David Wallace - A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

Part of the 2nd A.D.’s daily Call Sheet is a kind of charty-looking précis of the scenes to be shot that day; it’s called a “One Line Schedule” or “One Liner.” Here is what January 8’s One Liner looks like:

(1) Scs 112 INT MR. EDDY’S MERCEDES /DAY/ 1 pgs

MR. EDDY 21DRIVES MERCEDES, PETE 22LISTENS FOR CAR TROUBLE.

(2) Scs 113 EXT MULHOLLAND DRIVE /DAY/ ⅛ pgs

MR. EDDY TAKES THE CAR FOR A CRUISE, INFINITI MOVES UP FAST BEHIND THEM

(3) Scs 114 EXT MR. EDDY’S MERCEDES /DAY/ ⅛ pgs

MR. EDDY LETS INFINITI PASS AND FORCES IT OFF ROAD

These car-intensive scenes are, as was mentioned, being shot in Griffith Park, a roughly Delaware-sized expanse out in the foothills of the Santa Monicas. Imagine a kind of semi-arid Yellowstone, full of ridges and buttes and spontaneous little landslides of dirt and gravel. Asymmetrical’s advance team has established what’s called a Base Camp of about a dozen trailers along one of the little roads between Mulholland and the San Diego Freeway, 23and Security has blocked off areas of several other roads for the driving scenes, burly guys with walkie-talkies and roadie-black T-shirts forming barricades at various places to keep joggers and civilian drivers from intruding into the driving shots or exposing the production to insurance liability during stunts. LA civilians are easygoing about being turned back from the barricades and seem as blasé as New Yorkers about movies being filmed on their turf.

Griffith Park, though lovely in a kind of desiccated, lunar way, turns out to be a thoroughgoingly Lynchian filming environment, with perfu-sive sunshine and imported-beer-colored light but a weird kind of subliminal ominousness about it. This ominousness is hard to put a finger on or describe in any sensuous way. It turns out that there’s a warning out that day for a Santa Ana Wind, a strange weather phenomenon that causes fire hazards 24and also a weird but verifiable kind of high-ion anxiety in man and beast alike. LA’s murder rate is apparently higher during Santa Ana Wind periods than any other time, and in Griffith Park it’s easy to confirm that something’s up atmospherically: sounds sound harsher, smells smell stronger, breathing tastes funny, the sunlight has a way of diffracting into spikes that penetrate all the way to the back of the skull, and overall there’s a weird leathery stillness to the air, the West-Coast equivalent of the odd aquarial stillness that tends to precede Midwestern thunderstorms. The air smells of sage and pine and dust and distant creosote. Wild mustard, yucca, sumac, and various grasses form a kind of five-o’clock shadow on the hillsides, and scrub oak and pine jut at unlikely angles, and some of the trees’ trunks are creepily curved and deformed, and there are also a lot of obstreperous weeds and things with thorns that discourage much hiking around. The texture of the site’s flora is basically that of a broom’s business end. A single red-tailed hawk circles overhead through the whole first day of shooting, just one hawk, and always the same circle, so that after a while the circle seemed etched. The road where the set is is like a kind of small canyon between a butte on one side and an outright cliff on the other. The cliff affords both a good place to study the choreography of the set and, in the other direction, a spectacular view of Hollywood to the right and to the left the S.F. Valley and the Santa Monicas and the distant sea’s little curved rind of blue. It’s hard to get straight on whether Asymmetrical chose this particular bit of Griffith Park or whether it was simply assigned to them by the LA office that grants location-licenses to movies, but it’s good tight cozy site. The whole thing forms a rough triangle, with the line of Base Camp trailers extending down one small road and the catering trailer and salad bars and picnic tables for lunch spread out along a perpendicular road and a hypotenusally-angled larger road between them that’s where the actual location set is; it’s the c 2road with the set that’s got the great hill and cliff for viewing.

Basically what happens all morning is that Robert Loggia’s sinister black Mercedes 6.9 and the tailgating Infiniti and the production’s big complicated camera truck will go off and be gone for long stretches of time, tooling back and forth along the same barricaded mile of what is ostensibly Mulholland Drive while Lynch and his Director of Photography try to capture whatever particular combinations of light and angle and speed add up to a distinctively Lynchian shot of people driving. While the car-filming is going on, the other 60 or so members of the location crew and staff all perform small maintenance and preparatory tasks and lounge around and shoot the shit and basically kill enormous amounts of time. There are, on location today, grips, propmasters, sound people, script people, dialogue coaches, camera people, electricians, makeup and hair people, a First Aid guy, production assistants, stand-ins, stunt doubles, producers, lighting technicians, on-set dressers, set decorators, A.D.’s, unit publicists, location managers, costume people with rollable racks of clothes like you see in NYC’s Garment District, continuity people, script people, special effects coordinators and technicians, LAFD cigarette-discouragers, a representative of the production s insurance underwriter, a variety of personal assistants and factota and interns, and a substantial number of persons with no discernible function at all. The whole thing is tremendously complex and confusing, and a precise census is hard to take because a lot of the crew look generally alike and the functions they perform are extremely technical and complicated and performed with high-speed efficiency, and when everybody’s in motion the set’s choreography is the visual equivalent of an Altman group-dialogue, and it takes awhile even to start picking up on the various distinguishing cues in appearance and gear that allow you to distinguish one species of crew personnel from another, so that the following rough taxonomy doesn’t start emerging until late on 9 January:

Grips tend to be large beefy blue-collar guys with walrus mustaches and baseball caps and big wrists and beer-guts but extremely alive alert intelligent eyes — they look like very bright professional movers, which is basically what they are. The production’s electricians, lighting guys, and F/X guys, who are also as a rule male and large, are distinguished from the grips via their tendency to have long hair in a ponytail and to wear T-shirts advertising various brands of esoteric hi-tech gear. None of the grips wear earrings, but over 50 % of the technical guys wear earrings, and a couple have beards, and four of the five electricians for some reason have Fu Manchu mustaches, and with their ponytails and pallor they all have the distinctive look of guys who work in record- or head-shops; plus in general the recreational-chemical vibe around these more technical blue-collar guys is very decidedly not a beer-type vibe.

The male camera operators, for some reason, tend to wear pith helmets, and the Steadicam operator’s pith helmet in particular looks authentic and armed-combat-souvenirish, with a fine mesh of coir all over it for camouflage and a jaunty feather in the band.

A majority of the camera and sound and makeup crew are female, but a lot of these, too, have a similar look: 30ish, makeupless, insouciantly pretty, wearing faded jeans and old running shoes and black T-shirts, and with lush well-conditioned hair tied carelessly out of the way so that strands tend to escape and trail and have to be chuffed out of the eyes periodically or brushed away with the back of a ringless hand — in sum, the sort of sloppily pretty tech-savvy young woman you can just tell smokes pot and owns a dog. Most of these hands-on technical females have that certain expression around the eyes that communicates the exact same attitude communicated by somebody’s use of the phrase “Been there, done that.” At lunch several of them wont eat anything but bean curd, and they make it clear that they don’t regard certain grips’ comments about what bean curd looks like as in any way worthy of response. One of the technical women, the production’s still-photographer — whose name is Suzanne and is fun to talk to about her dog — has on the inside of her forearm a tattoo of the Japanese character for “strength,” and she can manipulate her forearm’s muscles in such a way as to make the ideogram bulge Nietzscheanly out and then recede.