Chapter One of Below the Line, a saga that begins with a prologue—a little life, interrupted
It seemed an impossible thing, and it made his gut fume and his mouth water at the same time.
North was a man of contradictions and a professional skeptic, but he was nobody's hero.
He double-checked the computer run. A wind that in L.A. would romantically be called a Santana, but which was here—in Mexico City—just a hot sweaty annoyance, rattled the blinds behind him.
Since dawn he'd studied the run, popping maalox and aspirin on the sticky cab-ride across the smog-drenched District Federal. He'd applied fifteen years of Hollywood accounting experience, squeezed every dime—every over-valued peso—out of the budget, and the bottom line was the same: they were crazy to shoot this picture. Better to shoot themselves.
"Well swee-pea," he murmured to the studio pussy gato who'd found her way into the deserted office and was watching him like a completion bondsman at the Tomb of the Pharaohs, "thas Show Business. Don't mean nothin. Fuck it and drive on."
North tossed the run on Wendy's desk and headed for the just-brewed Mexican café in the cocinita while he wondered to himself: where the hell am I gonna come up with two million dollars? A lesser bean-counter might have asked "Why me, Lord?" but Don North was not in the business of questioning his fate. For better or worse, he was only the Production Accountant on this picture. Let it be, amigo, let it be.
Don chanced a glance in the worn-out smoky mirror hanging behind the coffee urn in the little kitchen. He didn't like what he saw: a thirty-six year-old mug tending to heaviness, squinting from an overdose of sun acquired on a trip to the pyramids at Teotihuacán two days ago. His eyes were a little pink, the by-product of his Scandinavian genes and a date with a Mescal bottle in the lobby bar of the Krystal Rosa the night before. It was three days after Christmas and he was wondering if the kids liked the G.I. Joe arsenal he'd sent them down in West Palm Beach.
North heard the door in the outer office. That'd be Pepe, their Mexican gofer.
"¡Hola, Pepe!"
The little shiny Indian face peered round the door jamb:
"¡Buenos dias, Maestro!" Pepe answered a little too goddamn brightly. "¿Como esta usted?"
"Muy bien, amigo," replied North, pretty much exhausting the sum of his "proper" Spanish vocabulary. "How's by you?"
Pepe wobbled splayed fingers.
"How you say, in cueítl, in huipilli."
"Tell me about it, good buddy." Don hadn't a clue, but it must've involved snatch. He bumped into Pepe three nights out of four, this bar or that, cruising in an uptown state of mind.
Pepe attacked the already immaculate floor with one of those little brushes like the Vietnamese used to use, little short handle so you had to bend over. Industrious lil fucker, thought North. Day or night, he never stopped.
Don rambled into Gerry's office. Atop an easel in the corner, mocking him in implacable silence, stood the production board. To Don's practiced eyes it was not a pretty sight: a hundred and forty-eight vertical half-inch strips of different-colored card-board lay side by side in a channel round the board's perimeter—one strip for each of the scenes to be shot during the thirteen weeks of production that were about to commence on UNTITLED, or, as Don liked to call it HECHO EN MEJICO. At seventy-five thousand dollars and change a strip, he was looking at some expensive wet dream.
The Board is how a film unit knows who shoots what when where. Actors, locations, scene number, day out of days, props, special effects—the board tells you at a glance where the shoot is sitting. UNTITLED was squatting in deep Bandini and the cameras hadn't even arrived yet.
They had a saying south of the border: another shitty day in paradise. North took a slug of the hot bitter Mexican brew and shook his head. He needed some breakfast.
§
The blood-red new sun caught Don North hot and full in the face as soon as he'd lumbered downstairs and into the quad at Estudios Azteca. It was like stumbling into a Fellini flick—the movie studio morning nut-house with a twist: Mexicans were pushing the kliegs and pulling the dollies and scooting odd bits of scenery here and there. Half of them wore sombreros and the other half sported sweatshirts like "Do Malibu" or "Patience my ass, I Wanna Kill Something."
Peones. Though it took five peones to do the work of one trained Hollywood technician in twice the time, the peones did it ten times cheaper and they did it for pesos. A favorable exchange rate makes for strange bed-fellows in the movie world. North figured the rate would have to get a lot stranger before the numbers on UNTITLED got favorable. But he could wait. If he waited long enough, they'd make money without ever releasing the picture.
The wind that wasn't a Santana rustled the palm leaves while North walked between sound stages. As studios went, Azteca wasn't bad. The place was built of solid brick back in the fifties, when the Mexican film industry was churning out two or three hundred tortilla sagas a year. The peones worked well with brick and stone, but wood and lathe? Forget it.
North pondered this. In dollars-and-cents terms it was the jumping off place for a parcel of problems he would have to red-line. UNTITLED had eighty sets boarded. Two hundred peones had been on the job for three months and nothing was ready to shoot. There were a number of reasons for this. Much, of course, was due to the language problem and the mañana concept: why put off till tomorrow what you could put off till next week. North had factored this into his numbers as best he could. But then there was the Production Designer, Jacques De Cuir, and thar she blows:
North tried to will his six-foot, four-inch, two hundred forty pounds of integrity into invisibility, but it wasn't in the cards. Jacques De Cuir minced up to him with the sun at his back like some sort of queer kamikaze. As usual, the production designer smelled like an asshole drenched in cologne.
"¡Buenos dias, Donny!" he lisped.
North increased the length of his stride. De Cuir's designer jungle fatigues made sickening squishy sounds where his thighs rubbed together.
"Hola, Jacques," said North without a whole lot of enthusiasm. "How's tricks?"
"Unbearable, Donny," replied the designer. The man was incapable of uttering a single syllable that didn't make North want to chuck. "We have to talk."
"Talk, Jacquie. I'm scoring me some tortilla eggs." He marched on towards the commissary. The day was starting to stink.
"Good, I'll walk you, OK?"
"Free country, Jacquie, last I looked."
De Cuir grabbed Don too loosely by the arm. He insinuated his close-cropped pointed little head into the haven between Don's bicep and his chest. Jacque's breath smelled like sen-sen. Quaint.
"Don, I'll just die!"
"Bum lay, Jacques?" No sense even trying to hide his disdain for the three-time Academy Award nominee.
"And Anthony will have my head, Don!"
North smiled. The director could have any head he goddamned well pleased, but—like North—Sir Anthony Essex was a player. He liked the action.
"Why is that, Jacques?"
"These...peones, Don." He spoke the word like it was dripping with something unspeakable. "They don't understand that we shoot in three days!"
"Oh I don't know, Jacques. I think they understand all right. They didn't just jump off the burrito boat you know."
"I'll have to work them overtime, Donny! Just to get the first set and the cover set ready!"
North smiled.
"Like I said."
"But overtime, Donny! We haven't even starting shooting yet!" He pushed his head tighter against North's arm. His eyes circled around in their sockets like a feverish basset hound's.
"I'm sorry, Don. Really! I am truly and honestly sorry. You're not going to hold this against the whole Art Department, are you?"
"You mean you and your four American Art Directors and your three Mexican Art Directors and your two hundred peones and your five personal drivers and your six location drivers?"
De Cuir nodded piteously.
"Plus the mechanics who keep the vehicles running and the god-knows how many aces in the hole they've got behind them?"
Again, the nod of a man already beside himself.
"Why no, Jacques. I couldn't do that."
De Cuir held tighter to Don's arm for just the eensiest fraction of a second, in the beginnings of a kind of gratitude.
"I couldn't do that to you, Jacques. We haven't even started shooting yet."
They'd reached the door of the commissary. Half a dozen dozing dogs raised old heads expectantly. De Cuir started to breathe easier, but he had jumped to a sad and unstable conclusion.
"Gerry and Judy could hold it against you though, Jacques."
"Oh, Donny! Goddammit!"
Before Jacques's snit could work its way up to full steam, one of the Commissary curs, the tall black skinny but kind of good-looking Gordon setter that had been left behind by the DOOM company, struggled to his feet and sniffed De Cuir's crotch ravenously.
"Out! Down! You unthpeakably detethtable beahth!" shrilled the Art Director. Two Mexican guards sniggered at the gate.
§
"I'm worried," said Gerry Gold to Judy Silver, trying to act like he wasn't in order to impress the collection of waiters and busboys who had gathered in the otherwise empty commissary. He shot a hard, accusing look at the nearest of the Mexicans. The man took a demurring step and a half back. It wasn't enough. Gerry drew himself up taller than a short man should:
"Unh, ¿Señor, cafe por favor?" he said in his best Beverly Hills Spanish.
Judy hadn't had her coffee either and her head still hurt a little from wak-ing up after last night. She glanced a "me too" to the waiter and eyed Gerry, once again, like she had every morning for the seven years they'd been having these breakfast meetings together.
Gerry was a damned good-looking man, she considered. He kept himself in superb condition with a masochistic series of workouts and tennis matches. The trouble was he tried too hard, and a lot of that effort showed up on his face. He was just too Sho Biz for his own good. Too tan. Too intense. Nothing came easy for Gerry and now, at forty-six, he was hell-bent for the success that had so far eluded him in life, love, and the movie business.
"You're always worried, Gerry," was the best Judy could do. She smiled, and that made it a little better.
Judith Rebekkah Silver had a smile broad as a billboard on the Sunset Strip. It was one of the things she'd been taught—at a very early age—in the parade of ballet classes she'd taken all over the world. Judy had been a good dancer, could have been a great one maybe, if she'd kept at it. But she loved Production. From a little girl, she was always the one who'd run the show. UNTITLED was her first Big Picture. This morning she was hoping it wouldn't be her last.
"Can we talk later, Hon?" asked Gerry.
He'd spotted Don North wading into the commissary. Gerry licked his lips nervously. They were chapped from the sun at the pyramids.
"Nothing but time, Bud," said Judy conspiratorially.
"Morning kids!" chirped North. He took at close look at Judy:
"Too much mariachi last night, Sweepea?"
"You want coffee, Donald?" invited Judy, in lieu of a response.
"O.J. for the kid." Don patted the front of his considerable girth, which had stretched his O.P. teeshirt to the bursting point. "Burns off the cals..."
"Juego naranjo...unh, naranja, amigo," managed Gerry to the busboy. "Tres."
"Jesus, Gerry," said North. "You got a hell of a command a the lingo down here. How d'ya say 'I need two million bucks?'"
Gerry palmed both sides of this thick, black, but slightly graying curly head.
"You know," he offered expansively, "I keep telling you guys that Anthony is gonna pull this off."
Don failed to repress a snort. It sounded like something a sex-starved bull might make on his way to the corrida. Judy looked back and forth between the two men. She'd been to this particular tennis match before.
The waiter brought the coffee. Gerry edged over towards Don, away from the waiter, as if bearing a secret. "Anthony has worked miracles before you know."
Don checked out the menu, then raised an eyebrow skeptically.
"He shot the whole goddamn World War II for nine million!" Gerry continued, referring to one of the director's big hits, BLITZ.
"Fifteen years ago. His home turf. Good Brit stunt guys, a proper schedule. Christ, Gerry, your mother coulda brought that one in."
"Did he tell you how he got the Stukas from the King of Spain, Don?" coun-tered Gerry excitedly. "He had Rolls, Royce, and Daimler-Benz behind him on that one! Fucking brilliant!"
Kids," soothed Don North sympathetically, "if anybody can do it, Essex can. That's not the point. I just think we gotta cover our ass a little bit." The orange juice came and Don skimmed a little of the pulp off the top. He spoke meaningfully to Gerry: "You know who'll take the fall, man."
If Gerry Gold were a foot taller, he'd have hit the ceiling.
"I know goddamn well, Don! And I sign your check too you know!"
"Gerry. Gerry. Chill down a little, will ya? I gotta headache."
"I'll drink to that," said Judy, ever the peacemaker.
"Listen," said North, "if it looks good on paper, that's all the studio cares about. I just don't wanna see you have to hock your goddamn Nautilus set is all."
"Let me worry about the bottom line, Don. I been here before you know."
"I know," said North, as worried as he could be.
The fact is, Gerry had gone eight hundred thousand over in post production on his last film. That was four years ago. The picture had been released. Slightly. As track records went, Gerry had none. But he had two stars. And a killer script. He had the director of four LIGHTMAN pictures that had grossed over three hundred million dollars. And balls. Gerry had more balls than the Virginia Slims Tournament in May.
"So when's the General gonna make the scene?" queried Don.
"Four-thirty. United," answered Judy. We've got a production meeting at seven."
"I'm glad I'm gonna be there," said North. "Eighteen hours in the air from Las Palmas and the first thing he's gonna hear is he's gotta cut the statue outa the picture." Gerry headed for the ceiling again:
"I'm not cutting the statue outa the picture, goddamn it! The Art Department's ready to sculpt the goddamn thing next week!"
"Huevos rancheros, por favor," said Don to the waiter. Larry leaned away from the poor Mexican who probably didn't want to be there anyway.
"Don, the statue is one of the things that makes this film a fucking classic. We're not gonna cut off our fucking balls to spite our face!"
Don nodded to the waiter. "Easy on the ranchero sauce there, pardner. Not too caliente, si?"
"Si Señor. No caliente. Bueno."
"Gerry, I don't wanna cut the statue. I love the statue. I would like to have my manly way with the statue right here in Azteca bloody square. But the statue is a cool seven hundred thou, right there, Gerry. We're 30 percent home and it's just one scene. If we're gonna get a handle on this budget, it's not gonna come from splicing tape and cab fare. I just want you to know your options."
"That's a creative decision. Anthony will make the creative decisions."
"Right. Jet-lagged to hell and we shoot in three days."
"¿Señorita?" asked the waiter.
"I'm not hungry," said Judy, though she wanted to eat a cow.
§
For Airport Harry Golonka it was another shitty day in paradise. Shitty days were his bread and butter and Airport Harry ate like a king. He was drying his hairy muscular arms over the hot air machine in the john just outside customs. His immaculate linen shirt, purchased for birdsong in Gualupita, was open to the navel and it revealed a trim torso and enough gold hanging from his neck to seduce Hernán Cortés.
Airport Harry had worked as a grip on Huston's NIGHT OF THE IGUANA up in Puerto Vallarta. He developed a taste for mescal and he fell in love with Angelita Cordero, and the rest, as they say, is herstory.
Harry's story was written in the book of greasing the wheels of the economy, without which much of Mexican commerce and politics—not to mention her relations with Hollywood—would falter. It was for damned sure that no American could shoot a picture south of the border without a guy like Harry who knew the ropes: which customs inspector preferred Scotch; who craved blondes; whose eyes closed para dolares. It was a small essential talent and nobody did it better.
Mexico City International Airport was Harry's home away from home. You could find him there all hours dia y noche, practicing his art with astounding professionalism. Today was special, for the gringos arrived en masse. Eighty technicians and the first five of what was to eventually be twenty-five actors and actresses.
Harry had done his homework: he had a dozen maricons, eight coke-heads, and more-than-likely thirty or forty illegal pieces of equipment—tape decks, walkie-talkies, and hand guns—to squeeze past customs. If all went as planned, not one work permit would be questioned. Not a single bag would be opened. Harry was an artist.
His artistry depended less on bribery than it did on observation. At some gates, during some hours, neither money nor alcohol nor the promise of sex would suffice. If every customs agent had his price, it was also true that each had his pride, and his inspector—whether fed-eral or local—who just might not be in the mood to look the other way. Under these circumstances, Harry might have to sacrifice a traveler or two. A transvestite might be a little embarrassed. An extra carton of ci-garettes might be found out. But in all his years as airport liaison, no American company had ever lost an hour's shooting because of Harry Golonka. When he got caught, he got caught small.
Harry bought himself an L.A. Times. Job perk: all the norteamer-icano periodicals he desired. They had Playboy. They had The Wall Street Journal. He was especially fond of New Look. He checked his watch, then flipped open the financial section to check his stocks. Mexicana 61 was running twenty minutes late. Apple Computer was down an eighth.
Harry had a house in Culver City. He had a 36-unit apartment complex in San Diego. He had bank accounts and trusts in the states that his cousin administered. Most of his pesos were in Mexican C.D.'s, to start. They were paying 49%. The peso was at 185 and headed towards the ionosphere. If Harry could move anything into Mexico, he also knew how to move things out. It was a grand time to be an expatriate.
It was on a Sam Peckinpah picture, he forgot which one, maybe THE WILD BUNCH, when he first came across an extraordinary drug deal. An assistant cameraman had offered him half a million dollars to move a hundred keys of cocaine. He'd said no then, and he'd said no a score of times since then. Harry would buy, but he would not be bought. His interesting sense of morality was the thing that kept him in business.
UNTITLED was a big picture. They'd be shooting for over four months. They had a hotshot Hungarian cameraman named Laszlo Miljacovich who was used to traveling first cabin. He was bringing his own equipment down, leasing it back to the company like most of the high-rollers did.
Miljacovich owned three Arriflex BL's at a hundred and fifty thousand apiece. Harry had cleared two dozen magazines, three sets of Zeiss lenses, and two semi-trailers worth of assorted grip equipment. Miljacovich had a staff of ten, including two additional operators. This kind of thing scared the Mexican government shitless. You could sell the cameras for three times their worth south of the border. One lens was worth sixty grand on the black market.
It had taken Harry three months just to square away Miljacovich's manifest. Everything had a name and a number in his IBM PC-AT. Harry had three people back in his office who did nothing but update his database and file for permits.
The screwy thing was that, for all of this, it really was cheaper to shoot films in Mexico. The American Unions had made it prohibitive to film in the states. They were killing the golden goose up there and Harry was stuffing the gander. He charged a flat fee for his services—one percent of the budget plus expenses. UNTITLED would gross him a hundred and ninety thousand dollars plus all the booze and cigarettes and Hustler magazines he could barter. And they talk about the American Dream....
Airport Harry made a mental note to buy a thousand shares of Apple Computer. He used IBM, of course, but he liked this new guy Apple had, this Scully. He'd been CEO of Pepsi before moving over to Apple and he, like Harry, was a Bottom Line man. Harry guessed he'd trim Apple's operations to the bone and take record profits within the year. And that was real money. It didn't depend, like the movie business, on good luck and the whims of a fickle audience and whether the lead had a high fuckability quotient. Fuck it, he'd buy two thousand shares.
The P.A. announced Mexicana's arrival. Harry would have time to look over his mutual funds before the gringos hit the gate.
§
In the dark, with Liberty upside down in the smoky groundglass, Eduardo Galindez allowed himself a private smile. She was beautiful, even in her naked state. He threw his black old-fashioned photographer's cape back over the top of the bellows, straightened up, and donned his large, fringe-brimmed hat.
Extracting a fresh holder from the negative safe, he inserted it into the Calumet view camera—formal and imposing, expensive and precise—pulled the slide, held his breath out of habit and triggered the shutter. The camera winked and exposed an 8 by 10 inch negative of fine-grained panchromatic black and white sheet film. He smiled again, nodded, and his peones cheered.
A short coffee-colored man with fine-hewn aristocratic features, Eduardo gazed at Liberty out of dark brown eyes that knew much more than they revealed.
The Statue. As yet she had no face. Her form, rough-hewn in raw Styrofoam around a steel and aluminum armature weighing over twenty tons, was recognizable only by the crown which reached ninety feet above the dusty plain at Tlapan. Three dozen peones returned cautiously to work on various levels of the scaffolding that surrounded her, happy to be out in the sun this day and gainfully employed. Liberty would be magnificent, Eduardo's masterpiece. He replaced the slide, extracted the film-holder, and placed this record of his work to date into the negative safe. In a small logbook he was never without, Eduardo noted date, time of day, focal length, shutter speed, f-stop, emulsion and contrast ratios according to the Zone System, ferociously arcane and made internationally famous by Ansel Adams, the American landscape photographer.
Eduardo's actions were incongruous considering: it was as if Ansel Adams had suddenly and inexplicably left his beloved black and white Yosemite Valley, preferring instead to document a garish land of violent sunrises, velvet paintings on earth-colored walls and gaudy primitive pottery.
The idea of recording the construction of the statue in such minute detail (for 8x10 view cameras are serious cameras) came to Eduardo after his visit to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. There were hundreds of sepia prints on display there revealing each step of the carving of that enormous work. For a young sculptor like Eduardo in those days, who dreamed of many grand and glorious projects, these photos of a by-gone time were like blueprints.
As a boy, Eduardo had climbed the three hundred-odd steps that spiral up inside the real Statue of Liberty. They had not stayed there long enough he remembered, because his little sister threw up on her doll. A tall and kind American policeman comforted his mother, who was embarrassed and did not speak English.
Eduardo broke down the Calumet and tripod, placed them carefully in their cases and then in the back of his 57 Chevy station wagon. It was painted a singular two-tone combination of terra-cotta and worn-out black, and covered in mud, like a kind of tropical cocktail exploding inside a blender. Eduardo liked it. Simple as that. It did the job.
He gentled the car into starting, something of a small miracle these days—like the sun coming up each morning, a wonder—and splashed through some plaster runoff on his way off the site and back to the studio. Jacques used to like to meet with him on-site but he was getting too busy now, with shooting starting, so Eduardo would drive to Chiliverde, sometimes three times a day.
He enjoyed driving. The things he saw inspired him, made him think, enriched his soul. He had driven the Chevy to the Dakota Badlands, through Alberta and Saskatchewan, and all the way down the West Coast of Norteamerica.
The trees of the Pacific Northwest, the totems of the Chinooks and the Tlingits, all of it was part of him now, ready to be used in his art.
Modern Mexico City had her own grand sculpture you know: the Angel of Freedom in the Plaza San Angel; the monument to Los Hermanos Chicos in Chapultepec Park; the Monument to the Races just north of the city on the road to the pyramids at Teotihuacán. But compared to Liberty, they were merely the indigent offerings of a poor country to a cruel muse. And compared to the sculpture of Eduardo's forefathers, the Ancients of Meso-America, the Olmecs and the Toltecs and the Aztecs, they are as ants beside giants. In sculpting Liberty for the final act of UNTITLED, Eduardo Galindez would, he believed, realize the ambition of a lifetime.
His crew waved to him and he returned their waves enthusiastically. We think of sculptors as solitary men, strong armed, covered in dust, but here was Eduardo Galindez, strong, yes, but more like a military man on a battlefield than a Michelangelo in a studio. He was a boss now, an jefe. These men depended on him to feed their families. And he knew he could never let them down.
The car accelerated surprisingly smoothly. Since Eduardo was also an accomplished mechanic, beneath the car's plain exterior—like Mexico herself you might say—lay a wealth of excellence: new shocks; new transmission, valves, rear end. He'd replace the starter soon.
Eduardo came by his talents naturally. His father had begun crafting small folk objects to be sold to tourists along the highway between Tijuana and Ensenada soon after the war. By the time Eduardo was old enough for college, the Galindez pottery shops and gas stations were spread all over Baja and the mainland as well, like Howard Johnsons without the fried clams and ice cream. A million and one gringos paid for Eduardo's education. They bought burros, eagles, Mexican country couples, Aztec Calendar Stones, and Don Quixotes and Sancho Panzas (who have nothing to do with Mexico but seem to be popular with the Yankees).
Eduardo's father and uncles were millionaires now. But he had taken a more difficult route. After a decade of fine art studios, first in Guadalajara and later in Mexico City, (and none nearly successful as his father's tourist traps), las peliculas had claimed Eduardo, and, in this way—as a film studio sculptor—he had made his own name.
He tuned in the weather on the scratchy radio. He smelled a change in the air and he worried about safety on the site.
Eduardo had much on his mind this morning. Jacques had asked him about scaling down the statue, as if, after all this time, with the armature built, such a thing were possible. She had been designed to bear the weight of actors and stuntmen, weapons and explosions. An entire battle was to be staged upon her, a marvelous thing in the script and in Eduardo's imagination. And now there was talk of change. He wasn't sure if his crew was up to such a thing.
In the back of his mind, he hoped that the statue would remain long after the Yankees left his country. She would be a symbol of the brotherhood between their two nations. And she would serve as a reminder to Los Trabadores de Pelicula—the motion picture trade union—that he was capable of grander works than Homage al Cine, the naked winged man who stands inside the gate of Estudio Chiliverde, a work that is too cheaply erotic and too idealized to be considered art.
The forecaster predicted rain, too early in the season to be sure, but if it did come, out of the Caribbean and off the mountains like it did later in the winter, it would definitely slow them down out here at Tlapan.
Rain. He wouldn't have to wash the chevy. Rain. He could photograph wet streets at night in the Zocalo. Rain.
When all was said and done, when all the beans had been counted and placed in Señor Don North's very large jar, UNTITLED's Statue of Liberty would cost a million dollars. In pesos, that was more than Eduardo could imagine.
Prologue---
More
On Hollywood and filmmaking:
Below the Line
sex drugs and divorce
a little life, interrupted
- Hecho en Mejico
- Entrances
- Sam's Song
- Hemingway and Fortuna
- Hummingbird on the Left
- The Long and Drunken Afternoon
- Safe in the Lap of the Gods
- Quetzal Birds in Love
- Angela in Paradise
- And the machine ran backwards
a secondhand coffin
how to act
Right. Me and Herman Melville
Scylla and Charybdis Approximately
snowflakes and nylon
I could've kissed Orson Welles
the broken dreams of Orson Welles
the last time I saw Orson Welles
The Other Side of the Wind
ASC
avid
Below the Line
Charles Durning
completion bond
D/Vision
Film Editing
Film Editor
Final Cut Pro
forced development
HD Video
insert
king of the queens
Kubrick polishes a turd
movies from space
moviola
Panavision
Persistence of Vision
Sven Nykvist
Wilford Brimley
21 Grams
A.I.
Andrei Rublyov
Apocalypse Now Redux
Collateral
Entourage
Ivan's Childhood
The Jazz Singer
Mirror
Nostalghia
Six Feet Under
The Sacrifice
We Were Soldiers
Wild Strawberries