Magic Hours

by Tom Bissell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  EXT. MAIN STREET—NIGHT

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

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

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

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

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

  INT. ROSY’S DINER—MORNING

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

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

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

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

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

  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 defe
nsive 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.

  INTERMISSION

  “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.