A day on set through the eyes of a child

I meet a lot of children in my job auditioning NYC public school children for a ballet scholarship program -- but many of those children, though only eight or nine years old, have a toughness beyond their years, take care of younger children at home, and don't readily display the open sense of wonder that is so commonly associated with childhood.  Working on the film set I've been on since January, I've also met a number of children, but they generally have a very different background.  They're all child actors, all live in the suburbs, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania, and several have performed or do perform on Broadway.  While the children I meet in NYC public schools tend to start by questioning adults and our authority and frequently have to be coaxed out of their shells, the children I meet on set have an immediate trust of us and are eager to chat, engage, and ask questions about us and the world around them.  It's been a somewhat eye-opening experience interacting with children nearly the same age as those I work with in the schools and realizing the extreme differences in my interactions with them, born from their different opportunities, different surroundings, and different circumstances.

One child I met on set yesterday who made a particularly strong impression on me is named Nathan.  Before meeting Nathan myself, I listened to an entire conversation between Nathan and an adult woman (playing his mom) he just met. (When I told Nathan this later he told me that eavesdropping gets a bad rap, because "it's not like you can turn off your ears, so if you're paying attention to your surroundings of course you're eavesdropping."  My ears never turn off and I hear everything, so I agree with Nathan.  Nathan is wise), so I was charmed before I met him myself.  Sixty seconds after meeting Nathan, he seems like an average nine-year-old: his opener after an introduction is usually "Do you like Harry Potter?"  (If you respond, as I overheard the other woman do, "No, but I know why you like them -- you like Emma Watson," he'll look at you weirdly and say, "I think she's a good actress, yeah, but I meant the books.")  But then his standard questions diverge a bit.  Though we were on a film set, his second question is, "Do you do theatre?"  Say "No, I don't like that you can only do it once," and he'll passionately explain how that is exactly why he does love it....  Every show is different, it's gone the second it's created, it's vibrantly alive and unpredictable....  "You never know what's going to happen.  It's magic!"  That's when my eavesdropping ears really perked up and I started purposely listening.  I've never heard a nine-year-old so eloquently espouse the virtues of theatre.  He then asked the woman what other films she's done.  "They're mostly indie films. You wouldn't have heard of them."

He gasped.  "I love indie films!  Which ones?"

"No really, you wouldn't have heard of them."

"Try me."

Silence.

And then he started naming a list of totally obscure indie films.

She shook her head, and after a few beats of silence, Nathan asked, "Do you know what kind of camera that is?" pointing to the set photographer before continuing, "It's called a DSLR camera, but what does DSLR stand for?" 

The woman said she didn't know, seemed a little nonplussed by Nathan in general, and just said, "Will you remember me when you're a famous actor?" and he looked confused and didn't speak again until a PA replaced his broken dust mask (set that day was extremely dusty, so between takes everyone wore masks) with one that had double straps instead of ear loops. 

After Nathan struggled through a few takes to figure out how to put it on correctly as quickly as we needed to be getting them off and on, the woman said, "We can get someone to cut it for you and then tie loops.  Do you want that?"  Nathan clearly didn't understand what she meant, and meanwhile he was breathing in dust because he wasn't wearing the mask, so I turned to them and chimed in, "Or I can just break the elastics with my hands and do it right now."

The woman looked at me blankly and said vaguely, "There's a PA around here somewhere with scissors.  Or you can get a wardrobe person to cut it."  All the wardrobe crew members were busy, so I repeated, "Or we can break it and do it now."

The man on the other side of the woman, who apparently had also been listening, said, "You mean me break it?  I don't think I can just break an elastic strap with my hands."

"No, me.  I can break it," I said.

"You can break it?" the man repeated (after which I could have broken a strap twice as thick with the added adrenaline of a man doubting my strength).

"Do you mind?" I asked Nathan, and when he shook his head I took his mask, ripped both elastic bands at the center ("I'm in pain just watching you," the woman said), tied ear loops and handed it back to Nathan, who looked up at me with big eyes and said, "Wow. Thanks."

A bit later in the day, I introduced myself to Nathan, saying, "I was over there near you and fixed your mask, but we didn't actually meet.  I'm Jessica."

"Yeah I know.  Do you like Harry Potter?"

"I've never read Harry Potter, but I know you like them," I responded, which resulted in the aforementioned discussion about eavesdropping and attention skills and listening.  As it turns out, Nathan is an exceptional listener but unfortunately a "bad hearer," which means his attempts at eavesdropping are usually foiled by his poor hearing.

He then asked me if I do theatre and was delighted to find out I do, so we had a lengthy discussion about musicals (He's disappointed about the narrow casting in so many musicals and would love to play parts outside his type -- Just as a reminder here, the boy is nine years old...), after which I asked if he wanted to be an actor when he grows up.

"I don't know.  I've got nine years to decide."

"You have more than that.  Do you want to go to college?  You can decide in college what you want to do."

"YES!  I want to go to college.  Do you know where I want to go?"

"Where?"

"MIT!" he exclaimed excitedly.  "They're really good!"

"Yes, they are," I laughed.  "I visited MIT once on a campus visit.  I think it's cool you want to go there."

"Do you know what their acceptance rate is?" he asked eagerly.

"I do not. I never applied there."

He slumped dejectedly in his seat with an "Oh."

Then he asked, "Where did you go to college?"

When I told him Indiana University, his response (which by this point I predicted) was "What's THEIR acceptance rate?"

I told him I didn't know but he had some time before he had to start worrying about acceptance rates for college.

So then he asked me what DSLR stands for....  And I learned that apparently it takes a lot of people on a professional film set to figure out the R in DSLR.  I asked someone else, who didn't know, so we called over two great crew members to ask them, one of whom couldn't remember and the other of whom offered "recorder" as a possibility, which we all thought sounded good even if it's not correct (Turns out it's not  -- it stands for "reflex").  One day I want to continue this experiment and see how many crew members it takes asking before you get one who immediately knows the answer.

Before long, Nathan broke his mask again, pulling out the clip connecting the strap to the mask (the boy is so animated I get the feeling he probably breaks a lot of things accidentally), so I said, "Here, I'll fix it," and took it from him.

"But it's got my breath germs!!" he exclaimed.

"Are you sick?"

"No.  Why?"

"Because according to you I'm getting your breath germs all over my hands.  But if you're not sick, your germs won't get me sick.  Here." I said, handing him back his mask.

He looked at it for a few beats and looked up at me and asked, "How do you do that?"

"I'm just good at tying knots.  Or it's magic."

Then Nathan started trying to hear everything the director and ADs were saying and figure out how the chain of command on the set was working, but because of his bad hearing, it meant a lot of him asking me what someone had just said and me repeating it, until I held up a finger for him to be quiet when I couldn't hear something I needed to.

"Okay," I said, turning back to him, and I realized he was looking shy and slightly slumped in his seat as he said embarrassedly, "Sorry."

"No, it's okay, it's just that if you're always asking me what someone just said, then I miss the next thing being said, and I only get half of it.  If you wait, I can tell you the whole thing."

"Yeah, I get it."

Meanwhile I was thinking this kid has awesome parents, because he totally took that as a disciplining that he deserved and would learn from.

"If Linda's my mom, you can be my aunt," he told me.  "And you should be a teacher.  You're good at it."

There's a tutor who has "school" near set for the children.  They have a certain number of hours a day they have to be in school, but they can get "bank hours," going to school more than the requirement one day so that they can be on set more and not have to go to as many hours the next day.  Generally, the children don't like doing bank hours because they'd rather be on set (and their parents really don't like them doing bank hours, which seems quite messed up to me), but I learned later that Nathan was always volunteering for more bank hours and was disappointed to find out he didn't need any more.  At one point after he didn't need any more hours, they found him in school just because he wanted to go there.

I think Nathan is awesome.  And I think he'll get into MIT or wherever he wants to go, and I think he'll figure out how to play way outside his type in whatever musicals he wants to do.  And I wish, somehow, that more of the children I work with from the inner city could have the wonder and excitement and joy in discovery and life that Nathan has.  Their world -- and ours -- would be so much richer.

Life in Technicolor

The other day on set, I watched a complicated and important shot being set up.  I watched as the Director of Photography organized the lights and their cues, as the director blocked the shot, as the Steadicam operator practiced his long and difficult path, and as the star and supporting cast practiced their blocking.  Watching how the Steadicam weaved in the action, I realized the camera had the energy of another character in the shot.  Getting the shot from a stationary camera would make it a completely different moment with a different energy.  There was only one way to perfectly capture the feeling of the moment and that shot, and it was through the exact path that the Steadicam was taking.  As the Assistant Director called action and as I watched all the elements together, I felt transported into the camera.  I had a surreal moment of simultaneously feeling as if I were watching the shot on the big screen in a movie theatre and feeling as if I were living inside the screen, transported into the scene as it came to life through some trick of magic.

It was a beautiful shot that captured the joy of living life to its fullest, full of the richest colors possible, and soaking it all in.  And watching it was a magical moment that encapsulated what I love about film and filmmaking.

Of course, we don't always get to live life on such a grand scale and with the benefit of lights and cameras and sets and costumes.  But on the ride home, still buzzing from the energy, it made me think of all the colors and light and beauty that surround us every day in ordinary life if we stop to notice and soak it in.  I grew up in a city that's criticized for being landlocked and relatively flat, in a state known for corn fields.  There's no significant body of water, and certainly no one thinks of water when they think of Indy.  I live now in a city known for skyscrapers and a lack of trees and greenery.  No one thinks of beautiful woods when they think of New York City.  But last fall, I took photos (posted below) of the rich colors I found in the heart of downtown Indianapolis on the canal there and in the woods in a park in Queens in NYC easily accessible by subway.   Maybe if we always look for the unexpected beauty spots around us, even in a city like New York, we can always live in as much color and energy in real life as that shot so magically captured.

 

Lemons from lemonade

I like to make something good come from something bad -- lemonade from lemons and all that... (though personally I prefer eating a straight lemon to drinking lemonade, so if it were up to me, that expression would be reversed... except you can't make lemons from lemonade, so that pretty much defeats the point of the saying... plus I'm pretty sure I'm nearly alone in that preference.... Anyway...)  I was supposed to work today, but I was informed yesterday that I wouldn't be needed on set after all.  I was bummed.  But if I were working I'd have to go to bed early.  So since I didn't have to, and since my fiancé was out all evening and I had the apartment to myself, I used that time to start writing a short story.  I wrote an outline, and then when I was stuck for how to open (intros have always been the hardest for me -- In school I would write my essays starting with the second sentence or sometimes even the second paragraph and then write the beginning at the very end), I decided to pull a random book off the book shelf and use the last word of the first sentence to launch me....  But that word was "grind"... and there was just no way I could cleanly work that into my young-adult story....  So I pulled a different book off the shelf, and that word was "morning," which worked much better, and 24 hours later I have the first 5000 words of what's turning out to be a rather long short story, have stolen not one but two story elements from a play I wrote when I was eight years old, Googled the rules to a game from school I couldn't quite remember the specifics of and seven minutes later realized I'd been reading on grandparents.com, and sent off my first 5000 words to my brilliant-writer mom for feedback, feeling like I'd given life to some beautiful characters who wouldn't exist had I been working today and like I couldn't wait to find out what was going to happen to these characters next -- and getting invested in my characters and wanting to find out what's going to happen to them is the coolest feeling I can get as a writer.  Oh and then I thought of an idea to turn it into a trilogy.  And how I would go about casting the film version.

Moral of the story?  When you lose work, write.  And don't discount your eight-year-old self's literary instincts.  And grandparents.com has some pretty cool information.

Sound-off on the subway

A ride on the New York City subway is hardly ever boring if you're paying attention. My colorful train ride, as told through text messages to my fiancé:

>Big tattooed tough guy is blasting the Biebs on the train on his boombox.

>Do you think he knows it's a Justin Bieber song?  Or does he think Bieber is cool for grown men to listen to? 

>He's fighting for the airwaves with a 6'5" woman in an all-white spandex-and-taffeta too-tight mid-calf-length prom/ballroom dress with those white sandal boots I don't understand (I mean really, is it cold enough for boots or warm enough for sandals? Pick one, yo) and rainbow hair and 3-inch neon green nails.  She's yelling on the phone with lots of bad words inches (or feet if you count vertical distance) from a 5-year-old who is absolutely mesmerized by her. 

>Bieber radio dude has tattoos everywhere, including his hands. And wrists. That must have hurt.  Almost as much as listening to Justin Bieber.

>Everyone's looking back and forth between radio dude and the woman. Neither is acknowledging the other, but they're both pumping up their volume to outdo the other.

>Radio dude won the sound fight.

>Oo there's a new challenger!! Now it's radio dude vs. homeless man!

>Hey, this is like a dance-off but it's a sound-off!  Whoever wins the match-up faces someone new.  If someone beats radio dude, does that guy go against a new sound source?

>Meanwhile, I'm losing the smell-off with the man who sat down next to me.  I cede my territory to him.

>Radio dude has one yellow sock, one pink sock, and shower sandals.

>He also can't find the beat. Odd.

>Homeless man's out. Radio dude's still undefeated.

>Oo ok now his challenger is a dude preaching something or other about how we're all going to hell.

>Who's gonna win? Can anyone topple radio dude? (Said in the 60s Batman announcer voice...  Tune in tomorrow, same bat-time, same bat-channel, for the exciting resolution!)  Ah, so suspenseful.

>Radio dude can successfully rap while bopping his head to a beat that is nowhere near that of the song he's rapping. Impressive.

>Preacher dude's out. 

>AHAHAHAHAHHA. Radio dude has finally met his match. Little 100-year-old Italian lady with more wrinkles than a baby English Bulldog and lots of red red lipstick wins.  I knew as soon as she got on that she was a character.  So many colors!   "EXCUSE ME THAT'S LOUD! THANK YOU!"   And that was all it took.  She's got a variety puzzle book.  And a rainbow-colored purse.  I like her.  She's my kinda cool.

>Also, I now want a rainbow-colored purse.

Words and actions

There is a work colleague I've known for years who complains about how we as a society treat each other "like crap."  He posts frequently about this on Facebook and considers himself an activist for various rights causes.  Yet in his daily life, he is quick to brush people off, to ignore people who don't serve a purpose to him, and to make jokes about issues close to other people's hearts if those issues don't interest him.  I have a hard time reconciling his wish for more kindness in society, and how he seeks to effect that change, with his too-frequent disregard for it as it relates to the people around him in his day-to-day life.

Another acquaintance expressed to me months ago, leading up to the election, her wish that someone would assassinate one of the Presidential candidates, specifically saying that person "has no respect for people."  This colleague is late every single day of work and frequently leaves early, always relying on other people to pick up her slack, with never so much as a thank you or an apology.  She has a persistent chip on her shoulder towards others and sometimes lets out with catty eyebrow-raising remarks.  She wants the world to be more respectful, but from what I see, she lacks respect towards her colleagues in her daily life.

A third acquaintance said at work one day that anyone who didn't protest to try to get the Electoral College members to be faithless electors was "just part of the problem."  A few hours earlier I had witnessed him completely ignore a new employee when she said hi and tried to introduce herself, and he continued to ignore her throughout the day when she tried to join in in conversation.  She later said to me, "I guess I'm not cool enough for him."

What does it mean if we want change on a large scale but won't incorporate that change into our own small interactions with people?  How can we possibly change society at large if we won't change our own daily interactions with the people who make up our own personal society?