“Come on, McNixon.” Slim’s voice uncouples me from paralysis. “A quick drink and a word.”
A minute later we’re in a sterile conference room and Slim is pouring me a short glass of whiskey. He doesn’t pour one for himself, so I don’t touch my glass either. Picking up on this, he finally dispenses a half finger for himself and then sits, now facing me across a long wooden table.
“It’s complicated,” he starts.
I can only imagine, so I decide to take the drink.
“Funny. Your name. Almost the same as the president’s, but not quite. McNixon.”
He sounds out my name like it’s a joke. I nod and gulp the rest of my drink. It burns.
“So, we’re not landing on the moon?” I ask. “Armstrong, Aldrin… they’re all in on this?”
“No, Mr. McNixon. We are, in fact, landing on the moon. Just as we’ve planned to for years.”
Now I’m confused as shit. I nudge my glass toward Slim with my index finger. He pours me another few swallows.
“So… why the set? The charade? What’s the point of all this?” I ask.
“The point is that we—or you, rather—are going to create the footage of the landing that will be broadcast all over the world on landing day.”
I take a pull on the whiskey and swallow it fast. I’m getting lightly buzzed.
“I still don’t understand why we’d go through all of this unless…”
The alcohol unclogs my thinking and I begin to wonder if “… the real mission is top secret and can’t be broadcast.”
I hear myself say it aloud, and Slim doesn’t so much as blink.
“That’s it. Isn’t it?”
Slim raises an eyebrow. “You’re not the Hollywood pantywaist skuzzbucket I thought you were. Well done, McNixon.”
“So what’s the mission?” I ask. “The real one.”
The buzz I’m getting from the whiskey is hardening my balls, so I decide to push the man for info.
“Look, Slim, I’m neck deep in this now. Sworn to secrecy for the rest of my life. You might as well give me the skinny.”
Slim is not amused and wears an iron hard frown. “That is above even your obscene pay grade. Way above.”
“Look,” I say, “I’m good. Damn good at what I do. Kubrick’s a genius, I’ll concede, but dammit, I’m a fucking master myself. I will give you what you need so that the whole world will buy it—hook, line, and sinker. No one’s gonna know what we did here. If this were a commercial picture, they’d be begging me to take the Oscar. So why don’t you just lay it on me. What’s the real mission?”
Slim thinks it over long and hard. Finally he downs his drink, and then begins.
“There’s something on the moon that we’re going to investigate. A derelict ship.”
“Russian?” I ask.
“Not Russian,” Slim says. “Not terrestrial.”
I finish the whiskey and giggle. “Oh, come on. You don’t respect me much, do you, Slim?”
“Not a bit,” Slim replies.
I laugh harder. I can’t help myself. But ever so slowly, I realize Slim is telling the truth. It’s in his eyes. Fixed and hard like rebar in cement.
“Bullshit,” I say.
“It’s an alien, derelict spaceship, McNixon. For all we know it’s been there a hundred years, maybe a thousand. But that’s our target. Our mission. We land there, secure the site, and investigate.”
“Okay,” I start. “So, why not just… show the world what we found? Do the broadcast live. Be a hell of a show.”
Slim leans gently over his glass, narrowing his already narrow eyes at me.
“You ever listen to the Orson Welles radio broadcast of War of The Worlds? Do you know what took place after that broadcast? How over a million people were actively scared—no, terrified—by what they’d heard? They didn’t see shit, McNixon. They didn’t see spaceships or little green men, and still, they went batshit crazy. Some committed suicide. Imagine now what might happen if the world saw what we’re about to see. Because we really don’t know what we’re going to find up there. It could be nothing. It could be… something.”
I nod. I get it.
“Any chance I might be able to… I dunno… see some of the real footage when it comes back? Since I’m already involved in—”
“No,” Slim says. “You start shooting tomorrow. You have exactly seven days to produce the footage we need. Good luck, McNixon. We’re all counting on you.”
That’s the end of our talk and our drink. I spend the rest of the day walking the perimeter of the colossal set, examining the light fixtures on the sprawling lattice of truss in the ceiling. They’ve hung everything, including an array of 12K and 18K Fresnels. Shitloads of light point downward at an angle—a fake sun casting hard shadows on the powdery surface of a fake moon. I grab pad and pen and begin to make notes on how the hell I’m going to shoot this.
DAY 2
The pressure is on. I have just seven days to shoot a convincing moon landing event for worldwide television. I’ve overslept and arrive on set a half hour late. Slim is not happy when I show up, but I assure him everything’s under control. They’ve carefully moved the LEM—the Lunar Excursion Module—and placed it on the lunar surface set beneath the bellowing overhead lights. It looks pretty damned convincing from where I stand, and I’m feeling moderately encouraged that this might actually work somehow.
I’m given the cameras for this production. We will not be shooting thirty-five. This irritates the hell out of my director of photography, Bill Willis, who showed up in a tacky tweed jacket and smoking a gaudy pipe. I’ve never heard of this guy. Turns out he’s been making films for the army—a frustrated filmmaker who wants to be the next Kubrick. There’s that name again: Kubrick.
“We’d have much greater latitude if we shot this on thirty-five millimeter,” Bill says, taking a puff on his ridiculous pipe. He’s trying to impress me. I’m not impressed.
“No thirty-five,” I tell him. “We’ve got a Westinghouse television camera, a Hasselblad seventy millimeter for stills, and this Mauer sixteen for film.”
Bill Willis frowns and exhales two columns of smoke from his nostrils. When he speaks, it sounds like there’s a thinly veiled British accent in there. Whether authentic or phony, it sounds terrible and amplifies my growing disdain for this shmuck.
“Video.” He huffs and shakes his head. “The dregs. Medium of the amateurs. If you ask me, video will be dead and gone within five years. Ten, tops.”
I want to punch Bill Willis in the face and stuff the pipe he’s smoking up his ass. Instead I tell him that we have a job to do with strict parameters and we have to make it work. I tell him to get creative. To start thinking documentary and not feature. Off that note, he proceeds to tell me about his extensive documentary experience and that I shouldn’t worry—he knows what he’s doing. Then I get the elevator pitch.
“Listen,” he says, “when we’re finished with this project, I’d like to take you to lunch. I have a screenplay I’ve been working on and I think you’d be the perfect fellow to produce it. I’m attached to direct, by the way.”
Bill Willis is delusional. I will never work with Bill Willis again and I will blow him off so hard he’ll fall off the edge of the world into oblivion. I smile and say, “Call my secretary to make an appointment.” On this he grins, but rest assured there will be no appointment.
The rest of the day is protracted and laborious. Bill Willis is an anchor, still arguing with me about diffusing some of the overhead light for effect. I tell him that there’s no atmosphere on the moon and that sunlight up there is going to be hard. Very hard. He smokes his pipe and ponders, quietly disagreeing. He continues to make his case. Fed up, I get Slim involved. Slim takes Bill Willis into a conference room. They are gone for two minutes exactly. When Bill materializes from the meeting he’s no longer smoking his pipe or strutting in that cheap tweed jacket. He looks scared shitless like Slim put a gun to his head. And perhaps
that’s exactly what he did. We move on and start figuring out how to achieve the effects of lesser-than-Earth gravity.
By the end of day one we’ve shot nothing, but we’ve safely secured the Westinghouse video camera to the LEM, pointed at the ladder where our fake Neil Armstrong will emerge from the top of the craft and lay first steps on our moon. Since our actor will be completely sealed in his suit, that’s one less thing we have to worry about—finding someone that looks identical to Armstrong. We can manage with just about anyone in the suit I figure, so long as they’re about the same height and weight.
NASA is bringing us real suits. Exact duplicates of the real ones. These suits cost a fortune, but they don’t tell me exactly how much. I am told there better not be so much as a scratch on them when we wrap. No pressure, since I’m fairly certain we’ll be doing some wire work and slow motion photography to simulate the lesser gravity with these costly suits.
Frame rates. My initial instinct is to go with 60 frames per second for that clean slow motion look. Bill Willis thinks we should try 120 frames per second. That’s going to be too slow—I just know it. It has to be 60. Possibly 48. I realize then we should have shot some tests, just to be sure. I suppose we could, but then we’re waiting for film processing and that’s time we don’t have. Squashing Bill Willis like the insect he is, I make the final call. We’ll shoot 60 frames per second and hope it works. It feels right.
That settled, we discuss stars. I’m thinking about how we can hang some points of light in the background to simulate stars. On this point, Bill Willis actually redeems himself. He carefully steps toward the side of the LEM with his light meter. He dials everything in and takes a reading.
“Hmmm, we’re at an f-stop of sixteen out here under the direct light,” he says. “If we pan up we won’t see any stars, just the Earth. I recommend we scrap the idea of stars, unless we dim the overhead grid and buy ourselves another four or five stops.”
He smokes his pipe and stares at me thoughtfully. This chowderhead may have just earned himself a lunch with me concerning his stupid screenplay. My instinct kicks in.
“I’d rather keep the exposure where it is and sacrifice the stars than dim the whole thing,” I say. It’s true, so I’m told by Slim. Direct sunlight on the surface of the moon is violently bright. Blinding were it not for those reflective visors they wear on their helmets. I want the image to fucking bloom at the bottom of the frame. This will work especially nice for video, since it doesn’t have nearly the image latitude as film. This will work, I figure. It has to work.
DAY 3
“Cut!” I scream again. “Cut!”
Everyone freezes. Perhaps it’s because I screamed, or perhaps it’s because one of our lighting fixtures just fell into the middle of our moon set and almost crushed our Neil Armstrong, along with that very expensive space suit. No one breathes. It’s a close call and somehow comical. I wonder what would happen if that went out on the broadcast—a 1K Fresnel lighting instrument just drops from outer space and crashes with the full force of gravity onto our “landing site” on the moon. And four hundred million people see it.
I walk carefully out toward the light and examine it. There’s no safety chain.
“Hey,” I yell, “who rigged this truss?”
Two men with close-cropped hair raise their hands sheepishly.
“You forgot to safety chain this light! What the hell kind of amateur operation is this?”
I look up at the rest of the grid. At all those lights. Especially the big ones. And it occurs to me that perhaps I don’t want to be standing underneath them.
“Did you safety chain any of those instruments?” I ask, even though I’m pretty sure I already know the answer.
The two pinheads glance at each other. Did you? I thought you did?
This is hopeless.
“Get your asses up on that grid and don’t come back down until every single fucking light is secured! Now!”
I haven’t screamed like this since I did a western about five years earlier and one of the transport guys forgot to properly secure a grip truck, which proceeded to roll away and tumble off a mesa in the New Mexico desert. A whole five-ton grip package, gone. Totaled. The insurance claims on that picture were a gas.
I tromp off toward a foldout table where there’s coffee. What I really need is another glass of whiskey from Slim’s private stash, but he’s holding out on me until we wrap. And just then I see him approach from my right side. He’s pissed at me, and we’re now in a stare-down. His eyes glow dim red.
“We don’t have time for that,” he says.
“Slim,” I say. I figure I can call him Slim now, since I’m in too deep in to be polite any longer. “If those instruments aren’t secured and another one falls, especially one of the big ones… someone’s gonna get killed. Or our precious and very expensive LEM will get totaled, and then we’re dead in the water.”
Slim blows out a furious hard gust of air.
“Hey, this is grip and lighting one-oh-one,” I say. “It’s not my fault you hired these dipsticks for the job. You’re lucky to have me.” I stir sugar into my coffee and head back toward the set, leaving Slim to simmer in his own juices. It’s satisfying, even though I know the guy is right, too: we don’t have time for this. But we can’t afford not to, either.
I’m starting to regret taking this job. Then again, I really didn’t have a choice.
DAY 4
We’re finally getting shit done! We’ve completed the sequence where Neil Armstrong—I mean our double in the spacesuit; his name is Reed Richards—steps off the LEM ladder and puts first prints on the moon. Since we’re shooting video for that part we can’t employ slow motion. That would look completely fake and the whole party is over. So we do some very careful and articulate wirework to have Reed “float” down to the lunar surface. Once we’re satisfied with the result, we move on to shoot the rest of the extra-vehicular activities that are supposed to happen. Two hours’ worth to be precise. Not sure how long the wire thing will sell before it becomes obvious. The shitty quality of the video is helping to hide it. After reviewing the footage, I think we’ll need to make it look even shittier. Usually we’re doing just the opposite. And for the first time since I started this gig I’m really glad we’re not shooting thirty-five.
We press on and end up with a twenty-hour day under our belts. I’m delirious by the end of it. I inform Slim that I’ll be coming in late since I need to go home and get some sleep. Slim tells me to take the cot in the conference room. We start shooting again in four hours. Asshole.
DAY 5
Another murderous, long day. Hell. One of our astronaut actors passed out in his suit and fell face first onto the powdery set. Since they didn’t hook the real oxygen tanks to these real suits, our actors are breathing carbon dioxide and getting sick. I ask Slim if there’s any way we can help these guys out and hook them up with real oxygen. At first he rolls his eyes, but then he decides that for the sake of this whole production, we should take care of our actors. Oxygen gets delivered, and we re-slate our sequence and move on.
DAY 6
I haven’t slept in almost thirty hours. I want to die.
DAY 7
I want to kill Slim and everyone on the set. Bill Willis will be directly after Slim. He’s useless, just standing around, smoking, letting me do all the footwork. I yell at him and he skulks off into the shadows and puffs incessantly on his pipe. In spite of all the headache, heartache, and sleep deprivation, we come to the end and shoot our last piece of film. We pore over the shot list again and again, just to make sure we haven’t missed anything. By God, it’s done. I can’t believe it! I fall on my knees onto the surface of our moon, raise my arms in the air, and stare up into that blinding lattice of so many lights.
Everyone claps. Not for me, but for the fact that it’s over. I don’t care anymore. I just want to go home and sleep. Then wake up, drink, and go back to sleep again. I think my agent’s been trying to get
ahold of me, so I’d better check in before he gets suspicious.
When it’s all over—when Slim is fully satisfied—he shakes my hand.
“Nice job, McNixon.”
“Thanks,” I say. “So what’s next? Mars?”
He doesn’t smile when he says this: “Don’t be cute, McNixon. Remember our agreement. We’ll know if you break it. And you know what that means.”
I don’t know exactly what it means—that is to say, I don’t know exactly how they might choose to kill me. A warm, sick ball forms in my stomach.
“Don’t worry,” I tell him.
He begins to walk away from me, and I follow him because I have one more question.
“Hey, Slim, how will we know if the real mission is a success or not? How will we know for sure?”
“You won’t,” Slim says. And that is the last time I ever see him. He glides off and dematerializes into the shadows of the hangar like someone beamed him up on Star Trek. It’s eerie.
“I do hope we’ll have a chance to have our lunch,” Bill Willis says, extending his hand for a shake. The pipe is in his mouth and the smoke is obscuring his features. He looks like a pompous store mannequin. I don’t shake his hand. Instead I shoulder past him and walk a straight line out the door of the hangar and drop in behind the wheel of my car. I never see Bill Willis again. I heard he got a job shooting a few films for Roger Corman.
THE BIG PREMIERE
It’s July 20, 1969, and I’m at home. Alone. Petrified. Because it’s my biggest premiere of all. I’ve been to premieres at the Village Theater in Westwood and the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. I can handle all the people, the media, the noise, and the snobbery. But this… I can’t handle this. I’m scared shitless. Because if there’s just one problem with the broadcast—if just one person in the chain screws up—this whole thing will have been for nothing. And if it does crash and burn, I’m betting donuts to dollars Slim and his boys will be coming for me. I’ll become the fall guy—the patsy. That thought alone sets my heart into a raging gallop.
Tales of Tinfoil: Stories of Paranoia and Conspiracy Page 17