Upgunned

by David J. Schow

  I had forgotten I had friends of this caliber.

  As Joey might have said, it was a mute point.

  Time to go, time to go.

  I worried more about Joey than any other person on the West Coast. I hoped his street smarts would keep him clear of the firing line, if Gun Guy chose to probe that deeply or become that insanely petty. I hoped my entire catastrophe passed him by like a jet skimming perilously close to the earth before crashing, changing Joey’s life no more than a tragic news item from a foreign country. If I could get through the next six weeks and make a properly professional showing of myself, then perhaps I could risk a single contact with him to find out whether any flaming debris had landed near him.

  Calling him right now was against my new set of life rules.

  Then there was the puzzler of the gun. I had it and Gun Guy did not, which was another motivation probably sufficient to expedite my death. I tried to dispose of it like the cell phone, but it lingered in my grasp until I began to enjoy the weight and heft of it; its implicit guarantee of protection against harm. It was somehow karmically wrong to merely abandon it. Now I understood the mass and lure of killing hardware, the easy seduction of its mechanics. This was a thing designed to extend your reach and knock down those who would imperil you. And it was a lot better reminder than a mere bullet, which I had taken to keeping in my pocket.

  I know—stupid, wrong, dumb. File a lawsuit if you care.

  I found an online diagram and after several false tries, I succeeded in making the Kimber’s two main sections come apart—the slide and the frame. Push a release and it’s done, not dissimilar to breaking down a camera for cleaning. The clip with the bullets was a third yet equal part. That came out when you pressed a little button on the right side of the handgrip. With the slide off, you could remove the mainspring and the barrel. The online guide said you should change the barrel every 800 rounds but I was not sure what that meant. There was no need to take out the spring or the barrel. I just wanted to break the weapon down into smaller pieces so I could adequately conceal it among my camera gear, which totaled two large pro cases I could safely check. I always used Pelicans, which were airtight and waterproof, like little indestructible safes on wheels. Practically everything in them looked like a weapon, and Tripp and I had the added sanction of special dispensation for movie folks in a hurry.

  I was especially proud of the way I hid the ammunition.

  The cartridges were coated in some kind of sealant. During coffee at an internet pit stop with rental consoles, I found out that such lacquered ammo can prevent bomb dogs from sniffing the gunpowder. With a bit of coaxing the bullets fit into a tube support for the case feet (if you have seen From Russia with Love you know what I’m talking about; that’s where I got the inspiration). They would not rattle around and were now invisible to X-ray. They totaled nine; Gun Guy had come packing a full magazine plus one in the chamber of the Kimber. The argot was “nine is fine.” He had fired that bonus round at me in the darkroom. I replaced it with my souvenir slug, preserving an oddly pleasant symmetry.

  Smuggling an undeclared firearm onto an airplane? I was already learning new skills. To get caught with the gun inside Manhattan would be a pure felony. Hell, even having the bullet in my pocket there was a crime. But I needed and liked the sense of the weapon and ammo near to hand. I chose not to tell Tripp about it. Mine; private.

  The outright relief of leaving L.A. behind me buffered my head as though an anvil had just been lifted away. I got drunk on the flight and slept through most of it. Waking up on the other side of the country, despite the wrongness of the hour, was very much like rousing from a bad dream.

  * * *

  When I first met Andrew Collier, he was pointing a gun in my direction. Actually, he was staring through the empty chambers of the cylinder on a formidable revolver. At least it was unloaded.

  Collier was British, pink-cheeked, and tousle-haired, his manner that of a big kid set loose to play in the fields of celluloid. He resembled an aging Beatle. The production offices for the New York leg of Vengeance Is were set up in a building between the Battery Maritime structure and East River Park. The director’s sanctum was three times bigger than it needed to be and everything was crowded toward one busywork corner with his desk as the hub. None of the chairs matched. Production drawings and photographs were pinned and Blu-Tacked to the walls but with no sense of organization because everybody was set to vacate in two weeks. It was typical for an on-site combat office.

  “Colt Navy .36, converted from cap and ball to a revolver,” Collier said proudly. “Look at this thing. It’s almost an Expressionist gun.”

  “Is this a Western?” I said after Tripp had introduced us. I could not tell if the pistol was real, or a prop. Today Tripp’s blue cap had an iron-on logo for Covert Reprisals.

  “No genre,” Collier said with an air of rehearsed speech. “If you like, an urban Western crossover. I wanted no fixed time or place; I tried not to have any character make conventional phone calls or watch television.”

  “Drive the product placement folks bananas,” said Tripp, who had changed into the workwear I would see on him for the entire shoot: jogging duds, an old garrison belt adangle with a fanny pack, a sling for his water bottle and a holster for his walkie, which was wired to a headset I never saw him without. And of course, one of his bazillion crew hats.

  “Yes, I wanted all our brand names to be invented,” said Collier. “Labels, signage, that sort of thing. Makes for a better created reality.”

  Collier struck me as the sort of fellow who had all his day wear tailored, but had fourteen identical sets racked in a closet somewhere so it always looked like he was wearing the same clothes, with minor variations in pastel tones. A lot of “creatives” affected this shortcut system attributed to, I believe, Albert Einstein: don’t squander valuable thought or waste time by selecting an ensemble. Yet Collier’s dunnage was another peculiar form of rank: the director was always well-dressed, but not overdressed, his starched cuffs folded to mid-forearm to indicate he was already ready to work.

  I smiled. This would drive fashion hounds berserk. I had entered a different realm for sure.

  Yet much of the basic playbook was the same. The schedule was the gang boss of all that unfolded. There was never enough time for anything. You had to be nimble enough to adapt and improvise on the spot. Hot lights, cranky subjects, and an eternity of waiting for the right light or makeup rescues followed by activity that was often fast and frantic. As Tripp said, you have to be able to jump out of the chopper and start shooting, hence the term “run and gun.”

  Vengeance Is was run and gun because the studio had amputated a week off the original shooting schedule for budgetary reasons, which meant Tripp had to hustle in order to make the six-day weeks add up. Two of his most important jobs involved Gordo, his highly caffeinated first assistant director: at the end of each day, they had to somehow juggle and rejigger the schedule to fit the next day of madness, and they worked in concert to keep the lurking producers off Collier’s back so something useful might actually be shot. The whole system was elegant and hair-triggered; one had to account for every variable from runaway egos to unforecast rain.

  I was introduced to roughly seventy people over the next twelve hours. I did not have a hope in hell of remembering every crew name when I was having trouble remembering my own.

  Gordo’s job description was more akin to master sergeant or ramrod on a cattle drive. Just look for the person on the set with the bullhorn, the khaki shorts, and the climbing boots, and that will usually be the first AD, especially if he or she is yelling into the bullhorn or requesting a “20” (seeking some crew member’s location) on a walkie.

  In Gordo’s company Tripp and I trooped around the production offices and met everybody from the DP to Crafty. The former was Konstantin Vendredi, the cinematographer, the guy who shoots the movie. I resisted calling him DP for director of photography because of Joey’s whole double-p
enetration anecdote. The latter was Molly Bellerose, reigning diva of craft services—the snack-and-drink watering hole that is the second-most valuable thing to locate on an active set, after the nearest restroom. To a person the crew all greeted me warmly—as Julian Hightower—and eyed my camera with suspicion. Tripp had just finished a dustup with the fellow responsible for video documentation, whose name always slipped me; Collier did not want him on the set during shooting and the faraway gods of executive production had decreed otherwise.

  Video documentarian, I learned from Tripp, was possibly the lowest form of life on a film set, below even the screenwriter … practically under the floor. This hapless individual was charged with intruding camera-first into every aspect of filming on behalf of the eventual DVD making-of supplements. Nobody really liked him yet everybody tolerated him as an inevitable engine of relentless surveillance. Nobody wanted to get caught on tape disparaging work conditions on tough days or bitching about another crew member. Everybody tried to pretend a lens was not always in their face—yet, months later, they got irritated if they could not spot themselves in the behind-the-scenes footage. One frequent accusation was that the guy with the roving camera was actually a spy for the higher-ups. All I knew was that I did not wish to inadvertently appear on some podcast done for an online diary about Vengeance Is, which would be counterproductive.

  So naturally it fell to me to share office space with this fellow.

  Then, as Tripp had to catch up from going AWOL, I was remanded to my hotel with a copy of the screenplay that was joyous with multicolored revision pages.

  I hated screenplays. There’s a lot of argument over whether their manufacture constituted an art or a craft, similar to the artistic caveats targeted at photography. The debate held that pictures and movies (hence, moving pictures) were documentation, as opposed to paintings and prose, which were supposed more stylistically representative. The conflict was basically good for wasting time in a coffeehouse if you’re an idiot college student. Making a living at anything remotely defined as an art form could straighten your priorities out superquick.

  A script is essentially a blueprint for visual storytelling—without any pictures. The agreement between scenarist and reader is to imagine angles, tone, whether characters have distinguishing marks or not. A lot of people can’t suspend disbelief in a fictional movie narrative anymore, not even when all the work is done for them. Their capacity for dreaming awake has become that atrophied. The lack of visual augmentation in any film script irritates me in a bemused way. At the same time, I knew I was being asked to help interpret a production visually, to convey my own sense of attitude and composition in regard to a larger work controlled by outside forces. It was like being a war correspondent on some foreign front. My job here was to file dispatches and fabricate a historical record; not a notion that charmed me. But I was able to enjoy the sense of disengagement from my previous life as Elias, that poor dope still stuck in the merry-go-round clusterfuck that was the world of Clavius.

  Vengeance Is had to do with a sheriff in an Arizona frontier town at the turn of the last century. He gets lynched by bad guys who kill his wife and daughter. As he strangles on the hanging tree, the boss (a dapper J.F.K. type) shows up astride a mule and tricks the sheriff into selling his soul for a shot at revenge. A hot, unpleasant century passes in hell, after which the devil guy calls our hero up out of the pit to make another proposition: a gang of five super-badasses have escaped. Our guy’s job is to round them up “topside,” in present-day New York, using special bullets supplied by Hell’s Armorer, one for each bad guy in the cylinder of our guy’s modified Navy Colt six-shooter. If our protagonist succeeds, he gets his family back. He is monitored long distance by a vulture who happened to be on the hanging tree where he originally died—the eyes and ears of the boss on earth.

  As Tripp pointed out to me, vultures are carrion eaters. They only go after what’s dead.

  Naturally, Collier wanted to know what I thought of the script.

  “So you could call this a horror movie?” I asked, while shadowing him around an airplane hangar in New Jersey, then an office building with a vacant floor in the lower Thirties—a structure that would be condemned after filming. I nabbed about two hundred shots of Collier pointing at things. Peeling paint on a wall. Old architecture for a backdrop the crew would not have to build. Framable space.

  “God, no,” he said. “Don’t even say that word. It has, shall we say, a supernatural element. Like Field of Dreams.”

  “So, Field of Dreams with a high body count and gunfights, then.”

  “No, more like Heaven Can Wait”—he grinned evilly—“with a lot of gunfights. Call it a meta-Western if you like.”

  “Why not a horror movie?” I enumerated from my fast overview of the story as I understood it. “Guy goes to hell, comes back, there’s a devil, there’s escapees with supernatural powers, there’s zombies.”

  “Zombies?” Collier seemed genuinely taken aback. He was incredibly camera-aware and always froze his pose when he thought he looked good. I nailed him with that observation, though, and captured the first photo of him that I really wanted.

  “Yeah, at the end, when the bad guy’s crew rises from their graves at Boot Hill.”

  He stopped and blinked several times. “You actually read the script to the end?”

  “Wasn’t I supposed to?” Snap. Move. Focus. Snap.

  “Unusual,” he said, shaking his head. “That puts you ahead of most of the crew. Anyway, in our film they’re not really zombies. Not zombie-zombies, anyway.”

  I had heard Tripp employ this weird real-world, fake-world dichotomy. For a night shot, he’d ask is it night or is it night-night? For rainfall, is it rain or is it rain-rain? For fake-real or for real-real? It made everyone sound like a five-year-old speaking code only other five-year-olds could register.

  “Most horror films are … horrible,” Collier said. He was pleased with that. You could see him storing it for later sound-bite use. “Call it a mainstream film with perhaps a horrific element.” He was apparently changing his mind about the bones of his movie every four minutes.

  He was eager and nervous, manic and resigned all at once. He wanted to get past the first shoot day. He needed to plant that flag, get rolling, because the entire cast and crew complement would not settle into any kind of routine for the first six days or so. He had to marshal them through the wear-in period. He had to spend more time pop quizzing the actors, since the end of the film would shoot first. Tripp was somewhere knocking his brains out right now, so they could shoot scenes with the most warm bodies early and the fewest later. Sort out how much time to spend on each location and set, as I said, and prefigure backups if anything upset the plan. This would all wind up on a document called “day out of days,” I learned, as in “Day 1 out of 36 Days,” not counting pickups, second units, or overshoots.

  “No, not horror, at all.” His British was showing as he said “atoll.” “I mean, we’ve got Mason Stone.” He said that as though it was the cure-all answer to everything.

  * * *

  Mason Stone was a piece of work. His hairdresser got screen credit. His personal trainer got credit. He had his own chef, his own wardrobe lady, four assistants, a hovering minion of private security, and on location he lived in a two-story, trilevel “mobile estate” designed by Ron Anderson. Built around an eighteen-wheel rig, this ultimate “trailer” provided 1,200 square feet of living space that included a removable state-of-the-art recording studio, a lounge that could seat twenty, a fold-out exterior deck (really), a master bedroom, a baby playroom, a lush gallery, and marbled bathroom all with electric-thermal privacy glass. Flat screens everywhere. Double-soundproofed, satellite-capable, and a bullet- and bomb-proof Cocoon security module.

  The very rich are “different” than you or me, as Fitzgerald wrote.

  But since he was visiting New York, Stone was also billeted crow’s nest–high in the Jumeirah Essex House, with a million-
dollar view of Central Park South.

  Mason Stone had hair implants, and I needed to figure out a way to shoot close-ups that did not brag this fact to the universe. Mason Stone had plastic surgery scars, fine as threadlines, that I had to decide how to deal with in high-def. He had a clause in his contract that prohibited my taking pictures of him when he was wearing his glasses, and another in his general deal memo that specified that no one, but nobody, was to interview his hairdresser, trainer, chef, wardrobe lady, on-call physician, analyst, bodyguards … or photographer. While the lens rarely forgives, I had to pretend to be forgiving.

  Mason Stone was half a decade away from sixty years, and his leading lady, Artesia Savoy, was not even half his age.

  (You may recollect Artesia’s first movie, Kiss in the Dark [2001]. She was the sassy cousin. I remember her earlier, actual debut before a camera—as Cherry Whip, in a video extravaganza titled Bungholers 6 [1998], but the supermarket rags had yet to sniff out this tidbit for point-of-purchase consumption. Neither had the dirty-drawers Web sites twigged. So far.)

  Mason Stone was nearly fifteen years older than me, and I could’ve passed him off as my little brother.

  Mason Stone had weathered hits, flops, strikes, scandal, addiction and recovery, celebrity marriage and tabloid divorce. He once tried to diversify with a show-off directing debut: a cash-stupid vanity project for which he actually sang the title theme. After his one-and-only directorial flagship crashed and burned like the Hindenburg, he was now comfortably reensconced in his primary duty to society—leading man of the cinema, one of the ten people in the movie industry with the power to help green-light a project by signing on the line. A “tent-pole” star who had successfully evolved from winsome to craggy without losing his audience. When in the public eye he was gracious and giving; at his rates, he could afford a faux interest in commoners. He was not bad or evil. He was the sort of working actor who inspires wannabes to sign up for drama classes, so don’t ask if he owned a considerable ego. In the book of Mason Stone, every paragraph began with the words “Mason Stone.”