It's All In the Playing (19 page)

One of my lasting memories of making the movie, however, is that of my big crying love scene. I had done it fifteen times. We were shooting on a romantic balcony overlooking the Pacific at 3:30 in the morning, using glycerine on my cheeks and eyes because I had dried up. The glycerine attracted the Hawaiian mosquitoes. I tried to brush them away on Charles’s dialogue, thinking they would cut to him anyway, but it was no use. I finally broke down. But I wasn’t crying because of the scene. I was crying because the mosquitoes were killing me.

As lovely as Hawaii can look on the scene, to shoot intricate scenes with turquoise surf sweeping over us was more like a Marx Brothers comedy than a romp in paradise. First of all, if you see two actors lying in the surf, you know there’s got to be a crew in the water somewhere. If the angle is toward the land, the camera crew is definitely fighting the waves. If it’s a profile shot, they are going through whatever the actors are experiencing.

If the sun is peacefully setting in the West, with a magenta hue cascading around your head, bathing your face and shoulders in illuminating light, it doesn’t mean you’re not being eaten alive by sand crabs as you say lines of delicate and tender affection.

If you stand profiled in the surf, drinking in the sight of a passenger steamship on the horizon, it doesn’t mean you haven’t cut your foot on coral and the blood is running into the water for all to see if the camera were to pan down.

And if you see an actor basking like a languid lizard in the sun, you can bet he is smeared with sunscreen and then covered with Egyptian number one body makeup. Otherwise he’d be in the bar having a beer.

So, with the Hawaiian location behind us, we returned to America and proceeded with the real nuts and bolts of making the film. Location relationships were disbanded and home and hearth took a higher priority.

Chapter 12

   S
oon, however, having arrived back on the mainland, I had an experience that enabled me to practically apply some of what I’d been learning. I was going to visit a friend and had gotten on a plane that I had not originally been booked on. I had a strange feeling that I shouldn’t be on it. I wanted very much to get off. For some reason I did not want to be there.

The thought occurred to me that I now had the opportunity to experience the total fear of dying in a plane accident. I decided to go through with it. I sat back in the seat as the plane left the ground. Perhaps, I thought, it would happen on takeoff. I then decided to visualize my own fear. I didn’t visualize a picture of any accident such as a crash or an explosion or anything specific like that. Instead I visualized what I would do about it. I saw the plane going down, and then very calmly I found myself rising above the airplane, knowing that
I
was perfectly safe regardless of what happened to my body.

This was not what I would call an out-of-body experience. It was more a projected imaginary experience, yet
one with considerably real impact. I felt the fear course through me as though in a dream, and yet I had the election of moving away from the fear because I knew I was not going to die. It was, as far as I was concerned, a conscious enactment of a possible event—a rehearsal. And I was able to see some of my possible reactions. I saw that even if my body was destroyed in some kind of crash—
I
myself wouldn’t be.

When I arrived, safely, at my destination, my friend who picked me up said, “I had the strangest feeling something had happened to your plane.”

I explained that it hadn’t happened to the plane; it had happened to me.

It wasn’t long after settling into shooting in Los Angeles that I began to realize how many extras and crew members came to me with stories about feeling guided to work on the project. They didn’t know why and neither did I. They just felt they should be a part of it. Many said they actually got calls from their agents
as
they were reading the book. Those sharings led to longer conversations about inner reality and outer reality and how they related to personal relationships. For the first time in my professional life, I looked forward to crowd scenes with lots of extras. The extras brought with them not only my books, but many other metaphysical books which they shared with me. In between shots they read and chatted about New Age systems of thought. That led to discussions, and discussions led to personal application, and personal application led to personal transformation. One person, transformed, changes many other people.

Making a movie for television carries with it a different intensity than making a feature film. I’m not sure why. The amount of time between setups may be shorter, which means the lighting crew works faster. But even that depends on the speed of the cinematographer himself. The crew takes on the pace and personal rhythm of
their leader. If your cinematographer works with humor and an appreciation for the contribution of everyone around him, you have a happy and productive crew. If not, everything breaks down.

Ours was the former. And a member of a movie crew is an equal combination of artist and mechanic. I often marvel at how some burly guy knows just exactly how to create a soft shadow light to take years off my face or put sparkle in my eyes. Crews are a breed unto themselves. Their humor and honesty is largely private, because the next job may depend on what they say and do. But their sense of values is very fair, and they are mind-bogglingly professional when it comes to getting the job done. When you work the hours we were working, you easily see them at their worst and, because of that, their best.

We were shooting all over town in Los Angeles, changing locations every day or two. The “ready to shoot” call was 7:30 A.M. when we were shooting outside, because of the light. That meant that the crews had to load in at 6:00 or 6:30. Mobile homes, camera towing equipment, camera mounts, the generator trucks, the sound van, the wardrobe trucks, the prop van, the camera trucks full of lights, cables, batteries, lenses, film, etc., were the first to arrive. After that came the mobile catering—the honey wagons and doughnuts and coffee. It was an invasion of the mechanics of fantasy. Each department set up its own operating procedure, speaking show-biz dialects that only those who have worked together for years understand.

The makeup trailer was well lit inside by a generator outside. The actors sat side by side in high canvas chairs looking self-consciously or self-adoringly (depending on the person) at their
reflections
in the mirror. On a counter behind the chairs there were steaming coffee and unspeakably delicious treats that all of us took turns baking and devouring. Only those who aren’t having any fun
don’t
gain weight on a picture, regardless of the wearing hours.

Stories are swapped and gossip kindled as the makeup, powder, and hair curlers are applied. There are no secrets in the makeup trailer. Tabs that lift a face, toupees, wigs, and blemish coverings are soon common knowledge, and no one even thinks about them after the first day. Sometimes as we’re being made up we rehearse our lines for the day, but more often than not we sit munching our sugary breakfast, sipping hot coffee in between makeup strokes, wishing we had gotten more sleep the night before. After makeup, if there was time, I’d go to my motor home and lie down. My motor home was cozy, comfortable, practical, and my home away from home.

There has always been a conflict between actors and crew in relation to the best working hours in our business. It has to do with fighting freeway traffic. The actors would like to begin later (thereby missing morning rush hour), eat lunch on the run, and shoot until 7:30 or 8:00 in the evening. This is called “French hours.” The crew likes to start early, fight traffic, and quit at 6:30. They say it’s because they want to be with their families at night. I think it’s because they want to be with their girlfriends
before
they go home to their families.

Now, on our film, there was no way they would have time for either, because they arrived at 6:30 or 7:00 in the morning and never left before 8:00 or 9:00 or 10:00. We talked about the inhuman hours. They said they just set their minds to this professional commitment and their families would understand until it was over. But as I found out later, many of our crew went immediately on to other projects, with hours just as unrelenting. There’s a reason why people in show business refer to those outside of it as “civilians.” It’s as though the Normandy invasion were occurring every day of the week, and if one show-biz soldier lets down the professional
collective, that person is never respected and rarely hired again.

So we became a big transmigratory family, moving from location to location like a functioning movable city on wheels. There was nothing we could need that wasn’t part of our peripatetic unit, including a nurse and doctor.

The crew could build you a set of furniture from the construction truck in half a day if necessary.

The prop truck could handle your accessories, and the wardrobe truck had enough clothes hanging from giant racks to outfit Macy’s.

Then there was the production office bus. This was where the head honchos hung out with their mobile telephones to home base (the network) and their decisionmaking meetings. Schedules were devised and scrutinized there, and sometimes repressed emotions were released over a late-night takeout Chinese meal.

And so Los Angeles became a maze of nomadic zones for me. The restaurant scene zone, the goodbye corner zone, the zone by the park. I completely lost my bearings in the city and yet I had never seen so much of it before. Sometimes we dressed our L.A. city street to look like a New York City street by bringing in New York yellow cabs and a few bag ladies. The director would wince at the phony subterfuge, but the crew was proud of their transformation. We shot downtown, all over the streets of L.A., at the beach, in the Calabasas Mountains, Pasadena, Malibu State Park, and sometimes in an actual studio.

We were working from 7:00 in the morning to 10:00 at night. There was time for nothing else. Christmas was coming up and no one had shopped. Sometimes I stayed in hotels close to the next day’s location, always accompanied by my sound machine. The crew sometimes joked that I couldn’t get a scene right because my sound machine was missing. But unless the ride to a location
would take more than an hour and a half, I usually slept at home in Malibu where the waves were natural.

As the shooting progressed, I realized I was feeling totally responsible for everything that happened on the project. If we were rained out I felt somehow that I could or should have prevented it. Because it was
my
story,
my
script,
my
life, and
my
production starring
me,
I wanted everybody on the film to be happy, collected, and comfortable.

Yet as the schedule closed in I felt serious frustration because of lack of time to myself to process what
I
was feeling. I needed time alone, time to center myself, to balance within. Because of the responsibility I was shouldering (unnecessarily) I was beginning to feel out of attunement with my own private spiritual place. I was sleeping about four hours per night. So I couldn’t get up any earlier. There was no time or place to do yoga or meditation. It seemed that I was always involved with schedules, script changes, production problems, and phone calls that were about more of the same. I longed for a cool forest or a bubbling brook—or
any
private space, no matter how banal. For the first time since I had begun to work with spiritual techniques, I was feeling the consequences of not practicing them in my life. There simply was no time.

My legs began to hurt. My head ached and finally—last but not least—my back went out. I visited a chiropractor. He said I had an inflammation of the spinal column brought on by “nervous lack of attunement.”

I began to think of how individual consciousness works in relation to collective consciousness. If a single person was truly centered and happy in his own being, productively and positively using his free will, how did his relationship to a project relate to the free wills of others who were negative, discordant, and hostile?

I had wanted all of us in our movie to be harmonious and happy within ourselves, mostly because the theme
of my material echoed such values. On other films my expectations had not been so lofty. In fact, I don’t suppose I even really cared. But this was different.

Whenever I saw any of our people on automatic self-destruct, I talked to them, sometimes feeling I was invading their privacy. They listened for a while, understanding what I was getting at, but usually continuing to allow themselves to be overwhelmed until, lo and behold, I realized I was doing the very same thing to myself.

I was feeling negative about
their
negativity until I produced an inflammation of my own spinal column, curable only by a change in attitude!

Then I did a fast objective rundown of what I was feeling during the course of a day’s shooting. My assessment was anything but positive. I felt irritable with the woman who ran my motor home because she was depressed. There was no water and no toilet paper. I felt a lack of organization within the production unit stemming from the director’s indecision. I didn’t think anybody had much of a sense of humor during the work process. The power kept going off in my motor home when I was in it. Trash was building up everywhere I looked (most of it
mine).

Props were getting misplaced, most of them mine.

Some of the wardrobe was missing, also mine.

But what bothered me the most was when people looked to me to make decisions that they were better off making themselves. I wished they’d use their own creativity, their own ideas, their own imagination.

One day in particular exemplified it all. I left my trailer to go to the set. There was an entourage following behind. I was going in the wrong direction, but no one said anything. I finally stopped and turned around. The entourage stopped and turned around. “Aren’t I going in the wrong direction?” I asked.