Page 26 of All That Glitters

Chapter twenty-two

How Not to Make a Movie

“Hey. This thing on?” The jerky, low-resolution footage on the cheap mini-DV video camera flickered to life with Roy’s goofy face filling the screen.

His features were distorted by extreme close-up, every pore and whisker magnified to comic proportions as he squinted critically into the lens, his bushy eyebrows furrowed in concentration.

“Is the red light on?” came Craig’s voice from somewhere off-screen, gruff and impatient.

“I think so,” said Roy, tilting the camera at an awkward angle as he examined its buttons and indicators. “There’s a light. It’s red. So... probably?”

“Then start filmin’, ya idjit,” Craig barked, his frustration clear even from behind the camera.

Roy adjusted his posture, seeming to remember the purpose of the equipment in his hands.

He cleared his throat dramatically. “Hey ya’ll,” Roy said into the camera, his face still far too close to the lens, giving viewers an intimate view of his nose hairs.

“This here’s Roy, and I’m the guy’s gonna be doin’ the behind the scenes on makin’ our movie, The Frat.

It’s gonna be a real classy picture with vampires and college kids gettin’ all bit up and whatnot. ”

The camera swung around unsteadily, the image juddering like an earthquake simulation as Roy attempted to pan across their makeshift production headquarters.

The footage finally settled — somewhat — on the exterior of the Rif Raf Productions biker clubhouse.

The rest of the gang was busy loading lights, cables, and mysterious equipment into the backs of several pickup trucks, none of which appeared to have been washed in the current decade.

The entire operation had the chaotic energy of a barn raising conducted by people who had only seen barns in pictures.

The shaky lens zoomed in clumsily on Craig, who was directing the loading operation like a heavily tattooed drill instructor. He pointed and shouted at items of equipment, and the crew scrambled to follow his directions.

“That there’s Craig,” Roy’s voiceover narrated unnecessarily. “He’s gonna be directin’ the movie. He’s the boss man. He directed three plays in the joint, includin’ a real arty version of ‘Twelve Angry Men’ that only had seven guys ‘cause of budget cuts.”

The image swung over to Carl and another former inmate, Todd, who were carefully wrapping a strange, lumpy object in a blue tarp. The item appeared to be roughly human-shaped, a fact that might have alarmed anyone familiar with traditional crime scene materials.

“Them guys over there, they’s Carl and Todd,” Roy explained.

“They’s doin’ the effex work. Carl knows all about makeup ‘cause he used to run a tattoo operation in D Block. And Todd, well, he just likes blowin’ stuff up.

Been doin’ it since he was five, which is why we had to meet his parole officer ‘fore we could hire him.”

Todd looked up at that moment, noticed the camera, and gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up before returning to wrapping what was, hopefully, just a mannequin.

“Roy, get yer butt over here!” Craig’s voice boomed from off-camera. “Quit playin’ Scorsese and help load these lights!”

The image swung wildly back to Craig, who was now frowning directly at the camera, his expression suggesting that Roy’s documentary aspirations were considerably lower priority than getting their equipment loaded before sundown.

“But I’m documentin’!” Roy protested from behind the camera. “For pos-terity!”

“Pos-terior is what I’m gonna kick if you don’t—”

A moment later, the image tilted, spun, and dropped, showing nothing but a patch of asphalt before cutting out. The dizzying camera work ended with a crunch of plastic against concrete.

Back in real time, Roy set the camera down on a crate, more gently this time, and hurried over to give the others a hand, muttering something about “no respect for the art of cinema.”

The flickering home video returned, time having clearly passed as the setting had completely changed.

The production had moved from preparation to actual filming locations, and the camera now captured a montage of the disastrous first days of pre-production.

It was a visual record that would make every film school professor weep and give serious reconsideration to their life’s work.

First came a shot from the back of a bouncing truck as it pulled into a cemetery straight out of a classic horror movie.

It was the kind of location that screamed ‘perfect for vampires’ and whispered ‘probably haunted’ as a close second.

Gnarled trees clawed at the sky like arthritic hands, and marble statues of angels and saints stood watch over rows of granite tombstones.

“Day one of pre-production,” Roy’s voice narrated. “We done found us the perfect cemetery for our vampire movie. Real atmospheric-like.”

The image swept around, showing three four-wheel-drive pickups rumbling onto the hallowed grounds — and not on the paved path, but literally across the grass, leaving muddy ruts in their wake.

They parked in a haphazard formation that suggested none of the drivers had ever used a parking lot.

The inmates piled out, their excitement obvious even through the grainy footage.

“Technically, we ain’t supposed to drive on the grass,” Roy commented from behind the camera, clearly not bothered by the transgression. “But Craig says time is money, and we gotta get set up ‘fore the cemetery people realize we ain’t actually from the Historical Society like our permit says.”

The camera then showed the execs setting up shop, transforming the peaceful cemetery into something resembling a construction site crossed with a tailgate party.

A construction crew of fellow ex-con bikers nailed haphazardly cut boards to the side of a stone mausoleum, creating a makeshift production office straight out of a cartoon.

“That there’s our production office,” Roy explained. “We’re attachin’ it right to a real crypt ‘cause the stone walls keep the beer real cold.”

The lens drifted, finding Carrie sitting by a rickety old trailer, trying to memorize her lines.

Even through the poor video quality, it was obvious that she was both stunningly beautiful and utterly miserable, her expression suggesting she was contemplating both the script and the Starbucks career she passed up for this.

The camera did a clumsy, unsteady zoom in on her ample chest, held for a beat too long, then tilted up to her face.

She frowned, her eyes locking onto the lens with a look that could level a small forest. She stood up and stormed right at the camera, her angry face filling the entire screen before the image swept wildly up to the sky and dropped to the grass.

“I was just checkin’ the focus!” Roy’s voice squeaked as the camera recorded nothing but a worm’s-eye view of clouds.

In the next clip, a hillbilly-type inmate in overalls, Jethro, was nonchalantly buzzing through the branch of an ancient oak tree with a chainsaw, sawdust flying everywhere.

“We need that branch gone for the shootin’ angle,” Roy explained as Jethro continued his assault on the venerable oak. “Plus, Jethro just really likes chainsaws. It’s like therapy for him.”

Nearby, Todd and Carl were laying dolly track with the precision of men who had clearly never seen dolly track before and were working from a verbal description at best. The metal rails zigzagged across the cemetery ground like a drunken snake, occasionally disappearing into open graves before reemerging at improbable angles.

Craig stood a few feet away, shouting at something just off set, his face turning an alarming shade of crimson.

The camera panned right to follow his look, catching Elvis, the Labrador, dragging a thousand-dollar movie light across the lawn by its power cord as two inmates, Kevin and Steve, chased futilely after him.

“Elvis! Drop it! That ain’t a toy!” Steve yelled, diving for the cord and missing completely, face planting into a freshly dug grave with a muffled curse.

“He thinks everything’s a chew toy,” Roy commented as the dog continued his gleeful destruction of expensive equipment. “Last week he ate half the script. Craig said It was an improvement.”

The next scene opened on Carl backing his pickup truck across the cemetery lawn to unload equipment.

Suddenly, the rear end of the truck dropped out of sight with a sickening crunch, the tailgate disappearing as if the earth had taken a bite out of it.

A shaky zoom-in revealed Carl in the driver’s seat, his mouth forming a series of very creative and silent curse words that required no audio to be thoroughly understood.

“He done backed into a grave,” Roy explained unnecessarily. “That’s the third time today. You’d think he’d start lookin’ behind him, but Carl ain’t big on learnin’ from experience.”

A bit later, the truck was still stuck, its rear wheels spinning uselessly in the open grave like a turtle on its back. The camera captured the Rif Raf team’s solution to this predicament, which involved engineering principles that would make actual engineers weep into their calculators.

Steve had tugged the truck’s winch cable over to a large, beautiful marble angel statue, and wrapped it securely around the angel’s neck. He secured the cable and gave Carl a thumbs-up to turn on the winch.

“This is gonna work like a charm,” Roy assured the future viewers. “Steve used to be a tow truck driver ‘fore he got arrested for towin’ cars that weren’t actually parked illegal.”

The winch whined, pulling the cable tight.

Slowly, the truck began easing out of the grave, the backend rising inch by excruciating inch.

For a glorious second, it worked. And then, with a cracking of marble, the angel toppled over and shattered into a million pieces on the ground.

The truck, its winch cable now gone slack, slid right back into the grave.