A Star is Born (5 page)

“Yes, I did,” I said, leaning over to speak into his crotch.

Timing is everything. Just as I was delivering my line, Moira walked into the room. Instantly taking in the situation, she simply asked me, “Mark? Why are you talking to Elmer’s nuts?”

“Moira!” Derrick started to beg.

“Elmer!” she countered.

“We were just lectured on how the famous star wants to be referred to by his proper name at all times,” I explained.

“I said nothing of the kind,” he tried, but I cut him off.

“Do we have to genuflect at the same time?” she asked.

“Don’t give him any ideas,” I told her. Returning my attention to Derrick, I finished my earlier thought. “I will saw off your family jewels and shove them where the sun don’t shine. Do we understand one another? Do we have a meeting of the minds?”

“Yes, we have a meeting of the minds that my gonads are very happy where they are at the moment, and they should stay right there.”

“It is entirely in your control,” I pronounced as I sat back down. To drive my point home, I stepped out our front door for a moment to retrieve something I had found outside a week or so earlier. Coming back into the room, I placed the rusty teaspoon I had found on the hillside onto the table between us. At the time I had found it I should have just thrown it away. I had no idea why I hadn’t. Now, though, I was grateful that I had simply set it on the table outside.

Derrick’s eyes went wide. “Is that a threat?” he asked.

“That is a promise, Mr. St. James.”

“Mr. St. James sounds so formal. Are you sure you couldn’t use my first name?” he asked.

“In time, once I know I can trust your intentions with my man. Remember, I only have one man, and I intend to keep him. His warranty has expired, so you break him, you buy him.”

“So, I take it that you’ve broken the news?” Moira said to Bill and Derrick.

“Yes, the deed is done,” Bill said.

“I’m assuming, from the talk of hacked-off gonads, that the news was not well received?”

“Given their track record on this subject, no, it was not necessarily well received,” I explained.

“Well, on this one I have to agree with the two actors. I’ve spent my morning going through the focus group data and reports and it’s true—they did test extraordinarily well with every audience across the board. It is quite rare to find something that all audiences seem to appreciate in the same way and with the same level of intensity. If this holds long enough for the movie to be made, edited, and distributed, we could be looking at a real winning combination.”

Scripts, Lines, and Filming

A
ND
so it was that one of the biggest changes in our lives was underway. Bill and Derrick read the script, and then ran the lines to get comfortable with not just the words but the emotions required, the persona that was required for them to believably play the part. The next morning I found Derrick sound asleep on the sofa. Who knows how late they worked? Probably late for Derrick to sleep over. I didn’t know if I should try to wake them up or let them sleep. I decided on the latter, figuring they would both perform better if they had a bit of sleep.

When they both dragged themselves out of bed, muttering something about burning daylight and losing valuable rehearsal time, I ignored them and simply made breakfast for both of them. They muttered, they ate, they talked about the script—it was as if I wasn’t even there. I could feel a pissy attitude coming on, and told myself right then to get it under control, at least until I heard them run their lines.

They rehearsed outside by the pool for a while, trying to get the physical motions scoped out in addition to the words, the facial expressions, the body language—who knew acting was so involved? At about noon they called Moira and me outside—they were ready to run their lines for the first time. Probably not all of the lines, but at least some of them.

So we dutifully sat and watched—and we were both blown away. The story they were telling through their acting was gripping. Their acting was absolutely first rate, even though it was just a reading. There were a couple of points where I had to remind myself that I wasn’t actually “in” the story, even though it felt that way with the actors live in front of us. Both Bill and Derrick vanished, and in their places were the two characters.

It was rough. It was really rough. There were lots of places where they flubbed their lines or had to refer back to the script—really, who could learn an entire script in one night? Of course they were going to have to refer back to the script! They both berated themselves for not knowing all of the lines. At that point I told them they needed a break. I fixed lunch for all of us and insisted that they take a break to sit and eat.

They both asked for our opinions, for some feedback. I held nothing back and told them how moved I had been. I even let on to them that I called for the break not just because I was tired of hearing them berate themselves, but also because I found myself getting entirely too wrapped up in the story, too emotionally involved. It felt real to me!

Moira agreed with my analysis, pointing out lots of things where she thought they could fine tune a move or a better word in one place, not that they had script control. If anything, her comments were more positive than mine, and mine had been pretty positive.

After we ate lunch, the boys continued working their lines. By nightfall I insisted that they stop. They complained and complained and complained, but I met their complaints with pushy concern for their mental well-being and physical health. In the end I prevailed. I had prepared dinner for all of us, which I served at our dining room table. After that we all watched something mindless on TV and then went to bed. Derrick again stayed over, but this time slept in a bed in Moira’s house. She had lots of rooms and lots of beds so that was no imposition and was certainly better than sleeping on our sofa.

The next day was more of the same, only that afternoon the boys and Moira had a meeting with someone at the studio. I wasn’t there, but, from listening to all three of them when they came home afterward, it appeared that the meeting had gone well and that everyone was happy.

I had always pictured making a movie as a long, drawn-out affair that required years of preparation: constructing sets, preparing costumes, screening thousands of actors to find the few who would appear in the movie, months and months of shooting, and then months and months of editing before some selected previews. And then editing and obsessing. Not to mention the music that was overlaid on the movie, the scouting to find locations, and a thousand other details I couldn’t list at the moment, like hiring a director, arranging financing, and other little details like that.

But it appeared to be true that the studio wanted to fast track this one, because shooting began almost immediately. Someone was ingenious in their thinking, because part of the “set” involved the two guys looking bedraggled on a rickety raft floating in the ocean. The studio put the raft just barely off shore from one of the local beaches and filmed it with the cameraman standing in the water about waist deep.

I went along one morning, despite the unbelievably early hour of the morning that they started to avoid crowds on the beach and to capture the exact lighting that the director wanted. And I’ve got to say, if I had thought it was good before, I thought it was
fantastic
now. The energy, the way the two guys played off each other, the way their lines seemed more like a natural conversation than lines they were reciting—it all came together in a phenomenal way. I was impressed. No, I was beyond impressed. This was great! These guys were doing something amazing, and it was going to be a hit! I knew it! It just had to be!

They worked long hours, filming day after day after day. They were both so into the project that they wanted to keep pushing on. Every once in a while either I or the director would insist that they take a day or two off, because they were becoming very tired and it was starting to show up in the quality of their work. Every time, they pissed and moaned about how they needed to keep working, that they couldn’t risk losing the magic they had captured. And every time I won. They should just have realized that it was inevitable—it would have saved all of us a lot of work.

It took most of the summer, but they were finally finished filming. I still wasn’t entirely sure if I should call what they were doing “filming” since everything was digital now and there was no actual “film” involved in the process of recording video any longer. And saying “videoing” just didn’t have the same ring to it. So, for lack of a better term that carried the same impact, I continued to call it “film.”

All of the scenes they had shot went into editing. Several times they were called back to redo a particular line that just hadn’t worked on any of the recordings they had. Work continued throughout the fall on finding the right music to accompany the drama of the movie. There were so many details involved.

Another Premiere

D
URING
the fall, we got a sneak peak at the way the film was coming together. We were of course cautioned by absolutely everybody, right down to the janitor, practically, that what we were seeing was not the finished product and that editing would continue until it went into production.

Finished or rough, what we saw was absolutely phenomenal. I was personally blown away by the impact the movie had on me. By that point I knew the story pretty well, since I’d read the script, I’d heard Bill and Derrick running lines and rehearsing for countless hours, and I’d attended filming a couple of times. But to see the finished product—okay, I know, not finished—up on the screen was very moving.

The story was a very good one. The acting was first rate. The two actors—and yes, Bill was an actor, no question—were incredible. I thought they had a hit on their hands.

That night I lay in bed beside Bill. He was sleeping soundly, but for some reason I couldn’t get to sleep. Staring at the ceiling for about the hundredth time, I returned to a thought I’d had earlier in the day. Bill was a great actor. When that thought first hit me I was surprised. But the more I thought about it, the more it made perfect sense. Who better at acting than a gay man who had grown up in a straight society? We had spent our entire lives acting a part. While some people might study acting, we actually had spent most of our years on the planet acting in a drama, a drama with high stakes—our lives.

Looking over at the sleeping angel next to me, I smiled. I rolled onto my side and lay simply looking at him. Never in my wildest dreams while growing up would I have ever expected to be where I was at the moment. Never would I have expected to have the man beside me in my bed, living with me and loving me. Whatever had kept me awake was no longer relevant. I fell asleep with good thoughts running through my head.

The movie premiered in December and was scheduled for general release on Christmas Day, a day that had become sacred in the movie industry. Christmas Day was one of the high holy days in the movie business. Movies that rolled out that day were movies that were expected to draw big crowds and earn big bucks.

We attended the premiere in early December—Derrick with his wife, me with Moira and Bill. It was fun to get dressed up in a tux and do one of those events. By that point I’d been to several premieres, but it was still exciting. It was especially exciting to go on the arm of one of the two lead actors in the movie. Granted, we weren’t actually arm in arm, but I was by his side, smiling along with him.

If you’ve never been to one of those things, there’s one thing that is amazing: the number of photographers who are there and who take thousands and thousands of photos of the same thing—people standing on the red carpet, people waving, people talking. It didn’t seem all that exciting a subject to me, but they clearly thought it was.

I cannot speak for everyone in attendance that night, but as for me, I remained glued to the screen throughout the showing. Yes, there had been a few changes from the last time we had seen the movie, but they appeared to be minimal and only served to improve the final product. I was impressed. No, “impressed” was too mild a term. I was totally blown away by the movie.