Leaping Lizards

The cast of Invaders from Mars included Karen Black, Timothy Bottoms, Hunter Carson, and Lorraine Newman, and they all sat outside in the front garden in their canvas chairs talking and laughing and generally being famous, which impressed me to no end. Summer was just beginning and entire place was sunlight and green plants and blue sky.

 It was absolute thrillville when Tim and Karen started talking to me a few days in. I felt like one of the guys, a member of the crew rather than a worker drone. We all had hours of time where we had nothing to do.  On this show we waited for lighting for probably 80 % of the downtime.  So we just learned to listen for the first AD to call us, but in the meantime, anything was a go, even loud laughter.  Twelve hours and more we were going to be out there in the wilds of Malibu, every day.

But that was great!  It was one long outdoor picnic. I had never even heard of something as fantastically decadent and luxurious as Craft Service, and couldn’t believe that all this wonderful food was free and was always there, always being replenished.  I had never been exposed to Hansen’s sodas, or Evian, or even unlimited Starburst candies and Nacho Cheese Doritos.

So, in the boredom of doing nothing we all got to be friends, from the entire cast to the make up and wardrobe people, even to the lowliest of us, which would be the standby painter and carpenter.  We told each other our dreams, played practical jokes on each other, amused each other and at the end of the show, we even went sailing together out of Marina del Rey.

But during many of the waiting hours I was stuck by myself at a small old building, a shack, really, across the side lawn, and buried behind some mesquite and flowering bushes.  I was unable to leave it during long periods of takes and retakes.  I would sit on the steps, after dealing with various odd paint and maintenance tasks inside of the shack, where all my touch up paint was stored.  I would clean brushes, age wooden fence posts and the like, then run out of things to do.  I couldn’t risk crossing through the scene being filmed just in front of my shack, so I would quiet myself and remain frozen, more or less.

As the hours passed, and I was forced to stay absolutely still and quiet, I began to look at all the tiny things around me.  I noticed the never ending stream of ants first, and studied them, finding where they entered their holes, and how they passed information to each other by touching one another on their way past, one by one, antennae touching.  Little aliens, they could just as well have been Martians themselves; they were such strange, busy, mysterious tiny tots. I grew to know the movements of the ants, to pick up on their rhythms of their day.

Then one morning I saw a small dark head peek out from around the corner of the bottom steps. A bright eye touched mine and I warmed up in pleased surprise. It was a lizard.  I love lizards, and from childhood have always sought them out, sometimes catching them gently and turning them upside down to stroke their bellies and hypnotize them so they would lay in a trance, or cling to me for up to twenty minutes (although I wouldn’t presume to do it now or at the time of Invaders).

This lizard at first would just look at me, watching for my attention to turn toward something else. I would pretend to do so, but would sneak a peek to see what the lizard was doing.  Eventually I saw the lizard make her move—a little tongue flicked out and one ant went missing from the column.  She was hunting the ants.  She reminded me of a miniature tiger, shadowing a herd of teensy prey animals.

She grew bolder over the days to follow, and soon she was creeping closer to my shoes, sometimes flicking up an ant, but really I could see she was curious—about my big feet, about me.

Now, before this, I am not sure I would have recognized that a lizard was being curious.  I would have suspected it, perhaps, but I wouldn’t have really believed it.  However, on the first day of work at Mr. Blandings’ ex-dream house, our gang boss showed us something amazing during one coffee break.  He told us that he had realized two lizards lived in the front yard on a little hill.  They were very protective of their hill, and could be seen looking around from the top, proudly surveying their domain throughout the day.

So at break, our boss put a small wood board on their hill.  When he approached, both lizards whisked out of sight instantly.  “Now just watch this,” he said. “Give ‘em a minute or two to work up the courage to check out the strange new thing in their home.”

Sure enough, a few minutes later, both lizards’ heads peeked over the top of the hill. They bellied down from the summit, then sidled over to the wood.  They looked up and down at it; they cocked their little reptilian heads from side to side.  You could see the wheels turning. Then one by one, they shimmied up to the board, and leapt up onto the top surface.  Soon they were crawling all over the piece of lumber, checking every square inch, looking over the edges, pacing out the length. Curious lizards, right before our eyes.

Next time, more on our lizards, our actors and poetry from our fire marshal.