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VOLUME 1 — NUMBER 2.5 |
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Around the Block THE THINGS I DO FOR MONEY My friend and coworker Justin and I had been stopped by security. Justin rolled down his window. “Who are you here to see?” the plump, squat security guard asked him. “Jim Mazzola.” The guard turned away from us and spoke into her walkie-talkie. A moment later, a burst of static came forth, presumably instructions. The guard cheerfully waved us towards the parking lot and said we were to await Jim in front of a low, long brick building. The movie lot was an inauspicious office complex, located mere minutes from where my boyfriend lives in Lower Bucks County, consisting of a cluster of several more low, long brick buildings and a sizeable parking lot, all enclosed by a chain link fence and a sign reading REBELLION FILMS. Justin and I had gotten a gig helping to make typed and handwritten props, respectively, for a movie that we figured was a local indie. As we parked the car, I noticed some big white tents and construction vehicles around the parking lot. A few large pieces of what looked like chunks of a planet spilled out of one of the tents. Coming out of the building toward us was a tanned, mustached, middle-aged man wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers. He smiled at us, and when he spoke, he had a New York accent made pleasantly gravelly by years of cigarettes. As he shook our hands, I noticed the gold pinky ring that I think just about every Italian man over the age of thirty-five wears. He’s like a movie set Mafioso, I thought. “You must be Justin, and you are...?” “Raquel.” “Welcome. Thanks for coming. Come on in here.” He led us into the first of the nondescript buildings. As we walked down a long hallway, I mentally cataloged various small offices, hastily constructed using pieces of plywood and with typed signs taped to the doors. Casting. Extras. Set Design. Jim led us into an office labeled, appropriately enough, “Props” and sat us down around his desk. The room was crammed with stuff. Each of the cinderblock walls was lined with shelves that held dozens of duplicates of seemingly random items: suitcases, beach chairs, cereal boxes. On the walls were photos of several different Siamese cats and little notes with phone numbers. Jim’s cell phone and desk phone both rang numerous times while he was talking with us. “So how much do you know about what you’ll be doing here?” A little. Justin knew he’d be typing some sort of manuscript. I knew I’d be handwriting in a journal. “Right. Listen, I gotta run out real quick. Why don’t you guys read these scenes from the script to get an idea of what your props will be and I’ll be right back?” He handed us two black binders, opened to the appropriate pages, and was gone. He didn’t come right back — in fact, he took quite some time. Of course Justin and I both finished reading our scenes rather quickly, so we flipped the pages in the binders. Jim had stressed that the project was confidential, but who was I going to tell? It was just an indie. I found a scene with a Siamese cat in it — hence the pictures on the wall, I deduced. Imagine having to find the right Siamese cat to be a prop. I turned to the title page of the script. Under the title, the name was “M. Night Shyamalan.” “Justin... are you seeing this?” I asked in a whisper. (The plywood partitions meant that noise traveled too easily.) “Holy fucking shit. Is this...?” “This is a Shyamalan movie ” So much for indie. The boy-wonder director had come home. “Dude, this is unbelievable. Wow.” Jim came bustling back in, and we hastily shuffled the pages in our binders back to the original scenes. “Did you get a chance to look at your scenes?” he asked. We nodded. He turned on a fan and lit a cigarette. “Did you look at anything else?” Justin and I looked at each other. Justin spoke. “Yeah, we sort of looked at the front... is... this?” Jim chuckled. “Yeah. It’s Night’s next movie. I was hoping you’d get a better idea of it.” He grinned. “So you get what you’re doing? You,” he gestured at Justin, “are typing up a manuscript of this book that one of the guys, who Night is playing, has been working on, with these really radical, earth-shattering ideas. And you,” he turned to me, “are creating these journals with passages that Paul Giamatti’s character has written, and that the girl comes out and reads... she cries and the tears smear the page. Very dramatic.” Paul-freakin’ — Sideways — and — American-Splendor — Giamatti? Oh man. It was all too good. Jim was fabulous. He regaled us with stories about how he used to work with Woody Allen, and how he’d seen the Twin Towers fall from his kitchen window. Justin and I couldn’t believe we would be getting paid for all this. Later that afternoon, Justin left with an old typewriter and a ream of cream-colored paper under his arm. I had a pile of blank journal notebooks in which I had to copy a selection of four pages, over and over again, to provide them with numerous copies of the page that the tear would fall on and smudge. Jim showed me how the pages would be coated in a special, clear chemical that made ink smear and run. Very dramatic indeed. We went back to see Jim a few times during our work on our props, and he showed us a lot of other amazing things. He showed us a laser light that made things like rocks and jewelry sparkle when you trained it on them, but that would burn your retinas if you looked into it too long. He showed us a huge blank wall against which a scene of a city street had been portrayed and in front of which a car had driven, to give the illusion of a busy city street. He showed us my favorite prop of all, a tall silver stand with a piece of wire thinner than human hair hanging from it, and from the end of the wire hung a monarch butterfly. Using a remote control, he could make the butterfly flap and flutter so realistically it made my stomach jump to think that it wasn’t real. On one of our trips to the lot, he pointed out the fact that a huge chunk of the parking lot, previously occupied by construction vehicles, was slowly turning into a movie set consisting of an apartment building with an in-ground pool. As in, they hired professional pool installers to install a fully functional in-ground pool. He also gave me a journal with a sample of Paul Giamatti’s handwriting in it. Amazingly, my own handwriting looked quite like his. I was excited. But then came the grueling work of actually filling page after page with handwriting using a fine-point, felt-tipped black pen. I had to copy the same four pages of text seemingly endless times onto the pages in a certain section of each journal. And I had to use Sharpie pens to do it, because apparently Sharpies smear best. I single-handedly (pun intended?) nearly gave myself carpal tunnel syndrome and tendonitis and also got incredibly light-headed from inhaling so much Sharpie pen while working in a small, unventilated room. I wrote, and wrote, and wrote. I wrote until the tips of my fingers turned black, and the smell of fresh air felt strange in my nostrils, and the fleshy part of my palm under my thumb was swollen and tender. I had never found writing to be such a physically challenging task in my life. Justin, meanwhile, happily type-typed about a dozen or so pages on the old typewriter, then took them to Staples, ran off a few dozen copies, and stacked them together neatly to make them look like an entire manuscript. Ta-da. Oh, what grueling labor. “Don’t hurt yourself there, buddy,” I growled at him from across said small, unventilated room (which happened to be our office), where I had entirely given up on my day job in order to write in the journals. “It was kind of fun, thinking up ideas for what to type,” he said, throwing his ever-present plastic bottle of Wawa water into the air and catching it. I wanted to smash it into his skull. He had no idea what real work was like. I was really working. I was the one working, hunched over my desk, copying the same words over and over again, as my eyes teared and swam, feeling the insides of my sinuses erode as I inhaled the ink of Sharpie after Sharpie. Because let me tell you, I went through Sharpies. Did I ever. I went through eight of them. I pulled all-nighters to finish these things, driving to the movie set at odd hours to drop them off one by one and braving the astounding idiocy of the security guards, who couldn’t get it through their heads that I was working for the movie, too, and who didn’t seem to understand the concept of paging a person. On one of my journal drop-off forays, when I had nearly not been allowed into the lot by a security guard who reminded me of a giant, lumbering peanut on legs, I had been instructed to meet Jim out at the set, which from my vantage point looked like a house with the front of it stripped away. I could see into rooms and saw tools and cameras and a scaffolding device that was really an elevator. He was delighted with the journal. “This looks just like his handwriting. Come on, let me show you a little of the set.” We walked through a short hallway of plywood and suddenly I found myself in the middle of a two-story U-shaped apartment complex, with an in-ground pool in the middle surrounded by grass. Each of the apartments had different drapes in the windows. Behind the front doors of most of them was — nothing. As we walked around the set, he pointed out a small cabin across from the pool. “That’s where Paul’s character, who takes care of the apartments, lives.” He walked me back across the set. “Oh hey, Paul,” he said. “Come here.” A man, trailed by a clipboard-bearing woman I assumed was his assistant, turned around. It was Paul-freakin’ — Sideways — and — American-Splendor — Giamatti. “Paul, this is Raquel. She’s the one who made the journals for you.” He handed Paul one of the journals. Paul flipped through it. “Hey, this looks great. You can actually read this. ” He turned and smiled at me. “Thanks a lot.” “You’re welcome,“ I said, because what else was I supposed to say? You are brilliant? You are a good actor? I have a weird, geeky, intellectual crush on the characters you play? No. Then I would have been labeled “Stark staring mad star-struck fan” and Lumpy the security guard would have come to haul my Sharpie-stained ass outta there. As Jim led me off the set, I couldn’t help thinking that Paul looked shorter in person. So that was that. My big run-in with the silver screen. I never met Night (though I think Jim wanted me to; after I met Paul, he’d called up to the second floor of the set to see if Night was up there, but I have to admit I was a little relieved when they said he wasn’t, because I have no idea what I would have said to him other than “Hello” and “I didn’t like Unbreakable. ”). But a couple of weeks later, I did get a nice check in the mail for all my Sharpie-sniffing, tendonitis-inducing work, and I got quite an interesting story to share. So share I did. And, when previews for the movie started coming out in theaters, I got an excited message from one of my friends: “Oh my God, I saw the preview for your movie, and there’s a scene where you can see your journal and I got so excited!” All this excitement! Over a book! In my movie! So naturally I ran to my computer and downloaded the trailer ( http://ladyinthewater.warnerbros.com), and yes... yes, you can see a corner of my journal, where it sits on his lap, Paul’s lap, Paul-freakin’-shorter-in-person-Giamatti’s lap, as his character sits and contemplates the words he wrote, but which in actuality I wrote, and suddenly I feel a surge of pride that I was able to create something used by another human being — even if its ultimate purpose was just to be slathered in a coat of chemicals in order to be artistically destroyed — and even if I won’t like this movie and even if the only reason Justin and I go to see it and drag all our friends with us is because we made two of the props in it, it all seems worth it. Not a bad way to make a coupla bucks.
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