Magic Hours (7 page)

A couple approaches the set with a mixture of trepidation and privilege. They are, it is quickly determined, the owners of the house that a whole troop of Movie People are recklessly stomping into and out of. I ask the woman, Michelle, if she's worried about her home. She's not, she tells me, jerking a little as the screen door bangs shut for the fiftieth time. “They gave us excellent insurance.”

A stressed-looking Jeff Daniels is talking to a cameraman about (what else) lighting the driveway-parked pickup truck he'll be sitting in for the duration of this scene. Daniels's co-star, the unfairly beautiful Kimberly Norris Guerrero, most famous for an appearance on
Seinfeld
, waits nearby with her unfairly handsome significant other. Michelle abandons our conversation and approaches Daniels, asking him timorously if he's “too overwhelmed” to sign an autograph. It takes Daniels a moment to look at her. When he does, his mouth is smiling but his eyes are cold and featureless. In a patient, considered tone, he tells Michelle he's
working
right now, and asks that she wait until he's done
working.
Michelle laughs in a nervous, humiliated way and hastens back to her husband's side. It is hard to fault Michelle much here, since I imagine that, in her mind, it was pretty damned generous of her to cede Daniels her home, but it is equally hard to fault Daniels's brusque reply, since he
was
in the middle of a conversation and child-proofing his personal space while on the job is something he shouldn't have
to do. It is an all-around ugly scene that everyone pretends not to have noticed. Michelle and her husband soon join the phalanx of Escanabans watching safely from across the street.

Daniels climbs into the cab of the battered Ford pickup and Guerrero takes her place at the driver's-side window. Both suffer eleventh-hour preening at the hands of a makeup artist. Their conversation will first be shot from Daniels's perspective, and amassed on the Ford's passenger-side is a platoon of Movie People: the cameraman, the second assistant director, some gaffers, and the condenser mic operator, each frozen in a differently uncomfortable pose. Providing further distraction is the lights, all perched on thin metal stands called “lollipops,” and a huge white deflector that resembles the screen upon which children are lobotomized by elementary-school filmstrips. Beneath this sensory ambush, Guerrero and Daniels are now expected to have a quiet, character-revealing conversation. One does not need to see their awkward initial takes to grasp how ludicrously difficult motion-picture acting can be.

The Movie People will try to use as much native sound and dialogue as they can, since post-production redubbing is so expensive. It is therefore extremely important, Gary is explaining to the crowd, that everyone keep very, very quiet and very, very still while the cameras are rolling. The crowd is a cooperative of nods. Gary walks back over to the Movie People's side of the street, where he motions to a production assistant carrying a bullhorn.

A bullhorn-enhanced voice fills the air: “All right, everybody. No walking. Quiet, please.” Although I am standing at least twenty feet away, the block is wreathed with such silence I can hear Guerrero and Daniels's conversation perfectly. Noah, the sound mixer, a lanky, longhaired young man in a white Irish sweater, sits nearby at his portable digital audio recorder, monitoring the sound levels over his headphones and minutely adjusting
the console's numerous pots. Noah looks pleased until a neighborhood dog begins barking. The dog barks, in fact, through the entire take, and stops, with mysterious precision, the instant the take is complete. Gary motions for another bullhorned edict for silence, and Guerrero and Daniels begin anew. Five seconds in, the dog is at it yet again. Noah's eyes roll skyward, Gary is now helplessly scanning the neighborhood, and the production assistant is brandishing his bullhorn in a way that leaves little doubt of its canine-bludgeoning potential. When the dog's tireless larynx has spoiled the third take, another production assistant is sent on a door-to-door scour of the neighborhood.

A few minutes later, the production assistant, smiling and a little shaken, returns. The dog's owner has been confronted. Unfortunately, the man is not one of Northtown's finer citizens. This is not surprising, since finding an adult male at home at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday morning suggests dedicated unemployment. The man was unmoved by the production assistant's request that his dog be taken inside during the filming. The production assistant—wisely, I think—decided to leave it at that, and after everyone talks the situation over it is suggested that perhaps the bullhorn is the dog's Pavlovian trigger.

A fourth take is attempted minus the prefatory bullhorn. A weird, fretful aura descends upon the production. No one—not Gary, not Noah, not the crew, not the crowd—is listening to anything but this immaculate, fragile quiet. The dog's cue comes and goes, but we are no longer attuned to anything so specific. The late-morning twittering of birds all around us seems as raucous as a cocktail party. Footfalls register like exploding shells. It is pure aural anxiety. Near the end of the take, a crowd member's baby begins to cry. She turns and quite frankly
sprints
away from the crowd, her wailing infant mashed to her chest. It is as though she has just been gassed. At this, some more loutish crowd members
begin to laugh. Gary stands there, tight-mouthed, while Daniels and Guerrero, wholly alone in the temple of art, finish their take with a soft, scripted kiss.

On the following take, a school bus grinds gears two blocks away. The take after that is made unusable by an inopportune car horn coupled with a rotten muffler. Several takes, in fact, suffer invasion by questionable mufflers. After what feels like the three-hundredth endeavor to film twenty seconds of human interaction without some spike of unbidden sound, Gary looks up with a beleaguered smile. “Are there any cars in this town,” he asks no one, “that
have
mufflers?”

By now a small cadre within the crowd has openly turned against the Movie People. They are men, three of them, and their faint laughter is filled with hyenic contempt. They sport mullets, wraparound Oakley sunglasses, and shiny vinyl jackets with the names of local bars splashed across their backs. They are the sort of Escanaba he-men my friends and I, when in high school, approached outside of liquor stores and bribed to buy us cases of Milwaukee's Best. No one is paying these men much attention, though some members of the crowd have, in isolationist disapproval, inched away from them.

The battlements of filmmaking are moved from the Ford pickup's starboard side to that of its port. Daniels and Guerrero, their stand-ins in place, have taken refuge around a space-heater. Gary is on his cell phone again, probably thrilled that soon he will not have to endure such endless set-up and potential distraction. Tomorrow the production moves to a closed set in an abandoned health club just outside of town. The Movie People have constructed within the health club the simulated interior of a deer camp, and there the film's remaining scenes will be shot.

As I watch the laughing, truculent men, I remember a story Gary told me a few days before. Last year, he directed a Visa
commercial starring New York Yankees manager Joe Torre in Washington Square Park. Torre had, of course, just captained the Yankees to World Series triumph. Gary expected to do a good amount of Torre—shielding from gawkers, but other than a few raised fists and discreet hails, Gary's production was left unmolested. After Gary told the story, we exchanged some pleasantries of the Isn't-New York—Great variety. Yet I know that, for most of those New Yorkers, leaving Torre alone was striated with all kinds of apprehension, foremost of which is the New Yorker's singular desire to never
ever
seem eager or unguarded or gauche. I know, too, that these sneering Escanabans embody an exact inversion of that same desire. Why, then, do I
loathe
these men with such sudden intensity?

The lives of the laughing Escanabans are not too difficult for me to imagine. Their cars have shitty mufflers. They are smokers, drinkers, their romantic and occupational histories Iliads of woe. No doubt they have “some college.” No doubt they've swabbed enough aircraft carrier decks to have decided that Escanaba isn't so bad after all. These upper midwestern Jukes and Kallikaks live in a culture which despises them, consume entertainment produced by people who mock them, and it is suddenly hard to fault their powerless laughter at a film in which they will find no representation, not even as tough-talking rednecks deodorized by horse-sense philosophy.

I realize, then, that this film is not intended for these men. Or for Escanaba. Or for any small town. It is meant, instead, for that know-nothing American monstrosity, the target audience. Although I understand the pressurized financial contingencies that make this necessary, I do not, at this moment, much care. Loyalty is the small town's blood, and assault from without is its transfusion. I work myself into such a lather it occurs to me only gradually that I am a potential bull's-eye in that target audience. My own
private Escanaba shares some crucial denominators with the Movie People's: both are vessels of studied triumph over the inadequate past, both are backlit by the glow of the irrecoverable, and both are utter fabrications. Our Escanabas exist, but do not remain.

I abruptly thank the Movie People for having me and walk back to my father's truck. At the Second Avenue block-off stands a lone Escanaban. She is an old, old woman, thin in a nasty-looking way, with a nestlike white permanent.

“Dumbest thing I ever saw,” she tells me, waving her hand at the distant Movie People. “I don't think it'll even be any
good
.”

“Oh,” I say, walking past her, “I think it will be.”

Her look of cruelty softens into something hopeful, even tender, and she no longer seems nasty, but a confused small-town woman filled with doubt. “You think?”

 

—2000

The Case of the Underground Literary Alliance

—John Kennedy Toole,
A Confederacy of Dunces

 

L
iterature is always written by outsiders. Even lousy literature is written by outsiders. Everything from the artiest
Bildungsroman
to the most boldly ludicrous spy rhapsody to the Styrofoam drama of the lower science fiction was written by a person inclined not toward connecting with those around him or her but retreating into a world of nerdily private dream. But even within the outsider's own imagination, things do not much improve. The overwhelming majority of a writer's time is spent wondering why this world is not as vivid as he or she once—agonizingly,
deludedly
—believed. To write is to fail, more or less, constantly. Most writers are not garrulous people; those few who are can fall prey to substance abuse or behave in the uniquely alienating way of people who think they are celebrities but are not, actually, celebrated. There are reasons for this. Very little in our culture goes out of its way to reward good writing; as a profession, writing seems to interest people in same exotic
manner that professional whaling interests people. It is hard psychic work to feel professionally estranged. One explanation for why writers enjoy hanging around other writers is because writers often instantly forgive one another for being difficult or weird. In this way New York City is, for writers, a kind of literary sanatorium. I mean to imply in that equation some strong theoretical reservations about the sanatorium.

All the animals in Orwell's
Animal Farm
are equal, remember, but some are more equal than others. So, too, then, are some outsiders more outside than others. A few writers, such as Thoreau, seem for the sake of vanity or affectation to
will
upon themselves outsider status. Thoreau's friendship with Emerson, probably the most prominent writer of the day, indicates that he was something less than a solitary literary soul. There is the Clown Outsider, such as Whitman, who was not taken seriously until most of the insiders who despised him were dead. There is the Spurned Outsider, such as Melville, whose early success with
Typee
led him to believe that his skeleton key would forever provide entrance to the inside literary world; by the time
Pierre
appeared the locks had all been discreetly changed. There is the Outsider from Mars, such as Dickinson. There is the Outsider by Temperament, such as Jack London, who, however magnificent a man, was not actually a very good writer. There is the Square Outsider, such as Willa Cather, loved by readers but secretly loathed as a hopeless square by those on the inside. There is the Outsider Who Unexpectedly Finds Himself Inside, such as Jack Kerouac. There is the Nutcase Outsider, such as Hunter S. Thompson. There is the Geographical Outsider, such as the novelist Jim Harrison. (I once made the mistake of admiringly telling Harrison that I regarded him as the dean of Midwestern literature. His long career of being belittled by urban critics had acclimated him to regard that statement as a scatologically vivid insult. I am still apologizing.) There
is the Outsider Mistakenly Regarded as an Insider, such as John Updike, who is in fact so outside he does not even have an agent.

And then there is the True Outsider, the writer who believes, as he believes nothing else, that he has no hope of ever accessing the inner literary world. This conviction often sadly fulfills itself; people, artists especially, tend to internalize their fates. Nevertheless, not a few True Outsiders have met with literary success, though in many cases only when it was far too late to have any earthly benefit. The suicide John Kennedy Toole is probably the most famous True Outsider, though it pains me to admit that I regard
A Confederacy of Dunces
as one of the most overrated novels ever published. I am glad, all the same, that it
was
published, if only for the moments of reflection it caused those who rejected it to suffer.