Excerpt 7 / Part 2 - First thing we do is Fire all the Visual Effects Artists
Shortly after the Teamsters headed back out to their trucks for their morning naps, the Clorox (client) sycophants showed. My first exposure to the “Recrimination Rhumba” began when fourteen parasites, sans Bob still sitting in business class on his flight from San Francisco, gathered around the prop table. A question regarding just who might be responsible for product procurement made its way into the smoke-filled air of the soundstage. The prop Morlocks turned and pointed at me like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Clorox leader, a Bela Lugosi look-alike from Island of Lost Souls started the pig pile.
Bela Sycophant: “Where’d you get this product?”
Me: “Three from the Gristedes on Second Avenue.
Four from the Apple Market on Lexington. One from
the D’Agostinos on York and 80th. Five from—”
Lucretia Sycophant: “Why didn’t you get any shrink-wrapped
from the factory in New Jersey?”
Me: “There’s a factory in New Jersey? Bob—”
Igor Sycophant: “Bob’s been on vacation.”
Me: “I know that, but he—”
The Bride of the Sycophants: “None of this is acceptable.
They all look awful.”
A pissed-off Ben Oshman did come to my defense.
Ben Oshman: “In fairness to—”
Pinhead Sycophant: “The factory’s right near my house. I pass it on my way into the city every day.”
Me: “Well maybe you could’ve—”
Producer: “I’m sure we can fix this. We’ll send someone out to the factory.”
Bela Sycophant: “That should’ve been done a week ago!”
Me: “Yes, during Bob’s vacation!” [BEAT] “Just trying to help.”
[SILENCE]
Me (never missing an opportunity): “Would someone from Clorox be willing to call someone else at Clorox, someone who works at the Clorox factory, and request some Clorox product from the Clorox factory, seeing as this is a Clorox shoot?”
Producer: “Stop saying Clorox.”
Me: “Didn’t think Lever Brothers would be appropriate.”
The producer hustled me off the set as the Recrimination Rhumba continued.
Finally, a call was placed and I was volunteered to drive out to the Clorox factory during the morning rush hour and pick up a couple of cases of shrink-wrapped NEW AND IMPROVED 409. One of the sycophants, probably Pinhead Sycophant, the one who passed the factory every morning on his way into work, shoved into my reluctant hands a set of directions written in a dead language.
Pinhead Sycophant: “Twenty minutes. Tops.”
Me: “It’ll take that long to get the van out of the parking garage.”
Pinhead Sycophant: “Where’s craft services?”
Producer: “Why haven’t you left yet?”
Two hours later, the Brutalist architecture of the Clorox factory loomed behind a chain link fence replete with curled barbed wire running across its entire expanse. After talking my way past security, who had not received word of my arrival for some odd reason, I found myself on the typical Kafkaesque manufacturing floor.
I leafed through my personal copy of English to Gibberish/Gibberish to English dictionary and located the catatonic corporate-lifer contacted by Pinhead Sycophant. I resorted to ESL to communicate with the cadaver-like “Manager of Useless Conveyor Belts” and found myself on a loading dock seemingly run by the USSR . . . in the fifties . . . during the purge.
One of the twenty-seven Teamsters sleeping on folding chairs roused himself, had me sign a death certificate, and showed me a palette of shrink-wrapped product.
Teamster: “Take whatever you need.”
Me: “Can I have the keys to the forklift?”
Teamster: “Can I see your union card?”
Me: “Sure.”
I fished out my Hotel and Restaurant Workers ID from 1981. He looked it over far longer than the Continental Congress took to examine the Declaration of Independence, before handing it back to me.
Teamster: “You some kinda wise guy?”
Me (glancing first at the other twenty-six slumbering Teamsters): “Uh…”
Teamster: “Get your van in here, take your stuff and get out.”
I drove back to the soundstage, and schlepped one of the cases through a bank of fog that looked like it was left over from a 1932 Universal Studios horror film, but it was just cigarette smoke from the Teamsters.
To this day, I’m sure Roscoe (EFX supplier) was one of the litigants getting smoking banned from sound stages. Who needed one of their cyanide-based smoke machines when lighting up next to catering and allowing six-year-old actors to gorge enough sugar to crash their performances didn’t draw so much as a squeak from the Tobacco Nazis?
I carried a box of thirty-six one-quart bottles of NEW AND IMPROVED 409 to the prop table and sat it down as carefully as Vasily Alekseyev did after lifting six hundred pounds over his head at the 1972 Olympics.
Igor Sycophant: “Careful with that! It’s product!”
Me: “Hey, thanks for helping with the box!”
Sycophants in Unison with Chubby Agency: “Where were you? What took so long? All we wanted you to do was get some product? Where’s Bob? How come there aren’t any more bagels?”
The day only got better from there. The chain-smoking director of photography and his crew of seventy-eight-year-old gaffers and grips managed to get three entire product shots done in fourteen hours. I dropped off twelve thousand feet of 35mm film at the lab, just before the midnight cutoff. The Man With No Teeth, who worked the graveyard shift, took it from me with his usual charm.
Man With No Teeth: “You’re f#$k!ing late, but I’ll develop the neg anyway.”
The spot never ran.
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