Chuckerman Makes a Movie

by Francie Arenson Dickman

She admitted that most of her students were repeat offenders.

  “Groupies,” Janet interjected. “Everyone loves Miss Laurel.”

  “Like Judd?” I said to Laurel, who was now dabbing the corners of her mouth with a napkin, suddenly as dignified as the Queen of England. “What go-round is he on?”

  “Only his second,” Laurel said. She laughed. “Candy, however, is on her fifth.”

  “But the class is called Drama for the First-Time Film Writer.”

  Laurel shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Every time I teach, it’s a different class. People take away different lessons at different times. Writing is one of those things that’s constantly evolving. Like people.” She looked at me and then at my sketch of her breasts. “Like most people.”

  “You don’t even need to be in her classroom to learn,” Janet informed me. She bent down below the register as she continued to speak. “I know everything from just listening to Miss Laurel while she eats.” She stood up holding a red binder. “See, here’s my script. It’s sci-fi.” She said she’d been working on it for two years, it was her ticket out of the 3 Woos.

  “I need a ticket out of the 3 Woos,” I said.

  “Don’t look so worried,” the Mormon Rodeo said. She patted her stomach. “I’m full. I feel good. I’m going to teach you a thing or two.” She told me to pay attention, and then she began. “These here are slug lines.” She pointed to what she’d written on my sketch. “Every scene starts with them. Put them in all caps. Below the slug lines come stage directions, and dialogue follows that.” She pushed a clean napkin in front of me. “Drawing out each scene is a perfectly good way of working. Many film writers do it. If sketching works for you, I’m all for it. Anything that helps you visualize your story. Let’s start off your next scene together.”

  “I thought we were here to figure out my catalyst,” I said.

  She plunked the jar of sweet sauce over the breast portion of her caricature. “I think that ought to take care of your catalysts.”

  “I thought you were here to eat egg roll,” Janet interrupted. “Why don’t you eat?”

  I told her it was still too hot.

  “Dip it in the sauce, Chuckerman. Sauce cools it down.”

  “Yeah, Chuckerman,” Laurel said. She laughed and hit my shoulder. Her first use of Chuckerman. Her first flirtation. She dropped her guard long enough to let me see her in a different light, and in that moment, in the dark, dingy light of the 3 Woos, knowing that soon she’d be forced to abandon her following to move to Los Angeles, I felt sorry for her.

  But only for an instant, because suddenly she was back to business, assuring me that my catalyst would reveal itself as long as I wrote honestly. She’d prefer to spend our time teaching me some basics so I could move forward. She wrote SCENE 3 at the top of the empty napkin. “Okay, so Scene 2 took place in the card room. Where does your next scene take place?”

  “It takes place in three different spots,” I said. “So divide the napkin into three sections.”

  She shook her head. “If it takes place in three spots, its three scenes.”

  “A sequence, actually,” Janet, now munching from a bowl of fried rice, clarified.

  Laurel agreed with Janet.

  I told them they were wrong. “The next part of my story is one scene called What Went Down in the Building after the Brawl.” I pointed to my sketch of Big Sid lying on the ground to clarify.

  Janet shook her head in dismay. “He is a very remedial student.”

  Again, the Mormon Rodeo agreed. Then she said, “Let me give you the nuts and bolts, Chuckerman. A scene is like an atom, the basic building block of a movie. Related scenes link together to tell a piece of your story. These are called sequences. Every time you change either location or time of day, you have a new scene, because the crew has to adjust either location or lighting. So, if the next part of your movie takes place in three different places, you’ve got three scenes, or a sequence.” She said not to get hung up on sequences now since next week’s class would be devoted to them. However, she wanted me to get comfortable with scenes and slug lines. “Scene 3. Give me the slug line.”

  I told her that the scene starts with me charging through the doors of the game room to find my sisters. “Does the through-the-door motion count as interior or exterior?”

  Laurel rolled her eyes. “Try not to get bogged down in the nitty-gritty. Just do the best you can and we’ll fix it later.”

  “Fine. Exterior and/or Interior of Game Room of Imperial Towers Building 100. Late evening.”

  Laurel wrote my slug line on the napkin and told me to keep going with my story. She’d sketch it, break out the scenes, make notes, suggestions.

  “Here? At the 3 Woos?” I’d never told the story to anyone besides Estie and Ryan. To jump straight to the Mormon Rodeo—not to mention Janet—was a leap.

  Janet obviously sensed my panic, because she was filling a plastic cup with some sort of Chinese wine. “Take a sip,” she said. “It will settle you down.”

  “Does Miss Laurel often drive her students to drink?” I asked her.

  “No, Chuckerman. You are a first.”

  Comforted by that knowledge—that this scenario was as new to the Mormon Rodeo as it was to me—I spoke and she wrote, and maybe because she was looking at her napkins and not me or maybe because I was drinking Janet’s wine, I felt okay.

  I started by explaining that when I banged through the doors of the game room after the fight that night, Rachel was going for high score on Toledo, the room’s most challenging pinball machine, with crowds around her two layers deep, thick enough to insulate her from me and our family trouble. I told Janet that Rachel was my other sister, and even today, if you need Rachel’s help, as I often do, you’ve got to practically shove down her front door and wade through her four kids and all of their crap to get it.

  Marcy, however, who is and always has been only one year older than me, is and always has been readily available to me, although hers is and always has been advice that one should not be too quick to follow. When I charged through the door of the game room, Marcy, who’d been playing herself in a game of ping-pong, was, as usual, the only one who both noticed and took interest in my presence.

  The soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever had just been released and played relentlessly in the game room that season. Over the blare of “Jive Talkin’,” I gave Marcy a rundown of the card room events. She tossed her paddle on the table and, through repeated nods of the head, indicated her agreement that we should get our parents as quickly as possible.

  I explained to Laurel that for me, the urgency came from a sense that death loomed large over Imperial Towers 100—a sense that stemmed, in part, from our family breakfasts, which began with the obits. “See who died?” was the phrase that kicked off my day.

  “Try not to talk so much,” Janet interrupted. “Movies are a visual medium.”

  “Think in terms of dialogue,” the Mormon Rodeo said. “What did you say to Marcy to convey this urgency?”

  “Hurry up,” I said as Laurel stuffed egg roll into her mouth—similar to how Marcy stuffed the ping-pong balls into the pockets of her yellow satin disco jacket as she ordered me to run to the stairs.

  “Then what?” Laurel asked.

  “I followed her,” I explained, “because I was younger, and politics and power were age-based then. Had I the presence of mind or the courage, I might have questioned why running down the back corridor of the building and then up eighteen flights of stairs was speedier than heading into the lobby and taking the elevator.”

  Laurel cut me off. “When you go into the staircase, where does the camera go?”

  “Into the lobby,” I said. “So the audience can see the ambulance come for Big Sid and the building manager come for my grandfather.”

  “Then the lobby is a new scene.” Laurel pulled out a new napkin and picked up her pen. “Do the slug lines.”

  Janet couldn’t help herself. “SCENE 4. EVEN
ING. INTERIOR LOBBY OF IMPERIAL TOWERS 100. Wherever that is,” she added.

  I raised my glass in thanks.

  “Now give me stage directions,” Laurel directed.

  “I think I get it now. I’m good to do the rest on my own.” I stood up to leave, but the Mormon Rodeo pushed me back down.

  “Not so fast. Paint the scene in the lobby.”

  I couldn’t work from memory here because, thankfully, I hadn’t seen or heard the circus unfolding in the lobby that night. The noise in the game room had eclipsed the sounds outside, which was a good thing—a great thing—because of all of my fears, the sound of sirens, an advertisement for imminent death, topped my list.

  “I wasn’t in the lobby that night,” I told Laurel. “I can’t tell you what happens.”

  “Make it up, Chuckerman,” she hollered. “That’s the whole point. Or should I do it for you?” She continued on. “After Marcy and I disappear through the back door of the game room the cameras will head into the lobby, which will be a-brew with the type of chaos audiences love, like people rushing out of card rooms and paramedics rushing in. The audience will enter the lobby as the Miami-Dade ambulance crew storms into the building with stretcher in hand, issuing commands over a megaphone, like, ‘Folks, please keep it down and keep out of the way.’ The directive will fall on deaf ears—literally and figuratively—as sirens and spectacle overshadow the command.” She raised her brows. “I wasn’t in the lobby either. How’d I do?”

  I told her I understood why she had a following. “Do you want to write the rest of it?” I asked. “That way, if the suicide movie doesn’t sell, you’ll have a fallback.”

  The Mormon Rodeo rolled her eyes and asked Janet to refill my glass. Then she ordered me to give the next part a whirl. “Try not to talk in past tense.”

  I did my best. “Eileen, the building manager, on her own megaphone, will order the crowd to disperse. She’ll holler something like, ‘Clear the way. There is no loitering allowed in the lobby. If you have nowhere to go, return to your units.’” I paused and looked at Janet and Laurel. “How’d I do?”

  They nodded affirmatively, so I went on with the story.

  “But megaphones will not be honored that night. Instead the criminal, my grandfather, will carve his path through the throngs as he is ushered towards the elevators. ‘Get the hell out of the way,’ Slip will tell his peers. To Eileen, he’ll say, ‘Get the fuck away from me.’ Every so often, he’ll stop to adjust his cigar or to wink and smile at some of the better-looking women in the crowd.

  “The best-looking woman in the building will be there, too. Lucille Garlovsky will be the only resident sporting a bright red miniskirt and five-inch heels and standing separate from the pack. She’ll be leaning casually against the door to the building, talking to a paramedic. The audience may glimpse and wonder about her, like the rest of us always did, but they won’t get any closer to her until later on, when I do. Instead, another woman will holler, ‘Where they taking you, Slippy?’

  “‘None of your business,’ Eileen will answer as the stretcher carrying Big Sid emerges from the game room.

  “‘No one’s taking me anywhere, Belle baby. Don’t you worry,’ Slip will answer, and as his finger gives the UP button a shove, he’ll add, ‘I’m going home.’

  “As word of Slip’s destination reverberates through the lobby, the elevator door will open. Slip, Eileen, Jack Glassman, and as many others who can squeeze into the car without exceeding capacity will load themselves on, and off they’ll go.”

  I slammed my cup down and took a bite of the last egg roll. “There you have it. End of scene. That’s a wrap.”

  Laurel applauded.

  “I like it,” Janet said.

  So, with unanimous approval and another gulp of wine, I moved on to Scene 5.

  An hour later, I was standing in front of the Mormon Rodeo’s walk-up. We’d said goodbye to Janet, whose constant commentary had gotten to be too much for me, and Laurel had done away with the napkins and instead listened as we walked the ten blocks to her building. She sat down on the steps in front when we arrived, and I kept talking. She had comments, she pointed out scene changes, but by and large she listened until I reached the end.

  “You tell quite a story,” she said.

  I took a little bow. “Thank you.”

  She was staring at me. She was going to invite me inside. I had no idea the way to a woman’s heart, or at least into her apartment, was through my grandfather’s story. Who knew stories were aphrodisiacs. If only I could bottle them.

  She started to stand. I offered my hand and pulled her up, wondering if the gesture would lead to a kiss—a natural assumption, given our face-to-face positioning.

  “Now,” she said. “Go home and write it down.”

  “What?” I told her I thought she was going to invite me inside. I couldn’t mask my disappointment, I was too tired. I let it ooze all over my face.

  She didn’t care. “While everything is fresh in your mind, put it on paper.”

  “It’s eleven o’clock at night, I’m exhausted.”

  “You’ll feel good when you’re done.”

  “How am I supposed to just go home and write it? I only learned about slug lines an hour ago. We didn’t even get to dialogue.”

  She put a hand on my shoulder. “Relax, Chuckerman. Write out the Sentencing Scene exactly like you told me. Start with what happens after your grandfather gets on the elevator with Eileen, since I didn’t write down any of that.”

  I pretended to contemplate her advice while I actually contemplated her hand on my shoulder and the filth that had accumulated on the bottoms of her white pants. “Let me ask you this: are you going to show up at Marcy’s bakery on Sunday?”

  “Probably.” She removed her hand and crossed her arms. Suspicious, and rightfully so.

  I told her I’d make her a deal. “If I hand in my scenes to you there, will you go out with me afterwards?”

  “On a date?”

  I shrugged. “You can call it a date, but I prefer to think of it as a meeting.”

  As I sat in my kitchen at 11:30 p.m., exhausted, wanting nothing more than to get into bed yet feeling compelled to fulfill my orders from the Mormon Rodeo, I felt like I was in my own personal sentencing scene. NIGHT, the slug line of my life would begin.

  INTERIOR OF APARTMENT 22B. FOOL SITS AT KITCHEN TABLE. HE WEARS SWEATPANTS AND SCRATCHES HIS STOMACH WHILE MULLING OVER THE EVENING’S EVENTS, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WHY HE ASKED THE TEACHER ON A DATE AND WHY HE IS LETTING HIMSELF BE BULLIED INTO WRITING A “MOVIE” WHEN HE ISN’T A WRITER AND HE WANTS TO GO TO BED, AND HE SHOULD GO TO BED BECAUSE HE HAS A MEETING IN THE MORNING. WITH A POTENTIAL NEW CLIENT. A BIG ONE.

  The truth was, I was too anxious about the meeting to sleep. If I closed this deal, if I landed this client, my whole life would change.

  It turned out that the writing, once I got started, was a solid distraction. Somewhere else to put my mind.

  SENTENCING SCENE

  NIGHT. INT. OF ELEVATOR TRAVELING FROM THE LOBBY TO THE 18TH FLOOR FOLLOWED BY INT. APARTMENT 1812

  Maybe, had I not followed Marcy to the stairs, I would have been on the elevator that carried Slip and Eileen. Or, better yet, I might have been on the elevator before Slip’s—the one that carried my Grandma B, my other grandmother, my mother’s mother, who smoked Marlboros, like my mother, and who happened to be doing so while playing canasta in the Women’s Card Room when all hell broke loose in the Men’s.

  While the elevator lifts, the narrator might explain that to have both sets of grandparents living in Imperial Towers 100 was not the norm, but not unheard of, either. For many similarly situated children, deciding which set of grandparents to stay with each visit was an issue. Some rotated apartments by year, others divided up the single stay, schlepping midway through the vacation on the elevators—like children of broken homes—from one floor to another, suitcases and stuffed animals in tow.

  This is
sue of custody was one that we didn’t have to contend with, as Grandma B was a widow and lived with her sister, my mother’s aunt BoBo, for the winter. During vacation, Aunt BoBo’s apartment was filled with her five grandchildren. She barely had room for Grandma B, and certainly no room for us or the Marlboros. Aunt BoBo (who refused to go by her real name, Barbara, because she felt it was too modern) didn’t allow smoking with the kids around.

  Consequently, Grandma B spent a lot of time in Apartment 1812. She didn’t have a key, but she didn’t need to knock, either. If I’d jumped right on an elevator that night, I might already have been in the apartment when she burst through the door a step ahead of Slip, unaware that Gladys Greenberg—Big Sid’s sister and a bigwig on the Board—was sitting at the dining room table, poised to listen and hold her every word against Slip. Had I arrived first, I might have had a chance to set the record straight. At least I would have been able to head off the storm.

  “Slip just about nearly killed Big Sid. Almost beat him to death. It was vicious.” This will be Grandma B’s introductory line.

  Let me take a minute here to add that the role of Grandma B will have to go to someone under five feet tall, and ideally she will be shot in black and white. The whole scene won’t be in black and white, just the character of Grandma B. This will really make a statement, express my grandma’s grayness. I know, I digress, but I must make a note to ask Laurel whether this has ever been done in cinematography. If not, I could break new ground. I’ll de-color Grandma B—and all of her sisters, for that matter.

  Grandma B’s introduction was followed immediately by the entrance of Slip, Eileen, Jack Glassman, and eventually all of the onlookers from the lobby, so that by the time Marcy and I climbed our way to the eighteenth floor, it was standing room only outside the door to Apartment 1812.

  When I told Laurel this part of the story on our walk to her house, she laughed. She said my childhood sounded crazy.

  Maybe it was. I had no idea. I was a kid, and when you’re a kid, everything is normal. At least that’s the David Robert Melman definition of being a kid. Total acceptance that the events going on around you are par for the course if the adults around you treat them as such.