniels is bearded, flanneled, clad in long underwear, and convincingly rural, which is by way of saying he looks terrible. This is the first film he has directed, and each twenty-hour workday has etched some new crag into the topography of his face. Since the film's finances were raised privately, whether he will ever do this again depends largely on its success.

Daniels confers with Tom and Gary, his breath unfurling in long white banners. Tom and Gary stand there, listening, their own breath chugging out of their noses in little locomotive puffs. Daniels looks tired in that scary, familiar way one's father looked tired, pouring himself a drink at the dry bar, after letting someone go that day at work. I have always found Daniels's stardom slightly puzzling. Not in the way one finds the stardom of, say, Tom Hanks, in such clear defiance of celebrity's iron laws, but puzzling in a pleasing, even inspiring way. Daniels looks like any number of big clumsy Midwesterners I grew up around, and I am not at all shocked to learn he was born in Michigan. I wonder if Daniels's appeal has something to do with the fact that many men, if asked to cast their lives without undo conceit, might settle on Jeff Daniels to play themselves.

Tom, Gary, and Daniels break apart, and suddenly Daniels jogs out to the strip of track at the base of the bleachers and raises his hands to the crowd. A small, startled cheer. Daniels mock-reproves them and raises his hands again. Six-hundred suddenly animated voices shout back some innominate huzzah. Daniels segues into a prancing burlesque, whipping off his flannel and throwing it over his shoulders like a feather boa. “Hey, we like it!” one undeniably intoxicated voice shouts back at Daniels, who, as he turns away from the crowd, is smiling not the rictus of celebrity but an actual human smile.

“Well,” Daniels mutters as he walks past me. “We got a few people. It is three degrees out here. They're not stupid.”

As some final preparations are undertaken, I wander up into the stands, looking for someone I know. The crowd is not my demographic, most of its members very old or very young. I do see in the stands a number of well-dressed middle-aged women who “support” the town in its every endeavor, whether it happens to be turning out for the filming of a movie or the construction of internment camps. My PRESS button earns me several “Hello!”s from crowd members, each followed by a hurt silence when they realize I do not plan on interviewing them. A duo of ear-muffed junior high girls assails me, both asking if I write for the local newspaper. I tell them why I'm here. “
Herpes Magazine
?” one gasps, and rushes over to a gaggle of friends. “
Herpes Magazine
” sees a quick, contagionlike spread throughout this small portion of crowd. I am on my way back to the field when I see two quiet boys sitting in the front row. Both are decked out in green-brown camouflage, and they observe the Movie People very closely. I sit next to the boys and ask them what they think. “I think it's really cool,” the older one, Scott, tells me. He shakes his head. “Nothing really
happens
in this town. Now that there's something pretty big happening, people will think Escanaba's pretty cool.”

Scott knows nothing of the difficulty Daniels faces in getting this film distributed. He does not know that, despite the alien style with which the Movie People comport themselves, fully nine tenths of them are from Michigan. All he knows is that a movie camera will soon turn our way, and that, when it does, our small hometown in the middle of nowhere will be the only place in the world that matters. Scott's anticipation is so intense that, for a moment, I believe this too.

After tonight's filming, Mike and I drive down Main Street. It is 10:00 p.m. on a Saturday night and the streets are empty, the stoplights set on hypnotic yellow blink. Escanaba seems vaguely unwell. Nearly everything is closed. When one thinks of small towns, no two words are as suggestive as
Main Street.
They call up tableaux of a tree-lined avenue where the day's business is leisurely but efficiently transacted, a bustling vena cava through which every citizen passes to reach her town's rejuvenating heart. But Escanaba's heart has been stopped dead by the coronary thrombosis of commercial expansion out on Lincoln Road, a McDonald's- and Burger King-
and
Wendy's-
and
Blockbuster-
and
Walmart-beset thruway that streaks past Escanaba's western edge. Largely underdeveloped when I was a child, Lincoln Road has now made Main Street a pale mercantile ancillary. A number of Main Street's storefronts are abandoned, with no one rushing in to fill the void. And I am devastated to see that Sakylly's Candy, a Main Street stalwart, has opened a slick new headquarters right off Lincoln Road.

Not that Lincoln Road is a commercial dynamo. As Mike and I turn onto it, I am struck by a curious lack of entrepreneurial cunning. Every restaurant and strip mall has a sign, and beneath every sign is a glowing white marquee. Instead of festooning these
marquees with some incentive to stop in, Escanaba's brightest business-owning lights have, almost to the one, opted for William Carlos Williams—like austerity. “Buffet,” reads Country Kitchens's marquee. That of Elmer's Country Restaurant is comparatively encyclopedic: “Polish sausage, kraut.” The marquee belonging to Suds N' Sun tanning salon, while informative, seems to address some grievous past oversight: “New tanning bulbs.” Only Nanoseconds, a quick-stop found off Lincoln Road's main drag, does much to bring meaningful tidings: “Marlboro Carton $21.58.”

The new radio station, Mix 106 FM, has scored Mike's and my roaming to Smashing Pumpkins and Wyclef Jean. I have difficulty accepting this. Not too many years before, I nearly lost my board operator gig at a local radio station by playing Public Enemy's “Welcome to the Terrordome” at three o'clock in the morning. We take a spin by the new cineplex, where actual, prof—itable motion pictures are playing. As teenagers, Mike and I used to drive two hours to the nearest big city—this was Green Bay, Wisconsin—hungry for escape. Only there could we see
Reservoir Dogs
or
Malcolm X,
since all Escanaba's moribund theater had to offer was
The Exorcist III
or
Rocky V
epochs after their opening weekend. Mike and I relied on family safaris to Chicago to procure rap albums, but when we coast past one of Escanaba's new dance clubs, we feel within the cockpit of my father's Mountaineer the concussive urban thud of base. Mike and I special-ordered
Life of Brian
from Southside Video, whose uniquely crappy selection of slasher flicks we'd exhausted, but one pass by the new Blockbuster reveals unending walls of videos and DVDs.

After I left Escanaba, I felt some dignity that I had come of age far beyond the fallout of the cultural atom smasher. The movies I saw or albums I bought or, later, books I read were not much colored by the inducements of culture brokers. The pickings were slimmer, sometimes maddeningly so, and not always sophisticated,
but I was never less than certain that I had picked them. This is what makes rural, small-town people so opinionated. Strong opinion is the necessary attendant of choice, however limited, while fashion is the bootlick of exacting coercion.

If I were growing up in Escanaba now,
Amazon.com
would happily suggest which books or compact disks to buy. Over the Internet, I could chat with people as distant as Newark or Portland, erasing the demarcations of isolation, a visible suburbanite to a vast, invisible city. The Movie People have come to capture Escanaba's isolation, which exists, still, in every empty street and darkened storefront, but it is an isolation that is, increasingly, identical to that of a thousand towns just like it. All of them are attuned to the same cultural pulsar, as distant as it is familiar, as relentless as it is indifferent.

While driving to today's shoot, I find that the Movie People have closed off several blocks of Main Street. A small crowd of Escanabans stands at the barricade, shaking their heads in outrage. I would like to point out to these furnaces of rural anger that driving a single block north will grant them passage to wherever it is they wish to go, but I also know this is not the point. Routine in small towns is not ruptured lightly.

I park and walk down Main Street to Rosy's Diner, where I see that the Movie People's infestation has already taken root. I suddenly realize that I have not, as clearly as I can remember, ever before
walked
down Main Street. As a boy I dirt-biked the whole of Main Street almost daily, and as an adult I have driven down it thousands of times, but the slow-moving vista of its storefronts and clean sidewalk slabs is disassociating in a revelatory way.
No one
walks in Escanaba. Ever. No doubt this bears some relation to
the astonishing fatness of many of its citizens.

Rosy's Diner is a small, sensationally yellow building found a few doors down from the bank where my father works—the kind of place that serves Coke in glass bottles and where lunch for two rarely vaults into double digits. During the grim summer following my early withdrawal from the Peace Corps, my father and I ate lunch here every day and tried to figure out what I would do with my life. I arrive at Rosy's to find the Movie People adjusting the set's lighting.

“Wait,” one gaffer tells another, after placing a light. “This one'll be dangerously close to being in the shot.” I ask the gaffers, Isn't
every
light here dangerously close to being in the shot? There are five different batches of lights: three outside, shining into Rosy's, and two even brighter ones inside. Every possible place upon which the camera will not turn is a bulwark of hot white light. One gaffer smiles, walks over to me, and explains that movie-making is 10 percent good lighting, 10 percent production value, and 80 percent standing around and eating Gummi Bears, of which he offers me several.

I am squired to the back door of Rosy's, my escort and I stepping over cables and heavy black boxes stenciled with “Mid America Cine Support.” As we muscle our way through the sound equipment crowding the kitchen, I see that, in the diner proper, Daniels is in the midst of directing a scene. Wearing a thick flannel shirt and fingerless hobo gloves, he kneels next to a table where his three actors are seated and will soon pretend to chat over tepid coffee. Daniels speaks quietly, every word freighted with consequence. The actors listen, eyes narrow and mouths tamped, while a makeup artist dabs their faces with white foam cubes.