High Desert Legends

Oakland reminds me of Inglewood. It reminds me of downtown L.A., parts of Koreatown, the neighborhood where Sarah and I used to go for Dim-Sum, and it reminds me of the way I looked at the world before I moved to Los Angeles.

While I working on the Bollywood film MY NAME IS KHAN, we had a few shooting days in Sacramento. When I first hung around that town, it seemed impossibly city-ish to me. I was raised in Rio Vista, California, for the love of whatever god can help me get a spec script read. During the second day of the Sac shoot, I found myself looking for Vitamin Water for Manish's assistant around K Street, which is the closest thing to south Beverly's The Grove that Sacramento can offer. Years ago, the place was bigger than life. Now, it was a deserted stretch of mid-town strip mall in a mid-size city in California. Capital or not, Sacramento is forever an afterthought.

That in mind, try this:

HIGH DESERT LEGENDS (PART ONE)

or

The Making and Near-unmaking of Andrew Wright's Thesis Film

We really should've known. Should've seen it coming. We all sensed it those first days, scouting the location in the horribly bright, terribly hot sun, running around a patch of desert that Andrew Wright's grandfather may have owned in name, but was clearly its own entity. I felt it the instant I stepped out of the cool, air-conditioned backseat and reeled back a step, slugged with the full force of the desert at high noon. Later, DP Ryan Elwell would confirm a communal sense of dread: "I was walking through the shots with Andrew and looking at the sun, the sky, the snake dens... I remember thinking, We're going to try and shoot in this?"

And it's the very senseless essence of such an idea that attracts me to this kind of thing.

I hadn't been assistant director in a long while... aside from a pickup shot-reordering while shooting Mary's narrative elements scene, I hadn't done it since we all shot our portfolio short films, that grand and ancient, epic span of days long gone (and perhaps best forgotten)... the summer before, roughly. Living in Santa Monica. The house with the spare room, left empty since day one... acquiring rats and neglecting them until the poor neurotic things had to be left to their own devices...

"As must we all," I couldn't help muttering. It's Day Two. One twelve-hour span of Student Filmmaking in the high motherfucking desert down, about three more to go. I open the motel room door, take a few steps outside and stop dead in my tracks.

It was five in the morning. The sky the day before had been a smooth and healthy blue at the horizon, deepening to purple, then maroon, then a sheen of black at the very height of what I could see of space. The sun was up and grinning down at us by seven – by nine or ten, we were suddenly seeing the true, crushing nature of the high desert. That was on Friday, Day One.

As AD, I had done the most complete schedule I could come up with... with the exception of Ryan (our DP) and Tammie (his girlfriend and our production designer), the vast majority of us had no frame of reference for filming in a desert. We'd been in high, dry country before, shooting Script Supervisor (and part-time member of the art department, by default) Mary Stasilli's roommate Casey Fergeson's thesis, but as Ryan pointed out, that was different. That land had been tamed. It was used to our kind and not only tolerated our presence, but had been long since cowed by that blind, dumb, indomitable force, human willpower. And making a movie takes a whole shitload of that, on everyone's part.

The hot days on Casey's shoot were unpleasantly bright, with a weird, dry humidity that doesn't make sense trying to describe but no matter. The first day of shooting "Legend of the High Desert," Andrew Wright's thesis film, was brutally hot. I had checked the weather for that Friday... 104° Fahrenheit. Fine. I'm from NoCal, and will match your evil, sweltering afternoon in high August 405 traffic with any windless, cloudless summer day in downtown Sacramento, nearly paralyzed by the heat, humidity, the hot stench of baking asphalt and exhaust dripping from your skin and clothes... or any late-July, 101° mid-morning on the levee, with the sand and mud drying out and stinking to high heaven of the decades of swamp rot and sewage flowing down the Sacramento River... but those were still places that you knew, felt comfortable in. The desert was something else.

I stepped out of my motel room on the second morning and looked at the sky. I couldn't believe it: it was raining. Of all things. Of all fucking things imaginable after that miserable, hot, demoralizing, hot fuckin' hot as fuck day... This must not happen. It can not happen.

"Is it fucking raining?" came a low voice to my right. Danny Puckett had his room's door open and was peering at the sky through his glasses, black horn-rims almost identical to my own.

"Yes." I said. He just shook his head, turned around and slammed his door. There really wasn't much else to do at that moment. I felt the same way.

This is where the rational, reasoning world of basic, common human logic begins to break down. Only pure fools would try and film in that desert on a day like this. And this is when I truly, really discovered that if you want to call yourself a filmmaker, you not only have to attempt the impossible, but slap impossible's bitch-ass face and sit it the fuck down. Nothing's impossible. What one man can do, another can do. This is David Mamet and his judo fixation, Darwin, I. Ching, fuck it man, you got to roll with it...

Besides, somehow, this is my fault. As the AD, everything's your fault. And there's a rush in that when things are rolling smoothly: the DP and ACs are just truckin' along, the actors are troopers, cool to work with, totally cooperative, and all the while delivering pitch-perfect performances while getting clobbered by the blistering sun... the director's happy (for a change, and who could blame him), and the crew hums with a great, positive vibe... this is thanks to you, too... but like every other component to making a movie, if you're doing your job right, no one should notice.

There's a natural high in this that maybe only I could feel. God knows I’m not a pro, but I kind of felt like one by that last day, running up and down a desert road, hollering at the crew to get the shot while promising these leathery, sun-happy, tweeked-out redneck locals that we'll be out of their way in just five more minutes...

I'm certain everyone feels a different version of it. Saturday morning, I was feeling the day's early chill – absent the morning before; the heat had already been in the ground by sunup – and, in my head, drastically revising the shot schedule I'd typed up last night. The High Desert Motel is our base camp for this shoot, which already feels as epic as most of us figured it'd have to be... we're talking about Andrew, after all... there's a sense of endless scale to the stuff he directs, even when it's two people talking in a room... so it's only fitting that as I bustled around, waking up the crew (I've had to do this before... the sadistic Scorpio fucking asshole in me relishes their disgruntled growls... thank God Andy Klun, key grip and practiced smoothie, took it on himself to be their example and popped right up whenever I opened the door), printing out a shot schedule that would be slashed to bits in good time, I was thinking of the motto paired with Andrew's Wrench Head logo: More Epic Than Your Mind Can Comprehend.

Indeed.