Actors Anonymous (21 page)

Think about the camera on you: You’re on a set, there’s a script, but there are no lines; you have a character, but that character can change; if you want,
you
can change your character; you can do things like cut her hair, or dress her differently, or put her through college, or have her sleep around, or have her be chaste, you can give her a new religion, etc.

Now think about the set and the apparatus falling away; the camera still follows you, but there is no crew; it’s an invisible camera. It follows you everywhere; it records your every move.

The audience is there, but they too are invisible. Let’s call them your conscience, let’s call them
the memory of you,
let’s call them every-one’s idea of you.

To have an inside, there always needs to be an outside. The more elite the inside, the more people are on the outside. Get in there, but don’t live in there. Be on both sides.

The problem is that once you’re on the inside, people want to keep you on the inside, even if they hate you; they keep you behind the glass. You want to act humbly, but you are treated like royalty—especially on a film set. You can’t act humble because they won’t let you, so you need to act like a gracious knight.

The camera operators are the bishops, the director is the king, and you are the queen. The production assistants are the pawns; the wardrobe, makeup, and prop departments and the grips and electricians are the horses and rooks.

The queen is the tallest piece, the most conspicuous; you’re moving about the board like you’re the big cheese.

Everyone looks at the big cheese. They take pride in the big cheese. They all identify with the big cheese.

Sometimes I feel that making a movie is similar to a big fashion shoot. You get pampered and the shots are framed for maximum effect, and you’re lit in the right way. What’s the difference between this and a glamour shoot? In both, you just listen to the director.

But what is reality? When you go down to what Actors Anonymous calls the “veridic self,” of what does that consist? We like to think we have core values and passions, but where do those come from but the culture around us? You are either drawn toward your parents’ teachings or you are in revolt, but either way you have been shaped by them.

Genetics, okay, part of the character has been thrust upon us. Height, race, muscular build, sex: These things are harder to change in a character than worldview, cultural beliefs, religion, accent, education level, but they
can
be augmented. How many actors wear lifts, or change the appearance of their ethnicity, or have changed their sex?

The search for the real shows that there is no reality, not on the ground level. Think of the world as a grand set, think of all the designing and thought that has gone into that set. It’s fucking amazing.

The reason I can read on-set—any old book—up to the moment they say “rolling” is that I don’t need time to jump into character. I have played so many characters that acting is hardly different than living (or different than the book I was having a conversation with). Not only am I so used to being on sets—they are where I live half my life—I am used to the intensifying gaze of the camera.

Life before the camera is reality, the reality of performers acting out roles. Here existence is bracketed and highlighted. This is the way life works too: Life is choreographed, and we are subjected to invisible scripts imposed on us by family, school, and entertainment (movies, television, music, commercials, social networking, texts).

If everything is performance, maybe the most real performance is pornography. Two actors having sex on camera may be titillating an audience for pay, but they are still having sex. Their bodies are doing the act.

Something involuntary must be touched in them before they can come.

Maybe the search for the real is about playing the most roles and having the most sex.

TRADITION 4

Each film should be autonomous except in situations where other films are involved (sequels, etc.).

The Angel

S
HE WAS THE ANGEL
.
The Actor’s
girlfriend. Think of all the best attributes that can be found in a young woman, and those are what she consisted of. Everything perfect. Of course…

(Section missing)
¹

contingent on changing fashions over time; ever-varying opinions of how symmetrical or asymmetrical, large, round, slim, tall, or short one’s face, breasts, waist, or ass should be. There is no need to codify a list in the vein of Edmund Burke, who ostensibly determined objective principles for beauty, basically what is smooth and various: “I do not now recollect anything beautiful that is not smooth.” What is blindingly obvious to an enlightened twenty-first century reader of Burke’s treatise,
On the Sublime and the Beautiful,
is that while some of us might be breast men like Mr. Burke:

Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same;

there are others of us, such as Sir Mix-A-Lot, who “like big butts” and cannot lie: ass men. Earlier than Burke,
²
in the English Renaissance, it was believed that perfect female breasts resembled apples, but I for
one have never said, when admiring breasts, “Look at those Granny Smiths!” Or, if we were to measure female physical perfection by artist’s depictions, what could be said about Michelangelo’s bodybuilding Sibyls, or the undulating fleshy folds of Rubens’ Three Graces? I suppose today’s subscribers to
Shemale
or
Big Beautiful Women (BBW)
magazines might find the living actualizations of the masters’ depictions appealing, but I can’t; I am not into chicks with dicks, and I admit that I get a little queasy when I see the bouncing cottage cheese on the back of Marilyn’s legs as she runs into the ocean outside the Hotel Del Coronado in
Some Like It Hot
. Call me a pig. I am an ass man per se, but decidedly not a thick-ass man.

But the Angel was like none of this. She was small and blond, with large breasts (about the size of soft mangos) and a shapely ass, with no cottage cheese. She had a tight stomach, and a magic smile that tinkled and said
natural
and
friendly
and
pretty
. But this is all too specific; all that should be understood is that she was perfect. Whatever conception of that term might mean for your ideal composition, dear reader, conjure in your mind now. Be she (or he) black or white or Latino or Asian: perfection. Conjure it now, for this story is all of ours.

—This is ridikulus. I hate when peple list all the races like this and making generalizing so much that no one has any distinkt identity. They always say “purple” and “poka dotted” too when they make their lists. They want to show that even imposible races are ok too. So they kin say that no catergory should be beter than any other catagory. Unless you says “purple” and “poka dotted” are real races. this is third grade shit, to tak this ways about all the races.
³

Let’s begin this little anecdote:
The Actor
was in France for the summer, working on a small art film, the Angel was back in Los Angeles working on a shampoo commercial. There was a night in France… No, there were a few: young American exchange students… Hmmm, well, how do I begin? Let’s see, okay,
The Actor
could be very charming if he wished. Well, no, he wasn’t always charming. Actually, maybe he wasn’t charming at all. When he was younger he had a difficult time talking to girls. In fact, he was very shy. Before he started acting, before he was
The Actor
, when everyone called him Shrimp, if a girl talked to him, it felt like his mouth was stuffed with a thick sock and he said nothing. It was only after he became recognizable from his movies that he became “charming.” The fame allowed him to be as shy as he liked; his faltering speech was transformed into an attractive mysteriousness by the chameleon light of his celebrity. In actuality, he probably wasn’t charming at all.

—That’s right you wasn’t. You was just a dopy fuck that won the dork lottery and became famous and you cashed in. Don’t believe the hype little shit. And no more autobiografy! All you do is just write about yor conqests and pretend that that is litrature!
⁴

(I’m sick of it too, Shrimp. I mean I know you think it’s innovative to do this split personality thing,
⁵
but I think it’s just you covering because you can’t write a straight story. It’s like you can’t tell a story from beginning to end, so you hide behind all this shit.

And please, we all get women, are we supposed to be impressed because you seduced a few American undergrads in France? Your alter ego, “
The Devil
”
⁶
or whatever he may be, is dead on: This roman à clef is as transparent as fuck. Why are you writing about yourself? You’re not that interesting! You’re just a stupid actor that is taking advantage of these young girls, and then telling on yourself.)
^#

Despite the angelic beauty of his girlfriend, the Angel, when she wasn’t around,
The Actor
had an uncontrollable need to fuck every young thing he could. In France that summer, he fucked.

There was a tourist club on a barge called Concorde Atlantique, which was docked on the other side of the Seine from
The Actor’s
rented flat. One evening,
The Actor
ate two cones of pistachio gelato, purchased from a stand down the street, and watched
Band of Outsiders
on his laptop. He then fell asleep watching
Weekend
. He woke up at one in the morning and caught the three-minute shot at the end, which follows some of the murder happy crew through the forest over to a man playing drums on the edge of a river, while a French narrator compares the ocean to hell. After watching the shot,
The Actor
pressed the space bar on his laptop and paused the film. He got up from the low French couch and went outside. He went down the dark circular stairwell to the street. The night was warm, and it was okay that he forgot to take his jacket. He lit a Parliament and walked to the footbridge, just across from the Louvre.

The bridge was filled with youths of all nationalities, sitting in the dark air on the wooden slats of the bridge, drinking wine and smoking. The river flowed wide and gaping below them. Lit cigarette ends moved around like glowing mites, and French laughter breathed out from the seated groupings.
The Actor
didn’t stop; he crossed over to the Left Bank and walked north along the water. He passed a few drunken French people: a couple of twenty-something women in black skirts and spiderwebbed leggings, and a group of three loud, bald men, who thought they were clever, but
The Actor
couldn’t understand what they said. One man pissed in the street with his pants down past his ass.

Just before the Musée d’Orsay,
The Actor
found himself at the Concorde Atlantique, the club-barge. For lack of anything better to do, he walked across the gangplank and paid the cover charge. The club was fairly empty. It was mid-July, and most young locals had left the city. On the top deck of the barge, a spattering of twenty-somethings sat around small round tables. Mostly thin French guys with greasy hair, sitting amongst themselves without women.
The Actor
ordered a water from the bar at the capstan and sat down at an empty table on the side. He looked out over the river. It was romantic.

Soon after he sat down, a young American girl came up. She was not pretty. Brunette and chubby, with bad skin.

“Are you?” and she asked if
The Actor
was
The Actor
.

He said he was.

“I love your movies.”

This was always embarrassing, because
The Actor’s
movies were terrible.

He said thank you.

The ugly brunette asked, “Will you come sit with my friends and me? So we don’t get harassed by the slimy French guys?”

The Actor
joined their table. There were four of them, two ugly and two pretty. They were all sorority girls. They all knew who he was, and he didn’t have to say much after that.

(Section missing)
⁸

…ended up sleeping with the queen of the group, I’ll call her “Diarrhea.” She had a wonderful ass that he loved gripping while doing her from behind, despite the fact that she had let loose a loud spattering shit early one morning, after a long night of carousing in Spain.

This loud shit took place a week after the Concorde Atlantique meeting.
The Actor
, his friend,
The Villain
, and the four sorority girls were on a weekend trip to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls. After the first night, they all lay down to sleep at 10 a.m. The six of them shared the room:
The Villain
and three girls in the bed, and Diarrhea and
The Actor
on the floor. The curtains were closed, and the room was as dark as the bulls they had seen earlier that morning. Soon after everyone was settled and ostensibly asleep, Diarrhea went into the bathroom.
The Actor
tried not to listen, but the sound that followed was undeniable. Like a trash bag of wet guts being ripped open and dropped into a vat.
The Actor
and the four in the bed all pretended that they were asleep. But nobody was. After, Diarrhea came back and wrapped herself up with
The Actor
in the blanket on the floor. Then she gave him a blowjob.