by Nick Cole
“Don’t worry, it’s all cool, legally and union-wise,” scrambled Kip quickly.
The Great Director stared at him for a long moment. A hard moment.
“Is it? Really?”
Kip swallowed.
“It is.”
The Great Director turned back to look at the newly arrived students, now crewmembers, who were dropping their bags near the buses. A hacky-sack circle had already formed. They laughed as they communicated in slang, using words to mean the opposite of Webster’s definition, and in some cases using words to communicate thoughts that bore no resemblance to any meaning that could be associated with the words they had chosen. They also seemed to have their own pidgin dialect, reversing letters and adding nonsense to the beginnings and endings of words. It would be chaos to work with them on a film set, a place that required clear and concise communication at all times. They would break things and destroy valuable footage through ineptitude. They would waste expensive time by the thousands of dollars, through their ignorance, indolence, and sloth. In the end they would confound and complicate the legitimate members of the crew by forcing them to treat as equals those from the hallowed halls of damnation one and all referred to as… film school. Ultimately the professionals would be forced to do the jobs of the unshaven cherub-faced babes.
In the windows of the buses, the department heads stared out, shaking their heads with resignation and disgust from atop their lofty careers.
“Perfect,” said the Great Director. “They’ll do just fine.”
Moments later, with the established crew on the bus already muttering, and the grim scent of mutiny baking in the oven of frustration, Goreitsky’s new RV pulled up to the rear of the caravan. Once again, Kip checked his imaginary and meaningless notes. He announced, “He’s the last,” hoping he truly was. “Let’s mount up!”
After parking, as Goreitsky and his wife approached on foot, the students stopped their game of hacky sack and began to whisper among themselves.
“I would like you to meet my wife,” said Goreitsky as he approached the Great Director and Kip.
“Pleasure,” said the Great Director distractedly, hoping the imminent mutiny would occur quickly so he could get this thing wrapped up and head home to begin his new life, thinking once again he’d jump ship and go to the movies for the afternoon.
“Enchanté!” Kip greeted her with an extravagant bow worthy of the most dedicated of Renaissance Pleasure Faire players as he took her hand and kissed it. For a moment Goreitsky wanted to rend Kip in two with his bare hands.
“She is to be going with us in my RV, if that is okay?” stammered Goreitsky.
“Actually, I don’t think we’ll be going anywhere,” muttered the Great Director.
The department heads were exiting the buses and approaching in standard angry mob formation. Obviously, they had already decided that something must be done before they were sent off on this doomed voyage with a crew of snot-nosed know-it-all college students.
Oh boy, thought the Great Director with giddy delight, here we go. I’m almost free. The crew will absolutely refuse to work with these film school kids. And after the soon-to-occur mutiny I’ll be free to go to the movies, a bar, even Alaska. I wonder if I should drive or fly. I wonder if I could leave tonight?
Film school, or to be correct, a bar called Brody’s near the Cal State Long Beach film school, was exactly where Kip, with Eddie’s assistance, had found his replacement crew. After he’d offered them film credit, pay, and hours toward membership in the unions (all of which he had no idea if he could actually offer), they had signed on en masse. Some felt it was a wise move, considering their current lack of academic performance due to extracurricular bong-based activities.
“Are they supposed to be the rest of the crew?” asked Terry the Sound Guy much like an angry grizzly might wonder what a hapless camper was doing with her bear cubs. “Because if they are, we can’t go. They’re not union. They’re not qualified. Hell, they’re not even adults.”
No one said anything.
“Well, are they?” demanded Terry.
Kip stammered as he grasped for the beginning of one of his patented speeches, hoping to get the pervasive “bad vibe” turned around. But he couldn’t get started, and the crew had simply had enough.
The Great Goreitsky wandered away from the group with his wife in tow. The college students had motioned him over, and now he began to talk in animated gestures with the students nodding along enthusiastically.
The Great Director thought he’d better put up some sort of defense, mostly for show, until the execs arrived. Then he could at least be accused of wanting to make a movie.
“Listen, guys,” he began. “It’ll be okay. Think back to when you were in film school.” He paused as he watched most of the crew, hoping they would think back. “You’d have sawn off your left arm to get onto a film set and work.”
A few nodded their heads.
“I mean, this is what it’s all about for them. Sure, it’s old hat to us. But to them, this is their dream.”
A small number of the crew looked down at their shoes. The Great Director knew at that moment that if he continued, he could convince them to go and accept the students as fellow crewmembers. Instead, he delivered the death blow.
“Imagine if some old guy had taken you under his wing when you were that age. When you didn’t know an apple crate from an f-stop. Imagine if he would’ve taken the time to explain every facet of the real, hard work of actually making a film. If he had been available for the millions of questions your spastic mind could barely comprehend, and if he had been willing to teach you endlessly until you were as competent at his job as he was. He could have saved you a lot of time and heartache and gotten you out into the market a lot faster. Maybe even competing for his own job. Sure, that kind, older mentor would basically have needed to do your job for you and hold your hand through every task and even double-check it afterwards. But wouldn’t that have been worth it?”
After that last part there was a slight holding of breath among the assemblage. For a moment, a very small moment, a sliver of time even, the issue seemed to hang in the balance. Then it was broken by Terry the Sound Guy.
“Someone call upstairs. This isn’t right.”
Terry had not worked all these years, doing every menial job within his profession, to turn around and do it again for some student who wouldn’t even appreciate what he was doing, only to turn around again and have that same kid take his job. Plus, one of his most treasured job perks was that he got to boss people around. With these, these… students, they wouldn’t even know what to do if he did boss them around. There would be too many difficulties and sensitivities as he vacillated between which profanities he could inflict upon them. Some of them were even girls barely older than his daughter.
A cacophony of voices broke out from most of the crew as the bounds of civility and restraint snapped in the stormy winds of revolution.
Then…
“I think it is to be okay,” announced Goreitsky quietly.
Everybody stopped.
“I think it will be… okay,” said the Great Goreitsky again, raising his arms to get their attention.
In the midst of defeat for some, and victory for others, at the edge of catastrophe and destruction, Goreitsky convinced the mutineers not to bring the production to a grinding halt. Not with an impassioned speech or an ostentatious display of vulgar abuse designed to shock them all into submission and bend them to his iron will. Instead he convinced them by being himself. Telling them it would be okay if they worked together, with him. He, Goreitsky, had confidence in each and every person there. Including these foundling lambs.
That was enough for all of them.
Because Goreitsky was still a legend.
Still great.
At the heart of it, each of the mutineers t
ruly did love film. They may have forgotten, or gotten lost along the way. But Goreitsky was still something to them. He was a giant from the past. If he said it would be okay, it would indeed be “okay.”
Like schoolchildren after a near fight at the bus stop, they murmured and climbed aboard the waiting buses.
Thanks for nothing, Goreitsky, thought the Great Director as goodwill and teamwork suddenly abounded like so much unpredicted sunshine on a perfectly rainy day.
He boarded the bus, shoulders slumped in defeat. He sat, sulking, in the front row, just behind Manny, whose sole direction had been to head north.
Still, thought the Great Director, I’m escaping right in front of their eyes. It even occurred to him that if he chose to, when the production was far out into the great whatever, wherever that was, downrange as it were, he could simply disappear. Just leave one night after a day’s shooting and be gone. Forever.
But that seemed like leaving too much to chance. The studio might think he’d just had a nervous breakdown. No, he would have to see his plan of destruction through to its final phase. Like a kamikaze pilot, he would have to plant it right on the deck of the carrier.
Surrounding him, the drone of the bus blended harmoniously with his time-enfeebled attempts to remember the catchy women’s spinning wheel chorus in Der Fliegender Hollander, one of three operas his wife had forced him to sit through. The bus strained forward as the convoy climbed up out of Los Angeles heading for the Grapevine and the San Joaquin Valley beyond. The Great Director, who had been passing locations with one eye half open and dismissing them, spied a McDonald’s buried among a high stand of eucalyptus trees. His ears popped as the bus climbed into the hills, and he surrendered to the cotton-candied embrace of sleep. Soon, by the top of the grade, his mouth hung open. A small trail of drool explored the bounds of his chin.
Kip decided all would be status quo for the near future. He leaned back and placed earphones on his head. The Pixies began the first delicate thumpings for Wave of Mutilation.
***
Snowflakes descend out of the darkness among the tall pines. Falling between gothic branches. Passing through the orange light of a streetlamp. The long-ago infant self of the Great Director lies scrunched deep in his bassinet, swaddled by the green airline blanket with the large stenciled H. In the front seat of the 1968 mint green Ford Mustang, his mother is sitting. They are waiting for his father who is not in the car. Outside, up in the trees, it is night. But here in the car, with the steady warmth of the heater and the backlit glow of the radio, all is safe and warm.
Up high, above the trees, a single snowflake begins its fall. Dancing slightly. Becoming larger and larger, yet still small and delicate. One of many, floating toward the ground. The crystalline structure, clear and sharp, turns end over end, moving first this way and then dropping that way. The Great Director, as an infant, marvels at its trapped beauty as the little snowflake arrives upon the windshield, perfectly revealed. The defroster’s heat radiates through the window, transforming the snowflake, melting it slightly, almost polishing it for just a moment, then a moment too much as its fate is sealed. Its destruction is imminent. With a too-harsh, too-sudden finality of movement, the windshield wiper, scythe-like, moves across the glass-scape and murders the tiny little snowflake. As if to make clear this has not been accidental, it returns again across its killing field once more, ensuring the little snowflake’s demise.
Forever.
The Great Director closes his new infant eyes and buries this lesson deep.
Soon there is a tramping in the snow and his father approaches the car, returning. Reunited, everything will be okay now. The Great Director hopes there is no windshield wiper that can erase a family like it can a snowflake. Murmured sounds he does not yet understand come from his father and mother.
***
Later, after the dream, the Great Director leaves the bus Neil Armstrong-style. Slow and ponderous he sets his foot down on the surface of the moon. Behind him, the long highway stretches off toward the north, exiting the low mountains from which they have come.
The squat Date Shake stand is accompanied by a small two-pump gas station where every manner of plaster gift from angels to Indians is offered for sale. Dreamcatchers and wind chimes twirl and sing with each passing northbound truck. Off to one side, smokers have formed their tribal circle away from everyone, standing in small groups near the edge of the station. On the other side of the road, a long abandoned filling station and the ruins of a diner keep watch against any invaders who might pour through the thin stand of trees beyond. Manny the Bus Driver appears from around the back of the bus, having completed his inspection.
“Everything good?” asks the Great Director.
“Sure, sure. Our bus is good.” Manny pauses, searching the road behind him, hoping the other two buses will not come heaving into sight trailing smoke or making any kind of awful soul-rattling metallic screech.
“Our brakes just got a little hot. That’s why we stopped.”
It was the safest answer Manny could give as to why their bus had stopped to wait for the others who had fallen desperately behind. He did not tell the Great Director that one of the other drivers had needed to ride an already failing transmission down the treacherous grade. He did not tell the Great Director how much this concerned him. Instead he smiled, hoping the gringo would leave him to his worry and let him turn back to scanning the horizon. Watching and waiting for his compadres.
Kip emerged from the shack carrying two green and orange wax-striped shake cups and waddled purposefully toward the Great Director. His eyes gleamed beneath his mischievous brow.
“Date Shake?” he offered when he got close, holding out one of the cups.
The Great Director thought about refusing. But his mouth was dry from the nap, and he took it, feeling its slushy heftiness through the waxed paper of the cup. A cautious sip of the never-before-had, much-celebrated date shake started a creamy surge erupting across his tongue. He swallowed a great mouthful of vanilla ice cream and sugary chopped dates. Without pausing he sucked again.
“I know. Isn’t it great?” Kip said as he read the other man’s face.
The Great Director nodded and sucked again.
Within moments he had an eye-crossing headache. The icy spike shot through the top of his skull. He balled his fist in protest, placing it against the side of his throbbing head. Kip talked him through the attack while Manny inspected his bus again, throwing worried glances toward the south.
The Great Director, recovered from his attack, looked at the continuously leering Kip and nodded his head in thanks. Then he surveyed the surroundings once more. For a long moment he didn’t sip his shake. He just stared at the abandoned roadside gas station and the diner across the way.
He saw a shot.
The outside of the diner at night.
A lone vintage building, light off to the side, illuminating a circle in the parking lot. Maybe some trash cans. The lights flickering out in the diner. Flickering out in Kurt’s old life. Kurt sways in the darkness under the light and wonders: What now?
The Great Director took a sip of his shake, looking at the road north. He wondered about clouds and the possibility of rain. He looked back at the dilapidated building and estimated how much it would cost the art department to scour the local countryside and pay top dollar if necessary for traditional artifacts to accompany the few supplies they had on hand to fix it up. Make it vintage Edward Hopper, he thought. He hoped it would cost a lot. He wondered who owned the forgotten property and if they were greedy. Very greedy.
He looked at Kip. “I think we’ll set up here,” he said softly.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Night of the Fox
Two days later the Executive VP returned from a meeting with some European distributors. The Europeans wanted last quarter’s runaway blockbuster, Americana, renamed to the
more zany, and more easily understood by Franks everywhere, Big City Party Time. He’d battled the slender, well-dressed French mercilessly on contracts and schedules. Twice he’d forced them to retreat to the ever-sweltering parking lot to smoke their stale Gitanes and rail against the obscenities of the vulgar American studio system, all the while eagerly twisting their necks to inspect the occupants of each luxury car, hoping for a bona fide star sighting to complete their trip to the States.
As the sun fell to the west, throwing amber light onto the Golden Gate Beige walls of his recently repainted (in honor of his new title) office, one lone pink message sat atop the neatly organized stacks of paperwork on his desk. It was from the Fox. It read: Wait! I’ll call back!
“Well that’s just great,” muttered the Executive VP. He’d hoped to get off the lot early and attend a wine tasting in Malibu.
Instead he turned to a new budget proposal for a recently greenlit script about a young Navajo boy who sneaks on board the Space Shuttle. His Harvard education screamed every time he heard the title: Chief Astronaut. Soon he was lost among the numbers and strategies for offering an acceptable salary to the young star, or rather to his agent and parents, who were being courted in order to allow their offspring to make the picture. The child was neither Navajo nor ethnic-looking by anyone’s stretch of the imagination. The novelist who had written the incredibly mournful Nobel Prize-winning book on which the movie was very loosely based—I Am Not My Father, Anymore—was hard at work attempting to come up with ways to circumvent this minor plot problem.
When the Executive VP looked up from the proposed contracts, it was dark, and still the Fox had not called. Muttering, the Executive VP dialed his favorite takeout delivery restaurant and ordered a Salade Niçoise. He left his office only briefly when the delivery boy arrived, but he returned to find a blinking message light on the office phone system. The Fox had called, saying it was very important they talk and that he would call this number back shortly. The Executive VP stabbed at his salad angrily.