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

by Logan Miller

  “I’m not trying to fudge my way out of it,” Ed replied. He started thinking out loud. “Who else could I see in this role, who could I call to help you guys?”

  “Ed, you’re the only actor who can pull it off…Why don’t we sit down in person and figure this out?”

  “Where are you guys? You in San Francisco?”

  “No, we’re down here. In L.A…. In Santa Monica.”

  “I’m in Malibu.”

  “Why don’t we get together this week? What’s your schedule like? What about tomorrow?”

  “No…I can’t do tomorrow or Wednesday,” Ed said. “I got people in town. Thursday would work…Does that work for you guys?”

  “Absolutely. What time?”

  Our pens were ready, daily planners open.

  “You guys wanna come by my house at around eleven?”

  “Uhhhhh…”

  He was inviting us over to his house? Were the angels of mercy shining on us?

  “Sure, we’ll come by your house.”

  Ed gave us directions. “See you guys at eleven.”

  We turned off the phone. EXHALED. Opened up the medicine cabinet and drank a bottle of high blood pressure pills. Walked into the kitchen and started pacing.

  We’d lived to fight another day.

  The plan for Thursday was clear: find out when Ed will be available to act in our movie and get him to commit. We’re not leaving without a commitment. Do not relent. Do not let him back out. But above all else, don’t show him you’re desperate. Desperation never sold anything. Not even bandages to the wounded.

  There’s only solutions.

  PUMPING UP TO PUMP DOWN

  We worked out at Gold’s Gym Venice Wednesday evening, after dinner. It was our third workout of the day: a run in the morning at 5:30 A.M., a pile of push-ups and pull-ups midday, and now, weights. The system was surging, unable to concentrate.

  Our cell phone rang. It was the RESTRICTED number. This was not good. A phone call now, the night before our meeting…WAS NOT GOOD. After our conversation with Ed on Monday, we didn’t want another phone call from anybody—and especially Ed—until after our meeting.

  Our gut thought: Ed was canceling.

  Logan answered the phone. “Hello.”

  “Hey, this is Ed.”

  A CATEGORY 5 just made landfall. And our sand castle was beachfront.

  Ed continued, “Which one is this?”

  “Logan.”

  We’re screwed, it’s over. He’s come to his senses.

  “Hey, Logan.”

  Yes, it’s definitely over. He talked to his people and they brought him back to reality. YOU’RE A MOVIE STAR, ED. These guys, these twins, ARE NOTHING, NOBODIES. C’mon, Bruckheimer just called last week. National Treasure 2, baby! Let’s follow the treasure, Ed. Follow the treasure…

  Ed continued, “I need to run some errands in the morning so we’re not going to be able to meet at my house. I’ll come to you. Where are you in Santa Monica?”

  Breathe, remember to breathe, Logan. Look in the mirror, you’re still here.

  Logan said, “We’re at Ninth Street, north of Wilshire. A block south of Montana. Can we buy you lunch?”

  “Not necessarily…”

  “Do you know where the Starbucks is on Seventh and Montana?”

  “Sure do.”

  “Let’s meet there.”

  Logan hung up and relayed the call to Noah.

  The crop duster ride through a tornado had just begun.

  We finished our workout, speculating about the change of location. What did it mean?

  Our theory: Ed called us at Gold’s Gym around 8 P.M. The family had all sat down to a nice dinner, talked about the day, what’s happening tomorrow. And Ed says that some guys he met in an alley in San Francisco are coming over to the house. And his wife flips out. Rightfully so. Ed comes to realize that this might not be such a good idea. They could be lunatics. “Probably are,” his wife says, “especially from San Francisco.”

  So Ed picks up the phone and calls us to change locations for the meeting. It was the most logical inference we could form at the moment. But damn if it didn’t feel like we were playing Russian roulette with five in the chamber.

  LET’S SHAKE ON IT

  THE VERDICT WAS pending. The future of our movie hung in the balance. And the jury would soon enter the courtroom.

  We walked to the Starbucks on Seventh and Montana with our daily planners and grabbed a table on the sidewalk. We wanted to isolate our meeting with Ed, cut off potential interruptions. So we moved all the tables on one side of the building over to the other. Now there was only one table on the Montana sidewalk, and it was ours.

  Ed showed up on time—Wrangler jeans, white T-shirt, and a windbreaker. We bought him an orange juice and a zucchini muffin. We got a cup of diesel, and the three of us walked outside. Ed wanted to talk baseball. We obliged. It immediately turned the wheel of power in our favor.

  We had no acting experience. No screenplay sale. We had not directed a feature film. No credits to our name, not even fake ones. In Hollyworld, we had nothing. But in the baseball world, we had achieved quite a bit. We could talk with authority on the subject because we had done it.

  Our baseball experience added weight to the first fifteen minutes of our meeting as we exchanged Little League stories and other great baseball moments.

  Then the talk shifted smoothly into the trailer we shot during spring training.

  “I was impressed,” Ed said. “It really looked good.”

  He still hadn’t mentioned his role in the movie. So Noah forced the issue.

  “You’ve always reminded us of our father. Ever since we were little kids, watching The Right Stuff, Places in the Heart, every time we saw you we thought of our dad. And looking at you now, in person…You have similar mannerisms.”

  “Well, I like the role of him in your script. He’s a good guy. He’s just got some problems. He’s conflicted…Now, if I was to help you out.” Ed sighed, wiped his forehead with his hand. “You see, I’m so damn busy for the next six months…” You could tell he wasn’t bullshitting us. He was genuine, a real person, a guy you could grab a cheeseburger and beer with.

  He started thinking out loud. “I’m helping Ben Affleck with his movie, the first one he’s directing, leaving in a couple days for Boston. I finish with Ben in the last week of July and then I’m taking my family on vacation, riding horses in Montana. Then I’m off to New York to do this one-man show until after Thanksgiving…When did you say you wanted to shoot this thing? How long do you need me?”

  “We’ll shoot whenever you can make it. You’re our number one guy. We don’t want anyone else to play our father but you. Period. You’re the only actor that can do it.”

  During our first phone call with Ed, we made the mistake of saying that we were shooting in June. We thought that having a firm shooting date would make us appear more professional. But now, the schedule revolved around Ed. Whenever he could make it was when we were shooting.

  “You guys got a calendar in those things?” he said, motioning to our oversize daily planners.

  Noah turned to the calendar section and slid it over to Ed.

  “Let’s look at August,” Ed said. “So I’ll be with my family for the first two weeks. Sorry fellas. I can’t push that.” He smiled. “I love my family.”

  “We understand.”

  “But…” Ed studied the dates. “If you guys can push your shooting—how many days do you need me?”

  “Fifteen.”

  He sighed. “That’ll be tough…What kind’ve weeks will you be working? Five or six days?”

  “We’re planning on five-day weeks.”

  “It would sure help me if you could do six.”

  “No problem, we’ll shoot six. Hell, we’ll shoot seven days straight if you want. We don’t need to rest.”

  The skies were parting. We could feel the light from above. We might not need to sell our teeth for thi
s one.

  Noah handed Ed a pen. Ed circled August 21–September 2 in Noah’s calendar.

  “If you guys can move your schedule from August twenty-first to September second, then I can give you two six-day weeks.” Ed shifted in his chair, thinking. “But that’s not going to be enough. You guys said you need fifteen.”

  “We can shoot you out in twelve. Absolutely. You give us twelve days, and we’ll get it done.”

  How could we shoot all of Ed’s scenes in twelve days? It wasn’t enough time. But we figured we should commit to it now and figure it out later.

  “So…do we have a deal?” Ed asked.

  Do we have a deal?…

  Hold on.

  Ed Harris is asking us if we have a deal?

  “Ed…,” Noah said, a grin turning into a laugh. “We’re supposed to be asking YOU if we have a deal.”

  “Do we?” Ed asked, firm, straight-faced.

  “Hell-yeah, we have a deal!”

  “Good,” Ed replied. “Let’s shake on it.”

  Let’s shake on it? This was our kinda guy, the men we knew growing up, the salt of the earth, the blue-collared boys from back home. Ed rose from his chair and extended his hand to Logan. Logan rose from his chair and shook it. Ed tightened his grip, smiled, looked Logan in the eyes. Logan smiled, looked Ed in the eyes. Ed turned to Noah, who was now standing. Another firm handshake.

  “You know we’re going to pay you, right?” Logan said. We hadn’t talked money yet, and Ed hadn’t brought it up.

  “I figured you’d pay me scale,” Ed replied, taking a bite of his zucchini muffin, as if money was an afterthought.

  When Ed said he’d “help us out,” he meant it. He was under the impression that he was going to work for “scale.” Scale is the lowest amount of compensation he could accept under the SAG agreement, without getting into trouble. And it ain’t much, $1,500 a week. Ed was willing to act in our movie for three grand.

  In our initial budget, we had allocated X number of dollars for cameras. (Remember, this budget existed on PAPER ONLY. We still hadn’t raised a dollar of financing. And nobody could know this.) But after Panavision awarded us the New Filmmaker Grant, that theoretical money was freed up to disburse to other departments and line items. We felt it only right to give Ed that money. No matter what we paid him, it would still be considerably less than his usual rate.

  Noah said, “Ed, we have X amount set aside for your role. The Panavision grant freed up a lot of money. You should have it.”

  Ed smiled. “Even better…Now all you guys need to do is call my agent at CAA [Creative Artists Agency] and get a copy of the script to him. He’s expecting your call. I already told him I was doing your movie.”

  He already told his agent? Wow. He’d made up his mind to do our movie before sitting down with us! His gut told him he should do our movie, and that’s what he’d listened to. Like any great artist, he believed in his instincts. But maybe he also felt he got to know us from the script, and that if we had the nuts to rush the stage in San Francisco with fourteen hundred people watching and an army of security, cops, and press blocking our way, then we had the nuts to pull this whole thing off.

  It didn’t seem real though.

  How could it be real? This isn’t how deals are done in Hollywood. Ed Harris is one of America’s finest actors. And who were we?—just two guys with a dream. But in the beginning, that’s all you got.

  We refilled our coffees and talked for another hour. Ed gave us big hugs when we left. We felt important, confident, unstoppable.

  Ed Harris was going to star in our movie. And the deal was cemented with a handshake.

  AGENT MAN

  CAA’s building is called the “Death Star.” The name says it all. And we might as well have been Luke Skywalker and Han Solo.

  CAA is the most powerful and intimidating agency in Hollywood. They do not compromise. They do not negotiate. They demand. And they usually get it. You want them as your representatives. But you do not want to go against them or piss them off. And they DO NOT waste time talking to guys like us—EVER. In fact, we were so far below them they couldn’t even see us.

  So we called CAA after our meeting with Ed, excited.

  Agent Man answered, sick to his stomach.

  “This is the Miller Brothers. Ed Harris told us to call you. He’s doing our movie.”

  “I know,” Agent Man said. He walked over to the wastebasket and puked. “Send me the script.”

  Agent Man hung up, screamed, and threw his phone out the tenth-floor window.

  And we sent him the script.

  NO THANKS, I’LL TAKE MY DINNER BEFORE THE NUKE

  We were living off pots of oatmeal, beans and rice, milk and sardines. Meat always came out of a can. But tonight we needed to celebrate, blow some plastic money, pause and reflect on the range of emotions over the past few months: our father’s death, the lift and encouragement of the Panavision grant, the thrill of shooting in Arizona, the rush of the ambush—Ed Harris shaking on the deal.

  Seven years earlier, we had started at the lowest possible position in the industry: ignorant of the trade, uneducated and unskilled, no family or friends in the business, not one person we could call—NOT ONE—nothing to announce our arrival in the city of movies but an address in a crummy apartment off Hollywood Boulevard. But now we had strong-armed our way through the gate and were about to make a bold entrance into the exclusive club.

  We got an outdoor table at Rosti on Montana and asked for their cheapest bottle of red wine. The waitress said they didn’t serve alcohol. So we walked up the street to Fireside Cellars and asked the guy behind the counter to give us his finest “Ten-dollar bottle of red wine,” threw it on a credit card, and sat back down at our sidewalk table.

  We each ate half a chicken, a loaf of garlic bread, mashed potatoes and gravy, and watched beautiful people and cars pass by, drinking our wine in the easy weather of Southern California. This was the last space of comfort before the frontal assault, and we knew it. Ed was now on board, and that would radically change the dynamics. It was real now. The pressure was mounting, and so we savored this brief interval like soldiers the night before battle.

  The next morning, the world exploded.

  CLOUDS OF MUSHROOMS

  Ed called at 10 A.M. Here’s what he said: “I’m sorry, guys. But I can’t do your movie.”

  We were working at our desk. Before Noah answered, our guts told us this was a very bad phone call. As you produce a movie, your instincts become keenly aware of the good, promising phone calls, and the bad, not-so-promising ones. You know when you see the caller ID whether it’s a victorious call or whether one of your cities has just been nuked. This call was an incoming missile. It wasn’t to say thanks for coffee or some creative question about the script. We knew disaster was on the other line.

  Noah stood from the desk, instant vertigo, the room with white walls started spinning.

  Ed continued, “I screwed up. I’m sorry. The dates I gave you won’t work. I have to go to the Toronto and Venice Film Festivals to promote this movie I did last year. I’m going to be there the last week of August and the first week of September, the same time I was gonna do your movie.”

  CUT TO: AGENT MAN—IN HIS OFFICE

  Grinning, scheming, rubbing his palms together in front of his face, Ha, ha, ha…

  BACK TO OUR APARTMENT

  Logan saw the death of our movie in his brother’s eyes. Noah came back with, “Ed, you’re doing our movie. You have to do our movie. We’re counting on you. You can’t do this.”

  “Guys, I’m sorry. I messed up. I’m not the kinda guy that goes back on a handshake. I made a mistake, I’m sorry.”

  “When can you do it?”

  “That’s the problem. There’s no time I can do it…I’m doing Ben’s movie until August. Then I’m with my family, and as soon as I come back I’m in Venice and then Toronto. And right after that I’m in New York doing the play.”

  �
�Do you absolutely have to go to the festivals?”

  “I have to. I put a lot of hard work into that role. They’re counting on me to be there…Look, guys, I’m not trying to fudge my way outta your movie. If I could do it, I would.”

  “Ed, you gotta do our movie. We’ll figure it out.”

  “Guys, I can’t. I feel terrible.”

  “What about the play? Is it happening for sure? Are the dates set?”

  “Let me call the guy and check.”

  He hung up.

  CUT TO—AGENT MAN IN HIS OFFICE

  A look of confusion, trouble brewing. What is this? I thought we were finished with these hooligans? The agent throws his hands in the air. “What the fuck, Ed?!”

  BACK TO OUR APARTMENT

  Who would put us through this kind of torture? If there was a layer of Hell for this type of emotional carnage, it would be called WHIPSAW, sandwiched between Purgatory and Limbo. We paced our apartment, cursing, sweating, manic and dizzied. We felt like peeling off our skin, ripping out the concrete walls with our teeth, shattering windows and denouncing the heavens. How could we get this close and then lose it? Ed had given our movie life and then chopped off its head.

  Ed called back. “It won’t work, guys. I start rehearsals first week of September.”

  AGENT MAN

  Ha, ha, ha…He leans back in his chair, throws his feet on the desk.

  OUR APARTMENT

  “Ed, it has to work,” Noah said. “It’s going to work. You’re doing our movie.”

  “I know, guys. I hate it. I don’t break my word. But there’s no way I can do it this year.”

  “When’s the play over?”

  “Thanksgiving.”

  “What if we push our movie until after Thanksgiving?”

  “You don’t want to do that.”

  “We’ll do whatever it takes, Ed.”

  CUT TO—AGENT MAN

  Oh, no you’re not, Ed!

  OUR APARTMENT

  “You gotta do our movie, Ed.”

  “But…we won’t have time for rehearsals…It’s going to be rushed, guys.”

  It was insane for us to consider filming in Northern California in December, especially with the large number of daytime exterior scenes in our movie. It can rain the entire month. Most of Ed’s scenes took place outdoors. And if it rained, we were finished. It’s also cold. The days are terribly short. The sun doesn’t rise above thirty degrees latitude, and consequently, we’d be limited to eight hours of daylight shooting—maximum—which wouldn’t be sufficient to complete all of Ed’s scenes in twelve days. If we pushed to December, we’d be faced with an almost impossible challenge. On the other hand, if we didn’t push to December, Ed wouldn’t be in our movie. We had to decide immediately. Ed was slipping away. You could feel it in his voice. Our little movie was turning into a big hassle for him. We needed to find a solution NOW. Tomorrow would be too late. We’d probably never hear from him again. He was five seconds away from hanging up.