Upgunned (18 page)

“We're in the last week of prep, and I really shouldn't be playing hooky,” Tripp said. His bright crimson cap featured an embroidered logo for a movie called
Spyscope.
“Fortunately the other guy was there for preproduction, and got shots of the sets being built and the first costume fittings for the actors. We're covered, just barely.”

The first two weeks of shooting were in New York City—the real one, not Toronto. Then there came what Tripp called a “company move” to Arizona for four more weeks. As typical with the madhouse musical chairs of moviemaking, the last scenes in the script were the first to shoot since they were in and around Manhattan, front-loading the project with permits, crowd control, and the usual baksheesh needed for shooting exteriors in a densely populated urban environment that had a valuable and unique recognition factor. The Arizona part was more about interiors (sets on soundstages, for the New York part) and exteriors without the whirligig crush of Big Apple streets.

At first I holed up in a beach hotel on the Pacific Coast Highway—never mind which one. The cash I pulled down from my credit cards in the one-day window before I shredded them had helped. I called Tripp from my barely working pay phone every day at 5:00
P.M.
EST. I developed a relationship with that pay phone. It became my mute ally, an old soldier still standing, perhaps to be uprooted after it had served me.

Tripp's sense of obligation and friendship was grounded in my old life. He had lived in my loft for a month while his third marriage fell apart on account of his wife's enthusiastic search to find her inner lesbian. Hayley had hit age forty and was desperately trying to hone a new edge to prove she was still part of the world, and her own woman. Too desperately. Whatever. She had treated Tripp like a predictably dull life choice and dumped him as though he were the jerk. It was immature and pointless, compounded by the fact that Tripp actually loved her.

Ouch. This sounded uncomfortably familiar.

I also did my best to matchmake Tripp with a few of the less-toxic models I knew, which sounded oxymoronic. In return for their version of kindness, a couple of them reaped walk-on bits, day player gigs, and one of them, Inocencia Sanchez, lasted nearly six months. Inocencia was doing Bloomingdale's spreads now.

Tripp had a single off day as general of his multilimbed production juggernaut, and he used it to fly out and run a quick face-to-face with me in hopes of getting the true story, the one not for public consumption. The unrated cut. Once I filled him in, he demonstrated how involved he was by extending his stay—distance is the best excuse of all, and can work miracles—long enough to work out the alternate identity scam, and now we were both headed back east.

I had forgotten I had friends of this caliber.

As Joey might have said, it was a mute point.

Time to go, time to go.

I worried more about Joey than any other person on the West Coast. I hoped his street smarts would keep him clear of the firing line, if Gun Guy chose to probe that deeply or become that insanely petty. I hoped my entire catastrophe passed him by like a jet skimming perilously close to the earth before crashing, changing Joey's life no more than a tragic news item from a foreign country. If I could get through the next six weeks and make a properly professional showing of myself, then perhaps I could risk a single contact with him to find out whether any flaming debris had landed near him.

Calling him right now was against my new set of life rules.

Then there was the puzzler of the gun. I had it and Gun Guy did not, which was another motivation probably sufficient to expedite my death. I tried to dispose of it like the cell phone, but it lingered in my grasp until I began to enjoy the weight and heft of it; its implicit guarantee of protection against harm. It was somehow karmically wrong to merely abandon it. Now I understood the mass and lure of killing hardware, the easy seduction of its mechanics. This was a thing designed to extend your reach and knock down those who would imperil you. And it was a lot better reminder than a mere bullet, which I had taken to keeping in my pocket.

I know—stupid, wrong, dumb. File a lawsuit if you care.

I found an online diagram and after several false tries, I succeeded in making the Kimber's two main sections come apart—the slide and the frame. Push a release and it's done, not dissimilar to breaking down a camera for cleaning. The clip with the bullets was a third yet equal part. That came out when you pressed a little button on the right side of the handgrip. With the slide off, you could remove the mainspring and the barrel. The online guide said you should change the barrel every 800 rounds but I was not sure what that meant. There was no need to take out the spring or the barrel. I just wanted to break the weapon down into smaller pieces so I could adequately conceal it among my camera gear, which totaled two large pro cases I could safely check. I always used Pelicans, which were airtight and waterproof, like little indestructible safes on wheels. Practically everything in them looked like a weapon, and Tripp and I had the added sanction of special dispensation for movie folks in a hurry.

I was especially proud of the way I hid the ammunition.

The cartridges were coated in some kind of sealant. During coffee at an internet pit stop with rental consoles, I found out that such lacquered ammo can prevent bomb dogs from sniffing the gunpowder. With a bit of coaxing the bullets fit into a tube support for the case feet (if you have seen
From Russia with Love
you know what I'm talking about; that's where I got the inspiration). They would not rattle around and were now invisible to X-ray. They totaled nine; Gun Guy had come packing a full magazine plus one in the chamber of the Kimber. The argot was “nine is fine.” He had fired that bonus round at me in the darkroom. I replaced it with my souvenir slug, preserving an oddly pleasant symmetry.

Smuggling an undeclared firearm onto an airplane? I was already learning new skills. To get caught with the gun inside Manhattan would be a pure felony. Hell, even having the bullet in my pocket there was a crime. But I needed and liked the sense of the weapon and ammo near to hand. I chose not to tell Tripp about it. Mine; private.

The outright relief of leaving L.A. behind me buffered my head as though an anvil had just been lifted away. I got drunk on the flight and slept through most of it. Waking up on the other side of the country, despite the wrongness of the hour, was very much like rousing from a bad dream.

*   *   *

When I first met Andrew Collier, he was pointing a gun in my direction. Actually, he was staring through the empty chambers of the cylinder on a formidable revolver. At least it was unloaded.

Collier was British, pink-cheeked, and tousle-haired, his manner that of a big kid set loose to play in the fields of celluloid. He resembled an aging Beatle. The production offices for the New York leg of
Vengeance Is
were set up in a building between the Battery Maritime structure and East River Park. The director's sanctum was three times bigger than it needed to be and everything was crowded toward one busywork corner with his desk as the hub. None of the chairs matched. Production drawings and photographs were pinned and Blu-Tacked to the walls but with no sense of organization because everybody was set to vacate in two weeks. It was typical for an on-site combat office.

“Colt Navy .36, converted from cap and ball to a revolver,” Collier said proudly. “Look at this thing. It's almost an Expressionist gun.”

“Is this a Western?” I said after Tripp had introduced us. I could not tell if the pistol was real, or a prop. Today Tripp's blue cap had an iron-on logo for
Covert Reprisals.

“No genre,” Collier said with an air of rehearsed speech. “If you like, an urban Western crossover. I wanted no fixed time or place; I tried not to have any character make conventional phone calls or watch television.”

“Drive the product placement folks bananas,” said Tripp, who had changed into the workwear I would see on him for the entire shoot: jogging duds, an old garrison belt adangle with a fanny pack, a sling for his water bottle and a holster for his walkie, which was wired to a headset I never saw him without. And of course, one of his bazillion crew hats.

“Yes, I wanted all our brand names to be invented,” said Collier. “Labels, signage, that sort of thing. Makes for a better created reality.”

Collier struck me as the sort of fellow who had all his day wear tailored, but had fourteen identical sets racked in a closet somewhere so it always looked like he was wearing the same clothes, with minor variations in pastel tones. A lot of “creatives” affected this shortcut system attributed to, I believe, Albert Einstein: don't squander valuable thought or waste time by selecting an ensemble. Yet Collier's dunnage was another peculiar form of rank: the director was always well-dressed, but not overdressed, his starched cuffs folded to mid-forearm to indicate he was already ready to work.

I smiled. This would drive fashion hounds berserk. I had entered a different realm for sure.

Yet much of the basic playbook was the same. The schedule was the gang boss of all that unfolded. There was never enough time for anything. You had to be nimble enough to adapt and improvise on the spot. Hot lights, cranky subjects, and an eternity of waiting for the right light or makeup rescues followed by activity that was often fast and frantic. As Tripp said, you have to be able to jump out of the chopper and start shooting, hence the term “run and gun.”

Vengeance Is
was run and gun because the studio had amputated a week off the original shooting schedule for budgetary reasons, which meant Tripp had to hustle in order to make the six-day weeks add up. Two of his most important jobs involved Gordo, his highly caffeinated first assistant director: at the end of each day, they had to somehow juggle and rejigger the schedule to fit the
next
day of madness, and they worked in concert to keep the lurking producers off Collier's back so something useful might actually be shot. The whole system was elegant and hair-triggered; one had to account for every variable from runaway egos to unforecast rain.

I was introduced to roughly seventy people over the next twelve hours. I did not have a hope in hell of remembering every crew name when I was having trouble remembering my own.

Gordo's job description was more akin to master sergeant or ramrod on a cattle drive. Just look for the person on the set with the bullhorn, the khaki shorts, and the climbing boots, and that will usually be the first AD, especially if he or she is yelling into the bullhorn or requesting a “20” (seeking some crew member's location) on a walkie.

In Gordo's company Tripp and I trooped around the production offices and met everybody from the DP to Crafty. The former was Konstantin Vendredi, the cinematographer, the guy who shoots the movie. I resisted calling him DP for director of photography because of Joey's whole double-penetration anecdote. The latter was Molly Bellerose, reigning diva of craft services—the snack-and-drink watering hole that is the second-most valuable thing to locate on an active set, after the nearest restroom. To a person the crew all greeted me warmly—as Julian Hightower—and eyed my camera with suspicion. Tripp had just finished a dustup with the fellow responsible for video documentation, whose name always slipped me; Collier did not want him on the set during shooting and the faraway gods of executive production had decreed otherwise.

Video documentarian, I learned from Tripp, was possibly the lowest form of life on a film set, below even the screenwriter … practically under the floor. This hapless individual was charged with intruding camera-first into every aspect of filming on behalf of the eventual DVD making-of supplements. Nobody really liked him yet everybody tolerated him as an inevitable engine of relentless surveillance. Nobody wanted to get caught on tape disparaging work conditions on tough days or bitching about another crew member. Everybody tried to pretend a lens was not always in their face—yet, months later, they got irritated if they could not spot themselves in the behind-the-scenes footage. One frequent accusation was that the guy with the roving camera was actually a spy for the higher-ups. All I knew was that I did not wish to inadvertently appear on some podcast done for an online diary about
Vengeance Is,
which would be counterproductive.

So naturally it fell to me to share office space with this fellow.

Then, as Tripp had to catch up from going AWOL, I was remanded to my hotel with a copy of the screenplay that was joyous with multicolored revision pages.

I hated screenplays. There's a lot of argument over whether their manufacture constituted an art or a craft, similar to the artistic caveats targeted at photography. The debate held that pictures and movies (hence, moving pictures) were documentation, as opposed to paintings and prose, which were supposed more stylistically representative. The conflict was basically good for wasting time in a coffeehouse if you're an idiot college student. Making a living at anything remotely defined as an art form could straighten your priorities out superquick.

A script is essentially a blueprint for visual storytelling—without any pictures. The agreement between scenarist and reader is to imagine angles, tone, whether characters have distinguishing marks or not. A lot of people can't suspend disbelief in a fictional movie narrative anymore, not even when all the work is done for them. Their capacity for dreaming awake has become that atrophied. The lack of visual augmentation in any film script irritates me in a bemused way. At the same time, I knew I was being asked to help interpret a production visually, to convey my own sense of attitude and composition in regard to a larger work controlled by outside forces. It was like being a war correspondent on some foreign front. My job here was to file dispatches and fabricate a historical record; not a notion that charmed me. But I was able to enjoy the sense of disengagement from my previous life as Elias, that poor dope still stuck in the merry-go-round clusterfuck that was the world of Clavius.