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

by Logan Miller

  “We’ll meet Brian at the airport,” Noah said.

  “You sure?” Mike asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  Furthermore, we hadn’t seen or spoken with Brian since the first meeting. Since then, he was a rumor. We’d only heard about him indirectly through Mike. We felt uncomfortable taking millions of dollars from a guy we would have trouble recognizing at the supermarket. We wanted to tell him thank you and also let him know what he could expect from us that was not stipulated in the contract; that we would give him the highest level of transparency, that we would protect his money as if it were our mother’s retirement, that we would do everything we could to make the best film possible. Every dollar would go onscreen.

  “I’ll e-mail you directions to the airport,” Mike said.

  We packed our duffel bag, drove up to Sacramento, and spent the night on Bao’s living room floor.

  On our way to meet Brian the next morning we stopped at Starbucks for a cup of coffee. Bao came with us. There was a Sacramento magazine on the rack. Logan flipped through the pages.

  “Check it out. There’s Brian.”

  The title of the article was something like “People to Watch” or “The Most Influential People in Sacramento.”

  It felt like someone was watching over us. “Hey Dad-o,” Noah said, smiling, looking up.

  We arrived at McClellan Airpark at 9 A.M. and walked around. It was already getting hot. Heat waves shimmered on the tarmac.

  McClellan is a former air force base turned private airport. Both of Brian’s jets were stored there. Mike told us that Brian owned a “big jet and a small jet.” The small one—which we initially thought was the big one—was idling on the other side of the fence, the captain inspecting it. We admired the jet through the chain links. The fence separating us from Brian was about to come down.

  Brian drove up in his silver Land Rover, swiped his security card, and opened the door for us into the private lounge. Two women were sitting at computers behind the counter.

  “You guys have the contracts?” Brian asked us.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Brian walks almost as fast as he talks. His mind was already on the flight to survey a piece of land in the Central Valley.

  He pointed at a table in the corner. “Let’s sit over there.”

  Brian walked over to the counter. “Do either of you ladies have a pen I could borrow?” He looked over his shoulder and smiled at us, shrugged. “I forgot a pen.”

  We had expected Brian to sign the contract with a Montblanc or some other thousand-dollar writing utensil.

  One of the women handed Brian a pen.

  “Thrifty Car Rentals,” Brian said, reading it. “This’ll do.”

  Brian sat at the table with us. We handed him three copies of the contract, expecting him to take at least a few minutes to read them over. But no. Brian flipped to the back page of each contract and signed them without so much as glimpsing at a line or a clause. He could’ve been signing away his jet on the tarmac for all he knew. It was unreal. Here’s this guy, who we’ve talked to for a total of twenty minutes, and with his signature, has just given us several million dollars—and doesn’t even take a moment to see what he’s signing. It was complete trust in action.

  “Are we good?” Brian asked.

  “Brian, we’d like to tell you a little about what you can expect from us,” Noah said, trying to be very professional. “We’ll give you as much transparency as you need. You’re taking a huge risk and we want you to feel comfortable—”

  “I’m already comfortable. I trust you guys.” He checked his watch and stood up. “Guys, I gotta run. Good luck.” He shook our hands.

  “Can we at least get a picture?” Noah asked.

  “Sure, but be quick,” he said, looking outside at his jet, checking his watch again.

  Bao snapped a photo of the three of us. Brian handed us two signed contracts, kept one for himself. He then rolled up his contract and stuffed it into his back pocket like Tom Sawyer with a spelling test, then strutted down the tarmac and climbed into his jet.

  We treated our contracts as if they were the last two copies of the Declaration of Independence, placing them delicately inside a manila envelope and then placing that envelope securely inside our daily planners.

  We walked outside and stood at the chain-link fence separating us from the runway. Brian was sitting shotgun with the pilot of his aircraft, window open. Brian waved to us, slid the window closed, and took off into the cloudless morning. We stared through the chain links and watched the white jet disappear, a portrait of an unbelievable drama; Bao Phung, a Vietnamese immigrant whose family came to this country from a refugee camp with only the donated clothes on their backs, and the Miller Brothers, his best friends, a couple nobodies from nowhere whose life thus far was a chronicle of failure and unrealized dreams, who months earlier were visiting their homeless father in jail, a veteran who lost his battle with alcoholism, a man who died penniless and incarcerated, and were now making a movie in honor of him, and Brian Vail, the self-made real estate tycoon whose signature just made the movie possible, flying off in his private jet. To those who no longer believe in the American Dream, read this, and say otherwise.

  Then Bao said, hands on the chain link, “I guess that’s how the big guys do it.”

  “Guess so.”

  It took less than ten minutes from the time Brian pulled up in his Land Rover to the time he hopped into his jet. The only time he stopped moving was for the photo. And even that’s a little blurry.

  We drove back to Bao’s house and celebrated with cheeseburgers.

  Gordon left us a message. “Guys, you did the right thing. The goal is to get the movie made. Congratulations. I’m proud of you.”

  Four days later, over one million dollars was wired into our movie’s escrow account at Borel Private Bank and Trust in San Francisco.

  We were now bona fide.

  PART VI

  CHARGING NAKED

  MOTORBIKE KID AND THE ICE PRINCESS

  WE HAD THE money to make our movie, so we headed back to L.A. to rehearse with our September actors: Evan Jones, Brandon Hanson, and Ishiah Benben—the Juvenile Crew. (Ed, Robert, and Brad were the Veteran Crew.) You’ve met Evan. Here’s how we found Brandon and Ishiah:

  SIX MONTHS EARLIER

  Like most eccentrics, Carly Ivan Garcia, our lifelong friend and extraordinary artist, knows many things and many people, some of them actors. He called us. Here’s what he said:

  “You guys remember Brandon, the motocross rider I used to lift with at the gym?”

  “Yeah, think so.”

  “Well, he’s living in L.A. now. Just got done acting in some independent movie. He’s a good guy. You should give him a call.”

  We called Brandon and left a message. He never called back. Then, coincidentally, we bumped into him at Gold’s Gym Venice. He said he got our message and that he’d been meaning to call for the last two months.

  “Let’s go grab a beer,” we said.

  A few days later we drank some beers at an Irish bar in Venice. Brandon had been studying acting for a while and just completed his first role in a feature film. We told him we were making a movie. He asked if he could read the script. So we gave it to him.

  He read it, called, and said he wanted to play the role of “Brownie.”

  Physically, he wasn’t what we envisioned. But that didn’t prevent us from considering the possibility of Brownie looking like Brandon. Why not? Why couldn’t Brandon play Brownie? We thought about it for a few days, and the more we thought about it, the more interesting it became. Brandon was tall, thin, reserved, unassuming, a perfect counterbalance to a high-strung Mac (Evan Jones).

  We told Brandon we’d give him a chance if he was willing to start rehearsing with us.

  “No guarantees though,” we said. “You’re gonna have to earn it. If you wanna work on the role, we’ll give you the time. Hell, we’ll rehearse every day, twice a day if y
ou want.”

  “Just give me a shot,” Brandon said. “If it doesn’t work out, cast somebody else.”

  THE ICE PRINCESS

  “Have you guys seen Ishiah lately?” Jasha asked.

  “No. We haven’t seen her in years.”

  “She lives in L.A. now. Before that she was in Chicago at some big theater, doing plays or something. You guys should call her.”

  “What does she look like?”

  Now, Jasha is a man of profound appetites, especially the physical ones. His hunger was felt through the phone. “She looks like a Russian ice princess.”

  He gave us Ishiah’s number. We met her for coffee. She was stunning, overflowing with personality. Not in the bubbly, affected way they teach you in bad acting classes. Ishiah was pure and genuine. Quite rare in those parts.

  A year earlier, Ishiah won a national competition to train with the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago. It was a great experience, but afterward she found herself back home working at a bar in the small town where we all grew up in. Unsatisfied, she decided to move to Hollywood to pursue her acting dreams.

  She had earned her stripes in theater and was used to the demands of performing night in and night out, weeks in a row. She was disciplined, studied the craft. She hadn’t come to Hollywood hoping to get discovered by looking pretty at some trendy nightclub. She came there to work her way into a career.

  She had a job at a wine bar in Coldwater Canyon and shared an apartment with a couple in Culver City, a French guy and his girlfriend. We told her living with couples was a bad idea, especially if one of them is a Frenchman.

  “Yeah, I know. I’m trying to get out.”

  We gave her our script. She read it, called us, and now we were at Starbucks.

  “I’ll do anything to help you guys out on this movie,” Ishiah said. “I’ll brew the coffee, get the doughnuts, I don’t care. Anything. I can’t believe you guys are making a movie.”

  “What about Rachel?” Noah asked.

  “You mean the girl in the script?”

  “Yeah, her. You’re an actress, right?”

  “Yeah, but I’ve never acted in a movie before. Only theater…You guys have Ed Harris in this thing—holy shit—I can’t believe you guys. I can’t believe it!”

  Whenever she got excited—which was 98 percent of the time—she would blurt out “Holy shit I can’t believe it!” and then instinctively cover her mouth, hunch her shoulders, and look around, apologetically, realizing we were in Starbucks.

  “Sorry,” she’d whisper. “Oops.” Then she’d giggle.

  “Do you want to play Rachel?” Noah asked.

  We felt Ishiah was perfect for the role. She wasn’t famous, nobody knew who she was. She still had that small town feel, modest, humble, charming. We were concerned a big-name actress would take the audience out of the rural environment, out of the realism. Sure, we had Ed Harris, Brad Dourif, and Robert Forster, but it’s different with a female lead. Can’t explain it.

  “I don’t know if I can do it,” Ishiah said.

  “Of course you can. You’re an actress.”

  “Movies are different. I’ve only done theater.”

  “How many tries do you get in theater, when the house is packed?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Can you stop the performance when you flub a line, and say, STOP, let’s do that again?”

  “No.”

  “Well, when you’re making movies you get to do it until you get it right. Don’t worry. We’ll rehearse. We’re the directors. It’s our job to make sure you do a good job. We’ll get you where you need to be. Trust us. We won’t let you down…What are you doing tomorrow?”

  “I guess I’m rehearsing with you guys.”

  THE NAKED BUSINESS

  We started rehearsing with Ishiah, Brandon, and Evan—individually. We didn’t want to rehearse as a group until they felt comfortable with their characters, gained some confidence. Acting is a naked business. It can feel like that bad dream in which everybody else has clothes on. The key is to forget that you’re naked.

  So we started slow, simple, just reading the lines in the script without emotion. No acting, only reading.

  “Don’t put anything on it. They’re just words on a page.”

  Start small and then build. The same approach we used with success in Tucson, with people who had never acted. Cultivate the seeds of the performance: words, words before any choices, words before any direction, words before any intention, words before any camera starts rolling, words on a page, nothing more.

  “We’re just reading.”

  It was in these early stages of rehearsal that we took off our writers’ hats and put on our directors’ helmets. Each step in the moviemaking process requires different headgear. When you’re writing the script, you wear your writer’s hat. When you direct, you wear your director’s helmet. And when you edit, you wear a hockey mask, and so on.

  It’s wise to be objective at every stage of any endeavor—whether raising children, cooking an omelet, or shaving your goatee. If you repeatedly hear complaints about your child being an asshole on the playground or your omelet could use more cheddar and less ham or your goatee makes you look like you’ve just been paroled, you should probably consider making changes. Unless of course, your intention was to raise a little asshole, botch brunch, and intimidate relatives.

  We’d written the script, but so what? What worked on the page might not work once an actor tried to perform it. If a piece of writing didn’t work we couldn’t hold on to it because we wrote it. Rehearsals helped us discover what worked, and what didn’t. And if it didn’t work, we threw our writers’ hat back on and figured it out. This doesn’t mean that every time an actor struggled with dialogue we changed it. Sometimes we let them struggle, made them work, but tried to be smart about it, open-minded to the possibility that if a piece of dialogue or an entire scene continued to flounder, that it might not be the actor—it might be the writing.

  We’d fail to realize our movie’s potential if we held stubbornly to something that wasn’t working. So what if it took us six years to write? So what if we considered it the greatest demonstration of forensic oratory since Churchill? The audience wouldn’t care. They want the story to move. If it didn’t drive the narrative, then we needed to cut it out of the movie. Cut it out of our life.

  THE JUVENILE CREW

  Evan and Brandon came over to our apartment. They had never met. (We kept Ishiah away for a few more days, keep the guys focused.) We drank some beers and read through the script.

  Evan (Mac) and Brandon (Brownie) are best friends in Touching Home. The more time we could all spend together, the better the chemistry onscreen. The audience needed to believe these guys were friends since childhood, would have the other guy’s back in a fistfight.

  We were still at the reading stage. Nobody was “off-book” yet. (Off-book is when the actor has memorized his or her lines.) We had the time to take the time. So we took it slow. More important than the lines was getting to know each other, noticing the other guys traits, his mannerisms, like you know your best friends. Anybody can memorize lines. But chemistry—that’s the good stuff. Making it appear as if you’ve known someone your entire life—that you love them—when you’ve known them in real life for only a week or perhaps a few hours, is one of the most challenging dimensions of acting.

  We all started assuming our onscreen names. Evan was now “Mac” and Brandon was now “Brownie.” And we became “Clint” and “Lane.” It didn’t matter what we were doing or where we were at; the bar, a coffee shop, or walking down the street together, we were now Mac, Brownie, Clint, and Lane.

  Evan had worked on major studio movies, Jarhead, 8 Mile, Glory Road, and yet had no problem coming over to our tiny apartment for rehearsals. He and Brandon worked hard developing their characters. We trusted them and we hoped they trusted us. In a few weeks, we were all going to be naked together in front of seventy people. Everybod
y else would have clothes on.

  After rehearsing at our apartment one evening, we all went up to the Getty Museum and drank a bunch of wine on the grass above the topiary garden, laughed, and shared stories. It felt like we were a group of old friends.

  Bro and I thought back to those nights on the roof of the roach apartment, years earlier, lost and desperate, unknown and full of desire, staring at the glimmering city we were now above, dreaming about a dream we were now living.

  OUR BACKYARD

  REHEARSING IN OUR apartment was adequate but not ideal. It was acting. Not living.

  So we asked Evan and Brandon if they would come up north two weeks before shooting and rehearse on location. They thought it was a great idea and migrated with us. Ishiah came up a week later.

  Filming where we grew up had numerous advantages. One of them was rehearsing on location FOR FREE. The acting would be better, no doubt. It would also increase our efficiency during principal photography when we’d be throwing bags of cash into a mulcher—all day, every day.

  In the original screenplay, we went back home and worked as roofers with our father, just like in real life. But we were informed early on that filming on a rooftop would drastically raise the price of our production insurance. Furthermore, we were having trouble finding someone who would let us walk up and down their roof for two weeks without making us buy them a new one.

  Plan B: Find a suitable blue-collar working environment that was hot, dirty, and gritty, only on the ground.