Either You're in or You're in the Way

by Logan Miller

  We asked Gordon if he knew any cinematographers. He said no, “Call so-and-so. Here’s her number.”

  We called so-and-so. Here’s what she said: “Don’t know any. Call so-and-so.”

  And so it went for three or four phone calls until a “so-and-so” gave us Ricardo’s telephone number. We called Ricardo, met for coffee, gave him our script. He called the next day. “I want to shoot this movie.”

  Although supremely talented, Ricardo had given up on Hollywood in 2000. He was tired of the grind, the nasty, soulless aspects of the business. He had moved back to his native Miami and got a job at Restoration Hardware. He thought he’d never shoot again. His career was over. He was ready to sell his light meters, which, for a cinematographer, is akin to a painter selling his brushes. But then, as he was roaming linoleum floors, hawking bed linens and faucets, he received a call from a producer of a Swedish soap opera. They needed a cinematographer. And thus began his new voyage west, back into the belly of the beast—and us.

  100 PERCENT LUCK

  Anthony Sanders called us from Tucson a few days after we spoke to Lorette. He DID NOT KNOW we were making a movie. Anthony was Logan’s roommate when they played minor league baseball for the Toronto Blue Jays. Years earlier, Anthony’s family took us in when we were living in Tucson trying to get picked up by a major league club. At the time, we were staying at a transitional housing complex on East Twenty-second Street, the In N Up. It was a shithole. According to one newspaper, the In N Up’s tenants consisted of “the evicted, addicted, convicted, and afflicted and their children,” helping them, “avoid the streets, institutions and death.” It was so dangerous it had its own police station. The city was trying to close it down.

  As residents of the transitional housing complex, we were required to attend one meeting a week, a choice between Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Anger Management, or Men’s Group—where you discussed all three, sort of like an addict’s free-for-all. We told them we weren’t addicts. Of course, we were in denial. Forced to pick one, we chose Men’s Group on Saturday mornings. It was a no-brainer. They served free pancakes and sausage. The syrup was amazing.

  Anyway, you won’t find better people than Anthony and his family. Anthony named one of his sons Logan Noah Sanders.

  So Anthony called to tell us that he’d just signed with the Colorado Rockies and that he would be home in Tucson for spring training in case we wanted to visit. The profound effect of this phone call cannot be overstated. Coincidentally, the Colorado Rockies was the team Lane (Logan’s character) plays for in Touching Home! Reid Park is where the Rockies hold spring training. We’d practiced on those fields with Anthony dozens of times when we lived in Tucson. If he’d signed with any other major league team, our movie might not have come together.

  In strict numbers, the odds of Anthony signing with Colorado, as opposed to any other team, were 1 in 31. But there was nothing to guarantee that he would be signed by a team, let alone the Colorado Rockies. And the odds of Anthony signing with the team in the script, at the same time that we were putting our movie together, are well beyond our mathematical abilities to determine. Let’s just say, astronomical.

  Our immediate thought was: go down to Tucson for a day and shoot one of the spring training scenes in our script. Then cut the footage together and show it to prospective investors. We had to shoot something to demonstrate that we could direct Touching Home. Anything, even if it was just a few minutes.

  We immediately called Ricardo and told him we had a connection with the Colorado Rockies.

  “Get your gear ready, Ricardo. We’re going to shoot a day of spring training. We leave in a week.”

  We started calling vendors and booking gear. We drove out to Tucson and scouted locations, worked with Peter Catalanotte at the Tucson Film Office and secured our permits. We didn’t sleep much. Thank God for truck stops. We drove back to Los Angeles with everything in place.

  And then our plans were nuked.

  Ricardo called and told us that he couldn’t shoot spring training; he’d just got hired on a low-budget slasher flick in Georgia. He was broke, needed the money. We saw disaster on the horizon. Was our movie doomed to fail? If we couldn’t pull off one day of filming, how could we pull off an entire movie? It felt as though our ship had been torpedoed in the harbor.

  But it wasn’t sunk yet.

  Ricardo would be back in a month, which at first thought, didn’t do us much good, because spring training would be over by then. There wouldn’t be any baseball to shoot. We needed more than cacti and Indian casinos. Ricardo felt horrible.

  We hung up the phone and pondered our situation.

  We needed to shoot spring training this year. Not next year, but this year.

  What was the solution? There had to be one. As we would come to learn and adopt as a means of survival—everything was improvisational. We needed to accept and understand this concept as our new reality. When problems arose, we couldn’t just throw money at them like larger productions. We had to be an adaptive force. Flexibility and quick thinking would be essential; make immediate decisions and act upon them—and work with the consequences, painful though they may be.

  Should we call some other cinematographers?

  “What about extended spring training?” Logan asked. “There will still be guys down there.”

  “For how many months?”

  “Until mid-June.”

  It was now late February.

  “How many players?” Noah asked.

  “Forty or fifty…Enough to look like spring training in a movie. No one will know the difference.”

  We called Ricardo and told him we’d wait until he came back from Slasherville. We’d dealt with delays and setbacks before. Hell, our whole life up to this point felt like one big delay and setback. So we convinced ourselves that the delay would make us better, allow us to gather more knowledge, more time to prepare, compose a more thorough game plan. We’d be better by then. It was the luckiest failure we ever had.

  A PANAVISION WITH VISION

  IT WAS NOW March 1.

  “What do you think, should we call Ric Halpern at Panavision?” Logan asked.

  It was Ric’s first day back from vacation.

  We vacillated. Should we call or not call? He’d be swamped.

  “Never wait for a phone call,” Noah said, opening our cell phone. “We’ll be the first phone call on his first day back. Somebody has to be that guy.”

  So we called Ric.

  He answered. Not a secretary or assistant or voice mail, but the only man we needed to talk to, the man with the power—Ric Halpern. This event is so rare in Hollywood that it stalls the brain. It’s never happened before or since. It may never happen again. You just can’t get through to the Mifwic. Everyone has an assistant. Even the assistants have assistants. And if you get the assistant’s voice mail, well, you’re doomed. You never made that call. You don’t even exist.

  Our logic was that we’d call Ric in March to get a meeting in June, but probably more like July. When you’re nobody, everyone cancels on you, whether they’re busy or not. It’s just part of the drill. “How many times have we rescheduled this thing?” “Five, sir.” “Okay, cancel the meeting one more time and we’ll take it next month.”

  “This is Ric.”

  He wasn’t supposed to answer the phone. We didn’t say anything.

  “…Hello, this is Ric.”

  “…Uuuuuhhhh…Hey, Ric. This is the Miller Brothers.”

  “Who?”

  The brain cleared. Thoughts were transmitted to our tongue.

  “Lorette Bayle from Kodak told us to give you a buzz. We pitched her on our movie and she really likes it.”

  “My three o’clock meeting just canceled. What are you guys doing this afternoon?”

  We looked at each other, bewildered. Does he want us to come out there today? TODAY? He can’t possibly mean today. We’re supposed to wait at least a few months for this sort of op
portunity. How do we know this guy is even Ric Halpern?

  “Hey, if you guys can’t make it today, we can just schedule something for later—”

  “No-we’ll-see-you-at-three,” we said rapid-fire.

  We hung up the phone, slammed our laptop shut, ran out of our apartment, jumped in the car, and gunned it. Panavision was only thirty minutes away. Our meeting was in six hours. But we wanted to make sure we were there on time. You never know what can happen on the streets and freeways of Los Angeles, California. Six-hour traffic jams? They happen.

  THE PANAVISION NEW Filmmaker Grant could give us credibility, a commodity we lacked in spades. Of course this depended on us receiving the grant.

  It would take a miracle to realize our movie in the time we wanted—to realize it at all. Because at this point, we were zeroes, nonentities, ciphers—the proverbial nobodies from nowhere. We needed to raise money—several million dollars by our calculations—in a few months. In order to do this we needed things that we could sell other than ourselves—events, people, awards, who knows. We needed to build leverage out of nothing, ’cause right now, that’s what we had—NOTHING.

  It was one thing for us to set out to raise money with a script and a vision. That would be well received in the gumption department, but that was where it slammed into the guardrail and died. Past recipients of the Panavision New Filmmaker Grant included Napoleon Dynamite and Steven Soderbergh’s first film sex, lies, and videotape. Both movies generated tens of millions of dollars at the box office and launched careers. If we could associate ourselves with these successes—by receiving the grant—we would significantly increase our chances of raising money. It would give us credibility.

  We had to receive the grant. We needed this as much as anything we’d ever needed. And we knew this driving out there.

  THE CATALYST

  The receptionist told us that Ric wanted to meet in the espresso lounge. It was down the hall and to the right. We sat at a table. A bunch of technicians were leaning against the counter behind us, taking their afternoon coffee break and talking shit about everyone that walked by. We were sitting in the crosshairs of their ridicule, certain to be next. We had on collared shirts and khakis, backpacks, and oversize daily planners, a hybrid of schoolboy and Sherpa.

  Waiting there for Ric felt like medieval surgery.

  Ric showed up. We shook hands. He sat down. “Tell me about your movie.”

  No pleasantries, no “Where are you from,” none of that crap. He wanted to hear our pitch. We got the firm impression that he wasn’t looking for any new friends.

  So we broke into our pitch. It was miserable. Our words collided. We stuttered, paused blindly. We were all mishmash and hogwash, balderdash and claptrap, bosh, piffle and hokum—the verbal fluency of a backfiring go-cart.

  We were floundering and we knew it.

  We started sweating.

  And Ric sat there with his arms crossed and didn’t say a word. For thirty minutes.

  For thirty minutes he didn’t say a word.

  His face was expressionless. He was watching us drown. He was the Omen child.

  We felt like ending the struggle, stop the pitch, shake his hand, thank him for his time, and leave. Never see the guy again. Hopefully he’d forget about ever meeting us. Our prospects of receiving the New Filmmaker Grant were irretrievably lost. We felt like failures, minds blasted with the events that led us here: our father’s death, our vow to make our movie this year, all those years of hard work and struggle to get to this moment, and we were now failing. It was all some ridiculous plan.

  We’re making our movie this year. Sure, good luck guys. Why don’t you go borrow your neighbor’s home video camera and enter the YouTube Olympics?

  Who were we to think that we could make a real movie?

  All those years of discipline, and we had now failed.

  Then Ric lifted us out of the water, mysteriously, inexplicably—MIRACULOUSLY.

  “This is a movie that needs to be made,” Ric said. “Panavision is going to back you one hundred percent.”

  What?

  A man rushed over to Ric and whispered in his ear.

  “Guys, I gotta go take care of something,” Ric said to us. “I’ll be back shortly.”

  And Ric was gone.

  What the hell’s going on? We’d just pitched ourselves and our movie for thirty minutes, miserably, convinced that we couldn’t have performed any worse, when the man in charge stops us, and tells us the best possible result, “Panavision is going to back you ONE HUNDRED PERCENT,” without even so much as opening the script, and as soon as those words leave his mouth, he disappears.

  What would you think?

  We stood up and looked around.

  The espresso bar was now closed. It was silent in our corner of the building, as though everyone had gone home for the night, laughing their way through the parking lot at the gullible twins in the espresso bar with their collared shirts, backpacks, script, and oversize daily planners. How many times had they played this trick on aspiring filmmakers? The guy we just met wasn’t even Ric Halpern. That’s why we met him at the espresso bar instead of his office—because he doesn’t even have an office. He’s an imposter!

  It had been too good, too easy. “Hey, come on out this afternoon. I’m free.” He was free because he was a fraud. We’d heard no and been rejected thousands of times, and now suddenly, the cosmic fortunes were going to be in our favor?

  Hardly.

  We slumped into our chairs.

  We waited five minutes. Still no Ric.

  We waited ten minutes…

  Then…

  “Hey, guys. Sorry about that.” Ric appeared from who knows where. “So as I was saying, Panavision is going to back you one hundred percent. You guys need a break, and I’m going to give it to you. Sounds like you haven’t had many.”

  If there are earthly angels, then Ric Halpern is certainly one of them. We’d been working to meet this guy our entire lives.

  “The grant doesn’t provide you with any money, only equipment: cameras, lenses, camera bodies, and other gear, based on availability. Over the course of a feature-length film, however, it could save you hundreds of thousands of dollars…Now if I give you guys a camera package, are you going to promise me that you’ll complete this movie, no matter what, no matter how little money you raise?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Let’s go meet some people.”

  He marched down the hall, narrating Panavision’s celebrated history, pointing to the black-and-white photographs on the walls and the filmmakers and stories behind them.

  “This is this and that is that,” he said, all movement driving forward, nothing wasted laterally. “You guys want a crane? What about a Technocrane? Of course, you want a crane! We’ll make this movie of yours look like a big-budget film.”

  Technocranes are an expensive and exquisite piece of equipment. They cost about five grand a day, prohibitive on our change-jar budget.

  “Let’s go see Rich Amadril. He’s in charge of our remote systems.” Ric made a hard right into the reception area. “Where’s Mr. Amadril? Is he in his office?”

  The secretary didn’t have time to reply. Ric was already in Amadril’s office.

  Now, Ric Halpern is not a large man, at least not in the physical sense. But as you can tell, he’s got the heart and balls of a rodeo king.

  Rich Amadril, on the other hand, is a very tall man, standing nearly a foot taller than Ric.

  “I’d like you to meet the Miller Brothers,” Ric said, arms crossed, looking up at the face of Mount Amadril. “They have a very special project. We’re going to back them one hundred percent. What can you do for them?”

  Amadril was caught off guard, Ric, firm, staring up at him, looking like a young Teddy Roosevelt.

  “Uhhhh, yeah, sure…Whatever they need…”

  “Can you show them the Techno?” Ric asked.

  “Sure.”

  There was a Tech
nocrane in the corner of the loading bay, about twenty feet from us. Mechanics were wrenching on it. Amadril led us over to the crane and gave us a tutorial.

  Then Ric took us on the grand tour of Panavision.

  The building is an industrial labyrinth, single storied, covering several acres, hundreds of thousands of square feet. We explored the deep recesses and secret lockers. It was King Tut’s tomb to the archaeologist, Cooperstown to the baseball nut. We looked through lenses that shot some of the greatest movies of all time.

  We sat back down at the espresso bar. We still hadn’t seen Ric’s office.

  “I’m going to give you guys a letter of endorsement. It’s up to you guys to create the snowball. I’m also going to give you the telephone numbers of several vendors who work in coordination with the New Filmmaker Program. There’s Lorette Bayle at Kodak, whom you’ve already spoken with, there’s Allan Tudzin at FotoKem, the world’s leading developer of negative, and there’s Frank Kay at J. L. Fisher. Call them. Have lunch with them. Get the best deals you can. It’s up to you guys to make it happen. I’m counting on you.”

  It’s rare that the significance of an event is recognized immediately. Sitting there in Panavision, however, we knew instantly that our lives had changed. From then on, things would be different. We now had credibility. An industry leader believed in us. And we weren’t going to let them down.

  SOUND RANGER AND BOOM MAN VOOT

  UNLIKE A HOME video camera, motion picture sound is not recorded in the camera. It is recorded by a sound team, a discrete unit with its own instruments.

  Ricardo was our cinematographer. So we had “Picture.” To consummate the marriage, we needed “Sound.” A good sound man. Make that a GREAT sound man, or rather, a team. The sound mixer is only as good as his boom man. The boom man is the guy that collects the sounds. His instrument is a long pole with a microphone on the end, “the boom.” You typically see him in tai chi-like poses, his boom suspended inches above an actor’s head, trying to find the ideal spot to capture sound. But this is a futile, Platonic quest. There is no ideal spot in this cave called Earth. He’s always searching for pure sound, and invariably, there’s always interference. He’ll spend his life searching for an ideal take, and it will never happen, never, ’cause that microphone of his is so damn sensitive it can pick up the crunching of a Neanderthal walking on ice twenty thousand years ago. Like a philosopher seeking true knowledge, boom men and their brothers in arms, the sound mixer, are forever tormented. They’ll NEVER find the perfect sound recording environment, and they know it. Yet they courageously persevere, day after bloody day.