by Logan Miller
“Ed, we’re not getting anything. He’s not giving us a reaction. Scare the shit out of him. Yell SHUT UP as loud as you can. Please.”
“I’m not going to yell. Well, a little bit. Don’t worry. I’ll get what you want.”
Logan runs back outside. We shoot the scene again. Ed says “Shut up” a little louder this time. Nothing scary, just a firm “Shut up.” And still nothing from Rod.
Logan runs back inside.
“Ed…do you trust us?”
Ed grins, “Yeah…I trust you guys.”
“Then will you PLEASE yell as loud as you can. Scare the shit out of him. Yell ‘Shut up’ with all the force of your soul, all the man in your power…We need his reaction and we ain’t getting it.”
“Okay. Okay. Okay…I’ll yell.”
Logan runs back outside. Sits at the monitor. Puts on the earphones. The camera starts rolling. The actors start working through the scene, ridiculing Ed, giving him a hard time. And then Ed yells “SHUT UP!” with all the terror of his barbarian ancestors. The bar rumbled and collapsed in silence. Logan’s earphones exploded. And the reaction was there. Rod’s face dropped. His fear was real. His toothpick lifted when he clenched his teeth. An expression you couldn’t manufacture. For a moment, which was all we needed, Rod, and the rest of the players at the table, thought Ed was going to stab them with a poker chip.
It shocked everyone, even the crew. Most of them thought, from watching us whisper to Ed in the corner between takes, that we’d gotten into an argument with him.
Logan ran inside, elated. He’d just watched playback on the monitor. We had what we needed for the editing room.
Noah said, “Swing around the camera…We’re shooting Ed’s close-up again.”
Ed’s intensity on that take was riveting and we needed to recapture it.
We moved the camera and reshot Ed’s close-up. He yelled, louder and fiercer than before. This explosion of rage, this booming, knife-edged roar transformed the arc of his performance. It gave it a higher peak. It was an emotional turning point for Ed’s character. All his guilt and remorse, self-loathing, exploded onscreen. But what turns the scene is not the emotional height, but the emotional chasm it then falls into. Ed swings from an object of anger to an object of pity in one breath. You hate him the moment he slams the money on the table and then feel sorry for him when he pulls out the creased photo of his boys from his tattered wallet. It was a clinic on acting. We were all Ed’s pupils. And everyone in the bar that night felt privileged to be there.
YOU CAN’T ARGUE WITH SUCCESS
Noses were running. Half the crew had the flu. Interest and enthusiasm were now stolen by the dream of a warm bed and a bottle of NyQuil.
It was 3:30 A.M. Tonight’s shooting was supposed to take four hours, a half night of work and then a day off. It was now hour twelve.
Ed was in the Perfect Car with Logan and Ishiah, parked in front of the Fairfax Theater, rehearsing. The scene in the movie is hysterically sad: Lane (Logan) and Rachel (Ishiah) are on their first date when they run into Charlie (Ed), who is so drunk he can’t remember where he parked his truck. (This happened many times in real life.) Lane throws Charlie in the car and they drive around searching for his truck, but have no luck. Rachel comes along for the ride. Frustrated and embarrassed, Lane slams on the brakes in front of the Fairfax Theater and turns around to Charlie in the backseat, who, at the end of the scene tells his son, “You can’t argue with success.”
Jeromiah ran over to Noah, who was standing next to the camera, lining up the shot.
“You gotta go talk to Ed,” Jeromiah said. “It’s serious.”
The night had been a technical and mental disaster. Everything that could have malfunctioned did; the camera iced up, the forty-foot tower of lights blew a circuit and the street went black, a generator died, the batteries fried in the wireless video monitor, a semi got a flat, and perhaps the most debilitating, we ran out of coffee. Then two goons from the San Francisco union—a world away—showed up and threatened to shut us down. What’s more, we had closed down the main street of our hometown. The entire population had crawled out of the hills and creeks, even the shut-ins put down the remote to come watch the filming and steal all our food. It was a partying soup kitchen. Work? Who has to work tonight? The Miller Brothers are making a movie! Honk your horn! Don’t worry about interfering with the scene. Honk, yell, whoop, and holler, then march over to the food table and dive in! Support the Bros!
Yes, it’s good to be loved. But we had a crew to feed, and there was nothing left for them after the town stopped by.
And now there was a problem with Ed. Bring it on, everyone else is. Let’s deal with it all tonight!
“What’s the problem?” Noah asked Jeromiah.
“Ed’s driving home as soon as we’re done shooting.”
“I thought he was flying home for the day off? I thought you arranged for someone to take him to the airport once we wrap?”
“I did. But Ed said he wants to drive.”
“No way he’s driving back to L.A.! No way! That’s a suicide mission.”
“I know. It’s like a seven-hour drive. It’s nuts, he’ll fall asleep and die. I can barely stay awake myself.”
“If he crashes, we’re done. We’ll probably get sued too. We can’t okay that.”
Then Mary Mastro and Karen Bradley, the hair and makeup queens, hurried over, wrapped in black shawls like mourning widows. “Noah, you have to do something. This is your responsibility.”
“Ladies, thank you for your concern. I’m aware of the situation, and I’ve got it all under control.”
Noah walked over to the Perfect Car. Ed was lying in the backseat, in character, drunk, giddy, having a party with himself. Logan and Ishiah were in the front seat, laughing at Ed.
“Ed, you can’t drive home tonight,” Noah said, thrusting his head through the open rear window.
Ed chuckled, staying in character.
Logan, alarmed, whipped around. “You’re driving home, Ed?”
Ed chuckled again, amused at our concern, our hovering attention.
“Seriously, though, Ed,” Noah continued. “I mean, come on. You’ve gotta be exhausted. Look, Bao is going to drive you to the airport as soon as we’re done and you’ll be in L.A. an hour later. There’s no way you’re driving home tonight.”
Ed guffawed…
Continued laughing…for a while…Then:
“Look, I’m a grown man. I’ll be all right. I got a sleeping bag in the back of my truck. If I get tired I’ll pull over on I-5…Relax, guys.” He chuckled some more. “Do you think I want to kill myself?”
“Of course not, but come on, Ed. It’s almost four A.M. We gotta work again in thirty-six hours. It’s nuts…Hell, we’re not even done shooting tonight…No way, Ed. I can’t okay it.”
The more concerned we became the more amused Ed became.
He laughed. “Bros, you can’t argue with success.”
“Come on, Ed. Quit screwing around. This is serious.”
“I know it’s serious…and that’s why I’m being serious, Bros…Seriously, I’ll be fine,” Ed continued, drunk. He still wouldn’t break character. It was all fun to him. Our moment of career-ending concern was his moment of drunken amusement.
Noah dropped his head, turned, and walked back to Mary, Karen, and Jeromiah, who were waiting with emergency room suspense.
“What did he say?”
Ed sat up in the backseat and then stuck his head out the window, and hollered, “You can’t argue with success, Noah!” Then he hit the side of the car and laughed heartily and dropped into the backseat.
“I did my best…,” Noah said.
And that was that. Ed wanted to spend his day off with his family—and he wanted to get there by driving his truck.
“What a stud,” Jeromiah said. “You want a coffee, Noah?”
“We’re out.”
“Right.”
“Connie, you want to ca
ll action?”
“ACTION!”
Ed drove back to L.A. at 4 A.M. to spend time with his family and then drove back north a day later. How he found time to sleep is a mystery. But he made it back and forth safely, a thousand-mile round-trip.
AND THEN IT RAINED FOR THE REST OF THE TIME
The endless wet and gloom of a Northern California winter, the months without sunlight, the time of drip and drain, of wind and storm, had arrived. It was Week Two. Our plan to shoot the exterior scenes in Week One had miraculously worked out.
We solved the Evan Jones problem with a hat, a wig, and a rewrite to the script. Even Evan doesn’t know he wasn’t there.
For the most part, we were now filming inside a farmhouse in Nicasio on the Lafranchi Dairy, the actual house where our mom was living. We still had a few more scenes to shoot outside, but the rain would give them a nice contrast to the rest of Touching Home, help express the passing of time, the changing seasons. Producers pay big money for rain machines. We got ours for free.
Then the actors started heading south.
Robert Forster was the first to go. He is an effortless craftsman—dignified, trustworthy, handsome, kind, and wise. The man onscreen is the man in life. He does not wear makeup or have his hair groomed by professionals before he goes on camera. He would step out of the car each morning and onto the set ready to deliver. Directing him is not a job; it’s an observation, at most, a casual conversation. Learned and philosophical, a handsome exterior opens to a profound mind. He left us with this:
“It’s taken me some time, and a lot of living, and, well, I’ve made my own three-step program that I try to live by. Some days are better than others of course. But I’m still learning, like all of us…ONE: accept all things. That gives you a good attitude. TWO: deliver excellence—right now. That gives you the best shot at the future. When you deliver excellence right now you get the reward of self-respect and satisfaction. And THREE: never quit. You can always win it in the late innings. You can win right now.”
We were standing on the porch, rain driving into the night. Bao had the car running, waiting to take Robert to the hotel.
“Fellas, it was a pleasure working with you. I really think you’re onto something special. Working with Ed was a real treat for me.”
“It was our treat,” Noah said. “We learned a great deal from you.”
“The pleasure was mine, fellas. You guys did all the work. You wrote a great script and I just played the part…Give me a call when you’re back in L.A. and we’ll have breakfast. Thanks for the opportunity. So long…”
Brad Dourif finished shooting the following night. (And Bao returned his Hi-Def television to Target the next morning for a full refund.) At first, Brad viewed us with distrust. By the end, he was deeply moved when the entire crew stood and clapped for him after he finished his last scene in the cramped living room of the farm house.
We hugged Brad and he left. He was going back east for the holidays, to his house in upstate New York, look at the stars with his telescope, and hopefully, take a break from the Xbox 360.
And a day later it was Ed’s turn.
He finished around 2 A.M. Rain was blowing sideways.
“I’m really glad you boys talked me into this…I really am…I think we did some great work here.”
We didn’t know how to respond. He had made our movie possible. He had taken a huge risk on a couple of nobodies, put his reputation on the line, believed in us when few did. And now he was praising the work.
We didn’t know what to say, how to thank him.
Ed leaned forward slightly, his brow wrinkled, searching for a response, searching for approval.
But there was just the sound of the rain.
“Right? You guys think we did some good work, don’t you?” Ed asked, as though he was growing unsure of his performance as our dad.
This was Ed Harris. Four-time Academy Award nominee. An American icon, hailed by many as our greatest living actor, and here he was, asking us if we thought that he/we had done good work. There is no higher compliment.
“You became our dad…” Noah said. “You gave us a chance to say goodbye to him…We’ll forever be grateful to you…Thank you, Ed…Thank you for everything…”
“I want to keep in touch with you guys. I mean it…I want to have you boys over to the house for dinner some time, when things slow down for you.”
We hugged. Ed climbed in his truck and drove into the night. We watched him go, taillights disappearing down the dark country road.
THE DAY AFTER
IT WAS PAGE one of Moby Dick again.
The next morning we found ourselves walking down the frontage road alongside Highway 101, kicking rocks, post-shooting depression, no purpose to life, rudderless, insignificant, aimless. Filming was over. The intensity had vanished. What to do now?
Where were we walking to anyways?
We drank a vineyard of wine the night before, and the down and out, next morning blues of a hangover wasn’t helping us feel any better about ourselves. We were just trying to keep the rocks going straight, hadn’t kicked rocks down the road since we were nine or ten. And here we were, grown men, lost and forlorn. One pathetic duo.
The cars whooshed by as if they were angry with us. The sky was heavy, looked like it might rain.
“We should get outta here…Let’s drive to Montana,” Noah said, kicking a rock and watching it tumble.
“When?” Logan asked, kicking a rock and watching it go.
“Right now.”
It sounded like a good idea. It was better than kicking rocks. So we called Coach and Gale and asked if we could come see them. They told us to hurry up, “But drive safe, damnit.”
Thirty minutes later we were on our way to Montana, speeding east on Highway 80 in a rented Chevy Tahoe borrowed from the production. Jeromiah was hesitant about us taking the Tahoe; we had already damaged three rental cars during shooting. First, Noah fell asleep behind the wheel of a minivan in the hotel parking lot after a night of filming. The minivan was in reverse, not park, and it rolled backward through the lot and into an oak tree that did not move, blowing out the back windshield and door, waking Noah, sort of like an exploding alarm clock. Next, a rock flew into the windshield of a Jeep we were driving and spider-webbed the glass. Then Logan, driving the camera truck through the quarry, sideswiped one of the passenger vans, damaging both. So actually, we had cosmetically impaired four vehicles, not three.
“We had a lot on our minds when we were shooting,” Noah said to Jeromiah. “Don’t worry, we’ve reinvented ourselves since then.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to fly?” Jeromiah asked.
“Driving’s better.”
We stopped that night in Winnemucca, Nevada. It couldn’t have been more than fifteen degrees inside our hotel room. Someone had left the windows open and the heater was busted. But we were too tired to go downstairs and get another room. So we froze all night.
We hit the road at 5 A.M. the next morning. Noah’s toes were black.
Montana was the silence we needed. The land was dormant, frozen and white. Each morning we lifted weights in the garage with Coach, the door open to the negative temperatures, the steel bar icy and rigid, like our joints, calluses burning in the cold, straining, grunting, cleansing, Coach yelling, “Get up, you puke!” as a 330-pound squat tried to bury us. After the beating, we’d walk through the snow down to the pasture and feed the horses: Teddy, Fuji, and Spanky the pony. For three days it never got above twenty below zero.
We were in the mountains, away from people, away from the overstimulation of filming, away from the sensory explosion and mental overload.
It gets noisy. It gets tiring. Not saying we don’t love it, only that it gets noisy and tiring.
Sometimes you gotta quiet up to figure it out.
Montana allowed us to quiet up.
KEEPING THE VOW
When we got home we drove out to the field where the old oak tree
stood to spread our dad’s ashes. We’d kept him with us for a year in a small wooden box and weren’t going to lay him to rest until we’d completed the vow. Now we could set him free under the old oak tree we used to drive by when we were little, the old oak tree that stood alone in the field, the one he used to point to and say, “Boys, when I die, spread my ashes under that old oak tree out there.”
“Don’t talk like that, Dad.”
“Bring me a sandwich every once in a while.”
“Don’t talk like that, Dad.”
“It’s all right, boys…We’re just here for a short time and then we go home…”
We’d never be able to hug him again.
We parked alongside the road and crawled under the barbed wire fence and walked across the field. We poured our dad in a circle around the trunk and the tears started running down our faces. The ash that was now him, gray and dust, was all that was physically left of our father. We remembered the good times, fishing on the Russian River and playing baseball at the park, camping in the woods, eating hot dogs with American cheese melted on top, watching movies on rainy days, working hard in the long summer sun, how he had once been young and strong, a man with dreams, and how far those dreams had run away from him, the pain and tragedy of his final years, now spread under the mighty oak that stood alone in the field.
We stood under the tree and talked with our dad all morning. And when the sun got high we wiped our tears and walked across the field and back to the road.
For the first time in a long time there was no urgency, no anxiety; a freedom had been unleashed. We had suppressed our emotions for much of this year-long journey in order to focus on the enormous undertaking, and now we thought about our dad with unreserved reflection, a life that was lived with all its difficulties, with all its struggles.
Perhaps it was our father’s struggles that made his life profound. Perhaps his difficulties pushed his soul deeper and made the man more. Perhaps truth comes through struggle. And our father’s truth, stripped down from alcoholism and guilt, was often painful: deeply flawed, conflicted, poetic, and human.
The journey of our father’s death brought us closer to him in life. His spirit was there with us, at every moment. His final gift was himself. He was the movie and the movie became him. If we ever saw him again we could tell him, “We did it, Dad. We made our movie…”