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

by Logan Miller

  We tried calling Jeromiah, but we were buried in the forest and couldn’t connect.

  “Ricky, we gotta go back to the hotel.”

  With our world unraveling, we raced back to the hotel and ran into Room 4207, our makeshift production office where Jeromiah was living.

  “Guys, I got a phone call from Ed and his agent, asking if we could push our shoot to January.”

  “January?! Are they nuts?! It’s November twenty-second!”

  Noah was a little excited. The strain of battle will do that to you.

  Mind you, we were six days from shooting. Most of the crew was already working and on the payroll. Gear and trucks were arriving by the hour. Brad Dourif was flying up in two days.

  Jeromiah continued, “I told them ‘no way.’ But Ed’s agent said that Ed was exhausted from New York. He’d been home for only a few days. I don’t think it was Ed so much who wanted us to push, but I think his agent really does…Ed said for you guys to call him as soon as you can.”

  So we immediately called Ed at his house. He was cooking with his family, pots and pans clanging in the background, knives cutting carrots, sounded like a good time.

  “Yo, boys,” Ed said, happy to hear our voices. “So Jeromiah tells me there’s no way to push, that you guys are ready to go.”

  “Yeah, it would be impossible for us to push right now. Impossible.”

  “Fair enough…I didn’t know exactly where you guys were at as far as shooting was concerned, didn’t know if everything was in place or what not.”

  “We based everything around you, Ed. We’re ready to go.”

  “Great. I just had to check…I didn’t mean to scare you guys.”

  We laughed. “Well, you sure as shit did!”

  Ed laughed too. “Can’t wait to see you guys. We’re gonna have a good time.”

  “We got your plane ticket booked and everything.”

  “Is it refundable?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good, then I’m driving up on Monday. I don’t want you guys spending that kind of money on a plane ticket…Plus, coming up a few days early will give us a chance to go over the script, rehearse a bit. I really haven’t had much time with the material. This isn’t how I like to work.”

  “Don’t worry, Ed. You’ll be great.”

  “…Well, I’m gonna drop my daughter off at school Monday morning and then hit the road and drive up to you boys…Jeromy, could you e-mail me directions?”

  “I got you covered, Ed. I’m doing it right now.”

  “See you boys Monday.”

  “See you then.”

  Our world would survive a few more days. We could eat turkey tomorrow and be thankful.

  MAJOR MAJOR

  “WE HAVE A major problem,” Jeromiah told us as we walked into company headquarters. “You guys need to go up to Brad Dourif’s room—right now.”

  “We just dropped him off at his room a minute ago,” Noah said. “No joke. A minute ago. What do you mean major?”

  “Major.”

  “Major?

  “Yes, major.”

  Pause…Silence. Us staring at Jeromiah.

  “All’s I know is there’s a major problem,” Jeromiah said, pacing. “Bao said that Brad has a major problem and that you guys should come up to Brad’s room right now…Bao doesn’t know Brad.”

  “Neither do we!” Logan said, throwing up his hands.

  Brad was the first actor to show up for the December shoot. We hadn’t seen him since our meeting at Starbucks in May, the first time we met.

  So we ran up to Brad’s room, a mixture of panic and manic. “So what’s going on, Brad?”

  Bao was standing in the doorway with Brad’s suitcase, unsure what to do.

  “We have a major problem, guys,” Brad said. “A major problem.”

  “So I’ve been told…What is it?” Noah said in a calming tone.

  Brad was looking at the TV. He walked over and tapped the top of it with his index finger. “Guys, this television isn’t Hi-Def.”

  “Yeah?…”

  “I need a Hi-Def television for my Xbox 360…I only play on Hi-Def…It’s not gonna work on this TV.”

  “What do you mean it’s not going to work?” Noah asked. “Give me the damn thing, I’ll plug it in.”

  “No, you don’t get it, it’s not going to work, guys.”

  The major problem was a TV? We thought it was going to be something serious like a death in the family, a contractual dispute, a clogged toilet, a bloody horse head in the bed, or I want to make my character a transsexual—but a TV?

  “Brad, you want a Hi-Def TV?” Noah asked.

  “I need one.”

  Brad’s attitude was not that of a pampered movie star. It was more like a scientist with the wrong equipment.

  “What size TV do you want, Brad?” Noah asked.

  “It’s gotta be Hi-Def,” he said, emphasizing Hi-Def as if we’d never heard of it.

  “Yeah, Brad. Hi-Def. As in High-Definition. I got it. We have them up here too. It’s not an exclusive L.A. product…Bao, can you go get Brad a High-Definition television?”

  “No problem,” Bao said. “I’ll run down the street to Target. They got a fourteen-day return policy. I’ll buy it and then return it when Brad’s done filming.”

  “That’s terrific, cool man,” Brad said, looking at Bao in the doorway, who was still holding Brad’s suitcase. Then Brad turned to us. “Can we go see the pigeons now?”

  PIGEON STARS

  It rained earlier in the day. The pigeons were cold, didn’t feel like flying.

  Back in August, we bought the pigeons for $8 apiece from a guy named Jerry who lived in the Mojave Desert. We paid Jerry $224 for twenty-eight birds. He put them in a cardboard box. Then we put the box in our backseat and drove up to Northern California with the pigeons cooing and flapping the entire trip, six hundred miles’ worth. By the time we arrived, our car wreaked of pigeon piss and dirty plumage.

  Raccoons ate five pigeons the first week; mutilated them, feathers and tweety heads thrown about like savage artwork. Then we fortified the cage, and the raccoons went elsewhere for dessert. From August to November we trained the surviving birds with Bao. And they were now ready to become movie stars.

  Brad has a natural way with animals. Animals like who they like. It’s immediate. Some people have the gift. Some don’t. Brad has it.

  “The birds are trained to fly around their feeding schedule,” Logan told Brad. “If you try to fly them after they’ve eaten, it won’t work. They get lethargic. They won’t budge from the floor of the coop.”

  “I’ll start feeding them each day, get to know them.” Brad said. “These are my friends in the movie. We gotta get to know each other. Be comfortable.”

  We walked Brad through the feeding process, just as our dad had taught us when we were kids: how much seed to give them, where to put it, showed him how to open the cage, how the pigeons fly, what route they usually take.

  “Watch out for the hawks,” Logan said. “Check the sky before you let out the pigeons. Also check the taller trees and telephone poles, the high points, the hawks like to perch there. They’ll snatch the pigeons if you’re not careful.”

  We hung out with the pigeons for an hour and then drove back to the hotel. We wanted to rehearse with Brad, see what he’d developed for Clyde. We had only spoken to Brad a few times over the phone since our first meeting.

  “Where do you want to rehearse?” Noah asked.

  “My room,” Brad said.

  Brad sat at his desk and opened his script. We sat on the bed.

  “Now, this is just an example, guys,” Brad said. “But I think Clyde has a bad left hand, impaired.”

  Good. Nice touch.

  “And he speaks with a lazy tongue,” Brad added. “Like we discussed.”

  “Let’s see what you got,” Noah said.

  Brad went into character and started speaking.

  Now, Brad is keenly percep
tive, one of the great actors of our time. You can’t pull the “I like it” fake smile past him. He stopped midway through the scene.

  “You guys don’t like it, do you?” Brad asked.

  “It’s a start…”

  “It’s not ready yet,” Brad assured us.

  “We have time, Brad.” Noah said. “We’ll work on it.”

  Then Brad stood up, started pacing, head down, thinking, growing agitated.

  “My girlfriend loves it. It’s too late to change…What don’t you guys like about it?”

  “Who says we don’t like it?”

  “Don’t bullshit me guys…Your faces…You don’t like what I’ve created.”

  “What do you like about Clyde in the script?” Logan asked.

  “He’s wise. He’s the only person in the family who’s got his shit together…He’s a natural poet…Everything he says is lyrical.”

  “Well, the audience will never know that if they can’t understand what he’s saying,” Logan said.

  “Guys, I’m not like Ed Harris.” Brad’s voice grew louder, frustrated. “I can’t just snap my fingers and make a change to my character. These things take time. I’ve been working on this for months. I need to observe someone, a subject, model my actions after them. It’s too late to change now, guys. We start shooting in what, two days?”

  “We do…But you’re not scheduled to start shooting for five. We got five days until Clyde needs to be ready.”

  “Guys, it’s too damn late,” Brad said. He walked over to the window and stared at the hotel pool below. “Besides, my girlfriend likes it.”

  There was no point in waging a creative battle with Brad on his first day in town so we drove home. It was cold and dark, late November in the north. We were tired. But again, like so many other nights during this journey, we had trouble sleeping.

  How could we shape and alter Brad’s interpretation? We needed to be gentle, considerate. But we needed him to make a major adjustment in a short time. We barely knew the guy. His contract wasn’t even signed.

  “We gotta be smart about our approach. We need to build his trust,” Logan said. “We don’t want to frustrate him. We’re just a couple of first-time know-nothings right now who happened to write a good script. That doesn’t mean we can direct…We need to build his trust…He could leave anytime and fly back to L.A. Then we’d really be screwed.”

  There was a stubborn intelligence about Brad, a natural shield against stupid directors. He’d worked with a ton of good ones and many more bad ones. He didn’t know yet which category we’d fall under.

  The next morning we picked up Brad at the hotel and took him to Starbucks. Then we drove out to the country to feed the pigeons.

  “Do you guys feel better about Clyde now?” Brad asked.

  In fact, we felt worse. No sleep, caffeine—delusion and neurosis were beating us up.

  Then an Archimedes moment.

  “What if we took you over to our friend’s house to observe his uncle?” Noah asked, behind the wheel. “Would that help you?”

  “What about your uncle?” Brad asked. “I want to meet your uncle, the real-life Clyde.”

  “We don’t know where he is.”

  “Guys, look, it’s too late to make a change to Clyde. It’s too late.”

  “Brad, you said you need to observe someone, right?”

  Silence.

  Brad was getting frustrated with us. He just wanted to drink his damn coffee. And here he was, an Academy Award nominee, a veteran of over a hundred movies, a genius, being chauffeured down a twisting country road, badgered by a couple of first-time directors half his age telling him that they think his character needs to be reshaped, that it won’t work.

  Brad gets paid because he KNOWS what works. Brad works all the time because HE knows.

  Brad was getting carsick. Coffee was spurting out the hole in the lid.

  “Sure, call your friend,” Brad said. “Just get me off this damn road. It’s insane.”

  “It’s straight where we’re heading.”

  Noah dialed our friend’s number. He was in the navy, stationed in San Diego.

  “No problem,” our friend said. “My uncle is at my grandma’s house. Just drive on over there. I’ll call and let them know you’re coming.”

  Our friend’s uncle was waiting on the porch when we arrived twenty minutes later. We’ll call him “Woody.”

  Woody is in his fifties and still lives at home with his mother. He’s rail thin, glasses, perpetual bed-head, looks down at his feet when he walks. Now, it don’t take a doctor to notice that something ain’t normal with Woodrow. Not sure what the clinical diagnosis is, but let’s just say the room upstairs is missing some furniture.

  Brad Dourif has a cult following; being the voice of “Chucky” will do that for you. And it just so happens that Woody is Brad’s number one fan. Number one. As we walked down the hall to his room, Woody started randomly quoting lines from Brad’s movies, asking about scenes that Brad didn’t even remember filming.

  “Want to see my drawings?” Woody asked, opening the door to his room.

  “We’d love to,” Brad said, enjoying the attention.

  Woody took a box from the shelf. It was one of those kits that teaches you how to be an artist, the kind you see advertised on TV at three in the morning. It was filled with Woody’s charcoal and colored pencil drawings. They were excellent.

  He rifled through them, flashing them in front of us before flinging them onto the bed.

  “This is Captain America,” flash drawing, fling. “This is a barbarian,” flash drawing, fling. “Viking Lord,” flash, fling. “Martian Invaders,” flash, fling. Flash, fling, flash, fling…And so on until his bed was covered with heroes.

  Brad was studying Woody…Everything was working beautifully. We were thinking this is perfect: Brad has found his subject. We felt as confident as a beer league slugger on steroids.

  That is, until we got into the car.

  “Later, Woody,” Brad said, waving goodbye as we drove away.

  Brad rolled up the window, smiled, prompting us to smile—he finally has it, he’s found Clyde!

  “Was Woody a great study or what?” Noah asked.

  “Guys…” Brad paused. “He’s completely normal.”

  “Normal?!” Noah hit the brakes, pulled the car to the curb. “Normal?! He’s out of his gourd! He’s fifty years old, lives at home. He’s got a dentist appointment later today, and he doesn’t even know how he’s getting there, who’s picking him up, or where the office is—this has been his dentist since he was a kid. Normal?!”

  “I saw and spoke to an articulate, intelligent, and perfectly normal individual,” Brad replied.

  Noah was white-knuckling the steering wheel with both hands, rocking in his seat. We drove back to the hotel in silence.

  We all went up to Brad’s room to rehearse again.

  Brad put his script on the desk and got into character.

  “I think I know what you guys are looking for.”

  Then Brad read the scene.

  It was beautiful.

  It was Clyde.

  He saw our smiles.

  “You guys like that, huh?”

  “Don’t know what adjustment you just made, but it was great.”

  “You guys wanted less, more subtle…,” Brad said. “You should’ve just said that yesterday.”

  Brad closed his script, turned on his new Hi-Def television, grabbed his Xbox controller, and plopped on the bed. “Are we done?…’Cause, like I got some things to do.”

  THE MESSIAH IN A BIG FORD TRUCK

  IT WAS CHILLY and clear. We were waiting in front of the hotel for him, all nerves and caffeine. We could see his smile through the windshield as he pulled his diesel in front of the lobby.

  “Where should I park this thing?” Ed asked.

  “Throw it in the waiting area right there,” Noah said, pointing.

  Ed parked. His truck took up a space and a
half.

  “How’s it going, boys?…Sorry about the scare the other day,” Ed said, stepping out in faded Wranglers and a white thermal shirt, stiff from the drive. He was still smiling.

  “No worries, Ed.”

  He gave us strong hugs.

  We helped him with his things: duffel bag, backpack, cowboy boots, baseball glove, a couple of dumbbells in case he felt like hitting a quick workout in the hotel room, and some clothes he thought might be good for his role. We checked him into his room and introduced him to Jeromiah.

  “Ed, you feel like going out to the locations?” Noah asked.

  “Sure, I’m here for you guys. Whatever you want.”

  We drove out to the redwoods in Samuel P. Taylor State Park. It was dark and bone cold in the woods.

  “This is where our dad lived, off and on for the last fifteen years of his life. We ate lunch and dinner with him at this campsite many times, raviolis and cream corn out of the can, cooked hamburgers on an iron skillet over the fire…And now we’re going to be filming here.”

  Ed listened thoughtfully, observing the towering redwoods, the picnic table, the creek we used to catch crawdads in with our dad when we were little, the spigot where he used to brush his teeth and shave.

  Then we drove to the Winston House in Nicasio, the family home in the movie. Roy Rede and Tom Power were dressing the interior of Charlie’s truck (Ed’s character). Roy and Tom had done a bang-up job. Ed was impressed. Then we drove out to Love Field. A decade earlier, our buddy Tyler Love and his family converted their hay field into a baseball diamond, and now we were going to use it for our movie.

  We had some good conversations with Ed as we drove along the country roads. He was generous and open. He was playing our father and he wanted us to feel comfortable around him.

  “I really appreciate you guys sharing your dad’s letters with me,” Ed said.

  A short time before our father died we received a large manila envelope in the mail containing letters and stories he’d written in jail. We were living in Los Angeles at the time, and when we returned north a few weeks later and saw him, he asked with a big smile if we had read what he sent us. We told him, “No…We’ll get to them.” His smile left. He was proud of his letters and stories, and we had let him down. There was something he needed to tell us that he could only convey through writing.