August 14, 2094 - Action! Almost!

No, 90 years haven't magically passed since my previous entry, I just mistyped it.

After another unnecessarily large and varied breakfast, we went to the Natural History Museum. They had a special exhibit of butterflies you could walk through and have them land on you if you were wearing bright colors. I was mistakenly wearing earth tones, so the butterflies looked at me like I was dirt.

We only had about an hour and were thinking of skipping the museum entirely and going to a garage sale down the street, but I found one of the tags you get when you buy admission and I put it on and voila--instant access.

So, we experienced being a butterfly outcast, then drove to the set. We arrived a half hour late, but that was really a half hour early since I wanted to be there early to run lines with the women formerly known as my co-star but I'm getting tired of explaining how we aren't starring.

The first half hour was spent once again in serious costume deliberations. I had brought what I thought I would wear (a shirt with a very big pattern of fragments of American flags, daisies and the portrait of George Washington from the dollar), but it didn't "go with" anything Karen had brought, so she'd cleverly brought a gold satin pirate-style shirt for me, that would, cleverly, match the leopard skin top she'd also brought (along with enough costumes to clad the extras in Gone With The Wind if they'd wanted to look like hippies and gypsies.

It was very hot, and I was wearing my costume pants, which are red cargo pants that should look great but were too warm, so finally I just had to take off my pants. Luckily, I was wearing attractive new boxer-briefs I just bought at the Territory Ahead outlet store last night. I am not immodest but like I said this is attractive underwear, and further more, no one wants to look anyway.

Then we practiced our tango move with it's big ending and matching head-snaps, and ran our lines and ate some prop cookies which, happily, were real cookies, otherwise swallowing might have been difficult and digestion questionable.

Then Lovely Jeanne, the producer, director and crafts services manager, called to say they were running at least two hours late and we should go to lunch. So we got in the car, tried to find our way down the winding hills, then tried to find my hotel so I could get my shorts so I didn't have to continue to make appearances in my underwear, especially in front of people I had just met, as this might make a bad impression and make them exclaim, "My eyes, My eyes!"

It took forever to find the hotel as many of the charming streets are dead-ends, but we finally found it and I had to ask the proprietor for another key to the room. I wondered what he'd think when he say my attractive co-star and me without my wife asking for the key to my room but I'm sure he's seem worse.

The joke is my wife came back to the hotel a bit later and wanted to ask the proprietor for a key (because she didn't notice the key was on the same key ring as the car keys in her hand), and if she'd done it when Karen and I were in the room, can you imagine what the poor man would have to do? Would he open the door for her or tell her he didn't have a key and try to get her to leave without finding me in the room with another woman?

So I got my shorts and asked the proprietor (who probably wondered why I was so quick with my co-star, except, as I said, he might have seen some of my character's mini-porn which would explain it) where he suggested we eat. He hated Mexican food, so he couldn't recommend that, but he did recommend a pizza place where it would be easy to park, and after driving endlessly to find the hotel, this seemed like a good idea.

Karen, my co-star, who, as I've said before isn't really a co-star since we aren't starring but calling her a co-supporting-player doesn't have the same ring and besides, I think the word "player" has taken on an unseemly tone I want to keep out of this.

Oh, to finish the previous sentence, after the meal of burnt pizza, my co-star went around saying, "Have you ever been to Dino's pizza on Cliff? No? Good--don't go there." And everyone else said, "But they have the best pizza in town!"

OK, so the director has arrived. We're only about three hours late, which is good considering the fact that they had to shoot three outdoor scenes this morning. Now the action is fast and furious. I've met Trent, the Ozzie cinematographer, and the real star, or co-star of the movie, who's name I don't remember which only reflects badly on me, because she's a memorable woman and I'm just very bad at names. Rita! How could I forget? She really is a fantastic actress. My mind is just mush at the moment, which must be clear from this entry.

I've put on my costume, which is the gold silk shirt/blouse with a tie-up front that would normally expose the lush carpet that is my chest hair, but I'm wearing a t-shirt because I neglected to bring a hair dryer so am unable to do the Christopher Reeves Star Hairdryer Underarm maneuver.

I also put on some base makeup to cover my birthmark. I have a birthmark on my forehead kind of like Gorbechov's, only mine is in the shape of California with the Catalina Islands, and then it runs down my nose as if it was left out in the rain.

So I put on the makeup and look a little unnatural like Michael Jackson if he had a nose, and then Karen gives me a sponge to remove most of it so now I just look like California had been hidden under flesh-colored fog.

OK, we're almost ready for the set. We did a quick run through of our tango. Karen is taunting me for typing rather than acting, so I must go.

Action!

Now the magic happens. Or so we like to believe. It's all about believing. Believing you are who you are pretending to be, or that you can appear to believe you are who you are pretending to be, or, at the very least, believing that you don't stink so badly that the director is going to replace you with his or her brother-in-law, or, in this case, the associate producer/production designer, a man who bears an uncanny likeness to you, as if he's there solely to make you believe "You can be replaced!"

Jeanne is too nice to replace me, I think. No, I know she's too nice. But, just as Karen has gone around saying, "I don't want to ruin Jeanne's movie," I don't want to ruin it either.

Before we drove down here I read something about basic student movie-making clichés. And I was really sorry I did, because one of the clichés was "eyebrow acting," acting that was far too big for the screen and involved a lot of eyebrow movement.

Now, I understand how "real" cinema acting works (OK, so now we have film, movies, and cinema, and I assume that "cinema" is the more European-ish of the three, and therefore the most chi-chi. I would like to say it's the jejune because that word always sounds so classy and European-ish, but I don't know what it means. Wait, I just used my computer thesaurus and it means "sophomoric" or "juvenile" so it's not the right word at all and it's a good thing I didn't use it or everyone would realize that my vocabulary was woefully incomplete).

Oh, so "real" cinema, even movie acting is supposed to be very subtle. Since your nose is enlarged to the height of a 3 story building, every little movement of your face is similarly magnified, so even normal facial expressions could appear gigantic and grotesque.

In my case it's difficult to not do eyebrow acting because I have very large eyebrows, we're talking Peter... why can't I remember anyone's name, he's the guy on the O.C. who's done a million movies, each one was supposed to make him a big star yet none never did and he has real talent and has been on Broadway. You know surely who I mean. Lord. It's an Irishy name. I'll think of it later. Gallagher. That's it.

So my face features very large eyebrows and despite the gray in my hair and beard they're still dark brown as if I color them, which I don't, because that would be stupid and perhaps even dangerous. It would be like when Madonna had platinum blonde hair and black eyebrows--it would make no sense, but in my case it's natural and I'm not going to bleach them to make them more gray, so they are the way they are, and they are a major component of my face.

The only way I could avoid acting with them would be a generous shot of botox right in the middle of my head, which I can't abide because I've had a life long fear of botulism which is a highly deadly poison--just a spec of it can kill you. It's "anaerobic" which means it only grows where there's no air--like in canned foods, and if the can if puffy, it can have botulism and if you don't boil it for something like 15 minutes you will be as dead as the acting on Madonna's face.

I don't know why I've always been afraid of botulism but I just have. Maybe I died of it in a previous life. Or maybe I've just always known that someday some brilliant marketing mind would say, "Hey, let's take one of the world's most deadly toxins and inject it right into people's faces!" To me this is utter lunacy, if not idiocy, and paying someone to fill you with deadly toxins is even more stupid. So that's not going to happen to my face, which means my eyebrows will continue to be uncontrollably mobile.

It's like our chinchilla, who likes to get inside my shirt and make this odd-looking lump, and when he moves around I call him my "mobile goiter" which my wife and I still find hilarious after many years, despite the fact that normal people will probably recoil in horror when they read this.

So back to eyebrow acting--I read that thing and thought, "I'm doomed. I can't say anything without my eyebrows moving, so unless I can act telepathically, and say nothing, just think the words... no, then my eyebrows would move, too.

It's like this military thing I saw at a geek fest, where all you have to do is think about a word and your larynx or vocal cords unconsciously form those words. So a machine could have a camera trained, not on your face or mouth, but on your neck, and it could "read your mind" because as you were thinking words, it could read the them by the subtle changes on the skin of your neck. Or something. It seemed too sci-fi, too unreal, and yet there were geeky guys from some NASA lab demonstrating it, though it could all easily have been fake and perhaps they were just trying to get sponsors to pay for their research, but whatever, I believed it, even though it was unbelievable.

And we're back to believing.

So first we do some run-throughs, and oddly, none of us can remember the lines and there are these gaps where we can't quite figure out why it's going the way it's going or how we can remember what your line is because it doesn't seem to follow the previous one, which is the way conversations are in real life, but even so, it's hard to remember.

I'm actually the worst, and it's pretty embarrassing, because I'd changed a few of the lines and I should have remembered them, but I didn't. For me it's hard to memorize lines without blocking (blocking is the "staging," like, "Enter stage right, doing the tango. Do a big dip, look at each other, then look front simultaneously and say your first line. Then move behind that counter and make her some tea, then touch her hand, then make tea, then wince as your screen wife flicks you on the ear.")

The blocking makes it easier to remember lines, because it creates a progression of events. So I'd practiced my lines and seemed to know them while sitting down, but I couldn't remember them all standing up.

The director directed us and it started to get better and we went over the lines faster, because in movies you really need to talk fast.

I didn't know this but it's something I learned from Howard Cohen. He said, "Watch 'His Girl Friday,' see how fast they talk." I did and they did--they talk almost impossibly fast, and yet it just seems normal. That's really hard. Who knew that all this movie making stuff was actually pretty hard when with reality shows today it looks like any idiot with a face can get on TV and make entertainment.

So we run the scenes faster and faster. The only negative comment the director makes is that my earring (a clip on Karen gave me because it matched my shirt and went with the kind of Spanish Pirate motif of the shirt) was too much. "It's all I can see," she said as I ripped it off, not wanting to be upstaged by an earring.

It's getting better. The tango is very sharp--well, we're acting as if we're bad dancers but the look, snap, look part is slick and funny. Now the lights are on and it's very, very hot. We do a take, and it seems to go fine.

I think something has gone fine if I can't remember it. That means I've been working unconsciously rather than thinking about what I was doing. If I can remember what I'm doing, then I've done something wrong, like said a line wrong or something.

Most of the takes are fine. I stop thinking and just feel it. I'm actually worried about the lead character, Ella, because the actress, Rita, is so good that all I have to do is react. She looks like she's going to cry, she's welling right up and it's because of a little joke I make, and I feel really badly about it. I just do.

I try not to look at the monitor, which displays the high-res, wide-screen playback, and it's a mistake when I notice and see this is a closeup, because of course then I cannot spit out my lines. I am the only one who screws up their lines and it makes me feel like an amateur idiot. No one seems to mind and we just go on but then I'm not sure what I've done and whether it makes any sense or is at all believable or real. But if I'm not sure it's probably OK, but I don't know why I have trouble spitting out some very simple lines, a few that I've written myself. But I do.

Our scene is three pages long, yet it will probably be about 45 seconds, tops. It requires about 24 separate takes. There's the "master shot" which is a wide shot (the camera is far back so everyone in the scene can be seen at the same time). Then there are close ups of each actor throughout the scene, in case the director wants to insert close-ups at any time.

I think I blow my close ups. I do flub a line, but then we keep going. I think the take is terrible and want to do it again but they all think it's fine, which either means I don't know what I'm talking about or they don't care they just want to move on, or I am really brilliant and just working so intuitively and subconsciously that I can't recognize it. As much as I'd like to  believe the later, the truth is that I just think I wasn't very good, but decide not to dwell on it, because actors are have notoriously low self-esteem, so the others probably feel this and just don't want to say it. I wouldn't say it except I'm writing it here tellking far more than I should.

Then there are different angles of the scene--this angle highlights me and Karen, that angle highlights Rita and Oliver, and another shot looks over my shoulder at Ella. Shoulder acting is tricky--you have to be able to communicate your emotions using nothing but the back side of your shoulder--and you have to do all this without moving. Cary Grant could do this. Katherine Hepburn was a master of the "back acting," where you could tell, just from seeing her back, how she felt--look for it in "Desk Set," the scene in her apartment with Spencer Tracey--watch her body language, her neck, hands--and yes, even her back. And Meryl can act from any side, the soles of her feet can act, even in pitch blackness.

But I am not nearly that advanced, so I'm pretty sure my shoulder will look brain dead.

After three hours, and 24 takes, we are done for the night. Now--if you think three hours for 45 seconds of film is slow, then you don't know movie making. A 45 second scene can take days or even weeks on big-budget films. It can take half a day to light each different take, which means that 24 takes could take 12 work days--if everything went right.

So three hours for 24 takes is like supersonic filmmaking. Our cinematographer is really a cinematographer for Australian TV, so he has to be fast (since the news rarely allows for retakes). He set the lighting, manned the digital camera, and even moved the camera.

Everyone tells everyone else how good they were. Rita tells me that Karen and I are so full of life and energy. I think this is a very sweet thing to say, since "energy" is what I want to convey, but I also think she's just being nice. But I'm not just being nice when I say she's so good it makes re-acting (and some say "acting is reacting") easy.

The crew compliments us, they love the dance and think we're funny. I tell them they made it easy. But I know how it is on the set, and everyone tends to think everyone else is wonderful--partly because they really are, and partly because this is what extreme fatigue does--you can think everyone is wonderful or think they are all idiots, and on a movie set it can go either way, but on good movie sets everyone is always wonderful, as they were today.

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