House of Mirrors, Radio Hell, and the Little Piece of Plywood That Could: Dancing at Twilight

The Long, Strange Road to Working with a Bunch of Vampires on the Set of TwilightPart IV: House of Mirrors, Radio Hell, and the Little Piece of Plywood That Could: Dancing at Twilight 

No matter how many movies I have worked on, no matter how many sets where I have painted or done stand by, there are new, never-before moments—strange and brilliant bits of life-within-art that I will always remember.  Sometimes it happens on the first day.  I gave them a name, years ago, that reflected the ambivalence of such moments: “hideous absurdity”. I would suddenly realize: this moment is very bizarre, right now, so incredibly intense and yet so…stupid.  It’s like having an epiphany—but about nothing.

How could I ever have imagined that one day I would be standing in the dark, inside a giant, vaulted warehouse, inside a smaller (but still enormous) fake dance studio listening to a very young actress screaming her head off every time her leg got broken by an evil vampire named James?

 Let me just say that during the first two weeks of the filming of Twilight, when it was all up to Kristen Stewart as Bella, our teenage loner and soon-to-be vampire love interest, that this girl worked harder than any actor I’ve ever seen (except Michael Caine, but that’s another time and another story).  Usually actors spend about two, maybe three out of every ten hours that we technicians spend working on the set.

Part of the discrepancy is the huge amount of preparation that is required before the actors can just get in and do their job.  Lighting, loading in cameras, laying dolly track, figuring out the shots’ mechanics with the different departments, laying cable between video monitors and cameras, sound, etc.—it all takes unbelievable amounts of time.

But the result is that most actors—sorry if I offend any actors, here, but (Clint Eastwood, you’ve been on both sides of the great camera divide; you’ll back me up here, won’t you? Feel free to write a comment in support, sir), you actors don’t know what hard labor and long hours are when it comes to working on the set.  You just don’t.  Of course, this may be the Bitter (and Jealous?) Renee speaking.  Oh—and maybe the impending threat of a SAG strike has raised my hackles, but still… Jeeeeez (can you hear that? It’s my bitter and jealous sigh).

Sure, sometimes you actors have an early call for make up.  But you’re just putting on make up.  And actually somebody else is doing that for you. I have to put on make up, too, you know—long before your call time, and, I might add, I have to do it all by myself.  And my time isn’t paid for this, which I assure you, is a very necessary task.

I’m not saying that being an actor isn’t hard work.  But I suspect that the hardest part of your work is done in the years before getting on to the set, in auditions, preparation, courage and perseverance, and in learning how to let somebody else put on your make up for you.

So on most films actors usually work on the set less than half of the time that we do.  This was not true for Kristen.  It seemed like she rarely ever left the set, even for a ten minute break the first day, the second, the third—and she was acting her heart out, throwing herself against the floor and walls of the set, presenting agony to the camera constantly, and doing her best to make it count, because even though we were shooting it first, this was the dramatic climax, the big pay off for the entire film.  And she was only seventeen (although she would turn eighteen later on during filming).

Of course, she knew that this would make or break her future acting career, so that’s a lot of motivation, but she didn’t complain, slow down, or even hesitate to go again.  Kudos, Bella.

Meanwhile, a completely different world existed all around Bella, but unseen and mostly theoretical to the filming crew, like an other-dimensional plane from string theory that contains an entirely different (and more boring, and more physically demanding, and much worse-paid) parallel world.  This was the ‘off-set world’ and the crew of carpenters, painters and other construction types, in another part of the warehouse, were working and working hard, in a constant hurry to keep ahead of the shooting crew.

 Meanwhile, back in the ‘on-set world’ with the film crew, I was dealing with the fact that the camera was now inside a literal hall of mirrors.  The dance studio was two stories tall, with rows of square columns, each fitted on all four sides with huge mirrors.  There were also mirrors on the walls.  And any mirror that reflected the camera or the crew had to go away when the moving camera came around for coverage of Bella’s leg getting broken, or James leaping onto her, or any of the action taking place throughout the set.

For each column we were supposed to have a set of “marbleized” (which means painted to look like—surprise! marble) plywood pieces that would fit over each mirror, neutralizing them and helping to hide the crew. It had come up in the early part of the day that the camera would be moving around several columns, seeing almost 360 degrees around the set.  Two on-set carpenters were about ready to put up pre-painted marbleized panels to hide some of the offending mirrors, but they had just realized there was a serious shortage of panels.

Whaaat?

Since coming up with more marbleized panels would directly affect my job, I got anxious.  And a little pointed in my suggestions to some of the ‘off-set world’ carpenters.  Politely reminding them that although they were cutting something else on the table saw that could wait until next week, there were panels that needed to be cut and then painted to look like marble right now for use in front of the camera in less than 20 minutes.

Word of the crisis spread throughout the construction crew, and somehow, with all our mightily talented people racing at top speed, we, in our invisible, incredibly sped up parallel world managed to produce marbleized panels as they were needed, as more and more of the rest of the set was exposed to the camera, effectively breaking the normal laws of time and space—

Suddenly I got a call on my radio.  I was immediately ripped out of the ‘off-set world’ and found myself in the ‘on-set world’.  This was, of course, the world I was supposed to be in, with its own issues and requirements.  I had been pulled away from it by the burgeoning mirror panel crisis, and my heart nearly seized in a moment of terror.  Had I missed somebody important on the radio asking me to do something for the past twenty minutes?  Had they been calling me over and over again???  Was I failing to do my job????

Everybody on the set wears a radio, or walkie talkie.   Along with your radio you were issued either the “Taco Bell set”: large, cheap headphones with a ball mike on a curved piece of metal that hung in front of your mouth; or the professional set, a tiny single earpiece with a tiny lapel mike containing a tiny talk button.  Spend enough time on the set during filming and you probably have bought your own professional set, so you can go about your job looking like a secret service agent, talking to someone unseen, hooked in electronically to etheric voices, stylish and sinister, another agent of the Matrix.

As part of my job, I have to be listening to the first AD (assistant director) or someone who does his or her bidding at all times, because it will be usually be that person who will ask for my services.  Another important part of my job is responding to the request, first by acknowledging it and assuring the unseen voices that I am on the case and it is happening as fast as it can.  I usually give a time frame as I go, if I am doing something out of sight, letting them know my ETA and asking if that is fast enough.  Nobody wants to wait on art.  Nobody wants to wait on anything, of course, not lighting or sound or camera.  But especially heinous is the idea of having to wait on art. I mean, art is so simple anyone can do it, right?

Fortunately, nobody had been calling me, until that moment.  Jamie, the first AD was saying “…tell Renee if she pulls this off it will be the most incredible achievement in her career.”

I went inside the set, found Jamie, who gave me a brief glance and said, “Renee. Finally.  I’m glad you decided to join us.”  Excuse me?  I had responded instantly over my radio with a “Copy, on my way,” not five seconds earlier, immediately upon hearing my name mentioned.  I learned that they were going to need a four foot by eight foot piece of fake floor painted and ready for filming ASAP.

Of course, we didn’t have any fake floor, just a few dozen assorted pieces of hardwood floor boards meant to be placed along a huge break in the main dance studio floor caused (in the film reality) by James and Edward hurtling onto it at stupendous vampiric velocity.   In fact, we didn’t even have a large piece of plywood on hand.  I sent the carpenters off to scavenge, while I ran off to get latex paint, shellac, and two brushes, as well as a heat gun.  Along the way I talked into my radio mike, informing Deon the second AD and Jamie of what I was doing, gave them an ETA of 15 to 20 minutes, and then went into the zone of “anything you try will work”.

It’s hard to explain what this zone is.  Something comes over you, like a trance, and you just grab whatever jumps out at you as possibly useful, take it to one place and start painting as you plan.  I had to make a highly varnished blond hardwood floor with the same size planks and matching wood grain as the real floor so the good vampires could throw scraps of wood on it and set fire to that wood while not harming the real dance floor.

I had passed by my electrician pal Andy, who knew what I needed, and found me a stinger (power cord) for my heat gun, then brought a work light to my chosen paint area just off the stage.  I started with the base coat, and I was drying it while tinting some shellac dark brown for wood graining  when I heard Jamie on the radio asking, “Where’s Renee?  What’s she doing?”  I hurriedly answered him, but the anxiety of his questioning rose.  “Can anybody see where the stand by painter is?”

“Just give me 5 more minutes, Jamie,” I said.  “I’m off stage right from the cloak room.”

Silence.  Then, Jamie querulously:” What is going on with Renee?”

A small eternity later, the grips opened up a space between mirrors on the outer wall of the set and brought in my floor, which while not perfect, was actually a good match in tone and patterning.  It was a challenging job because of the time frame, but not the most challenging I’ve had.  And certainly I wouldn’t call it “the most incredible achievement of my career”.  But it was pretty darn good considering I had minutes, not days, to create it.

Yet once we got the floor on the set, nobody said anything like, “Thank you,” or even, “Let’s go.”  In fact the floor was barely acknowledged. I felt like I had unknowingly done a Very Bad Thing.   Jamie was annoyed even when we showed up with the finished floor two minutes early by my ETA.  Why?

Then something occurred to me—something hideously absurd…  I stopped our medic, Taylor, and asked her for a radio check.  I could hear her fine.  But she could not hear me.  All day I had been completely radio silent.  Ohhh, hell no. Now I knew why Jamie was annoyed.  ‘Stand by’ anything’s were supposed to be in constant contact with the crew.  It had appeared, during this, our first week, that I was an idiot who didn’t bother to actually respond to questions from the first AD.

But how was I going to tell him what had happened?  Anything I blabbered out would just sound like a pathetic excuse.  Dagnabbit!  I had done my own radio check every morning by saying on air, “Radio check”, and someone had always responded with, “Good check”.  Hadn’t they?  Maybe they had responded to somebody else’s radio check, and not mine?  Hell, it didn’t matter, now.  I was screwed.  I would have to find some way to let Jamie know what happened, but subtly, with aplomb, not like a whimpering cur begging forgiveness for some odious infraction.

I told Deon what happened.  I told Andy. I told everybody I talked to, working my radio failure into the conversation: “Speaking of _______ (the script, the weather, the smell outside the Porta Potties), guess what? My radio hasn’t been working for all of today, even though I did a radio check, like I know I’m supposed to, and somehow it got past me, even though it wasn’t my fault, and it could happen to anyone— Weird, huh?”  A voice in my head (my own real inner voice) finally said, “Just shut up and get a new radio, pronto.  And make sure nobody else gets the broken radio and ruins their career.

 The plywood looked good, though.  For about five minutes.  After the first take, dust and plaster had covered it all, so that I could have painted a huge skull and crossbones on it, and it would have still been perfect.  Maybe I should have painted a skull and crossbones on that frigging radio.

Next week: Part V: The Shade of Fear, Jewelry for the Aged, and the Blue Man Sans Group: Special Effects at Twilight