Either You're in or You're in the Way

by Logan Miller

  “So anyways, I was thinking…What if we threw Lane, which one of you plays Lane?”

  “I do,” Logan said.

  “What if we threw you in a Rockies’s uniform and let you practice with us for two days? Would that work for your movie?”

  He had to be kidding.

  But he wasn’t.

  We tried to suppress our smiles, but they exploded.

  “Yes, sir. That would definitely work,” Noah said.

  It felt as though the ghost of our father was staring at us through his eyes.

  “I think it would be a great experience for our young ballplayers, get them used to being in front of a camera. I trust you kids. If Anthony named his son after you boys, then you gotta be good guys…Your script touched me. I’ve had my own battles with alcohol. I tell people you’re allowed twenty thousand beers in your lifetime, and I had mine before I was thirty…I think your movie will touch a lot of people…Of course, you’ll eventually need to get this approved by the front office.”

  THE FRONT OFFICE

  Our primary concern, or more accurately, our primary fear, was the Colorado Rockies front office. The nightmare of them getting wind of our movie before we finished filming spring training was relentless. It threw us into severe paranoia.

  What we were trying to pull off was equivalent to borrowing the marines for two days without the Pentagon finding out. Yes. This was our grand plan.

  Who would even attempt something so stupid?

  It was going to fail.

  And yet it had to work.

  Perhaps it was so stupid, so bold—remember: one person’s bold is another person’s stupid—that nobody would see it coming…

  We told P. J. that we would contact the front office. We didn’t say when, only that we would. We were the producers. It was our responsibility. We’d call them when we were done. But not before. Our survival depended on timing.

  If someone from the front office in Denver called down to extended spring training in Tucson—which happens several times a day—and the man in Tucson, a clubee, coach, player, agent, groundskeeper, fan—pick one—intentionally or unintentionally mentioned that there was a film crew on the field making a movie with the ballplayers, we’d be arrested, thrown in the slammer, kicked off baseball fields forever.

  The conversation might have gone down like this:

  FRONT OFFICE GUY, smiling, upbeat, the sun shining in Denver: “How’s everything going down there?”

  COACH, smiling, chewing tobacco, sun shining in Tucson: “Great. Guys are working hard. The movie crew is having a blast out here, getting the shots they need, bought us all lunch. It’s a pretty cool process. Didn’t know it was so slow…But we’re working around them.”

  FRONT OFFICE GUY, mouth open: “Movie?”

  COACH, still smiling, spits a muddy stream of tobacco: “Yeah, the movie. The guys making the movie.”

  FRONT OFFICE, jaw clenching, a cold wind sweeping down from the Rockies: “What are you talking about?”

  COACH, chuckling, he’s having a ball: “The guys shooting a movie on the field with our players…Yeah, gave me a couple lines. I’m gonna be in a movie, can you believe that shit?! Holleewooood!”

  THE FRONT OFFICE: NUCLEAR.

  Our anxiety meters were pinging.

  We had to keep this impossible secret, secret for a week.

  Permission was inconceivable. We’d ask forgiveness later.

  We weren’t trying to cheat or swindle anyone. We were just trying to make our movie, a couple of guys with a dream, following their instincts to achieve it. After it was done, those involved would be proud, whether they had knowingly or unknowingly participated at the time.

  Our father had been dead for just two months. We’d held his cold hand at the mortuary and swore we’d make our movie that year. We had made a vow. And we would do whatever it took to realize that commitment.

  We were borrowing the marines. And there wasn’t a damn thing the White House could do about it.

  TRUCKIN’ IT IN A CAR

  WE DROVE BACK to Los Angeles (470 miles, one way). The fourth time in three weeks. We had to finish hiring our crew and booking equipment. Yes, we had Panavision cameras and Kodak film. But we also needed a bunch of other stuff: a grip truck and gear, lighting package, insurance, etc….

  So we went out to the Valley and negotiated deals with hard-bitten vipers of the moviemaking underworld. This is who you deal with when you don’t have any money. You just hope you make it out of their hole without them sinking their fangs into your ass. These guys have been burned, ripped off, and underpaid countless times. It happens to everyone in this business, even the best. If you make it through the fire, you come out crafty and hardened, like a mobster who has survived a couple purges in the ranks.

  These guys don’t care about your story or the quality of your movie. They just want your money.

  Typical conversation:

  FIRST-TIME FILMMAKER: “Good morning, sir. How much are your lighting packages?”

  HARD-BITTEN VIPER: “How much you got?”

  FILMMAKER: “Well…uhhh…what’s your cheapest package?”

  VIPER: “It all depends.”

  FILMMAKER: “On what?”

  VIPER: “How much you got?”

  And so the negotiation goes…Never tell them how much you got. Make them tell you how much it is.

  Our Tucson filming almost collapsed the last day in Los Angeles, hours before shipping out. Source of the problem: a Hard-bitten Viper.

  But that’s another adventure. All you need to know is that it wasn’t easy to get here from there.

  ACTING SCHOOL FOR NONACTORS

  Actors are important. And we had none. Other than ourselves, that is, and we had never been in front of a camera before, or behind it—but that’s the director’s position. We’re talking acting now. We needed five baseball coaches (three with speaking roles), a community college dean, a tutor, and a few hundred extras.

  Early on, we made phone calls to actors we felt would be suitable for the Tucson roles, actors we knew from L.A., actors suggested by friends, actors we had seen in movies.

  One actor was mildly interested, told us to call his agent. Fair enough. So we called her. The wonderfully charming agent told us to call back when we “knew what we were talking about.” Even the assistant was a bitch. This actor would later appear in Touching Home, in a much smaller role than we were currently offering.

  He’s no longer with that agent.

  With no money and no SAG (Screen Actors Guild) contract in play—better have one if you plan on filming anything other than your cousin’s wedding, actors are very serious about their union—we decided not to cast L.A. actors in the Tucson roles. Conclusion: hire locally, Tucson actors. Save money.

  Now, our approach to acting is simple: tell the truth. That’s it. Do that and you win. That’s all the audience asks for: TRUTH. Bad acting is false. It’s untruthful. No one likes to be lied to, whether in person or on the big screen.

  Somewhere along the stretch of desert highway from L.A. to Tucson, possibly delusional from diesel fumes and sun, we seized upon this quixotic notion: Why not hire the real people? We met the real-life characters on our last trip to Tucson. Why not cast the real people as themselves? They play the part every day. Vicki can play the dean, P. J. the Rockies’ coach, Edgar Soto and Keith Francis, the community college baseball coaches, and we’ll find a tutor somewhere…perhaps…the school? The place should be crawling with tutors.

  All we had to do now was sell this brilliant idea to these actors who had NEVER ACTED BEFORE.

  “No way,” Vicki said. She was petrified. “I’ll ruin your movie.”

  “All you have to do is be yourself, Vicki. You play a dean every day. You are a dean.”

  We reminded her that she had just beat cancer. If she could beat cancer, then she could certainly act in our movie—she could be the dean. She slept on it, called us in the morning, and said she’d try. We assure
d her she was in good hands and that we wouldn’t let her ruin our movie.

  P. J. was also concerned about his acting ability. We told him the same thing. “All we’re asking you to do is be yourself, P. J. Can you be yourself?”

  “Sure…I think so…I’ve never tried to be myself. It’s just something I do.”

  “You’re hired.”

  Coach Soto and Francis, the community college baseball coaches, were easy. They loved the camera. They wanted to be stars. We promised them they would be.

  Now all we needed was a tutor. So we strolled through the Pima CC drama department with our backpacks and oversize daily planners, odd, out of place.

  We found the theater and stood at the door. A professor was giving a lecture. He looked over at us, a hundred heads followed. Then he said, “Can I help you?”

  “The dean sent us down here.” A partial truth. She gave us directions. “We’re making a movie and we need an actor.”

  “Do you want to make an announcement?”

  “No, sir, just a question. Who’s your best actor?”

  “Evan.” The professor pointed.

  “We’ll take him.”

  REHEARSALS: FIRST, THE PHONE

  Baseball, and sports in general, taught us the importance of fundamentals. Start simple and gradually build toward more complex movements. The best hitters in the world, Ichiro, Manny, A-Rod, still take batting practice, still hit off a batting tee before games, same as a five-year-old.

  Why would acting be different?

  The first drill: READING. Actors read the script before they perform, some more than others, some hundreds of times. No different than hitting off a batting tee. We needed to create a safe, controlled environment for our actors, an environment conducive to repetitive exercises, one that would build their trust and confidence.

  We held our first rehearsals over the phone. Our actors were in Arizona, and we were in L.A. No one besides Evan had any acting experience, and none of them, including Evan, had ever acted in front of a camera. So we started with a simple exercise by reading the dialogue in the script with no emotion. Back and forth over the phone, ten times each, just to get them comfortable with the lines, the natural rhythm and cadence of the writing.

  “Don’t try and act, we’re just reading the words on the paper…No emotion. We don’t even know what ACTING is right now.”

  The first rehearsals were challenging. Our actors’ inexperience was painful. So was ours. This was just an experiment, mind you. They’d never acted, and we’d never directed.

  So we read with them over the phone, in the morning and in the evening, every day for a week. When we returned to Tucson, we rehearsed in person for another week—twice a day, driving to our emerging actors, all over town, wherever they might be. We rehearsed with them before they went to work, on their coffee break, over breakfast, at baseball practice, everywhere we could.

  Were we nuts? Maybe. But we had confidence in our abilities as directors and confidence in our actors’ abilities to be themselves.

  THE 10:1 TO ZOOMA

  OUR FIRST ASSISTANT director, Connie Hoy, cinematographer, Ricardo, his first assistant, Lenny, Sound Ranger and Voot, two grunkeys and a box truck, and several buddies from back home constituted our Arizona crew. The bulk of financial contributions were provided by an army of credit cards we’d accumulated over the past several years. During that span, every time we received a solicitation from a credit card company in the mail, espousing the glorious benefits of free money, we promptly filled out the application and sent it back. A week or two later we’d receive a new credit card. Like poverty, it was the gift that kept on giving. It was guaranteed success in an unsuccessful time.

  Armed with seventeen of these plastic time bombs and ten grand borrowed from a couple buddies back home, we drove out to Arizona for four days of filming.

  We were worth forty-five thousand dollars.

  The day before shooting we conducted a location scout with our skeleton crew. The first part of the day went smoothly. It was now late afternoon, and a warm desert breeze carried the sweetness of sagebrush as we stood in the bullpen of the Pima CC baseball field, the last stop on the scout.

  “FUCK!!!” Ricardo screamed, collapsing onto the grass, twisting in pain, forearm across his brow. We thought he was dying. “I need a zoom! I can’t do it without a 10-to-1 zoom, guys. I can’t do what you want me to do…Damnit, I need a zoom. Fuck me, you idiot!” Then the Spanish cuss words started flying.

  “I’ll call Panavision,” Noah said.

  “They don’t have any!” More Spanish cuss words. “They’re all booked. I asked for a zoom before I left.”

  “We gotta try,” Noah said.

  Ricardo was despondent, staring at the sky. “Even if they have one now, it’ll never make it out here on time. It won’t make it out here till midday. There’s no way we can make our shooting schedule with prime lenses. No way.”

  Noah pulled out our cell phone. There was no reception. So he ran to right field, waving the cell phone overhead, nothing there, onto left field, nothing there either, then to second base. Still no reception.

  He ran across the infield and climbed on top of the dugout. “I got reception!”

  He called Ric Halpern at Panavision.

  “Ric, we’re screwed. We absolutely have to have a 10-to-1 zoom for tomorrow.”

  “We don’t have any.”

  “We’re dead if we don’t get one. We need a zoom.”

  “We don’t have any. We’re all out. I’d give it to you if we had one, but we don’t.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I can check down at the receiving counter…But I KNOW that we don’t have any.”

  “Please. Could you please do that for us? Could you at least check?”

  “I’ll call you back in five.”

  It was silent on the field. Our crew sat on the grass: Ricky, Lenny, Connie—downcast, hopeless. Without a 10-to-1 zoom, tomorrow was doomed. (Don’t worry about all the jargon, zoom lenses, prime lenses. All you need to know is that WITHOUT A ZOOM, TOMORROW WAS DOOMED.)

  Ric called back. “I got one.”

  Noah started jumping atop the dugout. “He’s got a zoom! Ric’s got a zoom!”

  “It doesn’t matter!” Ricardo yelled to the heavens, still lying on his back. “It will never get here on time! Is anybody fucking listening to me?!”

  Atop the dugout: Noah was still jumping, the phone to his ear.

  Ric said, “You’re not going to believe this. But I was walking back from receiving, empty-handed, and I passed some guy pushing a cart with a 10-to-1 zoom on top. And now it’s yours. I can’t believe it. I can make FedEx, but it won’t get to you until mid-morning, which is probably too late. When’s your call time?”

  “Five-forty-five.”

  “Yeah, it’ll never make it.”

  “Let me make a phone call,” Noah said. “I’ll call you right back.”

  Noah yelled down to us on the grass. “I’m calling Sound Ranger. His shop is right down the street from Panavision. Maybe he hasn’t left L.A. yet.”

  Sound Ranger was supposed to be on the road three hours ago.

  Noah called Sound Ranger. “Sound Ranger, where you at?”

  “Dude, look, I’m sorry, but I’m running a little behind. I got held up at the shop. Don’t worry, though, I’ll be out there tonight.”

  “Perfect. We need you to pick something up for us at Panavision.”

  “I’m at Panavision.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “No, I’m here right now. That’s crazy…I haven’t been here in ten years. What do you need?”

  “A zoom.”

  LITTLE ANGRY

  Our crew had witnessed scores of confident first-time directors charge headlong into a tidal wave, swallowed forever. As a consequence, they were emotionally reserved, skeptical of the two greenhorns leading them onto the field in the morning.

  “Does anyone know what we’re doing
?” a senior member of the crew asked over drinks the night before shooting. Let’s call him Little Angry. “It would be nice if someone knew. That way they could tell me what we’re doing so I can be prepared. Because it sure as hell seems like nobody has a clue what we’re doing tomorrow.”

  We were sitting at an outdoor table in a grove of palm trees at the Old Pueblo Grill. We hardly knew any of these people.

  Little Angry was older than us by three decades and angry about it. He had insulted us in front of the crew, tried to project an air of dominance, undermine our leadership at the moment we were trying to establish it. Under normal circumstances, Little Angry would have been fired, stripped naked, and hog-tied to a cactus. But he knew our situation prevented that. We were 470 miles from base camp. He had all the gear; without him, no show.

  Connie told Little Angry the little plan for tomorrow. It quieted his anger for the night. Little Angry could now sleep happily.

  WE WALKED BACK to the hotel. We were sharing a room with our buddy Pierson, a talented film editor, sailor, and real-life Eagle Scout, as solid as they come. He’s also one of the first people we met in Los Angeles, seven years earlier, on a Jennifer Lopez video shoot. He was working as a production assistant, a month out of film school. We were extras, our first and last time in that role. In between takes, the extras were sent to a holding stage the size of an airplane hangar. Pierson was in charge of detaining the extras. He saw us writing on our notepads, arguing about a scene. He asked what we were doing. We told him writing a screenplay, Touching Home, the same screenplay that he was now helping come to life after years of struggle.

  We drank a Budweiser and reminisced about the low times and the broke times, and all the times in between when it felt like it would never happen. It was good to be there with someone who’d been there from the beginning. We all went to bed, smiling.

  Pierson slept. But we didn’t, not a wink. Our nerves were humming. Too many things could go wrong tomorrow.

  TWIN CHAOS AND THE BATTLE OF THE GREASY GRASS

  EVERYONE MET IN the lobby at 5:45 A.M. It was still night outside. We hopped into our cars and headed to Reid Park, the spring training home of the Colorado Rockies.