I’m in!  I am sitting on the steps of a camper, parked on a film set, at 8:30 at night. I’m watching semis and movie production functionaries move from place to place in a pattern that closely resembles blood coursing through arteries, like you might see on PBS shows like ‘The Human Body.’

It’s an odd mix of urgency and inaction, on a film set. People scurry from spot to spot, clutching walkie-talkies (film sets and battlefields are the only places you’ll find these 20th century relics.) Meanwhile, Teamsters sit in dark trucks with glowing cellphones and extras lounge in holding areas, waiting to be summoned to the Sun, around which all these human bodies orbit.

I am here tonight because my daughter’s boyfriend is a movie functionary. He belongs to the Scurrying breed and tonight he’s in great demand. He has graciously indulged my request to come onto the the set of a high-end HBO series, a few episodes of which are being filmed near my home in upstate NY. https://www.hbo.com/the-plot-against-america?camp=GOOGLE%7CHTS_SEM%7CPID_p52314304431&keyword=%2Bdavid+%2Bsimon&utm_id=sa%7C71700000064586825%7C%5B*AdGroupID*%5D%7Cp52314304431&utm_content=tun&gclid=CjwKCAjwvOHzBRBoEiwA48i6ArJZlGY7Ep9zOx9XhpJA-K3dlDC1Fwc_R_Ki5XWautOYAtdCkaPEphoCWdQQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

He is an assistant location manager (2nd Unit). This rank is, I believe, the equivalent of   A Staff Sargent in the Army. He’s the guy who has to secure the Location, once the Scouts have found a safe place to move the Hive. His job is to run interference between the production crew, the location’s owners and the town’s constabulary. Most owners (particularly the owners of derelict cement factories like this one) are more than happy to lease their properties: they’ll make enough $ in one night’s shooting to pay taxes for a year. The cops aren’t always so thrilled, though this depends on which celebrities are in the film. A picture of themselves with, say, James Franco will go a long way to grease the production’s wheels. This production happens to have an B-list Star, but it’s a small town: city cops are pickier.

At the moment the Star, if she’s on the set at all, is in a camper waiting to be called to set. Star campers never have the actual names of the actors that hold them, tho they may have their character’s name scribbled on a sign on the door. More often, campers are labeled with pre-printed signs like ‘Ricky’ & ‘Lucy’ (Fred & Ethyl) to designate the stars’ & co-stars’ trailers.

 All of this activity is vaguely familiar to me: I was once one of these human bodies, orbiting a bright, particular sun. In fact you could say I was kind of like Mercury, since my job was to stay next to ‘my’ movie’s director at all times on set. (You’d never say ‘on the set’. It’s just not done.) 

In 1983 I was an assistant to director Marshall Brickman on a feature film called Lovesick. Marshall was Woody Allen’s co-writer on Annie Hall (among other films) and by ‘83 he was making his own movies. Woody shot one film a year, in the fall, so Marshall would use many of the same crew in the spring. This arrangement was mutually beneficial, as it allowed the myriad people indispensable to any feature film to segue from one production to the next, without having to scramble for the next job. And it worked for Woody, who couldn’t afford to keep his favorite crew-members on retainer between films.

I had no particular ambition to work in films: this job more-or-less fell into my lap…as most of my jobs have. But lacking ambition and lacking desire are two different things, for I had long nurtured a Burning Desire to be behind the scenes on a movie set. This desire can be traced to the summer of 1971, when I was camping with friends in Big Sur, California. Heading from our campsite to the Pfeiffer Lodge gift shop to buy Cokes, we found that a small city had sprung up overnight in the lodge’s parking lot. There were trucks and trailers and klieg lights and, cut off from onlookers by a rope & stanchion, there were clusters of important-looking people clutching walkie-talkies. 

An officious person holding a walkie-talkie grudgingly answered our questions and told us they were there to shoot a scene for “Thumb-Tripping”.  (Years later I could have instantly identified this Imperious Personage as a mere PA, but at the time, my friends and I were deeply impressed.) ‘Thumb Tripping’ it turns out, was a Manson-Family inspired film in the Hippie Exploitation genre. It came and went quickly, tho it still has a certain ‘camp’ appeal, like Reefer Madness.

The Queen in the center of this hive of activity was a dark-haired beauty with a bevy of female attendants buzzing around her.  Her hair was freshly cut-and-curled and her makeup had been artfully applied, in the ‘Natural’ style. The thing that struck me most was how clean & well-groomed she was. As an authentic ex-hippie, I knew this curled & manicured creature for the imposter she was: Nonetheless, it was she, and not I, who was standing behind the roped-off area. 

Although ‘Thumb-tripping’ was the first time I experienced the full spectacle of a working film set, it was not my first exposure to the world of film: I had already appeared in at least 2 documentaries and one feature film. (If you consider being in a crowd scene a role in a movie, that is.) You’d have to look hard to see me in ‘Monterey Pop’  or ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ but I was there, somewhere, in the crowd.

My first non-documentary appearance was in a feature film, Play Misty for Me.  I reprised my role as Audience Member in a scene that director Clint Eastwood shot at the Monterey Jazz Festival, where I was working as an usher. That movie was my first introduction to the concept of Takes. In Play Misty, there’s a long scene where Clint Eastwood’s character walks down the aisle finds a seat. This scene happened more than once.  Since this was a captive Audience who’d paid to hear great music, not act as extras in a Clint Eastwood movie, they were only able to do 2 or 3 takes before the audience began to get restless and started to Boo. If you listen carefully you may hear a few Boos (and some great music https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YU96P6K3428.

Twelve years later I learned all about Takes on the set of Lovesick. Directors shoot multiple takes of a scene when they aren’t getting exactly what they want, or when the actors can’t remember their lines. (It took 47 takes for Marilyn Monroe to say “Its me, sugar” in ‘Some Like it Hot’ because she kept flubbing the line. I know, right?) 

We ran into trouble the very first day of shooting Lovesick because our female lead – a very young Elizabeth McGovern – had a mustache. Not a Tom Selleck moustache, but the veriest shadow of dark fuzz on her upper lip. Unfortunately, it showed up in rushes that night. 

What to do? Marshall was shooting the film in sequence, in large part because he was writing the script as he went along. The first scene of the movie is McGovern’s character appearing in the office of a Freudian analyst, played by Dudley Moore. 

Fern the makeup person was  consulted (or was it Romaine? These two were known as The Salad Sisters and were, to me, indistinguishable.) and arranged for a depilatory treatment the next morning, to remove the offending fuzz. Unfortunately the depilatory caused an angry rash, which was even more noticeable than the moustache: the production came to a halt, as Marshall quickly wrote in an extra scene with Dudley alone in his office. 

Lovesick was the only time I worked on a movie set (I worked for a casting agent on Silkwood, Amadeus & a movie called Class with Jacqueline Bisset & an unknown young actor, Andrew McCarthy.) But what a movie to work on! Here is a partial list of its cast, in addition to Moore & McGovern:

Alec Guinness as Sigmund Freud

Wallace Shawn as Otto Jaffe

Ron Silver as Ted Caruso

John Huston as Dr. Larry Geller

Alan King as Dr. Lionel Gross

Selma Diamond as Dr. Harriet Singer

Larry Rivers as Jac Applezweig

David Strathairn as Zuckerman

Christine Baranski as the Nymphomaniac

Renée Taylor as Mrs. Mondragon

Fred Melamed as Psychoanalyst

Because of its all star cast, there were many visitors to the set every day. A few that stand out were Dick Cavett and Sting (accompanied by the Irresistible Photographer/muse Lynn Goldsmith who I had occasion to experience on two other occasions: once with Bruce Springsteen and once with Dylan. But that’s another story.) 

One of my duties on Lovesick was to mind John Huston, who’d flown in for two days to play the role of Moore’s analyst. There was some concern about Huston, as he was hooked up to an oxygen machine for his COPD and, unhooked from it, would start gasping after a few minutes. He was a tough bird tho and wouldn’t agree to having an EMS truck stand by: “Hell, I made it through …months in the middle of the Congo with African Queen, I can survive two days in the middle of New York City!” So my job was to pick him up at his boutique Park Avenue hotel and deliver him to set, then stick by him like glue in case he passed out. Either from lack of oxygen or from the lite beers that he chain-drank in his camper.

Huston had a more utilitarian approach, where takes were concerned. When it was time for his scene – one of the more complicated in the movie , involving a magic trick – he wouldn’t wait for ‘Cut!’ but would launch right into another Take. Marshall was too intimidated to insist that Huston stand by while the set was restored & the lighting tweaked, so he basically turned the direction over to Huston for his scenes.  As a result, all Huston’s scenes were shot in a day. As a result, one of the highest-paid actors in the film was paid two days’ salary for one day’s work. He was a sly one, Mr Huston!

I’m coming to the end of my days in the movie business. Although being a permanent assistant had its advantages (access without soul-crushing responsibility being chief among them) there’s a built-in expiration date for such work in the Entertainment business. If you haven’t found a niche within a year or two (exception: administrative assistant, the job formerly known as secretary) you’re quietly shuttled into the same class as the brother-in-law job: Permanent Production Assistant.  

So, one last story, and then we’re done here.

As I mentioned earlier, I worked in a casting office on two Major Motion Pictures (and one runner-up film). The runner-up film was called “Class” and it starred Jacqueline Bisset. Bisset, a Brit, had had a successful career starting in the 60’s with artsy movies like Cul de Sac and Two for the Road but fame arrived for her in the 70’s with block-busters like Casino Royale, Bullitt and The Deep (whereIn she emerged from the eponymous Deep in a wet-T-shirt & rocketed to sexpot stardom.) After a string of hits (by 1978 she was getting 1M per movie) Bisset was offered the lead in one of the biggest & most expensive-to-date flops in film history: Inchon. This turkey – coupled with Bisset’s elderly-for-a-sex-Star status – made her an Affordable Star by 1983. (Think Martha Stewart’s Target line) Anyway, Bisset was cast as the sexy single mom of Brat-packer Rob Lowe, a High school senior. After Bisset and Lowe, there wasn’t much left in the till for the Lowe character’s best friend, who falls into an October-April romance with his friend’s mother.

To find this bargain-basement character, an open casting call was announced in Backstage magazine. It would’ve been something like this: “Seeking M actor age 18-21 to play lead role in Major Motion Picture. Bring headshot & resume to 78th street and Columbus Avenue this Saturday…”

Needless to say the elementary playground where this exhibition took place was teeming with wannabe movie stars on Saturday. Some were decidedly over the age of 21. 

I wasn’t on-hand for the casting call. The assistant casting director was a young guy named David Rubin and he & Mary Goldberg (the casting director) handled all auditions and go-sees. I was a glorified receptionist, fielding calls and taking messages for Mary & David. On the Monday after the call, I learned that a young NYU freshman named Andrew McCarthy had been cast in the part. David felt he had just the right combination of hunkiness, innocence and confidence to play opposite a superannuated international sex symbol.

There is a tradition in the the casting trade that, once cast, an actor gives the casting office an emolument of some kind to show their appreciation. These gifts are usually something tastefully expensive but expendable, like a bottle of boutique single-malt Scotch, or a post-modernist floral arrangement from Surroundings. 

And so it was that Andrew showed up that week with the most valuable gift he could 

think of, and also afford – tho presumably someone else had to procure it for him: a case of Heineken. 

I’m still sitting on the steps of the camper where Karel is deep in conversation with the 2nd unit AD.  It’s dark & getting cold and I’ve been writing this for 45 minutes. My phone’s battery is running low and pretty soon I’ll need to charge it sitting in my car with the motor running, like the Teamsters. I look over at the Background tent (‘Background’ is what you call Extras, tho why they changed the name, I don’t know. ‘Extra’ was never gender-specific,  like Script Girl). The extras are on their phones, in costume. One thing about being an extra: once you’re costumed, you have to be super-careful not to spill food or coffee on your clothes, as it may show up in the rushes. If you have a Part, the coffee stain from Thursday won’t match the scenes from yesterday’s  shoot and you’ll catch Hell from the Person formerly known as Script Girl.

I check the time again. It doesn’t sound like things are breaking up inside the trailer. I think about my cosy cabin in the woods, and how it’s just starting to get cold enough for a fire. Then I think, “Hey, I don’t need to be here. I can leave at any time!” I look over at the teamsters in their trucks and then over at the hungry extras under the Background tent. I close this essay in ‘Notes’ get up and walk to my car.’