Scrappy Little Nobody(43)
You don’t normally have your nails done on a film set. It’s fine by me; I’m heavy-handed and I don’t like sitting still, but I was recently talked into having biweekly manicures for a film. People will tell you that “gel manicures” won’t ruin your nails as long as you change them out every two weeks, but if you ask me they are filthy liars. Maybe by the time this book comes out the gel manicure will be a thing of the past, like electrolysis or those Anna Nicole Smith diet pills I definitely never took. Just in case, please let me share my painful experience. I wore gel nails for three months on this movie, and when they finally came off, my boyfriend wouldn’t let me touch him. My nails were so thin that they sliced and diced anything I came near. I was a human paper-cut factory.
I gain weight on every movie. Never ever have I left a set without putting on at least five pounds. You’re not sleeping enough, you give up on exercise, and there is food EVERYWHERE. But the curse of the lady actor is to reach deep down, past the gurgling stomach acid, and find some willpower. When I’m trying to keep my ass in check, you’d think that fellow ladies would help me stay motivated. Instead, we end up torturing each other and ourselves. A group of hungry actresses (a.k.a. actresses) will talk about food with the kind of fervor and specificity normally found in Star Trek fan fiction. Some deep, hard-core stoner shit. Discussing food with girls on diets can feel eerily like porn dialogue.
“God, I would kill for a burger. Like a big, bloody cheeseburger on a brioche bun and some caramelized onions.”
“Oooh, brioche? You’re so bad. What about some bacon?”
“Fuck yeah, bacon.”
“And some avocado . . . and grilled pineapple rings.”
“Grilled pineapple? You pervert.”
One Foot Out the Door
When you’re a struggling actor, every job you get is a thrill and a relief. But unlike most professions, every job you get is temporary. The excitement is mired in the terror of knowing you’ll be unemployed again in a matter of months. So even mid-movie you have to send out your résumé. For actors, that comes in the form of the self-tape. You can’t make it to a casting office when you’re shooting in the suburbs of Baltimore, so you and your castmates roll up your sleeves and put together a video in a trailer or a hotel room.
Rocket Science, my second film, was basically a sausage fest. Luckily, the young men in the cast were gentlemen of the highest order and fine actors to boot. On a day off, we all went to one cast member’s hotel room to help him make a tape for a mafia movie. (We were young enough that this was an exciting project for all of us, not an obligation.) Aaron read lines offscreen, Nick operated the camera, Matt knew how to upload and send video. I didn’t have a job to do, but I was happy to be there for moral support. True to any self-respecting mafia movie, there was a tremendous amount of shouting in the scene. We were all very impressed with the performance but wondered if the surrounding rooms were annoyed with the volume. Several takes in, there was a knock at the door. A take was still in progress, so I jumped up to go silence the curious party. I’m helping!
I gingerly whipped around the door without letting it completely shut behind me, like I’d seen crew members do when we were shooting. Outside was a stern-looking woman from hotel management who softened when she saw me. I held a finger to my lips, apologetic and pleading.
A man’s angry voice was still emanating from inside, and now a teenage girl was desperately trying to get rid of the woman at the door. To someone who had no idea why hotel guests would be screaming for, you know . . . make-believe reasons, this development looked suspicious, to say the least. The hotel manager looked at me like, Sister, if you’re in trouble, I’ve got your back. It was so courageous and supportive I was tempted to let her take care of me. I quickly remembered that this was real life and I figured ruining one take was worth it in this case. I threw the door open so she could see the collection of gangly young men filming their friend. Even in the throes of his heated performance, our resident artiste retreated from irate to meek instantaneously upon seeing the stranger at the door. We smiled nervously at the hotel manager. She looked us up and down.
“It sounds like you’re killing each other in here. If you’re gonna make your little movie in the rooms you have to be less dramatic.”
Special Skills
Even low-budget films can be riddled with communication problems, and they only get worse and more frequent the larger the scale. As a result I have learned a number of specialized skills for absolutely no reason.
One film sent me to lessons on a horse farm for weeks. I wasn’t learning to ride a horse, though, I was learning to sit behind someone riding a horse and not fall off. There wasn’t actually a lot of skill involved. All you had to do was learn to spend an extended period of time clutching at someone’s torso for dear life while galloping full speed, sans saddle or stirrups, on the aft of a sentient being (who weighed a literal half-ton and most days had a comically large erection).
I panicked during my first lesson because something was digging into my thigh and none of the instructors seemed that bothered about it. Saddles aren’t made to have a passenger behind them, so when I mentioned my discomfort, there was a general attitude of “Yeah, that’ll happen.” When I pointed out the culprit, a metal ring about the circumference of a golf ball attached to the back of the saddle, my teacher frowned at it, gave it a tug, and said she’d try to take it off for my next lesson. Before you ask (believe it or not), I’m not the kind of gal who knows what purpose a metal ring might serve on the back of an English saddle, so no, I don’t know what it was.