"Mommy, am I famous yet?"
4/27/2007
Film School Confidential
I was in a bit of a pickle on 4/20. Within the next two weeks, I'd have to shoot and edit my last-ever 290. I'd have to write a 10-page paper on the gender politics of Bound, and then I had to write another 10-page paper on the gender politics of comedy. I had to catch up on other work I'd missed thoughout the semester, and then I had to take finals.
On top of all that, I had agreed to edit someone else's class project for 290. I'm not sure why, except that it seemed to come as such a shock to them when they realized they'd forgotten to find an editor, and I felt bad for them. I didn't think it would be that big a commitment.
Little did I know that they had failed to prestripe the master tapes (note to laymen: such an oversight is both disastrous and EMINENTLY avoidable) and dumped the resulting mess in my lap, which was why I found myself stuck in the editing lab that day, fighting with Avid, trying to reason with a hysterical computer, while the rain poured epically outside. Hours passed: the footage would not capture. It was hopeless.
And finally there was nothing more I could do, because I had a deadline: I had also agreed to perform a starring role in a classmate's last 290.
On the first day of class, this classmate described herself as "from Korea and still struggling with the language barrier," and she's the quietest presence in the whole class, but it's all very deceptive: she's one of the best filmmakers in 290. More than anyone else in the class, she understands that cinematography really is painting with light, and she has an astonishing eye for outdoor light. One of her 290s was a romance, and I watched the entire thing in awe, wondering, "What is that beautiful location? How did she find it? I've never seen it before!" until I realized it was just the campus library. And not the beautiful old Doheney library either -- just the plain old Leavey library, next to my old dorm.
I'd starred in one of her previous 290s, a spooky ghost story awkwardly titled "True Jokes," at her request: "Because you have good facial expressions," she explained. I found my performance a little pantomimey as a result, but I was excited to be in her next project, which she told me would be "a makeup commercial." She wrote:
I felt bad about having been so late to the set of "True Jokes," and I knew I was working with a director who took no shit. So at 2:50 I abandoned my crisis in the editing lab and walked through the pouring rain to her house.
***
She was all business when I arrived. "Change into this," she ordered, handing me a little black dress. I did, right there in her room, leaving my army clothes in a pile on her floor. She frowned. "It's too big," she said, and it was: it was a strapless cotton number that hung perilously loose around my chest.
She had no pins; it would just have to do. "Did you bring black sandals like I told you to?" she asked. I showed her the ones I had brought. "Oh, NO!" she burst out. "Those are ALL wrong!" She rummaged through her stuff and found a pair of frail pink high heels, like Barbie shoes. "You'll wear these," she said.
She thrust a bottle of face lotion into my hands, pointed down the hallway, and said, "The bathroom is that way. Go wash your face so I can do your makeup."
I wasn't sure what the lotion was for, and I tried not to feel foolish as I smeared it onto my face, splashed it with water, and wiped it off with a brown paper towel.
She sat me down on her bed and proceeded to rub more lotion onto my face. She carefully spread foundation over it, then meticulously patted it all over with powder. "I bet you've never worn this much makeup before!" she said, laughing.
I hadn't, not since the Teen People modelling gig. I rather liked it; it was warm and peaceful in her bedroom, with The Simple Life playing on the little TV in the corner and the rain pouring down outside, and I felt very taken care of as she painted my face. She covered my lips with a light red gloss, colored my eyelids with pastel eyeshadow, and traced my eyelids with messy black liquid eyeliner. "Don't open your eyes until I tell you," she said, and it felt like ten minutes that I sat there with my eyes closed.
I flinched automatically when she stuck a mascara brush toward my eyeball, and she laughed. "Don't be scared!" She covered my eyelashes in mascara. "I was going to put fake eyelashes on you," she said, "but you don't need it. Your eyes look three times bigger already!"
Things got weird when she covered my chest in glittery bronzer. "You're so white!"
Finally she did my hair, clumping it up in dozens of bobby pins. It made for a crazy, porcupine-y, America's Next Top Model look, but I found it stark and chic, and I told her so.
"You should wear your hair up all the time!" she said. "You look so much prettier!"
I tried to remind myself about the language barrier, but I still wished she hadn't used the comparative adverbial form.
"Something is missing," she said. "Can you wear earrings?"
"I don't think so," I said. "I got my ears pierced when I was twelve, but I let them close up when I was thirteen."
"Try," she urged, and handed me a pair of earrings. I nearly re-pierced my ears trying to force them in before she accepted that it wasn't going to happen. She looked morose, but I assured her that her purple plastic necklace looked fine.
I looked at myself in her full-length mirror and almost felt embarrassed to be staring at this stranger. She had transformed me.
A guy, her hallmate, walked by eating a plastic bowl of Corn Pops. She yelled at him: "Why aren't you wearing your suit? We have to start shooting in five minutes!"
"Huh?" he said. "I thought you said it was cancelled because of the rain!"
She looked like she was going to explode. "No I didn't!"
"Yes you did!"
"No! No, I didn't!"
I stepped in: "Dude, just do it, okay? I'm all ready to go."
"Okay," he said.
Out we went into the cold rain, me in all my wacky hair and makeup and skimpy dress, with nothing over it all but a fur-trimmed purple coat she'd lent me. It was hard to walk in those Barbie shoes, and I must have looked pretty weird. Making the best of the situation, I made conversation with her hallmate. He was a white guy from the Valley and did not struggle with a language barrier.
We arrived at her location and met up with the rest of the cast, two guys she'd found on LAcasting.com. The rain was coming down harder and harder as she set up the camera and tripod, shielding both with an umbrella, and explained the shot she was about to take: I was going to walk toward the camera, with two bodyguards (Hallmate and Real Actor #1) trailing me.
"ACTION!"
I walked.
"CUT!" she interrupted. "Frankie, could you walk more pretty?"
I tried, but it was hard: the Barbie shoes were slender and backless and growing ever more slippery in the rain.
"No!" she yelled out. "Frankie, walk very pretty!"
I stumbled; the shoes slid right off. She groaned in frustration.
We began to shoot another scene, a chase scene in which I run away from the bodyguards. The soaked, muddy shoes slipping and sliding under my sweaty feet, their pointy little heels tripping all over the rough concrete, gave me a flapping, ducklike gait.
"CUT!" she was shouting. "Frankie, run faster! Faster and more pretty!"
Finally I walked over to her and managed to explain the problem, and we worked out a compromise: I would walk prettily, look over my shoulder, notice the bodyguards, take off my shoes, and run away barefoot with the shoes in my hands.
This solution was freezing cold and dirty, but it allowed me to run a lot faster, and to compensate I ran like the wind, on and on and on...
"Um, Frankie?" said her hallmate when we reached the crosswalk, out of the shot. "You, um, you have...you're kind of..."
I glanced down. A pretty serious wardrobe malfunction had occurred.
"Will you still respect me in the morning?" I wisecracked, making the best of the situation as I yanked the dress back up over my boob.
"Oh, yeah, it's cool," he assured me, like I'd been genuinely worried.
"Frankie," she called out, "can you come here?"
I thought she was going to tell me to run even faster and more pretty, but instead she gestured toward the LCD viewfinder of her camera, which was rendering everything a bizarre bright blue. "Can you fix it?" she asked, her eyes wide and helpless.
I fucked around with everything -- the white balance, the exposure, the trusty old turn-it-off-and-then-back-on-again...nothing worked.
Then Real Actor #2 asked her, "Can I talk to you for a minute?" He took her aside, and whatever they were talking about, it didn't look like good news.
I hit "AUTOLOCK" and suddenly the blue went away. "I fixed it!" I cried triumphantly.
"Thanks for understanding -- bye!" the Real Actor #2 was saying, and suddenly he was gone.
"He had to go to an audition," she explained. "[Real Actor #1] will be the main guy now."
On the way to the next location, I strode toward the crosswalk with typical New York impatience -- and Hallmate thrust his arm out, right across my tits, to "save" me from the oncoming traffic into which he thought I was blindly walking.
"What kind of movies do you like?" he asked me then, and we made awkward conversation about that until we got to the next location. My teeth were chattering and my nose was dripping with cold.
"Okay, in this scene you will jump off the roof of the building," she said. "It will just be fake. Put your leg over and pretend to jump."
She went to film me from the ground, and as I got ready for my stunt, Hallmate suddenly said, "We should exchange numbers! Maybe we can hang out some weekend."
I get asked out so rarely that I never know what to do when it actually happens, especially when I'm soaked in freezing rain and wearing nothing but a slip of a dress and seven layers of melting wet makeup. I was so amazed that I somehow hadn't managed to mention Sherman in the entire course of the afternoon, I didn't even think to do it now. Instead I just stupidly stuttered "Uh -- uh -- I don't have my phone and -- oh I think she's recording," and I thrust my leg up, doing a split over the railing at the edge of the building in a fake kamikaze move.
"FRANKIE, BE MORE SERIOUS!"
***
A week later, I was frantically editing my own 290 in the lab: it was due the next day and I had to finish in time to work on my Bound paper as well. I still had to finish the class project, too, not to mention the other paper, and my nerves were about to snap. The lab would be open for twenty more minutes.
Finally I fixed my problem, and I got my 290 onto a tape in the nick of time. As I walked out the door, I noticed a girl editing at a nearby computer. It was my director!
Ooh, I thought, I bet she's editing me! I sneaked over to get a peek at the footage.
The makeup logo was there. Her distinct directorial style was there. But what I saw turned my heart to stone.
All the way home, I tried to convince myself that Avid just had a really sophisticated after-effects program of which I wasn't aware -- an after-effects program capable of turning night to day, and growing my hair down past my shoulders, and turning me Asian...
***
She was the last person to show her 290 in class the next day, and I wasn't looking forward to it. I knew that she must have had a really good reason for replacing me, but it was hard not to be disgruntled when I thought of all I'd gone through to be in her movie.
I forgot everything, however, as soon as her movie started. The class was breathless and silent after it ended. "Play it again," murmured our British professor after a moment, and she did.
I don't know how she does it, but it looked like it had cost a hundred million dollars to make, even though I knew it had been done for free. It had such a glamorous feel to it -- the Impressionistic angled shots of L.A. at night, with colored lights slashing through the black, and the sunset reflecting on the silver concavities of the Disney Concert Hall, all set in dreamy slow motion to a sexy techno remix of Ave Maria...
...and her star! I didn't know who she was, but she was sexy and glamorous and perfect, a real international spy instead of an awkward muddy pretender like me. She was so sleek, so graceful...
...and she looked so familiar...had I seen her somewhere before? Why did I feel like I knew her?
It couldn't be...could it?
It was a face I hadn't seen in a whole year, a face made nearly unrecognizable by makeup and noirish lighting. But in the very last shot, I suddenly knew.
It was my freshman-year roommate, Hello Kitty.
***
"I don't want to know," I asked her afterward, "but I have to ask: was it my fault?"
She laughed: "Oh, no! I just didn't get enough shots, so I used shots from a movie I made with Kitty before. But I will edit yours later, I promise."
I thought: Telling me what she knows I want to hear -- she is so ready for Hollywood...
She added, "I was thinking yours could be the funny comedy version."
(My crest fell.)
***
Yesterday, as I finished the class project in the lab, I noticed that she was editing on the computer across from mine. She didn't see me, but I could see what she was working on.
When she left, I grabbed my headphones and sneaked onto the computer; she'd left her hard drive there. I quickly opened up Avid and took a look at what she had so far.
It wasn't a comedy. It was a sexy, thrilling, slow-motion chase, set to the techno remix of Ave Maria in the silvery rain, ending with the logo:
Lancôme
Paris
And I looked fucking sweet.
- posted by Frankie @ 10:17 PM
I was in a bit of a pickle on 4/20. Within the next two weeks, I'd have to shoot and edit my last-ever 290. I'd have to write a 10-page paper on the gender politics of Bound, and then I had to write another 10-page paper on the gender politics of comedy. I had to catch up on other work I'd missed thoughout the semester, and then I had to take finals.
On top of all that, I had agreed to edit someone else's class project for 290. I'm not sure why, except that it seemed to come as such a shock to them when they realized they'd forgotten to find an editor, and I felt bad for them. I didn't think it would be that big a commitment.
Little did I know that they had failed to prestripe the master tapes (note to laymen: such an oversight is both disastrous and EMINENTLY avoidable) and dumped the resulting mess in my lap, which was why I found myself stuck in the editing lab that day, fighting with Avid, trying to reason with a hysterical computer, while the rain poured epically outside. Hours passed: the footage would not capture. It was hopeless.
And finally there was nothing more I could do, because I had a deadline: I had also agreed to perform a starring role in a classmate's last 290.
On the first day of class, this classmate described herself as "from Korea and still struggling with the language barrier," and she's the quietest presence in the whole class, but it's all very deceptive: she's one of the best filmmakers in 290. More than anyone else in the class, she understands that cinematography really is painting with light, and she has an astonishing eye for outdoor light. One of her 290s was a romance, and I watched the entire thing in awe, wondering, "What is that beautiful location? How did she find it? I've never seen it before!" until I realized it was just the campus library. And not the beautiful old Doheney library either -- just the plain old Leavey library, next to my old dorm.
I'd starred in one of her previous 290s, a spooky ghost story awkwardly titled "True Jokes," at her request: "Because you have good facial expressions," she explained. I found my performance a little pantomimey as a result, but I was excited to be in her next project, which she told me would be "a makeup commercial." She wrote:
Synopsis:
A girl who is a spy steals a computer chip at the party scene and hides it in her mascara capsule. When she tries to slip out of the party, she is detected by two bodyguards. She runs away from them and they are chasing her. When she gets to the top of the stairs, she just looks down the stairs to jump down. But right under the stairs, there is a guy smoking. He happens to see her legs and takes her into his arms. Now she is holding his neck with her arms. They are looking at each other face to face very close. He starts to have a crush on her because of her long and charming eyelashes!
can you just come over by 3? putting on makeup takes a lot of time! don't be late.
I felt bad about having been so late to the set of "True Jokes," and I knew I was working with a director who took no shit. So at 2:50 I abandoned my crisis in the editing lab and walked through the pouring rain to her house.
***
She was all business when I arrived. "Change into this," she ordered, handing me a little black dress. I did, right there in her room, leaving my army clothes in a pile on her floor. She frowned. "It's too big," she said, and it was: it was a strapless cotton number that hung perilously loose around my chest.
She had no pins; it would just have to do. "Did you bring black sandals like I told you to?" she asked. I showed her the ones I had brought. "Oh, NO!" she burst out. "Those are ALL wrong!" She rummaged through her stuff and found a pair of frail pink high heels, like Barbie shoes. "You'll wear these," she said.
She thrust a bottle of face lotion into my hands, pointed down the hallway, and said, "The bathroom is that way. Go wash your face so I can do your makeup."
I wasn't sure what the lotion was for, and I tried not to feel foolish as I smeared it onto my face, splashed it with water, and wiped it off with a brown paper towel.
She sat me down on her bed and proceeded to rub more lotion onto my face. She carefully spread foundation over it, then meticulously patted it all over with powder. "I bet you've never worn this much makeup before!" she said, laughing.
I hadn't, not since the Teen People modelling gig. I rather liked it; it was warm and peaceful in her bedroom, with The Simple Life playing on the little TV in the corner and the rain pouring down outside, and I felt very taken care of as she painted my face. She covered my lips with a light red gloss, colored my eyelids with pastel eyeshadow, and traced my eyelids with messy black liquid eyeliner. "Don't open your eyes until I tell you," she said, and it felt like ten minutes that I sat there with my eyes closed.
I flinched automatically when she stuck a mascara brush toward my eyeball, and she laughed. "Don't be scared!" She covered my eyelashes in mascara. "I was going to put fake eyelashes on you," she said, "but you don't need it. Your eyes look three times bigger already!"
Things got weird when she covered my chest in glittery bronzer. "You're so white!"
Finally she did my hair, clumping it up in dozens of bobby pins. It made for a crazy, porcupine-y, America's Next Top Model look, but I found it stark and chic, and I told her so.
"You should wear your hair up all the time!" she said. "You look so much prettier!"
I tried to remind myself about the language barrier, but I still wished she hadn't used the comparative adverbial form.
"Something is missing," she said. "Can you wear earrings?"
"I don't think so," I said. "I got my ears pierced when I was twelve, but I let them close up when I was thirteen."
"Try," she urged, and handed me a pair of earrings. I nearly re-pierced my ears trying to force them in before she accepted that it wasn't going to happen. She looked morose, but I assured her that her purple plastic necklace looked fine.
I looked at myself in her full-length mirror and almost felt embarrassed to be staring at this stranger. She had transformed me.
A guy, her hallmate, walked by eating a plastic bowl of Corn Pops. She yelled at him: "Why aren't you wearing your suit? We have to start shooting in five minutes!"
"Huh?" he said. "I thought you said it was cancelled because of the rain!"
She looked like she was going to explode. "No I didn't!"
"Yes you did!"
"No! No, I didn't!"
I stepped in: "Dude, just do it, okay? I'm all ready to go."
"Okay," he said.
Out we went into the cold rain, me in all my wacky hair and makeup and skimpy dress, with nothing over it all but a fur-trimmed purple coat she'd lent me. It was hard to walk in those Barbie shoes, and I must have looked pretty weird. Making the best of the situation, I made conversation with her hallmate. He was a white guy from the Valley and did not struggle with a language barrier.
We arrived at her location and met up with the rest of the cast, two guys she'd found on LAcasting.com. The rain was coming down harder and harder as she set up the camera and tripod, shielding both with an umbrella, and explained the shot she was about to take: I was going to walk toward the camera, with two bodyguards (Hallmate and Real Actor #1) trailing me.
"ACTION!"
I walked.
"CUT!" she interrupted. "Frankie, could you walk more pretty?"
I tried, but it was hard: the Barbie shoes were slender and backless and growing ever more slippery in the rain.
"No!" she yelled out. "Frankie, walk very pretty!"
I stumbled; the shoes slid right off. She groaned in frustration.
We began to shoot another scene, a chase scene in which I run away from the bodyguards. The soaked, muddy shoes slipping and sliding under my sweaty feet, their pointy little heels tripping all over the rough concrete, gave me a flapping, ducklike gait.
"CUT!" she was shouting. "Frankie, run faster! Faster and more pretty!"
Finally I walked over to her and managed to explain the problem, and we worked out a compromise: I would walk prettily, look over my shoulder, notice the bodyguards, take off my shoes, and run away barefoot with the shoes in my hands.
This solution was freezing cold and dirty, but it allowed me to run a lot faster, and to compensate I ran like the wind, on and on and on...
"Um, Frankie?" said her hallmate when we reached the crosswalk, out of the shot. "You, um, you have...you're kind of..."
I glanced down. A pretty serious wardrobe malfunction had occurred.
"Will you still respect me in the morning?" I wisecracked, making the best of the situation as I yanked the dress back up over my boob.
"Oh, yeah, it's cool," he assured me, like I'd been genuinely worried.
"Frankie," she called out, "can you come here?"
I thought she was going to tell me to run even faster and more pretty, but instead she gestured toward the LCD viewfinder of her camera, which was rendering everything a bizarre bright blue. "Can you fix it?" she asked, her eyes wide and helpless.
I fucked around with everything -- the white balance, the exposure, the trusty old turn-it-off-and-then-back-on-again...nothing worked.
Then Real Actor #2 asked her, "Can I talk to you for a minute?" He took her aside, and whatever they were talking about, it didn't look like good news.
I hit "AUTOLOCK" and suddenly the blue went away. "I fixed it!" I cried triumphantly.
"Thanks for understanding -- bye!" the Real Actor #2 was saying, and suddenly he was gone.
"He had to go to an audition," she explained. "[Real Actor #1] will be the main guy now."
On the way to the next location, I strode toward the crosswalk with typical New York impatience -- and Hallmate thrust his arm out, right across my tits, to "save" me from the oncoming traffic into which he thought I was blindly walking.
"What kind of movies do you like?" he asked me then, and we made awkward conversation about that until we got to the next location. My teeth were chattering and my nose was dripping with cold.
"Okay, in this scene you will jump off the roof of the building," she said. "It will just be fake. Put your leg over and pretend to jump."
She went to film me from the ground, and as I got ready for my stunt, Hallmate suddenly said, "We should exchange numbers! Maybe we can hang out some weekend."
I get asked out so rarely that I never know what to do when it actually happens, especially when I'm soaked in freezing rain and wearing nothing but a slip of a dress and seven layers of melting wet makeup. I was so amazed that I somehow hadn't managed to mention Sherman in the entire course of the afternoon, I didn't even think to do it now. Instead I just stupidly stuttered "Uh -- uh -- I don't have my phone and -- oh I think she's recording," and I thrust my leg up, doing a split over the railing at the edge of the building in a fake kamikaze move.
"FRANKIE, BE MORE SERIOUS!"
***
A week later, I was frantically editing my own 290 in the lab: it was due the next day and I had to finish in time to work on my Bound paper as well. I still had to finish the class project, too, not to mention the other paper, and my nerves were about to snap. The lab would be open for twenty more minutes.
Finally I fixed my problem, and I got my 290 onto a tape in the nick of time. As I walked out the door, I noticed a girl editing at a nearby computer. It was my director!
Ooh, I thought, I bet she's editing me! I sneaked over to get a peek at the footage.
The makeup logo was there. Her distinct directorial style was there. But what I saw turned my heart to stone.
All the way home, I tried to convince myself that Avid just had a really sophisticated after-effects program of which I wasn't aware -- an after-effects program capable of turning night to day, and growing my hair down past my shoulders, and turning me Asian...
***
She was the last person to show her 290 in class the next day, and I wasn't looking forward to it. I knew that she must have had a really good reason for replacing me, but it was hard not to be disgruntled when I thought of all I'd gone through to be in her movie.
I forgot everything, however, as soon as her movie started. The class was breathless and silent after it ended. "Play it again," murmured our British professor after a moment, and she did.
I don't know how she does it, but it looked like it had cost a hundred million dollars to make, even though I knew it had been done for free. It had such a glamorous feel to it -- the Impressionistic angled shots of L.A. at night, with colored lights slashing through the black, and the sunset reflecting on the silver concavities of the Disney Concert Hall, all set in dreamy slow motion to a sexy techno remix of Ave Maria...
...and her star! I didn't know who she was, but she was sexy and glamorous and perfect, a real international spy instead of an awkward muddy pretender like me. She was so sleek, so graceful...
...and she looked so familiar...had I seen her somewhere before? Why did I feel like I knew her?
It couldn't be...could it?
It was a face I hadn't seen in a whole year, a face made nearly unrecognizable by makeup and noirish lighting. But in the very last shot, I suddenly knew.
It was my freshman-year roommate, Hello Kitty.
***
"I don't want to know," I asked her afterward, "but I have to ask: was it my fault?"
She laughed: "Oh, no! I just didn't get enough shots, so I used shots from a movie I made with Kitty before. But I will edit yours later, I promise."
I thought: Telling me what she knows I want to hear -- she is so ready for Hollywood...
She added, "I was thinking yours could be the funny comedy version."
(My crest fell.)
***
Yesterday, as I finished the class project in the lab, I noticed that she was editing on the computer across from mine. She didn't see me, but I could see what she was working on.
When she left, I grabbed my headphones and sneaked onto the computer; she'd left her hard drive there. I quickly opened up Avid and took a look at what she had so far.
It wasn't a comedy. It was a sexy, thrilling, slow-motion chase, set to the techno remix of Ave Maria in the silvery rain, ending with the logo:
Lancôme
Paris
And I looked fucking sweet.
- posted by Frankie @ 10:17 PM
