Cowboy Confessional

Gawd, now I’m an actor. I’ll understand if you walk away shaking your head.

I spent last night playing a bit role in an independent film. The San Francisco area has slightly more independent film makers than it has homeless people (the primary difference between these two groups is that homeless people have higher annual incomes). Being loosely connected to an indy film fan group (I once dated the founder) I get all manner of borderline incoherent emails from regional indy fans.

The other day a surprising lucid email arrived from a director.

Maimone Attia is his name, and as best as I can tell he is composed in equal measure of jet fuel and Starbucks double espressos. His email called for extras to mingle in a party scene. This job sounded as if it required no skill whatsoever, and having sipped my way through a few thousand cocktail parties I figured I could do this by rote. Also, I have long wanted to witness the film making process, suspecting that film directors need the combined talents of a touchy-feely psychiatrist, a mad scientist, and a concentration camp social activities coordinator.

I discovered my preconceptions about directors were fairly accurate.

As Maimone and his two-man production crew set the frame, he described the scene to all us extras. He then asked me my name, pointed to a spot on the floor and informed me that I would have lines to read. This caught me a bit by surprise, and I hid my reaction like a cat hides its … well, perhaps that analogy is too precise. Evidently the lines were so simple that Maimone assumed even I could pull it off.

This was not type casting. When shooting a low budget indy film with volunteer extras, you can’t be too picky when casting. So there I was — a southern-born ex-cowboy and former computer jockey — suddenly playing the role of a Shakespearean actor at a cast party following a production of King Lear (the one bit of Shakespeare I despise more than a cattle rustler running for office).

To act like an actor I had to develop an ego on the spot. This was not easy as I don’t have an ego of my own. My ex-wife won it as part of the divorce settlement. She wanted my testicles, but since I had long term plans for those, we negotiated. She got my ego and Satan now has deed to her soul.

Poor Satan. He doesn’t know the mess he has gotten himself into.

If you ever have the burning desire to act in a film, don’t. Working on a picture involves two terrible things: waiting and talking to actors. The waiting is endless as the director, grips, lighting technicians, audio engineers — all the job titles that you ignore during the credits — set the scene, argue the technology, change their minds, reset the scene, and repeat the process until out of sheer frustration an actors slaps the director into a neighboring zip code.

To kill time and the dull aches between your eyes, you’ll strike-up a conversation with any senseless item: a table, a flower pot, an actor. Don’t get me wrong. Actors are amusing people. It is their job. The downside is that to be a good conversationalist you talk about the interests of the other person, which gets actors talking about acting. Next a Barack Obama speech, there is no monologue on the planet seemingly more devoid of substance. I’m sure to a trained and experienced actor the nuances of their craft are fascinating. To an extra with an unanticipated field promotion, it had the same effect as qualudes but without the pleasant narcotic side effects.

(The exception to this rule about actors is my old pal Fred Ochs, a working thespian in L.A. Aside from being bloody good at his craft, he had a life before acting and thus has multiple tangents to his personality, making him delightful company despite his disreputable trade.)

So instead of listening to the actors, I told jokes instead. Think of it as return fire.

When a director has a budget, certain things are easier and faster. Modern cinematography equipment captures multiple digital camera and microphone feeds into a central server. This lets the director shoot a scene once (or twice if he is paranoid) and later edit all the different angles and sounds into a meaningful bit of entertainment.

When a director has no cash he must shoot the scene, move the camera, shoot the scene again, move the camera, shoot the scene again, move …. I think we shot one 20 second fragment of a single scene 1,320,147 times (that’s a guess, it might be more). Since nobody is being paid for their time on an indy film, time is the cheapest commodity involved and the one used in excess.

In this scene fragment I’m chatting with fellow “actors” at a cast party while the female lead is escorted up to us. I hug her friend (which given how damn cute she was made the 1,000 retakes the best part of the evening), make introductions, and wait for the male lead to stumble into frame. Sensing that a zillion takes might make my fellow extra-actors stale, I decided to ad lib different conversations with each take, inventing on the fly wild stories of stage productions gone horribly wrong. When the director shouted action (yes, they actually shout that) I would jabber something like “I was doing the graveyard scene from Hamlet, and Yorick’s jaw bone fell off, bounced off the stage and into the audience.”

If nothing else I kept part of the cast amused. Hmmmm. Maybe I’m devolving into an actor.

Film production and diaper changes are the two things devoid of reliable scheduling. The shoot was supposed to start at 6PM and finish by 10PM. It started somewhere around 8PM and lasted until midnight. The male lead had flown in that morning from Dallas, Texas. His bio-clock was convinced that it was actually 2AM by the time the director said it was “a wrap.” Despite endless takes, constant delays and a set where the air temperature rivaled Hades in July, the cast and crew kept their wits and humor about them, improvised everything (including putting a man with a boom mic under a dinning room table while nearly inserting it vaginally into the female lead) and we all managed to make believe without losing our collective minds. Well, the male lead may have lost his earlier that day while shooting a scene on location where he was to fall of a mountain. I trust he got stunt pay.

If anything ruins this movie it will be that that made us all dance. I may have some talent for writing and maybe even tune crafting. But rave dancing is not on my resume and nobody in their right mind should ask me to do so. Sadly, the unsightly horror of my dance moves are forever digitally captured, which no doubt means they will be the next laugh fest on YouTube.

Acting, dancing … I think I’ll stick to writing. It is less honest, more profitable, and a damn sight less annoying to the public.

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