It's 67 degrees here in Marquette, the dogged tail of October leaving us with one warm last wag before the dark of November. I'm laying on my bed, covered in the hair of the terrifying American Pit Bull, on an ugly green blanket my wife hates, but which keeps us warm when we're too tired to fight the war of the icy feet in the night. The sun comes through the window with the illusion of fire, careening, childlike, through the un-coy shades of maple outside the window. Chamomile tea steams in an old black mug, and Wire's "Heartbeat" reminds me, the way the best songs do, I suppose, of a place and time I've never known.
(The first time I heard "Heartbeat" was Big Black's cover on The Rich Man's Eight Track Tape, another album from before I was born. I suppose it's a case of first loves, but I like the Big Black version better.)
I haven't written in too long: my fingers are itchy, and I keep turning off the T.V. A sure sign I need to write is when I don't want to watch a movie. I'm in the middle of a great documentary about the evolution of the American Horror Film, but there you go. It'll still be there when I get done with work tonight.
Stephen (Wardell, the Director of Photography for Marlon) came over and watched the first hour and twenty minutes of assembled footage this afternoon. We drank coffee and laughed as I cued up the footage and played the clips. He seemed to laughed at all the right parts, and employed liberal profanity when the bloody bits came around...so, that was good. We walked Trinity (the aforementioned Pit Bull and incorrigible cuddle-bug) over to Michael's Arts and Crafts to get my car, I drove him where he needed to go, and came home.
Today was exactly what I needed. What the movie needed, too, probably, and they aren't always the same thing: sometimes the movie needs to be edited, or scored, or color graded, and I "need" (ha) to eat, sleep, read a book, have a good cry, etc. etc. And that's the point. I've found myself at odds with Marlon often, lately. Today taught me a few things.
First, I hate Marlon.
Second, I love Marlon more than almost anything.
Third, men with thighs like mine should not try to lounge on their beds in slim-fit khakis, or do anything in them but stand and try to look thin and suave. Slim-fit lounging leads to muffin tops. That's what I always say.
Watching the scenes I'd assembled with Stephen was like an hour and twenty minutes in hell. Or...no, that's not quite it. It was like an hour and twenty minutes in a boy's locker room after high school gym. There I sat, mortified, and Stephen...Stephen could see everything. I mean, here I'm just playing scene 69 (Marlon tells Nate his mother is dead), just minding my own business, and Stephen is watching.
Then the unholy Calcutta of scenes 62 through 66 comes along, and Stephen is still watching.
Imagine my horror.
Audio cues didn't sync properly. Clips were lost. The dreaded MODIFIED FILE screen flashed across the screen instead of the beautifully-edited slap I'd cut the day before.
"He's going to tell everyone," I thought. "He's going to tell everybody what he saw, and then I'll never get asked to the prom."
But after the last reel had spun its ones and zeroes around the digital spindle, after we'd put on our coats, once we were out in the Indian Summer, something changed. An almost imperceptible touch of clove and cinnamon that comes from the quiet places of autumn, from the undersides of leaves and the bones of trails through woods only children and dogs really know.
While we walked, we talked. We talked about what Marlon is and what it wants to be. What it should be, and what it's going to be when it's done. We talked about horror, and the deconstruction of horror. About how Ryan Sitzberger is a genius. The vulnerability and honesty of John Scheibe's performance. It turns out, we winced at a lot of the same parts, and a lot of the same kind of parts.
Trinity chased leaves around, and Stephen and I walked.
He told me what he thought Marlon was, down in its heart, and what parts of the assembly he thought weren't honest about that true thing at the film's core.
He was right.
I've spent so much time so close to this movie, it got to a point where all I could see was the pages and the lines and the scripted transitions from scene to scene. All I saw were the parts; a kind of frustrating, fragmentary collage. Frustrating because I love a lot of the scenes...love most of the movie, in fact, but then there are these great whacks of...stuff.
"Yeah," Stephen said. "But we'll get rid of that later." He doesn't smoke anymore, but I can see him take a drag in my head. I think I'll always see Stephen with a cigarette and a warm scarf, when I think of him.
"Finish putting it all together, first," he said. Two men were pushing leaves out of the back of a big black rust-pocked pickup truck. "It's weird. It's funny...it's like a horror movie that's fighting against its horror. And it's good." He takes another phantom drag here, tapping ash away.
Marlon isn't Winter's Bone, or Shame, or Evil Dead, or any of the movies I had in my head when I wrote it, cast it, shot it. It's not the movie I had in my head when I started cutting it. This is something else. Something good. Something weird, and other. Conversational and violent. And after I was done hating it, I realized it was actually pretty good.
Besides, I hate everything I do before it's done. I suspect all creative types do. (My wife certainly does: she hated both paintings she did for the film, until I'd shot them.) Probably it's a necessary cycle of anti-ego triggered in the artists' brains to keep them from being insufferable, egotistical pricks at parties.
Tomorrow, I get to play a violently unhinged gangster in a short film my friends are shooting. They're shooting on a Red, in 4k. The script is genius: a sharp, smart blend of Tarantino and the Coen brothers.
But that's tomorrow.
Right now, my dog is sleeping on my wife's pillow behind me. Right now, my fingers are stained with emerald ink from filling my fountain pen, and I have a blank notebook waiting for me in my office. The tea kettle is burbling toward a whistle downstairs.
Today is a good day.