Article

Here's an article about last week's burn(that's me in the brown, in front of the cameraman):

http://www.athensnews.com/news/campusnews/2009/feb/16/ou-film-students-get-fired-about-feature-film-trai/

Trailer Park #4--Pellston

Be careful thinking you're too clever. Events have a way of leveling you, but good. 

Last weekend,in Athens, on Sunday afternoon, we filmed the interior of the bobhouse scene that I appear in. There are others, but this was the lone scene I appear in the bobhouse. (FYI-- a bobhouse is a small shack icefishermen build over their ice fishing holes, and it stays there all winter, and then when the ice starts to melt, they take all their gear out, and burn it down).

So anyway, the interior scenes were created buy using a raised wooden floor, and 4 theatre flats, clamping the corners together to make the four walls, then removing various sides so the camera can capture the action. This was very cramped going, but the detail was very cool. Lots of gear, tackle, bedding and such, and a hole in the floor that the students filled with ice and snow to look like an ice fishing hole.

My scene consisted of bursting into the bobhouse, pushing through some other actors, then I accuse the the old guy who owns the shack of kidnapping, and then see his partially hidden shoe-box full of lottery money, grab it, but it gets snatched from me, and I go barreling out the door after the guy who took it. Cut. Print.

Not quite of course--we spent four hours doing various permutations of the scene. I wasn't comfortable with picking up the box and having it snatched from me--it just looked like I was holding it out for someone to steal. So I hit upon the idea to grab the box, realize I can't open it with my gloves on, so I begin to pull one of 

them off with my teeth when the guy snags the box and bolts. That way, I figure, it could be funny--I rise cursing, but my words are muffled by the glove in my mouth; I go out running with the glove still dangling from my teeth, money-fever having consumed me. The director loved 

the idea, so that's what we went with.

Cut to this past weekend. We have driven 8 hours on Friday to get to Pellston, Michigan--ok, more than 8 hours, because we took a wrong turn somewhere in a snowstorm and ended 30 miles away, and had to backtrack, finally reaching our hotel by 1:30am. The next day, we are driven to the location, about 7 miles away, a frozen lake upon which sits our glorious bobhouse. A lovely couple hosted us there, people who had a sweet little A-frame cottage on the lake. They have given over their garage as a warming shack for us, and it is filled with heaters of all sorts (Michiganders are experts on portable heating devices, I discovered). There is also a grand lunch of brats and chili and ravioli, provided by the parents of Andy Poland, the DP, who originally hail from the area. The crew has been on the lake since dawn, setting up generators and camera equipment, and constructing the bobhouse.  

The snow is falling pretty steadily, which is a problem. We are here to film the exterior portion of the scene from last Sunday. The stuff we are to film outside the bobhouse leads to stuff we also filmed last week, namely the trailer fire. So, the sequence is this:

(Above, the lake at dawn, before the storm)

1. We burst into the bobhouse and take the money box and run out--interior, shot last Sunday

2. We wrestle each each other on the frozen lake, grappling for the box, which I knock into the air, scattering all the money, which we all dive for, till the character Marcelle (Shelley Delaney) looks out past the cameras, and calls out "fire!"--exterior, to be shot now.

3. We all run to the burning trailer, try lamely to put it out, and give up and watch it burn. Exterior, filmed last Friday and Saturday.

The problem is, it wasn't snowing in Athens last Friday and Saturday. But now, in Pellston, Michigan, it's snowing hard. And, the wind is gusty and sharp, and most of the time the snow is falling at a 45 degree angle. So we have an exterior already shot which is snowless, and one we are about to begin which will look, accurately, like it was filmed some 600 miles north and a week later. And I doubt the budget includes money for CGI snow. I suggested we add some line to the fire footage, something like " Well, at least the snow stopped." Only, you know, not as lame. It'll be interesting to see how it's solved.

Anyway, like I said at the top, be careful of your own cleverness. Because now I realize that I am going to have to spend the entire afternoon with my right hand ungloved, and not only that, it is going to have be digging in the snow, snatching up money. (The money by the way looks very real, until you see the denomination is 6 dollars, and the President's face is Bill Clinton's, and at the bottom it says "SEX DOLLARS").

The temperature as we left the hotel was 10 degrees, and given that we were standing on an ice covered lake means a drop to about zero. Add to that the hard wind, and we are looking at wind chills in the -10 to -20 range.

I refused to complain however--the crew had been there all day, with nary a break. I was not going to be the pansy actor who whines about bad conditions, after the tending and consideration we'd been getting.  And I don't have nearly enough in the can to go Christian Bale on anybody yet (you want enough footage already shot so you can't be replaced), so I suck it up. My glove, dangling from my mouth on each take as I barrel out of the bobhouse and tackle the guy who took the box, keeps sticking to my lip. It has become stiff as a board from my drool on the fingers, and it freezes solid instantly as soon as I hit that wind.

The latter half of the scene, where we are scrambling on the ice, on our hands and knees, grabbing the dollar bills whirling around in the wind, is where I finally lost all contact with my right hand. My brain was sending signals, but the message was garbled in transmission. It became this red and white claw--it look more like a small garden trowel than a hand. and there was no place to warm it--because I was enthusiastic about diving for the money, there were a number of takes in which I was on my belly in the ice and snow, and all my pockets were filled with melting snow.

Finally, as "magic hour" approached, the time just before sunset when the light is perfect for film, we began filming wide angle shots, the whole sequence of events, culminating in our running out of camera range toward the burning trailer. On the last run, I stepped on a bubble in the ice (they said the ice was generally a foot thick), and my ankle buckled, and I fell into the pile of snow that the crew had swept from the playing area. As I lay there, making snow angels, I heard the word I'd longed for--"WRAP!"

We went to the warming garage (above), and gathered our gear, and were driven to another location which I forgot to mention. This was about 3 miles from the lake, a horse farm, with a large bunkhouse attached to a veterinarian's field office. This was our dressing room, this was where we stopped at the beginning of the day to change into costumes and get made up. There were a few horses in the pen, and after makeup I went out and passed the time till calltime scratching their ears, and letting them kiss me. I don't pretend they were being affectionate--they were looking for treats.

So anyway, we go back to the bunkhouse, get out of costume, and get shuttled back to the hotel. This is a Holiday Inn Express, but not like the one I stayed in in Athens the previous week. That one was new and pretty swanky, for an HIE. This Michigan version looked like it was a motel that got converted. The appointments were pretty average. But I didn't care. All I thought about all afternoon was getting into the hot whirlpool. I ran to my room, changed into my swim suit in record time, ran to the "spa" only to discover it wasn't working. The water was hot, but the jets wouldn't come on. After complaining at the desk, I saw a gaggle of 10 year old boys running through the halls with wet hair, and I put it all together. I went back to the spa, to the emergency shut off box, and saw that it had been tripped. Little douchebags, those boys. I reset the device, and the bubbles came full bore, and I dove in. My hand came back online in no time. Good thing too--that was my favorite hand.

(The crew's cabin)

After soaking in the spa with a few other castmates, I dressed for dinner, which meant bundle up for a long cold drive. The crew were staying at a rented cabin some distance from the hotel. 30 college kids were sharing this large cabin--sleeping bags all over the floor. There was a nice fire in the fireplace and a huge kitchen, where Mr. Poland, our craft service man, had prepared an amazing dinner of spaghetti, three kinds of sauce, meatballs, and a many bottles of red wine for the table. The crew had already eaten and were in the living room area sprawled out and chatting and joking and having the kind of camaraderie you only get at that age. I miss it sometimes. The cast, all 10 of us, sat at the table downing vats of spaghetti ( ok, I was downing vats) and meatballs, and polishing off bottles of wine in world record time. It was a terrific end to a hard day. After dinner, Patrick, one of the directors, showed a rough cut of the trailer burning scene from last week, and it looked terrific. SOme one teased me that of all the cast, I seem to have gotten the lion's share of the closeups, and I told them perhaps I was the only one giving the directors what they really needed in the scene. As written, it wasn't really a scene about me, but as cut together, it became so.  I suspect they'll see this, and make some proper edits to it.

After dinner, I was shuttled back to the hotel--I knew the crew would be up till dawn--and some of the cast we going to get together in the lobby for a nightcap, and I fully intended to join them, but I lay back on the bed, and woke up at 3 am, with the TV blaring some war movie and my phone ringing. By the time I answered it, no one was there, but I suspect it was the desk wanting me to turn down the volume.

The next morning, we loaded up the car, and returned to God's Country. It was easier coming home, because, as we all know, heading south is like going downhill.

Heading North, and then some...

Heading to Pellston, Michigan in the morning, to shoot exteriors on a frozen lake. Here is the Wikipedia description of this garden spot of the Midwest:

 

Pellston is a village in Emmet County in the U.S. state of Michigan. The population was 771 at the 2000 census. The village is the home of Pellston Regional Airport. Its motto is "Icebox of the Nation"; Pellston recorded the state of Michigan's record low temperature, a frigid -53°F. in 1933, and every winter is regularly called out in national weather reports, along with towns like Big Piney, Wyoming, Fraser, Colorado and International Falls, Minnesota, as one of the coldest spots in the nation.

When you look at Michigan on the map above, you see that it is shaped like mitten. Pellston is on the tip of the middle finger, which is somehow appropriate. I’ll be able to throw a snowball and hit Escanaba, or very nearly so.

Trailer Park #3--Second Day on Set

Saturday the 14^th was a day the production had been pointing to since planning began a year ago—the burning down of the trailer. When the production rented the trailers for the Trailer Park set, the dealer threw in a condemned trailer for them to burn, and it was delivered to the “burning ground” on the campus of Hocking College, in Nelsonville. They have a field there where firefighters receive their training in firefighting techniques—there is a 4 story building with a fire escape down one side, and every floor has burned out windows, where they practice tall rescues. The rest of the grounds have little shacks and piles of pallets and so forth.

 

And there was our trailer, sitting at the back of the property, backdropped by a copse of tall trees.

 

But, earlier in the day, we’d met at Kantner Hall on the OU campus to rehearse the scramble for the money box that we’ll be doing next weekend. Brian Evans, one of my cohorts from Escanaba, is a theatre prof and fight choreographer at OU (I suspect he was instrumental in my being on this project). We spent an hour blocking the scene, and tweaking it, and running it over and over until it was in the muscle memory. No doubt, some of it will lost by next weekend, but we’ll recapture it with a little rehearsal. Then, while others had a few scenes to film on the set at Lake Snowden, I had the afternoon off.

 

I drove around Athens a little bit, revisiting old haunts, and marveling how much the town has changed in recent years. A small college town changes its people rapidly, but not so much its look. I grew up there in the late 60s, and for years the town remained fairly unchanged. A few new buildings up, a few old ones down, but essentially the same. Now though, I’ve noticed a significant amount of change. Lots of student apartment buildings have replaced the some long- standing “landmarks” (landmarks to me anyway, with my 45 years of memory). Old local businesses are gone, replaced by chain stores. But even for all that, Athens is a unique little town, the one that most feels like home to me.

 

So anyway, after driving around for an hour, I headed back to the hotel, by way of Wal-Mart (talk about chain store invasion!) where I bought a bathing suit, as the Holiday Inn had a heated pool and spa. When I got back to my room, which was right across the hall from the pool, I could see it was filled with a large family, and for some reason I had no wish to share their company, so I chilled in my room for a while, watching a rerun of the Godfather for about the millionth time. I checked on the pool an hour later, found it deserted, and grabbing a book and a drink, I took it over. I swam a few laps in the pool, then settled into the spa with my book and drink, until some mom came in with her six year old son. She turned him loose on the room while she talked on her cell phone, and he took one look at me and decided we were best friends.

 

There followed a scene much the one in Jurassic Park, where the little boy latches onto Sam Neill’s character and refuses to be shaken off. This little boy decided to tell me his life story, while doing laps in the spa. I tried to get him to do laps in the pool, on the far end, but that wasn’t happening. He was happy with his new best friend. A few desperate looks from me to his mom went unnoticed. She was happy with her new babysitter while she yammered on the cell.

 

Finally, I gave up and drowned the little fuck.

 

No, no, I didn’t. But I’d be lying if I said the thought wasn’t bubbling there, like spa water.

 

So, evening comes, and its time for the shoot.  My driver—let me say that again—my driver—one more time—my…driiiivvvverrrr—picked me up at the hotel and took me to the OU campus. I dressed and made up at Kantner Hall, then was driven to Nelsonville, where the doomed trailer awaited us. Patrick Mulberger, the director for this sequence, told us we would be directed mainly by the cameramen and the DP, as he would be far back, looking at the monitors.

 

There was a 4 camera setup, and we blocked our sequences pretty tightly. By EPA rules, we only had a short time for the trailer to burn, then the firemen had to put it out. So the plan was to start off camera, and on “action” we run to our marks, go through all the preset stuff (the same as Friday night, though this time the camera is at our backs), then Patrick would yell “reset”, and we’d run back to the start, wait for “action” again, and repeat this as many times as we could before the time ran out on the burn. (I think it was 20 minutes for the burn).

 

So Patrick and Jonny Look, the other director, having secured permission ahead of time, entered the old trailer with a road flare each, and a couple of firemen following along. They scratched off the flares, dropped em on the straw-covered floor, and ran out, feeling mighty proud of themselves. Immediately, the three windows of the trailer began to light up from the flames. We got to our beginning places and waited. We’d been told by the firemen that these old trailers only take 15 minutes or so to become an inferno, so we were eager to see it. We waited. And waited. No change. Then the two end windows went dark. Instead of becoming engulfed in flames, it was putting itself out somehow. I made a joke about what a tactical error it was, hooking up the sprinkler system in the trailer. One of the set guys said, quite seriously, that the trailer had no sprinkler system, so that wouldn’t be it. I wanted to say, well what do you know! I assumed these swank double-wides came with all the fixins! But I just smiled and marked him for death later.

 

The firemen called for more pallets, and bunch of set boys began a pallet brigade, bringing them up to the trailer, and then the firemen (there were firewomen too, but “men” is easier to write) tossed them into the trailer through a hole in the back. Gradually smoke began to seep from under the eaves, and we knew it wasn’t going to be long till we had some action. Then, in rapid succession, the flames leapt up and consumed the prefab chandelier, then moved along the ceiling. You could see the outside of the trailer beginning to bubble, and the smoke blackening and growing thicker by the second. Then the center window exploded outward, and the flames shot up through the window and onto the gutters, and the director yelled “ACTION!!!!” and off we went. I don’t know how many times we did it, but it must have been more than a dozen, and all the while the asst. director, Jill, is counting down the minutes, then seconds, till shutdown. It reminded me of Apollo 13, when they had to do a burn for a specific amount of time.

 

Finally she yelled “TIME!”, and the director yelled “CUT” and “WRAP!” and the cheering began and we all began shaking hands, and clapping backs while the firefighting personnel put out the burning trailer.

 

And that was it for the night. After being on set till 2am the previous night, I was back in my hotel room by 10:30pm this time. I understand a lot of the young crew celebrated late into the morning. Ah youth!

Trailer Park #2--First day on Set

Friday the 13^th , my first day of filming, turned out to be a good day. I drove to Athens and was met at the Holiday Inn Express by Conor Hogan and Jen Taylor, our producers. Jon Farris, my cast-mate from Escanaba in Love, and a number of other CATCO shows, arrived at the same time. He is playing Merle Ring, the focus of one of the main plotlines. Conor and Jen checked us in, and came back an hour later to pick us up and drive us to the set, which is located in Lake Snowden, about 8 miles outside Athens.

 

Lake Snowden is a small campground, about a mile from Albany, Ohio. In hunting season, it functions as a deer check-in station, and the rest of the time it is open to RV camping and fishing. The lake isn’t very big, but the grounds around it are spacious and a great place to run dogs. Which I used to do, because my father actually lived across the highway from it for many years, and when I was an OU student and living with him, I would romp with his beagle in the park.

 

The production leased 8 trailers from a company in Circleville, and had them delivered about a month ago. They are arranged along the gravel roads of the park, on one side of the lake. When we arrived, people were on the roof of one of the trailers, putting down sheets of cotton to simulate snow. They had also made a bunch of ice and snow ( how I don’t know—in theatre we would use confetti), and were packing it on the ground in the areas  where we were going to shoot. Last week, the park was a winter wonderland—this week, cold, but no snow to be found. So through the magic of movies, a snowy trailer park appeared again.

 

They dropped us off at one of the trailers, which serves as the green room for the cast. I wish I could say I was taken to my trailer, and I suppose I could, but there were a lot of other people in it. The exteriors of the trailers are decorated for shooting scenes, but the inside of most of them are used for other reasons-- actor’s green rooms, crew green rooms, storage of equipment, guinea pig storage (more on that later)—and a few have been decorated for interior filming.

 

The bedroom of the cast trailer was a costume room, where my costume was selected (half my own clothes, and half purchased by the production). I was made up, which was really just a little powder for my nose and dark circles, and then the director, Patrick Mulberger, came in, and wrangled us outside to block the first scenes.

 

The whole weekend’s work, and next weekend’s too, is about filming what looks to be maybe 5 minutes of screen time when all will be said and done. The sequence is as follows: a group of us trailer park residents butt into an ice-fishing bobhouse on the lake, where Merle Ring (Jon Farris) has sequestered himself for the winter. He has a cigarbox full of cash from a lottery drawing he won, and the advent of all that money has thrown his neighbors for a loop. We squeeze into his tiny shack, I spot the box and grab it, someone else grabs it from me, and we all run out of the shack, and scrabble on the icy lake for the box, till I knock it into the air, and all the money showers out. As we are trying to catch the flying money, we notice one of the trailers has caught fire. We all rush to it, I try to organize a little bit of firefighting, but it’s too late. The trailer is engulfed, and the fire department arrives. End of sequence.

 

So, Friday night was about filming the attempted firefighting from the front. In other words, the camera was placed where the trailer would be, and it would film us looking at the fire. The crew stretched huge sheets of mylar between poles, and bounced powerful lights off it, and the wind blowing against the mylar threw flickering light across our faces that looked like the reflection of flames. We each had a few specific actions to perform in the shot, and I had a few lines, and they filmed us wide-angle, medium, close-up, and from a few other angles as well. It took about 3 hours of filming the same 30 seconds of action, which always ended with an Albany fire truck arriving behind us, and some real firemen running out with equipment.

 

Then came the waiting. From 9:30pm till 1:00 am I hung out in the trailer, paced around outside, though it was bitter cold. I brought a book, but I kept being distracted by the waiting, which sounds weird, but it’s true. It’s that way backstage in a play for me too—I’ve never been able to do what other actors do, such as read, nap, work crosswords, knit—I just usually pace, and try to keep my head in the game. I’ll chat with other actors now and then, but mostly I just pace. Even when I am chatting I am listening to the play. Can’t do that on a film set—they lock everything down so no noise interferes. Finally, Jill, the asst. director came to get me for some more close-ups, and by 1:30am, I was wrapped. Patrick announced “ That’s a wrap for Mark” and the crew applauded, which was nice, till I learned they applaud every time someone wraps, every day. It’s less about what a good job the actor did, and more about “ good, get this meat puppet out of here,  we are moving on.”

 

The only actor I knew beforehand was Jon Farris, but the rest of got acquainted as we waited. Most everyone already knew each other, so I just listened as they talked with each other. Gradually I was drawn into the conversations, and by the end of the first night we were all laughing and joking, and shivering. This last was because none of the trailers have heat. They aren’t even electrified. There are a bunch of generators all around the set, from which long extension cords run into the trailers, for lamps and space heaters, but you could see your breath in the room.

 

The park bathroom was open to us, but that was a frosty experience. There was also a tent set up for craft service, which was unheated as well.

 

When I first arrived, after I had been costumed and made-up, I stepped outside for a look around, and a smoke. When I was nearly done, Jen the producer came to me and said, “ Um, actually, we are not allowed to smoke at Lake Snowden” I looked at her incredulously. This is outside. There are campfire-rings everywhere. Jonny Look, one of the co-directors, just looked at Jen and shook his head, and she said, “ Ok by me”. So the smoking ban was lifted. This prompted a few other actors to come out and light up with me.

 

Our craft service dinner that night was Quizno’s subs and Red Bull. In fact, all the meals over the weekend were a college student’s dream of what craft service is--Saturday was  Chipotles, and Sunday was Papa John’s pizza. Not that I was complaining—except for the Chipotle, which I hate.

 

Later in the evening, during my purgatory of waiting, I came outside to watch the guinea pig scene. See, the trailer that burns is full of dozens of guinea pigs kept by Flora, an eccentric character in the film. One of the actions of the film for Tyler (left, with his new best friend), who plays the park handyman Terry, is to watch the fire and then notice a guinea has escaped and it runs to him and he picks it up and cradles it. For most of the evening he was using a dead guinea pig—that’s right, you heard me. One of the film’s stock of guinea pigs had died, and it’s body was frozen and used in the long shots. The production had to get Humane Society permission to use this frozen rodent. But when close-up time came, out came the star guinea pig. The stunt rodent was put back on ice, and the real article came out. There were 3 guinea pigs, each with their own wrangler, and a representative from the ASPCA, who was on set to ensure the creature was treated correctly, and also to eat heartily from craft service—I notice everything, my friend!

 

I told Tyler never in his career will he work with a co-star better tended. They stretched chicken wire around the close-up area, and scraped the ice away, so the little feller wouldn’t freeze his little feet. I was off to one side, watching, and during a break and reset, Tyler looked over, saw the look on my face, and burst out laughing. It was a freakin’ rodent, for God’s sake! They needed all the ASPCA stuff so they could place the disclaimer in the credits “ No animals were injured yada yada yada…” I doubt there will be a phrase like “ except for the one whose frozen body we used…” Maybe there will be a dedication notice at the end of the credits “ For Blinky 2008-2009”

 

I am determined to get one of those guinea pigs after we wrap shooting.

Trailer Park #1

For those who don’t know, I am a cast member of the feature film Trailer Park, which is shooting in Athens County, and on location in Michigan. I just completed my first weekend of shooting, and it was a blast. (That's me in the green cap at left...)

 

First, a little background—this is the first feature film to come out of the Ohio University film department. They have been leading up to this for a number of years, marshalling resources and assembling the right mixture of personnel. Frederick Lewis, the professor and progenitor of the project, told me they had been planning to move into feature production for sometime, and this year all the right elements of talents and personality coalesced. The students usually made 5 or 6 30 minute films each year, but department decided it was time to give them experience in the whole package, so the usual format was scrapped, and everything was bent toward one massive project. Seventy students make up the crew, from co-directors, producers, cinematographer, cameramen, sound engineers on down to grips, craft service personnel, costumes, makeup, and production assistants. They have a few websites to which I’ve linked at the left-hand side of the page, which include pics, blogs, and background, so I won’t spend much time on that. It’s fun reading though.

 

The screenplay is based on a book of short stories by Russell Banks, (author of The Sweet Hereafter, and Affliction, among many others) which is set in a trailer park. Each story features a different resident of the community, and each of the featured characters reappear as minor characters in the other stories, so the work is unified around the life of this particular place. It isn’t about the clichéd trailer trash that we usually see—the characters of this piece are just people at a certain point in the journey of their lives—people who are just starting out in life (a newlywed couple), people who are there after their financial situations have forced them to harbor at the park till they can reboot their lives, and people who find themselves rather at the end of their journeys (my character could be considered one of those, though he certainly doesn’t see himself in that vein). The screenplay is episodic, as one might expect, being based on a series of stories. The writers ( four of them, 2 of which are the directors, Patrick Mulberger and Jonny Look), have chosen to feature just a few of the plotlines, and my character, Dewey Knox, a retired military man, is not one of the main plotlines. But he emerges as the antagonist, or one of them—more on that later.

 

The crew has been working on this project for a year—writing the script, scouting locations throughout Ohio and surrounding states, game-planning and storyboarding all the shots and set-ups. They meet constantly, organized into cadres and departments, and workshop all possible scenarios. They spent months negotiating with various local governments for access to locations, trailer dealers (the main set is at Lake Snowden in Athens County, a smallish campground/park, and they trucked in 8 or 9 trailers a month back and set em up around the lake, to create the Trailer Park. They have contracts with SAG, and agreements with ASPCA , Ohio EPA, local fire and police agencies, as well as hotels, and food providers. They are in touch will all the union rules of the various guilds, and seem to be on top of their game in all aspects.

 

I have always avoided doing student films. I’ve seen enough of them to know that the filmmaking looks good, but the stories and the acting are usually lame.  Plus, no one is out there writing scripts for 50 year old guys. If they need someone my age, it’s to support a 20 year guy.

 (This is why I also tend to avoid working with young theatre companies full of young actors—they choose plays for themselves and their age brackets).It sounds arrogant I know, but I consider what I’ve learned about acting over the years to be more valuable a commodity than to be used as a filler for someone’s else’s dream. Acting is essentially a young person’s game—by the time most actors reach my age, they’ve long since given up banging their heads against the wall and joined society as a productive, if disappointed, member. My head still rings, but I’ve learned to embrace the pain. And I have my own reasons for still playing the game, and I have my own rules, so I long ago outgrew the “ I just want to work” mindset of many actors. It has to be right for me. Life is too short to spend the time and emotional capital on something that doesn’t please me, and teach me.

 

So I was prepared to pass on this opportunity as well. While I have the normal narcissism of most actors, I never had the need to see myself on film. Certainly not in a film of poor quality and story, that would be out there for all time. Plus, I hate waiting, and on film sets, that’s what you do: some famous actor, I forget who, said “ They don’t pay me for acting, I do that for free—they pay me for the waiting.” Film, unlike theatre, is not actor-centric. It is director-centric, process-centric—long stretches of time are spent lighting and rigging and all that. Sometimes the acting portion seems to be something they attend to after they can’t think of any other technical thing to do first. I know that’s a vast over-simplification, but as an actor, that’s how it feels.

 

But I realized that while I am conversant in all things theatrical, my film knowledge is scant. And when I learned how large the scale of this project would be, I thought why not get in on it, and learn something new.

 

The directors had come to see Escanaba in Love at CATCO, in which I performed last fall, and sent me an email asking if I would read for their movie. After an initial, pompous spasm of “ I don’t read for 20 year olds”, I thought, why not? It’s their project, their rules, if I am going to do this I need to come in open, so I said no problem, and even arranged to read in Athens, rather than accept their offer to come to Columbus. So I read, poorly, and figured that was that. This is not modesty. I was awful, not very prepared, and still harbored a distrust and ambivalence about doing film.

 

To my surprise, they emailed me few weeks later, offered me the role, gave me the details (SAG, meals, driving, etc), sent me the final script, kept me in the loop with tons of emails concerning costumes, dietary preferences, call sheets and location info, and here we are at my first weekend of shooting, though the film has been shooting for about 3 weeks (they only work weekends, another plus for me).

 

More on the weekend’s activities in the next post:

 

http://www.trailerparkmovie.com/

 

http://trailerparkmoviephotos.blogspot.com/

 

 

Sketch Idea

I was emailing my brother this morning, joking about how his extended tour in Korea is taking on Apocalypse Now proportions, and that I'll soon be tasked by my family to go up river and terminate his command.

Then I thought about making a sketch where some Marlowe-like guy gets a mission, during Vietnam, to go up river and find Bob Hope's traveling GI Christmas Tour, and terminate that. Not very topical, I know, but the idea of it made me laugh.

" He's operating beyond the pale of human conduct...still telling jokes from the 1940s...head-lining Anita Ekberg, for chrissakes! Terminate the comedian's command--with extreme prejudice."

Items of interest, or not...

In my never-ending quest to belittle people who are more successful than I, here are a few items which crossed my screen this morning:

 

Item #1:

 

Darrell Sandeen, the actor who played Buzz Meeks in LA Confidential (one of my favorite movies), died yesterday from injuries sustained in a fall. He will be buried in the crawlspace underneath his house. No truth to the rumor that he was last seen with a hooker cut to look like a famous movie star.

 

Item #2

 

And speaking of that last line, Halle Berry is, and I quote, “preparing” for a drastic haircut—she’s gonna shave her head bald for a role in her next movie, which is entitled, and I am not kidding here—Nappily Ever After.

 

According to IMDB.com, her decision to shave the noggin is inspired by a desire to make her 11 month old daughter proud of her career. She said, “"I don't want my daughter to look back at my work and think, 'Mom sold out.' I want to leave a legacy that she can be proud of."

 

Ok. A few things. First, preparing to shave her head? Is there a process to this preparation? Is she going to look at pictures of Bruce Willis and Telly Savalas and Yul Brynner? Is that part of the preparation? Will she have a coach?

 

And…Nappily Ever After? Really? I am going to say it again—Nappily. Ever. After. Her daughter will one day think, yeah, I know Mom won the Oscar for Monster’s Ball, and gave a gut-wrenching performance in it, but so what, you know?  I never really knew how good she was till I saw Nappily Ever After. I mean, she was BALD, people! Now that is a legacy I can be proud of! And she did it for me! Took a look at all her film offers and thought to herself, “ Now which movie will make my daughter proud of me…hey, here’s one-- Nappily. Ever. After.”

 

Item #3

 

Leonardo DCaprio has come out against the Berlin Wall. Yes, let the chips fall where they may, he doesn’t care. This courageous star recently gave a speech in Berlin, and told the crowd that when he was 12, he came to Berlin to visit his grandmother—his oma, as he called her, for those 2 or 3 Germans who don’t speak English—and this forward-thinking, child savant saw even at his young age the significance of the Wall: “…even then I was able to see how a simple wall threatened people's freedoms. My oma (grandmother) took a picture of me in front of the wall the moment we came back from the East side, and I immediately pretended to push the wall down."

 

Later in the speech, Leo also courageously took a stand against the Holocaust, Nixon’s escalation of the Vietnam War into Cambodia, 19^th century child labor laws, and the Spanish Inquisition.

 

I love the fact that he used the word “oma”. I wonder if the crowd cheered each time they heard a German word, like a concert audience when the band mentions a nearby local town? And maybe this emboldened him…the speech began to have more German words, each to applause and cheers---and then I—Aufheben (cheers)—walked along the –STASSE (applause and cheers)…looking for a PROSTITUEIRTE! (pandemonium)!

 

Item #4 (for those counting at home)

 

My favorite douchebag, Mickey Rourke, said recently he thought he would have a career like Al Pacino’s, and this made him think he was invulnerable. He says, “I wanted to be as big as Al Pacino. I thought my acting ability was enough so I didn't play by the rules, I ignored all the politics, I upset people and in the end I lost everything”

 

Of course, unlike the situation with most douchebags, with the Mick you need to read between the lines here. What he is really saying is that he was a maverick and a renegade, who didn’t suck ass and play by the Man’s rules—like Pacino obviously did—and so his career tanked.

 

Item #5

 

Salma Hayek was visiting Africa recently and picked up a little baby and breastfed him. Not kidding. Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzEKVcwx6a4

 

I understand her number of lunch requests have quadrupled since then.

 

My only complaint is that she is sharing her main qualifications with foreigners. Aren’t there starving people right here in America? Ohio, for instance. Grove City, if I may be specific? Just off Alkire Road, if you wanna be  technical about it?

 

 

 

Audience Participation

I know this is strange for a performer to say, but I hate audience participation in plays. I am not that crazy about it from comedians or musicians, either. I don't know why--perhaps it goes to my dislike of improv, which is profound. I prefer precision and preparedness, and audience participation offers neither. I see it as laziness from the stage performers--depending on the nervous giggles from the crowd to supply the void when there are no genuine laughs to be garnered. It's akin to announcing local towns to get cheers from the crowd.

I have warned friends in the past that if you see me in the audience, do not engage me. I am not there to be part of your show--I am there to watch you. If you try to include me, I will ruin it for you, I promise. I am at least as clever as you, and perhaps more so. I might top you, or more likely, I will slow your show down to a crawl. Or I might make it my show. 

Groucho Marx once attended a performance by Harry Houdini, and was asked to come to the stage to verify Houdini wasn't hiding lockpicks. Houdini didn't recognize Marx, who out of costume and makeup resembled a banker or lawyer. Houdini was shackled from head to foot, and asked Marx to look into his mouth to confirm there were no hidden instruments of any kind.

"Look into my mouth and please tell the audience what you see in there." Houdini said.

Groucho peered in for a long moment, and said, " Pyarhea", and returned to his seat.

So, my performer friends, a goodnatured warning: I wish to enjoy your show as a quiet, anonymous audience member. Engage me at your peril.

True Enough Fact #2--The Beatles

A pattern seems to have emerged in my life—once every 18 months or so, I get on an unrelenting Beatles kick, and have to break out all my Fab cds and play em, and get morose over the lost years. I watch the old film clips on Youtube, and look at those young faces and smirky expressions, and I feel almost as if I want to warn them “ Look out ahead, things are going to get rough. Two of you will die young, one of you will lose his wife, and all this camaraderie will fade as you mature and get sick of each other’s company.”

 

I confess, when John Lennon died, I wasn’t as shook up as I was later when George passed. I was 22 in 1980, and while it was a blow when I heard the news, I was young and there were parties to go to, and girls to chase, and college classes to blow off. I was too young to have anything to look back upon with regret yet. I was too shallow to realize that these guys were the background music of my life, and that Lennon’s death meant the end of all that.

 

Later, when George died, 2 months after 9/11, it threw me for a loop. Bad enough that I was a grim, pale and angry middle-aged guy in the aftermath of an event that changed my country forever, I also lost another bit of my childhood with his passing. People say these musicians live on when you hear their songs, but not to me. I hear their songs and see doors closed and locked forever. More and more it gets to be that way with me when I hear songs from my boyish days. I don’t get that pleasure reliving where I was when I first heard the music—I see, instead, the defeats racked up by Time.

 

For example, listening to an old Gordon Lightfoot tune, with his beautiful, troubadour –like voice only reminds me how shot that voice has become in recent years, unable to hold a note. It makes me sad for reasons other than he originally intended. All those guys and girls who filled the pop radio charts in the 70s, when I was a teen, are mostly gone now, either out of show biz, or out of this plane of existence all together.

 

I still get choked up when I see a picture of George Harrison. Though I don’t care for the religion he adopted (or any religion, for that matter), I respect that, unlike the other fabs, he stuck with it till the end. He kept up a level of quality in his music as well. I can tell a Harrison guitar lick at 60 paces.

 

When the remaining Beatles came back together to release “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love”, I was mesmerized. It was a haunting experience. I listened to both over and over. The accompanying videos were equally riveting. It was as if those sealed doors had broken open—how often does that happen in our lives? 25 years after they broke up—15 years after Lennon’s death, the Beatles had returned. Maybe only The Beatles could have pulled off such a return. I still get chills. I know some have knocked the relative merits of those songs, but I don’t care. They move me still.

 

The years have brought me much closer to an appreciation of Lennon. Back in the day, I have to admit, I found him to be something of a pussy—in song, he was forever begging Yoko to take him back, or to forgive him, or kissing her ass in some way or another. Christ, he even called her Mommy! Then he was a househusband for 5 years, after Sean was born. Not a lot to admire from a SE Ohio boy like me.

 

Now that I am 10 years older than he was when he died, I seem to look upon him with a kind of indulgence. He was working it out, you know? Figuring out who he was supposed to be, in the wake of that insane period of idolatry he and the other loveable Moptops went through. And he never stopped with his music, even if he stopped releasing it.

 

All the Beatles had their public moments of douchebaggery, but they were kids really, snarky and shouldering big chips as a result of their lower class backgrounds. No band ever went through so many evolutions, so much scrutiny by media and fans. We’ll never see that again. They were originals. And, as I said, they were the soundtrack of my life. The first song I remember liking was “ She Loves You”—my sister and I would sit on our couch and bounce forward and backward to the beat and sing “Yeah Yeah Yeah”, and would change the lyrics to annoy my younger brother Barry, who we called Beej (for BJ)—“ She loves you, be, be, beej…”

 

Since George died, I find it hard to watch Paul or Ringo as well. They always said John was the brain, Paul the heart, and George the soul. Dunno what Ringo was—the ass? Anyway, once the soul was gone, the rest of it was lost for me. So this semi-regular Beatles kick I’m on is fraught with even more melancholy than usual. So forgive me if you run into me and I am quietly humming “ Rocky Raccoon” and trailing a few tears along my way. It’s a mid-life thing, you know?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D196-oXw2k

and before we "Bale out"...

I understand Brokeback Batman had to be scrapped when Heath Ledger died...here's a still of Ledger bracing himself...what, too soon?

Christian Bale goes off on Cinematographer...

I love it when actors get publicly stupid...I have a feeling Bale is like Russell Crowe--"asshole" is their default position, and every nice or positive thing they do is usually on second thought...

http://www.aolcdn.com/tmz_audio/020209_christianbale.mp3

Just when you thought they couldn't get any lower...

Word comes today that Republican strategists on Capitol Hill are having, as their featured speaker on the stimulus package...wait for it... Joe The Plumber. Apparently, in addition to war correspondent, and country singer, he also received a degree in economics (maybe he minored in this at plumbing college). It seems Mr. Wurzelbacher is not in favor of the stimulus package, and I am positive his speech will contain an in-depth, point-by-point analysis of the package, complete with graphics, historical perspective, future projections based on models in the Keynesian as well as Friedmanian modalities.

Or, you know, he might just say " Fuck that stimulus package!"

Remember when McCain told a crowd that Joe was his hero, and, if elected, he planned to consult Joe on important issues? Like Gov. Pappy O' Daniel in " O, Brother Where Art Thou", who, after pardoning the Soggy Bottom Boys, announces " These here boys is gonna be my brain trust!"

Congrats, Repubs! Keep up the good work! Keep on digging--soon there will be a hole deep enough for you all.

When You Are Old

Reread this favorite of mine, by Yeats...

WHEN YOU ARE OLD

WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep  

 And nodding by the fire, take down this book,   

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look 

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; 

 How many loved your moments of glad grace,         5 

 And loved your beauty with love false or true;   

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, 

And loved the sorrows of your changing face.  

And bending down beside the glowing bars,   

Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled  10  

And paced upon the mountains overhead, 

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.