A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (31 page)

Fact: in my three days here for
Premiere
magazine I will meet two (2) different people named Balloon.

The major industry around here seems to be valet parking; even some of the fast food restaurants here have valet parking;
I’d love to have the West Hollywood/Beverly Hills concession on maroon valet sportcoats. A lot of the parking attendants have
long complicated hair and look sort of like the Italian male model who’s on Harlequin Romance covers. In fact pretty much
everybody on the street seems ridiculously good-looking. Everybody is also extremely well- and fashionably dressed; by the
third day I figure out that the way to tell poor and homeless people is that they look like they dress off the rack.
¹⁷
The only even marginally ravaged-looking persons in view are the hard-faced Latin guys selling oranges out of grocery carts
on whatever median strips aren’t already taken by cittern players. Supermodels can be seen running across four-lane roads
against the light and getting honked at by people in fuchsia Saabs and tan Mercedeses.

And it’s true, the big stereotype: from any given vantage at any given time there are about four million cars to be seen on
the roads, and none of them seems to be unwaxed. People here have got not only vanity license plates but vanity license-plate
frames
. And just about everybody talks on the phone as they drive; after a while you get the crazy but unshakable feeling that they’re
all talking to each other, that whoever’s talking on the phone as they drive is talking to somebody else who’s driving.

On the first night’s return from the set, a Karmann-Ghia passed us on Mulholland with its headlights off and an older woman
behind the wheel holding a paper plate between her teeth and
still
talking on a phone.

So the point is Lynch isn’t as out of his filmic element in LA as one might have initially feared.

Plus the location helps make this movie “personal” in a new way, because LA is where Lynch and his S.O., Ms. Mary Sweeney,
¹⁸
make their home. Corporate and technical headquarters for Asymmetrical Productions is the house right next door to theirs.
Two houses down on the same street is the house Lynch has chosen to use for the home of Bill Pullman and brunette Patricia
Arquette in
Lost Highway
’s first act. It’s a house that looks rather a lot like Lynch’s own, a house whose architecture could be called Spanish in
roughly the same way Goya could be called Spanish.

A film’s director usually has a number of Assistant Directors, whose various responsibilities are firmly established by Hollywood
convention. The First Assistant Director’s responsibility is the maximally smooth ordered flow of the set. He’s in charge
of coordinating details, shouting for quiet on the set, worrying, and yelling at people and being disliked for it. This allows
the director himself to be kind of a benign and unhassled monarch, occupied mostly with high-level creative concerns and popular
with the crew in a kind of grandfatherly way.
Lost Highway
’s First Assistant Director is a veteran 1st A.D. named Scott Cameron, who wears khaki shorts and has stubble and is good-looking
in a kind of unhappy way.
¹⁹
The Second Assistant Director is in charge of scheduling and is the person who makes up the daily Call Sheet, which outlines
the day’s production schedule and says who has to show up where and when. There’s also a Second Second Assistant Director,
²⁰
who’s in charge of interfacing with the actors and actresses and making sure their makeup and costumes are OK and going to
summon them from their trailers when the stand-ins are done blocking off the positions and angles for a scene and everything’s
ready for the first string to come on.

Part of the 2nd A.D.’s daily Call Sheet is a kind of charty-looking précis of the scenes to be shot that day; it’s called
a “One Line Schedule” or “One Liner.” Here is what January 8’s One Liner looks like:

(1) Scs 112
INT MR. EDDY’S MERCEDES
/DAY/ 1
pgs

MR. EDDY
²¹
DRIVES MERCEDES, PETE
²²
LISTENS FOR CAR TROUBLE
.

(2) Scs 113
EXT MULHOLLAND DRIVE
/DAY/ ⅛
pgs

MR. EDDY TAKES THE CAR FOR A CRUISE, INFINITI MOVES UP FAST BEHIND THEM

(3) Scs 114
EXT MR. EDDY’S MERCEDES
/DAY/ ⅛
pgs

MR. EDDY LETS INFINITI PASS AND FORCES IT OFF ROAD

These car-intensive scenes are, as was mentioned, being shot in Griffith Park, a roughly Delaware-sized expanse out in the
foothills of the Santa Monicas. Imagine a kind of semi-arid Yellowstone, full of ridges and buttes and spontaneous little
landslides of dirt and gravel. Asymmetrical’s advance team has established what’s called a Base Camp of about a dozen trailers
along one of the little roads between Mulholland and the San Diego Freeway,
²³
and Security has blocked off areas of several other roads for the driving scenes, burly guys with walkie-talkies and roadie-black
T-shirts forming barricades at various places to keep joggers and civilian drivers from intruding into the driving shots or
exposing the production to insurance liability during stunts. LA civilians are easygoing about being turned back from the
barricades and seem as blasé as New Yorkers about movies being filmed on their turf.

Griffith Park, though lovely in a kind of desiccated, lunar way, turns out to be a thoroughgoingly Lynchian filming environment,
with perfu-sive sunshine and imported-beer-colored light but a weird kind of subliminal ominousness about it. This ominousness
is hard to put a finger on or describe in any sensuous way. It turns out that there’s a warning out that day for a Santa Ana
Wind, a strange weather phenomenon that causes fire hazards
²⁴
and also a weird but verifiable kind of high-ion anxiety in man and beast alike. LA’s murder rate is apparently higher during
Santa Ana Wind periods than any other time, and in Griffith Park it’s easy to confirm that something’s up atmospherically:
sounds sound harsher, smells smell stronger, breathing tastes funny, the sunlight has a way of diffracting into spikes that
penetrate all the way to the back of the skull, and overall there’s a weird leathery stillness to the air, the West-Coast
equivalent of the odd aquarial stillness that tends to precede Midwestern thunderstorms. The air smells of sage and pine and
dust and distant creosote. Wild mustard, yucca, sumac, and various grasses form a kind of five-o’clock shadow on the hillsides,
and scrub oak and pine jut at unlikely angles, and some of the trees’ trunks are creepily curved and deformed, and there are
also a lot of obstreperous weeds and things with thorns that discourage much hiking around. The texture of the site’s flora
is basically that of a broom’s business end. A single red-tailed hawk circles overhead through the whole first day of shooting,
just one hawk, and always the same circle, so that after a while the circle seemed etched. The road where the set is is like
a kind of small canyon between a butte on one side and an outright cliff on the other. The cliff affords both a good place
to study the choreography of the set and, in the other direction, a spectacular view of Hollywood to the right and to the
left the S.F. Valley and the Santa Monicas and the distant sea’s little curved rind of blue. It’s hard to get straight on
whether Asymmetrical chose this particular bit of Griffith Park or whether it was simply assigned to them by the LA office
that grants location-licenses to movies, but it’s good tight cozy site. The whole thing forms a rough triangle, with the line
of Base Camp trailers extending down one small road and the catering trailer and salad bars and picnic tables for lunch spread
out along a perpendicular road and a hypotenusally-angled larger road between them that’s where the actual location set is;
it’s the c
²
road with the set that’s got the great hill and cliff for viewing.

Basically what happens all morning is that Robert Loggia’s sinister black Mercedes 6.9 and the tailgating Infiniti and the
production’s big complicated camera truck will go off and be gone for long stretches of time, tooling back and forth along
the same barricaded mile of what is ostensibly Mulholland Drive while Lynch and his Director of Photography try to capture
whatever particular combinations of light and angle and speed add up to a distinctively Lynchian shot of people driving. While
the car-filming is going on, the other 60 or so members of the location crew and staff all perform small maintenance and preparatory
tasks and lounge around and shoot the shit and basically kill enormous amounts of time. There are, on location today, grips,
propmasters, sound people, script people, dialogue coaches, camera people, electricians, makeup and hair people, a First Aid
guy, production assistants, stand-ins, stunt doubles, producers, lighting technicians, on-set dressers, set decorators, A.D.’s,
unit publicists, location managers, costume people with rollable racks of clothes like you see in NYC’s Garment District,
continuity people, script people, special effects coordinators and technicians, LAFD cigarette-discouragers, a representative
of the production s insurance underwriter, a variety of personal assistants and factota and interns, and a substantial number
of persons with no discernible function at all. The whole thing is tremendously complex and confusing, and a precise census
is hard to take because a lot of the crew look generally alike and the functions they perform are extremely technical and
complicated and performed with high-speed efficiency, and when everybody’s in motion the set’s choreography is the visual
equivalent of an Altman group-dialogue, and it takes awhile even to start picking up on the various distinguishing cues in
appearance and gear that allow you to distinguish one species of crew personnel from another, so that the following rough
taxonomy doesn’t start emerging until late on 9 January:

Grips tend to be large beefy blue-collar guys with walrus mustaches and baseball caps and big wrists and beer-guts but extremely
alive alert intelligent eyes—they look like very bright professional movers, which is basically what they are. The production’s
electricians, lighting guys, and F/X guys, who are also as a rule male and large, are distinguished from the grips via their
tendency to have long hair in a ponytail and to wear T-shirts advertising various brands of esoteric hi-tech gear. None of
the grips wear earrings, but over 50% of the technical guys wear earrings, and a couple have beards, and four of the five
electricians for some reason have Fu Manchu mustaches, and with their ponytails and pallor they all have the distinctive look
of guys who work in record- or head-shops; plus in general the recreational-chemical vibe around these more technical blue-collar
guys is very decidedly not a beer-type vibe.

The male camera operators, for some reason, tend to wear pith helmets, and the Steadicam operator’s pith helmet in particular
looks authentic and armed-combat-souvenirish, with a fine mesh of coir all over it for camouflage and a jaunty feather in
the band.

A majority of the camera and sound and makeup crew are female, but a lot of these, too, have a similar look: 30ish, makeupless,
insouciantly pretty, wearing faded jeans and old running shoes and black T-shirts, and with lush well-conditioned hair tied
carelessly out of the way so that strands tend to escape and trail and have to be chuffed out of the eyes periodically or
brushed away with the back of a ringless hand—in sum, the sort of sloppily pretty tech-savvy young woman you can just tell
smokes pot and owns a dog. Most of these hands-on technical females have that certain expression around the eyes that communicates
the exact same attitude communicated by somebody’s use of the phrase “Been there, done that.” At lunch several of them wont
eat anything but bean curd, and they make it clear that they don’t regard certain grips’ comments about what bean curd looks
like as in any way worthy of response. One of the technical women, the production’s still-photographer—whose name is Suzanne
and is fun to talk to about her dog—has on the inside of her forearm a tattoo of the Japanese character for “strength,” and
she can manipulate her forearm’s muscles in such a way as to make the ideogram bulge Nietzscheanly out and then recede.

A lot of the script people and wardrobe people and production assistants are also female, but they’re of a different genus—younger,
less lean and more vulnerable, without the technically savvy self-esteem of the camera/sound women. As opposed to the hands-on
women’s weltschmerzian cool, the script and P.A. females all have the same pained “I-went-to-a-really-good-college-and-what-am-I-doing-with-my-life”
look in their eyes, the sort of look where you know that if they’re not in twice-a-week therapy it’s only because they can’t
afford it.

Another way to distinguish different crewpeople’s status and function is to look at what kind of personal communication gear
they have. The rank-and-file grips are pretty much the only people without any kind of personal communicative gear. The rest
of the hands-on and technical crew carry walkie-talkies, as do the location manager, the people in touch with the camera truck,
and the burly guys manning the road’s barricades. Many of the other crew carry cellular phones in snazzy hip-side holsters,
and the amount of cellular-phone talking going on more than lives up to popular stereotypes about LA and cellulars.
²⁵
The Second A.D., a young black lady named Simone whom I get to interact with a lot because she’s always having to inform
me that I’m in the way of something and need to move (though she isn’t ever crabby or impolite about it), has an actual cellular
headset instead
of just a holstered cellular phone, though with Simone the headset isn’t an affectation: the poor lady spends more time conferring
on the phone than any non-teenage human being I’ve ever seen, and the headset leaves her hands free to write stuff on the
various clipboards she carries around in an actual clipboard-
holder
.