It’s time to go home. En route we will visit new friends in Geneva and Burgundy, driving late at night over French and Swiss borders where, once again, nobody is bothered about the papers we worked so hard to get. We are experts now, and the travel is smooth. We fly our favorite, Lufthansa, which means stopovers in Paris and one last overnight stop in Munich to allow time for the dog to eat, relieve herself, and exercise. We stay adjacent to the airport. We will catch our flight home the next morning (my preferred overnight flights are a no-go in this direction). In order to fulfill my strategy of making sure Ellie eats no later than four hours before flying and to ensure enough exercise to make her calm in the carrier, I have to rise at three in the morning. We walk through the empty streets of this Munich suburb, as snow twists in a silent breeze. We pass shuttered stores, restaurants, and homes. It’s so peaceful, so serene. I imagine us home in Los Angeles tomorrow, where the sun will warm us, and the orange tree outside our front door will be fragrant and full of fruit. I try a quick ‘down’ with Ellie. She hunkers calmly. I walk away from her on the empty road, saying, ‘Stay.’ She doesn’t move, and watches me confidently with her big, dark eyes. Snow dances between us like orange blossoms. It wasn’t easy but here we are, one last ride from home, our trust not only unbroken, but rock solid. This journey has changed us both. I pat her, pick up the leash, and we turn and head for home.
Showdown in Real de Catorce
BOB BALABAN
Bob Balaban has appeared in about a hundred movies, including Midnight Cowboy, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Waiting for Guffman. He produced and co-starred in Gosford Park, which won Academy, Bafta and Screen Actors Guild Awards, and directed Bernard and Doris and Georgia O’Keeffe for television, both of which were nominated for Emmy, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild and Directors Guild of America Awards. He wrote a bestselling series of children’s books called McGrowl (Scholastic) and is currently writing a new series for Viking called The Creature from the Seventh Grade. His most recent film appearance is in Wes Anderson’s movie Moonrise Kingdom.
It’s 1998. Sometime in April. My agent calls and tells me there’s interest in me playing the villain in The Mexican, a new Julia Roberts/Brad Pitt movie for DreamWorks. It starts shooting in six weeks in Los Angeles and Mexico. Gore Verbinski is directing. He made a movie I like a lot called Mouse Hunt (and has since directed the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise). He and the producer, Lawrence Bender (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill), are in LA. I’m in New York, and can’t come in to meet them. I tell my agent I’ll put myself on tape.
I get out the family video camera (this is pre-videophones) and ask my twelve-year-old daughter to film me reading a couple of scenes from the movie in my living room. I tell her to try not to jiggle the camera too much, and to zoom in and out a few times. The whole thing takes about five minutes. I send in the tape and forget about it. Much to my surprise, a few days later I get the job and before I know it I am on a plane to Los Angeles to shoot some interiors. Filming in LA goes well, and soon I am on my way to San Luis Potosí, Mexico, the closest city with an airport within 500 miles of our location, Real de Catorce.
After my five days of shooting in Mexico, my part will be wrapped and I will be homeward bound. Which is a good thing because I’ve got to get back to New York in two weeks to see my older daughter graduate from Sarah Lawrence. It looks like I’ll be there in plenty of time. The movie gods are already laughing as we begin our descent into the middle of what looks like the Sahara Desert, only bigger.
It’s easy to spot my driver in San Luis Potosí’s tiny airport. Of the six people in baggage claim he’s the only one who isn’t wearing sandals and a sombrero and carrying a rifle. It’s hot. And I’m already thirsty. We get into our limousine and begin the six-hour schlep over winding dirt roads to the location.
‘Real de Catorce is over 10,000 feet above sea level,’ my driver explains. ‘Staying hydrated is one of the best ways to avoid altitude sickness.’ He hands me a bottle, which I’m not drinking because it says ‘bottled in Mexico’ in small print on the bottom of the label and I’m no dummy.
He also warns me that I may feel a little tired until I get acclimated. ‘Get plenty of rest,’ he advises. ‘And stay away from the scorpions. They’re everywhere.’
He fails to mention you also have to stay away from the food and the blistering sun that will fry you to a crispy burnt sienna in less than five minutes of exposure to the famously thin mountain air.
On the way I read a pamphlet I picked up in the airport. ‘The town of Real de Catorce, population less than a thousand’ – take it from me, a lot less – ‘was once a thriving silver mining settlement. It has long been a pilgrimage site for both local Catholics and Huichol shamanists, and is now being discovered by tourists drawn by the desert ambience and its reputed spiritual energy.
‘Enrico Caruso sang here regularly in the city’s lavish opera house, and an international group of cosmopolitan travelers, ex-patriots and mine owners from across the globe frequented the local bullring, a number of quaint but lovely hotels, and shops featuring the finest in European luxury goods.’ Sounds promising. ‘In 1900, when the price of silver plummeted, Real de Catorce was all but abandoned and remains the “ghost” town you see today.’ Make that ‘sounded’ promising.
‘From the main road you will traverse a seventeen-mile-long cobblestone path … until you reach the 1.5-mile-long Ogarrio Tunnel, which only accepts vehicles one way, with travelers in and out having to wait their turn.’
Wait. It gets worse. What the pamphlet fails to mention is that until the movie began prepping the location nearly two months ago, the tunnel had no electricity whatsoever, and several hapless backpackers who happened to find themselves wandering through, dropped briskly into open mineshafts and were never heard from again.
At this point my mouth is so dry that my tongue is like cardboard, and I am so car-sick that I have to put my pamphlet down and stare straight ahead to avoid throwing up. As we enter the tunnel we are plunged into sudden darkness, until our eyes become accustomed to the light from a few randomly spaced 25-watt light bulbs dangling from the roof of the tunnel, which provide sufficient illumination to keep us from crashing into a wall. But as far as anything requiring actual ‘vision,’ like avoiding a coyote, or a boulder, or god forbid an open mineshaft. Let’s just say we’re on our own.
After what feels like days, I am safely deposited at last, weak and shaky, in the middle of the picturesque, though dusty, town square. Whatever time and wind and heat and dust can erase, they have. A few burros wander around aimlessly looking for water, as I drag my bag a few hundred yards up what might have been a charming, rose-covered, delicately winding path when Caruso was here, but would now be best described as a steep and barren, rock-strewn breeding ground for scorpions and tarantulas.
Halfway up the hill, I stop and massage the cramp in my side until I catch my breath, my head clears and I recover enough strength to make it to the entrance of a small pueblo-like structure carved deep into the side of the mountain. This will be home for the next ten days. A quick perusal reveals a few chairs, a side table, and a threadbare oriental carpet. A large overhead electric fan rotates slowly and ineffectively. It is not hard to believe that some scenes from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre were actually filmed in this place. It is, however, hard to believe that travelers, however cosmopolitan, ever considered it lovely. Or quaint. Or even a hotel.
The first thing I do after I am deposited in my room is search for scorpions and tarantulas. I look in the corners of the closet, under the bed, and in the bathtub. I shake out all towels (which would be my hiding place of choice if I were a poisonous arachnid). So far so good. I go to what passes for the lobby to get an extra bath mat, and run into the crew for the electronic press kit (EPK) who will be shooting interviews with us for the DVD. They tell me about this great Italian restaurant run by some expats a few hills down from the hill on which we are staying. I ask if it is sa
fe to eat the food there and they assure me it is perfectly fine. Everything is flown in from southern California. Or Texas. Or somewhere.
I eat a great Italian meal. I’m not kidding. I drink Coca-Cola bottled in the good old USA, and scarf down the best gnocchi with truffles I have had in a long time. By the time I am back in my room fully sated, I am somewhat used to the altitude and eager to get a good night’s sleep. I carefully search every inch of my covers for animal life, and finding none, drift quickly off to sleep. It’s like Stanley Kubrick directed my dreams. All night long I soar through jungles populated by red elephants and flying glass monkeys. When I finally awaken I remember the driver saying something about altitude-induced ‘nightmares.’ Boy was he right. I shower, careful to shake out my towel, and after I examine my clothing both inside and out, I check out my shoes for uninvited guests, get dressed and try to go to work.
You would think it wouldn’t be hard to find a crew of 150 alligator-shirted Angelinos shooting a movie with Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt in the middle of a town in Mexico the size of a Kmart. But it takes me a few minutes before I realize that the crew and the actors are all hiding behind a large black curtain as big as a small mountain that has been erected to protect everyone from the hoard of paparazzi who have assembled to try to snap the first photo of Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts ‘together’ in the history of paparazzi-dom.
Dozens of photographers have been flooding the tiny village since someone who saw Julia and Brad arrive at the airport tipped off someone who tipped off someone who put it all over the internet. It’s a feeding frenzy. Both actors stay close to their hotel-like quarters, and have their meals cooked for them ‘in house.’
The next few days drift by in a hazy fog of filming, as I try to avoid getting terminal food poisoning, or bitten by a scorpion or a tarantula, or altitude sickness. While remembering my lines.
The script supervisor is toweling off after a shower and gets stung by a scorpion. Fortunately it’s just a baby scorpion, so she only gets numb and weak for a little while, and will be able to go back to work in a few days after her blurry vision gets better and the antidote takes full effect. I promise you, if it had been me, I’d have been medevaced home yesterday.
I don’t see the EPK crew anywhere. An assistant director tells me that after last night’s dinner (in the same restaurant where I had my delicious gnocchi) they came down with such violent turista they are all sequestered in their pueblo and may have to be sent to the nearest hospital 200 miles away.
My character gets shot in the neck by Julia, and I get to have fake blood spurt out of a prosthetic device and fall backward out of the shot onto pillows. The gun goes off. The blood spurts. I fall like a professional. It’s my favorite death scene.
While walking across the town square I encounter three confused young hippy tourists passing through town, which is the polite way of saying that three peyote-ridden addicts hoping to get even higher on the vibes from the little village’s reputed ‘spiritual energy’ are having a super-bad trip.
These guys are totally wasted. They have been drugging for days as they made it through the surrounding desert. How they managed to avoid falling into a mineshaft when skipping through the Ogarrio Tunnel I will never know. But here they are, and something terrible must have just happened to them because they are looking into the sun and taking off their shades and blinking and stammering, ‘Oh, man, oh jeez, oh man,’ like they have just seen the mother ship landing.
‘Hey mister,’ they call when they see me. ‘Where are we? What’s going on?’ Clearly something has freaked them out.
‘What’s the matter?’ I ask politely, being sure to stay back a few feet in case one of them has a sudden LSD flashblack and turns violent.
‘We just saw … oh man,’ one of the guys says. ‘You tell him, Janie. I can’t. It’s too weird.’
‘We think we just saw Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt walk by,’ their young Janis Joplin–like friend tells me. ‘And we’re worried we’re overdosing. Can you tell us what’s really happening?’
I patiently explain that they really did see Julia and Brad. And that they have stumbled across a $60 million movie being filmed in the middle of their hallucination-filled camping trip to a spiritual mecca in the middle of Nowhere with a capital ‘N.’ I am still not sure whether or not they believed me. They hung around for a few hours. Watched the big black velveteen curtain for a while. And then got bored and wandered back through the tunnel of death.
The paparazzi are getting so aggressive that one of them tries to tear down the black wall of Jericho and storm the set, so Brad and Julia’s publicist comes up with a brilliant plan: Julia’s friend is going to take a million pictures of the two of them posing together, sell them all over the place, and devalue their worth. The minute the paparazzi learn of this devilish plan they evaporate back into the desert quicker than a mirage. And we are bothered no more.
So now it’s my fifth day of filming in Real de Catorce and if all goes well I will be on the plane back to New York tomorrow morning. I call home, relieved to inform my family that the movie is on schedule. The weather is fine. And I will be there in plenty of time to witness the momentous occasion of my daughter’s graduation.
And then, of course, everything falls apart. First they have to reshoot a scene they did before I even got here because the negative got scratched. Okay. We’re only a day behind. I’ll still make it.
And then the weather starts to change. All of a sudden it’s cold and cloudy in the middle of this arid desert that hasn’t seen weather like this in about 200 years. We are shooting the climactic scene at the end of the movie and waiting for the sun to come out. It is five in the afternoon. Brad races off to change into the costume he must wear in case the sun really does make a brief appearance.
And then it actually does peep out for about a minute. It’s perfect. The sky turns golden. You can see the rainbow forming in the distance. The shot will be amazing. Someone runs to get Brad in his pueblo – but they can’t find him because all the pueblos look exactly alike. Then they do locate him and just as he races back, panting and tucking in his shirt tails and trying to catch his breath (even movie stars have trouble with altitude, not just me), the sun goes back behind its cloud and it starts to pour. Add one more scene to our day’s work.
Even I can see at this point where this is all headed. And so, I assume, can you.
Eventually my family forgave me. They knew how hard I tried. And how upset I was when I finally got back fifteen hours too late. And they may even forget eventually. But I never will. The moral of my story is simple.
Your pitfall may arise whence you least expect it. And hit you harder than a case of Asian flu. So travel with care, fellow readers, and take my lesson to heart. You must never depend upon the weather to do what you need it to do. And if someone you truly care about is expecting you to attend an important event at the end of your trip? You better stay home. As my cousin Fanny always used to say: you cannot ride two horses with one ass. And you are a fool if you think you can.
With two burros it’s even harder.
Trust me. I was there.
Shooting in Romania: What Doesn’t Kill You …
PAULINA PORIZKOVA
International supermodel Paulina Porizkova has graced the covers of magazines worldwide for more than a decade. She began modeling at the age of fifteen and quickly rose to the top of her profession. Paulina’s acting life began with the title role in Anna. She has also appeared in Her Alibi, Arizona Dreams, Female Perversions, Thursday and sixteen other films. In the past two years, she has written about beauty and its cost for the Huffington Post and Modelinia. Her recent television appearances include The Oprah Winfrey Show, multiple appearances on CNN’s Parker Spitzer, The Joy Behar Show and The Late, Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Paulina has also written a novel, A Model Summer, and a children’s book, The Adventures of Ralphie the Roach. She lives with her family in New York City.
When, in the year 20
00, I was offered the starring part in a horror-adventure flick co-starring Judd Nelson and Larry Drake, there was really no reason for me to turn it down. I had two small kids, no career to speak of and was slowly going brain-dead. An offer to play a dead hooker would have seemed alluring. And this one was a starring part. So what kept me from jumping for joy and landing on the set? The movie was to be shot in Romania.
Now, I had been in a movie shot in Bisbee, Arizona, where the best, and only, restaurant was a Taco Bell. My hotel room had unmatched sheets with little trucks printed on them. Forms of entertainment were few; on our days off, we’d drive into the desert and shoot holes in our cowboy boots. I have also done several super-low-budget movies where I used my own clothes and changed behind a van, which also served as our equipment truck, makeup room, dressing room and cafeteria. So what was the big deal?
I had been to Romania before. It was beautiful. It was also one of the few countries in Eastern Europe that didn’t fully adhere to the communist doctrine of ‘all peoples should be equal and have equal food, or lack thereof.’ Instead they had a rather confusing system, which blended the worst part of a communist regime with a dictatorship. Shooting a film there would make a super-low-budget film in the States look like the set of Cleopatra.
But the film’s charming director and its charming producer assured me that Romania had changed. In the year 2000, ten years after Ceauşescu’s reign of terror, Romania was ready to join Europe as a little sister rather than a hobo. A four-star hotel had been built in Bucharest (four stars as counted by Americans), where we were to stay. We were to shoot in the best television and movie studio in the country. I would be treated like the star I thought I deserved to be.
Lights, Camera...Travel! Page 12
