Shivering. Cold. I’m shivering. HOT. I’M HOT! No, but really I’m very cold right now and it’s strange because it just isn’t like this this time of year usually. I’ve been in my pen or in my “pit” as William Goldman would say (a friend), and I’ve taken to using various lightbulbs and ON/OFF switches on appliances for my daily dose of sunshine and light; all artificial will do for now. Me and Da Boss have another deadline to meet, and this time the bit we’re sending out into the world is maybe the best one yet.
“I don’t even think we’ll have to reedit this or reexamine this when we put it back into the feature, this is incredible, Monica!” He’s rarely this enthusiastic about my work, but enthusiastic about many other things—well, not really many other things, just movies and music and books. The night I finished the first working rough mix to send out to some favored friends and pre-judges (and the segment’s star), Da Boss saw a revival screening of After Hours, Martin Scorsese’s 1985 downtown New York nightmare, a masterpiece of anxiety, irritation, and the ineffable horror of a bad dream. Everyone was laughing, he said, and there was even a guy who sounded like Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear, some guy way in the back, just cackling at every-fucking-thing but having enough sense to shut up when Rosanna Arquette talked about being raped for six hours, but actually she slept through most of it and it was actually her husband who broke into her house and—
Stop. Pause. I hit the brakes on his rant, entertaining as it was, because I was starting to feel anxious. I was having a full-blown panic attack because everything Da Boss was telling me gave me such a profound sense of deja vu that I slipped into my own private nightmare for a moment as he went on trying to describe the plot of this totally unique and idiosyncratic movie. But what about the rough mix? “Oh yeah, it’s great, it’s great…” and then, it wasn’t the strangest thing, but it was unusual: Da Boss broke down into a fit of tears, rolling around on the floor balled up and crying for help, for mercy. Save me, he moaned, Save me. I told him to take another look at the rough work mix.
He sat down. The beginning needed to be fixed… too much of the previous segment…. Not the right series of shots when the first chorus comes in… some of the earlier footage is perhaps misplaced and might confuse the audience… there’s a minor problem with the audio of the coda section becoming misaligned, an accident from an otherwise productive last night… we got it figured out, but still those shots near the end, where they break character, he thought it worked, he hoped it worked, but no—so out it goes. And those are his notes.
What have you got, Monica?
Four shots left—maybe eight.
—Follow Monica Quibbits on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits