A Ghost in the Music by John Nichols

Author:John Nichols [Nichols, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780393349504
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1978-12-31T13:00:00+00:00

6 I went through the rest of that afternoon in a daze. Simply spectating the logistics of coordinating the bridge scene had left me exhausted. With weary awe I observed my father’s every move, as he and Jerry Fazzina, John Holbein, and several other functionaries manipulated that ungainly crowd of film people, hangers-on, ecology protestors, ersatz advisors, egomaniacs, cops, and sundry characters through the tortuous exercise of getting some usable film in the can. The entire production seemed like a wild reincarnation of the myth of Sisyphus. Fantastic amounts of energy were needed just to blunder several feet forward. And, despite the nearly crazed hullabaloo of the operation, the overall impression was of an event locked in near rigor mortis. A single progressive step required a downright overwhelming amount of frenetic activity swaddled in the mind-boggling boredom of endlessly waiting around.

At the heart of it, Bart shouted, cajoled, laughed, taunted, teased, raged. He knew all parts, all idiosyncracies, all personalities of his scatterbrained machine. He tinkered delicately with some people and bullied others unmercifully. Occasionally, he oozed politesse. At least once he threw a conniption and wound up foaming like a rabid dog. One minute he threatened to bugger Rick Bates personally if the actor wouldn’t shelve his ego trip and perform. In the next breath, he was incredibly obsequious while trying to flatter Jerry Fazzina into a camera angle he thought might be better than the one Jerry wished to shoot. He badgered Julian in French, and conversed in a foreign technica1lingo with the special-effects crowd. He renegotiated the loan of a Cessna when the plane’s owner had last-minute apprehensions about allowing its use for the airport gun-battle scene. No detail escaped his scrutiny. He double-checked bullet-hole squibs taped under a false fuselage panel to make sure they would go off exactly as Jerry wanted. And he insisted on double and triple checks on actors’ clothing to be sure it corresponded with outfits worn in other segments.

I was flabbergasted by the amount of human energy consumed in order to produce what would ultimately be perhaps a money-making, but also an inordinately trivial, work.

At one point I said to Lorraine, “I don’t see how everybody can take this so seriously.”

“These people are earning a living, Marcel. And some of them, including your father, are actually having fun.”

It was true, I suppose. Despite the relentless trauma involved, my father, the cameramen, the grips, the actors—everybody did seem absorbed in the work. They loved their lighting and their special effects, their machines and their props. They got off on how it all looked—the illusion—and anxiously wondered if the audience would believe the bullet holes and the blood. They were fascinated by the timing involved in the film. And they dug the rhythmic power involved in prodding a small army of talented and emotional cripples toward a finished product.

But nobody cared much for the picture itself, the story line, the message; not one of them would have wasted a breath dealing with the question of whether the end result would be art.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.