The Man In the Rubber Mask

by Robert Llewellyn

  My head was spinning with all this new information and names I had to try and remember. The three other members of the cast were Lorraine Toussaint who played Captain Tao, Elizabeth Morehead who played Kochanski and Michael Heintzman who played Officer Munson.

  Naturally, I managed to get the whole thing utterly confused. The cast stood in a small circle and I said everyone’s name and pointed to them.

  ‘Hinton, Jane, Craig, Chris.’ I got Craig and Chris the wrong way around. I was so confused about the fact that they had the same names as their English counterparts my brain had gone on short time and I had decided that the coincidence was too great, it must be Rimmer played by Craig, and Lister played by Chris.

  ‘I’m Chris, that’s Craig,’ said Chris Eigman patiently, he patted me on the back. ‘You’re confused aren’t you, Robert? But you’re working in Hollywood now though, it’s important you remember everyone’s name, I’ll be testing you from time to time.’

  People started to sit down around a long table in front of the set. Most people seemed to know where to sit, I couldn’t work it out so I hovered about looking around for help. Elvin noticed this and pointed to a canvas directors chair with my name emblazoned on the back in red appliqué.

  ‘Robert Llewellyn,’ he said as he tapped the chair. I couldn’t believe it, I had my own chair with my own name on the back, like in Hollywood. I was in Hollywood. I sat down but kept turning around to look at my name, I showed Rob and Doug who were sitting down the other end of the table. They stood up and showed me theirs, they had their own chairs too. The only difference being theirs stood a good five inches higher than mine. There was already a hierarchy, the actors get the low chairs with their names on, the writers and producers and directors all have higher chairs with footrests.

  ‘Good morning everybody, and welcome to Stage 42, Universal Studios, where we are going to make a pilot episode of Red Dwarf,’ said Linwood in his soft, undulating tones. ‘We are all going to have a great time here, this is a fantastic script, it comes from a great series which is a real big hit in Great Britain, we’ve got a fantastic cast, you guys.’ He looked along the side of the table where we were sitting. ‘Craig Bierko, Chris Eigman, Robert Llewellyn, Jane Leeves.’ There was a huge round of applause from everyone, Rob and Doug joined in slightly later but with no less enthusiasm.

  Linwood continued, ‘A great director, Jeff Field,’ he looked at a quiet-looking man with a beard who nodded and smiled. He got another round of applause, not quite so big as ours. ‘And a great crew.’ About fifteen assorted people whooped and clapped vigorously, I joined in politely, they got the least of the claps.

  ‘Well, alright!’ said Linwood, rising to the occasion. ‘I know we’re all going to bond real good, and really have a great time, because if we have a great time, we’ll produce a great product. And that’s why we’re here people, to produce a good television, Red Dwarf.’ Even Linwood said Red Dwarf a bit like John the limo driver. ‘Okay, so let’s read the script, then, we’ll have a talk, get to know each other, and have lunch.’

  My smile was fixed to my face, I told myself quietly, ‘These people are clearly mad, they all clap each other but we haven’t done anything yet. Stay calm, you’re only here for three weeks, you haven’t actually signed your contract yet, breath into the anxiety.’ I glanced to my right to see Craig Bierko looking healthily depressed. ‘Maybe they’re not all mad,’ I hoped as I picked up my script.

  As we read, the banks of men in suits sitting in the audience seating laughed very supportively during the funny parts. The director laughed convincingly, but automatically, at every potentially amusing moment. We had to wait every now and then for Linwood Boomer’s long, languorous, ‘Ahaha ha ha.’

  For the first time in my Red Dwarf experience, though, I was the old-timer. I knew my character backwards, everyone else was struggling with theirs. As soon as we’d finished reading through the script, the cast gathered around the craft services table.

  Craft services is catering to you and me. At the BBC this might sometimes stretch to a coffee machine and a pile of plastic cups, sometimes even one packet of biscuits. In Hollywood there was always a huge table freshly stocked with regular coffee, decaf coffee, fifteen different sorts of tea, herbal and regular, Danish pastries, doughnuts, a massive bowl full of candy bars, bowls of fruit like they have in adverts, chewing gum, bubble gum, lollies, mints, muffins which are like small Christmas cakes, and a fridge full of every sort of soft drink, fruit juice, cola and mineral water you could imagine. The table sagged under its heavy burden, and as soon as we’d demolished one pile of food, it was mysteriously replaced by someone from craft services.

  ‘So what d’you think of the script Robert?’ asked Hinton. I was just about to speak when I realised the whole cast were standing around waiting to hear what I had to say.

  ‘Oh, ur, it’s ur, yeah, it’s good.’

  `‘C’mon, it’s crap isn’t it?’ said Craig Bierko.

  ‘Well, it has room for some more gags,’ I said politely.

  ‘Like about ten square miles,’ said Chris Eigman. ‘C’mon people, let’s face it, we’ve got a turkey on our hands.’

  ‘Oh no,’ I interjected, ‘it’ll be okay, look, the boys are here.’ I pointed to Rob and Doug who were talking to Linwood Boomer and Jeff Field, the director.

  ‘Is that Rob and Doug?’ asked Hinton. I nodded. ‘Which is which?’

  ‘Rob is the one wearing the weird cowboy boots who’s smoking and talking quite a lot. He’s sort of harsh and cruel on the outside, but actually I think there’s a very caring person trapped inside somewhere. Doug is the one with the limp who is talking less, but listening very carefully. He’s more caring and considerate at first glance, but I have the suspicion he is an absolute rock on the inside.’

  It was like a scene from a thirties backstage movie. The cast were all grouped around to hear what I was saying. I was almost expecting Mickey Rooney to walk in at any moment and say, ‘C’mon guys, let’s do the show here!’

  We had lunch together in a huge canteen, miles away on the other side of the lot. To get there we had to walk through the public part of the studio complex, the Universal Studio tour section. It was like working backstage in a theme park because that is essentially where we were. Every ten minutes or so a tractor pulling five hundred people in open-topped trailers would rumble past the studio door and we would hear snippets of studio history.

  ‘On the left is the studio where in 1953, Clint Eastwood made his first appearance in…’

  The canteen was not full of movie stars, but every now and then someone would walk past who I recognised from some sitcom or other which had been shown in England. Of course, being proper actors, my fellow cast members knew who everyone was, what they were in now, what they had been in, what they were hoping to be in, how much they got paid, which agency they were in and which team they batted for.31 We spent the afternoon blocking out each scene in the most relaxed and happy manner. The whole set-up was so calm; as actors our every whim was catered for, there was absolutely no pressure on us to do anything. Jeff Field, the director, came up to me at one point as I was trying to learn the first couple of speeches I had to do.

  ‘Robert, maybe we could go through this opening scene at some point, you know.’

  ‘Sure, sure, sure,’ I said as I jumped up, my normal reaction from three series of Red Dwarf in England.

  ‘No no, there’s no rush, you come over when you’re ready,’ said Jeff. I was slowly learning that all the hierarchies I was used to did not apply in America.

  On the set of a British TV programme the director is the boss and everyone works around them. In America, it’s the producer, who is often one of the writers as well. Linwood Boomer was that man, Jeff was just the director and seemed to be more or less at our beck and call. The actors seemed to be the ones in charge. When we’d been over the show once, Linwood showed up and we all went through it again for him.

  He looked like
a worried man when it was over, he looked yet more worried after Chris Eigman and Craig Bierko both had a little word with him, quite rightly because they thought both their characters were being short-changed. I kept quiet because from where I was standing, Kryten had all the best lines, the best gags and the best routines. The other unexpected bonus was that I knew most of my lines already because I’d learned most of them before. This was the odd thing about the script, although it did have Linwood Boomer’s name on the cover, I recognised a lot of the lines from the first episode of the British version.

  I’m not saying that Linwood should have written a completely new show, he wasn’t claiming to have done that either. It was an adaptation of the original script but as seems to happen so often, it lost some of its original sparkle.

  The first week was spent very calmly going through the script, blocking out each scene, eating Danish pastries and drinking coffee. At one point, when I was making an entrance into the sleeping quarters, Jeff Field asked me why I kept ducking as I walked in through the door.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong, Robert,’ he reassured me, ‘I like it, it’s cute, but why do you do it?’

  I explained that I had to or I would knock my head on the top of the door-frame. Jeff and I stood under the entrance, the top of the door was a good six inches above my head. I had been in the set about three days before I realised it was about half as big again as the British set. It looked exactly the same, but it was bigger. This tends to be the rule across America, everything is bigger, but you still behave as if you’re in cramped old Europe and duck your head. It was a metaphor for the whole experience for me. I was in a country where everything was bigger and different, but I still behaved the same. It was going to take me a long time to adapt.

  In the evenings, after rehearsals, Hinton and I would generally go to the 24-hour gym which was just down the road, have a big work out and then go to a diner and stuff our faces with high-fat food laced with colourings, flavourings and E-numbers.

  Hinton was great, born and bred on an army camp in Kansas, his father a middle-ranking military man. Hinton didn’t hear the word ‘nigger’ until he went to Washington when his dad was posted there. He was called one by a black man on the street.

  We discussed the possibility of the series going ahead, and what we would do.

  ‘I’m happy to live on the Coast,’32 said Hinton, ‘I’ve been in New York too long.’

  ‘I don’t know if I’m happy about it or not,’ I said.

  ‘Hey, man,’ said Hinton, ‘get in touch with your feelings.’

  I tried to. I said, ‘Well, I don’t like London that much, but it’s a bit scary here. It feels like this is the filter where all the mad people get stuck. People get shot for bumping into another car at the traffic lights.’

  ‘Listen, Robert, we don’t all have guns, I’ve never had one, it’s not that crazy here.’ I tried to believe him, I tried to feel at home in this weird world. Hinton told me how he had lived in New York for twenty years and the worst thing that ever happened to him was being hit by a speeding bicycle.

  ‘I’ll tell you what, Hinton,’ I said having one of my ideas. ‘I’ve always wanted to drive right across America, how about, if the series goes ahead, I meet you in New York, we buy some heap of shit big old car, and we drive across together.’

  ‘Whoa,’ said Hinton laughing deeply in that special way only black men can. ‘Okay, like, I know I said not everyone is crazy and carries a gun, but I meant like, in New York and LA. If you and I drove into some towns in the Midwest, we’d be in deep shit. In one place if I was driving the police would think I had kidnapped you, so they’d shoot me. If the police didn’t shoot me, some honky redneck would shoot you for being a nigger lover. Then in another town, if you were driving, the police would think I was kidnapping you, so they’d shoot me. If the police didn’t shoot me, some honky redneck would shoot you for being a nigger lover. If we come back here baby, we fly!’

  On the Friday night of the first week, all the men from the cast went out for a meal together at a branch of the California Pizza Kitchen. We had designer pizzas all round. I had a smoked chicken, pine kernel and spinach pizza with Gruyère cheese and ham, sun-dried tomatoes, sliced dill cucumbers and mayonnaise on top. I think that’s what it was, it didn’t really look like a pizza, it looked like something you’d make for yourself late at night when you were stoned and had an attack of the munchies.

  Within five minutes of meeting these men I knew all about them, who they lived with, who they loved, who they hoped to love. They were incredibly open about their private lives incredibly quickly. There are ups and downs to this of course, the negative side being the man who stands next to you in the queue for the plane will be telling you how his mother was shot dead in Toledo, Ohio by a masked bank raider, how his wife left him for her lesbian psychoanalyst, how his child has stabbed his teacher in a dispute over pornography in the classroom, and all this before you hand your boarding pass in.

  On the other hand, you could say that the American attitude is normal and the English are a bunch of sad, repressed tossers who would rather be run over by a tractor than express a genuine emotion. I leave you to decide.

  On Saturday morning, I stood in the foyer of the hotel with Andrea and her boyfriend Mickey. I had hired a car and we were going out shopping. That’s what a lot of Californians do in their leisure time, they have stickers like ‘Born to Shop’ on the backs of their cars. I am very bad at shopping, but I was prepared to give it a try.

  We had originally expected to go with Rob and Doug, who were desperate to go out and see Los Angeles, having never been there before. They had either been asleep in the hotel or on the set since the day we arrived. I knew things were not happy with the production, but I wasn’t sure how unhappy. Rob and Doug were locked up in the big black tower33 for the weekend, working with what sounded like three hundred comedy scriptwriters on the scripts. That sounds close enough to hell for me.

  Andrea grabbed my arm and pointed out of the doors. A huge black truck/station wagon/tank, which would make a Range Rover look like a toy, rumbled into the car park. I had hired this car through the studio; I said to the hire company that I wanted one of those jeepy sort of things, so you’re high up and can see over things.

  It was a Ford Bronco something-or-other, a monster, but a luxury monster. We sat in the car park for ten minutes playing with all the switches, whizzing the seats up and down, the roof open and closed, playing with the stereo, which could burst our ears, the air conditioning which could freeze our genitals. It was great.

  We rumbled around town all day, sitting up high just as I wanted, but feeling slightly stupid to be going shopping in a car which could easily drive over a mountain.

  In the afternoon we visited a make-up superstore where Andrea was in heaven. Hundreds and thousands of jars of weird make-up, prosthetic remover, wigs, glue, false beards, all kinds of fake blood and eyeballs. We met a man who worked there who’d made the masks for Warren Beatty’s film Dick Tracy. The workshop at the back of the store had an extraordinary collection of rubber bits and pieces used in films, this place seemed to supply everyone in Hollywood, including the foam which made Kryten’s head.

  Come the second week of rehearsals and it was clear that a lot of shit had hit a lot of fans while I’d been rumbling around in my monster jeep.

  Rob and Doug had been banned from the set for overstepping the mark. They were present as ‘advisers’ to the producers, but they were naturally worried that the show was going to get screwed up. I assumed they had tried to influence things too much and had trodden on some frayed egos.

  The script had changed dramatically, and not, I have to say, that much for the better. We spent another day eating doughnuts and Danish pastries, drinking coffee and wandering through the scenes in a half-hearted sort of way. We had a long break at one point. I found out later that this was because Rob and Doug had words with Linwood. I don’t know what those words were exactly, but I do
n’t think they were the sort you’d go to a church to hear.

  Early the next morning a script was slipped under the door of my hotel room. I opened it, read it quickly and started laughing. It was funny and I knew why. The Comedy Boot Boys had got tooled up and were cruising the mean streets looking for trouble. They were attempting a coup, spreading propaganda amongst the masses. It was thrilling. I met up with Hinton in the foyer.

  ‘This is good shit,’ he said, waving his copy of the script. ‘Who did this?’

  ‘The Comedy Police,’ I said ‘Let’s go watch the shit come down.’

  As soon as we got to the studio it was clear everyone else had received a script too. The mood was much better.

  ‘I like this one,’ said Craig Bierko holding the script aloft. ‘This one is funny!’

  The cast were asked to vote, can you believe it, on which script we preferred. It was a landslide for Rob and Doug, the Comedy Police had won the day. We all started to try and learn our lines for the first time. We’d been piddling about for ten days then suddenly, with what was virtually a completely new script, we only had two days rehearsal left. We worked hard all of a sudden, which was a bit of a shock, but the show came together remarkably quickly. I really enjoyed working with the cast and felt more and more happy about doing a series with them, even if I secretly hoped it would only be for one year.

  During the second day of rehearsal on the new script, Elvin came up to me and said very loudly. ‘Robert Llewellyn, phone call.’ I found the phone hanging on a wall in a dark corner of the cavernous studio.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hi, darl, it’s me, in Ethiopia. You’re not going to have plastic surgery are you?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You’re not going to have a facelift and have muscle implants in your legs are you?’

  ‘I don’t think so, darl,’ I said, ‘why are you worried about it?’