From the get-go I know I won’t be putting this one on my reel because we’re shooting in Queens, and Queens is where I always end up with what the old Catskill guys used to call a wish sandwich. You know - two slices of bread and you wish you had some meat.
Maybe it’s Queens, maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s the fumes and mold from the old flour silo. It just happens.
Once we shot a talking horse spot out here. It was for an upstate beer and the horse was supposed to be singing ” a hundred bottles of beer on the wall.” He did it like an orator when he was rehearsing up on the animal talent farm, up in Hamilton by Syracuse. Same place they train the camels for the Radio City Christmas Pageant. But here in the Silvercup Studios with those LaGuardia planes stacked high over the roof he turned into a mule and wouldn’t open his trap. They had to tickle his lips with filament from a fishing line and it still took forty four takes to get it right, which added a half day (read half a hundred grand) and made the Buffalo beer baron bullshit.
Pardon the illiteration, I should know better. My job is to write the lines, which in advertising is shit, really. But I still get excited. The day before shooting began I saw a great one scribbled on a wall in the men’s room of The Blarney Rose on 32nd. It said, “Please do not throw cigarette butts in the toilet as they get wet and are hard to light.” I don’t get a chance to write lines like that. As they say, it’s not creative unless it sells.
We don’t all go out to the Silvercup building right away. Before Queens there’s always the pre-production muzz-muzz in Midtown.
So the three of us are sitting in the hotel cocktail lounge sipping cocktails after finally checking into the Royalton on 44th Street, where we live as much as we live anywhere, weary and jet-lagged after the flight across the whole North America. We came in from Tokyo and then from Santa Monica, where, you have to believe this, I always have better luck than in Queens.
I’m telling people about the yak shoot we did once at Silvercup, where we trucked in a real yak from some farm in Ohio and had him stand next to a real Sherpa dressed in the client’s product, fleece outerwear, which we had the client do up custom in authentic Himalayan yellows and reds.
The Sherpa looked ridiculous and the yak was pissed about the long night in the truck, so he kept snorting and pawing and hooking his long, pointed horns to the left.
The left, in this case, was exactly where the Sherpa’s crotch was positioned, under a thin layer of fleece. Take after take the horns came hooking in and each time they came so microscopically close to the gonad zone if it were me I’d be jumping out of my fleece if not my skin. Through it all this Sherpa doesn’t flinch. Maybe that ’s why he leads rich guys up K2 and I lick up their crumbs at places like Silvercup Studios.
At any rate, the conversation is starting to calm us down when into the Royalton bursts Wayne, the head account guy. He’s wearing seersucker and a bow tie, the kind of duds they don’t want to see in this starfucking hotel, where the boss used to run Studio 52 and they give discounts if you wear Prada. It’s as though Wayne must be staying across the street in the New York Yacht Club, in one of those preppy-shabby rooms they keep for members. Wayne sits down and proceeds to announce that he never washes his hands after taking a piss. He calls it “number one.”
“We want to thank you, Wayne, for ruining these nice gin and tonics,” says Joline, the art director. Gin and tonics are back in Manhattan. They came back up from Mercer Street, the point of re-entry for whatever used to be cool.
“Remind me to never shake your hand again,” says Kim, the producer.
“Why wash my hands,” says Wayne. “My hands don’t touch anything when I pee.”
“You’re telling me,” says Joline, “that when you take a leak with your dick you don’t touch your dick. Is that right?”
Joline is my 98-pound art director partner, who stands five foot one in her stockinged feet and about six foot one in her Fleuvogs. To her there are two kinds of people, the cool and the dead. Joline sees me as some sort of advertising antique, like a Buick ad from the 1950’s. If I were a hotel I’d be the Waldorf, not the Royalton. Valid only as retro.
Three years of shoots with her have left me on the verge of clinical depression.
Wayne throws a quick funny look at me. Fifty percent for verification, fifty percent for permission to continue the conversation. Wayne is twenty years younger than me. Joline and Kim could both easily be my daughters, and Joline could even be my granddaughter. Although Kim works in back of the camera, she’s already starting to do voice-overs on local radio ads; and what she really wants to do is some sort of hip celebrity gossip show, the kind you see on E!
As for me, I couldn’t make the horse move his lips. But I can’t make Wayne stop moving his.
“Are you trying to get out of this, Jake? Are you trying to avoid the question?”
He bears down on me like some preppy D.A.
“Okay, sometimes I wash and sometimes I don’t.”
“Eeew,” says Joline. “Grody.”
She looks at me the way you’d look at your great grandfather if his teeth fell out of his mouth, shiny with mouth goo. Kim’s look is even more degrading. Her eyes fill with sympathy, the kind a nice young person is supposed to feel when she sees an elder being treated with disrespect.
Finally, Wayne rests his case. We sip and smoke. I fiddle with the gray skin of my shaved head, the successor to my gray ponytail of two years ago. I don’t want to smoke anymore so I grab my cell phone and check voice mail.
You have two saved messages. One from my bank; one from some intern in the direct mail department. From a coupon writer; it’s come to that.
This afternoon it said the same thing. And this morning.
So what message is the message machine really playing when it keeps telling you have the same two messages?
Later that night the client flies in from Sacramento. He’ll be here in The City for the whole shoot, all nine days, and for part of the edit leading to the rough cut of film, which is only the beginning for this project since only half of the action will actually be shot by the camera. The other half, same as in Titanic, will be generated by computer artists pounding Power Macs in some digital paint shop in The Bowery, the place no bum can afford anymore. The client, simply because he’s a client, behaves anally from the moment he arrives, forever fighting for a bigger logo or an extra millisecond of exposure for one of his products. His name is Mike, and he looks like a Mike. He’s a chunky guy and he has nice, normal gray-red hair, the kind that was cut in a barber shop, not done in a salon. He’s wearing golf slacks and a green checkered golf shirt with the company name and logo embossed on the right sleeve. The epitome of what New Yorkers call an out-of-towner.
Around midnight, we three creatives plus Wayne gorge on sushi at Kuruma Zushi on East 47th Street, the secret hole-in-the-wall Joline says the Silvercup Studios people say suddenly became better than Nobu a few months ago. Mike, who’s sitting with us but would have preferred Smith & Wollensky’s, holds forth in the most gentlemanly way about the vast differences between the number 7006 saber saw and the number 7009 saber saw. He wants both shot even though both look exactly the same to the camera. No raw fish for Mike; he calls it bait; just give him some Teriyaki salmon and a fork, thank you very much.
The sea urchin creeps down my gullet and the wasabe fumes slash at my sinuses. Mike moves on from saber saws to routers. Bored and exhausted as I am, I have to envy this man. Looking at myself in the restroom mirror, dressed in my Mercer Street this and my Melrose Avenue that — wardrobe items selected for me on previous shoots by the studded, tattooed Joline — I do indeed envy this nice, normal man. On my feet are black boots so heavy you could moor a boat with them. Mike, he’s in Cole Haan summer loafers.
Next day, bleary-eyed, we all come down in the charcoal gray “light” of the Royalton elevator, which is designed to conceal your wake-up face. We’re gathering so we can meet the director. The production company has taken over a conference room and covered every available inch of a long side table with bagels, croissants, honeydew and cantaloupe, the usual things no one ever eats, except account guys and clients.
Wayne is there, looking like the junior commodore of the yacht club. With him is a preppy junior account guy, Derek, who politely takes notes for Wayne. Both are eating.
Mike is there with his power tool catalog open to the drill page. Eating.
Wayne offers Kim a piece of his croissant. “From your hands ?” says Kim. She rolls her eyes and swigs her Evian. I’m drinking New York City tap water, because a piece in The Post said it tastes better than Evian, which of course reads “Naïve” when you spell it backwards.
Joline rolls her eyes in response and swigs her Evian. She thumbs through a stack of Polaroids the production company has brought to show work in progress on the set. On their side there are five people, on ours six, including Mike. Everyone’s there except the director, who’s stuck in yellow-cab gridlock because he will stay only in Soho on the top floor of the Soho Grande.
The bloom is well off the cream cheese by the time, Perez, the director, finally does sweep in, and all the fawning agency people, me included, line up to shake his hand. Wayne lets Mike go first, then goes himself. “You don’t want to shake that hand,” says Joline, giggling. For an instant Wayne’s eyes go ballistic. “Agency humor,” he says to the director. “You don’t want to know.”
Perez has an international flavor, like a fusion restaurant. He’s Asian, he’s Cuban, he’s 125th Street. In The Business he’s mostly known for two bad kung fu movies and one promising kung fu movie that crossed over into the general action/thriller market. In the ad biz he’s mostly known as a problem solver for big technical shoots. Not an actor’s director, but a gizmo director, fearless around big sets with cranes and humans and animals flying through the air and enough lights to light Yankee Stadium. Which is why Perez could do all the music videos he wants, except music videos don’t pay.
Perez is about the same age as Joline, and he has even less body fat. He looks like he could fight welterweight on ESPN. We’re both wearing the same Versace black tee shirt; his makes him look like he just came from a filmfest, mine makes me look like I just came from Bergdorf’s men’s store.
Funny thing, he knows who I am.
“I was looking through the Clio book, 1978. You were all over that, man.”
“That’s me, the world’s oldest copywriter. I invented rich, pure and creamy.”
In 1978, the Clio awards ceremony was in the Waldorf and the Royalton didn’t even exist. Hotel toilet seats were warm porcelain, not the cold Royalton steel they also have in jails. Gin and tonics weren’t back in because they’d never gone out.
Out of the corner of my eye I notice Kim watching us. She has that same look of sympathy she had during the dick conversation in the cocktail lounge. Kindhearted and earnest, the look you give the elder statesman who’s not quite with the program.
“It’s an honor, sir,” says Perez. He actually says, “it’s an honor, sir.”
I learn more about why Perez shoots so much kung fu - and so little stuff with dialogue - later in the day when we cast the leading lady at a cattle call in the rag district on Seventh and 37th, near where they have the giant bronze thimble in the street. I once did a Calvin Klein thing there with Calvin himself, but that’s another story.
The casting specs call for an upscale type, an executive socialite, part SciFi and part Sharon Stone. The kind of face you see at charity balls in the Styles section of the Sunday Times. Her big line is, “Oh, Clyde, we forgot the foie gras.”
Okay, so it’s not “Where’s the beef?” But when is the last time you saw foie gras in an ad?
Perez goes for an elegant brunette with large dark eyes and a speech impediment. And he puts his foot down.
“She says foie gras like a deaf person,” says Wayne. “It sounds like fah gah.”
“You won’t notice it,” says Perez. “What you will notice is the reflection of the power drill in her eye, full frame.”
How can the account guy argue against a sexy product shot. Wayne shuts up.
“I think she’s perfect,” says Joline. She can’t wait to tell her friends she worked with a guy who did a P. Diddy video.
I say nothing, not wanting to be seen as the creative suit. I just wish they had let us go double scale on the talent, instead of putting all the money into sets and special effects.
And Kim looks at me. Kindhearted, earnest.
Very late that night, she really wants to talk to me.
We go to my room and talk about her days as a rich horse girl, mucking out stalls of jumpy Arabians. We sit on the charcoal gray sheet squinting in the charcoal gray light and talk about her rich father, the importer with the secret Asian connections, gone for months at a time, like Marco Polo. We talk about her days as a student nun, and we talk the low-rent industry gossip agency producers always hear third hand from other producers; the stuff Kim would be dishing if she had her dream job on TV.
“Perez’ girlfriend is flying in from L.A. Saturday night. She’s the hot one from Shanghai Warrior.”
I tell Kim I missed Shanghai Warrior.
“Why do you keep on working, ” she says. You act like someone who wants out bad.”
“The agency certainly thinks so. They keep sticking me with Joline on these shitty power tool shoots.”
“You don’t know how much she looks up to you as a teacher.”
“And down to me as a toilet.”
“Even Perez sees you as a teacher. And he sings Nat King Cole songs with Lauryn Hill on a beach in Mexico.”
Right. It’s an honor, sir.
We talk and talk. We talk a real long time about her wild and crazy life as a 29-year-old producer building connections with the hot directors on all continents.
“My voice mail is insane,” she says. “Hundreds of calls.”
Stick the knife in deeper.
Kim orders champagne and a fruit plate from room service. An out-of-work actor in a charcoal gray Frankenstein suit delivers it forty minutes later. All the fruit, mostly mango and kiwi, looks charcoal gray. She asks me again why I keep doing this job. I tell her it’s for the free champagne and fruit plates. Then I become maudlin and ask, “do circus people leave the circus? This is what I do.”
Kim finishes her second glass of champagne and wants me to tell her about the period before she was born.
She asks, “isn’t that when women threw away their razors?”
I remember the chanting streets of the East Village, nod yes and pour the third glass of champagne.
“There are days I’d like to do that,” she says, sounding slightly like Kathleen Turner. For some reason I hear this as a possible hint that Kim wants to stay in my room. For more than conversation.
But a few moments later she has her hand on the doorknob, yawning, batting her sleepy eyes in a happy and wholesome way, like a girl saying goodnight in a dorm, after tea with one of the deans.
Her parting words are that she looks up to me as a teacher, too, just like Joline.
For the hell of it, just before going to bed, I check the Star-tac again.
You have two saved messages. I could erase them, but I don’t want to.
The next day, which is the first day of the shoot, Day One in Queens, Mike the client wears his blue checkered golf shirt, company logo on the chest. Why he looks so entertained is anyone’s guess; he’s watching the client monitor, which means he’s watching white snow on a gray screen. They’ve strategically placed the monitor so it’s half a football field away from where Perez, the maestro of visual pyrotechnics, is working out the first shot with his director of photography, the gaunt and haughty Phillippe.
Of the eighty or so cast, crew and agency people hopping or dawdling around the set, Phillippe is the only Frenchman and the only person with a cigarette butt hanging out of his mouth. Evidently, he’s so important to Perez he’s been granted divine dispensation from the no smoking rule posted at every exit.
Shitty as I feel, I can’t possibly feel quite as shitty as the 300-pound guy dangling twenty feet above the cement floor a good hundred feet from where Perez and Phillippe, with their respective lackeys, are doing the photo-geometric calculations needed to make a flying camera sweep around four carpenter-astronauts erecting part of a skyscraper on some distant planet, each armed with a different power tool, each requiring a zoom-in, zoom-out on the tool; all to take place in a single move for which the script girl allows no more than 6.3 seconds.
Of the four guys swinging on thick wires, three are clearly athletes as well as actors, and their natural body strength and conditioning have allowed them to twist and turn into various gravity-defying positions, exactly on cue. But the 300-pounder looks like a former high school tackle whose eating life has been one big off-season since 1985. (He also looks like a real construction guy.) And every time they rehearse the shot he keeps wrecking it by doing the same thing, the only thing his body will let him do; an enormous bellyflop that pitches him head over heels and cinches the wire up his crotch.
Maybe his problems, like mine, are made all the worse by the fact we’re working at a sound stage that used to be a giant bakery; i.e.white-bread factory. Silvercup Bread, the old sponsors of the Lone Ranger on radio. Jingle, circa 1955, by Rootie Kazootie. Maybe the old smells of fresh-baked loaves haunt the upper air where he’s hooked and wired.
I take up a position behind Perez and Phillippe and their fortress of rigs and booms and terminals and monitors, the better to hear them conspire on this poor trooper’s torture. Since the cigarette butt is permanently attached to Phillippe’s lips, he is a man of few words, especially when speaking English into the mouthpiece of a walkie-talkie phone.
“Move heem five inches, no, six.”
Forty yards away a trio of crew members spring into action. They know what they’re doing. They worked out here on Men in Black and When Harry Met Sally. They yank the ropes that control the fat guy’s wire and move him into a slightly different position, like a hog on a meat processing line. He winces, he sweats, he clutches his groin with his silver astronaut gloves; and it’s all to put bread on his table and keep working until the big movie offer comes along.
What’s odd is that he’s a player you do see in feature films all the time, as the janitor or cop who has one line and does something so funny with it he steals the scene. By far, he’s the best actor of this bunch.
I’m telling you, he even reads. During pre-light we were munching breakfast burritos from the catering truck and he told me Saul Bellow had Moses Herzog eating Silvercup Bread in Humboldt’s Gift. News to me. I’d only heard about Rootie Kazootie. Saul Bellow is not in my universe.
Of course, he’s not in the Clio book either.
When I can’t watch any more of this I turn and walk as far away from Perez and Phillippe as I can. This puts me back near Mike’s territory at the client monitor, and before I can duck out of his line of vision he waves me over with a big, friendly smile.
“Jake, how’s the shot going?”
“Going like it always goes,” I say. “Like watching grass grow.”
“It’s been nearly all morning,” Mike says,” and they haven’t shot one take.”
“So what else is new. They’ll get it right. One way or another they always do.”
By the time we reach the last day of the shoot, they do get it right. As the hours wear on, some combination of fear, passion and scrotal irritation causes the fat actor to get his act together. Lo and behold, on take 9002 he soars like an eagle and wields his radial arm saw like an old pro carpenter, pleasing Mike, Perez, Phillippe and the relentless script girl with the stopwatch all in one fell swoop.
According to the plot of our seven-figure, sixty second epic, fat boy and his cohorts have left their homes in the U.S. to build a skyscraper hotel on some distant planet, the first Ritz or Four Seasons not on this earth. When they finish, the lady hotel manager and her lackey tour the place to make sure the hotel is fully stocked and ready for its first contingent of space-traveling V.I.P. guests. That’s basically it.
Shortly after six in the evening of the very last day, the day the budget runs out, Perez and Phillippe begin shooting the tall, elegant brunette, our kung fu director’s personal choice as leading lady and hotel manager. The camera follows her and her foppish assistant as they officially inspect the kitchen of the intergalactic royal penthouse suite, ten zillion miles from earth. A few minutes after midnight she throws open the refrigerator door at just the angle Phillippe wants, gives Perez the big eyeballs for the reflection shot, and nails her line.
“Clyde, you forgot the fah gah.”
“Wrap it,” says Perez. And they do. They don’t even do a safety.
And why should they? This isn’t 1978.
Wham bam, they break the set and Joline and Kim swarm Perez and Phillippe, hot to party. I head for the Blarney Rose on 32nd Street, where you couldn’t see the big Silvercup sign if you had a telescope.
After the cab gets out of the tunnel I check the Star-tac.