© 2000, 2001 Channel49___

I look for jobs only because I need the money. Not very much higher purpose involved. I have always looked for jobs, and sometimes found them. I analyzed this, and discovered that my best chances for employment were with mis-managed companies who were unsure of what they wanted somebody to do. These situations were always doomed.

Out of extreme frugality, and minimal luck I managed to accumulate a small capital stake from these adventures. I decided to take this money and re-invent myself as an independent film producer. This would give an outlet, I believed, for all of those fantasies cultivated during my sojourns at unsuited jobs.

Film producing was essentially a 24 hour day of looking for a job. Looking for out-of-work actors, out-of-touch investors and out-to-lunch distributors. My net return from this avocation was several un-exhibitable reels --often of me, my most reliable performer for an unpaid 6:00 A.M. call-- feigning acting in front of a partially unfocused camera that, oftentimes, I myself had set up. True, there had been some delicious actresses promised enduring fame to spice up a scene, but in the end it was I who was broke and once again looking for a job. This time with an embarrassing hole in my resume.

Lack of money is the prostitute of invention --to debase a phrase. I had already begun to panic in the midnight hours. One unusable, unreleased film in the can, an odd dozen of shorts, interstitial programming for channels that did not exist...I had already started flinging out the occasional resume, wondering why there were no call backs.

Yet, I pressed on. What else does one do? I had an ingenious scheme to make a movie for about 500 bucks. Yuck, yuck. How does one make a movie for 500 bucks? One doesn't. One attempts a promotional reel; in this case a tape. The collateral material --print-- would have to be cheap. Desktop-published words with black & white photos reproduced on a Xerox with a halftone screen. One out of a thousand would know it wasn't printed. I could use that material as inserts with the portfolio covers I already had on order. What a clever bastard, huh? Go heavy on the photos, spend the most for the one-shot poster. What a damn-fool, to which bankrupt entity was I going to show this to? What would become of it? Why was I really doing this all over again? To remind myself that I existed?

With such a wacky plan, every component must be based on the most bizarre premise. Premise number one: Make this movie in one's living room with a rented camera. I didn't own a living room, but still had enough friends to borrow one.

Premise number two, design the portions of the scripts so that amateur or lousy performers can be used for much of the material. Hope to make the piece interesting with music, narrative and smart cutting. A foolish hope, especially when it was I who would be doing the directing, the camera work and the audio. (as well as the lighting).

I ran out of actresses. I just didn't have the same delusions of success as I had on earlier efforts. I could barely render promises. I refused to pay scale, claiming I was only taping rehearsals without direct commercial intent and outside of union-contract jurisdiction. There were still a few to call. I had plenty of head shots, and resumes...Some gotten through advertising, some caged from other filmmakers, or local theater groups.

There was no more budget for auditions in rented facilities. Even thirty dollars a night, was too much. So I had to make phone calls and arrange for these would-be's to show up at my borrowed house. What sane woman would allow herself to be lured to a home under such tenuous circumstances? Plenty. But their virtue was safe with me, I was only interested in exploiting them in ways that would inflict its greatest humiliation on me.

Sarah Greene was my 10:00 A.M. call. Ding Dong. Attractive woman...Fifteen years older than her photo which was already bordering on mature. 'Welcome to the meatmarket'. She rubbed sleep from her eyes. She was after all a theater-type person used to going to sleep at 3:00 A.M.. and unused to awakening at 8:00.

"Nice home you have here..." she said.

I hadn't the heart to explain that it wasn't mine. My unfurnished room/office was too small for any production save one starring me. The lights and video camera were set up in the center of the living room. Kind of like taking baby photos. This made, at least, me laugh.

"What kind of a picture are you making?" She asked, nervously.

'Alright, honey get naked and give me the standard poses.' Half of these actresses would disrobe. "A black comedy." I said. The younger set, usually asked, 'And you want a few white people in it?'

She was nervous. Almost trembling. She seemed so casually dressed. Worn corduroy slacks, too baggy to be fashionable. An ancient black suede jacket with fringes (a cast-off prop from a wild-west show?) and worn boots that matched nothing else. Typical actress clothes. I wondered why she was so ill-at-ease. I hadn't made a female nervous since I was seventeen.

"I haven't done much of this lately," she blurted out. "I just...recently returned to acting...and..."

"It's okay..." I counseled, checking the lights.

"I'm gonna do bad, I just know it..." She twisted the strap of her handbag with two clenched fists. She was practically biting her lip to stop from grinning idiotically --out of sheer terror.

There was something very familiar about her. I sat down, away from the circle of light I had concocted. "I'm just taping your audition. All I'm going to do this week is a rehearsal of five performers and videotape it...for a 'promo' reel. I'm also going to take stills. That's it. I'll pay forty dollars a piece for the one afternoon of taping and photos...It's no big deal..."

"I need this," she pleaded.

"For forty dollars?" I asked, "That's car-fare."

"For the opportunity..."

I shrugged, probably dubious about the opportunity myself. "I'm just doing this in an effort to raise money for the project..." I claimed.

"But it's very...Very important to me. Extremely important..." she insisted.

Okay, there were people in this world that were crazier than me, I could theoretically accept that. But I had heard her extremely spoken before. It was distinctive.

"Have you done spots? You know, commercials?" I asked.

"Not yet..."

"Have you done...anything?" I asked.

"Not yet," she replied, again.

My expression betrayed exceptional curiosity.

"That's why this is so extremely important to me," she implored.

"Sarah Greene...?" I asked aloud, wondering why such a name didn't jar bells in my 'extremely' curious brain.

"My name used to be Grainway...and..." she began to blather. I couldn't hear her. I was flushed with a wave of heat and perspiration. It's not everyday that a ne'er-do well, like myself, could get to audition his seventh grade English teacher. I choked back the loudest laugh of my career. Yes there was a God, and what an amazing sense of humor the Deity possessed!

I shook my head with humorous disbelief. I leaned forward to share our past. But she changed the moment by removing her jacket and standing for me in the center of the room. Underneath her black, cowboy outerwear was a loosely knit, mesh sweater. Yes, I remembered, Miss Grainway had a large bosom. Sarah Greene was able to support this inheritance.

She smiled wanly. There was nothing provocative about this act, nor anything subtle. She was showing her wares...'Welcome to the meat-market...a piece of this, a piece of that... grind it up; make me some chop-steak...'

Could I use her, I wondered? She was nothing like the lead female character as I had imagined her. Could I change the character? Should I change the character? I considered enlarging my promo piece to include a more peripheral character. But who would she play off of?

"Can you act?" I asked, aloud.

She shrugged, "...Sure..."

I was certain she couldn't act. I set up the camera, turned on the color monitor, zoomed in all the way (chest high). Focused on her tits and pulled back for a medium shot. She stepped forward and I lost focus and had to run through it again. She watched me focusing on her bosom.

"It's there." I told her. "You'll have to stand still."

"Sorry..."

I pulled back very slowly to a medium focal length and watched the monitor. 'Elements,'  I had been told. 'What are the elements?!' Elements are names, genres...'You have got to have elements,'  I was instructed at the last exhibition by the independent distributors who would talk to me --before they went bankrupt.

What elements did Sarah Greene posses? Thickly built, pleasantly features. A nice, forty-plus girl friend. Somebody's mother maybe...Certainly no actress...Why was she wasting her time with me? And furthermore, why was I wasting my time with her?

"This is so important to me," she pleaded. "So extremely important. I've wanted to be an actress ever since I was a little girl," she recited stiltedly.

I looked at her to see if she was giving me an unknown shade of the comedienne. She wasn't. Maybe, what she wanted to be ever since she was a little girl, was simply, a little girl. And why not? Who was I to disparage juvenile things?

The phone rang. I 'saved' the lights and turned off the camera. It was my 11:30 audition calling.

"I can' make it because I hab a code."

"Sorry, I hope you feel better."

A nose was blown into my ear. And then 11:30 tried to entertain me with things from her recent personal history."

"I have someone here," I said.

"Oh sorry...Listen...will... I get another... you know...opportunity? "

We paused in our conversation.

"I could come down there today... later..." she offered, "I've got a little fever...102... but...excuse me..." She blew her nose again.

"Hey, drink orange juice and take some aspirin... Don't worry about it, okay?" I offered.

"Okay," she replied in a tiny voice, lost and sorrowful.

I turned from the phone and found Sarah practically in my face. "Do you have something for me to read?" She asked. "You know, like a script?"

I didn't want to suffer through it. The endearing peculiarities of her voice and diction were unacceptable for the part, 'Welcome to the meatmarket.' I felt the same way about myself.

"Have you had breakfast?" I asked her.

"I don't usually eat breakfast," she said.

One hundred and fifty pounds of solid woman and she claimed she didn't eat.

"Let's go catch a bite...I could use something... You can have some coffee, maybe..." I said.

"Oh," she pleaded, "you don't want me to read for you,... you don't!" She pouted. "That's cruel... I came all the way out here and you won't let me read for you," she said, growing angry in a restrained and eccentric way. She scooped up her jacket and kept her eyes lowered.

"Hey. Think about it...I'm offering you breakfast with the producer..."

"Oh," she said, brightly. "And where are you serving this breakfast?"

"At a restaurant."

Her face darkened as if she had made an error. "Oh." Another tiny voice.

"I think maybe...I should leave?" She asked me, searching my face for clues.

I broke my cover, "Jesus Christ, why the fuck aren't you teaching English at a junior high school, someplace?"

She examined me carefully. "That wasn't on my resume..."

"I was there."

"On the staff? Were you the intern assistant principal they brought in for a few months?" She asked, waving a naughty finger at me.

"I was in the back row, next to the last seat, near the window."

She couldn't comprehend what I was talking about. Was she experiencing a fugue state? Had she wandered out of the teacher's room into my film-world with a certain psychic deficit?

"I was one of your students!" I shouted.

"Oh... Well I guess I taught you right," she said.

"Taught me correctly..." I shook my head.

"Is that why I can't read for you?" She asked. "You're prejudiced because of my age?"

"Come on, let's get something to eat..."

She wouldn't leave the living room. As if the camera had a magic, an immortality to it that once lost could never be regained. I grasped her forearm and pulled her out of the door with me.

**

I ate, she sipped black coffee, plain, and watched. "Sure you won't have anything? Eggs? Pancakes? Danish?" I offered.

"No thank you."

"I hate to eat in front of somebody who isn't eating," I said.

"Oh, it's fine," she insisted.

"What happened to teaching English?" I asked.

"It wasn't me. I had a degree in theater, you know," she said.

"I didn't know that. How long did you stay with it, teaching?"

"Over twelve years."

"That's along time to be not you," I commented.

"A person has to do what a person has to do," she stated adamantly.

"Absolutely. I know that. I took every penny I could get my hands on and sunk it into my dreams. I think every person who has these kinds of aspirations should buy or rent a cheap camera and make movies of themselves acting. It has a curative effect."

"Don't you believe in yourself?" She retorted.

"Not really. I'm about 150,000 dollars short, working capital-wise, of doing anything that has promise of being exhibited anyplace, in any format. But I had to spend thousands of dollars to even learn that..."

"That's why you're doing what you do, to raise the money, right?" She queried.

I shrugged. "My problem, personally, is that I never did any one thing for twelve years. I never had a job I liked, that liked me. I guess I was saving myself for this... It's an important excuse. It allows me this excess. But I envy people who belong."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm an outsider. I have to do things like this, because even if I were to attempt something conventional I wouldn't have a chance. So if failure is my result, I might as well fail at something that's interesting..."

The waitress brought us more coffee. Another river of blackness fell into her cup. It bothered me.

"Have something to eat," I pleaded.

"No thanks... What are trying to say?"

"I don't know. If I tell you that you'll never make a dime as an actress, tomorrow somebody will sign you up with a contract. But I think you should reconsider your career goals."

"You never heard me read!" She protested, "I believe in what I'm doing. It's extremely important to me," she said with her usual affectation.

I ate silently. Maybe some kinky casting director would get off on her extremely. We mocked her in the hallways in the seventh grade: 'This shit is EXTREMELY extreme!'

"Have you ever made any money doing this?" I asked.

"Not yet... I waitress."

"Not too far off from a theatrical occupation... Look Miss... Sarah... Even I managed to make ten grand as a videographer doing lousy industrials. True, my illusions lie in other areas but..."

"What are you telling me?" She demanded.

I blushed. I felt bad. What business did I have, of all people, to step on someone's dreams? "Be prepared for a very long and difficult road."

"But you won't let me read for you?" She pressed.

I became thin-lipped. My temple throbbed. "No, you are not right for the part. I need a siren. A woman so photogenic she can be a center for anyone who looks. It's just the way it is..."

She retreated into a shell for a moment. Tears rimmed her eyes. I felt as I had just yelled at my Mom. But she snapped out of it. "When you've made it, you will remember me, and give me a part in something, alright?" She coaxed.

I laughed. I covered my mouth and laughed.

© 2000, 2001 Channel49_________                                        

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