A Miraculous Return, A Future Film

This will be a digression, and not strictly about filmmaking except in the sense that the events I am about to describe will make a great film someday, and it will be made, and made well. The film will be based on the book that tells the following true story. You see, I have just experienced a close encounter with a creature from space.

Sure, it’s the space just above our houses and maybe up to ten thousand feet at times, but he is from space, nonetheless.  He doesn’t have a space ship, he does all the flying, over thousands of miles, by himself, through the exercise of his powerful wings and light-as-air feathers, and he’s armed with claws that are deadly and quick, and a beak that tears flesh as easily as I slice sourdough bread, although not as neatly.

I am talking about, for those of my readers who aren’t familiar with my friend for over a decade—my wild red tail hawk friend Tennerin. For those of you that are familiar with this mysterious raptor, you will be overjoyed to know that he has come back again from his spring migration, after nearly six months away from me far to the north in heaven knows where, mating and nesting and raising little mini-Tennerins.  He came very early this year, more than a week early, in fact, but I had the feeling that he was on his way, and that he was hurrying to get here, so I have been checking the trees in the backyard every few hours for the past four or five days.

Yesterday, around 6:05 pm I spotted a hawk in the fir tree next to the deck, and after a few moments I knew it was him when he cocked his head and listened to me intently as I called to him and blabbered on about how much I had missed him, how we welcomed him, how beautiful he was, etc. The only reason I thought this might be a false alarm was that almost every day I have noticed either a red tail hawk or a peregrine falcon or a sharp shinned hawk lurking around our house.  I came to suspect they might be messengers from Tennerin, scoping out his winter palace and making sure all was in readiness for him.

Not really. I’m more circumspect than that. But there is a hint of otherworldliness about a wild hawk that seems to love me and follows me through town and even on hikes though the thick woods across the river. Everyone on the crew of any film I work on knows when Tennerin is here, because I will bring in the footage I have shot of him, and he is often doing amazing things.

Like the time I went into the woods across the river and grubbed my way through miles of mud and bog water looking unsuccessfully for him for over three hours, intending to film him flying from tree to tree while following me.  I finally got out of the quicksand and turned my camera onto the woods, explaining my failure with the words: “I never saw Tennerin on this trek, but I’m a human being, and my senses are so atrophied he could have been right above my head and I wouldn’t have known it.” Then I turned my video camera toward the path out of the woods, and there was Tennerin, on a branch just above my head, calmly waiting for me to notice him. I almost dropped the camera, and then found my focus. I took that little piece in the next day to set and showed it to everyone who knows about Tennerin.

One of my favorite skits from Saturday Night Live is Will Forte’s The Falconer! This strange man leaves civilization to live in the woods and he worships his only companion, his dear falcon, Donald, who is much smarter and better educated than the man he lives with.  For example, once when the Falconer got trapped by a snare, he sent Donald out to find a knife to cut the rope, and instead Donald went to Las Vegas where he partied with Alec Baldwin all night and paid for everything with the Falconer’s credit card. The Falconer has all the sappy love in the world in his voice whenever he holds his hawk up proudly and says his catch phrase: “Oh, Donald!!!” Friends see me in that falconer, and I suspect there’s an uncomfortable amount of resemblance between us. I am completely besotted with my dear Tennerin.

So after I saw Tennerin arrive yesterday, I ran down and left him some pieces of beef, and he waited for my command (“Go for it, Tennerin!).  Then he dropped from the sky like a missile, and at the last moment leveled off and came in on a beautifully controlled glide just three feet off the ground, his wings held still.  It is the form he has perfected in our time together, and he hadn’t forgotten a move.  He stared at me many times, studying me for up to a minute, listening to my nonstop prattle about love and missing him, and the happiness that he always brings to me.

The book I will write will describe the scientific reasons behind the magic of our relationships with animals, how they heal us, from the inside out.  It will be a revelation and a validation for all those of us who know in our hearts the beauty and strength of our love for an animal who is our companion.

Tennerin spent all day today calling, and talking back to me as I talked to him, telling him about all the things that had happened during his time away.  What he was telling me, I do not know, as I am a human being and we are notoriously bad at understanding animals.  But he was very emotional, and would even fly back and forth to me from across the river, calling to me all the way.  If you can imagine the wild, haunting sound of a hawk scream, but close to you, and slurred gently, somehow, becoming personal, and directed to you, and then if you can imagine that the hawk responds to your questions on cue, for hours at a time, then you have some idea of the wonderful strangeness of this afternoon.

He once, last year, was this demonstrative verbally.  He behaved as if he was an avian Lassie, calling to me, flying a little ahead of me, then coming back, then showing me where I was supposed to go.  I was being led across the river, and when he flew over there, he would scream and dive, scream and dive, over and over again.  I know he sleeps over there, and he was very upset by something in his “bedroom”. I had no choice, really.  The request was obvious: “Come over here and help me deal with this.”

I had to drive several miles down to the Salem bridge, then drive several miles up to the end of a gravel road, then trespass on private property, then whack my way through brambles, thorny masses of blackberry bushes.  Now, when I read Sleeping Beauty as a child and discovered that the castle was suddenly overgrown with “brambles” and this was apparently enough to keep any knights from reaching the sleeping princess for one hundred years, I said, “What?… Brambles can’t be that big of a deal!”  Well, they are a big deal, and you need leather gloves and a bolt cutter to fight your way through every square foot of the land next to the river where Tennerin sleeps.  It is very wild, there.  I had a mile and a half struggle through bramble hell, all the time wondering just what my hawk was so concerned about, and wondering how I would ever figure it out, and help him.

It turned out that a large horned owl had taken up residence in a tree near Tennerin’s bedroom.  Owls are the natural enemy of red tails, and they detest each other.  Thanks to a group of crows, who along with Tennerin, led me to the owl, we scared him out of the area, and the crows mobbed him, and chased him upriver until he was out of sight. The whole thing was very clear.  The animals wanted the owl out of there, and they wanted me to help them.

I felt as if I had entered another dimension that day, like a shaman who is part of a magical animal world. The hard part? Trespassing on somebody’s land, knowing that they often shoot guns there for hours at a time, and that this is redneck country, where people take their land ownership pretty damn seriously. But I was on a mission from Tennerin.

This winter should be even more magical than the last.  That’s the way it works with Tennerin. The better I know him, the more I see in him. Intelligence (he even knows my car and my parents’ car); loyalty (over a decade of returning to me and staying with me), and affection (he will sit with me all day, listening to music, or even (unlike any boyfriend I’ve ever known) listen with great interest to me as I rattle endlessly on about nothing in particular.

Welcome back, my dear friend.  You are a miracle.  For your book, I will write down all our adventures and all that we’ve learned from each other, and someday we will see the beautiful, unforgettable film about you and all you’ve brought to me.

“Oh, Tennerin!!!” 

Fire Marshal Philosophy and Coffee to Go

We return to the halcyon days of work on Invaders from Mars and my first job as standby painter on a feature film. It is spring in the beautiful canyons of the Santa Monica Mountains in Southern California, and our movie crew is filming at an old house in Malibu Creek State Park, surrounded by cottonwood trees, live oaks and boulder-strewn clearings.

My little shack across the lawn from Mr. Blandings’ ex-dream house was full of paint containers, all matched to the various rooms of the house, and between runs to get one color or another for touch up tasks I was trapped on the steps between takes, making friends with the little lizard day by day. Early one morning as she lay close to torpor from the relative cold, trying to warm up in the sun, I felt such great affection for her that I carefully reached down and touched the tip of her pointed snout.  She looked up at me with her eyes half closed, but didn’t flee.  I reached down again and lightly touched her back. When she allowed that, I stroked her head. I thought that perhaps once she got her blood heated up enough to be more active she would not be so compliant, but that did not turn out to be the case.

In fact, she eventually would stay still several times a day when I would pet her.  I felt as honored as if a queen had invited me into her palace for tea.  I was so proud of our friendship that I took one of my new human acquaintances, Ben, the fire marshal who was assigned to our show, a man in his late sixties, over to meet my lizard friend.

He had to stand about fifteen feet back, though, because any closer and the lizard would retreat around the corner of the shack.  When he saw the lizard approach me and let me pet her, he was just as thrilled as I was. I had decided to tell him about the lizard because I knew he would appreciate seeing the bond between us.

Ben had caught my attention one day as he was showing his wallet photo of his dog to one of the actors. He started to talk about the dog, but choked up and, tears filling his eyes, had mumbled an apology and stuffed the wallet back into his pocket. I learned from him later that his dog had died just days before.  I also learned that Ben was a poet and a philosopher, one who believed in a great, indefinable creative force that powered all things of the world. I told him I thought that sounded a bit like Taoism, and he said he didn’t know what anybody else called it, but whatever it was, he felt driven to write poetry about it.

He gave me one of his hand-made books, which I have to this day. And inside, his verses were indeed something like Chang Tzu might have composed, if, instead of ancient China  he had lived in the San Fernando Valley during the 1980’s.  Ben’s poems were remarkable.

We talked a great deal about philosophy and about our love for animals. Ben was the first example of an important principle or kind of advice I’ve talked about before in this blog: that one of the most valuable, wonderful things about working on a film is the people you will meet on the periphery of the production.  These have been, for me, everyone from fire marshals to the head of the Eureka Springs, Arkansas tourism council, to moonshine makers in South Carolina, to extras who turn out to be amazing musicians. Through making a film where they live, you have a passport into their world. Everyone out there has a story, and often, in the insulated and somewhat magical circle of daily filmmaking, they will tell you theirs.

But all was not heart-warming animal and human bonding. There was the unforgettable first time I stayed on the set after filming began. Earlier in the film, I had always hurried away, afraid to be near the camera and lights during the big, important moments (my, how things have changed—I’m within ten feet of camera at all times if I have my way).  But I had some last minute touch up task to do and the first AD called “Rolling!” before I could get out the door.

Everybody froze, including me. I knew it was incredibly important to stay still and completely silent. I had a coffee cup in my hand, taking it out of the set before it could spill on the furniture, when somehow—and I will never know just how this hideous thing happened—my hand opened up without my volition, kind of like a robot hand belonging to someone else which has suddenly begun to malfunction. I watched in horror as my hand opened up like a claw and the cup fell from my nerveless fingers.  It struck the floor, and the loud, hollow “PLOP!” sound echoed through the room. Everyone turned to stare at the new girl on set. I felt as if I had just accidentally detonated a small bomb. It was, without doubt, the most embarrassing moment of my life.

I retreated to my little shack and stayed there for the rest of the morning, seeking comfort in the company of my little reptilian friend.

Next week, Here Come the Marines!  

Haunted by Extreme Makeover

To digress this week from my ongoing series about that first job in film, I would like to describe an interesting new experience I’ve had over the past few days.  A friend of a friend called me early in the week and asked if I would like to volunteer my time and skills working on refurbishing a haunted house for the local school for the deaf here in Salem. The ABC series, Extreme Makeover had plans to build a dormitory and to reanimate (so to speak) the school’s popular and profitable annual haunted house attraction.

Now, as most of my readers know, it’s all about me, all of the time.  But this was an intriguing proposition, and the school was a mere two miles away from my home.  For once I wouldn’t be facing an hour drive each way just to get to work.  I wasn’t working on a film or television project at the moment, so I said yes. As if to encourage my relatively selfless act, the next day Michelle Obama sent me an email stressing the importance of volunteering for some kind of community service on September 11^th, as way of honoring those who lost their lives.

I don’t believe in karma, but just in case karma is real, I don’t want to take any chances. So I worked all three days they needed me at the haunted house.  I learned a lot about my community, about the work ethic of Extreme Makeover, and about myself.

What exactly did I learn?

Firstly, I learned that many, many people in Salem, Oregon are crazy about Extreme Makeover, which I must confess, I have never seen.  Not even once. Everyone was raving about Ty Whoever, and about designer Michael Whoever, and I didn’t and do not know who these people are.  But autographs of said people were sought after and treasured and shown to others, most often scribbled on their hard hats or blue Makeover t-shirts, which were required wear when on campus. So many people wanted to be part of the Makeover that every day at the volunteer check-in tent as I signed in, they had to turn people away.  Later, there would be hundreds of spectators lined up around the work site from early morning until after dark.

Second, I learned that the regular crew members who work on Extreme Makeover are tireless, energetic, and supremely dedicated.  Alex, the art director for the entire haunted house, did not seem to sleep, eat, or ever get the least bit cranky or even need rest.  She was in a wonderful mood all the time, every time I saw her, and she was grateful—to all of us.  I can’t tell you how different this is from the usual dynamic on one of my paying gigs. It’s amazing to interact with a boss who is so completely thrilled and in awe of your simply being there, ready to work.  The downside?  I felt the guilt of ten thousand bad deeds whenever I had to go home, covered in sweat and exhausted, wondering how the Makeover crew kept going and going and going like that pink bunny, but with a much happier attitude.

The third thing I learned, about myself, was that my working energy levels, endurance, pain thresholds, and competitive instincts are mainly fueled by one thing: Money.  I felt more pain on this job, more fatigue, and less concern about perfecting the particulars of this work than I ever do for something that I know will supply me with a paycheck for my labors. I think this makes me a shallow person.

At any rate, I felt pretty shallow and petty and weak when Alex asked me to stay for another few hours to help her dress the haunted house.  I had only been working a nine hour day by that point, and normally I work a twelve or more.  But normally I get paid.  I looked deep into myself (not that deep, actually, being, as it turns out, so shallow).  Nothing was in there. I was done.

I apologized, and said I couldn’t stay.  And I really couldn’t.  I was barely able to walk back to my truck, limping along and wincing from all sorts of bodily aches and pains, and when I got home the only thing that kept me from falling asleep on the couch was the dread I felt at having to climb the stairs to take a shower.

I didn’t make it to the big reveal today, because it cost $50.00 to get into the school’s haunted house, and I haven’t that much scratch to spare.  I think it will be quite impressive, though, and I’m glad I contributed something to the school’s now totally awesome haunted house. Several thousand dedicated people from the community came in to help turn the Extreme Makeover into a reality, and seeing all the volunteers, each of them involved in their own groups’ specialties, from animatronics to plumbing to roofing to landscaping was inspiring.  Just don’t ask me if I saw Ty Whoever in person.  I couldn’t tell you.

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.

 

 

Wild in Malibu

After two weeks of traveling and writing (stuff other than this blog) we’re back and ready to return to those days of yesteryear, remembering the first job we ever had on the set of a film as a standby painter. Enjoy these stories of a time when everything was new and fresh, and full of promise, like the first morning of the rest of your life.

I was still technically working for Cinnebangs when Invaders from Mars started pre-production, and a small contingent of us were sent out to restore, paint and wallpaper a mysterious old house located inside Malibu Creek State Park, a 7,000 acre piece of wilderness once owned by Ronald Reagan, Bob Hope, and Twentieth Century Fox.

As I crawled west in the sparkling early morning traffic on the Ventura freeway, I realized that for at least the next month I would be driving to a lovely wild place up into the Santa Monica Mountains, far from the grime, crime and beautiful transvestite streetwalkers of downtown Hollywood. Although I would miss those daily glimpses of the outrageous fashion parade on Sunset, I was definitely glad to be exiled from Hollywood Central for a while.

The drive off the freeway was idyllic; every curve in the road revealed more green and growing things. Huge oak trees, manzanita and fragrant sage covered the mountain sides and the sun shone on picturesque valleys. Further in, I passed multi-million dollar ranches with acres of white fences patrolled by thoroughbred horses worth more than my combined income from the past ten years. There wasn’t single human being in sight.

It was hard to believe that the teeming crowds of the Topanga shopping mall and its exponentially expanding population of tweens infesting the ice skating rink were less than twenty minutes away. The park was off to my right, and as I drove through it, I could see it was a nature reserve area more than a baseball field type of area.  Nobody had changed it from its natural state. I liked the wildness, very much.

I found the house far back in the park, and it was a bit derelict, but charming, a storybook house.  I stared at it for a minute. It looked eerily familiar. The carpenters had been there for a week before us painters, so piles of lumber cluttered the overgrown front yard, and I knew that the whine of power tools would be heard whenever work went on, drowning out the wonderful sounds that I heard all around me now as I got out of my truck: birds singing everywhere, noisy and happy and alive.

As we painters were shown around and given the rundown on what needed to be done to bring the building back to life, our gang boss explained why the house inspired a sense of déjà vu.  It was the house that Cary Grant struggled to complete in the 1948 movie Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.  I wondered if the ghost of Cary Grant ever visited.

The house, perhaps because it hadn’t been used for a long time, or maybe because of its isolation, seemed otherworldly. It would be months before I left that house, working on it or in it six days a week, ten to fifteen hours a day. When we started painting and wallpapering, it was late spring.  When we completed filming, it was late November.

In all that time, I never got over the faint, haunted feeling of the house.  But it became comforting in its strangeness, and there were things that happened there which probably could never have occurred in another place.

I would meet my best friend for the next fifteen years there, learn about filmmaking there, go jogging every day through some of the most beautiful scenery in the world there, and because of the long hours spent sitting still during the months of filming, I would make friends with a lizard while I was there. Seriously. That lizard let me pet her, towards the end of our time there. So I believe there was something strange about that house, but also wonderful.

Next time, a story about lizards, a fire marshal philosopher-poet, and why you should never bring a cup of coffee onto a hot set.

 

From Set Shop Hell to Malibu Creek

That first job on the set of a real feature film was an adventure, the likes of which I will never know again. That’s because I will never again be so full of wonderment and fear, and pure desperation to get out of where I had been working, which was at a set shop I’ll call Cinnabangs.  Every day at Cinnebangs was a hardworking, kick-ass experiment in boredom and/or terror, with a healthy dose of toxic materials handling and a puzzling lack of employee morale.  Maybe it wasn’t so puzzling.  We never knew when exactly we would be off work each day.  We always started at 6:30 am, but we were allowed to leave at 5:00 pm or maybe 7:00 pm, or possible 12:00 am. You just never knew, because it apparently was an ongoing secret, one kept from you for obscure reasons.

As everybody kept working, drilling holes in plywood, mixing resin for some mold filling, spraying glue onto felt squares, apparently oblivious to the need for dinner as the clock crept past 5:00 pm, then left 6:30 pm behind and headed towards 8:00 pm, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Why don’t they just tell us what time they want us to work to?” I’d come up with possible reasons: maybe they didn’t know what time we should work to; or maybe it was just the competitiveness of the workers there (not me—I had a boyfriend and wanted to get home); maybe nobody working there wanted to be the first to cave in, exposing themselves as a detestable weakling and a coward by asking if they could go home.  Anyway, whatever the reason, it was an eternal mystery as to what time you would be leaving work that day, and I learned not to make any plans with my boyfriend on weeknights.  Whether someone in authority would remember to break you for dinner was a crap shoot, as well.

For some other unknown reason, even though there were at least ten to fifteen of us working in the set shop every day, and they only gave us a half hour for lunch, making it impossible to go out for anything, Cinnebangs had no break room, no lunch table, not even any chairs for their employees.  Each day at lunch time we’d glumly file out to the sidewalk in downtown Hollywood and sit there like beggars, pulling in our feet when people with better jobs walked through our sad, mopey little cluster.

Conversation was hard and mean, and usually consisted of a statement from person A followed by a comment from person B that would be something along the lines of: “I did that, too, but I did it better.” Or perhaps a disdainful, “So what?” I remember I once mentioned that I had just had dinner with Timothy Leary, something I was rather proud of—it was a wonderful and very interesting evening.  Person B replied (I’m not making this up), “Oh come on, everybody here has had dinner with Timothy Leary!”

So I was desperate to get out of the set shop, but didn’t know how to do it.  Then when some of us were sent out on a mysterious mission to paint and wallpaper a place out in Malibu Creek State Park, I was thrilled.  We didn’t learn until later that this was to be one of the sets for a movie that Cinnabangs had been hired to work on.  And that movie was Invaders from Mars.  For once we wouldn’t have to eat lunch on the sidewalk of the grimiest back streets of Hollywood.  We would be out in the beauty of nature, and maybe, since it was in a park, we might even be able to find a lunch table.

As it turned out, Malibu Creek State Park had many, many things, amazing, lovely, and unforgettable things.  It was also the place where I discovered the way out of the misery of the set shop and onto the set of a real movie.

Invaders from Mars: Remembering the Good Times

Who can forget their first job? Certainly nobody who works in the film business can forget theirs.  They will be able to relive it whenever the first film they worked on is shown again, thus embarking on a bright and nostalgic skip along memory lane or a repulsive stumble into the dark side.  Sometimes, depending on the film and the experiences, it can be both (and for me, it was). In honor of that long ago on-the-set adventure, for the next couple of entries I’d like to talk about my first film job.

The other day, partway into an extended period between jobs, while successfully avoiding all forms of productivity, I came across my very first film.  They were showing it on one of the outer channels in the satellite dish movie array, past HBO, Showtime, and any other recognizable franchises. Frankly, if I hadn’t been channel surfing for far too long, killing time and the battery life of my remote, I never would have found it.

Invaders from Mars was an ‘80’s remake of a truly creepy 1953 sci-fi movie of the same name.  The plot was the stuff of a child’s nightmare: your parents and then everyone else in your town is taken over by… something horrible, and they become zombified, possessed automatons.  You are all alone, the only person left who is still human.  Come to think of it, this is probably the stuff of adult nightmares, too.

The Martians have landed in a big sand pit outside of town, but just over the hill in your own backyard.  People go up the hill and disappear into the sand.  When they come back, they aren’t themselves.  As the one kid who hasn’t been taken over by Martians, it’s up to you to save yourself and everyone else.  And that requires going down into the sand pit, to find out exactly what is under there. What you find is pretty amazing.   Scary, too, if you are between the ages of four and seven.

If you get a chance, and you, like me at the moment, have the inclination to slothfully dispose of some time which could be better spent doing something (anything) else, give this film a look.  The production design, done by Leslie Dilley with the help of Craig Stearns and sets designed by Randy Moore, is actually very impressive.  The script is not, however.  It suffered by being a product of Cannon Films filmmaking standards (slapdash, fast money, remarkably unconcerned with quality) at the time. Still, there’s fun to be had, somewhere in there.

I do recall what my mother said after seeing it for the first time, though. The very first job on a film her beloved daughter had ever had, a many months’ long ordeal of hard work and endless hours, framed by daily commutes from the north end of the San Fernando Valley down to Long Beach on the worst freeway in the world, the dreaded 405.  For those of you unfamiliar with the geography of LA, that is a distance of approximately 400 miles, one way.

I was anxious to hear what she thought of this epic endeavor, and called her at home the night it opened, after she had gone to see it.

She was only slightly apologetic. “Oh honey, I don’t want to embarrass you, but that movie was pretty terrible!”

A Trick of the Light

Depending on your brand of physics, light may be the fastest thing in the universe.  However, light is not a thing, exactly.  Light is both a wave and a particle, but it is neither until it is observed.  Light seems to be extremely important, both in the concrete, everyday world sense, and in the metaphysical sense, the sense of reality itself.

I think about light quite a bit—its wavelength determines the colors our eyes perceive, and our perception is tied in with our emotions.  Color choices can affect the entire feel of a film.  If you don’t believe me, look at any David Lynch film (except Eraserhead which was shot in black and white for the emotional effect the lack of color engendered: fear, alienation, the darkness of nightmares).

Red makes us feel somehow different than blue, and the juxtaposition of colors can be pleasing or jarring, exciting or disturbing.  Some responses we have to color are learned, while others, such as the “strobing” of colors which are equal in luminescence are pre-wired in our brain.  An example of this, called “equiluminence” can be found here Luminance Differences Affect Our Perceptions

I recently reviewed Newton’s old experiments with a prism and along the way, discovered that in medieval times all painting was done with egg as the binder for the various pigments they made from minerals or vegetable matter.  Medieval painters had no way to paint layers of color on top of each other, which is why medieval paintings appear so flat (although perspective wasn’t very well done or even understood, either).  Instead, each new color muddied or threatened to erase the color beneath.

But then oil paints, using vegetable oil rather than egg to bind the pigments, came into use.  This meant that different colors could be layered on a painting without disturbing the layer of color put on before.  Once this elementary, but debilitating problem of egg-based paint had been overcome, painters could use all sorts of colors over, with and next to each other, and they could mix colors on the canvas as they painted.  Finally people could play with color and thus, play with light.

Another innovation that arrived with oil paint was varnish, and if you have ever tried to get more depth into your colors or add dimension to a painting, you know that the colors and the depth of your work look much, much better, somehow, when you varnish, whether your varnish is gloss or matte.  Somehow, that layer of clear or tinted clear stuff brings your painting alive.

I finally found out why this is so.  It involves a trick of the light. While researching Newton I came across a diagram that shows how light is transferred and mixed by a layer of varnish, and how varnish brings out the colors of your painting.  You can find it here: Optical Properties of the Paint Surface .

Isn’t that cool?  I don’t understand how light can be so many things at once: energy, particles, waves, single photons, just a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that our eyes are designed to detect…  Light is a Mystery.

But I do know light looks real pretty if you can get it to do what you want to in a painting or on a set.  And film can do even more with light and color than varnish, adding dimension and depth and breathtaking reality—-even creating entirely new realities.  Film, after all, is light. You go, light!

Avatars and Shamans: Blue and Emerald Forests

Many years ago I went out with some friends to see a double feature: Silverado and something called The Emerald Forest.  I had primarily come to see Silverado—critics had touted it as the first great western in a long, mostly western-less period of filmmaking, and I loved westerns.   However, by the time I exited the theater, I had dismissed Silverado.  Instead, The Emerald Forest (1985), directed by John Boorman and written by Rosco Pallenberg, had enchanted me with powerful, haunting new images and thoughts.  In fact, within the film’s 114 minutes, I had undergone a fundamental change in my world view and my core values.  To this day I marvel at how much my mind set was altered simply through experiencing The Emerald Forest.

Recently I watched Emerald Forest again, for the first time in probably fifteen years.  Immediately the music pulled me in.  I remembered then that I had bought the soundtrack soon after that night at the theater, and for a while I had listened to it almost daily.  I would go hiking with that music, running with it in my headphones, and I would sometimes bring it out to the beach with me at night, just to feel the emotions and re-imagine the insights of the film.  How had I forgotten that music?  It had slowly faded away when I stopped listening to my vinyl and cassette tapes.  Now, within the first few minutes of watching the film again, I resolved to go out and buy the music once more.  I wanted to remember what I had forgotten about this film.

Based in part on a true incident, the story begins as an American engineer (Powers Boothe) is charged with building a dam in the Amazon that will permanently flood out thousands of miles of unexplored, undeveloped rainforest, along with the primitive peoples who live there.  One day he is picnicking with his seven year old son near the forest’s edge when a tribe of stone age natives who call themselves the Invisible People see the boy and kidnap him, raising him as one of their own, even though he is white, one of the “Termite People”, so called because they eat up all the wood of the forest.

Over ten years the father searches for his son, and when he finds him, learns that his son is truly lost to him.  Tommy (played by the director’s son, Charlie Boorman), or Tomme, as he is now called, has taken a wife, and become a man, even though at seventeen in the Termite world, the Dead World (where all trees are felled and earth is stripped bare), Tomme would be merely a teenager, with years of growth ahead of him before maturity.

Boothe tries to convince Tomme to return to his rightful world, and his real family.  The father, it was clear to me at the beginning of the film, was absolutely in the right.  His son would be missing out on the great potential his life in civilization could bring to him.  If he stayed in the forest, he would be doomed to a primitive, substandard existence, a life both “brutish and short”.

But by the end of the film, I saw everything differently. As The Emerald Forest ended, I saw that Tomme’s life in the emerald forest was full—he had realized his potential there.  His life hadn’t been stolen from him by his kidnappers; his life with the Invisible People was a gift.  

Slowly, as the story unfolded, scene by scene, I would recognize, in the openness and innocence of the native peoples’ worldview, a kind of wisdom I received from the film that has stayed with me all this time, and has shaped my longings and feelings about wilderness and our connection to it, about the magic that is in the land if we are able to live in the right way within our place on earth.

“It’s just a movie,” you might say. What is film?  Is it merely illusion, simply entertainment?  I believe film, at its most powerful and poetic can be a call to action or even a spiritual journey, in and of itself.  Boorman wrote a book, Money Into Light (1985), about the making of The Emerald Forest, which took three years of his life to bring to the screen.  As part of his preparation for the film, Boorman journeyed up a tributary of the Amazon to an extremely remote area and spent time living with a stone age tribe called the Kamaira, talking daily with their shaman.  Boorman was deeply respectful of the tribe’s lifestyle, and recorded their myths, rituals and daily lives. In an interview, Boorman says of the tribe’s shaman, “I felt Takuma was in possession of a knowledge, a consciousness, that far surpassed my own.  I can’t imagine ever seeing things quite the same again.”

I think much of Boorman’s sense of these people was translated into the script, and this was one reason I felt so much truth to this work.  That, and the pure, wild riotous life of the Amazon, the emerald forest, that becomes, in essence a driving force, even a character in the film.  The film tells us that the Amazon is under siege, lost to almost unimaginable destruction as man dams rivers and kills ecosystems with unregulated development.  We will lose so much if we cannot stop ourselves. The message of conservation struck me once again, and as I relived the scenes and dialogue I thought I had forgotten, I realized I had taken much of this film into myself and made it mine.

Would I have gone to Alaska several years later to clean up the oil spill from the Exxon Valdez if I hadn’t seen this movie?  I can’t honestly say whether I even consciously remembered the film when I left for my three months as a volunteer in the emerald forests of the Kenai Fjords.  But part of me knew there was something precious at stake, out there in the dark green places not cut down, controlled or hemmed in by man. Although, as The Emerald Forest and the reality of oil spills make terribly clear, these vast, seemingly untouched places can be destroyed so easily by man.

This past year, when I watched Avatar, I felt a reawakening to the spirituality of nature.  Its message of conservation was achingly clear.  But now, after seeing Boorman’s 1985 film again, I know many of my feelings, my sense of the spiritual connection we need to have with our own world, were first realized consciously with the experience of watching The Emerald Forest.  These two films do the same thing for me, spiritually.  There are pundits and critics who debate the awesomeness of Avatar.  Some claim it’s too simplistic a story, a bare beginning that is over-praised simply because it is the next big thing technically, as the first of a new generation of 3D technology.

But to me Avatar is more than a simple scifi underdog story, video game mythology or an overblown slew of special effects.  It is art, with a powerful message. So, too, is The Emerald Forest.  The two films are deeply related, and if you can, watch both and see what you come away with after entering into those two distant, different, yet ultimately similar worlds, lush with their magical forests and the peoples who harmoniously exist within their web of living flora and fauna, whether real or imagined.

And regarding the power and importance of film within our own lives, as Boorman, in Money into Light says:

“The Indians, with their music, dance and ritual, are constantly striving to escape their material lives into the spirit world. In making a movie we take the material elements of our society and transmute them into a stream of light flowing on to a wall, hoping that it will contain something of our spirit.”

Police Line - Please Cross

Like many people, in the shadowy depths of my heart I’ve come to harbor a profound distrust and fear of authority. Whether this was caused by witnessing uncalled-for wars, miscarriages of justice, or simply through exposure to the slime inherent in the politics of government, I have to force myself to be civil to anybody who has been given the authority to tell me what to do and what not to do.

I don’t even care if their orders (or as they might call them, “advice”) make sense.  I still react with rebellion, assume a contrarian position, either secretly or (if I can get away with it), flagrantly.  For example, a few years ago when I pulled into my campsite next to the Grand Canyon, and two of the rangers there warned me not, under any circumstances, to go down into the canyon all by myself, my immediate reaction was to pack up some gear and head down there, all by myself.

I took all the right precautions, brought plenty of water, knew my limits, and, rather than the hideous death that they predicted for me, I had a wonderful time.  And I think the energy that fueled my solitary seventeen mile hike down into and up out of the canyon that day was pure, seething resentment that somebody had the gall to try to tell me what I shouldn’t or couldn’t do.

Police are no exception.  I might be the model of driving perfection—but if I spot a police car anywhere near me on the road, I am suddenly faint with terror and guilt.  I don’t even know what I should be guilty about, and when I realize the illogical nature of my reaction, I get angry and resentful of the authority that triggered it.  Of course I know, after all this time, how silly my reactions are.

But those crazy, negative feelings about authority—they still continue to be set off by anybody who might have the ability or power to order me, advise me, warn me, or arrest me.

However, filmmaking is the one exception.  On a film, the police are working with us, maybe even for us, and I get such a thrill from not being afraid or resentful of their presence.

The last few days of filming we were all over the heart of downtown Portland, moving from one filming location to another inside a six by six block area crisscrossed by several busy major streets, and along a half mile stretch of the park that runs along the river.  We had police cars positioned at each of four intersections, and no matter whether the lights were green or red, we were allowed to cross at will.  We freely ignored all “WALK” and “DON’T WALK” flashing signs, and scorned the little beeping noises warning crosswalk pedestrians that time was running out.  

We could pull up to a bright red painted curb signed “NO PARKING!” on any section of the boulevard, and just leave our vehicle there for as long as we needed, right in front of the police, and no officer of the law could tell us to move on.  We even parked inside the fire station, just because we felt like it.  We double parked; we parked half up on the curb and in the middle of the main courtyard next to the city fountain, places where it was absolutely FORBIDDEN to park.

The officers helped us cross back and forth, up and down the street, stopping traffic for us if we had slow carts to push, and they kept watch on our cars and open truck beds, making sure nobody stole our stereos, tools or equipment.  Some of us even skateboarded right through the “NO SKATEBOARDING!” areas with impunity.  Repeatedly.

While I’m shooting a film, I get a brief glimpse into what it would be like to live in a world without fear of authority, and it is good.  I appreciate this unheralded little perk of the film business.

But perhaps the most wonderful of all the privileges allowed by working on a film and dealing with authority is this: I could and I did cross through, over and under, many times and many miles of bright yellow police tape proclaiming in large black letters: “POLICE LINE - DO NOT CROSS”

Our entire base camp had been walled off with miles of the plastic tape of officialdom in order to keep out traffic and pedestrians, and every time I had some kind of mission that took me from the set to base camp and back again, I would run up to that fearsome, authoritarian tape, silently scream “YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME!” and gleefully slide under the warning and on my way.

I love this business.

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