Upgunned (19 page)

Vengeance Is
had to do with a sheriff in an Arizona frontier town at the turn of the last century. He gets lynched by bad guys who kill his wife and daughter. As he strangles on the hanging tree, the boss (a dapper J.F.K. type) shows up astride a mule and tricks the sheriff into selling his soul for a shot at revenge. A hot, unpleasant century passes in hell, after which the devil guy calls our hero up out of the pit to make another proposition: a gang of five super-badasses have escaped. Our guy's job is to round them up “topside,” in present-day New York, using special bullets supplied by Hell's Armorer, one for each bad guy in the cylinder of our guy's modified Navy Colt six-shooter. If our protagonist succeeds, he gets his family back. He is monitored long distance by a vulture who happened to be on the hanging tree where he originally died—the eyes and ears of the boss on earth.

As Tripp pointed out to me, vultures are carrion eaters. They only go after what's dead.

Naturally, Collier wanted to know what I thought of the script.

“So you could call this a horror movie?” I asked, while shadowing him around an airplane hangar in New Jersey, then an office building with a vacant floor in the lower Thirties—a structure that would be condemned after filming. I nabbed about two hundred shots of Collier pointing at things. Peeling paint on a wall. Old architecture for a backdrop the crew would not have to build. Framable space.

“God, no,” he said. “Don't even
say
that word. It has, shall we say, a supernatural element. Like
Field of Dreams.
”

“So,
Field of Dreams
with a high body count and gunfights, then.”

“No, more like
Heaven Can Wait
”—he grinned evilly—“with a lot of gunfights. Call it a meta-Western if you like.”

“Why not a horror movie?” I enumerated from my fast overview of the story as I understood it. “Guy goes to hell, comes back, there's a devil, there's escapees with supernatural powers, there's zombies.”

“Zombies?” Collier seemed genuinely taken aback. He was incredibly camera-aware and always froze his pose when he thought he looked good. I nailed him with that observation, though, and captured the first photo of him that I really wanted.

“Yeah, at the end, when the bad guy's crew rises from their graves at Boot Hill.”

He stopped and blinked several times. “You actually read the script to the end?”

“Wasn't I supposed to?” Snap. Move. Focus. Snap.

“Unusual,” he said, shaking his head. “That puts you ahead of most of the crew. Anyway, in our film they're not really zombies. Not
zombie
-zombies, anyway.”

I had heard Tripp employ this weird real-world, fake-world dichotomy. For a night shot, he'd ask is it night or is it
night
-night? For rainfall, is it rain or is it
rain
-rain? For fake-real or for real-real? It made everyone sound like a five-year-old speaking code only other five-year-olds could register.

“Most horror films are … horrible,” Collier said. He was pleased with that. You could see him storing it for later sound-bite use. “Call it a mainstream film with perhaps a horrific element.” He was apparently changing his mind about the bones of his movie every four minutes.

He was eager and nervous, manic and resigned all at once. He wanted to get past the first shoot day. He needed to plant that flag, get rolling, because the entire cast and crew complement would not settle into any kind of routine for the first six days or so. He had to marshal them through the wear-in period. He had to spend more time pop quizzing the actors, since the end of the film would shoot first. Tripp was somewhere knocking his brains out right now, so they could shoot scenes with the most warm bodies early and the fewest later. Sort out how much time to spend on each location and set, as I said, and prefigure backups if anything upset the plan. This would all wind up on a document called “day out of days,” I learned, as in “Day 1 out of 36 Days,” not counting pickups, second units, or overshoots.

“No, not horror, at all.” His British was showing as he said “atoll.” “I mean, we've got Mason Stone.” He said that as though it was the cure-all answer to everything.

*   *   *

Mason Stone was a piece of work. His hairdresser got screen credit. His personal trainer got credit. He had his own chef, his own wardrobe lady, four assistants, a hovering minion of private security, and on location he lived in a two-story, trilevel “mobile estate” designed by Ron Anderson. Built around an eighteen-wheel rig, this ultimate “trailer” provided 1,200 square feet of living space that included a removable state-of-the-art recording studio, a lounge that could seat twenty, a fold-out exterior deck (really), a master bedroom, a baby playroom, a lush gallery, and marbled bathroom all with electric-thermal privacy glass. Flat screens everywhere. Double-soundproofed, satellite-capable, and a bullet- and bomb-proof Cocoon security module.

The very rich are “different” than you or me, as Fitzgerald wrote.

But since he was visiting New York, Stone was also billeted crow's nest–high in the Jumeirah Essex House, with a million-dollar view of Central Park South.

Mason Stone had hair implants, and I needed to figure out a way to shoot close-ups that did not brag this fact to the universe. Mason Stone had plastic surgery scars, fine as threadlines, that I had to decide how to deal with in high-def. He had a clause in his contract that prohibited my taking pictures of him when he was wearing his glasses, and another in his general deal memo that specified that no one, but nobody, was to interview his hairdresser, trainer, chef, wardrobe lady, on-call physician, analyst, bodyguards … or photographer. While the lens rarely forgives, I had to pretend to be forgiving.

Mason Stone was half a decade away from sixty years, and his leading lady, Artesia Savoy, was not even half his age.

(You may recollect Artesia's first movie,
Kiss in the Dark
[2001]. She was the sassy cousin. I remember her earlier, actual debut before a camera—as Cherry Whip, in a video extravaganza titled
Bungholers 6
[1998], but the supermarket rags had yet to sniff out this tidbit for point-of-purchase consumption. Neither had the dirty-drawers Web sites twigged. So far.)

Mason Stone was nearly fifteen years older than me, and I could've passed him off as my little brother.

Mason Stone had weathered hits, flops, strikes, scandal, addiction and recovery, celebrity marriage and tabloid divorce. He once tried to diversify with a show-off directing debut: a cash-stupid vanity project for which he actually
sang
the title theme. After his one-and-only directorial flagship crashed and burned like the
Hindenburg,
he was now comfortably reensconced in his primary duty to society—leading man of the cinema, one of the ten people in the movie industry with the power to help green-light a project by signing on the line. A “tent-pole” star who had successfully evolved from winsome to craggy without losing his audience. When in the public eye he was gracious and giving; at his rates, he could afford a faux interest in commoners. He was not bad or evil. He was the sort of working actor who inspires wannabes to sign up for drama classes, so don't ask if he owned a considerable ego. In the book of Mason Stone, every paragraph began with the words “Mason Stone.”

A phalanx of PAs—production assistants, like Joey—deflected diversions and held at bay eager beavers who all just need a tiny piece of Mason, right this minute, so I was able to fire off some pretty decent frames of him posed in costume against elements of the lynching tree set built outside the airplane hangar in Jersey, close to the Meadowlands. That is, after Mason waved away his bodyguard, who pricked up like a pit bull on my approach. I got some up-angles that were shadowed a bit ostentatiously, but for this movie, melodrama played. Later I found out the setting sun threw an interesting glint into his left eye in the last shot we grabbed by the tree, which was a gypsum-and-plaster fake, apparently from a haunted house yard sale. Mason Stone bid adieu and promptly forgot my name when an effects assistant stopped by with what looked like an enormous stuffed vulture to chock into the tree. It wasn't dead or taxidermied but was instead fabricated by the makeup department, which promptly nicknamed their creation “Lurch.” The faux vulture was used for setups and focus-pulling; it looked dopey and I opted not to use it.

Later I got to meet several real vultures, trained—insofar as scavengers could be “trained”—to food-based commands by a genial guy named Hunnicutt who told me that at one point, one of these monsters would soar into frame and land right on Mason Stone's shoulder without clawing his star face off or pecking out his eyes for hors d'oeuvres. I tried to imagine the rehearsals. It would be like trying not to flinch while a helicopter tries for a two point on your shoulder. None for me, thanks. They trained falcons; I guessed they could train vultures. Hunnicutt had three, a hero and two backup birds in their own spacious travel caddies. Like wardrobe and props, even the scavengers in this movie came in multiples.

The optical and digital effects team had the entire movie already on an animatic, prearranging scenes that had not been shot yet. An animatic is basically a moving storyboard, like a cartoon, that can impart a crude sense of movement within a shot and changing camera angles. These omnipresent keyboard jockeys also had lockdown plates of the bigger exterior Arizona sets—like the period Western town—they could factor into their compositions. They had a wireframe model of the fake plaster tree they could shrink, enlarge, rotate, and plug into their pictures. The little flying vulture in the animatic was wearing aviator goggles. They showed me a shot of the vulture swooping down to light on the tree and sit there, glaring. The cartoon vulture hunched forward and little black lines shot out of his head, just like Sunday funnies. In fact, the caricatures provided by the effects team put me very much in mind of that old Tom K. Ryan strip,
Tumbleweeds,
a kick in the pants to everything Western and clichéd. The actual shot would not see live film for another four weeks.

On another monitor they demonstrated how treelines, mountaintops, and green-screen sets could be made to match lighting in postproduction. This same midnight-oil magic could also put your head seamlessly onto another person's body, or erase your limbs to order in case you're playing a cowboy who lost an arm or leg inside a mine collapse or dam explosion. For the climactic throw down where the ex-sheriff faces off with his old enemy of a century earlier, the CGI guys were removing a third of the bad guy's head so you can see the exposed skull and a few convolutions of brain matter. From there, I met the antagonist of the piece.

Garrett Torres had a trademark toothy sneer and a complexion like indifferently mixed concrete. You've seen him bite the big one in a dozen movies, and he loved his status as a bad guy character player. His voice was chipped ice, raspy, from the back of the throat, and bespoke visions of whiskey and cigarettes. In the feature film of my regrettably short life, Garrett would have played Gun Guy. He was currently trying to bed one of the camera assistants, a woman he met four days ago named Aspen DeLint. She wore cutoffs and work boots that molded her legs in a showy way; the way her set tool belt was slung around her hips was an angle most appealing. She was obviously a runner
and
a climber. Burnished chestnut hair cascaded in a horsetail from the gap in her gimme cap. Possibilities, there. The left ridge of Garrett's skull had been shaved to allow the makeup guys to glue on a partial skullcap, bright green with coordinate pips—tracking dots—to aid the computers in later removing the appropriate section of his head; Garrett was concerned his weird haircut might make him look too freakish as he pursued his mission of getting into Aspen DeLint's cutoffs. But he was game enough to allow me to shoot pictures of him on his absolute worst day for photogeneity.

No one busted me. When I awoke the next day, I felt better, as though I was now part of this movie, on the job, ready to work and in full command of my senses. Never mind that I knew where Char and Clavius were holed up, across the city. I would be leaving in two weeks. It would be child's play to avoid them. At least, until my first and only day off.

*   *   *

“No, it's a kick, you should see it. In fact … hey, where's that fucking photographer, whats-his-name?”

Mason Stone was cranking up the charm and firing it straight toward costar Artesia Savoy's all-too-willing wide eyes. She was working with an icon, so she nodded attentively, and went “um-hm,” and encouraged him to say more for as long as he could stand talking to her without having an actual conversation. Inside of two weeks her conditional misgivings would crumble and she would be rocking Mason's world with a live replay from another of her early video successes,
Cuntfinger
(1998). Right now she was still working up the nerve, knowing that their affair would last exactly as long as the shoot—six weeks, if that. Mason was already playing her like a Stradivarius, maybe a Stratocaster. He already knew how this dynamic worked, what the unwritten rules were, and was so good at cherry-picking young talent that he could probably circle, on the call sheet, the soon-to-come date at which he and Artesia would mix fluids.

Next Thursday was my guess.

I came up on Mason from behind and told him my name again. Not my real name, but my
name
-name. His face went all friendly and he clapped me on one shoulder like an old war buddy. Artesia's expression shifted into neutral, vaguely hostile, judgment pending. Mason told her I was the unit photographer and her face changed channels so she could invest some of her energy into guaranteeing I'd flatter her with my camera. She nailed me with her frank brown eyes and cornered me into the Man-Woman Standoff—you know, when you maintain eye contact and jabber away until your gaze finally drops to her chest and back, at which point she “wins.” It's not my fault the female breast was composed as a bull's-eye; three concentric circles, breast, aureole, and nipple. Targets.