I point at the figure on the display paper. “Roheen is some kind of Afghan name or something,” I say. “I looked it up. Is that an Afghan costume?”
“No. They told me to give them something otherworldly and serene.”
“Otherworldly and serene,” I repeat. I think about that for a moment. “Dagmar said I was a kind of an angel.”
She shrugs. “Can’t help you,” she says.
I give her a look.
“Do you know what the picture’s about?” I ask.
Her blue eyes twinkle. “They didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
She cackles. “They didn’t tell me, either. Even the script is a damn state secret.”
“So far,” I say, “the secrecy is working.”
Because there are places I can usually find copies of scripts, often well before the movie is released, or even shot. Scripts leak out of everywhere, and I’ve been hoping to find this one, but I’ve had no luck. The fact that I don’t have a title hasn’t helped. But nothing by Dagmar Shaw has got onto the market—though it has occurred to me that Dagmar might not be the actual screenwriter.
“But you’re auditioning, right?” Jaydee says. “Didn’t they give you a script?”
“They gave me three scenes. They’re good scenes, but there’s no context.”
Which I really hate. Because when I say a line, I want not only to know the line, but to know why my character would say it and what he means to achieve by saying it. And without a context to hang my characterization from, I’m going to have to take a stab in the dark.
Angel. Otherworldly. Serene. That’s something, at least.
“Do you have the jacket?” I ask.
“Yeah, but it’s just basted together. It needs a final fitting.”
“Can I see it?”
Actual leather is very hard to light, so the jacket is made of a material that will look like leather on camera. I try it on, feel the weight of it, try to find the character that lives in it. I make an attempt to move in an otherworldly, serene way. Jaydee watches with amusement.
“I can’t tell if you’re supposed to be an angel or a drag queen,” she says.
“Oh shut up.” I look at her. “Can I take this?”
“Sure.”
“I mean,” I say, “it’s supposed to be a test. They’re supposed to see how I look in the costumes, so maybe I should actually take the one piece of costume that belongs to my character.” I clench my teeth. “Even though it’s really an audition, so I could fuck this up with or without the prop.”
“I said you could take the jacket,” she says.
I realize that my anxieties are leading me into behavior and dialogue worthy of ridicule, so I thank her and close my mouth.
I operate, I have realized, on hope. I’m always focused on the future, and right now Dagmar and her project are my future. It’s not just a part, it’s the only part I have to look forward to. If this feature doesn’t happen, all I’ll have in my life is sitting in my apartment smoking bud, watching old movies, staring at the old-time popcorn ceiling, and looking back on my glory days on Celebrity Pitfighter.
Jaydee reaches into a pocket for a pack of chewing gum and offers me a stick. I shake my head, and she pops one into her mouth. She’s recently given up smoking, and this is her substitute.
“You’ll be fine,” she says.
I sigh. “This whole setup is so strange.”
Jaydee gives a little twist of her lips. “They’re not film people, that’s how I read it,” she says. “They don’t have any experience in this, they’re making it up as they go along.”
“Maybe.” I look at some of the costumes on the rack, and I see the tags attached to each piece. Surprise floods into me.
“Nataliya’s on this picture?” I ask.
Jaydee pops her gum. “ ’Fraid so,” she says.
Nataliya Hogan was born Natalie, but now pronounces her name nattle-EE-ya, because it’s that much more pretentious. She started out as a teen pop star with a TV sitcom in which she played a teen pop star who had a secret identity as a spy, and now she is an actress whose list of credits, appropriately enough, mainly read “Self.”
I’ve noticed she only dates men who are more famous than she is, so she can benefit from the association. Due to her own growing celebrity, the pool of acceptable candidates is growing smaller and smaller.
In a town full of egomaniacs and narcissists, Nataliya is without peer. Nothing can happen anywhere in the world—in the universe—that doesn’t have her at its center.
If you tell her there was just an earthquake in, say, Mexico, she’ll explain how she has millions of devoted fans in Mexico and that she had a wonderful weekend in Cabo. If you mention that the president is trying to broker peace in the Middle East, she’ll tell you that her TV show was a huge hit in Egypt. If she is told about a grisly bombing in Peshawar perpetrated by jihadi fanatics, she’ll mention that she once had a manicurist from Pakistan who told her that her hands were beautiful.
“What’s Nataliya doing here?” I say in astonishment.
Jaydee laughs. “What do you think?”
“Joey hates her,” I say. “He’s told me so. Why’d he cast her?”
“Maybe he wasn’t the one who hired her.”
“Oh…crap.” I’m hoping I don’t have any scenes with her.
From Wardrobe I go to Makeup, where I piss off the makeup artist by giving him too much advice.
The fact is that I don’t need makeup to play a Klingon. The unusual proportions of my face and head cause certain technical problems, and the solutions aren’t always obvious. Though my face looks simply wrong, my eyes are large but otherwise normal. They’re the features that look most human and I always want to emphasize them. I’ve found that dabs of yellow eyeliner smoothed up under my brow help to light up my eyes and keep my big Frankenstein forehead from overshadowing my face. It also helps if my giant forehead is contoured with a darker shade of makeup in order to de-emphasize it, and if my stick-out ears are darkened, they don’t look so obvious.
The makeup artist might have worked this out on his own, but I’m nervous about the test and I’m not thinking about his sensitivities when I tell him what I want, so he spends most of the session glowering at close range and otherwise not speaking to me.
Not being spoken to by a makeup artist has never been a huge concern of mine. It lets me concentrate on mentally running my lines and thinking about how I am going to deliver them.
There’s a knock on the door toward the end, someone’s assistant coming to tell me that they are ready for my test.
INT. SOUNDSTAGE—DAY
The assistant waits for me outside the trailer, and escorts me to the soundstage—not that I need escorting, because the stage is the biggest thing on the lot. I wish the assistant weren’t around, because I’m thinking about Roheen and how I’m going to play his scenes. The assistant takes me through a door, and I pause for a moment to let my eyes adjust to the dimness of the vast, barnlike building. The place smells musty.
Only one corner of the soundstage is lit, and that’s clearly where the test will take place. Cameras gloom on the edges of the spill of light; people sit on folding chairs or stand around; there’s a kind of portable tent where the director, remote as a little god, will sit and watch the action on a video screen.
I recognize someone and increase my pace; she hears me coming, turns, and comes to meet me.
“Tessa,” I say.
“Sean.”
We take hands and give each other Hollywood air-kisses. It’s not that we’re insincere, it’s that she doesn’t want to smear my makeup.
Tessa Brettel is a tall, broad woman in her mid-twenties, probably over two hundred and fifty pounds. Her skin is chocolate, and her cornrows are braided in an elaborate geometric pattern. She wears a simple pale linen shift and gladiator sandals.
Twelve years ago she was part of the cast of the family comedy Life on Top, where she was the f
oil to Kendra Toamasina, who played her irreverent younger sister. Tessa was the serious, dutiful sibling, and was the principal target of Kendra’s jokes. Somehow Tessa survived years of slurs on her intelligence, her weight, her looks, her fashion sense, and most of all the size of her booty. Making fun of the fat girl was high sport for all America, and Life on Top lasted four seasons, until Kendra Toamasina drowned in a swimming pool following an afternoon of binge drinking. Kendra was mourned by millions, and Tessa forgotten.
“What are you doing here?” I ask Tessa. “Are you testing?”
“I’m the second unit director,” she says.
“Wow,” I say. “Great!”
I mean it, too. For years her career was as dead as Kendra.
“This project is taking me to Namibia in a couple weeks,” Tessa says. “We’ll see how much fun that is.”
“You shooting the desert?” The fact that there’s a desert in Namibia is about all I know about the place, and that’s only because I once saw a National Geographic documentary.
“Parts of Namibia are doubling for parts of South Africa.”
“Right. Okay.”
That’s normal. Under most conditions Southern California doubles for everyplace.
Tessa grins at me. “After that I go to Swaziland. Which is doubling for Swaziland.”
I don’t know where Swaziland is, but it sounds African to me. I say something neutral. “That should be fun.”
“You should get into directing,” she says. “You’d be good at it.”
“Well,” I tell Tessa, “let’s get the test over with first, and then I’ll take your job.”
I turn from Tessa to the little blond woman who’s just appeared at her elbow. She holds out a hand.
“Hello, Mr. Makin. I’m Carter-Ann Dixon.”
Her voice has a kind of reedy high-pitched Munchkin quality to it, and she speaks with a strong Southern accent. She comes up to about my elbow, and is dressed in a skirt and heels and a white blouse with a fluffy jabot. She wears a few pieces of tasteful gold jewelry. Her smile is a brilliant white, and there is a little mole on the left side of her chin.
“Hi,” I say, and shake her hand. Her palm is dry.
“We are all so looking forward to your test,” she says sweetly. She speaks with a certain amount of slow deliberation, enunciating every syllable as if she’s concerned that I might not completely understand her.
“Um,” I say, “thanks.”
I look at Tessa, and she’s looking at the new arrival with a kind of dry, distant amazement, as if Carter-Ann were an alien who has just materialized in the room.
“Are you part of the crew?” I ask Carter-Ann. Because, though she seems completely out of place here, she might just be a script supervisor or something.
“No, not really.” She blinks blue eyes up at me. “I’m a consultant.”
This tells me nothing. “What kind of consultant?” I ask.
She waves a hand and makes a pishing noise with her lips. “That’s all complicated. Let’s get on with your test.”
She takes my arm and starts walking with me toward the set. I look over her head at Tessa, who seems about as bemused as I am.
“Dagmar sends her apologies,” Carter-Ann says. “She wanted to be here, but she had an important meeting she couldn’t miss.”
“Is Joey da Nova here?” I ask.
“He couldn’t make it, either. Miss Brettel will be directing the test.” I look over her head again at Tessa, who smiles at me.
Carter-Ann walks me onto the set, such as it is. A metal grid has been lowered from the high ceiling to about twelve feet from the floor. To the grid are attached a bare minimum of three lights. There’s no actual set, just a neutral-colored curtain behind me. The only props are a chair and a small table.
Carter-Ann releases my arm and walks off.
“I’ll just watch from over here,” she says.
“Okay,” I say, for lack of anything better. I stand on the bare set and look around, then turn to Tessa. “I see you’ve left no impediments to the exercise of my imagination.”
Tessa smiles. “Wait a second,” she says, “till we get up to speed here.” She’s bossing a very reduced crew for this shoot, but there are still about a dozen people. The various specialists on the set take their places. Tessa gives quiet instructions. She is suddenly very businesslike, very much the professional.
I check the lights overhead. The key light is to my right, a 1K because the area being lit is small and no more wattage is necessary. The fill light is to my left and is another 1K inside a Chinese ball, a paper lantern to diffuse the intensity of the light. The backlight is a 650W tweenie behind a scrim, to keep the curtain behind me from blazing up and overwhelming the picture. The three-light system is basic in the industry and the gaffers can set it while staggering with drink, blind with hangover, or watching a football game on their cell phones.
I look at the lights again. The Watcher, examining the curiosities of Earth. “Tessa?” I ask.
She finishes talking to the camera operator and turns to me. “Yes?”
“The key or the fill needs to be lower,” I tell her. “Otherwise you’re going to get nothing but forehead.”
Over the years I’ve got really tired of telling people this. My damned forehead is the cross I carry onto every movie set. Tessa studies me, sees my eyes in deep shadow, the tip of my little nose winking out of the darkness like a silver button sewn to the middle of my face, and she nods.
“Yeah, okay.” She turns to someone. “Markie? Can you lower the fill?”
Markie is the grip, apparently. Standing in the bright light I can’t see him very well off in the dark, but he has a high-pitched voice with a south Boston accent.
“Where’s Arthur at?” he asks.
“I think he went to the toilet,” someone says.
“Donna,” Markie says, “you got the walkie-talkie?”
He gets the walkie-talkie from Donna and calls Arthur in the toilet.
“Arthur,” he says, “can I move your goddamn fill light?”
Arthur’s indignant voice crackles from the walkie-talkie. “I’m taking a fucking dump here,” he says.
Markie gives the walkie-talkie back to Donna. “Arthur says it’s okay,” he says.
This conversation is necessary because everyone in the room belongs to a union and it is necessary to maintain a proper division of labor. Markie is a grip, and Arthur is a gaffer, and while a grip can tell a gaffer where to put a light, he can’t actually touch it himself.
While great union leaders of the past rotate nobly in their graves, Markie turns off the fill light, gets a ladder, takes the Chinese ball off the overhead rack, and fixes it to a standing pipe with an alligator clip.
The crew goes back to whatever it was doing, ignoring me. When Arthur comes back from the john, he doesn’t comment.
I mention this episode only to show why film and television actors have to be really good at what they do. A film set buzzes with distractions. The grips are fussing with the tracks on which the cameras move, or they’re trying to get a read on the passive fill so they know how to shape the beam that’s coming off the fill light. The electricians move the lights around, or are on ladders setting the barn doors that channel the light. The sound technicians are swinging the booms or trying to get readings on the voices and background noise. The director of photography is moving props and furniture around to add to the artistic composition of every shot. The props master is also running in to add to or subtract from the props visible in the frame, and the script supervisor is trying to keep track of all the changes for the continuity. The script supervisor or the director or the writer-on-set produces new last-second lines for the actor to learn. People are sticking light meters in the actors’ faces to get a sense of the light coming off them, or running up with tapes to measure the distance from the camera to the actor. The guy with the clapper runs up before every shot and tries to snip off the actor’s nose with his li
ttle guillotine blade. And on a big production, everyone’s got numerous assistants who perform even more of these little tasks, and more often, and with more noise.
Which is why, when the set is finally quiet and the cameras are running, and the director calls for action, the actors have to be right in the zone. They have to ignore all the chaos that has just been going on around them and become their characters. They have to know where the camera is, and where their marks are, and they have to interact with the other actors and with the camera. They have to remember their lines, and—even if the lines are cliché, which they often are—speak them with sincerity, as if this were the first time those lines have ever been spoken or thought of in the whole history of the world.
Once everybody’s in place and Tessa calls for quiet, she eases me into the test by just having me stand and walk and sit in various attitudes, just to see how the camera likes me—or not—and how I move in the Dr. Zaius jacket. I try to project angelic sincerity as I stand and walk about. I think about Michael Clarke Duncan in The Green Mile. I think about Morgan Freeman in, well, anything. I think of insipid pictures of Jesus and try to be that character, only with a little more edge.
A voice breaks in. “Mr. Makin?”
I blink and look around. Carter-Ann Dixon has risen from her chair and taken a step toward the light.
“Yes?” I say.
“Can you take a step forward with your left foot? And turn your palms a little toward the camera?”
I look at Tessa, who is the director and in charge of the set, and who by all rights ought to be beheading Carter-Ann at this point. Tessa gives me a deadpan look, then nods.
I do as Carter-Ann suggests. She looks at me critically. “Could you turn your left instep out just a bit, Mr. Makin?” she asks.
I do this.
“That’s lovely!” Carter-Ann says. Her voice throughout remains distinct and deliberate, each word enunciated perfectly. “Could you say a line for me, please?”
I’m so surprised that I can’t think of any of my actual lines, so I just say, “Tallulah Tallulah Tallulah.”
Carter-Ann quirks her mouth in a way that says, I’m going to condescend to you and pretend to be amused, but you’d better not try that again.
The Fourth Wall Page 8