6. Leaving the Garden
I NEVER PLANNED a career in the film business. I loved movies but had no particular urge to work on them. At age thirty-one, I had a wife and two children. My one-year-old son suffered from a serious and inoperable heart condition. To make ends meet, I’d been driving a New York City taxicab and picking up a few bucks on the side with freelance photography. After I volunteered to help a friend who was shooting the tag end of a low-budget feature, word soon got around that I was a hard worker. Producers started employing me as a kind of all-purpose crew member.
The first full-length feature film I ever worked on was a low-budget Merchant Ivory production called Savages, starring Sam Waterston and Susie Blakely, which began shooting in the summer of 1971.
Savages begins with a series of intertitled black-and-white sequences purporting to show the activities of a Stone Age forest tribe called the Mud People. One day at dawn, these masked and mud-covered savages prepare for their annual human sacrifice by feeding a powerful narcotic leaf to the consort of their queen. Just as the sacrifice is about to be carried out, a small spherical object comes sailing over the treetops and lands on the forest floor. Naturally the queen of the tribe sees great significance in this. The Mud People abandon their sacrifice and follow the mysteriously rolling object—a croquet ball, as it turns out—through the woods, until it leads them to a huge colonial mansion in a tidy clearing. The tribe cautiously enters the mansion, led by its youngest member, a girl. You can see wonder in the girl’s eyes as she takes in the wide central staircase and the huge chandelier, and you can imagine her thinking, Wow! This is a happening place!
The Mud People explore the lavishly furnished but inexplicably abandoned rooms of the mansion. One of the women discovers an oil portrait of a preppy-looking boy and licks his face; another tries on an evening gown and learns how to use scissors. The queen herself places the croquet ball at the base of a statue of a naked woman, thus creating an altar. One of the men figures out the purpose of a pair of spectacles and puts them on. Predictably, the savages are seduced by the material comforts they find in the mansion. As they remove their primitive masks and wash off the mud, they are transformed into recognizable early-twentieth-century stereotypes—a songwriter, a capitalist, a hostess, a debutante, and so on.
When I first arrived at Beechwood Mansion in upstate New York to begin work on Savages, I was pretty much following my own personal croquet ball. Like the Mud People, I was propelled more by curiosity than ambition. Compared to the social upheaval of the 1970s—exploding racial tensions, widespread alcohol and drug use, rampant sexual experimentation—domestic life simply paled. Working on a feature film—away from home, away from the reality of my son’s illness—offered a welcome diversion. The pay stank—$150 a week, flat—but it was enough to keep my family going in a two-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
That first day at the mansion, just as dawn was breaking, our three-man crew unloaded a standard package of lighting and grip equipment and staged everything in the house. My immediate boss was the gaffer, a fellow who called himself Bobby V. Bobby, who had done jail time in Chicago for burglary and car theft, looked like Ichabod Crane—tall, gaunt, and intimidating. He was nervous on this day because his own boss was none other than Walter Lassally, a British cinematographer who had recently won an Academy Award for his work on Zorba the Greek.
I kept my mouth shut and proceeded to lay out long lines of electrical feeder cable, dropping the coils at the generator and dragging one end across the lawn and into the mansion. At 7 A.M., everyone else showed up. The cast disappeared immediately into the wardrobe room right off the main lobby. I helped the best boy electrician set up the tungsten lights on rolling stands. I scurried around connecting extension cables to the light heads and plugging the extensions into the stage distribution boxes located in the hallways. Soaked with sweat and streaked with dirt, I taped up all the connections, while James Ivory, Ismail Merchant, and Walter Lassally floated around effortlessly in leather sandals and clean linen clothing, making artistic decisions. I had always thought of myself as a creative person, but I relished this physical labor. Here was a job—unlike the novel writing I was trying to do—that had a substantial shape to it. Compared to facing a blank sheet of paper in my typewriter, the task of setting up film equipment was a huge relief.
None of us had seen the film script, written by George W. S. Trow. And I for one had no idea what the movie was about. That it might be an allegory mattered as little to me as the broader purpose of a war matters to a soldier on his first day in combat. Since I was a lackey at heart, it was enough for me that the actors had stellar theatrical reputations—people like Lewis J. Stadlen, Thayer David, Salome Jens, and Kathleen Widdoes. And of course there was Susie Blakely, who today would be called a supermodel; Ultra Violet, a veteran actress in Andy Warhol’s films; and Sam Waterston.
When the cast made their first grand appearance on the set, I happened to be on my knees, struggling to jam a bent stage plug into one of the distribution boxes. Blue-and-white sparks flew from the box every time I tried to insert the thing. Half-blinded by arcing flashes of electricity, I looked up and saw the entire cast fanning out from the dressing room door into the wide entranceway of the mansion—all sixteen of them, ranging in age from fourteen to eighty, stark naked except for their mud masks and, in a few cases, loincloths. My jaw dropped.
Just then Susie Blakely, wearing neither loincloth nor mask, approached me with two dripping gobs of gray mud, one in each hand. She looked for all the world like the biblical Eve bearing an offering of two apples. She stopped and stood in front of me—me, on my knees like some supplicant beggar—smiled her all-American smile, and said, “There aren’t enough makeup people. Would you mind rubbing this mud on me?”
My first thought was that I had electrocuted myself. It was a writerly kind of thought, and as such, was slow and ponderous to emerge. In the several seconds it took me to think it, Bobby V. swooped in, grabbed both gobs of mud from Susie’s hands, and announced, “I’ll take care of this.”
Susie, clearly sensing my disappointment, transferred what little mud was left from her hands to mine, which were absurdly outstretched in her direction. “You can do my ankles,” she said.
And I did. I settled for Susie’s ankles.
Some experiences in life, when we look back at them, seem to contain the seeds of everything that follows. No matter how long we go on kissing the one we love, it is the first kiss we remember. So too, no matter how many days we show up to perform the work we decide to do, we are basically refining and polishing the original thing—the prototypical experience. In this way the shape of a whole career can be divined from a single moment of work. My lackey position in the hierarchy of the film business was set in stone when I agreed, that day, to remain on my knees, massaging mud onto the ankles of a naked fashion model, a woman who—like Eve—personified lost innocence.
We shot the black-and-white scenes first. The second act, which we shot in color, began with a dreamy sequence titled IN THE SCHOOLYARD, which opened with the beautiful and scantily clad Salome Jens swinging happily on a huge outdoor swing. The allegorical implication was clear: many of the impulses that led to what we call civilization—like many of the impulses that led me to a career in the film business—were childlike, playful, and pure. There was a time, the movie seems to suggest, when wonderment and gaiety and joyous participation outweighed the forces of cynicism, morbidity, and socially sanctioned greed.
The first week’s work on Savages exemplified such a time. The more responsibility they dumped on me, the more eager I was to work. In addition to my duties helping the electrician, I was given the position of dolly grip, which meant that I worked directly with Walter Lassally whenever the camera moved during the filming of a scene. It also meant that I had to work twice as hard for the same amount of money. But no one—not even Walter—was getting paid very much. This infused us all with a wonderful no-strings-
attached, egalitarian spirit—both during and after work. That I was a sweat-covered neophyte did not prevent Sam Waterston from sharing a joint with me when the day was done. That Kathy Widdoes was an experienced actress did not deter her from asking my opinion of her performance.
The harder we worked in those first days, the more intimate the cast and crew became. I began to aggressively seek the company of Kathy and Ultra and Susie and Salome—sometimes all four of them at once—and I very quickly began to envision a more exotic social life than that of a wannabe writer and financially strapped family man. To sustain this fantasy, I happily added four hours of intense partying to my sixteen-hour workday.
But since a more exotic life was not really available to me—I mean, nothing in my life had actually changed—the fantasy soon became exhausting. I was not alone in this exhaustion. No one likes to be overworked and underpaid—not even actors, who stand to achieve immortality in the bargain. After about a week, the wonderment of selfless community and egalitarian good times finally gave way to cynicism, morbidity, and greed. Needing—all of us—to position ourselves professionally for the long haul, the cast retreated into its shell of creative superiority, and the crew into servitude.
The schoolyard sequence of Savages ends when the newly sophisticated savages discover a dead wolfhound lying on the steps of the garden. They don’t know what to make of the dog’s death. But we do. It is the death of egalitarianism. Equality is not enough for the human spirit. Neither is innocence or gaiety. In the background of the dead wolfhound scene—in the dusk—the lights of the mansion blink on and off, beckoning the new sophisticates to the next sequence, announced by a title card that reads THE DINNER PARTY.
It has been said that working on a movie is like being in combat, with its long periods of waiting and its sudden bursts of urgent activity. But it is also very much like attending a cocktail or dinner party. Imagine, if you can, being face to face in tight quarters with the same fifty people, sixteen hours a day, six days a week. Movie stars and principal actors are allowed to retire to dressing rooms and trailers. But everyone else on the set must be prepared to relate at all times. This requires maintaining a persona throughout the day, and to do this, you need the appropriate constructs: a solid self-image of some kind and a recognizable position in the hierarchy of the company. To get a seat at the dinner table, you must demonstrate some kind of authority.
On Savages I had felt perfectly content, at first, to be whatever anyone wanted me to be—electrician, grip, gofer, I didn’t care—as long as everyone else was willing to do likewise. But I soon learned that if I wanted to maintain my distance from the domestic scene and prolong my avoidance of writing—and I felt an urgent need to do both—I would need to define myself in some recognizable way. As it happened, I had a natural instinct for rigging, and Walter Lassally loved my dolly moves. So I began to flirt with the idea of becoming a key grip.
A key grip supervises the rigging of all the lights—on ceiling grids, construction cranes, scaffolding, and so on—and all the subtle diffusion of light, both artificial and natural. Grips are responsible for the construction and placement of set walls, as well as for all the dolly shots, car rigging, stunt preparations, set safety, and so on. The key grip is the chief problem solver on a movie set, and as such needs to be able to analyze things quickly and make snap decisions in matters that affect many other departments—and often a great deal of the producer’s money. People always need a key grip’s advice. If you are a timid writer who has lost all hope of a readership, become a key grip. It will change your life. Famous directors and cameramen will ask for your opinion—will this or that shot work? Movie stars, knowing that your concern for their safety is an integral part of their immortality, will address you by name and ask if you slept well the night before.
I remember one job—a Jell-O commercial—for which I had to drive a large camera crane, quite fast, right up to Bill Cosby’s face, take after take after take. Cosby, who can be very curt to people who work with him, spent half the day following me around and making small talk in order to ensure that he remained on my good side. Bill and I were the best of buddies.
Notice that I have dropped a celebrity name. Without the reference to famous directors, and the inclusion of Bill Cosby’s name, my job description would read like a help-wanted notice tacked on a bulletin board at a construction site. This raises the very real possibility that if the movie set of Savages had in fact been an everyday construction site, I probably would have concluded that the brutal hours and low pay were exploitative and cruel, and I might well have retreated into writerly anonymity—free then to examine my soul and produce volumes of creative work.
But this phenomenon of fame by association is a powerful and seductive drug. It loves a creative void. Freud would probably liken it to libido. I liken it to static cling. Once you have experienced it (people describe heroin this way), the bar is set for life.
Over the years, I worked on the early films of actors such as Susan Sarandon, Jeff Goldblum, Michael Moriarty, Paul Sor-vino, Treat Williams, Samuel L. Jackson, John Heard, Tim Robbins, John Turturro, Raul Julia, Margaux Hemingway, Rick Bel-zer, Chevy Chase, and Matt Damon and his buddy Ben Affleck, to name a few. If pressed, I will gladly call attention to my having rubbed elbows with iconic figures like Robert De Niro, Martin Scorcese, Charlton Heston, Sylvester Stallone, Spike Lee, Irene Worth, Anjelica Huston, Mick Jagger, Ice-T, Elliot Gould, Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, Gene Hackman, Carly Simon, Raquel Welch, Catherine Deneuve, Marcello Mastroianni, Chuck Yeager, various Apollo astronauts, Henry Kissinger, several U.S. presidents, Pope John Paul II, and oh yes, the supermodel Elle Macpherson.
If one of these celebrity names comes up in casual conversation, I usually cannot resist mentioning that I “worked with” him or her or that I “did” his or her film. Dropping a celebrity name makes me feel better about myself.
I did not return to writerly anonymity when we finished shooting Savages. I began billing myself as a key grip, even though I had never even met a real key grip. There is some precedent for this kind of moxie. I once asked a Native American medicine man what you had to do to become a medicine man. “The first step,” he said, “is to call yourself one.” By referring to myself as a key grip, I made a place for myself at the dinner table. Like one of the sophisticated savages, I could now walk the walk and talk the talk. And my brand of medicine seemed to work. Producers like to see confidence in their department heads, and I exuded confidence. I wore a red kerchief around my neck and sported a large bowie knife on my belt; at one point I even wore a cowboy hat. If, during a job interview, the producer questioned my experience, I would simply distract him or her with a reference to, say, Kierkegaard or Camus. This would nearly always leave a producer blinking.
I joined a young film union to make my job title official. The pay got considerably better. I bought a small truck and stocked it with specialized rigging and grip equipment. In partnership with a cameraman, I started a film equipment rental company called Feature Systems. It was exhilarating. For every film I accepted, I turned down five. And between films, I worked on hundreds of commercials, where the real money was.
In the early 1970s, when competent film crews could be found only in Los Angeles or New York, we traveled all over the country to make movies and commercials. We invaded and occupied small towns, wowing the women, ravaging the supplies of liquor and beer, hiring local police forces as our security personnel. We turned paved roads into dirt and paved over dirt roads; we built false-front façades on main streets, then tore them down. We transformed spring into autumn and summer into winter, caused rainstorms and produced lightning. Then when we had had our way with a place—when we had infused it with static cling—we would pull out in a cloud of diesel exhaust, leaving behind piles of used lumber and stacks of broken hearts, the way traveling circuses used to do.
During the dinner party sequence of Savages, the former Mud People dress up in tuxedoes and evening gowns, gather at a
long table, and spend a large part of the evening posturing and dropping names. The relationships among the guests are discernible only in terms of the power one person exerts—or does not exert—over another. Innuendo rules the conversation. Subtle and not-so-subtle insults are hurled, and grand pomposities articulated.
When the women retire to the library, the men light up cigars, and Sam Waterston’s character tells a story about a mysterious Stone Age tribe called the Mud People. His intellectual affectation prevents him from remembering that he and his fellow sophisticates were, only twelve hours ago, Mud People themselves.
When we cut to the women having coffee in the library, Ultra Violet tells Salome Jens that one of the older men at the table seemed to be a very powerful person.
“Otto is a bluffer,” replies Salome. “We are none of us very powerful here.”
“But he’s treated with respect by our hostess,” says Ultra. “He’s deferred to.”
At this point Salome leans toward Ultra and delivers one of the key lines in the film: “You do know,” she says, “it is all going on somewhere else.”
“What is?” asks Ultra.
“Everything,” says Salome.
And there it is. For all the hullabaloo and dinner-party atmosphere of filmmaking, the lived lives of the participants happen somewhere else. As hard as I tried to mask the inevitable with newfound ambition, hard work, and a film biz moniker, my son died four months after Savages wrapped. My daughter was six at the time. Her mother and I got an amicable divorce the following year. For a decade, I embraced drugs and alcohol and promiscuity and dabbled in the occult. I gave up my equipment company and traveled to Chichen Itza to sit on a pyramid. In the early 1980s, after quitting drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes, I got married again, this time to a woman who was also in the business. We bought a house in the country and one hundred acres of land, and planned to have a child together. I spent my weekends mowing the lawn and raking leaves and shoveling snow. My daughter graduated from high school. Between film jobs I started to write again. I completed a novel about a film producer. It was judged by publishers to be quite well written but ultimately disappointing—perhaps because I had never been a film producer myself. My daughter graduated from college. I got divorced again. My parents died. Then one day I looked at the movie set, and suddenly everyone seemed terribly young.
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