The Roma were very persistent in their begging. A needy mother would hold her child aloft, stump prominently displayed a little too close for comfort. When I declined, the woman simply followed me down the street, refusing to take no for an answer. After a few of these disturbing encounters, I discovered the magic bullet: speak French to them. Americans are well known as suckers around the globe, but the French are much better at being detached and indifferent. The Roma must have known this, because as soon as I said, “Je ne sais pas si le Cameon pourra traverser le pont,” in my best French (translation: “I don’t know if the truck will be able to cross the bridge”), my stalker turned on a heel and never bothered me again.
WARNING: Eye contact with a Roma constitutes a binding marriage/adoption agreement.
The Roma were doing what they had to do, I suppose. Scorned for decades, mistrusted, they are still mostly ignored in Europe, and yet Roma are seemingly everywhere. I always wondered, What does a Roma man or woman do all day? Their main mode of transportation was a horse and buggy. The image of a Roma driving these carts around hasn’t changed in centuries – like a snapshot from another time, only it still existed.
One sleepy Sunday morning, I heard clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop – the unmistakable sound of a horse’s gait – from the street below my apartment. I shuffled over for a look. A Roma man pulled his cart, loaded with cardboard, to a halt in front of a Dumpster. After some motivated rummaging, he found a few pieces of cardboard, tossed them atop his pile and clip-clopped away.
I made some morning tea, then heard another clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop sound approaching. This time, another Roma man pulled his cart full of metal scraps to a halt at the same Dumpster and added a few prize pieces to his collection. The construction site across the street was an added “supplier.” Now I just waited, looking out the window, wondering who would come next and what they were looking for. It didn’t take long. A few minutes later, a Roma woman arrived on foot, pulling a cart. She was looking for clothing and found several pairs of nylons. It was the ultimate form of recycling. Ida and I later noticed that clothing items, or broken appliances, were sometimes placed in the Dumpster neatly and purposefully by tenants, because they knew that the Roma were going to search for items anyway.
The Roma may be considered second-class citizens by some, but I almost lost my wife to one – at least in her heart. Ida was walking down a side street one sunny afternoon and a “stunningly beautiful” (her words) Roma man, driving a horse and buggy, turned the corner in her direction. Ida relishes telling the story, to anyone who will listen, about this mid-twenties demigod of a man with caramel, flawless skin, penetrating eyes and sinewy muscles, passing her in ultra-slow motion. Their eyes met for just a moment – but it was a moment.
At the end of Ida’s story, I always have to wave my hand in front of her face to bring her back to reality.
DOG DAY AFTERNOON
I live in rural Oregon, so I’ve seen plenty of wildlife, but not the Bulgarian kind. As Americans, growing up on iconic animal TV programs and movies, like Lassie and even Air Bud, we get the naïve sense that, as “man’s best friend,” loyal canines are living the dream all over the world – fetching sticks or slobbery tennis balls for appreciative owners who feed them food that makes their coats shiny. Sadly, it’s a very distorted and untrue picture of what our shaggy four-legged friends are really faced with beyond the local dog park.
It’s a pretty basic situation: Whenever a country struggles just to put food on the table of its human citizens, everything else gets sloppy seconds. Dogs in Sofia, Bulgaria, ran in packs, partially out of instinct, but I would guess it was also for protection. Nobody really wanted to mess with nearly half a dozen hungry, mangy dogs. I had to make peace with this sad situation early on.
My first visit to the “production office” made it abundantly clear that I was not in the land of Lassie anymore. Upon my getting out of the production van, a pack of dogs peered out from scrubby fields and the relative safety of a crumbling building. Ornate concrete pots, once used to display large plantings in front of an abandoned office building, now served as uncomfortable beds for several canines.
Creeped out by this horrible situation, I returned the next day with the largest bag of dry dog food I could find. This time, I was ready for the mangy mutts and began the ritual of whistling as loud as I could – a skill honed at Tiger Stadium in Detroit as a kid – in an attempt to teach the dogs that the shrill sound was synonymous with eating food. It didn’t take long for them to catch on, and soon I became the Pied Piper of homeless canines. One loud whistle brought out at least half a dozen dogs of all sizes and dispositions to see what was being served up.
But just because I provided food didn’t mean we were going to become fast friends. To feed dogs in Bulgaria, you poured out a healthy glob of food and got the hell out of the way. You didn’t pet these pooches, which had developed a latent mistrust of humans. I tried once and almost lost a finger, so I was content to provide a bright spot in their otherwise dismal lives.
THE UNTOUCHABLES
Bulgaria was racing toward the future (and has subsequently joined the volatile European Union), but remnants of communism were everywhere. When the central government lost control, many of the local power brokers simply stepped in and things got done “mafia-style.” When I was prepping Man with the Screaming Brain, the local newspaper ran a story of two men dressed as priests who entered a restaurant, found their target, blew him away with automatic weapons and simply walked out – presumably to get back to the rectory for afternoon mass …
Bodyguards seemed to be everywhere. It was not unusual to see a sedan with black-tinted windows racing down the street with four ninja-like bodyguards flanking the car on motorcycles. These guys made no effort to hide their guns – they wanted you to know that armaments were part of the security detail.
Traveling back from set one day, we were on a road with a speed limit of 35 miles per hour. Traffic was thick and moving even slower than the posted limit. Out of nowhere, we heard the roar of engines as four black SUVs passed us in the opposite lane going around 70 miles an hour. Cars on both sides of the narrow street lurched to get out of the way. Ivan guessed that the cars were driven by mafia bodyguards who had little regard for anyone else.
A scene filmed at the Hotel Rankoff almost gave Ivan a heart attack. The sequence required a lot of vehicles coming and going in front of the swank hotel. The best way to accomplish this was to block the street and reroute civilian traffic. This was arranged, so we presumably “owned” the street for the shooting day.
You know what they say about assuming. No sooner had we gotten our first shot of the scene when a large SUV maneuvered around a guard blocking the street and proceeded to cut through the heart of our busy set. Joel, my dutiful assistant director, waved his arms and stepped directly in front of the SUV.
“Hey, hey, stop. Back off!” he shouted.
The SUV, driven by a little old woman who could barely see above the wheel, inched forward, undeterred. Joel became incensed and slammed his hands on the hood of the car.
“Hey, did you hear what I said? Get this car the fuck out of here!”
Joel was not going to lose another minute of shooting and forced the old woman to take the detour. Relieved that we could get back to work, I noticed that Ivan had a very different reaction to the event.
Translation: “Yet Another American Assistant Director Found Dead”
“Joel should be very careful for the rest of the day today,” Ivan warned, nodding gravely to Joel, who was back to the business of running the set.
“Why?”
“Because the neighborhood she was driving to is very exclusive. How you say? High-end. There are only three types of people who live there: politicians, athletes and mafia. Joel better hope he didn’t piss off the mother of a mob boss. They will come back and kill him – today.”
Fortunately, Joel was not murdered in cold blood, but we did get our sc
hedule severely messed with courtesy of Russia’s Prime Minister Putin. It turned out his wife was coming to Sofia for a visit and she needed the entire hotel to herself.
PAIR ANNOYED
Learning to shrug off the daily twists and turns was just part of life in Bulgaria. Hell, I had nothing to complain about – I had a job and a third-floor apartment with no elevator! The place we chose in Sofia came at the recommendation of Ivan. He had grown up in the neighborhood and considered it “quiet.”
Our neighbors were quiet, for sure – almost too quiet. Culturally, the passing of someone in the hallway of our building never required the friendly nod or “hello,” because people didn’t want to know anything – about anyone. Americans will spew their life story, physical ailments included, within ten minutes of meeting a complete stranger. In Bulgaria, there was more of a sense that information was “need to know.”
The daily greeting in Bulgaria is usually “Doberden,” loosely translated: “whazzup?” Whenever I offered it up while hauling sacks of groceries three flights up, the reaction was usually a surprised look, like “did that stranger just speak to me randomly?”
The privacy thing was evident in the number of locks on the average apartment door, which was around three. Our third-floor door had two locks, vertically aligned. The top one was a conventional dead-bolt deal-e-o and the bottom lock controlled a horizontal bar that secured the door side to side.
I got to use those locks one night, but not in a good way. In movies and on TV shows, I’ve played a lot of heroic characters, willing to put their butts on the line for the greater good. Sadly, in real life I’m mostly a coward. This became evident, yet again, one night after consuming a particular herb that grows naturally on God’s green earth. One might assume that certain paranoiac tendencies are the result of such herbal consumption, and, sure enough, moments after partaking I heard excited shouting echo up from the street. I walked to the back of the apartment and looked out the window, just in time to hear a resident on the ground floor shout, “Americanski!”
Son of a bitch! They’re on to me! I need to get word to brother Don right now and tell him that the commies finally got me! They’ve been spying on me and they must have smelled the herb and notified the authorities! I’m screwed!
To inflame my paranoia, I turned back to see flashing lights from the street in front of the building – the alternating, multicolored kind that cops use. I ran to the front window, feeling a little bit like tough guy John Dillinger on the run. Sure enough – two uniformed police officers were approaching our building.
“Shit! Ida, what should we do?”
“Nothing. Stop freaking out.”
It took a while for the cops to work their way up to us. It appeared that they were talking with residents on each floor. Then a dreaded sound: boots on barren concrete steps. Fueled by THC, the increasing sound became positively Edgar Allan Poe-like in its constant, growing intensity.
Desperate for a plan, I whirled to Ida. “Ida, as my wife, I order you to go out there and deal with them!”
“You what?”
KNOCK-KNOCK.
I half-pulled and half-pushed her to the door. “Talk to them outside the door, not at the door.”
“What’s the difference?” Ida asked, growing more annoyed.
“They might try and force their way in. If you take the conversation outside, it’s harder for them to break the door down.”
Ida didn’t respond, just shot me a classic “I am so disappointed in you” look, opened the door and stepped outside.
My heart was sending so much blood through my veins that I became light-headed and experienced strange images of Russian gulags in Siberia and the dread of scurvy. It was all too much, so I locked the door – that’s right: I locked my wife out of the apartment in front of two strange policemen who could have easily carted her away.
Ida and the cops were experiencing their own foibles. The way the lighting works in Bulgarian apartment hallways is that you twist a timer, which turns on an overhead light for a given period of time – and it’s never enough. This is to prevent costly waste, of course, but it’s overkill. Another timer was at the base of the steps up to our apartment. You could turn it all you want, but nine out of ten times I’d have to dive for the timer on the landing of the third floor to avoid being plunged into total darkness.
With local graffiti like this, it’s hard for an American not to be paranoid.
The cops had turned the timer on, but it became forgotten in their ill-fated attempt to communicate. Ida knew three words of Bulgarian and the police knew exactly zero words of English. It made for a short, frustrating conversation. Ida was pretty much convinced that the cops were there to investigate a robbery, not perform a celebrity drug bust, but none of it mattered because the hall lights, with timer expired, turned off. In pitch-blackness, Ida screamed at the top of her lungs.
“It was a scream of innocence,” she later recounted.
But as Ida turned and groped for the apartment doorknob, she realized that she was locked out and she screamed again, which made the cops freak out and argue while fumbling for the twisty timer. Eventually, the lights came back on, the shouting subsided and the cops, not wanting anything more to do with the situation, got the hell out of there.
Back in the apartment, Ida slammed the door behind her and delivered an impressive “what for” speech. I don’t remember the particulars, but she used the words “incompetent” and “useless” more than once.
9
APOCALYPSE HOW
We’ve all heard the term “sweatshop.” It conjures up images of overworked women packed into inhumane conditions. Bulgaria wasn’t anywhere near as bad, but my costume fittings were in a second-floor sewing “factory” with a dozen small, chain-smoking women in white uniforms who stopped everything in unison as I stepped through the door. They looked at me like I wasn’t supposed to be there. I stared back at them like I wasn’t supposed to be there.
Turning to leave in embarrassment, I was stopped by, “It’s okay, Mr. Camp-bell. You are in the right place.”
I turned back to see a young, alert woman and her boss, an older, more traditional “battle-axe” of a woman.
“I am Raliza, assistant costumer,” the young woman said, offering her hand in a businesslike fashion. “This is Katya, the costume designer.”
“Hello, Katya, how are you doing? Nice to meet you.”
I extended my hand and Katya smiled and nodded but did not respond.
“She can’t speak English, can she?”
Raliza shook her head. “Not a word.”
“Okay, looks like it’s you and me,” I said, shrugging. “Shall we try some stuff on?”
In Josh’s Alien Apocalypse (the new, “catchy” title), my character wears a space suit for the entire film, so it had to be versatile, durable, and not make me look like a dork. The first fitting didn’t last long. I put on what was the equivalent of a scaled-down Michelin Man outfit – white and very puffy.
The prototype for my heroic space suit.
I turned to Raliza. “Have you ever heard of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man?”
She smiled. “No, but I think I know what you mean. Too puffy?”
“Yeah, can we rip all the stuffing out of the legs and half of it out of the jacket?”
“Of course.”
I looked to Katya for some form of approval. She smiled and nodded.
I looked in their full-length mirror again. Another issue was the shoulders.
“Hey, Raliza, I’m a good guy in this movie and he kind of saves the day, blah, blah, blah. Can we avoid the droopy shoulders and get some padding in there?”
“Of course. Come back tomorrow and we will fit again.”
The next day I stopped by the sewing factory, the chain-smoking sewing women didn’t look at me like I wasn’t supposed to be there. In fact, they didn’t even look up. Raliza was ready with a new version of my space suit. The “puffy” issue was solved and t
he shoulder issue was solved, but to a ridiculous degree. They not only padded the shoulders, they padded the shoulders so much that I looked like a superhero crossed with a Mexican wrestler.
“Well, that’s certainly heroic, I’ll give you that. Think we could get the padding to stop where my actual shoulder does?”
“Of course,” Raliza assured me.
I looked to Katya. She smiled and nodded. That was the essence of our relationship for two films – lots of smiles, nods and shrugs.
When I was notified about a makeup test, I got very excited – tests weren’t something that low-budget films normally do. I guessed they had their act together after all.
After feeding the dogs in the production office parking lot, I made my way into a dank room for my makeup test with Petia, the “key” of her department. She scrutinized my face for a moment, then asked very simply, “What would you like?”
“Makeup,” I replied. “The good stuff.”
Normally, that’s about all that transpires between actor and makeup artist. Under most conditions, they exchange pleasantries or gossip, because the makeup artist already knows the color of base they want to use, the type of concealer, the blush, the powder – the whole routine. Bulgarian crews, I was starting to learn, were completely different in their approach. They have the tools and the skills readily available, but harkening back to the days of communism, thinking ahead wasn’t part of the plan.
Make no mistake, Bulgarians are hardworking, generally pleasant people, but Petia wasn’t going to “pitch” a pre-thought-out makeup plan like some artists do or have a long discussion of makeup theories or makeup brands. I simply had to tell Petia exactly what I wanted – item by item. There was a fine display of makeup in front of her, but I had to choose it. This was panic-inducing, because I honestly hadn’t paid attention for so long, I didn’t have a clue where to start.
Hail to the Chin Page 8
