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         Synopsis: Screenwriter on a film shoot for the Sidney Bamf Film Company, I discover that both the on-site producer and the film’s director have an insatiable fondness for cocaine. Hopelessly behind schedule on this “low budget” vehicle, located in Virginia for tax reasons, I try my best to hold things together amidst a sea of conflicting agendas.

                                                      *

            In order to flesh out our story with superfluous scenes at the cheapest possible price, Bamf orders me to “layer” the script. Thus, our movie opens with Molly sitting in a lifeboat, lost in thought, ostensibly gazing at the foundering Titanic. (Filmed in the middle of the day, on dry land, in a Boston Whaler courtesy of the Old Coast Guard Station on the Boardwalk in Virginia Beach. I’ve always loved this little museum. Marty Markham loves using it for every conceivable setting.)

            The next “layer” comes partway into the film when it transpires that a modern researcher is actually the narrator. Confusingly, a lot of different voices take turns narrating. The more, the merrier, it seems. Usually with a peculiar accent or a crusty / perky / exhausted / resolute / resigned tone of voice (Pick One) to provide depth. Without further explanation.

            “I mean, who is this person?” I keep asking Marty, who keeps ordering up additional narration. “These disembodied voices don’t bode well for our movie.”

            “THAT’S IT!” he shouts excitedly, his aviators all but jumping off his tanned, handsome face. “Disembodied voices! Write that down. ‘Lost souls of the Titanic speak to us from beyond the grave!’ Wonderful. Wunderbar !”

            “I know what ‘wonderful’ means,” I sulk.

            “You’ll narrate!”

            “I don’t have a Texas accent.”

            “Fake it, for Christ’s sake.”

            “I’m a writer.”

            “Congrats! You’ve just acquired another arrow to your quiver.”

            “Analogies— “

            “Set up a scene on deck where an artisan is teaching archery to aristocrats.”

            “A crew member?”

            “Well, duh! Where else would an archery instructor come from?”

            “Are you serious?”

            “Just do it!” Marty commands imperiously in a slave-driver tone that all too often enters our conversations. “That’s where you can plug in the explanatory dialog about…”

            “About too few lifeboats! I get it.”

            “Good boy!”

            Yes, this creative process bulks up the script to feature length, but our movie seems to be metamorphosing into an astronomical number of scenes.

            “I want Charley, the modern-day researcher, to be playing tennis with a sexy young lady whose Great Great Grandfather was aboard the Californian when that steamship saw the flares from the stricken Titanic and blithely kept on sailing,” explains Marty. “Charley drops his racket in mid-swing when she mentions that ‘Family lore has Great Great Grandpa always bitching that Captain Stanley Lord saw the distress flares from the Titanic and didn’t stop to pick up survivors.’ That saves us the expense of filming still another scene in period costume on the deck of a ship!”

            Shrewd bubbe, I think.

            It also gives Marty the op to ogle an endless series of leggy coeds who audition for the part of the great great granddaughter in skimpy white tennis outfits. I don’t complain. I like cheesecake as much as the next guy, but I feel the tennis sequence is a cheap shot that diminishes the quality of the film.

            “Everybody has heard the goddam story a hundred times,” rumbles Bamf from the West Coast. “So the real draw is how you tell it, cinematically. If you’re gonna be a screenwriter, you should know that. Layering!— P.O.V.— I want as many points of view as I can get.”

            “Hey, you’re the producer. You tell me what to write, I’ll crank out the scenes!” I pant.

            “You have my every confidence,” he grumbles in a voice filled with concern.

            Because by now, we’re already rapidly nearing the 21 days of principal photography that Bamf has assigned this vehicle. Whatever dreams Marty had of going back in the script and filming the prairie scenes in a real sod hut in North Dakota, they have by now evaporated with most of the travel budget. We can tool up and down the Virginia coast in our caravan of vehicles, but gas prices keep skyrocketing, killing our mobility. Fortunately, Virginia has a lot of state parks and coastline to choose from. Equipped with generators, purchased locally, and arena spotlights developed to film Olympic events, Vilgot uses the cover of darkness to fake scene after scene portraying the North Atlantic. The Chesapeake Bay never looked so cold and ominous!

            “Half this movie is being filmed in the dark,” I complain. “I feel like we’re filming a sequel to Pitch Black.”

            “THAT’S IT!” Marty enthuses. “Put that in your notes! ‘Tone: A sequel to Vin Diesel in Pitch Black.’ Kevin, you’re a genius!”

            No, I think. You, my friend, are a snowbird.

            So, our two raving cokeheads— the on-site producer and the film’s director— egg each other on, as the storyline grows in complexity and expense.

In a striking example of group cowardice, the actors, technicians and writer are all struck dumb by our communal fear that Sidney Bamf will shut down production. So none of us admit to him over the phone that his chosen representatives are totally out of control.

                                                      *        

            Notified of a controlled burn up in the hills of the Blue Ridge, Vilgot and I grab some pages of dialog, Janice, Hugo, tripods, cameras, battery packs, Wayne the soundman and his trusty Nagra, and assorted reflectors. We drive up there. Jesus, what an effect! A forest fire! We film Molly and J.J. arguing in the foreground. Behind them, a fiery inferno. The wind shifts and we’re enveloped in smoke. “A lucky accident!” chuckles Vilgot, as we trudge back down the mountain, gritty with sweat, our clothes reeking of smoke. “I just took a deep breath and kept filming, filming, filming. Very unusual! The screen fades to white.”

                                                        *

               Scene 34: At dinner on the Titanic, Molly rises from the table, glass in hand, and says

              MOLLY: “Here, here. A toast to Hippocrates and his hypocritical oath. We’re all familiar with that! A toast to the Socratic oath, which is SO cratic. And to Mr. Lincoln, who— although he freed the slaves— knew better than to legislate the ways of the business community.”

              LORD BAXTON: “Alas, Molly, I think you’ve had a bit too much to drink, my dear. The bubbly seems to have gone straight to your head.”

              MOLLY: “Said like a true gentleman!” (With utter contempt, she toasts them all.)

                                                       *

            Because Wayne, our soundman, requires water lapping on the shore, we agree to spend a day at Virginia Beach. We stay two weeks! Yes, there are navy jets constantly flying overhead, but somehow we convince ourselves that dubbing afterwards in a studio is worth the effort if we can grab some good footage. Tom Hanks had to dub all his island dialog in the film Cast Away. Most of our water scenes get shot in or adjacent to the Old Coast Guard Station just off the Boardwalk. We use their side walls as a backdrop. Their Boston Whaler masquerades as a lifeboat. Hanging a black curtain behind it, Vilgot plays tricks with filters in a process called “day for night,” a true throwback in this digital age. “When in doubt,” he tells us authoritatively, “have the women take off their clothes.”

            This advice is directed at Reggie, but since he looks and acts like a zombie 90% of the time, we don’t expect him to respond. “Naw,” he suddenly drawls, his old self, “it ain’t that kind of pitcher.”

            “Picture,” I murmur, glad to see Reginald back among the living.

            “Whassat?” he queries.

            “Nothing! I’m just mumbling to myself!”

            “It would be nice,” Wayne the soundman adds, “if everybody could just shut up so I can get a clean recording of the dialog here!”

            – – –

            “Thank you!” he sighs and Scene 46, Take 3, is officially in the can.

            We bring the Airstreams over to Virginia Beach and set up camp at a trailer park outside of town. Janice and I sort of have a problem. I’m as addicted to her body as she is to mine. Not good. I understand the equation: Since we don’t really have a director, Janice feels insecure in her role as the young Molly Brown. She compensates by doing something she is really good at— fucking the be-Jesus out of Uncle Kevin. This goes on night after night, her hot box a ready refuge for my lonely dick.

            We have a ghost in the trailer. Some alcoholic character actor who passed away one dark, lonely night. We see him all the time, evenings, midnight, mornings. Lying athwart my lovely lady, I look up and meet his ethereal gaze. “Hey!” I shout. “You can haunt the trailer! But don’t come in here when I’m having sex!”

            He gives me such a look! But he respects my wishes. I never see him again while I’m in a clutch.

            Day 27: Word has come down the pipeline. The missing Martha Lloyd is tied up on another project. Replacement: Hot-house flower Edith Colson. Yeah, the opera star. Shee-it. It’ll be interesting to see if we ever get to the post-Titanic footage.

            Under orders from Bamf to include at least one blatant anachronism, I write a ballroom scene where dancers do the Charleston. The jazzy, lush orchestral music fades, replaced by wailing girls’ voices singing

                               Do the hippy, hippy shake!

                               Do the hippy, hippy shake!

                                                                                          © 1959, Chan Romero

            This segues into a modern discotheque where our researcher Charley dances with Janice, who is dressed in a chic black shift. The choreography is also an old favorite: The Hitchhike. Swinging their hips, licking their thumbs, they “do the hitchhike, baby!”

            “The more things change,” a crusty narrator intones, “the more they remain the same.”

            Cut back to the Titanic where Molly stands by the rail gazing at the starry night while a ship’s officer beseeches her, “Madam, don’t be sad. The voyage is still young. A wealth of experience awaits us!”

            Everybody agrees that’s a great line.

            Truer words, rarely spoken? What looks like the ship’s railing is actually a section of wood fencing adjacent to one of the restaurants on the Boardwalk. We also use the outdoor pavilion at The Cavalier Hotel, properly decorated, for both indoor and outdoor scenes. In ballroom mode, it’s not as regal as James Cameron’s, obviously, but it’s functional and all we can afford.

            In our film, at the end of the dance, the passengers stand solemnly together and sing “God Save the King.” Sometimes, historical accuracy corresponds with a satisfying visual and auditory experience.

            Thank God for Virginia Beach!

            This goes on and on. The authorities think we’re nut jobs. When not writing, I accompany Marty— shooting schedule in hand— to Town Hall to apply for another batch of permits. We pay by check. I assure the lady cashier behind the counter that we have funds to cover our expenses.

            “Well, I should hope so!” she replies starchily. 

            In Cameron’s version, the phantom iceberg comes floating out of an inky night like a single ice cube in a sea of cherry cola. Reality wasn’t like that: The ocean was covered with ice floes, thousands of broken pieces of ice forming a jigsaw puzzle in white. And atop all this broken ice loomed a mountain of white that came afloating straight at the ship, inexorably, unstoppable. The ice floes were so bad, the Carpathia had difficulty picking out the lifeboats, small slivers among a thousand jagged shapes.

            “Thank God for CGI,” says Marty Markham. “It was positively made for shit like sea ice. So let’s film our ocean sequences as cleanly as we can. Bamf can dressy-uppy in post-production.”

            What can I say? Having lost all respect for Marty, we ignore him entirely.               

            A relatively complicated scene with a lot of extras, filmed at The Cavalier Hotel’s outdoor pavilion: As the ship sinks, the Irish are on deck singing Auld Lang Syne while the British do Rule, Britannia! The Americans, standing as a group at the back of the ship, are more pragmatic. They call on The Lord for Divine intervention.

                                “…So thank you, God,

                                Please send us the help.

                                 The others need it, too,

                                 But that ain’t your yelp.”

            (Janice looks absolutely enchanting— angelic face, glistening white teeth, golden hair, shining blue eyes— as she sings this last line. “Ah! Good show!” comments Reggie, the Englishman. The historical implication is totally lost on him.)

            Up until now, the Titanic has always been exhibited as an example of income inequality— rich versus poor. There were 370 first-class cabins and only 297 third-class ones down in steerage. We don’t ignore the obvious, but in the melee, in the darkness of an icy night, when women and children are going into the boats, this class-consciousness breaks down.

            Who can blame a Texan for siding with a Texan, a Yank with a Yank, a Brit with a Brit? “Tha’s all ahm sayin’,” says a burly Irishman, his brogue thick as soup, as he helps an Irish lass and her two darling children to clamber over the rail. “Man got t’ think o’ flag an’ country.”

            “Here, there! Wha’ are you doing?” sneers an English officer, pulling a truncheon from his belt. “You have them come back on board!”

            “Not bloody likely!” insists our burly Irishman.

            “Oh, all right! But come up front and help some of the first class passengers for a spell,” orders the officer, pulling the man by his collar. Raised in the British Empire, the officer exerts his authority and the rebellious Irish obeys. Until the next big revolt.

            “Ah, I say,” comments a tipsy British “topper” in greatcoat and top hat, stumbling about the deck. (Keenly played by our very own Reggie in a cameo.) “You officers do know how t’ put on a good show, jolly what?!”

            “Clausss has its priv-e-leges,” answers the officer.

            This is degenerating into a very Marxist movie.

            There are also a lot of little yapping dogs, to heighten the tension and add verisimilitude. “Throw ‘em o’board,” suggests a Chief Mate.

            “Why, I never!” answers another officer. “Some o’ my best friends are toys!”

            “Is a bit o’ a chukka is all ahm saying! Not a lot o’ time for dilly-dallying.”

            The term “chukka” comes from polo, signifying a 7-minute period, kept short in order to replace tired horses.

            “Make haste!” cries a voice in the darkness.

            “Look who’s talking!” comes the reply.

            “That’s my toe you’re standing on,” shrieks a damsel in distress.

            “Beggin’ yer pardon, ma’am!” 

            Our storyline allows us to do something James Cameron could not: We can get ourselves off the damn ship.

            We hire members of a barbershop quartet to impersonate newspapermen. They sport luxuriant facial hair and striped suspenders. We stick them in a broom closet of an office with a bit of old-fashion ticker-tape. We have one rush up to the other and say

            NEWSPAPERMAN: “Ollie! The Titanic is sinking.”

            (Background noise of teletype machines, hustle and bustle of an office.)

            OLLIE: “The whosis is whatsis?”

            NEWSPAPERMAN: “The Titanic. It’s an ocean liner. A floating casket, I tell you. By tomorrow morning, it’ll be the lead in every rag across the country.”

            OLLIE: “I have a good story on the Widows and Orphans Pension Fund.”

            NEWSPAPERMAN: (exasperated) “Ollie! You’re not listening!”

            (Cut back to ship.)                      

            A squiggly line of shiny vehicles, we return to Blacksburg.

            What’s going on? I find myself wondering, adrift in a fever dream of lust in the back of our trailer. It’s 98 degrees, the humidity is 100%. It’s pitch dark outside. The croaking of frogs and buzzing of mosquitoes populates the night. “It’s not like we’re Humphrey Bogart filming The African Queen,” I moan aloud.

             Indeed, helplessly sucking on Janice’s yummy nipples, my hands clutching every accessible inch of her body, bathed in sweat, I’m not sure how much of this experience has a direct bearing on the Hollywood film industry.

             Following our portrayal of the Titanic disaster, we super-impose one of those “Ten Years Later” subtitles to explain why we’re using a considerably older actress. We show Molly doing philanthropy, raising ungrateful children, running for Congress. We get a lot of mileage out of her sister marrying a German baron, a real no-no during the First World War. These scenes have a strident, melodramatic quality not previously encountered, but then, Edith is a very different actress than Janice. Reggie actually stops snorting cocaine in an effort to get her to tone down her perf. “It’s not the Ring Cycle by Wagner,” he pleads. “Please, Edith! We’ve put in too much time and effort to settle for caricature. I know you can do it, darling!”

             The next take is even more hyper.

            “Reg!”

            “What?” he asks. “Camille I don’t mind. It’s the Miss Piggy impersonations I find rather unacceptable.”

            “Just tell her to be herself. She’s trying too hard. Molly Brown isn’t special. She’s an ordinary human being who finds herself in special circumstances.”

            “Right! Tell her that,” he barks.

            Gingerly approaching Edith, I crouch at her feet and make my spiel. “…Besides, you are an interesting person, Edith. You, yourself. People like to see you in films because you interest them. You, Edith Colson.”

            After that, she’s still pedantic, but her presentation is no longer over-the-top certifiable.

            Off-camera, she’s a pussycat, a friend to all the world. On camera, she chews the scenery to beat the band.

             “Oh, well,” sighs Reggie. “It certainly makes for an interesting cinematic experience.”

             Day 35: Boopsie comes down by car from Md. He complains about traffic, worries himself silly about cost overruns, other shit I have no control over. If he can’t help me do the writing, I’ll kick his sorry butt off the set.   

             “No wonder the ship sank!” Boopsie bitches, handing me a print-out. “It’s 1912 and they’re carrying 20,000 bottles of beer on board, 15,000 bottles of mineral water, 40 tons of potatoes, 40,000 eggs— 40,000 eggs! — 1,750 quarts of ice cream, 6,000 pounds of butter and 7,000 head of lettuce.”

            “You’re just hungry,” I admonish him. “Let’s go get pizza.”

            Everybody on the set finds it very amusing that we are filming the last third of the movie last. No modern director would dream of shooting a script chronologically, from first page to last, but Martha Lloyd wasn’t available, we got delayed, and now we’re using the understudy, Edith Colson.

            As soon as we wrap her final set-up and concluding take, Janice Bulova disappears from our movie set and my life. Poof! She’s gone. I mean, I knew we’d part company eventually. I’d heard how tenuous film location liaisons are. We never claimed we were in love. But like any other drug addict, I find myself deep in the pain of withdrawal. Call me an idiot, but I had never given my body so freely to another person to share. We spent literally hundreds of hours, naked, flesh pressed against flesh, all night, every night, mixing our sweat, our saliva and our bodily juices. Not even my marriages— chaste by comparison— were this intensely physical. That’s what you get when you cohabit with a Method actress.

            I come back from scouting a location and find she has left— without scribbling so much as a note. This shocks me grievously. I am shocked that I am shocked! I guess one reason it hurts so much is that I’m a wordsmith. She could have written me something…?

             Janice has flown the coup. I mourn my loss.  

             Day 48: Tomorrow is the last day of shooting. We’re totally over budget. May sink the studio. Saved the best for laughs, the kick-ass bedroom scene. For whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee! I wish Janice was still here.

             Our epic concludes by having the camera slowly, slowly pan right and zoom in on Molly— portrayed by Edith Colson, grande dame of the opera. She is propped up in bed, surrounded by fluffy pillows, meant to symbolize a quick ascent into the clouds, on her way to heaven. She stares blindly into space. Church bells ring sonorously in the background. Lots of echo, a death knell.

             MOLLY: (breathlessly) ”Yes, I see it now! Each of us is a lifeboat, endlessly tacking among the ice floes of our existence. Nothing more, nothing less.”

             The tolling of bells swells in volume as we… fade to black.

            However schlocky the rest of the production— and we’ve had our moments— this creepy ending, based on old-fashioned cinematic techniques, sends a shiver down the spine of the viewer. Yeah, I wrote it. Yeah, that hop-head Reggie directed and Vilgot filmed it. Wayne the soundman did his magic with the playback of the bells. “Heavy on the reverb” he claims. Edith’s acting, however, simply blows away the cobwebs, the junkiness of our production values, the fake Edwardian wallpaper, overriding our combined effort at mediocrity. Her performance is nothing short of brilliant.

            With the addition of several weeks’ worth of CGI at a studio in Santa Barbara, The Trollop Molly Brown all but bankrupts the Sidney Bamf Film Co. Too many set-ups, too many days spent on principal photography, too many takes, too many additional scenes hastily constructed to add weight to a story that never really jells, never comes into its own.

            I’m so frustrated, I am sorely tempted to take up smoking again.

            Instead, a privilege rarely accorded the writer, I am invited out to California to sit with Sidney and his editor, Sam Hall, in the cutting room and piece together the disparate parts.

            “You can do narration,” grunts Bamf accusingly, pointing to the recording booth with a hand clutching yet another unlit cigar.

            “What, again?!” I groan.

            “Fake it.”

            Ugh. Again. That’s how we glue together our screenplay, a disembodied narrator providing expository continuity.

            “You’re a born storyteller,” Bamf counsels me, sounding almost kindly. “Feel free to tell Molly’s story.”

            Sam Hall and I do just that, equally mystified every time one scene effortlessly melds with another. “Your cinematographer really knows his stuff!” says Sam. “We’ll need to make some color corrections in the final print and clean up some of the imagery, but on balance, he grouped his sequences very nicely, indeed. Good continuity. Compliments to the scriptgirl.”

            “Money.”

            “Pardon?”

            “We called her ‘Money.’ We thought she was an airhead,” I admit, embarrassed.

                                                        *      

            “GAAAAAH! That’s some last scene!” Bamf explodes in the screening room as the lights come up. “You write that? You’re a killer!”

            “Yeah,” I say, feeling myself blush.

            “Still, there’s no excuse for using up every dollar in my bank account.”

            “I feel really bad about that, Mr. Bamf— “

            “Marty and Reggie no longer work for this studio.”

            “Please don’t blame the girls,” I tell him, the only thing I can come up with.

            “You dumb schlub, you made me a hell of a movie!” he marvels. “Fucking Molly. Jesus Christ!” He stands in the hallway outside his office, chomping on an unlit cigar, antsy. “I gotta take a meeting,” he says abruptly and presses an envelope into my hands. “Go back home and write me another story!”

            “I was thinking a screenplay about this snake oil salesman Blackie Diamond.”

            “The black guy running for president? In the Democratic primaries? He’s a demagogue. I don’t see how you can write it— it’s way too early.”

            “I’m thinking of calling it The Sorrow Tomorrow.”

            Sidney kind of backs away from me. He gives me an inscrutable look. “Sonofabitch, what a mamzer you are,” he says. “When you’re ready, pitch it to me. Meanwhile, pshol von!  G’bye!”

            I know this last phrase, it’s colloquial Russian for “Shoo! “ What you say to chase away a stray mutt. M.O.T.— Members Of the Tribe— we carry our heritage with us wherever we go.

            I watch him walk into his office. He slams the door in my face. I open the envelope. I find a one-way plane ticket to BWI and… a check that guarantees the life of our screenwriting venture for at least another year!

            Shamefacedly ecstatic, I draw a last cup of water from the office water cooler. Then, I walk out of the building, a goofy grin plastered across my face.

            Nothing beats success.

                                                      *