Scrappy Little Nobody(14)

I don’t mean to suggest that I didn’t believe in what we were doing, I just couldn’t imagine a world where anyone outside the cast was ever going to see it. I knew that tiny films like Clerks or The Blair Witch Project could be huge, but I wasn’t sure that musical numbers from Burt Bacharach’s Promises, Promises or jokes about Stephen Sondheim were going to play wide. I also knew that Killer Films had made dark, important films like Kids and Boys Don’t Cry, but again, Promises, Promises and Stephen Sondheim.

My big problem was Fritzi, a weird girl with greasy hair and terrible clothes who happened to be the character I was playing. Fritzi was the camp loser and she was obsessed with (and probably in love with) Jill, the hot, popular girl at camp.

Today, I would be thrilled to play such a twisted little character. At the time, I just wanted to wear makeup and have my hair done, like the other girls in the cast. I wanted to downplay the ambiguously sexual nature of Fritzi’s (very much unrequited) interest in Jill. I wanted to be likable onscreen. I still had to go back to high school once this was over, and I so badly wanted to be the hot girl in a movie, not the girl who washes the hot girl’s underwear by hand.

A few years ago, Diane Lane gave an interview where she admitted that she was equally conflicted about one of her first film roles. She played the talentless front woman of a rock band in (the wonderful) Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, and she hated that the band was supposed to be terrible. She wanted to be an onscreen rock star. I hear that, sister. Sixteen-year-old insecurity is a real impediment to truth in art.

The very first scene on our very first day was a long and complicated tracking shot on the street near the West Side Highway that involved almost the whole cast. After each take, we’d just stare at each other, waiting to hear if we needed to do it again. I didn’t know it then, but that’s sort of how it always feels. I heard Todd laugh that the people at Killer Films were going to be pissed when they saw the footage, because there was no coverage (I knew what that meant!).

That first scene was the only thing we shot in Manhattan, and when we finished, we piled into vans and drove up to a vacant camp in the Catskills, the real Stagedoor Manor, where we would shoot the rest of the film. In interviews, lots of actors say that making a movie is “like sleepaway camp.” They have no idea.

There was no phone, no TV, no internet, and no cell reception. If you weren’t working on a certain day (or a certain week), too bad. No one had a car, so you weren’t leaving. We got paid seventy-five dollars a day on the days we worked, and only on the days we worked. This is why unions matter.

The blessing was that the other cast members were wonderful. Without the aid of cell phones, we spent our days off wandering around the camp to see who else wanted to hang out. It was as close as I ever got to having a gang of neighborhood friends, like I’d seen in movies from the nineties about growing up in the seventies. Our ages ranged from twelve to twenty-five and our interests ranged from musical theater to music. Or theater.



We found a few board games in the main offices but got sick of them quickly and spent most of our time engaging in general nerdery. We held Waiting for Guffman trivia competitions and took makeshift dance classes from a cast member who had obsessively collected bootleg videos of Twyla Tharp shows. Sasha and Tiffany, the two best singers, taught each other riffs and tested them out in parallel harmony while the rest of us listened in disbelief. Casual singing became so normalized that when I went home, it took me weeks to stop peppering my conversations with melodic interludes.

I shot my first real scene about a week into our stay. That morning, I got into my awful wardrobe, a woman rubbed down my frizzy hair with fistfuls of men’s pomade, and I went to the set (a.k.a. I walked three minutes to a different part of the camp).

We did a few final rehearsals in the set of “Jill’s” bedroom, and Todd told us we were going to film the next one. Someone yelled “last looks,” which meant that three people came into the room and poked at me: the wardrobe department pulled my sleeves back down to my wrists, the hair department gave me another handful of grease, and the makeup department looked me over to make sure I hadn’t secretly applied lip gloss again, like I’d done the first day.

This new ritual of last-minute touch-ups taught me that actors could become unfilmably ugly at any moment and needed to be beautified at ten-minute intervals. At first, it felt like pampering, but very quickly it became the standard by which I measured how insecure I should feel that day.

The scene was really just a conversation between Fritzi, my character, and Jill, the object of her obsession. It was creepy content, but pretty straightforward in terms of filmmaking. Back on the first day in the city, we had filmed the whole scene at once, in an open space, with complicated blocking. It had felt like a piece of theater. This was just two people in a room talking at each other.

Once Jill had been glossed, fluffed, and shimmered and I’d been, well . . . greased, we stood on our start marks and waited for “Action.” We did the scene, just like we’d done it in rehearsals, and eventually heard Todd’s voice call “Cut” from the next room.

That was it; that was my first time filming a scene in a movie. It might have driven me to distraction had it not been so . . . ordinary. I’d only ever performed in front of an audience before. The audience was a barometer of your success or failure. The audience gave you energy; their presence filled the room with a kind of electricity that told you, This is it, this is happening! The “audience” on a film set was just your director and the perpetually bored crew. Filming a movie felt exactly like not filming a movie.