The Princess Diarist(13)
So while I combed the environs for my potential location adventure, Harrison may have been combing, too.
? ? ?
on one of the first Friday nights after filming began, a party was organized to celebrate George Lucas’s thirty-second birthday. It was billed as a surprise party, though I’d be surprised if he was actually surprised by it. And even if he was, you never knew with George. He really wasn’t into facial expressions, much like Darth Vader and various and sundry robots, stormtroopers, and Ewoks.
One thing George never did like other directors—I was to later learn, with dismay—was encourage us to “just have fun with it.” So many directors have urged me in that amused direction, and I always want to say, “Is that what I’m here for? Fun? I am here for my salary, and to periodically use an ill-advised British accent, and to get people that I don’t know to like me.” Fun was for later, and generally misguided, which brings me back to George’s surprise party.
The festivities took place in a medium-sized, uncluttered room adjacent to the cafeteria at Elstree Studios. The walls were dirty-yellow, though a more generous and myopic guest might call it mustard. Most of the assembled crowd was made up of the crew—the grips, the electricians (“sparks” in the UK), the drivers, and all the others who toiled daily on the new, fairly obscure film that was being shot there. If they can get on the screen half of what George put on the page, I thought, people will come to see it. No matter what, it’s going to be this cool, weird little movie. I’d go see it. Well, I’d have to anyway, but they wouldn’t have to drag me.
So, this cafeteria was a biggish blank sort of place—inscrutable, impassive, without affect, the better that you might concentrate on what you were ingesting, which would have been chips, dips, carrots, celery, and pretzels. And next to the table boasting this decidedly less-than-exciting spread was everybody’s destination, another table with more sought-after treasures: the bar.
Not having located George yet, I tried to look as unconcerned and blasé as possible as I slowly sauntered barward, adding a smile to the mix in order to make it easier for the people there to like me and not wonder why I, of all people, had been cast in the role of the rather daunting princess.
“Hi! How you doing?” What was his name? “Great to see you.” Oh, no—what was his name? What were any of their names, I wondered as I weaved through this ever-growing crowd of faces I saw every day. Of course, they all knew my name because there it was on the call sheet.
“Could I have a Coke with ice, please? In as big a glass as you’ve got? Oh, that’s right, we’re in England, there is no ice. Okay, then, warm Coke it is.”
And then there was Harrison at the door. Wow, he really looked thrilled to be there. It could happen, though, I thought. This could be the night that he smiles. I waved as I brought my warm cola to my lips, hoping it wasn’t that warm. Not swamp-in-summer or overheated-hot-tub warm. Harrison raised his hand in a gesture intended as a greeting and began making his way through the assembled group that was every minute growing larger—a social fungus, slowly and deliberately fed by the bar.
“Sure, I remember you!” I emphatically reassured someone else whom I again didn’t remember. “Yeah! I’m having a great time. Are you?”
“Hey, look who’s here,” I greeted another. “I wondered if you’d be coming. No, I’m not, I really wondered! No, I already have a drink. It does so pass for a drink. Alcohol isn’t the only thing that quenches thirst. It’s the sense-quenching component that baffles me. Say that three times fast: Sense-quenching. Sense-quenching. Sense-quenching. No, really, I can’t drink. I’ve tried, I really have given it my best shot. But really, I’m allergic to booze. It makes me stupid, sick, and unconscious really fast. So I’ve never actually been drunk—just senseless and inert. I love that word, don’t you? ‘Inert.’”
The gathering smoke transformed this nondescript accommodation into the back room of a pub near closing time—all that was missing was the pool table. Following a somewhat shy beginning, everyone came to realize that this was not some polite celebration for their forbidding boss who was all but unknown to them. This was a kind of gleeful car wreck taking place at the end of a long early-in-the-shoot week. Maybe we were already behind schedule.
A lot of the crew knew each other from other shoots, and the filming—except for a brief jaunt to Tunisia—was taking place at home. No uprooting and staying at some cheap but comfortable faraway hotel. Most of these folks would go home at the end of a workday/week/month and sit at their own dinner tables, surrounded by their loving, supportive families, and beam with barely suppressed joy at the spouse or family who took a lively interest in his or her day.
Indeed, this very issue was being discussed. “This ain’t nobody round here’s idea of fun and frolic in the workplace, right?” a crew member said. “Everyone I’ve ever worked with that’s got a brain in their bloody head would rather be in some warm nowhere-near-here spot—say, on the coast someplace where the locals are ready and willing and the ale is dark and flowing.”
“Home?” said another. “After working all the livelong day on some dark set waiting for the bell so’s you can talk above a whisper—fuck me five ways till Friday. Give me a nice remote location with some per diem to pay for a round or two in the local bar, where there’s no bloody shortage of strange but friendly quim, and we’re off to the races, eh, lads?”