Disaster Productions

by Brian Bakos

Duals and I return to Grandpa’s house and crash for the night.

  26: Starting Fresh

  Aside from a lot of fingerprints on its surfaces, the camera is okay. At Grandpa’s house the next morning, I clean and polish it up like a precious gem.

  “I’ll be hanging onto this for a while,” I tell Duals.

  He starts to object. He probably wants to whine about all the trouble he had getting it back, and don’t I have any gratitude, etc., etc.

  But I’m in no mood for such talk. Duals seems to figure this out, so all he says is:

  “Sure, Matt, take all the time you need.”

  “I’ll take that Steadicam, too,” I say. “I want to figure out how everything works.”

  “Anything else?” Duals says.

  I feel like banishing him to the boom pole, but think better of it. If I’m to be the leader of Studio Duals, I’ll have to know how to handle people so as to get the best out of them. Humiliating my number two guy will get me nowhere.

  “That’s it for now,” I say. “I just want to get the hang of things, you understand.”

  “Right,” Duals say.

  I pull the camera’s data card and shove it into the laptop’s reader. There is some pretty raw footage on it – guys throwing up in the toilet, couples slipping into bedrooms, girls pealing off their tops for the camera.

  “This is great!” Duals cries.

  But Kaitlyn is with us now, and she’s sending this furious glower Duals’ way.

  “On second thought, let’s delete all those files,” Duals says.

  I select Reformat. This seems to satisfy Kaitlyn. She walks off to the kitchen for a bottled water.

  “You downloaded those files to the hard drive first, didn’t you?” Duals says in a low voice.

  “No, I was reading direct from the card,” I say.

  “And you wiped the card?” Duals is appalled.

  “Yeah, the files are gone for good,” I say.

  “Oh, man!”

  Duals rocks back on the couch with his hand over his eyes. He looks like he’s just lost his best friend. A change of subject seems urgent.

  “So, what do you think about my script?” I say.

  Duals needs a few more seconds of recovery time before he can answer.

  “It has some good points,” he says, “but it needs to get punched up. And that lake rescue scene comes out of nowhere. We have to work it into the plot better, use foreshadowing.”

  “Fine, go to it,” I say.

  Kaitlyn has returned by now.

  “Is there a part in it for me?” she asks.

  “Sure,” I say.

  This pleases her, and she leaves again. This time for the bathroom.

  “Now, when you ‘punch up’ the script, that doesn’t mean adding a lot of negative stuff,” I say. “The message of this movie is strictly upbeat.”

  “Sure, I get that,” Duals says. “It’s the perfect cover.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Look at it this way,” Duals says, “reality works on two levels. We have the reality of what we’re filming, then there’s the reality of what’s going on around us. There’s bound to be something interesting we can add to the story. You know, mix the two realities.”

  This sounds like something he told Grandpa. I hadn’t thought much about it at the time, and it’s moving right past me again.

  “It’s like Shakespeare, man,” Duals says, “a play within a play.”

  “I’m not real good with English literature,” I say.

  “Suppose we’re doing the lake rescue scene,” Duals says. “Elsewhere on the lake a true disaster could be happening – a boat capsizing perhaps. It’s like the early moviemakers who’d run out to film a burning building. Later on they’d work the fire into their plot.”

  I don’t like the direction this conversation is going. I knew there’d be friction about this down the road, but now doesn’t seem the right time to hash it out.

  “I get what you’re saying, Duals. How long do you need for the script revisions?”

  “Give me a couple of days,” Duals says.

  “Fine.”

  “We’re going to need more people for the production crew, not to mention the cast,” Duals says. “Have you thought of anybody?”

  Yes I have – Lauren. But there could be problems with that.

  27: Climbing the Learning Curve

  “How is Stephan?” Mom asks the moment I enter the house.

  I hoped that she’d be out when I got home so I wouldn’t have to tell any more crappy lies.

  “Oh, he’s fine,” I say. “We had a little blowup, but that’s over now.”

  Mom gives me this peculiar look, then she scopes out my leather bag. She looks as if she wants to say something, but I’m already tromping up the stairs to my room, playing the uncommunicative teen. I hope the cover holds.

  Nobody knocks at my door, so I figure I’m safe. I stash the camera stuff, then get out my cell phone. Before I left Grandpa’s house, Duals accessed his data base and provided me with Lauren’s number. I’d had no chance to ask for it myself during the Roll-O-Center catastrophe.

  The phone stares back at me from my hand – a cold, alien, and dangerous thing, like that praying mantis. In my other hand, I grip the paper with Lauren’s number on it. I haven’t added her number to my phonebook yet. That seems way too rash, like I expect to be using it again.

  This way, if necessary, I can tear the paper up or burn it or something. Then I just have to figure out some way to avoid her for the next four years at school.

  Now or never, Matt.

  I punch in the numbers ....

  After five heart-stopping rings, I get the “please leave a message” routine.

  “Uh ... hi Lauren,” I say. “This is Matt Alpin. I was thinking ... well you see, we’ve got this new project ... and ... well I’ve been away a couple weeks, and ...”

  Boy, am I doing great! Then Lauren picks up.

  “I was wondering when you’d call,” she says.

  “Oh, hi Lauren,” I say. “I-I was just saying that I was up north for a couple weeks – at my grandparents’ place.”

  “Really?” Lauren says. “How are you feeling.”

  “I’m all recovered, if that’s what you mean.”

  The conversation bats back and forth for a while. Lauren isn’t unfriendly, exactly, but something seems to be bothering her. Then it finally comes out.

  “I didn’t like what happened at the skating party,” she says. “It was very mean.”

  “Yeah, it was pretty messed up.”

  I feel it necessary to come absolutely clean with her.

  “We were hoping to catch Dylan in one of his screw-ups,” I say. “It backfired on me, though.”

  This doesn’t seem to bother her as much as I expected. The more important issue comes up next.

  “The way that Tamika girl was falling all over you was pretty lame,” she says.

  “It was all for the camera,” I say. “Did you see the online video?”

  “I heard about it.”

  “If you really insist, I’ll show it to you,” I say, “but please just take my word on it.”

  She is starting to come around. Next thing I know she has sort of agreed to work in the cast / crew of our Adventure Bike Club movie. She’ll have to see the script first, though.

  “I’ll email you the initial draft,” I say. “It’s a bit rough, but we’re still working on it.”

  And that was that. I leap across the room to my computer and access my email. Within moments, the script is winging its way toward Lauren with a “Please let me know what you think” message. Maybe there is hope for me yet in this life.

  My inbox has a message from Grandpa in Costa Rica:

  I’m back in Alajuela now, Matt. The church out in the wilds is all finished. It could be pretty scary out there!

  He’s attached a picture. It shows Grandpa standing by a huge jungle tree with an upraised m
achete and a crazed, frightened look in his eyes as he stares at some off-camera ‘danger.’

  He also sent a video about the church’s construction. It shows Grandpa and other members of the mission work crew carrying lumber, mixing cement, nailing up wood paneling.

  In one shot they haul supplies out of a dugout canoe and up a steep river bank assisted by smiling Costa Ricans. All around is tropical forest, a tropical river, tropical bugs. I wonder if they have giant praying mantises there.

  The final scene is a grainy night view of a tree. Somebody is shining a light into the top branches where two glowing eyes stare back.

  “We think it’s a giant tree sloth,” a voice says off camera. “If not, then we don’t want to know what it is.”

  This is so cool – if only I could be there! I start to call Mom to watch the video but quickly change my mind. The less communication I have with her today the better, I don’t want to deal with any awkward questions about last night.

  ***

  I spend the next couple of days practicing with the camera, studying online tutorials, reading up on film production. Man, there’s a lot to the movie making business! Getting your own studio is only the first step.

  I can’t get the hang of the Steadicam. The thing seems to have a mind of its own, and I can never get the smooth effect I’m after. The camera is always bouncing in some unexpected direction.

  Then I am struck by an inspiration: Duals will be the Steadicam guy, and I’ll operate the camera when it’s on the sticks. We’ll take turns with the hand-held shots when a jerkier, more hectic style is needed.

  There! Duals will not feel excluded now. I’ve made my first executive decision as CEO of Studio Duals.

  I call Gerry and Bill to see if they’d like to work on my movie. They both say the same thing:

  “You’re not going to get violent if I screw up, are you? I mean, with the baseball bat.”

  “No, no,” I assure them. “I was only being theatrical that day. You’ll be perfectly safe, trust me.”

  Finally, with a certain amount of reluctance, they both agree to help.

  Lauren emails back saying that she likes the script and is also on board. “A diamond in the rough,” she calls my screenplay. I arrange to meet her at Studio Duals Monday afternoon.

  Things are really starting to pop!

  28: Raspberry Debut

  Monday, when I arrive at Grandpa’s house with the camera stuff, Duals is already there, per usual. I’m beginning to wonder if he’s moved into the place.

  “How are the screenplay revisions going?” I ask.

  “Okay,” Duals says. “I kind of had to work on this one, too.”

  He hands me a script. On the title page:

  RASPBERRY, WHERE ARE YOU?

  by Tamika Boeing

  “What’s this?” I say.

  “The screenplay for Tamika’s movie,” Duals says. “I’m thinking that we should make it the first priority.”

  “What about my movie?”

  “We can get to yours next,” Duals says. “Tamika wants to do this one for her reel.”

  “What about my reel!”

  “Look, Matt, we owe Tamika a lot. We’d have never got back the camera without her.”

  This brings me up short.

  “You’ve got a good point, Duals,” I say. “Let me guess, she made it very clear that we owe her, right?”

  “You could put it that way,” Duals says.

  “Let me read her script.”

  Duals hands it over, and I plop down on the couch with it.

  “Look on the bright side,” Duals says. “By the time we get to your movie we’ll have more experience. We’ll get better results.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  I fan the script pages. How come every time I walk into the studio I get a nasty surprise? Aren’t I supposed to be the guy calling the shots?

  Well ... nobody can accuse Matthew Alpin of not knowing how to repay favors. I begin to read.

  As far as I can tell, the story is a cross between Beauty and the Beast and The Frog Prince. In it, Tamika (playing herself) vies with another girl, Skagg, for the affections of a magical dog. The dog has a habit of appearing at crucial moments and performing rescues, as when Tamika is fleeing through the woods pursued by evil forces.

  Eventually, Tamika wins out over Skagg. She’s so delighted that she kisses the dog, at which time, supercharged by her love, the thing morphs into this human prince stud.

  I toss the script onto the coffee table.

  “Oh, man,” I say, “that’s a real classic!”

  “Let’s just get it done, okay?” Duals says.

  “Who’s going to play the prince?”

  “Dylan.”

  “That figures,” I say. “What are we going to do about a dog?”

  “Tamika is providing that.”

  The doorbell rings.

  “That must be them now,” Duals says.

  He opens the door.

  “Hi, Tamika,” he says. “How’s it going, Raspberry?”

  “Hello, Stephan,” Tamika says.

  She enters the house with this gigantic black dog. I jerk upright on the sofa.

  “Hi, Matt,” Tamika says. She seems much too amused by my terror. “Just thought I’d bring Raspberry over to get acquainted with the crew.”

  She unhooks the dog’s leash. Raspberry lumbers across the living room toward me, almost knocking over one of the light units. Duals moves the camera sticks out of the way.

  “Say hello to Matt,” Tamika says.

  The dog walks up to the sofa and shoves its head onto the arm. I pat the massive cranium reluctantly.

  “W-what kind of dog is this?” I manage to ask.

  “A Newfie,” Tamika says.

  “Newfie?”

  “Yes, a Newfoundland,” Tamika says.

  That’s in Canada, right? That would be a good place for him to be right now. The dog has a serious, dignified face. He looks friendly enough, but he’s so huge!

  “How much does he weigh?” I ask.

  “Only about 140 pounds,” Tamika says. “He’s not full grown yet. He should top out around 170.”

  Good grief!

  Then, as if I haven’t have enough shock for one day, the girl with the spiky hair walks in.

  “Hey, it’s Freshie!” she says.

  “Uh, hi ...” I say.

  “My name’s Trace.”

  “Hi, Trace,” I say.

  She turns toward Tamika. “You gonna need a ride home?”

  “No thanks, we’ll walk back,” Tamika says. “Raspberry needs the exercise.”

  “Sure.”

  They exchange this girl hug thing. Trace gives me an amused little glance, then she’s gone.

  “Come on, Raspberry,” Tamika says, “let’s see the back yard.”

  They walk off through the dining room and into the kitchen. The dog is so massive that I half expect Tamika to climb on and ride it like a horse. I hear them leave through the side door.

  “That dog’s big enough to wreck the whole studio,” I say. “Can’t we get something smaller?”

  “Tamika insists on using him,” Duals says. “She’s one of those ‘love me love my dog’ type people. They’re a package deal.”

  “Great, I’m all for that,” I say. “Let’s ditch both of them.”

  “We can’t do that,” Duals says. “We owe her.”

  “Yeah, but the deal doesn’t include monster dogs,” I say.

  “Raspberry only appears in outdoor shots, so we don’t have to worry about him wrecking the studio,” Duals says.

  “That’s very comforting.”

  Duals throws up his hands.

  “Relax, Matt, I’ll be the director. You can take any other job you want.”

  “Like handling that dog?” I say. “Who’s going to do that when Tamika is on camera?”

  “Dylan.”

  “Oh, man!”

  I’m off the couch now, p
ounding a fist into my palm.

  “Please, Matt,” Duals says, “there’s also Kaitlyn to consider.”

  “What’s she got to do with it?”

  “It’s this girl solidarity thing,” Duals says. “If we don’t let Tamika have her movie, Kaitlyn will be mad at me. Things have been going well with her so far.”

  Then, to round out the perfect afternoon, Lauren arrives. I decide to confront the issue head on.

  “There’s been a change of plan, Lauren,” I say. “We’re going to do a movie for Tamika first.”

  This dark expression comes over her face, and her eyes flash.

  “Think I’ll see how things are going in the back yard,” Duals says.

  Lauren holds her piece until Duals leaves the house. Then she lets fly.

  “I thought you said it was over with you two.”

  “There was nothing to be over,” I protest.

  “Could’ve fooled me,” Lauren says, “the way you were undressing her with your eyes at the skating party. And that kiss!”

  “Please, Lauren, none of this was my idea,” I say. “Besides, Tamika is going with Dylan now.”

  “Dylan ... and that girl?”

  “Yeah. I know it seems weird.”

  There’s a tense silence, then:

  “Are you putting me on, Matt?”

  “No, I – ”

  Out in the yard, Raspberry lets out a series of deep, powerful barks.

  “What’s that?” Lauren says.

  “The male lead,” I say.

  “Oh?”

  She leaves for the backyard. I have no time to warn her that Tamika is out there with a monster dog. I flop down on the couch again.

  Wouldn’t it be nice to go someplace else today? Costa Rica, for example.

  Several minutes pass. More barks. Lauren doesn’t come stomping back in, so my optimism rises a little. Then, through the picture window, I see Tamika walking away down the sidewalk with Raspberry. Lauren and Duals come in through the back door together.

  “What a gorgeous dog!” Lauren says. “I want one just like him.”

  “Yeah, he’s pretty cool, isn’t he?” I hurry to agree.

  Duals shoots me this sidelong glance.

  “It’s going to be so much fun making this movie,” Lauren says. “I’d like to try doing the sound.”

  I settle back. A knot in my stomach begins to untie.

  ***

  It rains heavily during the night, and I wonder if Duals will cancel the next day’s outdoor shoot. But by early morning the skies are clear, and it’s a go.

  29: Exterior Shoot

  We all meet at Studio Duals for the trek to the metro park. Everyone is excited, especially the talent. Only Kaitlyn is kind of quiet and tense.