Thomas Sullivan

Truth in advertising here. If you are tuning-in to this month’s column for pearls of wisdom about writing, maybe you’ll want to rethink. Of course, my column is always useless when it comes to pearls, though I did write some pretty spiffy copy about a mothball one time. This essay does, however, offer some fun stuff that happens to writers maybe a little more often than to say Elephant Rakers and Chicken Sexers. Being a storyteller, it seems, invites stories to happen. Many of us have Hollywood tales (no pun, I swear), and this is one of mine, told from the POV of a hayseed rube (how do you do) who suddenly finds himself in a Harrison Ford flick…

It is true, “Fordy” as we anointed ones on the inside like to call him, got millions of dollars for his role, while I, his co-star, received 35 beans (or maybe 45 – I lose track with large sums), but my agent, if I had had one, would’ve advised me to go for the film credit rather than the filthy lucre. The fact that I never got a film credit is beside the point. You can’t know these things until you are weeping on the cutting room floor. And anyway, I did get in the film (do not blink while you are watching).

You get your first rush of vanity from the eyes of those denied access to a movie set, and the true cost of movies may be reckoned in the lost productivity of employees gaping down from nearby office towers. Talent agent Marce Haney was there, and I signed the pay voucher and release on the hood of a pickup truck, missing the irony. 12-hours earlier I was killing fleas on a collie with alcohol and couldn’t have told you they were filming the best-selling “Presumed Innocent” in Detroit. I’ve fallen into a couple of these movie hoots before (“Spartacus” and “The Rosary Murders” come to mind), and it was mostly tedious, but a late-night phone call led to a what-the-hell moment and a promise that my kids were going to get in the flick if we all just showed up at an ungodly hour.

Security was so tight on the rooftop parking lot of the International Plaza Inn that it looked more like the shoot for “Police Academy 43.” Wheeled islands of sound, lights and camera paraphernalia rose out of nowhere, manned by a one-armed crew (the other arms cradled clipboards) who spoke to each other, even face-to-face, through headsets. It was like a ventriloquists convention. You’d be talking to someone and voices would be cackling out of their hip speaker, headset and walkie-talkie.

Five extras were asked to park their cars in a certain configuration. I had an ’82 stretch Honda with leprosy and was relegated to the perimeter. It was a hot, muggy day and my windshield looked like a dirty aquarium wall. But there wasn’t any question who it was when Harrison Ford stood on the other side.

The man has a certain maverick independence no matter how rigid the role (an assistant county prosecutor in this case), and that’s why you like him beyond the consummate skill of his art. Quietly intense but affable, he was unphased by the many delays – airplanes overhead, intermittent rain, car alarms going off. Given the large number of people on the set, his polite smile and hello caught me off guard the first time they were offered and I barely responded.

By 11 we were on our way to the day’s main shoot at the Woodbridge Tavern, and that was the first time I heard the dreaded words: “Wardrobe change.” There were a couple dozen extras in the sit-down restaurant scene, and it seemed everyone had been told to bring changes of clothes. Except me. Damn, but I am expendable. Suddenly there were suitcases and garment bags everywhere. The holding area was the terrace of the Woodbridge, another rooftop (casting seems to favor making escape difficult but suicide easy). A succession of wardrobe people swept through us like the wind off the river, sanctioning or condemning. I got a droll look that said, “Who put you up to this?” I smiled lamely and shmoozed, “I swear we played tennis 15 years ago, and you won,” but my warder wasn’t buying it. He led me gently toward oblivion, I thought, but it turned out we were merely going to the wardrobe trucks. There were two, one with air conditioning, one without. The one without was a jumble of racks and boxes and for 20 minutes I played Superman, fast-changing from casual to preppie to formal while we stumbled over each other.

The wardrobe master had done “The Godfather” and recounted a history of violence for each jacket and shirt I tried on. Undressing was a trial. I had had an unfortunate mishap that morning, lowering the electric razor from my face and accidentally shaving a swath down my chest with the groomer. What the hell, I wasn’t going to do a nude scene, but I felt obliged to keep turning away or explain that I was into “punk.” I was antsy about losing the purpose for coming down in the first place, which was getting my kids in the family scene, but the more I shot off my mouth the more I was trashing my father figure image. A hasty meeting of casting people decided I was too flamboyant to grace a table. They elected to make me a bartender.

“Whenever I do Vodka, I dance on the bar and sing Pagliacci,” I warned.

Lemme tell you something about casting people in the minor leagues of extras. The more you play hard-to-get, the more they want you. The “professional” extras, who evidently traipse around from one movie set to another, were clamoring to escape the family sit-down scene, but agile fingers were rolling up my sleeves and the Godfather’s tailor was slapping an apron on me. I foresee my children being orphaned from the flick, so I’m protesting with one-liners that I don’t drink, that I just took the pledge, that my kids are actually midgets who can knock down Fuzzy Navels and White Russians like…uh, white Russians, but they think it’s all part of the act. “What role did you give him,” I ask about a man lying on the ground below the rooftop rail, “is that the last bartender?” Pointless. Done deal.

Bow tie, no tie, silk tie, I was back and forth to wardrobe (the a.c. truck this time – the reason stars always look so cool is because their stuff is flash frozen in a vault). The bar they ordered me behind said, “Waitresses only.” Swishing my apron, I pronounced myself a snappy crosss-dresser, but the casting director laughed lethally and said, “You get points for style and character, I’ll give you that,” and for better or worse, I, who drink only holy water from the Ganges, was a bartender.

Lunch had been rumored for some time, and here the
true caste system emerged. The order of “doing” lunch is first stars, then crew, then extras. The food, however, was redemptive as we beat the sudden downpour to reach Taboo down the street. And an hour after that the scene was set. By then I had grown weary of bartending Shirley Temples for the child star in the flick and saw the last of him after asking him if he would like to participate in dwarf tossing. I was briefed in a conversation that went two sentences too long:

“Just act like a bartender.”

“What’s my motivation?”

“Just . . . act . . . like . . . a . . . bartender.”

I read his lips so that I wouldn’t forget any words in the pauses. Quick study, I am. I mean, I never met my understudy, so I had to be at my Thespian best. The film depended on it. As a handicap, they hung a tie around my neck that knotted like Mike Tyson’s fist and swung like a plumb bob.

There were eight takes of Harrison Ford, Bonnie Bedelia and Jesse Bradford sitting at a table. I did my peripheral thing in pantomime, fearing lest I tip over a tray of glasses or compulsively write, “Surrender, Dorothy!” across the bar mirror in whipped cream. At one point the shot top on the Seagram’s I was fake-pouring came off, and everyone within sniffing distance salivated like a Pavlov dog.

When the director (Alan Pakula) cleared the set after the second take, I was left trapped knee-deep in cables behind the bar. And, lo, the director and the star sashayed to the stools in front of me and we were nose to nose. Only it was like I wasn’t there.

“Got anything to . . . ?” Indiana Jones gestured toward me as if he held a cup handle between his fingers.

I guessed he talked like that without a script. “You think I do ties funny, you ought to see me do drinks,” I said.

He gave me that famous languid laugh. “Oh, you’re not a . . . a real-ly.”

“No,” I acknowledged. “Usually I walk backward and wag my head.”

Now, I don’t know why I said that, but the laugh lingered a few seconds this time, and the director iced me as if I were breaking his man’s concentration. Indiana Jones wanted coffee. He got it. The next 20 minutes were a quiet pep talk about the scene. I dry whistled Beethoven’s Fifth twice and counted the bubbles in the jukebox. Show biz. Love it. It ended with Messrs. Pakula and Ford laying odds on how long it would take Bonnie Bedelia to return from her trailer.

The rest of it went about the same. “Cameras rolling . . . background action . . . cut . . . print . . . that’s a wrap.” The kid, Jesse, had to eat three plates of food for another angle and a trio of takes, but it didn’t deter his sweet tooth. He brought the bartender his sucker stick to throw away. Then they took away my apron, my shirt, my Mike Tyson tie. Then they smiled and gave me my kids back. Then they said, “The check’s in the mail.” Them they signed me out. I went home.

I guess I’m not a . . . a real-ly.

Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are welcome, your attention valued. My web site is below. If you’d like to see more of my writing, please check out the free sample chapter from my latest novel, THE WATER WOLF.

Thomas “Sully” Sullivan
www.thomassullivanauthor.com