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.

Above the Fold & The Ride Down

Two incredibly silly screenplays from screenwriting class.

• The Ride Down - Sometimes being helpless is your only defense.
• Above the Fold - If you want to be heard, you have to speak the language.

Cinderella Man and Land of the Dead

Saw a few movies this weekend. Let�s get started.

I have nothing to heckle. It was satisfying and pretty and based on true stuff. Max Baer�s depiction seemed outta place because he was so-o-o super evil bad, but I didn�t mind because it was dude from Long Kiss Goodnight and nobody can make so super evil bad work like he does.

Anyone ever tell you you look like my heckling partner?

Just three observations:

• Paul Giamatti gets lit from the side a lot. Even with half his face lit, all he needs is one eye blink to make you feel everything he�s feeling. You know what Sophia Loren said about nude scenes � �When Sophia Loren is naked, this is a lot of nakedness.� When Paul Giamatti gets a close-up, that is a lot of face.

  
  Here�s where I keep more talent than the cast of Phone Booth.

• There�s a scene where Renee Zellwegger�s character goes to talk to Paul Giamatti�s character in his apartment. At the turning point in the conversation, Ron Howard goes around and shoots the rest of the scene in reverse, so the characters are in silhouette. I thought that was rilly rilly slick. (Cinematographer: Salvatore Totino)
• Sound design was KICKIN�. Somebody put some love in the fight sequences. (Supervising sound editor: Anthony J. Ciccolini III)
• I�m going to ca-a-asually work in here that I was lucky enough to receive a dozen roses last week without deserving it at all, and I may or may not have carried them around the house with me for maximum enjoyment, giggling all the while. But if I were a Depression-era mother with recent risk of homelessness and disease and my husband brought home roses I would be mad as aitch ee double hockey sticks. Mad!

I don�t really have anything to heckle about this one either. It left me kinda unsatisfied, though I can�t put my finger on why. I think the problem is I�m sitting here two days later and I can�t remember much that happened. Asia Argento has a fascinating face. Simon Baker has dilated pupils. I gasped and jumped a lot � I have nothing to complain about.

They brought what for lunch?

When Finding Nemo came out, Home on the Range in mid-stride went from �pretty good for a kids� movie� to �we�ve come to expect more from cartoons.� Maybe that�s what Land of the Dead is up against � there�s nothing wrong with it, but when Shaun of the Dead exists it�s hella hard to compete.

There may or may not be Shaun-related cameos in Land of the Dead. I would never give something like that away.

Just caught a chunk of it on TV last night. I didn�t get a chance to see it when it came out, though it looked interesting, but holy Waldorf salad with Dijon vinaigrette Ben Affleck is a bad actor. Or maybe the editor just hated him. There�s this scene toward the end with Amanda Peet (who is in turn getting attacked by unflattering lighting) and him reconciling in a fancy restaurant, and there are a couple of reaction shots of him being sad and shocked that are full-on �Tory, I�m going to need you to dial it down a notch this next take� bad. Furthermore he�s generally upstaged by his Maxim Hair Color for Men.

I am so having an intense but unspecified emotion right now.

Boy, am I snotty.

Pumping Iron

(This is actually from a year ago, which is why the math is a little hinky-punk for 2005)

I gave my dad the 25th anniversary DVD of “Pumping Iron” for father’s day, and he lent it to me to watch this weekend. That movie is a core component of the Hoke family experience, especially memorable misquotes like “this is for all the mowbles, Louie” and “I vomit in the chym many times.” I hadn’t seen it all the way through until now, because despite its prehistoric PG rating it has many things you shouldn’t be in the same room as your dad for.

Do you not see it? Dude, I`m pointing right at it.

So many things about this movie. I think we’ve established I like Lou Ferrigno. He’s so weird and baby-faced here, like any brooding Guido high school student, with those kinda Joaquin Phoenix low black eyebrows over light eyes. But instead of Joaquin’s scarred palate he’s got major hearing loss and an accompanying speech impairment. AND WAIT he’s also got a tic in his eye.

I think if you had to cast someone to portray Lou Ferrigno as he’s depicted in Pumping Iron, Joaquin Phoenix would be a good choice. Except you could NEVER cast anyone as Lou Ferrigno because he is a MONSTER. In the movie they cite him as 6`5″ and 270 (in some later commentary he’s suddenly 6`8″ and 280, but 6`5″ is consistent with his height relative to Big Arnie.) Now, I know in these days of WWE you can’t swing a belt without hitting some dude 6`8″ and 310 and 22″ neck and blah blah blah. But this was 1979. And Big Louie was 21. TWENTY-ONE.

Holy crap that’s a big dude.

It’s important to reiterate that a lot of Pumping Iron was fabricated. Ken Waller hiding Mike Katz’s shirt. Big Arnie not going to his dad’s funeral because it was too close to a competition (Not clear on whether he went, but he according to Big Arnie later he didn’t die in proximity to a contest. Even so, knowing a little about Big Arnie’s relationship with his father and brother [which is to say his dad preferred Manfred, the older, and put them in all kinds of physical contests that the younger, weaker Arnie inevitably lost], I was happy to assign all kinds of Oedipal Freudian shenanigans to his enthusiasm for this story.)

Time to talk about Big Arnie. First, in Pumping Iron he reminds me for all the world of my ex’s younger brother — from the eyes and eyebrows and diastema and the mole on the side of his face (now removed) to his mannerisms, physical and vocal. Hell, his whole aspect. It was very weird and consistent.

So my older brother was dating this chick…

I should mention that the subject of Big Arnie has become a sore one in our family. Arnold Schwarzenegger is, as you may have heard, a huge pervert. This was one thing when he was just a bodybuilder and a boob-grabbing movie star. But now he’s a politician and all the misogyny and Republican hypocrisy smells like circus peanuts. So from my mother’s quarter there’s the idea that the Hokes shouldn’t be in the business of supporting perverts and she can’t stand to watch him in anything. Fair enough.

But from my dad’s quarter there’s been Big Arnie in his blood and his culture for twenty-five years. My take is that, yeah, Big Arnie’s not someone you want to leave alone with your daughter. But it seems to me that you can be entertained and even fascinated by someone who disgusts you, and that’s not immoral. If the Sopranos are okay, then Schwarzenegger can’t be far behind.

Anyway. This DVD included a making-of featurette that reunited the players. Lou Ferrigno and Franco Columbu — looking good, kids.

It’s funny to me that I saw Lou Ferrigno and his dad, Matty — who had a couple of shots of making that deadeye Al Pacino/Joe Trippi face — and thought, well there’s a quintessential Italian-looking father and son. Then I watched Franco Columbu visit Sardinia and realized I don’t know nothing about Italians or Italy. Italian-Americans, maybe.

Who *didn’t* look so good was Arnie 2004. Owowowo. He’s got this Ronald Reagan bootblack hair color and eyebrows to match. His eyes are bizarre — they don’t look at all like the eyes he had in 1979, and in fact they have a wild, Parkinsonian dementia to them. The planes around his mouth are inert when he talks. Something about his jaw and forehead has been entirely remodeled.

(If you want to see my obsessive Big Arnie plastic surgery post, click here.)

But the worst development here — the biggest loss of his former self — is that he has become *self-conscious.* In his solo interview, he makes the same “I did inhale” reefer joke twice. Can’t be sure this interview was shot in 2004, but I do know Clinton’s reefer confession was in 1992. For perspective, this would be like someone in 1992 making reference to a faux pas from 1980. So, like, Color Me Badd referring to the formation of Husker Du.

Once was a walking photoshop experiment

A-a-a-nd I`m spent.

Before They Were Famous-Type People

Maybe you already know these. Or maybe you will gasp, like I did when Mischa Barton ralphed in The Sixth Sense.

• Matt LeBlanc was the dude in the Heinz ketchup commercial where he puts the bottle on the roof of a tall building and goes downstairs in time to catch some on a weenie from a hot dog stand. Then he eats it real sexy, like, hey, I`m a hot guy eating a weenie, and flirts with this chick while presumably ketchup continues to splatter behind him. He was that guy!

  
  Hi, I`m a hot guy eating a weenie.

• Morena Baccarin (from Firefly and Serenity, and if you don’t know what those are then you better Google RITE NOW) was the chick in the Secret pit stick commercial where she asks her roommate if she borrowed her black shirt, and her roommate says, “Does it LOOK like I borrowed it?” And she looks at the shirt and it doesn’t have white pit stick streaks on it, so she’s like, huh. But maybe it smells like smoke and watered-down apple martinis, but the commercial’s over before the roommates resolve their fundamental distrust.

  
  So I got out of my lease and became an intergalactic escort.

• Michelle St. John (from Smoke Signals and The Business of Fancydancing, the latter which director Sherman Alexie brought to my school and proceeded to be the best. guest artist. ever and we’ve had some good ones) was the voice of Nakoma in Disney’s Pocahontas. You may remember Nakoma as the best thing in that movie (”She listens to you.” “Sher she does.”)

  
  Best. Face. Ever.

  You may also remember that Irene Bedard as Pocahontas did not do the singing (Broadway star Judy Kuhn did). So-o-o-o now that I’ve heard Michelle St. John at the end of Fancydancing blast out a vocal that was soulful and rich and technically beyond reproach, the question is begged: why did they pick for the lead an actress who couldn’t do the singing? Would closing the gulf between the Bedard’s light, hollow performance and Kuhn’s sanitized, theatrical singing have made Pocahontas a better movie? Well, better writing and less emphasis on animated cute in a story that ends in genocide would have made a better movie. But more Michelle St. John would have helped.

While researching these, I encountered this milt-able website:
In the 80s. Of their “Before They Were Famous” list, some are obvious, but there’s this:

Matt Damon: Snotty little brother of the rich boyfriend of Julia Roberts in Mystic Pizza - only in one scene, a family dinner

Ha! Which reminds me that everybody in the damn hell ass world was in that movie. Click here to see. Frippin` Vincent D`Onofrio even.

Which then reminds me that Alyson Hannigan and Seth Green (Juliette Lewis, too) were both tiny little kids in My Stepmother is an Alien, which I’ve been thinking of a lot now that I`m up to the werewolf part in Buffy Season 2.

Image stolen from BuffyFan.dk

Which reminds me that Christian Bale was the star of The Newsies which I haven’t seen, but the thought of singing dancing Newsie Christian Bale makes me want to go to Blockbuster RITE NOW!

LOOK! Looklooklooklooklook!