Low Angles, Page 2

  Winding vaguely north down the perilous two lane road, I took in the mountains looming left and right, eucalypti breaking the sunshine into hot shards and cool splotches. A hairpin curve around a knoll, then a short, rolling valley infested with a hamlet announced by a rusty, bullet-plugged sign: Calisher Rotary, Wednesday Noon, Riverview Motel.

  Slowing to thirty, I rolled past the motel on the right, a dirt crossroad, a trailer park full of giant metal slugs, and a meadow; then the stores on my left gave out and I spotted a dust cloud rising behind them. The buzz of motorcycle engines drifted in.

  Must be that dirt road. I turned around, drove south through the village, then west on rutted clay toward the dust and insect cycle drone. An even smaller track branched to the right and disappeared over the lip of a depression. I parked and walked in.

  It was the town dump, a great clay bowl half filled with bedsprings, boxes, jalopies, appliances, great mounds of cardboard subsiding into compost and at the far side, the tinny clutter of a movie company. The camera and reflectors were aimed to my right, so I trudged leftward to avoid them, around the rim and down among the happy crew of Cycles from Hell.

  I found a bargain basement shoot: a venerable Arriflex 35BL camera with a ten-to-one Angenieux zoom lens atop a fluid pan head atop an Italian spider dolly. Three or four banks of quartz lights, so they had a generator someplace, but mostly square reflectors on tubing stands. A few director’s chairs with patent umbrellas clamped to their arms. It seemed that I’d wandered through a time warp into a film school of the seventies.

  Cast members lounged under a canvas shade that also shielded a table sagging under coffee urn, water dispenser, and the usual donuts, rebaking in the desert heat. Several vans and cars and a sprawl of Harley-Davidson bikes under their own shade canopy.

  People clustered in distinct groups: scruffy bikers in leather and denim uniforms, crew in baseball caps and work boots, many sporting cute T-shirts (Electricians Are Juicier. Edith Head Gave Great Costume) cast members in makeup with tissue buffers tucked into their collars.

  A grip carrying hammer, spirit level, and a handful of wooden wedges was truing up the dolly tracks: checking them with the level, tapping wedges beneath the low spots, double-checking. The assistant cameraman fussed with the Arri: removing the lens and blowing out the film gate with a syringe, adjusting the clamped umbrella to shade the film magazine.

  Diane LaMotta stood in the meager shadow of a grip truck, flipping pages of her script and peering at it through reading glasses. She held sunglasses by one earpiece, in her mouth.

  As I approached, the unabashed male in me took automatic inventory: thick hiking boots and short red socks, brown legs whose sleek lines were only slightly marred by knobby knees, khaki walking shorts, and seersucker shirt of the kind displayed in preppie catalogs. Overall: a lanky frame set off by pleasant local ripenesses. Strong hands with short nails and a plastic K-Mart watch on one wrist. Thick pigtails, colored Clairol auburn, pulled her hair defiantly off slightly oversized ears.

  “Ms. LaMotta? I’m Stoney Winston.” In close-up, she was perhaps as old as thirty about two years younger than I am.

  She looked up and down my six-foot-two as if making a similar survey, checking out my short brown hair, Roman nose with chin to match, and a frame that didn’t exactly strain the fabric of my polo shirt and jeans. I recalled that my third-best sneakers were tatty, but stopped myself from glancing down at them.

  She looked me in the eye again. “You didn’t waste any time.” Her large gray eyes were as hostile as her tone.

  “Greystoke said to be here this morning. How’s it going?”

  “Just dandy until a minute ago.” She snapped the script shut and clamped it in a protective armpit. “So how do we play it? Do you throw me off the set or just whisper orders in my ear?”

  “Not necessarily either.”

  “Shall we cut the crap? Greystoke sent you to take over the picture. Simmons’s phone call made that clear.” She had the kind of husky voice that could purr when happy. Now, however, it carried an abrasive rasp.

  “I don’t work for Simmons, and Greystoke told me to do whatever was needed.”

  “Whatever was...” She turned away toward the grip truck and addressed it grimly: “I’m not going to play this game.”

  “Ms. LaMotta, I don’t like this any better than you do.”

  She swung back to look at me. “I’ll just bet.” We held a four-second staring competition, then she whipped off the reading glasses and put on her shades. “What did you have to do to Greystoke to grease in here?”

  “This isn’t going to help a tough situation.”

  “Then unmake the situation: get your ass in gear and get out; leave me the hell alone.” She opened the script at random and pretended to study it. I thought of reminding her to put on her reading glasses, but suppressed the impulse.

  “We both know I’m not going to do that.”

  “Then any time you feel like taking over, you come and announce it to everybody.” Her voice rose: “And if you get up the courage to do that, which I doubt, I’m going to tell you and everybody else just what I think of little suck-up no-talent creeps who stab people in the back. In the meantime, stay the hell out of my sight.”

  People fifty feet away were turning to look. “Can we talk about this quietly?”

  She paused, pulled her mouth into a straight line, then moved close until the six-inch difference in our heights forced her to look up at my face. “Maybe we can. Start with some answers: who is trying to close down this movie?”

  “How so?”

  “Give me a break!” She took a deep breath and lowered her voice again. “All right, one: Simmons is the producer but he’s never even showed up. Two: the bikers turn out to be amateurs who never acted in their lives. Three: the D.P. is bombed half the time and the key grip does nothing but argue with me, and four: the production manager walked out yesterday.”

  “Why?”

  “‘Problems,’ he said. ‘Delays. Poor cooperation.’’’

  “Anything more specific?”

  “Isn’t that funny? He was somewhat evasive about details.” Her growl turned bitter: “I have three more weeks to shoot eight weeks’ worth of stuff. Twenty-five people to wrangle, and no production manager.”

  “I’m replacing him.”

  “That’s not true and you know it.”

  I started to say “I’m only supposed...”

  But she exploded. “Why are you giving me this shit?”

  I could understand her anger but her abrasiveness was growing tiresome. “Why don’t you try listening for a minute?”

  “Why don’t you go fuck a hot Harley tail pipe!”

  With this quaint topical allusion, Diane LaMotta loped away toward the waiting camera.

  “That’s what you call your basic New York mouth.” The familiar gravel baritone came from above and behind. As I turned, the grip truck passenger door opened to disgorge Stogie Rucker in the flesh, about 270 pounds of it. “Good to seeya, Winston, howya been?” Stogie rolled forward, impeccable in starched yellow sport shirt and tan slacks belted just south of his solar plexus, where his girth is a foot less than at mid-paunch. It keeps his pants up. At five feet-six, Stogie resembles a weather balloon with a big white moustache.

  He relit his dinky trademark cigar with a vintage Zippo and shook my hand. “So you’re taking over.”

  “Just helping. Front office thinks there’s trouble here.”

  “They’re right, for a change.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “The usual: twenty-hour days; crappy equipment; four weeks to shoot a whole goddam feature; nonunion crew. Like I said, the usual.”

  “You’re union: I. A.”

  “And I ain’t even here, am I? But things get slow sometimes you know how it is. Gotta keep myself in bourbon and cigars.”

  “I know the feeling. You the key grip?” He nodded shortly. “Any problems with the director?”
br />   Stogie spat precisely ten inches from his gleaming Hush Puppies - he could shoot films in a colliery and not get smudged - and gazed off toward the camera. “Myself, I think she knows her business. She works fast and she don’t ask me for unrealistic stuff.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You know how it is: some directors want a hundred yards of track for one goddam shot. Then they want a hundred more at right angles. Not her. She calls for track and then builds half a day’s setups on it. That kinda thing.”

  “She thinks someone’s screwing her movie.”

  Stogie chortled. “Ever know a director who didn’t?”

  “So it’s just her paranoia?”

  He bestowed slightly more attention on his cigar butt than it seemed to warrant. “Probably.”

  “But not definitely?”

  After a shrug that did interesting things to his belt line, Stogie gazed off toward the crew and camera. “Ya get a feeling, you see what I mean? Like things just ain’t gettin’ done. Ah, who knows?”

  “How about the crew?”

  “What about ‘em?”

  “Taking orders from a woman.”

  “My boys take orders from me.”

  “And you?”

  Stogie measured the horizon through gold aviator bifocals, smoothing his thick silver mane. Then he sighed. “Everything changes. Got to, I guess. Hell, I don’t know - today there’s nothing but pussies. Everyone’s a pussy.”

  “I think she’d resent that.”

  He spat again, disgusted. “Naw, I mean pussy pussies; men, broads makes no difference. Not like the old days.” Then, as if embarrassed by this sneak attack of nostalgia, he grunted and stepped on his cigar butt. “Break’s over, I guess.”

  Stogie waddled toward the crew, pulling a crushed trucker’s cap from his belt and settling it on his head.

  * * * *

  I spent the rest of the morning watching the shoot, then mingled with the crew at lunch. I knew a couple of them and they confirmed Stogie: it was the usual ultra-low-budget shoot: long days full of two-take setups and desperate improvisations.

  Sean Parker had the lead: a beautiful hunk with an ego as big as his shoulders and the brain of a gerbil. He’d done a TV series until cocaine made him too unreliable to hire.

  The bikers had been recruited from a local club, “The Crossbones,” and they had little to do in the film but roar around and raise hell, which they managed with authentic banality. Greasy, thuggish men and sallow women, they said little for the national gene pool.

  They were kept in line, more or less, by one Pits Caudle, a stocky man of fifty with a face moon-cratered by ancient acne, who translated the director’s instructions into biker argot and saw to it that his scabrous troops carried them out.

  Shooting resumed after lunch, with Diane LaMotta in six places at once, spotting the camera, blocking actors, checking makeup.

  Her energy was impressive, as I’d already discovered. She would approve the lens and angle, rehearse the cast, talk the bikers through their background roles, order a take, consult the cameraman, order another, break the setup, and move decisively to the next one - usually at a half trot.

  The crew seemed willing enough but slow, and the fat, balding cameraman displayed a telltale lethargy following a lunchtime disappearance. Diane had said he was drunk half the time. All in all, she was pushing forward, but she couldn’t keep this up without a production manager.

  The sequence they were shooting covered the biker hero’s return from jail to a gang whose interim mentor was ungracious about restoring the post to his predecessor. Now they were jousting for it on bikes in the arena of the dump, swinging castoff lumber lances and torturing their howling metal mounts. Pits Caudle was the stunt coordinator, which seemed a dangerous idea, considering his evident ignorance of movie stunt work.

  I made myself inconspicuous behind Diane LaMotta, who was instructing the leading man. “Now he chases you up this dead-end slot, Sean, and you see it’s too narrow to turn in. You’ve lost your two-by-four and you’re trapped. You’re in the foreground. You look around, see him coming down on you, look ahead. We cut in a shot of this plywood panel on the trash pile there see, it’s like a ramp. It’s that or nothing, so you gun the bike and roar out of frame.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then your stunt double shoots the ramp.”

  “No way, lady. The people pay to see me do that shit. It’s only three or four feet anyway.”

  “I can’t risk that. Now let’s rehearse.”

  Mr. Wonderful caught her by the arm: “Look, girlie, you don’t tell me what I do and what I don’t. I’m going to start where he breaks my two-by-four. He swings; I swerve around him; then I make a clean approach and climb the ramp. All one shot.”

  “No.”

  “Then I walk. Here, hold up the bike.” He flipped it at her so that she caught three hundred pounds of off-balance motorcycle and staggered as she fought to keep it upright. The leading man strolled away, but not so fast that she couldn’t recall him.

  LaMotta stared after him venomously, then checked her watch; squinted at the sun. “Okay; your way.” She stood back and let the cycle drop.

  Sean looked foolish as he tried to wrestle the bike up from the ground, while the crew swiftly positioned the camera to catch the action and then follow Sean over the plywood ramp. They read the light, threw some foreground fill from a reflector, and got ready to slate.

  LaMotta crouched umpire-style behind the camera. “Places, people. Slate in.”

  The assistant cameraman spelled “27A 1" on his slate with lettered pieces of cloth tape while the property master handed Sean a duplicate of the two-by-four stud broken in the previous shot. The opposing biker gunned his motorcycle and skidded into his start position.

  “Roll.”

  “Speed,” from the sound man.

  “Mark it.”

  “Twenty-seven apple, take 1.” Clack!

  “Give me some dust.” A grip threw a double handful of dirt at the rear wheel of Sean’s bike, filling the air with dust.

  “Action.”

  The two knights revved their big Harley-Davidsons and snarled across the pocky clay, waving their wooden studs in clumsy left-handed arcs, since their right hands were needed for their handlebar throttles. The two-by-fours connected and Sean’s snapped in half, as the property master had prepared it to do.

  Fat Stogie tapped the dolly grip and the camera eased down its track toward the spot from which it would cover Sean’s launch.

  The bikers skidded around to face each other, revved again, and resumed the combat. As Sean’s rival swung his stud, the star veered out of range, came back on course, howled past the camera in a cloud of choking dust, screeched up the plywood panel, and sailed out of sight over the trash pile.

  “Shiiiiiiit!” Then a metallic racket like an avalanche of milk cans.

  “Cut!”

  I scrambled up the trash midden and stood looking down the other side. Two fifty-five-gallon drums were rolling to a stop, a third trembled on its side, and mighty Sean Parker lay half under his toppled cycle, screaming with pain.

  The company swarmed around both sides of the trash pile, led by a skinny biker in a Willie Nelson headband: “My hog! You totaled it!”

  “Get it off me!”

  “You asshole, look at the fork. Look at the front wheel, Jesus!”

  “Get it off!”

  Four pairs of hands lifted the cycle and Sean sat up, still screaming. He clutched at his leg, which had suddenly acquired an extra, wrong-way knee.

  He’d obviously landed on the fifty-five-gallon drums, which was intriguing, to put it mildly. The drums hadn’t been out there five minutes ago when I’d come around the back of the pile to avoid LaMotta’s eye. The crew had cleared Sean’s landing area and leveled the ground to give his tires traction. But in the minutes while everyone was preoccupied on the other side of the trash pile, somebody had set Sean up for a broken leg - or wor
se.

  And Sean, of course, was the star: the irreplaceable center of a full week’s footage. Without him, Diane LaMotta was out of business.

  She watched impassively from the edge of the crowd as volunteers carted off the fallen knight, then threw both arms up in a “why me?” gesture, swiveled on her heel, and stalked away.

  Chapter 3

  I left the dump and drove around the dusty little valley to get the lay of the land while I sorted out the day’s events. And because I think better out loud, I was sharing my perplexity, as I often do while driving, with an imaginary guest. This afternoon it was Orson Welles in the passenger seat, as the Beetle’s list to starboard attested.

  He gathered his night-black coat about him - a considerable project - and scowled at his surroundings. “Must we have all this air? I’m being blown away.”

  “Beetles can’t take crosswinds, I assure you. Anything sufficient to blow you away would put the whole car in a ditch. The air is my defense against your cigar.”

  Welles unplugged a Churchillian corona and inspected it fondly. “I need my cigar for glowering. You cannot glower properly around a naked hole in your face.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “I’m not surprised.” He stared at me, his eyes hot plums in a hairy pudding. “In one minute you have dispensed three fat jokes and maligned my cigar. With what am I to be favored next?”

  “Are you always this crabby?”

  A grunt, then: “I do not suffer fools gladly; and at present, my suffering threatens to be intense. Now are we to continue this persiflage, or do you have something to discuss?”

  “I can’t decide what’s happening with this film.”

  “The usual.” He reinstalled his cheroot and talked around it, without perceptible loss of resonance. “There is some malignant cosmic force that does not want films completed. Trust my word; I know it well.” The intensity of his speech dislodged a cigar ash, which traveled majestically down his front like a boulder rolling down an alp.

  “Today’s ‘accident’ wasn’t cosmic malevolence; it was sabotage.”

  A chuckle like distant tumbling thunder, then: “The Malign Will works in mysterious ways.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe the real problem is Diane. Her personality doesn’t beg for cooperation.”