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.

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.

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.

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!”

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!

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.”

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.

I have not written an entry for the past two weeks because I cannot bring myself to talk about film just at the moment, not when my focus is on something so much more pressing.  For this reason, I will post what I have been writing, even though film is only mentioned in passing.  As a side note, I understand that filmmakers have been going down to the Gulf to do good work.  I commend you and hope that film in your case will rise to the great transformative and insightful heights that it aspires to be.  So far Edward James Olmos and Robert M. Young have returned with the incredible video, The Short BP Doesn’t Want You to See.  You can find it here:  http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2010/06/16/video-gulf-coast-residents-are-devastated/ .  I highly recommend this ten minute eye-opener.

The following letter, one of several that I have been writing in the past weeks to entities including President Obama, BP, and Anderson Cooper’s 360 site on CNN, is in response to coverage on CNN of one of the two groups put in charge of the rescue of oiled wildlife during the Gulf of Mexico (or as my good friend Stephen Colbert has taken to calling it, the Gulf of America).

Dear IBRRC:

Just saw a feature about your work on CNN last night and was impressed by the dedication and the work of all at the International Bird Rescue Research Center. Please understand that this is not a letter about blame. However, I believe more people are needed to help right now. There are surely more birds than “twenty response team members” (the figure mentioned in your previous blog entry) on the ground there can handle, especially including the birds out in the wild that have to be collected safely.  They, the truly innocent oil spill victims, need more boat operators and trained capture personnel to get them in for clean up before they are too far gone to withstand the process, and every day of delay, of not having the people in place to respond proactively and quickly, is causing more oil exposure, more damage to internal organs, more dead.  If not now, then in the immediate future, more people are needed to do everything from manning wildlife hotlines to building bird triage or clean up centers, and their training and mobilization should start now.  Many of us, rather than using existing lodgings, would be willing to stay in campsites surely empty of tourists.

It is certainly a tangled ball of who should do what, but someone should be mobilizing the thousands of volunteers willing to help.  After locals are given slots (rapidly! they are right there and ready to pitch in), then others from around the US must be allowed to help the wildlife.  How many more birds could be collected and cleaned in time to save more lives with another thirty people or another sixty?  Of course, facilities must be organized, tasks that could and should be delegated to volunteers as well.

I believe that simply putting my name on a list and “waiting to be called” is virtually useless.  I’ve read of volunteers able to help who haven’t been contacted or even acknowledged as being on a waiting list (as on the BP site), or they don’t even know who to contact. Today I read about two volunteers who were asked to come down to the Gulf by one organization only to be stopped by another! The volunteer bottleneck, whether red tape or organizational in nature must be fixed.

I realize you can’t effect these changes, but the next time you’re on camera please let other organizations into the volunteer process rather than sending would-be volunteers into the bowels of a US Fish and Wildlife Service waiting list, or the Tri-State Bird Rescue site, which, when I tried, had no way for volunteers like me who live outside the area to even respond with our contact info.  Sending donations (which are not even allowed to go toward the Gulf spill clean up) doesn’t do it for me personally.  I work as a freelancer in the film business, so money is tight, but between shows I do have time, willingness and skills.

Please let the public know that Audubon has started a volunteer response center where people from anywhere in the US can sign up to do many different, specific, vital tasks, and they will be part of a smaller, more manageable volunteer list. The link is http://www.audubon.org/campaign/advisory/advisory1006.html#volunteer.  By the way, the link to Audubon on your site is broken.  I sincerely hope that they, if no one else, will find a place for me before my free time ends as my next job begins.   

I also hope somebody can and will act on these suggestions, for those of us who feel deeply frustrated at being kept from participating, from helping to save the animals we love when we have the time, the transportation, and the ability to help.

I worked for months on the Exxon Valdez clean up as a volunteer, and would have loved to help with the birds and otters, but was kept out of the animal work by just this kind of bureaucratic tangle. I still regret this, as I have handled birds all my life and my skills might have been better used to help those devastated creatures rather than shoveling oiled beaches, as I did.  However, the work I did do, the chance to make a difference, changed my life profoundly, and I encourage anyone who can to contact an appropriate oil spill response organization—and I wish them luck in getting past the fences that keep us from being good neighbors.

            Sincerely- Renee Prince

And as another side note: Okay, Stephen Colbert isn’t “my good friend”—but that’s only because we’ve never met.

Night shoots are wonderful because you can sleep in late and still have plenty of time to get to work.  Night shoots are awful because later on in the middle of the night, no matter now tired you are you can’t sleep.

During a night shoot, the six to eight hours after lunch (or dinner, really—or who knows what meal, because you eat it at anywhere from nine pm to twelve am to 2 am, depending on your call time) are the hardest for me.  Time seems to stretch out and slow down until the hours ahead of me before wrap appear to become an impossible infinity.  Wrap seems to be so far into the future that one doubts it will ever happen.

By the second half of the day (or rather night), most likely all my crazy, flat-out running to get work done and put out fires is over.  The conflagrations have been extinguished and the set has been established, meaning not much is allowed to change, paint-wise.

Of course every show is different.  Sometimes the DP will have me going in to paint shadows or dull down hot spots pretty much constantly all day (or night).  On this show, however, the pattern is to get the set ready, then lighting is adjusted to work around hot spots or shadows.  This leaves me with not much to do after the first rushes of the earlier part of the day, unless our on set dresser or props needs my help.

Today I helped them hang Christmas lights in driving rain and hail, move furniture in and out of the set to make room for changing camera set ups, and washed windows.  But that was hours ago and now I am trying to keep warm and not become obsessed by time’s elasticity.  I am very tired.  It won’t serve me to think about everything we have to do at wrap just to get out of here, or the hour long drive home after that.

I shiver, wonder if I should risk going back to crew parking to get my heaviest jacket from my truck (a good way to ensure they call me into set—-when I’m a mile away).  I decide maybe I can go inside the basement of the house where we are filming.  Nobody is in there; everybody is upstairs, somehow squeezed into three tiny rooms snaked with cables and blocked in by chairs, monitors and lights.

The basement is a dark, moldy, cobwebby space stuffed with old junk, paint and props, and I am sure many species of spiders have made their homes on the walls and ceiling.  In fact, it is a repulsive, disgusting space, probably perfect habitat for deadly brown recluse spiders.  But it is warm, and that causes it to glow with a deep attractiveness in this dark, frigid night.

Earlier in this shift, a couple of hours before sunset, it was 60 degrees and bright sun with a huge rainbow that arched over the house next door and brought out the crew’s cell phone cameras.  Now clouds scud through constantly, drilling us with rain and hail every ten or fifteen minutes.

Weather here in the Northwest—-it changes every few minutes and runs the gamut.  Why didn’t I just bring my heavy jacket in from the beginning?  When will I learn to cope with this weather?  I listen to channel one while I fret about coats and cold nights.

It’s easy to keep track of the movie as it is being created, though, and this is a great thing.  I listen and wait for “new deal”, and “moving on”, or “next set up”, and then I go inside the set to pitch in, to move set dressing and director’s chairs around in a musical chairs dance with camera, then step out after doing our work.  There are always other tasks that need doing, as well.

This time we cleaned a large glass door frantically, polishing the last few square inches of foggy surface to a clean shine, then stepping out of frame at the same second the first AD called “Rolling!”

To be able to do that reliably, to step out at exactly the last moment after finishing your little job on set is a sign that you know your way around the Business of shooting a film.  It carries a certain sense of satisfaction and forms a rhythm that helps this long, cold night finally begin moving toward wrap and home and sleep.

A long day today, all of it spent painting, although not on set.  I have been fixing up the house next door to today’s set, readying it for when we move back here tomorrow.  I have been listening in on my radio, though, the rhythm of the first AD and his compadres’ chatter keeping me in the loop as I roll walls with primer and later, as I place dozens of silk flowers in the front yard, making them look like freshly planted rows of accent blooms.

I had a blog entry for today already written out in longhand, but left it with my clipboard back at the house that is going to be our set tomorrow.   And now, with my brain on idle after my long drive home, I can only muster these few lines as a poor substitute for a cogent essay on night filming.

That essay will appear next week, and until then, I am working and trying to get my blessed four to five hours of sleep for every twenty four.  But I love the work, even though this show, disappointingly, is one of those where I am not particularly close to the DP or the director—it happens, but I don’t have to like it.  I much prefer being called in to tweak this and that every few shots, making a contribution to the effort that is visible and more part of the shooting team.

However, in my solitude at the house today, I enjoyed the artistic flower arranging and there is satisfaction in getting work done, whether or not anybody is there to notice it.  I’m not scenic-ing anything, just painting walls with primer for a brief shot or two that we couldn’t fit in last week.

It’s certainly not glamour on this show, but it is still great—it’s a movie and I enjoy the crew, the camaraderie, and the creation of a new reality from words on a page.

It’s magic.