Magic Hours (6 page)

Gary Goldman wanders around Daniels and the actors, pointing out every possible disruptive influence within the scene's frame: “There's spilled water on the table. Do we care? There's
no steam coming off that coffee. Do we care?” Watching all this adamant preparation, I try to conceive of how a bad film is ever made. Daniels's budget is only a little over $2 million dollars, yet nothing seems to fall outside consideration. Nothing seems hurried or rushed. Rosy's is filled to its gunwales with incredibly conscientious, hard-working Movie People whose focus on getting down the scene well has made the room a cauldron of concentration. Did a mandarin like David Lean prepare this thoroughly, or was his vision so honed he merely willed things into place? What of the journeyman director tapped for the new Martin Lawrence vehicle? Does he sit down with his AD night after night, day after day, and debate how to light Lawrence? Through what alchemy does the leaden spectacle of three actors surrounded by lights and cameras and twenty other people transform into art's precious metal? One can only conclude that no one, least of all the Movie People, is quite sure of how this happens. Their preparation is backlit by this terrified lack of surety, and just as David Lean collapsed in bed at night, certain of total failure, the journeyman director holds a small cameo of expectancy that he will, finally, wrest from his overworked script and unappealing star something with which the declining remains of his conscience can abide.

Behind me, Tom Spiroff stands in the kitchen, talking to a
Detroit Free Press
reporter. He will later be quoted as saying: “I'm completely confident we're making a movie any studio is going to want to distribute.... The novelty is these Yoopers, who are a special breed of people you haven't seen in movies before.”

“Last looks, everybody!” Gary hollers. Tom and the reporter break off their conversation. A subterranean silence falls within Rosy's. The second assistant director snaps his slate. Daniels nods in a deep, comprehending way. Gary yells, “Action!,” a moment-specific imperative, like “Charge!” or “Full speed ahead!” that no
human being could ever tire of being paid to shout.

They shoot the scene—three hunters talking—several times. Movie People really
do
say things like, “That was perfect. Let's do it again.” Between takes, an elderly woman standing to my left asks me, “Do I have to yell out ‘Flash!' if I'm taking a picture?” She is clearly a native Escanaban, and I wonder how she has bypassed the wranglers whose job it is to keep Escanabans off the set. I whisper that I don't think flash photography is allowed during filming. She then asks, “Is that man in the chook from Escanaba?” Since the man in the “chook” is an actor, I feel confident in telling her no. “Is Jeff here?” she whispers. I fix her with a long, icy stare. When the takes are completed, Daniels walks over and introduces the elderly woman to the
Detroit Free Press
reporter.

She is the owner of a deer camp the Movie People are using for exterior shots. I now feel like a jackass, and compound this by eavesdropping on the woman's subsequent interview. Her use of “Jeff” is not framed in grossly arriviste terms at all. She'd never heard of Daniels before the filming. The delighted
Free Press
reporter asks her if she ever thought her camp would be used in a motion picture. “Not really,” she says.

I wander outside to see Tom Spiroff valiantly holding up his conversational end with a stout Escanaban and his young son. The man talks animatedly of just about everything. Tom remains heartrendingly kind, even after his responses have fallen to a take-me-to-your-leader tonelessness. “Really,” he says. “Huh,” he says. The man sallies forth into some new topic, and I can sense the psychic battle being waged behind Tom's faceplate: I
will
be nice. I...
will...
be
nice.
This is another skirmish in the undeclared emotional war between Escanaba and the Movie People. The Movie People, so far, have been regarded in Escanaba as surprisingly courteous. “Good, normal folks,” one person told me. But they are not normal folks. They are making a movie, one of the more abnormal endeavors a
group of human beings can undertake. One senses that Tom knows that the smallest lapse with this Escanaban will poison the garden of friendly relations he has assiduously pruned. One senses further that Tom also knows, and detests, how unfair a burden it is to have to disprove the negative of Movie People's reputed baseness to an entire town twenty-four hours a day.

Here two selves stand in naked confrontation, the Small-town Self and the Hollywood Self, each severed from its context, each forced to create a new, precarious reality. For the Escanaban, this reality holds that, while he is impressed with Tom, he is not overwhelmed by him, and by enjoying with him everyday conversation, he will allow this Hollywood movie producer a respite from the fakery he believes makes up Tom's world. For Tom, the reality is defensive and turns back on itself, a metaphysical hairpin that actually
forces
him to portray the normal, friendly person he is. Having to concentrate, in interaction after interaction, on being oneself must be ontological hell, and I catch a sudden glimmer of why so many famous people lose their minds.

I simply cannot bear to watch any more of this, and hurry away.

“In some ways,” John Clayton writes in
Small Town Bound,
a primer on abandoning the toxic urban lifestyle, “moving to a small town is like moving to a foreign country.... Compared to your old neighbors, these people really are different... A slip-up may be costly. Despite the best of intentions, your statements or actions... may send the wrong message, and you'll find yourself disliked.” Even for a booster like Clayton, the small town is ineffably the Other. Some of Clayton's pointers (“If you truly have a secret that absolutely nobody should know, then tell absolutely nobody”)
read like transcriptions from a counterintelligence manual; others (“Your brash New York sales technique may offend reticent dairy farmers”) come off as deconstructions of
New Yorker
cartoons. But in the face of lifestyle decompression, Clayton is optimism's archangel. Small-town folk may at first be unsophisticated and a little frightening, he assures, but by obeying draconian rural protocol and (the implication is clear) not expecting very much, you will soon become a welcome member of the community.

Clayton's evidence-gathering in the case of
Small Town
v.
City
will be greeted by many without skepticism. Most Americans, after all, do not live in small towns but in suburbs or micropolitan “edge cities,” such as those outside of Phoenix, Houston, and Atlanta. Whether hated, loved, mourned, or celebrated, the small town is, to those who do not live in them, an alternate universe whose values fall hideously short or gloriously surpass those of their referents. Many of our stumping politicians speak plangently of their small-town origins, while most mass entertainments prefer a more cynical vision of small-town life. However small towns are portrayed, they are never Now, and they are never You.

For browbeaten city-dwellers whose rural flight needs more codified guidance than the bromides of
Small Town Bound,
there is Norman Crampton's
The 100 Best Small Towns in America.
Crampton ranks small towns according to their “uniqueness” and “quality.” His complicated formula involves average income, percentage of nonwhites, crime rate, and local government spending on education, among other brow-wrinkling concerns. Communities like Beaufort, South Carolina, and Provincetown, Massachusetts, with their singular mission of providing summer housing for millionaires and sucking money out of tourists, score highly in Crampton's playoff. (Escanaba, needless to say, does not merit a mention.)

When discussing the thousands of anti-Provincetowns lacking the restorative power of boutique art and agreeable
socioeconomics, small-town boosterism goes only so far. “The good small towns are booming,” John Clayton writes. “The bad ones are dying.” Probably, Clayton would toe-tag my hometown in an instant. Escanaba offers its citizens almost nothing appreciable beyond a stagnant local economy and community theater. Despite this, a good chunk of each graduating class hangs around. Every year enough old high-school acquaintances migrate back from Milwaukee or Detroit to give vague misgivings to those of us with no such designs. In a small town, success is the simplest arithmetic there is. To achieve it, you leave—then subsequently bore your new big-city friends with accounts of your narrow escape. Indeed, when I was younger, I felt certain that what kept small-town people in their small towns was some tragic deficiency.

My stridency was fortified by American literature's constellation of small-town exiles. Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and Sherwood Anderson all wrote their best work after abandoning their small Midwestern hometowns. Only Cather opted for aria. Hemingway, typically, chose silence, not once writing about Oak Park, Illinois. Fitzgerald seemed to hold his Minnesota boyhood in a regard that is half sneering, half heartbroken. In
Main Street
and
Babbit,
Lewis horsewhipped America's small towns so ferociously the latter has become synonymous with everything strangling and conformist about them. Anderson is the most influential small-town anatomist, his
Winesburg, Ohio
famously coining the term “grotesques” for small-town people and inspiring what might best be called the “Up
Yours
, Winesburg” tradition in American literature.

But I am left with the nagging feeling that, long after leaving my small town, I remain a small-town person. While suburbs tend to produce protoplasmic climbers for whom ascension to the city is a divine right, small towns leave a deep parochial stamp. I have dwelled happily in New York City for several years yet still
find edgy discomfort in cell phones and being kissed in greeting by acquaintances. I would like to credit my dislike for swanky Greenwich Village drinking holes to high-minded asceticism, but I know it is animated by the same wretched self—consciousness that kept many Escanabans away from the filming. Small-town people live in dread of any substantiation of how out of it they secretly suspect themselves to be. This is why many small-town men dress so hideously, and why many small-town women do such upsetting things to their hair. One never risks rejection when one has made that rejection inevitable.

On my way out the door for the last day of location filming, my father asks where the Movie People are shooting today. I tell him where “we” are shooting and, while driving to the set, marvel at my unthinking use of the first-person plural. My self—election to the parliament of movie-making is not star-fucking solipsism as much as it is an involuntary submission. When your town is incorporated into another reality, your very identity succumbs to the resultant vortex.

Today the Movie People are filming in Northtown, Escanaba's economically depressed district. In perfect storybook synchronicity, the division between Northtown and its flusher counterpart, Southtown, is the long stretch of Main Street. Since Escanaba lacks any minority presence, Northtowners and Southtowners are forced to dislike one another. I am from South town. Worse yet, I grew up on its toniest street, Lake Shore Drive, a descendent of an
ancien régime
Escanaba family whose kingly house overlooks the city park and the oceanic glory of Lake Michigan.

Today's scene takes place at Reuben's house, where he attempts detente with his unhappy wife. The Northtown home the Movie
People have selected to film is a biggish, olive-colored two-story on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue; it is in sore need of a paint job. Despite the fact that it is the coldest day of filming yet, a savage temperature not unlike that of the moon's solar lee side, a fairly large group of Escanabans has materialized to watch the filming and been corralled into a line across the street. Gary Goldman, in his ever-present sunglasses and white ball cap, paces up and down the sidewalk while talking into his cell phone.

Two large production trucks pull up and are gingerly emptied of equipment. One guy, loaded with an armful of walkie-talkies, calls alms: “Get your red-hot walkies!” Movie-making might be the only occupation without potential lethality that encourages such rampant walkie-talkie use. Several of the gaffers and grips are wearing “I love Escanaba” buttons on their jackets. Even though they are busy, this inspires me to strike up some conversation. For just about all of them,
Escanaba in da Moonlight
is their first “feature” experience, though many have done production work in commercials and public service announcements. They are counting on this movie's success no less keenly than Daniels: the best boy, Hans, is working his way through community college in Lansing at a garage-door manufacturer. I am about to ask whether they truly love Escanaba when I see an old high school friend, Doug, talking with Daniels's stand-in.

Doug is both Mike's cousin and the fullback against whom I concussed myself in that junior-high football game. He is also the only person I know who has been shot for non-geopolitical reasons, taking an accidental bullet in the leg while deer hunting a few years ago. Doug's femur was shattered, and he walks with a noticeable limp. Doug, I learn, has signed onto the film as its Gun Safety Consultant. I congratulate him on his gig, and he regales me with amused but not at all mean-spirited stories of the Movie People's innocence in things ungulate.

The Movie People arrived with the thought of using a tranquilized farm deer for the hunting scenes. But a tranquilized farm deer proved difficult to procure. A mechanical deer was thus obtained from the local branch of the Department of Natural Resources, a notion so oxymoronical I swoon at the thought of it. Why I ask, does the DNR have a mechanical deer? “To catch poachers,” Doug replies. Robot deer are patrolling the forests of Upper Michigan, and clearly I am here covering the wrong story.