Low Angles Page 4

  First ambulating oil drums and then spoiled footage, and both happened on the same day.

  More sabotage.

  Chapter 4

  Trudging through the dust and weeds at the edge of the highway toward the Riverview Motel and another bout with its evening cuisine - linoleum hamburgers maybe, or pork and beans in which the “pork” was a local improvisation. After all, small vermin swarmed around the village, just asking for it.

  The town itself looked like an abandoned back lot set: shanties stumbling out of plumb, rusty flivvers decomposing in hardpan yards, gas station attendant snoozing under a single bulb, exhausted by the day’s three sales. Twilight in downtown Calisher at the end of a long day’s shoot.

  Diane peered around in the dying light. “I wish we had summer sunshine.”

  “It goes fast in April.” When the daylight had dropped below the lens’ widest aperture, we’d moved in blue-filtered quartz lights and shot close-ups for an hour in faked sunlight, the flaccid cameraman grumbling at his meter, as cameramen do.

  A lengthy pause full of crickets and crunching footsteps.

  “Your new scenes look pretty good, Stoney.”

  “Not bad for a tyro.”

  “All right, plain good.”

  “Sorry; I’m just tired.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  The motel’s sputtering neon NO was a hundred yards ahead when a squat figure detached itself from the shadow of the motorcycle repair shop and swaggered into the road: Pits Caudle, shaved head gleaming in the cross-light.

  “Hey you, Winston! We gotta talk.” Even shouting, Pits achieved the truculent mumble that bikers affect for civilians.

  Diane muttered, “Godzilla speaks.” In fact, he wasn’t all that scary, despite the warlord whiskers, the tattoos, and the smoked granny glasses that would make navigation hazardous in this light. Like an actor subtly miscast, Pits Caudle could not quite make his costume believable.

  “What’s up, Doc?”

  “Huh?” He sensed a put-on but couldn’t identify it, so he marshaled his troops and continued: “Whattabout this new crap? What I mean is it gonna take longer?”

  We kept walking. “I hope not.”

  “I don’t care.” Left behind, he trotted after us. “I mean, yer payin’ by the day.”

  “Yes?”

  When I declined his serve, he was forced to grope after his own thought. A pause, then, “Well, I gotta know. I mean, what if somebody wants the motel?”

  “For what, a lepers’ convention?”

  “Huh?”

  Diane shot me a warning look and asked in a reasonable tone, “What’s the problem, Pits?”

  He addressed me as if she didn’t exist: “We got books ta keep: motel, coffee shop, extras, drivers, scooters - the whole shot.”

  “What do the bikes rent for?”

  “Depends.” But he looked as if he didn’t know.

  “I mean, one motorcycle for one day. How much?”

  “Well... Molly writes it up, y’know. I leave it to her; she’s my ol’ lady. I mean like I manage.”

  I said, “Just barely.”

  Another dirty look from Diane, then she tried again with Pits: “We’ll wrap the exteriors first. That way, we don’t have to keep renting the bikes.”

  “No way; it’s a package deal.” Again, he looked only at me.

  “What kind of package deal?”

  “Everything’s for the whole...” the term eluded him “...thing.”

  “The duration of the shoot?”

  “Duration, yeah. That’s the deal.”

  “Who made the deal?”

  “Greystoke guy.” Thoughts appeared on Caudle’s face like light bulbs in cartoons: “Hey: you talk to him, right?”

  “I’m the production manager.”

  As he nodded, the cross-light raked the craters in his face. “Okay, then Molly’ll give ya the bills. You give them to him.”

  “How have you done it up to now?”

  “She... I mean, I dint yet; it’s only a week so far. He’s spose ta get a bill every week. That’s the deal.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Right. Okay, I got work to do.”

  As he turned, Diane stepped in front of him and forced him to look at her. “How about getting us some better food?”

  He stared at her, blinking, then: “Talk to Molly; she does it. Dumb bitch never could cook.”

  Diane kept her voice even: “I’ll tell her you said so.”

  “Not even good fer humpin’. If she wasn’t my, like, secatary, I’d dump her.” He held Diane’s eye for an insolent beat, then swaggered away toward the bike shop.

  “The bastard.” She said it quietly.

  “I know, but I shouldn’t have given him a hard time.”

  “Me either.” She paused to look around the dreary street, then spoke softly to the evening: “How on earth did I get here?”

  “I wondered.”

  A long pause, and then her reply seemed tangential: “You know what I like best? The mechanics. I was always good with machines. Even in grade school, I used to run the projector for the teacher.” A contemptuous snort. “She could thread a bobbin on a Singer slant-needle but she wouldn’t lace up a Bell and Howell.”

  I kept an encouraging silence.

  Diane sighed. “I wanted to be a cameraman, but no way. They said a woman was too small to hand-hold.” Bitter silence.

  A flight wing of mosquitoes had their gun sights on us. When I smashed one against my forehead, my fingers came away bloody. “Come on, they’ll drain us dry.”

  Diane looked vaguely into the shadows. “Who will?”

  * * * *

  At five o’clock the next morning, the rising sun was blasting through my motel window, artfully placed to aim it like a key light at my face. I cursed myself for forgetting to throw the bedspread over the window rod, from which the curtains had long since vanished.

  Usually I run on full automatic until I’ve had three cups of coffee, but today I’d awakened spinning with shoot logistics and ideas for scenes. Writing and managing at the same time were getting to be too much.

  Bang! bang!! bang!!! on my flimsy door. “It’s Lee, Stoney.” I pulled on jeans and let him in.

  “The camera’s gone.” His normally calm face was stiff with worry. “I looked everywhere.”

  “Grip truck?”

  “Grip truck, camera truck, utility truck, wardrobe. I went to yesterday’s setups and looked.”

  “Ask around?” He shook his head. “No spare?”

  “On this shoot? We don’t even have a sawed-off.” He meant the smaller tripod used for lower camera angles.

  “Case too?”

  “Case and camera. The mag case is here and the film magazines are in it.”

  “Okay, you wake up Scuzzy; I’ll get Diane. Be in the coffee shop in ten minutes.” He turned to go. “Keep it to yourself.”

  Crunching through the gravel to Diane’s room on the front side of the motel, I shivered in the mountain dawn. She answered my knock, bare under a short, homely robe, lush hair a dark waterfall over her shoulders. She looked very young in the morning light, like a sleepy child padding to breakfast in her jammies.

  But the cat behind her eyes awoke at once: “The camera’s lost?”

  “I don’t think so. Coffee shop in five minutes. I’ll explain.”

  She shut the door as I trotted toward the rank coffee shop adjacent the motel office.

  * * * *

  Scuzzy puffed in like the morning train and just as big, apparently wearing his unmade bed, but then he always looks like that. He filled two mugs from the coffee urn, slopped them down before him on the table, and sat beside Lee. They stared at me, the mountain and the molehill, Yang and Yin.

  The screen door banged as Diane clomped over to the coffee in her hiking boots. She bent over the spigot with a grace that few tall women achieve, then crossed to sit beside me. Somehow, she’d had time to braid her hair.

&
nbsp; I didn’t want the assistant cameraman to hear the discussion: “Lee, how about going through the trucks once more just to be sure.”

  “Okay.” But he shook his head doubtfully as he left.

  “Diane, you said someone was screwing the picture.”

  “I was just mad.”

  “I knew you were, but someone put those oil drums in Sean’s path, and half of that day’s footage was ruined.”

  “What?”

  I shook my head. “We reshot the stuff. Anyway, now the camera’s gone.”

  Scuzzy drained one mug. “Maybe Lee misplaced it.”

  “He’d sooner lose his honorable father. You know A.C.s: they guard their gear like mother ducks. No, not Lee.”

  Diane frowned into her coffee: “Maybe they stole it to sell.”

  “A twenty year old Arri?”

  Scuzzy spoke with rabbinical weight: “A provocative discussion, but out of place. What do we do?”

  “Scuzzy, take a bike out to yesterday’s area and comb the place. Diane, you pick a sequence that’ll need rehearsal. Lots of it.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll get on the horn and find another camera. If you keep people busy ‘til it gets here, they won’t notice anything.”

  Diane opened her mouth as if to ask, why the cover-up? Then she nodded. Scuzzy slurped his second mug and expanded to full height, knocking over his chair. He ignored it. The three of us surged out the door and then split up like planes deploying for a dogfight.

  * * * *

  We reconvened an hour later in Diane’s room, since the coffee shop was now full of cast and crew, yawning over cornflakes.

  I saw that Fenster was distinctly bowlegged, which gave him the profile of a huge extracted molar. “What’s the matter, Scuzzy?”

  “My stupidity: I picked one of the Funny Bikes: no shocks at all and no seat springs. Like to kill me.”

  “You probably gave as good as you got; I bet you warped its frame.”

  Scuzzy grimaced ho-ho-funny as he eased onto the bed, which sank eight inches. “No camera, though.”

  Diane glanced up from her script pages: “You went over the rock pile?”

  “Did everything but move it stone by stone.”

  “I’ve got a long scene at the mud hole location. It’ll take a while to rehearse. Say, did we make the mud hole?”

  I nodded. “Stogie’s boys dammed the creek last night. We’ll have plenty of goo.”

  “And makeup?”

  “She made a whole bucket full of ‘mud.’ I told her last night too.”

  Diane looked at me a moment as if she wanted to say something; then she just smiled.

  I checked my watch. “And Ken Simmons will bring a camera here by nine.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  I shrugged. “That we couldn’t find the camera. He wasn’t ecstatic. He’s even less thrilled about driving up here. But I found an Arri at Fricsay Rentals, and that’s the main thing.”

  Scuzzy frowned. “They’re a crummy outfit.”

  “And we have a crummy budget. Just pray it works.”

  Diane remembered her earlier question: “Stoney, why are we covering this up?”

  “Company morale is lousy enough. Why tell people we’re being sabotaged?”

  Scuzzy intoned, “A hedge about wisdom is silence.” Diane and I stared at him. “Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph, who died a martyr.”

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  “In his ninety-sixth year.”

  We looked appreciative of this deft exit.

  * * * *

  Stripped to their panties, two biker maidens battled in the mud of the Calisher “river,” grappling, shrieking, slipping in the ooze. What had started as a fight was dissolving into hijinks, and now the shrieks were childish laughter.

  Scuzzy sat watching on the bank, bracketed by slack-jawed bikers - proprietors of the sopping wrestlers. His stare switched from oaf to oaf as they guzzled Coors and yelled advice.

  “Grab her tits; grab her tits!”

  “What tits, man?” They roared at this repartee.

  Scuzzy’s rumpled visage clouded. He looked at the girls; frowned; then rose to his impressive height, decision in his face.

  “And cut! Print both one and two. Set up for the pullback shot.” Pigtails flapping, Diane loped over to the next setup. “Can we use the dolly, Stogie?”

  The key grip, pristine in all this slop, waddled to the camera position and squinted at the mud. “Goddam ground’s too soft.” Stogie relit his cigar.

  “Then put it on sticks; we’ll zoom.”

  Lee nodded and ran for the tripod. In two minutes he’d planted the legs, whirled off the wing nut screwing the pan head to the dolly, replaced the whole unit on the tripod, and leveled it with the built-in ball and bubbles. “Camera ready.”

  Ken Simmons and I watched from the sidelines, below the temporary dam that had backed up the puny “river” to make a mud hole. “Thank God you brought the camera, Ken.” He looked around the glade for a place to sit as I groped for diplomacy and, as usual, failed: “Now I need another favor.”

  Simmons whisked a finger across a log and inspected it. “Not if it means more money.” The log was too dirty for his Rodeo Drive pants.

  “No, it’s your time. You’ve got to stay up here and take over.”

  His slate eyes widened. “The hell I do!”

  “I can’t rewrite a whole script if I have to manage production. Without a script, we have nothing to shoot; but without a working producer, we’ll never get it shot. We need you.”

  He moved his face into a splotchy shadow. “I’ve got other things to do.”

  “Ken, you are the producer. This comes first.”

  “I don’t need you to tell me.” His quiet tone carried a distant warning.

  “No you don’t.” I watched the cast rehearse as I sought a persuasive line. “You’ve always been a pro, as long as I’ve known you.” He nodded, mollified. “But you see how dicey it is up here.”

  “I know the situation.” Simmons’ face relaxed and he moved closer. “Look, Stoney, we’ve got a lose-lose proposition, face it. The script is too bad to fix, the budget’s ten percent of what we need, and the backer’s just playing with himself.” He grinned sympathetically. “You can’t change it, so just lay back and enjoy it.” Almost an afterthought: “You’re making twenty-two-fifty.”

  I resented that: “And what are you making?”

  Simmons’ steely tone returned: “I’m doing a job with what I’ve got. If Greystoke wants to spend the money, it’s not my problem.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way. But this can be a really good picture - if we pull it off.”

  Ken looked at me with sad affection, my elegant Sancho Panza. “All right, I’ll stay a week.”

  “Hope I can finish the rewrite.”

  He smoothed his curly beard. “One week.”

  Diane stood by the camera. “Now everybody: one take only, ‘cause this is going to wipe us out.”

  One of the slime-coated girls yelled, “Makeup!” which drew a big laugh.

  “Quiet, people. Slate in.” The camera started; slate clacked. “And action!”

  Scuzzy, in tight three-shot, grabbed the backs of the two bikers’ belts and lofted them into the swamp as Lee zoomed out to hold the action. The bikers flailed into the mud facedown, staggered up choking, and thrashed toward the opposite bank. Scuzzy beamed down at the two girls, who howled with mirth.

  As the bikers turned murderously, Scuzzy pinched his nostrils in a dainty grip, pounded down the slope, launched his bulk, and, majestic as the Hindenburg, sailed into the water, backside first. A brown tsunami raced across the mud hole and knocked the bikers flat.

  The girls embraced Scuzzy, who now resembled a chocolate-covered whale, and the three cavorted happily under the poisonous glares of the dripping bikers. The scene ended as Scuzzy swept up a girl in each thick arm and carried them tenderly up the bank. They kissed him. Cut.

/>   The company broke into applause.

  Diane sounded happy: “Close-ups quick, before that stuff cakes.”

  Ken Simmons looked bemused. “That wasn’t in the script.”

  “It was and wasn’t. It started as a mud wrestling scene - gratuitous skin and sadism. We changed it to show Scuzzy’s shifting values.”

  He shook his head doubtfully. “I hope shifting values go over in Texas drive-ins.”

  “We may do better than that.”

  Ken’s answering look was unfathomable.

  We started back around the slough - Ken taking picky, loafer-saving steps while I considered more arguments to keep him here. “The fact is, there’s something else.” I told him about the sabotage. “Someone wants to shut us down, Ken. I need time to find out why.”

  He looked worried. “I wish you wouldn’t. I don’t really know what’s going on with this production.” He stared off through the eucalyptus trunks. “I pay cast, crew, equipment rentals. Everything else goes to Greystoke. Maybe he’s playing some kind of game.” Ken looked at me. “But if he is, I don’t want to know.”

  “See no evil?”

  He shook his head patiently. “Look, suppose some guy buys my car to use in robbing a bank. If I didn’t know that, then I sold the car in good faith. But if I did know, then I might be an accessory.”

  I stopped to watch the crew prepare a setup. “Anyway, I’ll do some checking.”

  “You can be awful naive for your age.” He shook his head and smiled. “All right, I’ll stick around.”

  “For as long as it takes?”

  A softhearted sigh: “Yeah.”

  * * * *

  Determined not to exploit the girls’ nudity, Diane was personally applying makeup ‘mud’ to plaster over their stimulating parts. “Okay, let that dry; we’ll spray it just before the take. How’s it look, Stoney?”

  Realizing just in time that she meant the sequence, I shifted my gaze before she caught me. “It’s going to be hilarious.”

  She nodded, wiping her hands with a paper towel. “It makes the point. How’d you do with Simmons?”

  “He’ll take over as P.M.”

  “For the whole shoot?” I nodded.

  Diane lit a skinny brown cigarette. “A new camera, a terrific scene, and a production manager.” She put out a hand as if to touch my forearm, then stopped halfway. “Not a bad day’s work, pardner.”

  My cowpoke voice: “No ma’am.”

  * * * *

  For all Diane’s efforts, the biker belles displayed a consciousness deplorably unraised. Now they were teasing Fenster as they waited for a take: lissome Tracy tickling his ear while dark chubby Gail rubber-stamped his stomach with her chest, printing twin bull’s-eyes of fresh mud. Scuzzy’s face suggested that he bore these little trials without great strain.