The three musketeers sat there, heads in their hands, mumbling about how stupid they were. “We never should’ve hired a real chicken.” They’d been calling me “chicken,” I’d gotten used to it, but it’s important for the world to know what kind of scum are making your movies: men who call grown roosters “chicken”—and in their presence! It’s as if I don’t exist. Sorry, I’m not “furniture” like a slave. Mr. Tarantino made a movie about slavery, very good I thought, but it’s not as if the Gimp lived very long. He didn’t even have any audible lines. So what does Mr. Tarantino know about the oppressed anyway? He doesn’t know what it’s like to be called “pollo” and considered a culinary delicacy in the Western United States. I’m kind of on the menu everywhere, actually. No it does not feel good to be “wanted.”
To be clear, they’re treating me well. But they’re rude. Quite rude. At the same time, I’m not being chased through the streets or threatened with vivisection and live animal rendering. I will not be taken to a Wendy’s or a Kentucky Fried Chicken and to be “inspected for further use.” My time will be valuable, and used on screen, as a member of the repertory company acting in and filming The Continuing Adventures of Cliff Booth. To say I’m excited would be an understatement; in many ways, this is the time of my life, a period which everything else has been preparation for. I’ve already completed scenes on a boat, and I’ve seen a woman cut in two. Not for real, it was just for the movie. You know, fake. But it looked real. Was it real? Maybe… no, it wasn’t. But? Sorry, fake. Still…
In the course of the five weeks it took to shoot that two-minute scene, I became very close with Mr. Pitt. In fact, I became his emotional support Rooster. See, Mr. Pitt is an actor much like Harrison Ford or Robert Mitchum—they’re not fussy, and they’re only rude to people who try and overcomplicate things. He knows I won’t judge him when he chain smokes cigarettes and joints full of hash and kief, hard stuff for a “weed smoker.” He looked at me one day after I refused an oil joint and told me a story about Kevin Costner. “He was on the set of some direct-to-video piece of shit, and the AD caught him smoking a joint outside his trailer,” he said. “And so the AD starts laying into him. Keep in mind this is the mid-2000s, Costner is a major star, probably the reason this movie was even financed in the first place. The AD must know this, but he’s berating him for being stoned at work.
“Costner lets him finish, waits a beat, and then screams at this guy, ‘I did Dances stoned, I did Bull Burham stoned, I did JFK stoned; if I have to work straight, I WILL WALK.’” And the only man walking that day was the AD. This was encouraging as Mr. Fincher had caught Mr. Pitt and I several times on the set smoking joints in between the dozens and dozens of takes he would demand of, for example, walking through a doorway, or throwing a set of keys onto a table. “The pot helps us concentrate, Dave,” he said. “It really calms me down. It makes me forget about those numbers and why they keep going up.” Somehow, Mr. Fincher believed him, and we got marijuana immunity for the duration of the production. “He’s my emotional support rooster,” he said. Mr. Fincher told him that that sounded like a line from their movie Fight Club.
They laughed and laughed, and I felt excluded, so I left in a huff and went looking for my own personal weed in my trailer. I stayed up all night eating pizza and drinking Coca-Cola from glass bottles. Life is good on a movie set—you’re kind of more important than everybody else. Especially you, you reading this. You’re not important—I am.
—Follow Bennington Quibbits on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits