Free B008J4PNHE EBOK by Owen King Page B

be more negotiable if the actors were experienced, but luckily, that was not the case here.He liked to walk through the blocking as briskly as possible, make sure the actor knew his marks, and get right into it. For the first couple of days of shooting, though, the performances were just so-so. There was too much tension, an atmosphere of fearful competition. Everyone seemed to be clenched, piling on the business, barking their lines, becoming weepy-eyed during brief, ironically intentioned exchanges about things like whether or not Captain Morgan was a real guy, or if vampires could contract herpes, and if vampires could contract herpes, were they totally up the creek, because how do you medicate a dead person, etc. Sam pulled an actor aside. “A little less,” he told her, and when that didn’t work, he said very softly, “Pretend you don’t give a shit.” Though this did seem to help somewhat, the actress cried off and on for the rest of the day. Then, in the scene where Brunson smokes meth for the first time, the actor who played the role, a hulking drama major named Wyatt Smithson, improvised a line; exhaling, he added in a stoned drawl, “Bite my bag, Republican America.” Without yelling “cut,” Sam shoved past the tech holding the boom, strode into the middle of the shot, and swatted the actor across the back of the ear with the rolled-up cone of pages that constituted that day’s shooting script. The impact produced a rubbery snap. The thirteen-odd people on-set went silent. (The composition of this group was typical for the shoot as a whole: three actors, nine crew members, and one stranger; there was Sam, the director; Brooks, the assistant director; the director of photography, Anthony Delucci; Professor Stuart in his official capacity as the script supervisor and his unofficial capacity as the jack-of-all-trades; Wyatt; Linc, the obstreperous and annoying actor who played Hugh; George, whom Sam was somewhat defensive about casting as Roger, Sam’s alter ego, because he was the handsomest of the actors, with a jaw that could have deflected bazooka shells; Quinn, universally known as “the Eskimo,” today in charge of a flag that was actually a sheet of black poster board; Elia, nicknamed “Toughie,” too petite (i.e., too anorexic) to lift anything or assist in the moving of anything weightier than a ream of paper, leaving her to handle the clapper and carry Sam’s Production Office, a three-ring binder of notes, receipts, and contracts, which she lugged by holding it tight against her chest with both arms and groaning a lot; Big Alex (also sometimesreferred to as “Straight Alex”), who on most days performed as the gaffer; and Regular Alex (also sometimes referred to as “Bisexual Alex” or “Al-experiment”), who usually handled the boom; the middle-aged makeup artist, Monica Noble; and a white-bearded maintenance man from the college who had wandered by and taken a seat on his toolbox to observe the proceedings.) Perched on the edge of a dorm room bed, clutching the smoking pipe, Wyatt stared at Sam. The director held his breath. The attack had been entirely instinctual; he had reacted not out of anger but out of alarm, as if Wyatt had touched a live electrical current and needed to be knocked loose. Sam was appalled by what he had done. He assumed that everyone would leave now, quit. But no one moved or spoke. Wyatt tentatively reached up to rub his red ear. Sam tucked the cone of pages into his back pocket. “Well, do you want to do it again?” The actor nodded his assent, and the director clapped his hands, said keep rolling, and hurried back behind the camera. Everything was better from then on; the actors’ fear seemed to be focused not on each other but on him. The performances became more restrained. They hit their marks and did what he wanted them to do with a minimum of fucking around. Sam didn’t care if the crew thought he was an asshole. The director was responsible. And