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

by Logan Miller

  Honcho turned his back to us and climbed into his golf cart. “Good luck with your movie,” he said over his shoulder as he drove away.

  SOMBREROS IN THE NIGHT: ME TEQUILA, YOU TEQUILA

  It glowed magical under the lights. The electric hum wrapped the stadium in a sonic shell, muting the city noise. It was as though we alone existed. Our crew was mesmerized, we were mesmerized. Our own stadium. We were living the dream as we walked through the left field gate and across the outfield grass.

  We didn’t have time for a technical scout with Ricardo, which is a big deal. You just don’t shoot without a technical scout and expect greatness, or even mediocrity. You expect disaster.

  Ricardo’s main concern was the lights. Cinematographers are paid to control light. He wouldn’t be able to control the stadium lights, and that worried him. “Guys, there’s no guarantees here,” Ricardo said. “I don’t know anything about these lights. This scene could look like ass.”

  He pulled out his light meter, held it in the air.

  “Jeez…Never mind, this place is perfect.”

  In the movie, the brothers give the groundskeeper a case of beer in exchange for an hour on the field. It’s night, the stadium empty. The brothers take batting practice. It’s an important moment for them, the last rise before the fall, before their baseball hopes are dashed…

  So we shot the batting practice scene from six or seven camera positions, smooth, effortless, Logan cracking the ball all over the park. It was now time for the “martini.” (The martini is the last shot of the working day. In this case, the night.)

  There was a visual trick we wanted to pull off on this last shot. Here was the idea: Logan hits the ball over the fence and circles the bases as the lights go out, in order, from right to left. When he touches first base, the lights on the right side of the field turn off. When he touches second, the lights in center field turn off, and so on as he circles the bases until he lands on home plate and the entire stadium crashes to black.

  All this needed to be performed on the field, what’s called “in camera,” one miraculous take, no special effects, no computer wizardry to aid the shot. Very, very difficult! The stadium lights needed to be turned off manually. The timing had to be perfect. We would only have one chance. And the human chain required to pull this off made it even more difficult. It required everybody—EVERYBODY—even the drunks.

  THE HUMAN CHAIN OF DRUNKENNESS

  The muscle we brought to Tucson, two of our good buddies from Northern California, modern-day Celtic warriors, Nate and Taylor, and two of their buddies from Southern California, Brooks and Andy, got thirsty and started shotgunning beers and shooting Cuervo in the bleachers after they unloaded the equipment. They had been working in the desert sun since 6 A.M., for free. They were volunteers, and they were now voluntarily going to get drunk. This was a working vacation for them.

  We asked them not to swim too deep into the booze. We still needed them for the last shot of the night. They assured us they would be able to perform.

  In between takes, one of us would yell up to the muscle in the stands, “Guys, you okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah, we’re fine up here,” someone would reply, an empty beer can cartwheeling down the cement steps.

  “Why don’t you guys slow down?”

  “Don’t worry about the lights,” Jon, the head groundskeeper, would say. It was Saturday night. He was hanging out and drinking with the muscle. “We got it covered. No problem. Quit worrying.”

  They would rag us in between takes. “Miller, you’re a bum. Get him out of the game…Hey, Noah, you throw like a girl. Hey, Logan, your brother’s ugly.”

  We started filming around 8 P.M. It was now 11 P.M., time for the final shot. The camera was placed behind home plate, all the way against the backstop.

  We called the muscle down from the stands. They were wearing huge sombreros. Some of them were cross-eyed. They had to lean against the wall to stand.

  Noah sighed, dropped his head. He didn’t bother asking where they got the hats.

  “We’re ready, Captain,” Nate said, standing at attention. He saluted. They all saluted.

  “We’ve been rehearsing all night…in our minds,” Jon said. “My boys are trained.” He was just as drunk as they were. “C’mon, boys, let’s show ’em what we got!”

  We climbed into the stands and followed Jon and his staggering crew. Their trail of breath was like jet vapor.

  “I thought you guys stopped drinking?” Noah asked.

  “We did. Now we’re drunk,” Nate replied.

  The switchboard for the lights was in a bunker underneath the stadium, down a maze of dark cement hallways. It looked like a serial killer’s workshop. There was no cell phone reception down there. We didn’t have walkie-talkies. This meant that the signal to turn off the lights needed to be orally relayed, from the field, through the maze, and into the bunker. This required a human chain.

  “Who’s the least drunk?” Noah asked.

  “I am,” Taylor said.

  “No you’re not,” Nate said. “I am.”

  “You’re right. I lied. I’m a pirate.”

  Here was the plan: Nate would be in the stands watching Logan circle the bases. Just before Logan touched each base, Nate would yell “NOW” down the hallway to Brooks. Once Brooks heard “NOW,” he would yell “NOW,” down his hallway to Andy, who, once hearing Brooks’s “NOW” would then yell “NOW” into the bunker, where Taylor and Jon would manually turn off the lights. Each section of lights corresponded to a specific base. First base had its own quadrant, second base had its own, third base, and home plate.

  Before all this could happen, Noah needed to pitch the ball to Logan, who needed to hit the ball over the fence. No small feat. Ricky needed to capture the image. Sound Ranger and Voot needed to capture the sound. Everybody needed to be perfect, especially the human chain. One take was all we’d get to pull off a fantastically complex operation, anchored by a bunch of cross-eyed drunks.

  Where in history has this combination produced success?

  So we rehearsed it a few times. Logan would stutter-step just before hitting each base, cueing Nate to begin the drunken chain of yells.

  Finally, we were ready to go. Or at least as close as we could be, considering…This was one in a hundred, and everyone knew it. But even though it should not have been, confidence was fairly high.

  “WE’RE READY AMIGOS!” Nate yelled from the stands, waving his sombrero in the night.

  Noah pitched the ball and Logan hit the ball over the fence. Logan rounded the bases, and with sober precision, the lights went off, one after the other, POOF…POOF…POOF…crashing to black at home plate—the final POOF. We howled. Our crew howled. The drunks HOWLED.

  Somehow, by some godly touch of sobering intervention, we had pulled it off.

  WE COULDN’T SEE. We could only hear, temporarily blinded by the darkness. The electricity was off, but we were not. Stumbling, groping for a shadow, everyone hugged and congratulated one another, tripping over equipment, rolling in the grass, laughing at the absurdity of the achievement, the drunks rioting in the bleachers as the stadium lights slowly began to glow again.

  We all started packing up the gear. The final shot was a paragon of collaboration. Everyone was buzzing, except one.

  A LITTLE ANGRY

  His toxic frustration had reached the Vesuvius level. His anger was now volcanic. He was going to bury the operation. We were succeeding marvelously and he hated us for it. Everyone was having a blast and their joy clashed with his ash.

  Little Angry was now VERY ANGRY.

  And he was leaving, taking off with all his gear, driving back to L.A. in the morning. Our movie was sunk. We had two more days of filming, impossible without him and his gear. He said he had a SMALL problem with us and a BIIIGGGGG problem with Ricardo. He hated the Cuban, wanted to smoke him. Little Angry was so angry he was making flour out of his teeth.

  INTERDEPENDENCE

&nbs
p; How can your world blow up at any moment, you ask? How did Little Angry have such big power? It’s easy. Everything on a movie set is interdependent—people, equipment, it all forms this long chain of production that culminates with the camera rolling film on the actors. It’s TEAM art. This implies multiple people and parts working toward a unified goal.

  The locations department arrives at the set first. Sometimes they sleep there to make sure that everything is ready to go in the morning. Then the trucks arrive: grip, camera, art, catering, and so on. All of the trucks, people, and equipment funnel goods and supplies toward the camera position, and when lights, sound, grip gear, C-stands, and a multifarious assortment of industry goods are in place, then and only then, can actors speak, car chases speed, and sex scenes burn an image onto film.

  Large productions have redundancy measures. If one link in the chain is broken, they have the resources to replace it. Not true on our budget. If the grip truck got a blowout or a generator failed or the camera broke, we were finished. If someone got lost, if a light broke, if the sound department ran out of batteries, if a boom microphone was struck by a baseball (it happened), if the film stock wasn’t delivered, if any of a ridiculously large number of variables in a prodigious equation failed, our movement ceased. The convoy was stuck in the mud.

  Now, considering that Little Angry owned the only truck on our Tucson shoot, which was loaded with all our equipment, and we mean all of it—grip, lighting, sound, and camera—he had the ability to wipe us out. We couldn’t allow that to happen. We didn’t have the time, money, or industry resources to fire Little Angry and hire a friendly replacement by morning. We HAD to shoot the next morning or else all was for naught.

  Little Angry was threatening to destroy years of determination and hard work. Yeah, we felt like introducing Little Angry to TWIN ANGRY. But that would only make MORE ANGRY, a human eruption we were trying to avoid. Right now we needed to shrink VERY ANGRY back down to Little Angry. Make him dormant. Make him safe.

  So we pleaded with him for forty-five minutes in left field as our now faithful crew waited in the parking lot, throwing worried glances at us, hoping that we could stop the lava and save the village.

  Eventually, we persuaded Little Angry to stick around and work the next day. The show would go on.

  We encountered more of his tribe along the way. Little Angry was just the first.

  BORDER TANGO

  IN CASE YOU’VE been smoking the reality TV pipe for the past decade, we have a crisis down there, a virtual war zone manned by choppers and border patrol agents with machine guns. So why not film there? The location was interesting. Sound was a problem; the Black Hawks probing the desert made it difficult to record dialogue. But as Connie’s boyfriend Buck would later say in the driving rain of Northern California, “What are you guys, a bunch of Hollywood pussies? Shut up and shoot it.”

  So we did.

  IN THE MOVIE, the brothers are on their way home from Tucson, canned from baseball. They are parked in a turnout, taking a break from the road. Clint (Noah) is doing push-ups in the dirt. Lane (Logan) is leaning against the car, despondent. Clint finishes push-ups, stands, and tries to break Lane out of his funk. There’s some heated dialogue. The brothers get in the car and drive away.

  Like many great locations, we found this one by chance. We were looking for a lake and found a shrine instead. We’d driven eighty miles into the desert along a two-lane road to find out the lake was a mud puddle. It had been a time-warping trip, checkered with half-dead Indian reservations, abandoned cars, trailers, and gas stations, stray dogs and coyotes, with relics of once good ideas and busted hopes. The road hugged the border, Mexico on our left, the United States on our right. It felt as though Pancho Villa might ride out of the heat waves, chased by a chopper.

  On our way back to Tucson, we pulled off the road to take a piss. The turnout overlooked an arroyo. There were hundreds of footprints in the sandy riverbed made by caravans of illegals heading north from Mexico.

  There was a shrine built to honor a saint, maybe the Virgin Mary, can’t say for sure. It was an interesting backdrop. We surveyed the ground. There was ample room to park a grip truck and situate our equipment. But this was outlaw country, a dangerous stretch of road traveled by drug smugglers, human traffickers, and banditos. Shoot-outs and murders were commonplace. We ran the risk of getting robbed for our gear, or worse.

  We considered the hazards. The location was perfect. We’d come back and film in a week.

  PICTURE CAR, THE PERFECT CAR

  We needed a car for the brothers in the movie. One week out and no car. We were the transportation department, and we didn’t have a car. The directors would fire us if we didn’t get one quick. Our personal car, the one we planned on using when we first wrote the script, was abandoned by us on Highway 101 north of Santa Barbara after it blew up. It was now a hundred Chinese bicycle frames.

  So we searched the Internet at Anthony’s house and found several potential cars, but after further inspection, we concluded that none of them were right for the movie. So we drove around to every junkyard and used-car lot in Tucson. We kicked tires and checked under hoods. After five days, still nothing. Two days out now and still no picture car. Stress was building. If we hadn’t been the directors, we would’ve been fired by now. We searched online again and found a prospect. We called the owner.

  He’d moved out to Tucson from New York six months earlier. He was now selling everything and moving back. At least that was the story he gave us. He was shady, prickly. Let’s call him “Shady Cactus.”

  So we met Shady Cactus in a dirt alley behind some Mexican groceria on his side of town. We brought our pistola. Physically, the car was perfect—a total heap of shit; it was the kinda car we used to drive, the kinda car that ain’t worth fixing, the kinda car that when it blows up you don’t call the tow truck, you just pull the license plates and leave it where it dies. We knew these kinda cars.

  We drove the Perfect Car around the block. It swayed and creaked. It had no license plates. (Shady had a great story for that one.) The upholstery looked like you kicked a lion in the balls and then threw him inside. The rear window was busted out, looked like you threw a horse inside after the lion. The backseat was portable, the radio had been ripped out, and there was a Cadillac hubcap in the trunk in case you felt like going to the club.

  “Do you think it will make it back to L.A.?” Noah asked. The only honest answer: no way in hell.

  “For sure,” Shady replied. “I’d drive this thing cross-country…It just had a tune-up.”

  We laid five one-hundred-dollar bills on the hood. Shady took the dough and disappeared down the alley.

  PLANET ZORTON AND BIZARROVILLE

  One week later we were heading back to the shrine to shoot the pullout scene. The Perfect Car stalled at the gas station on mile one. It took fifteen minutes to restart. The day certainly didn’t start off with the smell of success.

  The Perfect Car rattled and shook down the highway, as if we were driving a vibrating bed from some cheap motel. We didn’t want anybody else to ride in the Perfect Car in case the wheels fell off. We stuck to the slow lane. Top speed fifty. Anything beyond that was suicide.

  We rehearsed our lines and discussed the coverage for the scene as we drove south toward Mexico.

  Finally, the Perfect Car gurgled into the dirt turnout. Our crew looked around the alien landscape as if they’d just got off a rocket ride to planet Zorton.

  “It’s an interesting location,” Noah said, selling the place to our disoriented crew. “It helps express the brothers’ emotional desolation at this point in the movie.”

  Eyes rolled. “Sure guys…You couldn’t find anything closer to town…or safety?”

  “Not like this…,” Noah said. “This place is Bizarroville.”

  A Black Hawk shrieked over the mesa, chasing things illegal.

  “Whatever it is, let’s just shoot it and get the hell out of here before we get abduc
ted,” Ricardo said. “I happen to like my freedom.”

  We set up the first camera position, the master shot, and rehearsed the scene for the crew. It took about four minutes.

  The camera was far from the action, emotionally distant. It would eat up several minutes of film. It seemed wasteful to most of our crew. “You don’t need to shoot the entire scene from here. You’ll never be in this shot very long.”

  It was sound reasoning. But we had a distinct vision for the scene that contrasted with their experience. We felt the distance of the shot expressed the dramatic mood without being heavy-handed.

  Our gut told us to shoot the whole thing, all the way through. Don’t edit in the camera. Always shoot the entire scene. So what if it took a few extra minutes? We could decide in the editing room what to eliminate.

  Thank God we went with our gut, ’cause one take with a working car was all we’d get. We would have been irreparably screwed if we hadn’t listened to our innards and filmed the brothers driving away.

  TAKE 1: We played the scene: Push-ups, dialogue, we jumped in the Perfect Car and drove down the road. CUT.

  We turned around and parked the Perfect Car on its mark. It was running strong, like it did back when leg warmers were hot. We moved the camera closer.

  TAKE 2: Push-ups, dialogue, we jumped into the Perfect Car and Noah turned the ignition.

  The engine strained, growled, shook for a few seconds, fizzed, and then smoked. And the Perfect Car went silent. Nothing. Total car death. Not a shocker, but a problem. We now had a 4,000-pound corpse on our hands.

  We finished shooting and packed up the gear. The next location was Patagonia Lake, outside the border town of Nogales, forty miles southeast.

  We had established the Perfect Car and needed it for the rest of the movie. It was now a character. We had to get it fixed and then out to California. So we called a tow truck in Tucson. But we couldn’t leave the Perfect Car unguarded on Zorton and expect it to be in one piece when the tow truck showed up in a couple hours. There were too many scavengers roaming this part of the desert.