by Logan Miller
MONTHS EARLIER
“Have you guys checked out the quarry on our property?” Randy Lafranchi, our mom’s boyfriend, asked us. “You might want to take a look at it, see if it’ll work for your movie. We rent it to the Lunny family. They’re good people…I’ll call Bob Lunny and let him know you’re coming by.”
So we drove out to the quarry.
Bob Lunny, the owner of Lunny Quarry and possessor of the county’s firmest handshake, was waiting for us next to a two-story pyramid of gravel.
“Randy told me you’re filming a movie,” Bob said. A rancher by birth, straightforward and clean dealing; there’s no B.S. to Bob. “Do you want to use the quarry?”
We were surrounded by giant earth-moving machines: tractors and dump trucks, excavators and loaders, gray rock piles, gravel pits, a conveyor, and a carved-out hillside. It was dirty, gritty, and hot; it screamed timeless Americana and the workingman.
“It’s not as tough as roofing,” Bob said. “But it’ll look tougher in a movie.”
“How does it sound?” Noah asked.
Bob smiled and walked us over to the rock crusher, a yellow Dumpster-looking behemoth of steel and horsepower that pulverizes boulders and spits out streams of gravel onto a thirty-foot-high conveyor.
Bob turned on the crusher. The electric pulse slowly whined thousands of horsepower into action, pistons gearing up, ominous, a violent upheaval building, surging, and then ten thousand jackhammers were shaking the valley, booming, thunderous, thrilling.
Bob was still smiling, yelled into the roar. We read his lips. “Loud enough?!”
We smiled, nodded. We were sold.
BACK TO NOW—REHEARSALS
We took Evan and Brandon out to the quarry every day of rehearsals and drove the heavy machinery. We’d eat lunch on the rock piles and then drive to another location. Sometimes Brandon would bring his dirt bike and ride around the hills; Bob borrowed it one day, expertly soaring off the gravel mounds and nearly scaling the wall of the quarry before stalling the bike feet from the top.
Ishiah would usually meet up with us in the afternoon or early evening.
By the time we started filming, we had walked through each scene dozens of times, taken road trips together, drove up to the Russian River and rehearsed under the Monte Rio Bridge, and went swimming afterward.
We were careful not to overwork each scene. We didn’t want the acting to become stale. We wanted to save the freshness, the raw emotions for the camera. The object was to live like the characters, not act like them. Once living in their skin, all we needed to do was capture it on film.
Evan and Brandon hung out with our buddies, the guys their characters were modeled after. They fit right in. They had become one of us.
The effect this would have on the quality of the acting, not to mention our shooting efficiency, cannot be overstated. It allowed us to make our schedule each day. We averaged three takes per camera setup, substantially fewer than the industry standard. It’s not uncommon for directors on a studio movie to shoot twenty, thirty, even fifty takes. They can spend days on one scene. They have the money and the time. We had neither. We couldn’t spend more than a few hours on a scene. It was all the time we could afford, and in most cases, all the time we needed. Many times we nailed it on the first take, shot a second for insurance, and moved onto the next camera position. This was only made possible by the extensive rehearsal process—in our backyard.
YOU’VE MET LITTLE ANGRY, NOW MEET BIG ANGRY
HE CAME FROM the same tribe as Little Angry, only Big Angry must have stolen more anger from the mush bowl growing up. If Little Angry was a harmless dust devil, then Big Angry was a deadly tornado, so much more anger did he have inside. We were two weeks from shooting, and things were blowing down.
Big Angry’s job was to oversee the entire production side of the movie so that we could focus on the creative side. He had done a decent job up to this point. But when we started hiring crew, and allowing them to express their opinion, he became a massive, puckering asshole. Every discussion was a golden moment for Big Angry to scream at somebody. His idea of effective communication was “Fuck you, bitch.” Needless to say, it wasn’t very effective. He was fifty years old, yes, FIVE-ZERO, and that’s how Big Angry spoke to people.
Our days were unimaginably hectic. No other time would be as demanding, and yet half our day was spent playing peacemaker between Big Angry and everyone else he was pissing off; everyone else being a crew that was about to abandon the movie because of him. Thankfully, he would soon self-destruct, setting the stage for Jeromiah Running Water Zajonc. But that’s a few weeks from now.
Right now was chaos, the clock spinning in free fall as we sped toward principal photography; each day we were rewriting the script, rehearsing, composing our shot list, learning our lines—don’t forget we were also acting in the movie—negotiating deals with vendors and crew, reading actor contracts and location agreements, signing checks, ordering film and lenses, visiting locations, making hundreds of wardrobe decisions, hundreds of prop decisions, interior and exterior production designs, colors of paint, rugs, plates, beer cans, cereal boxes, artwork, furniture in the house, pigeons, bicycles, baseball gloves, baseball uniforms, lighting preferences, public relations, and a billion other decisions that all make a movie happen. And Big Angry was doing his best to make sure we failed.
In hindsight, we should’ve fired him early on. But in our inexperience, we thought we could work it out. Plus, we didn’t know anyone at the time who could replace him.
(It should be noted that Big Angry wasn’t all bad. He actually managed to hire two gifted people: his burnout buddy who thought it was totally acceptable to smoke weed and drink whiskey while shuttling Oscar-nominated actors from the hotel to the set, and a female medic with a mullet, who, after being paid $9,000 to treat one bee sting and hand out thirteen aspirin, decided to sue us for $18,000 in overtime. The court graciously awarded her $344.44…if she promised to cut the mullet before it came back in style. So you see, Big Angry wasn’t entirely bad. After all, he did hire these two Outstanding Achievers.)
BRING ON THE SAGE
It’s impossible to express the value of a good editor. Try quantifying the value of your eyeballs. You get the picture. Editors are important. And we didn’t have one yet.
Back in April, and long before that, the plan was for Pierson to edit Touching Home. We’d spent years talking about it. He’d witnessed its genesis on a notepad. But in June, Pierson was offered a job as a supervising editor on a reality TV show. It was a huge opportunity, worth ten grand a month. No more night shift. He’d been pulling night shifts for seven years and finally reached the Promised Land: humane hours.
But he was torn. If he took the job he wouldn’t be able to edit Touching Home.
We talked in his garage until three in the morning, passing around a bottle of Maker’s Mark.
“You can’t pass this up, Pierson. Who knows what’s going to happen with our movie? We don’t even have the financing yet. Even if we do get the money, we won’t be able to pay you what you’re going to make on that show, not even close.”
His wife, Annie, one of the great ones, would back whatever decision he made.
“You gotta take the job, Pierson,” Noah said.
“I know.”
After we lost Pierson, we met several established editors in L.A. They were all nice. Had terrific résumés. But our guts told us they weren’t right for our movie.
So we took Gordon out to breakfast to discuss our problem; a week and a half from shooting and we didn’t have an editor. Situation dire.
“I strongly suggest you boys get a Northern California editor. They have different tastes, different sensibilities that I think would be right for this movie.”
“We called Walter Murch.”
Walter Murch is an editing god.
“What did he say?” Gordon asked. “How’d you get his number?”
“From Richard Hymns…We calle
d Walter and left a message. But he never called back.”
That’s no reflection on Walter. We would later become friends with him and his wife, Aggie. They became strong supporters, watched early cuts of Touching Home, and gave us valuable notes.
“Let me see what Robert Dalva is up to,” Gordon said. “He’s good friends with Walter. Dalva, George [Lucas], and Walter all went to USC together. They were all original members of Zoetrope. I’ll give him a call when I get home. I think he’d be good for your movie.”
This was a watershed in our relationship with Gordon. Before that morning, he never called anyone for us. But he had witnessed our progress, our determination, and now believed that we might have what it takes…might.
Twenty minutes after breakfast, Gordon called us. “I just got off the phone with Robert Dalva. He’s not working right now. He wants to read the script. Get it to him as soon as you can. Here’s his e-mail address.”
We e-mailed Robert Dalva our script. He read it and called us the next morning as we were driving out to Nicasio to photograph the locations.
“I really like your script,” Dalva said. “It’s well done.”
“Why don’t we get together and talk about it?” Logan said. “You live in Larkspur, right? You know that little Italian bakery on the main street there?”
“Rulli.”
“Yeah, that’s it. How about lunch there today? Let’s say two o’clock?”
“Sounds good.”
We met Dalva at Rulli and talked for two and a half hours. He has a gray beard and long gray hair, looks like a wizard. In 1980, he was nominated for an Academy Award for editing The Black Stallion. His credits include Jumanji, Jurassic Park 3, Hidalgo, and October Sky. A baseball nut, he always wears a Giants cap. Fans like Dalva are the reason baseball players make millions a year.
But baseball was only a warm prelude to our conversation.
Dalva understood story. He was the first editor we interviewed who spoke about the central importance of driving the narrative. He quoted Aristotle as he gave us notes on our script.
A man of many talents, Dalva has performed just about every significant creative duty on a movie set—except acting; although his hands made a debut in an early version of Touching Home, and then, in an ironic twist of editing, met their death by those same hands. He’s directed, edited, DP’d, gaffed, recorded sound, and is also a terrific camera operator.
Dalva came on board a week before we started filming and set up his editing gear in the downstairs room at our mom’s house. We lived together for nine months, drank a hillside of Colombian coffee. Dalva is a true collaborator, philosopher, and teacher. We called him “Sage,” “Scenus Adeptus,” and later, “The Alchemist.”
WEEK ONE
IT WAS TIME to roll film.
We put up our crew at the Novato Oaks Best Western, which might have the best waffles in the country. Scott Curran, the manager, cut us a swap-meet deal on the rooms. It’s adjacent to the Wild Fox restaurant, which had a full bar to satisfy our thirsty crew after a long day’s work.
Unlike Tucson, we now had a real production, a fleet of vehicles: a forty-foot eighteen wheeler, a Peterbilt grip truck, camera truck, art department truck, four passenger vans, three minivans, three stake-beds, four Starwagons, three picture cars—a ’71 Ford Ranchero, a ’71 Ford F-150, and the Perfect Car, which arrived from Arizona the night before shooting. When our production moved down the road, it was a half-mile long.
There were several days of anxiety surrounding the Perfect Car in the week prior to shooting. Because—
Big Angry shipped the Perfect Car from Tucson with some ragtag outfit. Bao had repeatedly volunteered to drive down to Tucson and bring it back on a stake-bed. Other than gas and the truck rental, Bao would do it for free. But Big Angry liked to make war with everyone and everything.
“I can handle the fucking job!” Big Angry screamed. “I don’t need twenty people telling me how to ship a fucking car from Tucson to Northern California. LET ME FUCKING HANDLE IT!!!”
So we let Big Angry handle it, and he totally blew it. The Perfect Car was lost for three days. That’s right, LOST. How do you lose a car for three days? It’s doesn’t seem like an easy thing to do, but he did it.
After Big Angry melted down on day two of the Perfect Car’s disappearance, we gave the job to Bao, who said, “I’ll take care of it.”
If Bao hadn’t found the Perfect Car, we would’ve been so far up the creek that not even Hiawatha could have paddled us back. Needless to say, as if we didn’t have enough worries, the three days it was lost were mental earthquakes. At 2 A.M., the night before shooting, Bao delivered the Perfect Car to the Novato Oaks.
In the afternoon, we stood on the balcony outside the production office and looked over the convoy of vehicles and equipment occupying a football field in the hotel parking lot. We walked over to the Wild Fox, bought the boys a shot of whiskey, and called it an early night.
At 4:30 A.M., Bao, Claytus “Beowulf” Bertlesman, Dave Lifton, and a few other soldiers pulled the trucks out of the parking lot and onto Highway 101. Destination: fifty miles north to the Russian River and the Monte Rio Bridge. We were standing proud in the parking lot, coffee in hand, gave the vanguard a thumbs-up. They pulled their horns, loud diesel and candy lights in the darkness.
We followed a half hour later in a minivan with Ricardo and Connie and pulled into Monte Rio at 6:30 A.M. A ceiling of fog shrouded the redwood hills. We were concerned it wouldn’t burn off. We needed sunshine for the fishing scene.
We walked around to every department, said good morning, making sure all their gear made the journey, when we heard the rising voices of distress, and turned around to see a look of alarm on Bao’s face, an expression rarely seen. He’s cool under pressure, as many people are from war-torn countries. But now he looked concerned. And his concern was for us.
We jogged across the parking lot and over to Bao’s truck, which was idling beside Gary Beaird, our key grip.
“Gary, the list said that you’d be driving the Peterbilt,” Bao said.
“I know. But that was a few days ago,” Gary said. “I told Big Angry yesterday that I wasn’t going to be driving my grip truck, that transpo would have to bring it up here. Big Angry said he was going to tell you. He said he would make the change to the transpo list.”
“Well, no one told me.”
They weren’t yelling at each other, just trying to solve the problem. The grip truck was sitting back in the hotel parking lot fifty miles away. We could NOT shoot without it. Forgetting the grip truck was like forgetting the gasoline at the Indy 500; you can’t win. Hell, you can’t even begin.
Somebody had to go back and get the grip truck.
So good ole Bao and trusty Claytus immediately jumped in Jeromiah’s convertible Porsche and drove 120 mph back to the hotel. And in just over an hour and a half they had the grip truck in Monte Rio in time for the first shot of the day, the only casualties being a few chickens that tried to cross the road. When they returned, Bao and Claytus looked like they’d just had face-lifts. Their hair was iron straight and launched back. They’ve never looked so young.
After that, the first day was a cakewalk. The fog burned off and the day was beautiful, a sublime time on the river. The acting was smooth, effortless, real. We got all the shots we needed, and the crew was happy.
As we were packing up, Taylor and Jeromiah gave us each a gift basket with a bottle of Knob Creek, a chocolate bar, and stainless steel flasks engraved with one of our favorite quotes: “We mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”
To commemorate the day, we each took a long pull from the bottle as the sun set on the river. The whiskey heat swirled with the heat of achievement. We felt unstoppable. We were living life at its peak. The four of us had talked about this day for seven years—at Jeromiah and Taylor’s UCLA apartment, at our crummy hole in the Gaza Strip of Hollywood, in the Mar Vista War Room, around the c
ampfire at our spot in the desert, sharing a chew on the road through New Mexico on our way to Austin…
We drove along the river back to the hotel, passing rolling vineyards glowing shades of pink in the dusk as the redwood hills turned to shadows against the dying light behind them. We called Coach in Montana, and mentally prepared for Day Two.
DAY TWO: WATERLOO
It ran without time. It felt as if there would be no end to the bloodshed.
During principal photography, every director will have a day where he gets slaughtered. Some directors have several, while others never escape the carnage. Ours was Day Two.
There are three “DON’T’S” for first-time directors, and we were violating two of them on Days One and Two.
Don’t shoot on water—which is what we did on Day One at the river.
Don’t work with children—which we also did on Day One and were now repeating on Day Two.
Don’t work with animals—which we would do extensively in December.
Day Two began at the Little Store in Forest Knolls, population, very few, a loud whistle from our dad’s old shed. It was foggy and cold, just like the morning of Day One. Before we started shooting, Ricardo took us over to an oak tree in the park across the street. He looked serious, solemn. We put our backs to the crew.
“Give me your hands,” Ricardo said.
Someone must have died; definitely, it was that kind of seriousness. So we too, with respect to the newly departed—whoever they were, we were about to find out—became serious, that deep, respectful seriousness of death. We gave Ricardo our hands and made a circle of three. He locked eyes with us, deeper, more intense now. Half our crew has been wiped out, we thought. Multiple deaths, for sure, perhaps it’s bigger than that, a new war—America is being invaded. WE ARE IN TROUBLE. A movie? Trivial. We should be ashamed to be out here right now.
We bowed our heads, waiting, bracing…for…the inevitable…hoping it never came, but knowing it would…just give us the names, Ricardo…give us the news…be frank, we can take it…