by Mike McCrary
“Yeah, fine, I was under the influence. She’s a professional. She should know about the effects of drugs and trauma on a fragile mind. Now, I’m fucking pissed off and another thing—”
“Stop. Are you kidding me with this? You’re sweating some nurse after the shitshow you’ve created? You’re lucky to even be here, man. I’ve seen the footage—holy fucking shit, man.”
Snapping out of my troubles with the nurse, I’m brought crashing back into the here and now of my situation. Like a tidal wave has crashed into me, throwing me back in time with furious vengeance. Bad memories have rip-loaded into my brain in a blistering stream of data. I can’t sort through it all fast enough. The drugs and trauma have slowed the synaptic flow as if my frontal lobe is sinking in quicksand.
More importantly, I now know Alex has been working the footage.
Thank God. I need to know more. I hold my breath and ask…
“Did you cut it together?”
“I did.” He smiles.
“How does it look?”
“Pretty fucking great.”
I want to cry. The floodgates are holding back the tears of joy filling my eyes. In all the insanity and my struggle for survival, I almost forgot there was a film at the core of this ragtag disaster.
“Yeah?” I ask. “Is it good—really good?”
“It’s good. Needs some work—”
“Work? You just fucking said—”
“Look, we have to work some things out quick—real fucking quick.” He looks to the door and continues. “That nurse is going to get the detectives out of the cafeteria. They’ve been waiting for you too. They’ll have a shit-ton of questions. Which means we need a shit-ton of answers.”
“Oh fuck. Did you cut out the Gains footage?”
“Of course. And what the fuck happened there? It’s been the Hollywood murder of the moment. All over the news and everything.”
“Did you cut something together to feed the cops?”
“I did.”
I lower my voice on the off chance someone is listening. “The stuff about me paying them?”
“Yes,” he whispers back.
“You looked at all the footage in the trunk?”
“Relax. I did.”
“Because we can only use what we give them. You understand, if I pull out new footage they haven’t seen, we’re fucked. I can’t get arrested at the premiere.”
“No shit. What am I, new? We’ve talked about this. I cut the best I could. You’ve still got hours and hours of stuff to cut together. I only took out the stuff with Gains and other incriminating tidbits. It was a judgment call, but I left that freaky shit in. Did you really fuck that incest-loving whack job?”
“Did you wipe the cameras clean?”
“Yes.”
“Did you drop them back in the trunk?”
“Yes. I did it all. And before you ask, I wore gloves when I picked them up and when I dropped them off.”
“Alex Tripp, you gorgeous motherfucker.”
Pushing back into the pillows, I try to think. We’ve covered a lot of the items that were on the little yellow legal pad. Alex and I pored over them before I left for New York. I gave him a crash course in Final Cut Pro, just enough for him to cut out any possibly incriminating footage quickly and pull it together enough for law enforcement viewing. It needed to look crude and done on the fly, because that would be the reality of the situation I was in. They’ll probably be able to tell it was edited, so I had him do it all on my computer in CA. We paid a tech geek to toggle the time coding so everything on the laptop that Alex used to pull the edits together on shows everything happened in 2007. We can play it off as an annoying glitch in my operating system. Not great, but not important enough to get fixed.
I hear a group of feet walking down the hallway.
Alex moves to the door. “They’ll be in this room momentarily. What else needs to be discussed?”
Think, Jasper.
Alex tells me he’s working with a couple of defense attorneys on the legalities of using my footage and creating a movie. He says we have a loophole that everyone thinks will work, but we have to play ball in the beginning. Don’t be a prick. Be open. Transparent. Cooperative. Especially in the beginning. This is all about the film.
Voices are getting closer.
Alex leans on the door, blocking it. “Come on, man. What have we missed?”
Cops will be in here soon.
Run it through your head, Jasper. I’ll tell them all my gear is in the trunk of this car near the beach and where to find it. They’ll go there, if they haven’t already, and find all my stuff…after Alex got ahold of it and did his thing of course. Seeing what we want them to see. Nothing more, nothing less. While they are working it over, our lawyers will pressure them to give it back. Not that it matters. I have all the footage, Choke’s and mine. So while the fuzz is poring over the footage, I will be cutting it all together and negotiating the distribution details for the finished film.
Coming soon to a theater near you.
It was risky keeping all the footage on the drives and my laptop, but I couldn’t rely on an Internet connection for uploading, and asking homicidal criminals for a Wi-Fi password every time we changed locations didn’t seem like a realistic option. I’m drifting—focus. Task at hand.
The door tries to open, bumps Alex. He shoves it closed. Best brother ever.
“Out of time,” he says.
Shit, fuck, damn. I cannot believe this damn fucking shit. It’s hitting me like a two-by-four to the face. There is one more thing.
Did I get enough?
Did I steal enough shots?
Enough reaction shots of me?
Did I shoot enough footage to make it look like I was kidnapped?
86
While I was in the company of Choke’s family, I made it a point to steal shots here and there.
A quick moment when my captors weren’t looking. A fast camera whip to my face, which I had done my best to contort into a look of absolute fear or worry. I’d do this as much as I could. Multiple takes if I could. All different expressions, tried to work in a few with some dialogue. Basic stuff.
“No.”
“Dear God.”
“Please don’t.”
“I only want to get home.”
Some were easier than others, but I worked to get these shots down at every location. The trunk, the backseat, the front seat, the cabin, lovely home in the woods, the bank, the beach. All of it and more. Hell, I even stole a shot of me fake-crying after Ruby and I had our time together.
Well, I cried. Not sure how fake it all was. I’d been through a lot. Post-coitus, no sleep, hungry in a cave, it was a lot to take in mentally. So I used the moment to create something I hope plays on the screen. Need to create a human element to the story. A failed Hollywood asshole who’s done all this out of vanity and spite isn’t a strong four-quadrant play. Will not travel well overseas. If there’s one basic rule of moviemaking storytelling you will hear over and over again, it’s make the main character likeable. Not perfect. The audience just needs to root for him, or at least empathize with his struggle.
A suburban man whose dreams had been crushed by the evil Hollywood machine is abducted by sick criminals and forced against his will to document the whole ordeal in order to satisfy their twisted vanity. Now that, my friends, that will play anywhere and everywhere.
Why did I do all this?
The truth of why I did it is embedded in that narrative to a certain degree. It is true that my boyhood dreams were destroyed by the coldhearted, disease-riddled, limp-pricked motherless fucks of Hollywood. They left me twisting in the wind like a piñata with my best friend from childhood taking his best whacks at me. They all took great pleasure in bursting me open and eating my insides.
Those are the facts, and they are undisputed.
I’ll leave W. Gains out the narrative, for obvious reasons.
Lucy? Lucy I’ll leave out for
less obvious reasons.
Still, if you think about it, she is the most likeable character reason I had. Doesn’t sit right using it. Doesn’t feel like it is the right thing to do. Not the right way to go. Feels like something I need to keep for myself. Truth be told, a large part of why I did all this was about her. That much is probably clear by now. I was broken by how far I had fallen. I couldn’t face her in the state I was in, certainly not from my bunker in the burbs. Needed a shame cleanse in the worst kind of way. Needed it all washed away, send it spiraling down the drain.
I remember the look she gave me when I told her I’d sold my first screenplay and an agent wanted to meet with me. We were at the Century City food court—Panda Express, I believe. I will never forget what was glowing behind her eyes. That look from her will forever be a part of me. I want to earn back that look and never ever want to witness pity from her. Not from her. I want to be something she can be proud to be around.
So, why did I do all this?
The same reasons a man does anything in this life. Vanity, greed, spite, revenge, a middle finger to the people who doubted him, and of course—the biggie—impress a girl.
Now.
Let’s shine it on for the members of law enforcement who are presently surrounding my hospital bed.
87
They are a captive audience, I’ll say that.
My conversation is guarded, to put it mildly. Alex has a pretty tight leash on me, and the two defense attorneys he brought into the room are pretty quick to shut me up if I happen to wander off into unsafe waters.
I’m tired and the medication isn’t helping, but I do my best to hang in the conversation. Every once in a while I’ll catch myself watching one detective’s magnificent mustache rise and fall as he speaks. I’m not really hearing the words he’s tossing out there. I’m simply mesmerized by the fuzzy animal taking up residence above his lip. When I realize I’ve been tuned out for a few minutes, I force myself back into the here and now.
From what I gather, the LAPD and FBI have located the footage and equipment in the car. They thanked me for giving them the location and for my cooperation. I know they don’t believe a single word of my story. That’s their job. Disbelief. It’s my job, as a filmmaker, to suspend that disbelief.
I tell them a story.
A story about me being kidnapped in New Jersey, knowing there has to security camera footage of me in New York and New Jersey. The last possible place I would have been seen was in that park in Jersey. I explain that I was doing a new film, a comeback film for me, about a stripper in New Jersey and her struggles in the underbelly of American society. An independent film financed by a foreign investor I’ve worked with in the past.
“Australian financing?” the FBI agent asks.
“Yes,” I say.
They’ve been busy.
I continue the narrative, telling them how I went to that park to interview a group of drug dealers and from out of nowhere—
They stop me, say those weren’t drug dealers.
I say, what?
They say they were members of a criminal group known as the Shaw gang.
Really? I say.
You were set up, they say.
I allow my face to go slack. I’d like to thank the Academy. A pause for dramatic effect, then I tell them that all makes sense. I tell them the people who took me hostage talked about someone named Shaw, but I didn’t know what that all meant.
They say they believe the two groups were involved in some sort of war.
I say the footage they found should confirm a lot of their beliefs.
They nod.
Moving this along, Alex picks up the conversational slack by saying I’m still recovering and that we will do everything we can to cooperate. He says the toll of the traumatic events, the healing that still needs to take place, both physical and mental, needs to be respected by the authorities.
They nod.
They ask me why I think they targeted me.
I pause, take a sip of water, and say that they never said, but I suspect they heard I was a filmmaker and I was around town. Maybe they looked me up on IMDb and thought I might be someone they could exploit.
But they wanted you to film them, they say.
Yes, that was the strange part. I go on, explaining it did feel like it was an ego thing, like when a celebrity makes a sex tape. They want a record of how great they think they are. They want something to watch later so they can soak in their glory or to show off to other people. A vanity piece, if you will. I explain that Choke had a huge ego and spoke of himself in the third person quite often.
They nod.
Alex says that’s enough for now and again states how cooperative his client, and brother, is being. Says I need to rest and recover. If they have any more questions to please contact his office.
They stare at me.
The way Choke used to stare at me. The same blank intensity in their eyes. Then something occurs to me, a question I haven’t bothered to ask.
I ask if they are still alive.
Who, they ask me.
Choke, Ruby, Shaw—all of them. Are any of them alive?
The older FBI agent standing toward the back says there are bodies in the house, many burned beyond recognition, and that they have yet to be properly identified but they believe Choke, Ruby, and Shaw to be among them.
No idea how I feel about any of that. I wanted out, no question, and while I wanted them out of my life, the news of them being dead lands hollow. Empty. Maybe this is a Stockholm syndrome hangover, but they are strange feelings of—I don’t know what. Mourning? Loss? Like if you heard an annoying former coworker had died, or a horrible old girlfriend. I was in extreme close proximity of these people and involved in incredibly intense situations. Bonding sounds trite, not to mention insane. Sadness mixed with relief?
The FBI agent tells me to relax and again says they are believed to be dead.
I nod.
88
The first assembly of the film is tough.
Damn rough to watch.
Not a good-looking movie at all. It is a first cut, so the horror I’m wrestling with is to be expected, but still. This thing I’m watching right now at three A.M. is a theatrical turd.
I can only use the footage that was given to the police. Alex did an admirable job of putting together the cop cut, as it would be known. Really only leaving out the few odds and ends that could possibly crush my kidnapping story, along with the execution of W. Gains.
Jesus. I’ve become so casual about his death. He was a friend. A friend who became an enemy and an absolute asshole, but he was a good friend at one point. We grew up together for fuck’s sake. I should feel more than I do. Have I swallowed it? Hidden it deep? I’ve become so casual about death in general. So detached. Not sure there’s been a lot of research on the subject, but I have to think that too much quality time with a family of incestuous psycho/sociopaths will do that to you.
Also have to think that me sitting here for fourteen hours a day alone in the dark, editing hours and hours of this footage, can’t be helping my damaged brain any either. Not one bit.
Watching it all is a completely out-of-body experience.
I know it is me up there, but in a way it is not.
This is like the ultimate loop in my little mental trick, my trick of removing myself from all things. I am almost completely removed from the guy on the screen, but yet he is me and I am him. Making decisions as to where to cut in on lines of dialogue the guy on-screen is saying, and also being upset with that guy for not nailing the moment the way he should. All this without making the connection that it is me up there. We are one and the same.
I need some rest.
Was right about one thing, however. I do need to use voice-over to tie some moments together. Alex and his small legal team are hashing through all the legal bullshit with the authorities on the issue of what I can use and how I can manipulate it for the sake of art.
&nb
sp; My official version of the truth.
They don’t really care about the art. They care about me not withholding anything they might find interesting. I have to be very careful and not add anything new into the voice-over that might open a door for them.
I’ve separated everything the cops and feds haven’t seen onto a different drive so there will be no mistake or temptation to cross over to the dark side. There is a great urge to dip into the other footage to find a cutaway shot or a look from Choke or something perfect to button the end of a scene with and transition into another, but I can’t do that.
I’ve sent an intern from USC out to get some pickups of exteriors around LA. Eager little hipster that he is, he couldn’t get out the door fast enough. It’s a little difficult for me to get out there while I’m bound to this wheelchair. Should be out in a few weeks, the doctors tell me. I’ve debated if I should go to the premiere in the chair. Me wheeling down the red carpet, the victim of this kidnapping, a broken man just trying to tell the truth of his story.
Me, the truth seeker.
W. Gains wanders into my thinking. His film from the ‘Stan, the film steeped in lies. At least I actually lived through everything in mine. The faker. I remember how he wore a sport coat with an American flag inside for the lining to the premiere. He came in on crutches months after his leg had fully healed, trying to look somber with his arm wrapped around a veteran. If the vet knew the truth about Gains, he would have stomped his guts out right there on the red carpet. Entertainment Tonight could have gotten his last words live before your local news.
I found out later he got boxed in during a tough interview and more or less got shamed into making a provision in his will saying his entire net worth, including the profits from his film, would go to the Wounded Warrior Project. The struggle I’m having is not feeling like W. Gains dying was a bad thing. When he was killed in front of me, I thought I was going to collapse next to him. My insides twisted. My head went blank. Feeling in my legs left. I woke up the other night in a panicked sweat, ripped free from another dream starring W. Gains. Those have happened a lot since I woke up in that hospital.