My Extraordinary Ordinary Life (26 page)

Maybe she was also grateful that I saved all of our lives one night when we were riding around in that van.

Much of the story of
Badlands
is told in voice-over by my character, and one scene called for Holly to describe seeing the distant lights from the oil fields around Cheyenne. Since there were no flaming derricks nearby, Jack had built enormous bonfires out on the prairie to create the effect. When the sun went down, Jack lit the fires and Terry started filming. We were sitting in Jack’s van, watching the fires and listening to Terry and the crew on our walkie-talkie, when Jack noticed that one of the burning piles had started to go out. “Got to go stoke that fire!” Jack said, as we suddenly went tearing across the desert at top speed. Of course he didn’t turn on his headlights, because that would have wrecked the shot. We were bouncing along at fifty miles per hour, which normally would have seemed like fun to me, but we were off the road and couldn’t see a thing in front of us in the moonless night. I started yelling at him to stop, but he kept going. Finally I screamed so loud there was nothing he could do but slam on the brakes.

Then we heard Terry’s voice over the radio. “Cut!”

Jack switched on the headlights. We were teetering inches away from a twenty-foot drop into a ravine. If I hadn’t screamed, we would have sailed off the edge and landed facedown, with no seat belts or air bags to save us. After that Jack was afraid not to listen to me.

Both Jack and Terry had this idea that the prairie was as flat as it looked, and they always took crazy risks driving around on it. One afternoon Terry wanted to shoot some scenes of Kit racing around in a stolen car on the open range. The crew turned a Corvair into a camera car because it had a rear engine and a trunk in the front. They removed the trunk lid and strapped Terry inside with a camera in his hands and a football helmet on his head, then someone drove the Corvair across the desert at top speed while Terry filmed. I’ll never forget the image of him zooming across the plains in a cloud of dust, wearing that silly football helmet.

It quickly became clear to everyone that Terry would die to get things right. He was—and is—an artist and a perfectionist. We’d be shooting one scene and he’d look over and the moon would be coming up, so we’d all drop everything and rush to get that shot. We were running around like the Channel 5 News Team, Terry later joked. Jack and I thought it was a brilliant and exciting way to work, but the crews tended to disagree. One morning Terry came out of his motel room with all the actors in tow. The production team had set up ahead of us down the road somewhere, but Terry liked the light where we were, so he said, “Okay, we’re gonna film here.” The producer said, “We can’t do that! We’ve already sent all the equipment over to the location!”

“I don’t care,” Terry said in his soft drawl. “I’m shooting here.”

There was a lot of eye-rolling among the camera operators and grips. Terry had never completed anything longer than that short in film school, and most of the crew figured they knew more than he did. Which may have been true. But Terry never lost sight of his vision, and he fought for every foot of film he shot. And he shot a lot of film. Thousands and thousands of feet; he was insatiable. By midsummer he was already over budget and behind schedule. It seemed like every day the production was about to be shut down for lack of funds.

The low point came when a special effects man named Roger George flew in from Hollywood to stage the fire in Holly’s house. Rather than build special sets to burn, he decided to film the fire inside an abandoned house—which seemed risky to Jack. But since George was the pro, everyone went along with him. Roger liked to coat everything with rubber cement and then light it up for dramatic effect. He and his team were walking around the house in gum boots, pouring rubber cement on piano keys and slathering it on walls. Everybody was getting lightheaded, including Jack, who stepped outside the house for some fresh air. The idea is to wait for the fumes to dissipate and then set a controlled burn in each room. But Roger’s young assistant apparently didn’t get that memo, because as soon as they were done, he lit the match. Roger was screaming, “Nooooooo!” when the house went up in a fireball. The crew, the cinematographer—everybody started diving out the windows. Roger ran outside, engulfed in flames. He had to be medevaced to a hospital in California, where he recovered from serious burns. It was a miracle that nobody was killed. The house burned to the ground, along with the equipment and the cameras.

After that, most of the crew quit, figuring they wouldn’t be paid. Only the actors and the art department lasted for the whole shoot, which went on for sixteen weeks. What remained of the crew operated out of my dressing trailer, which was the only vehicle left behind. I ended up catering their meals, which shows how desperate things had become. Luckily they enjoyed peanut butter and jelly.

But we soldiered on. Edward Pressman, one of the producers, needed to borrow more money to complete the film. He asked for $100,000 and the bank turned him down. Then Ed’s mother, a colorful and savvy businesswoman who ran the family toy company, stepped in to help. “Never think small,” she advised. So she went to the bank, asked for $1 million, and they gave her the $100,000 we needed to keep going.

By the time we wrapped, Jack was painting the leaves green at some of the locations, because the season had changed to fall. He and I rented a small U-Haul trailer and filled it with some of the treasures we’d saved from the set. Then we loaded Five into the red van and pointed it west on the interstate, heading back to Los Angeles and a new life together. As we were pulling out of La Junta, we passed Terry’s Volkswagen bus on the side of the road. He stood smiling next to it with his wife, Jill, his Great Dane, and an Aeroflex camera. He had about twelve rolls of film left, and he wanted some more nature shots.

It turns out that Terry Malick liked editing even more than he liked shooting film.
Badlands
took ten months to cut, and he decided to write an extended voice-over for my character to help knit together the narrative. He stapled quilts to the walls of one bedroom in his house, and we recorded the voice-over there. It is some of the most beautiful language ever written for film, and I still get chills hearing it. But it also contains the funniest, most deadpan lines I’ve ever read. “Kit shot a football. He said it was excess baggage.” Or, while looking out at the bleak, featureless landscape, Holly says, “Kit told me to enjoy the scenery, and I did.” The genius of
Badlands
is that Terry somehow made it possible for the audience to forgive Holly for her complicity in the murders because of her innocence and pliability. Or, as she puts it, “When Kit says ‘frog,’ I jump.”

When
Badlands
was finally finished, I went along with Terry to present it at the New York Film Festival. We were both exhausted, living on nerves and excitement, when we finally took our seats at the Lincoln Center premiere. Terry and I grabbed each other’s arm like kids as the film rolled along on the big screen. But we were shocked that the audience watched in utter silence.
Badlands
is by no means a comedy, yet there are many funny parts; but nobody even chuckled. There was applause at the end of the screening, but we had the sinking feeling that the audience didn’t get the film. Or maybe they thought it was inappropriate to laugh at a couple of killers, no matter how ironic or funny the lines.

But no matter. The critics loved
Badlands
and instantly recognized it as a landmark in American cinema, even though it would never be a hit at the box office. The studio didn’t know what to do with it, how to market it. But I realized even then that I had been a part of something great. I’d been a part of making a nearly perfect movie, and if I never did another film again, it would be okay, because it was enough to have done
Badlands.

Terry Malick went on to direct a succession of brilliant, complex films, from
Days of Heaven
to
The Tree of Life
, always with Jack by his side as production designer. But nothing has ever really matched the magic of discovery we all felt that summer in the Colorado desert, when we learned how a film could be a living, breathing, collaborative work of art.

… 10 …

“What’s the man I’ll marry gonna look like? What’s he doing right this minute? Is he thinking about me now, by some coincidence, even though he doesn’t know me? Does it show on his face?”

—Holly Sargis,
Badlands

Just like Holly in Terry’s script, when I was a girl, I used to daydream about the man I would spend my life with. What does he look like? What’s he doing right now? It turns out that while I was looking up at the sky in Texas, trying to imagine my dream partner, Jack Fisk was growing up in Illinois and Virginia, watching the same moon and wondering the same thing. How lucky we were to have found each other, and at just the right time. If we had met a few years earlier, when I wanted to be a rock star and he was a painter, we might have sailed right by each other. But now all either of us wanted to do was be artists and make films. It was already impossible to imagine a life apart.

We were a perfect match. I always fell for the tall, dark, handsome guys. And Jack had always dated strawberry blondes, starting with his first grade girlfriend, Maude, who I’m told looked a lot like me. When we showed each other the childhood photos we carried with us, both of us proudly holding up fish we had caught, it looked like we could have grown up in the same neighborhood. We would have been friends. Jack was like my brothers: kind, straightforward, with a great disposition and a sense of humor—and more than a little mischief. Most of all, when I was with him, I felt like I could be myself. I didn’t have to pretend I knew things I didn’t, or be cooler or smarter than I was. He thought I was beautiful and intelligent, and he liked me the way I was. And if that was okay with him, it was okay with me, too.

Jack and I spent hours and hours telling each other stories about our childhoods and our families. Jack Alan Fisk Jr. was born in Ipava, Illinois, a small village tucked into the cornfields between Peoria and the Mississippi River. His ancestry is German, Swedish, French, English, and Cherokee Indian, a heritage that expresses itself in his high cheekbones and dark hair. His grandfather owned and operated Ipava’s only funeral home and furniture store, and his dad, Jack Sr., was expected to go into the family business. He met and married Geraldine Rosalind Otto while they were both in college, and their first child, Susan, was born in 1941. Jack Sr. was in undertaking school in Chicago when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and he immediately signed up with the army air corps. After pilot training, he was assigned to the 475th Fighter Squadron, flying P-38s in the Pacific theater. He rose through the ranks to captain and earned a Distinguished Flying Cross as an ace pilot with seven confirmed kills. According to family lore, Jack Sr. flew on a combat mission with Charles Lindbergh, who was then a civilian, training U.S. pilots how to conserve fuel. When they ran into a Japanese warplane in the skies over New Guinea, Lindbergh shot him down. Because he wasn’t supposed to be shooting at anything, Lindbergh wanted to award the kill to Jack Sr. “Let Fisk take it,” he said. But word of the dogfight got back to the army brass, who grounded Lindy and sent him home.

After Jack Sr. returned from the war, the family lived together in a house across from a small park, and he reluctantly went back to work as an undertaker. Jack was born in December 1945, and nineteen months after that came another daughter, Mary. Jack was a happy, imaginative little boy. I loved the story he told me about sitting on the front steps of his family’s house in Ipava, watching a man mowing the grass in the little park across the street. Jack could hardly believe his eyes; the man had a pet monkey that rode on the top of the mower. So every Saturday Jack would sit patiently on the front steps and wait for the man with the monkey on the mower to cut the grass. He loved that monkey and would watch it for hours. Finally one day, he couldn’t stand it any longer, and he ran across the road to get a better look. But when he got up close, the monkey was gone. Jack was crestfallen. The monkey on the mower was just a big, black gas-powered engine. So Jack ran back across the street, sat down on the steps, and there was the monkey again, riding on top of the mower.