The Man Who Heard Voices

by Michael Bamberger

  On Friday nights, a crew member’s name would be picked out of a hat, and Night would award the winner an all-expenses-paid vacation for two to a European capital or Hawaii or some other lush place. Each week it got more elaborate, leading up to the biggest prize at the end: two weeks in the Far East. Night paid for the trips himself. It had nothing to do with Warner Bros., and it wasn’t something other directors did. It was pure hucksterism, Night standing in the middle of the catering tent with a bullhorn in his hand, asking, with great fanfare, for an actor or a crew member to pick the name out of a hat. But it also showed a keen understanding of the people he was working with. They were like Night; they enjoyed a scene. It wasn’t Night playing god, just Night having fun. Being a huckster was a part of his personality. He liked the trumped-up excitement of a lottery, even though it contradicted his earn-it ethic. He was no one thing.

  Night worked at camaraderie. Jimbo Breen, the key greens-man (in charge of anything that grows), lived with his dog in a trailer on the set and had erected an elaborate after-work bar somewhere behind Cleveland Heep’s bungalow, called Jimbo’s. Jimbo had built these clubs on each of Night’s studio movies, at the director’s urging, and this one was his best yet. The theme was Polynesian, with a tiki-style roof and bamboo torches, and it had a pool table and a Ping-Pong table and beanbag chairs. Jimbo tended bar. He was an amazing-looking man, with a stout belly, a big head, bronzed shoulders. He had a gravelly voice. Night had cast him in a small role in the movie, and Brick would sometimes refer to the “magnificence of Jimbo.” He was a superb barman. By opening only occasionally, he made each evening at Jimbo’s an event. Night always came, and he played Ping-Pong and shot pool and talked to everybody and stayed until Jimbo announced last call. Several veterans said they had never heard of anything similar working on other “shows,” as they referred to shoots. Jimbo’s, never part of the official tour of the set, brought the departments together. Many of the actors, the stand-ins and the stunt people, most of the hair and makeup people, plus the painters and the carpenters and the payroll people and the nurse and the caterers, would go to Jimbo’s. If a day was going well, or if the Eagles were playing on Monday Night Football, Night would say to Jimbo, “You got to open tonight, don’t you think?”

  About the only person who didn’t go to Jimbo’s was Chris Doyle. (You seldom saw him in the catering tent, either. You didn’t see Bryce there either, for that matter.) Doyle’s first stop after work was a bar in Bristol where he had quickly established himself as the life of the party, after a near-brawl on his maiden visit. He’d be driven there by his young bilingual assistant, Elaine Liu, with whom Doyle spoke in Cantonese. From there, she would drive him another seventy miles to his room at the Soho Grand Hotel, unless he had one of his arty downtown parties to attend first, which he often did. Elaine lived in Manhattan but way uptown, in East Harlem, another half hour away. Her working conditions were terribly unsafe, brought on by Doyle’s refusal to stay in Philadelphia and Sam Mercer’s unwillingness to hire a driver for the movie’s DP. Elaine knew Doyle had to be getting less sleep than she was, and she was getting about three hours per night. It often fell to her to rap hard on his hotel door at some ungodly hour to rouse him from bed and to start another day.

  Sam watched Doyle carefully during his wild first week. Near the end of it, he sat down with Doyle and had a discussion with him about the facts of life as they related to sexual harassment lawsuits in the United States. It was a delicate conversation for Sam. If he said the wrong thing, or said something the wrong way, he risked losing Doyle altogether. Doyle could check out mentally or simply walk off. Night didn’t want either of those things to happen, which meant that Sam didn’t, either. But Sam knew he couldn’t have the movie’s DP continue to kiss people on their stomachs or grab their genitalia, because eventually, someone would see it not as an expression of manic energy but as harassment. Grab even one wrong testicle, and a $70 million movie could come to a grinding halt. Sam had to say that he understood it as a display of exuberance, but Doyle needed to behave.

  The weekend after the first week of shooting, Doyle went to Amsterdam. (He said he got most of his sleep on planes.) When he came back, he was strangely subdued, with no hint of his regular self.

  John Rusk, the assistant director, said to Elaine (THERAPIST TO CHRIS DOYLE, it said on her office door), “What’s up with Chris?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but enjoy it while you can.”

  But Night was terribly worried—he needed the manic Chris Doyle.

  Nobody knew if the personality change was the result of Sam’s talk with Doyle or if Super Chris was sick or going through some sort of detox or what. It was eerie, though. And then, slowly, the old Chris Doyle came back. One day he wore yellow caution tape as a headband. Another day, a surgeon’s cap bearing the Viagra logo. One night he danced a lovely light-footed poolside waltz with an enormous African-American extra, playfully grabbing her bottom at the end. Some days he’d make visits to his secret stash of adult refreshments, hidden beside the tire of a production truck that was going nowhere; other days he ate solid food and didn’t seem to be drinking at all. His personality was the movie’s biggest variable. Paul Giamatti asked one morning, “Who’s working the camera today, Dr. Jekyll—or Mr. Hyde?” One day Doyle wore a prison jumpsuit and a T-shirt underneath stenciled with the words NEW YORK STATE MENTAL INSTITUTION. It looked pretty authentic.

  Dailies were shown after a quick dinner, in a trailer reconfigured as a long, narrow screening room, with a popcorn machine in the front and a projector in the back. Thirty or forty people would cram in, every seat taken and most of the steps, too. Night always sat with Barbara Tulliver, his editor. Doyle sat on the floor in front of the first row, his back sometimes resting against the legs of his lighting chief, Bill O’Leary. O’Leary was a pro, a veteran, blunt and able. He had known alcoholics in his life, and he found working with Doyle like a bad flashback. Doyle often slept during dailies, but somehow he knew what was going on. When Night said one day that his DP should feel particularly good about that day’s work, Doyle rallied and said, “James Brown feels good. Super Chris feels better than good.” He tried to kiss Night’s foot, but Night wouldn’t let him. Another time, when Night said he was “excited” by what they were doing, Doyle stood up, unzipped his fly, and said, “I’ll show you excited.” It was like he couldn’t help himself. Night’s comfort with it all was astounding.

  Paul said there were two Chris Doyles, the working-class Aussie Chris Doyle obsessed with his own libido, and the cultivated Chris Doyle—you’d make him a Dubliner in a character breakdown—who would talk about his friends Gus Van Sant and the writer Simon Winchester or say clever things like “American football is not a sport—it’s a promotion for supersizing.”

  There was both tension and affection between the director and the director of photography. Night once said, “We’re actually very similar.” When he told Paul about his ongoing saga with Doyle, Paul said, “You two need a marriage counselor.”

  When he hired him, Night had told Doyle that he wanted him as a filmmaking partner, but when he saw him focusing on, say, Farber’s key, he’d get understandably nervous. Doyle had been hired for his eye, and about 28 percent of the time, it was brilliant. The rest of the time, Night was fending for himself. There were parts of days and even whole days when Doyle was on his game, making a suggestion about lighting, about how an actor held a prop, about how a shot should be framed. But there were whole days and parts of days when Doyle was drunk or obstinate or both and the only thing Night could do was work around him. Among the crew, there was a running question as to whether Doyle would make it through the show, the way beat writers covering a ballclub place bets on when the manager will get fired. Would Super Chris quit? Would Night give him a moist towelette (his code language, with Jose, for firing somebody)? Would Doyle go to Europe for a weekend and forget to come back? Something had to give.

  Bryce, Paul, and Night were
the only actors who had stand-ins. Not stunt doubles but stand-ins. When Night and Bill O’Leary and Doyle (sometimes) were setting up shots, getting the lighting as they wanted it, having plants moved, creating shadows, lowering window shades, the stand-ins would stand where the actors would be later. The requirements for the job were a pleasant, easygoing personality—the job required hours of standing around, Doyle moving their body parts like a golf pro manipulating a student’s limbs—and a basic physical similarity to his or her actor. Armando Batista, Night’s stand-in, was a young Philadelphia theater actor, dark-skinned and athletic, who would read Samuel Beckett and Peter Brook while waiting to come off the bench. Jacqueline Sanders, an aspiring actress and screenwriter, had Bryce Howard’s beautiful red hair and would bring a brown-bag lunch from home every day rather than eat the elaborate delicious free catered food she was welcome to. Paul’s stand-in, Christopher Shookla, was an incessant talker who was six months older than Paul and nearly the same height and weight. Their faces and skin coloring and hair color bore no resemblance, but Chrismandu (his stage name) was growing a beard in an attempt to look more like Paul.

  Chrismandu lived in a working-class neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia with his wife and young son and got to Bristol each day by a combination of bus and train and, for the last mile, by foot. He had an extraordinary walk, with his feet splayed and his shoulders bopping from side to side, as if he were the designated goon in a street gang, even though he was always by himself. He often wore large black sunglasses and a sport coat with big shoulder pads, and his hair, which was thinning and red, oiled down and combed back. Paul would sometimes see him walking along Green Lane and would think about asking his driver to stop the car (a needlessly large SUV, actually) and give Chrismandu a lift. But Paul worried that it might embarrass his stand-in, so he never did.

  Jimmy Mazzola had given Paul a pair of gold-framed prescription glasses for Cleveland Heep, and he gave Chrismandu the same glasses with clear lenses. Chrismandu would wear them all day long, even while eating breakfast and lunch. I asked him why, and he said, “It helps me stay in character.” He was one of Night’s believers.

  Chrismandu’s accent, as Pierce Brosnan said of Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire, was a bit mottled, and that was because he was born and raised in northern England, in Sheffield, where his father worked in the Wilkinson Foundry, and he had spent his adulthood in Northeast Philadelphia, which had an accent all its own. He was also proud of his Mike Ditka imitation, and some of that was mixed in, too. He was dubbed Chrismandu in Sheffield while working as a courier. He made deliveries to a Pakistani restaurant where the owner said, “Christopher is too ordinary for you. From now on we call you…Chrismandu.” Chrismandu had played a bookie in Unbreakable and a poker player on the TV show Hack and a street vendor in the movie National Treasure but was still looking for his first credited role, where his official Screen Actors Guild name would appear in the final credits right alongside all the other actors’.

  When he found out he was in the running to be Paul Giamatti’s stand-in, he could not believe his good luck. Paul had long been one of his favorite actors. “I seen Paul Giamatti first time as Pig Vomit in Private Parts, and I fell in love with him,” he said. “The intensity he brought to it.” Then he said something painfully true: “That Pig Vomit was a broken, broken man.” Chrismandu drove his fellow stand-ins crazy at times with his talking, but amid all his jabbering there was poetry.

  He knew most of Paul’s roles long before he got the job on Lady. “My local Blockbuster video, they never had the American Splendor movie, and then one night I’m at our twenty-four-hour Save-A-Lot, and there it is, in the five-dollar bin. I just loved that movie. That Harvey Pekar, he’s probably the quirkiest bastard on Planet Earth, and Paul just nailed him. I seen the real Harvey Pekar couple years ago, when he came to the library to give a talk. I ask him about Paul, and he says, ‘Paul did a good job, but I didn’t get enough money.’”

  That Paul did not have the classical features of a leading man but was still getting regular acting work gave Chrismandu hope. He worked sometimes in children’s theater in Philadelphia. One of his biggest jobs had been as the voice of the title bear in The Adventures of Paddington Bear at one of the city’s lovely old theaters.

  Weeks after he was hired as Paul’s stand-in, Chrismandu had not met his subject. Then one day Paul was coming down one of the Cove’s many cement staircases while Chrismandu was climbing up.

  “Hey, man, I’m your stand-in,” Chrismandu said.

  “You’re my stand-in?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Really. Well. Whoa. Wow. My stand-in. That’s something.”

  The whole idea of a stand-in—a person whose sole job was to pretend to be you, in body, for several hours a day—didn’t put Paul at ease. Still, he made steady eye contact with his stand-in as they talked, and that made an impression on Chrismandu. The stand-in said, “Well, it’s good to meet you, sir,” and saluted the actor. Paul liked that word, sir. His father had used it often. Paul saluted him back and said, “Good to meet you, sir.”

  Before long, Chrismandu began to wonder if he might be able to get regular work with Paul. Travel to wherever Paul was shooting. Stay in hotels. Get to know him and the other movie people around him. Paul’s Lady stunt double—who, unlike Chrismandu, actually looked like Paul—had done stunts for Paul on other movies. Chrismandu was earning, as the SAG contract required, $17.50 an hour plus overtime, plus wet pay, an extra $14 per day for the days he had to work in the pool or stand in the rain. To paraphrase Billy Ray Valentine in Trading Places, he could hang with these people for a while. Paul stayed pretty well clear of him. He liked his Coach Ditka imitation, but he didn’t want to create any false expectations.

  The movie’s lead actor knew something Chrismandu did not. Paul knew that if you stripped away all the extras—the hotel suite, the giant payday, the car and driver, the coddled life—there was no essential difference between what he was doing to make a living and what Chrismandu, so gratified by having his voice in a children’s play, was doing. Every day, people were treating Paul like “Paul Giamatti,” but in his mind, he and Chrismandu were more similar than different: two thirty-eight-year-old men, each with a wife and a young son at home, trying to make a living in a line of work that guaranteed nothing.

  To prepare for her first big scene with Paul, the one in which Cleveland asks Young-Soon to look up the word narf for him, Cindy Cheung pulled out all the stops. She asked someone from production if she could have, in her elegant suite at the Ritz-Carlton, a replica of the poolside chaise Young-Soon would be lounging on during the scene, for practice. It showed up close to immediately. But life on a big-budget movie—that snap-your-fingers quality—didn’t particularly impress her. She found daily housekeeping to be an intrusion, and living in a hotel was not part of her dream. She’d call her husband every night when he was off work. Like most novelists, he had a day job, as an editor for an online version of Forbes.

  How was your day?

  Boring—nothing happened.

  No, tell me all about it. I really need to know.

  Cindy had flown in an acting teacher she was close to from her San Francisco days at the American Conservatory Theater, Bonita Bradley. Cindy didn’t tell Night about it. Maybe she knew how it would sound to him—like she didn’t have faith in him as a director. Cindy put Bonita up in a room at the hotel and worked with her extensively for five days. To Cindy, it was an investment. They worked in Cindy’s suite and ate at various Asian restaurants in Philadelphia. One night Cindy, Bonita, and June (Mrs. Choi in the movie) went to dinner at Porky & Porkie, a Korean restaurant with a Vietnamese owner. June told the owner, “She’s the big star. I’m just the mother.” June was convinced that Night really had died as a child, as a spoof documentary about Night on the Sci Fi Channel had once maintained. They shared auditioning war stories, and June scolded Cindy for telling Night and Doug Aibel her true age: “Never tell your age. Neve
r, never, never.” Cindy spied on the Korean diners and waitresses, looking for clues to Young-Soon. She paid close attention to the rounding-out vowel sound at the end of many Korean words. She started experimenting with scrunta and narfa.

  In her hotel room, Cindy had Korean tapes, giving herself a crash course in a language she did not know. She had taught herself the Korean alphabet in a week, so she wouldn’t have to learn her Korean lines from a transliteration. She also had videotapes of Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson, which she and Bonita watched over and over. The teacher and student watched how the starlets played their stomachs, hips, bottoms, navels. “Even when they bow, they’re saying, ‘I rock,’” Cindy said. The Koreans Cindy watched didn’t do that. For Young-Soon, Cindy would need some of each.

  Bonita, fine-boned and wearing a pink pashmina, took notes on a legal pad and sat on a chair in the lotus position, barely moving. She had taught Annette Bening and Harry Hamlin and Denzel Washington and thousands of other actors whose names you probably don’t know. Cindy could have been one of the latter group, but then Night had hired her. Bonita’s specialty was something called character embodiment. To help Cindy find Young-Soon, Bonita asked her to embody various animals. Getting there was, as they say, a process.

  “Go to your core, to the part of your body that is most Korean,” Bonita said. Her voice was hypnotic.

  They were in the suite’s sitting room. Cindy was wearing khaki clamdiggers and a pink shirt with no shoes, no makeup, no jewelry. Her fingernails and toenails were painted pink. She started groaning loudly, with her eyes closed. She sounded like she needed a doctor.