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

by Logan Miller

  HAD HIM, THEN LOST HIM

  No more than twenty seconds after she disappeared behind the curtain, Ed Harris walked out. He looked at Logan, then at Noah, then again at both of us, a double take. He grinned, chuckled, amused by the twin thing.

  “Ed Harris, what do you boys got?”

  Ed extended his hand and Logan shook it, then Noah. He had a firm handshake. It seemed honest.

  It was loud onstage, fourteen hundred people chatting behind us, moving up and down the aisles, grabbing a Coke or hitting the bathroom before the show. We started our pitch.

  “We’re local independent filmmakers and we wrote a story about us and our father.”

  “You guys twins?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ed smiled. “Keep going.”

  “Our father was homeless for the last fifteen years of his life, battling alcoholism. It’s really a coming-of-age story about a father trying to make amends with his sons as they pursue professional baseball…We had always dreamed of playing in the major leagues, but it didn’t work out.”

  “How far did you get?”

  “High A ball for the Toronto Blue Jays,” Logan said. “I had two surgeries on my arm, and then they let me go.”

  Logan rolled up his sleeve, showed Ed the zipper on his elbow. Then a man called to Ed from the seats below. Ed turned and looked down at him. “Hey, Phil…Hold on. I’ll be right there.”

  Ed looked back at us and said, “Hey, guys, that’s Phil Kaufman. Let me go talk to him for a second. I’ll be right back.”

  (Phil Kaufman directed The Right Stuff, casting Ed as John Glenn, the role that made him a star.)

  We had him and then lost him. We figured he wasn’t coming back. He’d walk out the Castro with Phil and go have a drink or something, anything to get away from the twin nutcases who had so rudely forced their way backstage.

  CORNERED IN AN ALLEY

  “I’m gonna grab our script and laptop so we can show Ed the trailer,” Logan said.

  “I’ll keep my eyes on him. If he leaves, we’ll follow.”

  Logan sprinted back to our seats, where Chau was guarding our stuff as Noah kept his eyes locked on Ed and Phil Kaufman talking at the base of the stage, a crowd gathering around them.

  “Logan, what’s happening?” Chau asked. “I saw you guys talking to him.”

  “I gotta get back up there,” Logan said, pulling our laptop out of the backpack and then fishing for our script buried underneath our jackets and popcorn buckets and empty soda containers.

  “This is so exciting,” Chau said.

  “I know,” Logan replied as he ran back across the theater with our gear and vaulted onto the stage. He turned on the laptop, handed Noah the manila envelope with our script inside.

  Then, miraculously, Ed walked back up the steps.

  “Sorry about that guys…I haven’t seen Phil in a long time…So you guys wrote a story about you and your father, and you’re shooting it up here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  We started pitching our movie again—way too excited—speaking in tongues like a couple of meth-heads, “Jibberish nonsense movie, nonsense jibberish twins, nonsense jibberish Panavison, jibberish—Amen.” There’s no way he could decipher half of what we were saying. But we could tell that he was amused. We were a circus act, a carnival sideshow, talking over each other, hands and arms running all over the place. We felt rushed, like we had thirty seconds to tell our life story, sure to be cutoff at any moment by security or someone more important than us, more important than a couple crazies trying to pitch a four-time Oscar nominee on a little movie. Any distraction could ruin our attempt.

  The stagehands kept bumping into us. Logan held the laptop for Ed.

  “Here’s the trailer we just put together.”

  Logan pressed play, tried to angle the screen for Ed. But Ed couldn’t see or hear anything. The stage lights washed out the image, and the commotion and chatter from the audience silenced the music.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Harris,” Noah said.

  “Call me, Ed.”

  “Ed, do you mind if we show you the trailer backstage?”

  “Sure. Let’s go.”

  Ed pushed through the curtain. We followed. It was cramped, crowded with festival people, stagehands. We huddled in a corner and pressed play on our laptop. A stagehand bumped Logan with a chair, almost knocked the computer onto the floor. Backstage wasn’t any better than front-stage.

  So Noah searched for opportunity, a better place to watch the trailer, one without distractions.

  The door was open to the alley.

  “Ed, do you mind if we go into the alley?” Noah asked, pointing to the open doorway. It was dark and quiet out there, no people.

  “Sure…,” Ed said, moving toward the open door.

  Then a tall woman swooped upon us, near six feet of rage, thin glasses, red hair, white skin, freckles, looked like the boss of something. She was all fire and flame, smoking nostrils. “You two have two minutes and then you’re outta here!” She finished with a right hook toward the door. “Outta here!”

  Her job was to keep stalkers like us away from stars like Ed Harris. We’d breached the wall and were now digging handfuls out of her wedding cake, our faces covered in frosting. This was her soiree, her cave, her night with Edward Harris, celebrated actor and director. Who the hell are these assholes?!

  “Two minutes and you’re—outta here!” She raged. “OOOOUUUUUUUTTTTTTTTTTAAAAAA HERE!”

  Ed bravely confronted the Red Dragon and adroitly smothered the fire. He turned to her, an unlit cigarette between his fingers, held it up to his mouth. “Excuse me, but could you please get me a match?”

  Dragon sighed, wings fell, smoke releasing from its nostrils like a car’s last sputter of exhaust. Nice Dragon now. “Absolutely, Mr. Harris.”

  “Ed.”

  “I’m sorry, Ed,” she whimpered, and then flew away screaming, “Maaaaaaaaaaattttttttccccchhhhhh!!!!!”

  We stepped into the dark alley. We searched for a place to screen our trailer. There was a greasy Dumpster beside the door. So we set our laptop on it and hit play. Ed moved closer to the screen, the music playing to dreamy images of baseball. He took a drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke into the night.

  “This looks beautiful. Looks like you guys know what you’re doing.”

  ON THE TRAILER: Logan was catching. He popped out of the hole and threw a frozen rope to third base.

  “Nice throw. That was you, wasn’t it?” Ed asked, pointing to Logan.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “See, I can tell you guys apart already…I used to be a catcher. Like I told the guy onstage, I always dreamed of playing in the big leagues. Didn’t make it as far as you though, only made it to college.”

  Ed continued watching the trailer, focused, bringing the cigarette to his lips, the inhale tightening his concentration. He nodded a few times.

  The trailer ended.

  “Did you guys go to film school?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “We just went out and did it.”

  “Yeah, that’s probably the best way. Where are you guys planning on shooting the rest of this?”

  “Up here…Across the bridge. Do you know where Nicasio is?”

  “No.”

  “Fairfax, Lagunitas, Point Reyes…West Marin?”

  “Maybe…I probably drove through it a long time ago when I was doing theater up here.”

  “It’s beautiful country,” Noah said. “It’s rural. Lots of oak trees and rolling hills and redwood forests.”

  “Do you boys have any actors attached?”

  “Brad Dourif.”

  “Wow…You guys must be getting this out there. Brad Dourif is excellent, love his work.”

  To say we had Brad Dourif attached was a stretch. Not dishonest, but very elastic. Expressing interest over the phone through a third party (Brad’s agent) was months away from a formalized deal. B
ut it was one of the only pieces of leverage we had at the moment, and we needed to exploit it, even if it was extremely tentative and just a few hours old. Actors always want to know the other actors involved, who else is on the team; good actors tend to elevate each other’s performances. And bad actors, well, they tend to do the opposite.

  The manila envelope with our script inside was on top of the greasy Dumpster, next to our computer. Ed grabbed the envelope.

  “Is your script in here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What about your contact information?”

  “It’s all in there. We typed our phone number on the script, attached our business card as well. There’s also a DVD of the trailer you just watched.”

  Ed took a long drag from his unfiltered cigarette, thinking. He blew out the smoke.

  “I’m pretty busy right now…Give me…A week…Yeah, a week.”

  A week? Nobody reads your script in a week. Not even your mother. Established writers, yes. They demand it. But a couple of nobodies like us? Your script grows fields of dust on its cover page, becomes a doodling pad, and when spring cleaning rolls around, it rolls off the desk into the trash can. In the winter, it starts fires, keeps houses warm, kids cozy. Nobody reads your script in a week. NOBODY.

  A group of festival staffers had made their way into the alley and were now standing behind Ed, their backs to the busy street fifty yards down. They were waiting to escort him to his next engagement. Ed put out his cigarette on the Dumpster, threw it inside.

  “Good show, fellas,” he said, shaking our hands. He smiled and then turned and walked down the alley with his people.

  We watched them grow small, black outlines shrinking into the blur of streetlights. They turned the corner and disappeared. And we stood there beside the Dumpster, listening to the sounds of the city, staring at the cars streaking by the mouth of the alley. We didn’t want to move, didn’t want to step out of the dream.

  THE REFLECTING ROAD

  AS WE DROVE through the fog across the Golden Gate Bridge, leaving the city and Ed Harris behind, we started thinking about our father, alone with his truck in the woods, eating canned food on his tailgate, lantern beside him. Then he was walking the back roads, hands in his pockets, muttering to himself, beat up by life, hunched and shrunken, not proud, not hopeful, not happy, alone with his struggles and abandoned dreams.

  Thirty minutes later the highway approached the jail where he died, and a mile from that horrible tomb was the bank parking lot where Uncle Gary’s body was found in the trunk of his car, and this same strip of asphalt had just carried us to Ed Harris and past them.

  We arrived home, heads spinning, the night an overload of fantastic images and swirling voices, punctuated by one distinct moment in a San Francisco alley. We were back in the woods now, and all was quiet in the trees.

  We sent Gordon an e-mail at 12:58 A.M.:

  We talked to Ed Harris for about ten minutes in the alley outside the Castro, gave him the pitch, showed him the trailer. He thought it looked beautiful. He took our script and said to give him a week…Also, Brad Dourif’s agent called and said that Brad read the script and absolutely loves it. Call us when you get a moment. We need to talk…

  We’d accomplished our mission, achieved everything within our control. Now it was in Ed’s hands. It was hard to sleep though. We feared that pitching Ed Harris in the alley would be the summit of our adventure, a bitter story that would grow old and gaudy with embellishment, a story of how we almost made it, a story every grandfather has about coming within an arm’s length of fame. Yes, the thought of us coming that far and then failing to attain the rest of it was tormenting, a retrospective sting that would increase throughout our lives whenever we searched for a reason why fortune never left the alley.

  We finally managed to sleep a few hours, but the anxiety followed the dawn, pistol-whipped by the thought of Ed losing the script, leaving it in his hotel room, or giving it to one of the festival staff, or worse, the Red Dragon, who might conveniently misplace it or torch it with her fire. Or perhaps Ed would open his eyes in the morning to the absurdity of these two guys pitching him on some super-long-shot movie with a one in ten million chance of getting made. Ed Harris was a movie star, an American icon. In all likelihood, he had a dozen scripts at his house waiting to be read, each with a seven-figure offer on the table. And he’s going to spend two hours reading OUR SCRIPT? That would be an excessively bad waste of time. We had no financing, no studio underwriting our movie, nothing. We were the studio, a studio with no track record except a two-minute trailer.

  Ed’s agent might call the next morning and ask about the Castro. And if Ed mentioned that he had been cornered in an alley and pitched by a couple of aspiring filmmakers and was about to start reading their script, well, his agent, after choking on his earpiece and murdering his assistant, would do everything he could to prevent Ed from biting the apple. Two guys off the street peddling unsolicited scripts to clients is a radioactive superpill. An agent couldn’t imagine a more toxic scenario. It was the agent’s job to keep guys like us away, find his client big-dollar roles that advance careers upward on the money chain. These high-paying jobs are found on studio lots, not in San Francisco alleys. Opportunity doesn’t knock there, only despair.

  GORDON CALLED AROUND 9 A.M. He doesn’t excite easily, but the Ed Harris episode had him jumping on a trampoline with four shots of espresso and a chocolate kicker.

  “He’ll call you.”

  “You think?”

  “Yes…My gut tells me he will. It’s a great script, a good role for him. Actors don’t get these kinds of roles very often, even ED HARRIS. If he reads the script, which I think he will, he’ll call. I don’t think that will be the hard part, I really don’t. But when he calls, he’s going to immediately ask questions about the production side, how far along you are, scheduling, that sort of thing. It’s going to be your job to navigate this area. You don’t have any money, no schedule.”

  “We’re filming the movie this summer.”

  “C’mon, guys. You don’t have a penny. You can’t have a starting date for principal photography without any financing.”

  “We’ll get the money.”

  “Guys, we’re talking about—at the very least—a few million dollars to do this movie right. It’s not that easy to raise millions of dollars.”

  “What about George Lucas?”

  “Guys, guys, guys! George doesn’t invest in other people’s movies!”

  “Will you ask him?”

  “No.”

  “Give us his number and we’ll call him.”

  “Guys, great job. Let’s see if Ed calls.”

  STRESSFUL PLEASURE AND THE ART OF PACING

  We drove back to L.A. the following morning, our brains at war with themselves; the lofty vision of Ed calling and saying he wanted to make the movie was brought down by the alternate vision of Ed not reading the script and never calling, or worse, reading the script, hating it, and telling us he didn’t want to be in our movie. Up and down, the battle of wild dreams and practical failure. Both sides fought without intermission.

  The week passed like a kidney stone, long and painful. The phone was our pipeline to both deliverance and damnation. Every time someone called, the space of each ring was filled with the bipolar suspense of hope and failure. We’d scrutinize the caller ID, attempting to divine and shape prophecy.

  NINE DAYS LATER

  It was 9 A.M. Monday morning. We were reading at our desk when the phone rang. Noah checked the caller ID.

  “Who is it?” Logan asked.

  “It’s restricted.”

  “Answer it.”

  There was only one phone call we wanted—Ed Harris. That’s it. Eight days of disappointment. Our average heart rate: 189 per minute. We couldn’t survive another week. What made things worse, was that friends would call to see if Ed had called. Selfishly, we only wanted to speak to Ed. He was the only call that mattered. We were terrib
le friends that week.

  But this new call was promising: RESTRICTED. There was only one number that consistently came across our caller ID as RESTRICTED—and that was Gordon. And we were not expecting his call. Noah answered.

  “Hello.”

  “Who…who’s this?” A rugged, manly voice asked.

  “This is Noah.”

  “Hey, Noah, this is Ed.” A long pause. “Ed Harris.”

  Noah recognized Ed’s voice from the first syllable. It was unmistakable. Especially since our life’s new focus was directed toward his destiny-shifting presence on the other end.

  “Hey, Ed…How’s it going?”

  Ed has a tendency to speak slowly on the phone, a mixture of perplexity and great thought; a Hemingway man, at once tough and vulnerable.

  “So I read your script.”

  To say that we were excited would miss half the story. Yes, we were excited that he called, overwhelmed. But we were also terrified.

  Ed continued, “It’s good. I liked it.”

  “Can I put you on speakerphone so Logan can hear?”

  “Sure.”

  Ed was now on speakerphone.

  “Hey, Logan.”

  “Hey, Ed.”

  “So I like the script.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s well written…Now, where are you guys with this thing? You’ve shot some of it, when are you finishing it? When are you shooting the rest of the movie?”

  The right answer would have been “Whenever you can make it, sir” or “What’s your schedule like, sir?” But in our hasty inexperience and frazzled judgment, we blurted out, “We’re planning on shooting in June.”

  “That’s too bad…You see, I’m busy then. Gonna be back east shooting Ben Affleck’s movie.”

  We heard the drumroll of our execution, the axe raised overhead. Our final words had to be persuasive.

  “Well, the date isn’t exactly firm,” Noah replied quickly. “We’ll work around your schedule.”

  “Well…You guys want to shoot your movie when you want to shoot it.”

  He was slipping away fast.

  “Look, Ed. You’re the only actor we want to play the role of our father.”