The audition started. Alan switched on his camera and said, “So. I had dinner with your ex last night. Beth.”
I was unprepared. I just smiled and said, “Oh. That’s nice.”
“She is really something.”
I said, “Yes. She can be very amusing.”
Alan continued, “Why did you two break up?”
I answered flatly, “We had a disagreement as to what constituted a joke.”
There was a silence and then Alan laughed warmly and said, “Very good. Very good, indeed.”
I read through the scenes once more and went back to my room. I heard a day later that I got the part. I am not sure, but I think my reply to Alan’s dinner with Beth tipped the scales in my favor.
I was hired for two weeks at $3,000 a week. This money was enormous. It meant in one week I could pay two months’ rent and have money left over to see a movie and buy a giant tub of popcorn.
One of the scenes I was in was a huge outdoor torchlight rally. They brought in twenty-five hundred extras to be in the audience. It was rumored that one-third of them were using their Klan cards as ID to work in the scene.
When a scene takes place at night you can be sure that you will be shooting until dawn. As springtime in Mississippi was so uncertain, they asked me if I could hang out until they had a go-ahead from the weatherman. They just needed assurance that we would have a twenty-four-hour period with no rain. My two weeks of employment stretched into ten. I was paid for each week I stayed in Mississippi waiting for the green light. I felt like someone just dumped a truckload of money on my head.
Even though I wasn’t working I was “invited” to come to the set. In this movie, the “set” could have been a two-hour drive to a remote town in Mississippi, Georgia, or Alabama. But I said yes. In life it’s good to say yes. Unless you were at my last party.
I was in my trailer waiting to watch them shoot a scene with Gene Hackman when I had a knock on my door. I opened it to find Alan Parker at the foot of my steps. He had heard I was interested in directing, and wondered if I wanted to follow him around and watch him do what he does.
“Sure. Great,” I said.
Since this was near the beginning of my career, I thought directors always invited neophytes to follow them around. Alan first took me over to film editing where we watched his editor Gerry piece together some of yesterday’s work. I asked Alan why he wasn’t supervising the edit. Alan looked at me with mild irritation. “Because it’s Gerry. He’s the best there is and he knows what I want. That’s why I use him.”
We went to see John Willett over in the art department. John told Alan he had made up a new batch of OMD. “What is OMD?” I asked.
Alan smiled and said, “Shall we tell him our secret?”
John laughed and said, “Sure.”
Alan got a naughty look on his face and whispered, “It stands for Old Man’s Dick. It is a mix of purple, yellow, and brown. We make a wash of it and paint it on every prop, every surface of the set, every chair, every table, every door. We make a dye out of it and dip every piece of clothing in it. It’s everywhere.”
“Why?”
Alan smiled. “You’ll see tonight. Come to the dailies.”
I went with Alan that night to the screening of the work from the previous day. I couldn’t wait to see what OMD did to our movie. I watched the dailies but I couldn’t see anything. There was no sign of the dye or the color at all. The scene featured a black man walking down the street. Some white men taunted him. I thought I noticed something, but I wasn’t sure.
Afterward Alan asked me what I saw. “I didn’t see the OMD,” I said.
“I didn’t ask what you didn’t see—I asked what you saw.”
I thought for a moment and then said, “The skin. I saw the black man’s skin.”
Alan’s face turned a lovely red and he said, “Right. The OMD is on everything except human skin. When the human eye senses sameness, it tends to discount it, and it makes what is different jump out. This movie is about the color of a man’s skin. With OMD we fool the brain into focusing on skin tone. Wait till you see it on the big screen.”
I continued over the next weeks to follow Alan around into sound editing, into camera rehearsals, discussions over lenses. One day the routine changed. I sat in on a meeting about the next day’s work. Alan stopped almost midsentence and said, “Stephen, how would you shoot this scene?” I had the cameramen, the director of photography, and head gaffer (the man who does the lighting) looking at me with a certain amount of confusion. I stammered and offered a shooting plan. Alan said, “That would work, but it’s not very good. We’re doing this.” And then he would list a series of shots that I never would have imagined.
For the next month Alan taught me some of the basics of film-making. He constantly threw pop quizzes at me. Quizzes I never passed. He would shake his head and say, “Well, do you understand now?” I would nod. “Yes. I think.” He would laugh and we would be on to the next.
At last, we got the go-ahead to shoot the big Klan rally. Alan was having a drink in the bar with all of the actors. He looked at me and said, “Now it’s your turn. Don’t fuck it up.” Alan looked at me seriously, but I couldn’t help smiling.
I didn’t know what to make of my ten weeks being schooled by Alan Parker. At the time I thought he was being a good guy. Maybe an idiosyncratic guy. I don’t know. But here was a man who was not my friend, not my family, not someone who owed me money, and he was giving me the benefit of everything he had learned. A lifetime of experience. And even more precious, he gave me his time.
Harold Ramis, on the set of Groundhog Day, told me that making it in show business was impossible. Everyone who has made it has to have at least four heroes. Alan Parker is one of my four. I tried to thank him once a few years ago when I saw him in Westwood. He looked vaguely irritated and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Stop it. It was nothing.”
It was everything.
10.
A WAGER WITH FREDDIE
I VISITED WITH some friends from high school when I was back in Texas last summer. They asked me what it’s like to work in Hollywood. They didn’t realize that they were asking a trick question. The trick is that a lot of what we know as Hollywood is not shot in Hollywood anymore. The governing factor is usually money. Hollywood can be anywhere in the world where production is cheap.
One of the centers of cheap production for the last two decades has been Canada, more specifically, Vancouver. Vancouver is a wonderful city filled with bighearted people and highly alcoholic beers. Even if you have never been there, you’ve probably seen it without knowing it. Any movie that takes place in a typical American town but with lots of Indian restaurants in the background is Vancouver. Any movie that takes place in Texas, but with mountains, is probably Vancouver. And any movie whose story features an alien, zombie, space zombie, vampire, ghost, walking dead, or living dead was probably shot in Vancouver. I don’t know how Vancouver became the sci-fi/monster capital of the film world, but it is.
My guess would be that it began with the enormous popularity of The X-Files. Many series followed: The Lone Gunmen, The Outer Limits, Millennium, Poltergeist, The Dead Zone, and the list goes on. If you ran into a fellow actor in Vancouver, it was always a good news/bad news situation. The good news was they were working. The bad news was they were probably working with a mummy.
The first commandment of Hollywood states that as long as the viewing public wants these films and they’re cheap to make, they will be made. I know many people get cognitive dissonance when they try to put the notion of a science fiction movie together with “cheap.” They’re thinking of James Cameron or Steven Spielberg. The principle of entropy applies to everything in the universe. Science fiction movies are no different. There is a big trickle-down from the heights of Avatar. And most of that trickle happens in Vancouver.
There are lots of ways a science fiction film can be made on the cheap. First, you can save a
lot of money on sets by having several scenes take place in a “laboratory.” This technique is a big cost-cutter. A laboratory is just an empty room, anywhere. Put a Bunsen burner and boiling beakers in it and you have a chem lab. Add a body on a slab and you have a medical lab. Throw down some old computer monitors, black desk phones, and a map of the world, and you have a Defense Department lab. Add a map of the solar system, and you have a UFO-conspiracy lab. If the room is concrete, you have an underground lab. In Vancouver they let you shoot in the sewers so you get an underground lab with lots of gauges on the walls and running water.
One of the fringe benefits of shooting in a lab is that you can save on costumes by utilizing the “lab technician.” Translated from producer-speak, this means an extra in a lab coat. Give them a clipboard, and they become an engineer.
By definition, a science fiction movie should not make sense. You don’t need a script. It’s nice if you have one. It’s very nice if you have a good one—but it’s not essential. Jeff Goldblum can turn into a fly or Roland Emmerich can trot out space people, or the Mayan calendar, or weather to destroy the world over and over again, and we all have a good laugh and go out afterward for cheeseburgers.
Rather than a real script, writers use a formula of something that worked before. You can roll your own. I’ll give you five seconds to fill in the blank. The earth is invaded by ________.
I say horses.
Plot: A small town is invaded by horses that have been infected by a virus that came to Earth on a meteorite. At night, the horses change into beautiful, sexy women who go to nightclubs to find prey. They flirt with young men—get them drunk—then take them out to the stables to have sex. In the morning the young men are found dead with a saddle on their back. Curtain.
Title: The Lost Rider.
Setting: A veterinary lab in Vancouver.
The movie I was in was called The Traveler. But due to some random misfortune in timing, Bill Paxton was starring in another movie called Traveller to be released the same month. Our producers changed the name of our film to The Visitor, which was not scary. The Visitor sounded like it could be a domestic comedy about Gramps moving in over the summer or a coming-of-age comedy about a girl’s first period. So they changed the name again to Night Visitors, which was not particularly sci-fi, either. If you add the word “Naughty,” it sounds like a skin flick.
The plot of our movie was as follows: A spaceship crash-lands somewhere in the American desert (which looks an awful lot like a Vancouver suburb). I play a power-mad, megalomaniac colonel. I am put in charge of recovering the alien from the spaceship. My soldiers find the creature and take him to our secret lab, which looks a lot like the main hub of a Canadian sewer system. But then, in a strange breach of military etiquette, I begin a ruthless campaign of kidnapping and murder to eliminate anyone who knows about the spaceship and the little spaceman. I even take out some of my own men. Why? Why not. Not sure.
I asked the writer and director why it was such a big deal that people found out about the alien landing on Earth. They both looked at me like I asked the dumbest question since “Who gave the green light for this film?” The writer said, “Are you kidding? If news got out about the alien, there would be a worldwide panic. Who knows what kind of truth he would reveal to us.”
I was so far off the track on so many levels. From my experience watching movies like this, aliens never know any truth beyond what’s in the Boy Scout oath. Second, I always imagined it would be kind of fun if we knew an alien landed. If we made friends with them, we would probably get to ride in the ship. We could borrow some of their technology to develop a cell phone that worked.
The script had large helpings of the usual ingredients: women and children in jeopardy, angry men with guns, and an innocent, uncomprehending alien. Just like in real life. Clichés and idiotic nonscience peppered the dialogue. The script would have been depressing if it weren’t so derivative. It gave me comfort to know this wasn’t someone’s original vision. It was a sausage made up of bits and pieces of every alien movie I had seen over the last forty years.
One of the main ingredients of this kind of film is something referred to as “suspense,” usually leading up to a dissatisfying climax. There are several possible ways to establish suspense. In this movie, the chosen route is not to show the creature until the final scenes. Most of the movie was a tease. An alien tease.
As filmgoers, we know the visual shorthand used in these types of movies all too well: the sounds of a falling flower vase in another room, odd shadows moving across walls or under closed doors, slime on floors or doorknobs. It means an alien is nearby, but we missed him. Soon, we get the gnawing feeling that someone is setting up the camera in the wrong room on purpose. The central dramatic element becomes “will we see it?” The filmmakers confuse “suspense” with “frustration” that builds throughout the film until you feel like you’re talking to an IRS agent at an audit, or playing golf.
Our producers claimed that they wanted to keep the suspense of the film in the “Hitchcockian tradition.” Translation: the audience’s psychological horror of imagining what the alien looked like was greater than seeing him.
When I saw our alien on the set, I agreed with the producers. It was better not having seen him for the first 95 percent of the film. Not so much out of being true to the “Hitchcockian tradition,” but more in clinging to the “Shakespearean tradition” of “assuming a virtue if you have it not.”
The alien came out of the makeup trailer looking like a green teenager covered in calamari. It did not inspire fear, only hunger. I kept looking at him and wishing I had a squeeze of lemon and some cocktail sauce.
Of course, the main reason why the alien was not seen throughout the movie was cost. Good aliens are hard to find. When you have a good alien like Ridley Scott did in Alien, you have a franchise.
When the day’s shoot was done, we all got in vans and headed for our home away from home. All of the actors from the States working on other sci-fi movies were put up at the Sutton Place Hotel, a.k.a. Hollywood North, a.k.a. the Gray Palace. After a long day of menacing women and children, I would sit down in the Gerard Lounge, the hotel’s wonderful bar. Relaxing amidst its paneled walls, burning fireplace, and prominent moose head, I was able to muse on how big an entire moose would be. I heard that the Canadian government has since cracked down on the Sutton Place and made them remove the moose head because it represented animal cruelty. A day late and a dollar short if you ask me.
On any given night you could have one of those highly alcoholic beers or a glass of what was described as “Canadian wine” and talk over the day’s work with friends. You could mingle with the locals who knew this place was an “actor’s bar” and hung out here in hopes of “getting lucky.”
Packs of young, attractive Canadian actresses hung around the Gerard Lounge in hopes of getting discovered by a producer. There were apocryphal stories about the local actress who hung out at the bar and was cast as Queen of the Space Vampires. I always suspected a producer started those stories.
The next week we had to shoot one of the climactic scenes of our movie. Here, we experienced another common feature of low-budget science fiction productions: the last-minute rewrite.
The scene involved the confrontation between me and the heroine of the movie (played by Faith Ford). She steals the alien from me and hides it in a box. I retaliate by kidnapping her little boy. This scene was the exchange, the final showdown. Of course, my real plan was to take the alien and kill them all.
As originally scripted the action took place at night, in a deserted warehouse district with snipers in helicopters ready to take out our leading lady. Faith pointed out to the director and producers that it made no sense for her character to go to a deserted warehouse area at night to meet me. Her character was “smart.” She would pick a safe exchange location. After all, she had the alien so she could dictate terms. Logic demanded the exchange take place during the day and in a crowd. Not only d
id that argument make sense, but it also meant they could cut the helicopters, which cost too much anyway.
When I discovered we were shooting the final scene at the Vancouver Art Museum during the day, I was confused. I went to the director and asked why we changed the scene’s location. He explained the logic of not having the scene occur at night in a deserted place. I said it made perfect sense. But the previous 95 percent of the movie (that was already shot) was based on the logic that the alien had to be kept a secret. I killed anyone who found out about the alien. The reason for kidnapping Faith’s son was to keep the alien a secret. If we exchanged hostages at the Vancouver Art Museum and in broad daylight, how could I keep hundreds of extras from seeing the alien? I would have to kill them all.
The director looked like he wanted to go back home to Argentina. He asked what I would suggest. “I would suggest a rewrite three months ago, but this isn’t a time travel movie,” I said.
He looked at me wearily. “So . . .”
“So . . . we have to do the only thing we can do at this point. We keep the alien in the box.”
“Then how do you know the alien is in the box without opening the box and showing it to everyone?” he asked.
From years of watching Saturday matinees at the Texas Theatre, I had the answer. “We have to rely on the history of other alien movies. We have to use an ‘alien detector.’”
“What?”
“Yes. We will need some piece of phony equipment, like a Geiger counter, that can tell if an alien is in the area. I’ll pass it over the closed box. Read the display. It reads positive for aliens. Bingo. We move forward. No one will know.”
The director thought for a second. He liked it. The search started for an alien detector. One of the guys in the sound department offered us a decibel reader. It was a handheld piece of equipment with a graduated scale and a moving pointer on the front. At one end of the scale it had a C and at the other end it had an A. I thought, “This is perfect!” The A at one end could stand for “Alien” and what made this even better was that there was a button on the side of the device and when I pressed it, the pointer would jump to the letter A. This way the cameraman could get a close-up shot of the device working. The director wanted to know what to do about the C at the other end of the dial. Was it confusing? Should they black it out? What does the C stand for?
The Dangerous Animals Club Page 11
