The Tory Party

F.T. W.G.T.T.B.

This is officially my favorite story of the first year. It is long and it would be a lot shorter if I understood what I like about it so much, but I don’t so it’s not.

I was art director for a second-year movie right at the end of spring term. It turned out to be a pretty big enterprise — child actors, dream sequence, duplicate costumes, duplicate prop books, and a cast-iron bathtub full of fake blood (that had to be scrubbed clean of fake creamed corn. Nas.) I hornswoggled three other first years to help me, and keenly I felt my responsibility to them. I loved them. I loved them so.

[You would have fallen in love with them, too:

• Haruka, a scenic painter who once worked at the Biltmore Estate, in twenty minutes painted the wrong pair of diving goggles the right color (which she mixed herself), and even put a layer of sealant on it so it would survive the bathtub scene. Twenty minutes. This is utterly aside from all the storyboards and design and shopping and general damage control she did.
• Matthew B. figured out how to make a staircase look dusty (pat it down with a coffee filter full of baby powder) after a frantic hour of experimentation that included a flour sifter and me dumping out the location’s vacuum cleaner bag. (Because baby powder doesn’t look like dust, it looks like baby powder. Note to student art directors — demand an effects screen test. Note to student directors and cinematographers — if you change the script, give your art director a copy.)

  I would have liked a picture of the look on my face when I put a wet handprint down in Matthew B.’s dust and saw the success of the effect. I would have liked another picture of the look on my face when we started putting down the baby powder on set, and the cinematographer said, “Yeah, that’s gonna take forever, you just want to dump it out…”

• Alan, who’s a writer and yet grips circles around the average cinematographer-type, works like a beast and smiles when he’s pissed. So as I learn to defend my team’s interests on set, he’s the one I turn to to see if I should just suck it up and let it go. He’s the one who made two trips back to my apartment to try to find the right diving goggles, and he did it without freaking out or complaining. His superhero identity is “Taken for Granted Man.”

Anyway.]

I loved my precious team. I can’t even talk about it.

So the last day of the shoot comes around, and the bathtub leaks and sets us back 90 minutes (Matthew B. wanted to do a dry run the night before, but I was like, nooooo, it`ll be fine), and I make the little girl actor cry because her costume doesn’t fit right, and the shooting schedule has the actors wet and then dry so someone’s gonna be running to the campus laundry room. But we’re solving problems, and they’re getting the shots, and we’re almost done with the location.

And it’s almost time for lunch.

Sidebar: The policy is that the shoot has to provide snacky for the crew at all times, and after six hours, it must serve a meal. So if call time is at 9:00 AM, as it was in this case, you`ll be served a meal at 3:00 PM. Which means at 1:00 PM you start asking around to see if anyone knows what lunch is.

2:45 — food’s almost here. I look at my beloved team. Soon we can sit, dry the sweat, pick the fake blood out from under our fingernails, get some protein. Will it be pizza? Maybe Subway? I like Subway.

3:00 — 1st AD asks for grace because we’re a-a-a-almost done at this location. It’s cool. (Incidentally, the 1st AD was very good and I liked him a lot.) After this we get lunch.

3:10 — I think I just saw the producer go by.

3:15 — Break for lunch. I go into the classroom we’re using for craft services, and there’s our food:

Macaroni and cheese. And a bag of shredded lettuce.

   +   
   ! =   LUNCH

No little bits of ham or nothing in the mac and cheese. No dressing or nothing for the lettuce. Kraft macaroni and cheese. Chopped iceberg lettuce.

I stood in the doorway with my beautiful art department crew and I looked at people lining up, LINING UP for this pitiful spread and I said:

“Fuck this. We’re going to Taco Bell.”

We jumped in the Jeep and hit the Taco Bell which I now have a deep affection for as well and got two Grilled Stuft Burritos and an apple empanada and a whole lot of tacos and soda and everything and we paid for it out of my Zip-Loc baggie of Art Department cash (though it didn’t come out of the Art Dept. budget — that would have been a fast track to getting my ass beat by the Head of Production). It felt so right.

I fi-nally found the lu-u-uv of a li-yeef-ti-i-i-ime…

I was willing to take it right back and eat it in with all those sad em-effers and their mac and cheese, but Haruka and Alan and Matthew B. said maybe that wouldn’t be cool.

I wasn’t on set for the other two days, so I don’t know what the story was there, so I can’t be fair and tell this story fairly, because that’s how I roll, baby. I don’t think the issue was money (the upperclassmen movies get a budget, albeit a modest one), because alla time the producer was like, “Art department, do you have everything you need? Because we have more money.”

And later that day, we had prop food that was better than lunch. PROP. FOOD.

I need to put a hueueueuge disclaimer here and point out that I am not talking smack about the producer or anybody else. These jobs are hard and thankless and relentless and it seems like nothing gets done without you having to hunt it down and make it happen, and this producer did a damn good job and stayed cool under pressure and kept a difficult production on track which turned out to be one of the best second-year films, eye em aitch oh.

Furthermore I don’t know the situation that day so I`m in no position to judge. Furthermore I’ve never produced no nothing, so who the hell am I to go complaining about one lunch? Furthermore lunch is certainly no greater crime than not testing out the leaky bathtub from hell, which, you may have noticed, I should have done.

So don’t go be sayin` I`m hatin`, `cause I ain’t. I`d do it all again tomorrow. Tho` I`d still go to Taco Bell.

My babies. My precious art department babies.

That is all.