The house was a 1980s riff on the modernist Case Study aesthetic, all sliding glass doors, wide windows and external conversation pits. A portable generator burbled power on the ground floor, and this was piped up the steep concrete stairs to where cameras, lights and monitors were clustered about the small zone that was to be immortalized. It took over an hour for the eight producers, four directors, seven lighting cameramen, fifteen sound recordists and thirty-eight lighting technicians to be happy with the set-up. I found the process utterly absorbing, all the more so because in order to get the lighting and the camera angle exactly right I was asked to sit on one of the banquettes as a stand-in for Pete Postlethwaite, who was late on set.
When he eventually arrived he came skipping up the stairs looking tanned, relaxed, fit and debonair, with two or three achingly beautiful personal assistants tripping along behind. He barely glanced at me as Brad made a fragment of an introduction — ‘Pete, this is—’ — and skipped on to a zone of mirrors and clothes racks where twenty or thirty makeup artists and wardrobe assistants began prepping him.
I might have been offended, were it not that Postlethwaite’s arrival was immediately succeeded by a still greater commotion — a running back and forth of production crew, the collective making of manifold phone calls, the passing of orders up and down the chain of command, the mournful note of a bosun’s whistle. I hunkered down in a corner and made myself as small as possible; when I looked up again a mass of denim legs was shuffling along the corridor. I stood and peered over their shoulders.
The cynosure of all this activity was looking grimly at a tray being held in front of his overly familiar face, a tray containing a selection of watches — the straps gold, chrome, leather; the faces jewelled, plain or black. It was Kevin Spacey — I recognized him instantly, because in common with all movie stars he had that quality of being pre-known, his face not so much a visage as an a priori category waiting to be filled with a serviceable identity. In this case the limp pennant of a mohair tie, the clever prostheses that filled out his cheeks and neck, the still more skilled weeding out of his hair and the inspired tarnishing of his teeth confirmed that he was portraying Dr Zack Busner.
As Spacey’s hand ranged over the watches, picking one up and then dropping it with a ‘chink’ clearly audible because of the hushed reverence of the 250-strong crew, I was visited with an overpowering intimation of death: Death pressed me back against the rough concrete wall, Death rubbed my belly, Death circled my wrist with his bony finger and bony thumb and all the rottenness of this world oozed from the holes in his skull.
‘OK, rolling.’ Brad’s instruction was incredibly downbeat — no bullhorn, no gofers yelling, ‘Quiet on the set please!’ We couldn’t see the players from where we stood, only a monitor upon which the fuzzy black-and-white figures of Spacey and Postlethwaite confronted each other, seated either side of a concrete coffee table. A clapperboard was waved in front of the camera scrawled with: ‘107 #I. INT. DAY. Busner’s consulting room, Venice Beach’. Then:
BUSNER: How’s it going with Shiva Mukti?
CLIENT: OK, I guess.
BUSNER [provocatively]: He’s a neat guy, Shiva, but kinda dull.
CLIENT: He shot movies of me when I was, like, freaking — then played them back to me.
BUSNER: Did it help?
CLIENT [giggling]: Help… well, I guess with the movies — and a little bit with reality—
‘OK, that’s cool,’ Brad called, and the whole schmozzle ground to a halt. Spacey stood up and began rolling his shoulders, presumably to ease the tension of performance.
‘Where’s Philbin?’ Brad asked a nearby AD, ‘I need Philbin here right now — and tell him to bring the sides.’
‘Philbin!’ ‘Philbin!’ ‘Philbin!’ The name echoed away through the house and in a short while a fussed-looking writerly type — small, glasses, needlessly sensitive face — came hustling up clutching a handful of A5-sized yellow pages.
‘OK, Philbin.’ Brad took the sides from him and shuffled through them rapidly to find the right scene. Maybe seven or fifteen men and women in business suits materialized out of nowhere, and the entire group adjourned sideways through sliding doors on to a roof terrace, where they formed a promenade of couples, passing the yellow pages back and forth between them.
Eventually some sort of consensus was reached, because Brad and the blackleg writer came back with the relevant side and they bent over it together. Brad said, ‘Uh, yuh, uh, so… here, and here — I don’t like that — that doesn’t seem to me the kinda way he’d say that at all.’
‘It’s too, uh, teen?’ Philbin ventured tentatively.
‘Yeah!’ Brad was delighted. ‘You got it, Philbin, it’s too goddamn teen, now put some words in his mouth that have got more… more… ’
‘Gravitas?’
‘I’ll grab your fuckin’ ass if you don’t hustle, Philbin,’ Brad laughed, and the writer withdrew to a corner with the script editor and the script editor’s four assistants. Spacey was now doing neck rolls.
After a few minutes Philbin was back with the new sides and Brad okayed them and Spacey and Postlethwaite scanned them fast like the pros they were, and the makeup and wardrobe people stampeded out of shot and the clapperboard was waved in front of the camera again: ‘l07 #2. INT. DAY. Busner’s consulting room, Venice Beach’. Then:
BUSNER: How’s it going with Shiva Mukti?
CLIENT: OK, I guess.
BUSNER [provocatively]: He’s a cool guy, Shiva, but sorta dull.
CLIENT: He shot movies of me when I was, like, freaking — then played them back to me.
BUSNER: Did it help?
CLIENT [giggling]: Help… well, I guess with the movies — and a little bit with reality
There was no denying: it was an improvement — far more plausible. But I knew there’d be at least twenty or fifty more takes before they nailed the scene down and I had six or seven miles still to go. I didn’t want to disturb Brad while he was shooting, so I asked one of the gofers to tell him goodbye from me. She said she’d make sure Brad’s PA got the message: ‘He should know you’ve gone by early next week — midweek at the latest.’
I set off along Dell pursued by the sinister intimations I’d had when Spacey was sorting through the watches. Watches! Such a cliché — whether on wrists, mantelpieces, or melting in the corner of Dalí canvasses, timepieces were always just that. Still, what did I have to fear? I’d survived it all, and here were the cheery apartment blocks surrounding Marina del Rey, their balconies like the open draws of filing cabinets, their sunbathing tenants brown-papery in the afternoon sun.
I’d survived it all, and here were out-of-work hoofers break-dancing with placards advertising real estate brokers at the intersection of Washington and Lincoln boulevards — tossing them up in the air, then catching them behind their backs. There was a metaphor there, but I was too weary and footsore to reach for it; I only wanted to keep on going across the Ballona wetlands, where Leonardo DiCaprio had flown his Spruce Goose, and the Native American juju had repelled the developers and the toxic effluent from Hughes Aircraft had been pumped away and the egrets and the herons waded… I only wanted to keep going, but there was this awful tinnitus plaguing me — bass notes and bum notes, a sax riff that pierced me from ear to ear.
The sidewalk gave out and I went on, the fenders of SUVs shaving my cheek. I wanted to keep going — but out here in the middle of the marsh, where freshwater floods met saltwater tides and the wrack was Infinitis and Escalades and trucks and town cars, all mired in solid oil, I spied a figure tailing me from the front. How long had he been there? Had he been keeping tabs on me all the way from the Chateau Marmont, or from still further back along my circuit? He was in shirtsleeves, a jacket slung over his shoulder, and although I thought I recognized the set of his shoulders and the shuffle of his gait, every time I tried to catch up (the bass doubling time, the sax beginning to rock), he accelerated as well. I slowed down and he slowed down, I hopped and he hopped, I skipped and he skipped.