by Rob Lowe
The director was not impressed.
After a very tense negotiation, the actor was forced to shit-can his self-penned opus and stick to the original script. There was only one problem: He hadn’t bothered to learn it. Cue cards were made and placed next to my head while we filmed his part of the scene. When it was time to turn the camera onto me, he was sent home. My part of the scene called for me to listen to this very intricate two-page speech and run a wide range of emotions at very specific times. The director offered to have the script supervisor read the departed actor’s lines.
I’ve long since learned that when faced with a problem, you should rip off the Band-Aid, acknowledge the problem and cut your losses.
“Just turn on the camera, I’ll do it without anyone.”
I did the two-minute pivotal close-up reacting to my own imagining of what the speech should have been like while staring at a strip of duct tape marking where the actor should have been.
Like life, moviemaking is never exactly what you think it will be. Sometimes it’s great when you think it’s gonna be a turkey, and sometimes even a ship of fools becomes Battleship Potemkin. You can go to all of the acting classes you want, you can be first in your class at the fanciest film schools, but you’re never going to know what to expect until you do it. And then do it some more.
I have nothing against film or acting schools. Many huge talents have come out of both, and lots of folks who are more accomplished and better storytellers than I will ever be owe them a great debt.
But today, anyone can make a movie on their phone. You can edit a film on a midrange laptop at the same level as the pros. Today, no filmmaker has an excuse to not make his movie. As the man says: “Just do it.”
And as for acting classes, drama schools, et al., let me say this: I’m thinking about opening one of my own. It won’t be a four-year impossible-to-get-into school; I’ll take anyone. It won’t be expensive, and as long as your check clears, you are in. You can enroll and graduate in a day. I’m calling it Film Acting School. In just one day, students will experience the reality of filmmaking.
Here is the breakdown of the course:
4:00 A.M.:
You will be required to report to a location via directions that you will receive in the middle of the night, slipped under your door. They will be incorrect.
4:05 A.M.:
You will be ushered into a makeup trailer, where you will begin having a prosthetic face applied. (There will be a variety to choose from, fat man or woman, old-age face and creature from Star Trek: Voyager.)
5:00 A.M.:
Halfway through the makeup process, you will be provided your speech,1 to be filmed with a full professional crew as a lifetime keepsake and the culmination of your course.
5:30 A.M.:
The catering truck will arrive to provide you breakfast. At this point your prosthetic will be 80 percent complete, so you will have to eat through a straw.
6:00 A.M.:
Face completed.
6:30 A.M.:
You will be provided with your accommodations for the shoot, an eight-and-a-half-by-four-foot room with an open toilet called a honey wagon. For an added fee of just seventeen cents, FAS Studios will provide a working heater and/or air conditioner.
6:45 A.M.:
The director will stop by for a meeting to discuss any ideas you may have about the upcoming scene.
6:46 A.M.:
The meeting ends. The second assistant director will be introduced to you. He will provide all information related to the day’s shooting schedule.
6:50 A.M.:
Your wardrobe arrives. Although you will have provided your measurements in advance, nothing will fit.
7:05 A.M.:
New wardrobe arrives. The costumer apologizes for its being 100 percent wool.
7:10 A.M.:
The second AD brings you water and says, “Hydrate. It’s going to be one hundred ten degrees today.” He also gives you a twenty-minute warning for your scene’s rehearsal.
9:10 A.M.:
The second AD returns and tells you they are “ready, ready” (for whatever reason, no one just says “ready” anymore in show business). You hop into a white van for the ride to set.
9:20 A.M.:
The van departs.
9:25–10:00 A.M.:
You rehearse your speech with a full crew.
10:05 A.M.:
You are dropped back off at your honey wagon. The AD gives you an estimate of forty-five minutes for the crew to light the set and to begin shooting.
10:06–10:40 A.M.:
Final moments to prepare for the scene.
10:55 A.M.:
AD arrives and says they have decided to shoot another sequence first and will update you as information comes in.
12:45–1:00 P.M.:
Lunch (through a straw).
1:05 P.M.:
After-lunch “touch-ups” of your prosthetic head, in the makeup trailer.
2:00–3:30 P.M.:
Free time in your trailer.
3:45 P.M.:
AD tells you he will have more information on when you will shoot in forty-five minutes and will give you a fifteen-minute warning before they are ready.
3:46 P.M.:
AD returns to say they are ready.
4:30 P.M.:
After rehearsing on set and final makeup, hair and wardrobe checks, it’s time to shoot your big speech; everyone gets into position.
4:31 P.M.:
“Roll camera” is called.
4:31:30 P.M.:
A dog begins barking in a house nearby, preventing any sound recording.
4:45 P.M.:
A neighbor receives $500 to lock his dog in the garage.
5:00 P.M.:
You finally shoot your first take. It will be unusable due to a focus problem with the camera.
5:05–5:30 P.M.:
Multiple takes will be attempted. None will be completed. Among the problems will be other actors who don’t know their lines, too much sweat pouring from your prosthetic face, a flare in the lens, a “hair in the gate,” a helicopter circling, a jet landing, a boom microphone in the shot, bystanders wandering by in the background and a guy who wants $5,000 to turn off his leaf blower. The director takes you aside for a stern talking-to. “We are losing light. If you don’t give us a usable take now, we will have to scrap the scene.”
After being on set for thirteen hours, you will have approximately four minutes of ideal conditions to shoot your big scene.
Maybe you can pull it off, maybe you can’t.
If this sounds like something that interests you, you may have what it takes to be a working actor in the film business. And it won’t take you four years of drama school to find out.
* * *
1. You can choose whatever great speech you want memorialized and commit it to memory beforehand if you wish. The Film Acting School LLC does not guarantee any speech can be shot due to a number of possible unforeseen or force majeure situations that may arise, including, but not limited to, weather, illness, mechanical malfunctions, and personnel changes due to scheduling conflict, miscommunication, bad information, tardiness, nonperformance, incapacitation, drugs or death.
With fellow Best Actor nominee James Gandolfini at the Emmys.
A Boy
I’m trying to remember when I felt like this before. Like an elephant is sitting on my chest, like my throat is so tight and constricted that I can feel its tendons, like my eyes are 100 percent water, spilling out at will, down pathways on my face that have been dry for as long as I can think of. I’m trying to remember: When was the last time my heart was breaking?
The death of my mother was one time, but her passing was prolonged enough to let me prepare for it, to the extent anyone can. At the most intense moment, sitting at her gravesite, I felt like I could hear every leaf blower in a fifty-mile radius, felt as if I could feel the sun’s rays turning my skin darker shades with each second, my s
kin irritated and jumpy, making me want to crawl out of it. I’m feeling it all now again, but no one has died.
When I was a boy, I had to leave my friends in the summer, just as Malibu was becoming Malibu, say good-bye to my first girlfriend and go to Ohio to stay with my dad. There is a little of that sense memory at play too, a feeling that I’m about to be left out of important events, separated from life as I know it, the world as I love it.
I am remembering and feeling the details of my parents’ divorce and our family’s forced march out of my home to an alien world across the country. The good-byes to my father and my beloved grandparents; rationally I knew I would see them all again, but now I have the same body-deadening weight of the condemned, counting the minutes until the final moments of a life that’s all I’ve ever known. This encompassing, exhausting sadness I had mostly forgotten, or buried, until now.
Today is my son Matthew’s last night home before college.
I have been emotionally blindsided. I know that this is a rite many have been through, that this is nothing unique. I know that this is all good news; my son will go to a great school, something we as a family have worked hard at for many years. I know that this is his finest hour. But looking at his suitcases on his bed, his New England Patriots posters on the wall and his dog watching him pack, sends me out of the room to a hidden corner where I can’t stop crying.
Through the grief I feel a rising embarrassment. “Jesus Christ, pull yourself together, man!” I tell myself. There are parents sending their kids off to battle zones, or putting them into rehabs and many other more legitimately emotional situations, all over our country. How dare I feel so shattered? What the hell is going on?
One of the great gifts of my life has been having my two boys and, through them, exploring the mysterious, complicated and charged relationship between fathers and sons. As I try to raise them, I discover the depth and currents of not only our relationship but ones already downstream, the love and loss that flowed between my father and me and how that bond is so powerful.
After my parents’ divorce, when I was four, I spent weekends with my dad, before we finally moved to California. By the time Sunday rolled around, I was incapable of enjoying the day’s activities, of being in the moment, because I was already dreading the inevitable good-bye of Sunday evening. Trips to the mall, miniature golf or movies had me in a foggy, lump-throated daze long before my dad would drop me home and drive away.
Now, standing among the accumulation of the life of a little boy he no longer is, I look at my own young doppelgänger and realize: it’s me who has become a boy again. All my heavy-chested sadness, loss and longing to hold on to things as they used to be are back, sweeping over me as they did when I was a child.
In front of Matthew I’m doing some of the best acting of my career. I’ve said before that the common perception that all good actors should be good liars is exactly the opposite; only bad actors lie when they act. But now I’m using the tricks of every hack and presenting a dishonest front to my son and wife. To my surprise, it appears to be working. I smile like a jack-o’-lantern and affect a breezy, casual manner. Positive sentences only and nothing but enthusiasm framing my answers to Matthew’s questions.
“Do you think it’s cold in the dorms in the winter?” he asks in a voice that seems smaller than it was just days ago.
“Naah!” I lie, having no idea what his new room for the next four years will be like.
This line of questioning is irrelevant anyway, as Sheryl is preparing for any possible scenario, as is her genius. We all have our strengths; among hers is the ability to put anything a human being could possibly need in a suitcase. Or box. Or FedEx container. She is channeling her extraordinary love and loss into a beautiful display of preparing her son for his travels. And in the end, Arctic explorers will travel lighter.
Matthew’s dog, Buster, watches me watching Matthew as he sorts through his winter jackets. I am one of those people who believe dogs can actually smile, and now I can expand that belief to include an ability to look incredulous as well. Buster seems to be the only member of our family to see what a wreck I am, and he is having none of it.
“You disgust me,” he seems to say, looking at me with his chocolate eyes. “Get a backbone, man!”
The clothes are off the bed and zipped into the bags. The bed is tidy and spare; it already has the feel of a guest bed, which, I realize to my horror, it will become. I replay wrapping him in his favorite blanket like a burrito. This was our nightly ritual until the night he said in an offhanded way, “Daddy, I don’t think I need blanky tonight.” (And I thought that was a tough evening!)
I think of all the times we lay among the covers reading, first me to him, Goodnight Moon and The Giving Tree, and later him to me: my lines from The West Wing or a movie I was shooting. The countless hours of the History Channel and Deadliest Catch; the quiet sanctuary where I could sneak in and grab some shut-eye with him when I had an early call time on set, while the rest of the house was still bustling. I look at the bed and think of all the recent times when I was annoyed at how late he was sleeping. I’ll never have to worry about that again, I realize. I make up an excuse to leave the room and head to my secret corner.
For his part, Matthew has been a rock. He is naturally very even-keeled, rarely emotional; he is a logical, tough pragmatist. He would have made a great Spartan. True to form, he is treating his impending departure as just another day at the office. And I’m glad. After all, someone’s gotta be strong about this.
Our youngest, Johnowen, will be staying behind and returning to high school, and now it’s time for them to say good-bye. I’ve been worried about how Johnowen will handle the departure of his big brother. Only two years apart, they share most of the same friends, which is to say that Johnny hangs with all the older boys who are also leaving home. My sons are very close in that vaguely annoyed constant companionship that brothers can share (if they are lucky). Now what will happen to their NFL rivalry and smack talk? The nightly ear-splitting deconstructing of Scandinavian dubstep EDM? The incessant wrangling about what guys and what girls are coming by and when? Life is breaking up the team that kept me in loving consternation until all hours of the morning and throughout those never-ending summer nights.
I am a boy again as I wonder: What will become of my two closest friends?
In the driveway Matthew gives Johnowen a laconic high five. “Peace,” he says, clearly going out of his way to avoid any emotion or drama. Johnowen, whose passion runs just barely under the surface, is a little taken aback. He looks at me, sad and bemused, and I know what he is thinking: “That’s my brother! A cool cucumber till the end.” He watches Matthew hop into the car for the ride to the airport.
Of the many horrors of divorce, the most egregious is that it robs a kid of the best of both worlds. Dads can do many things that even the best moms can’t, and vice versa. I’ve always been fascinated by whom my kids come to and for what purpose, whether they are drawn to Sheryl or to me, and I’ve noted that it always surprises me which one of us they need for comfort or advice and when.
On the plane, we have two seats together and one apart. Matthew chooses to sit with Sheryl and I see how happy it makes her. Then on go the headphones and not a word is shared for most of the flight. Sheryl and I look at each other and smile. “Teenagers.”
An amber, evening light fills the cabin as we flee the setting sun, heading east. I’ve taken a break from reading and am staring at my boy. The light from his window is cutting across his face, accentuating his cheekbones and strong jawline, making him look unbearably handsome and grown-up. He might as well be a young businessman headed to a meeting.
His favorite headphones are on and he is reading, so I can consider him in freedom, without his awareness. I remember the first time I laid eyes on him in the delivery room. “He’s blond!” was my first thought. And I remember what I whispered to him when his eyes opened for the first time in his life as he peered in my fac
e, and (I am convinced) into my soul. “Hello, I’m your daddy. And I will always be there for you.”
Sheryl has looked up from her iPad and mouths to me, “Are you okay?” I want to be, for her; I don’t need her worrying about anything other than the logistics ahead, and I certainly don’t want to draw any attention on the plane. But something about her face and the way she is looking at me, while I am looking at him, pulls the rug out again and I avert my eyes from her, from him; my sunglasses go on and I open up a newspaper, covering my entire face and anything that anyone might see, like a bad version of Maxwell Smart hiding from a KAOS agent. I am amazed that so much water can come out of the eyes of someone who dehydrates himself with so much caffeine.
Just as we land, I take one more peek at Matthew. If he has any emotion about any of this, he is not showing it. I’m proud that he is charging into this chapter that opens the narrative of his adult life with such confidence. And I sneak another peek at Sheryl and allow myself to think, “All of this is exactly as it needs to be.”
* * *
It’s move-in day. We drive onto the historic, grand and beautifully intimidating campus with our rental car packed with Matthew’s belongings. Stuck in a nonmoving lineup of cars filled with other parents in the same emotional boat, I am cursed again with idle time to contemplate the day ahead of me. But today, for the first time, the overpowering melancholy is gone, the bittersweet nostalgia too, replaced by an envious, excited adrenaline. To be at the true beginning! To be moments away from meeting strangers, some of whom will be in, and change, the course of your life forever! To have the opportunity an elite university provides to be able to discover yourself, your true adult self, away from any of the tentacles of childhood! I feel the gooseflesh rising from my arms.