Gravity’s Volkswagen

Thirty

It’s six months later, and I’m back in California. It’s only temporary. I haven’t gone native, despite what Caroline might say. I’ve been home; I’ve been getting on with my life. I’ve been writing. But suddenly here I am again, on a movie set, specifically on a full-scale sound stage in Burbank. It’s very different from Fon-tinella in some ways, not so different at all in others. Chiefly there is a great deal more of everything: more people, more lights, more cameras, more activity, more commitment, more expertise, more money, more free food, more stuff of every kind.

Oh yes, and there are velociraptors, lots of them everywhere: models, puppets, animatronics; velociraptors made of rubber and foam and plastic, with metal armatures and ingenious, magical remote-control mechanisms. The creatures come in various sizes and varying degrees of completeness, sometimes there’s just a head on a stick, sometimes a single clawed foot or just an evil, beady glass eye — whatever’s required for their use in a specific scene or shot in the movie. This makes me happy. This feels like real progress.

But exactly as in Fontinella there’s an awful lot of waiting for something to happen; more than ever, a lot of standing around being sort of interested and sort of bored. Right now, for instance, we’re waiting for a Volkswagen Beetle to be filled with cement. Really.

♦

The truth is, everybody who’s ever owned a Volkswagen Beetle has got a Volkswagen Beetle story. 21,529,464 Beetles: that’s a lot of stories. And some people have owned more than one Beetle. Some people have owned fleets of them. Some people have collected them. And that’s why some people have multiple Volkswagen stories. Our job is to cash in on that.

Anything that can be done in, on, with or to a Beetle has been done. The cycle of conception, birth and death, even burial, even resurrection, has been played out around a Beetle; old stories, of love and hate, loss and redemption, fire and ice and explosion: archetypal stories, movie staples. It all adds up to a lot of history, and as Josh Martin so very nearly said, whether you know it or not, you’re always guaranteed to be repeating some version of somebody’s history. Certain people may even feel the need to repeat somebody’s urban legend.

Jan Harold Brunvand, the author of The Vanishing Hitchhiker, the first great book about urban myths, what they mean and how they spread, details several clusters of Beetle-related folklore, including ‘the cement-filled Beetle’. In this story a man who works as the driver of a ready-mixed-cement truck is driving past his own home one day and spots a Volkswagen Beetle parked outside. He recognises it as belonging to a friend of his. He parks the truck, goes into the house (very quietly, if the story is going to work) and finds his wife and friend in bed together, too engrossed to notice the husband’s presence. He slips out of the house without disturbing them, fills the Beetle with liquid cement from his truck and drives away. By the time his friend has finished in the bedroom the cement has solidified and his car now weighs several tons and has to be towed away by a special, heavy-duty tow truck.

As with all urban myths, this one comes in multiple versions, and moves effortlessly around the world — the United States, England, Denmark, Kenya — changing its specifics with local circumstances. Norway has a surprising number of variations. Sometimes there’s an extra twist: the friend and the wife aren’t in bed, but sitting innocently on the sofa, nevertheless the truck driver jumps to the same conclusion and again fills the car with cement, only to discover that wife and friend were in fact planning a surprise party for him. Sometimes he fills the car without even going into the house, and then discovers the wife won it in a competition or bought it for him as a birthday present.

Sometimes, to be fair, the car isn’t even a Beetle, and becomes something far fancier and more expensive, making its ruination that much more magnificent, but this also tends to make the story less believable. The fact that the Beetle is so ordinary and ubiquitous, helps with the credibility of the myth.

Ultimately, after much careful research, Brunvand concludes there’s no evidence that the events in the story ever happened at all, anywhere, to anyone. But that doesn’t make the story any less significant or potent as a myth. On this movie set, on this sound stage in Burbank, California, however, the cast and crew of the revivified production of Volkswagens and Velociraptors are about to make it happen ‘for real’.

♦

It feels good to be back in California. I couldn’t exactly say that I feel at home here, but certainly my actual home in England, in rural Suffolk, seemed extremely tame and grey after the dramas I’d been through in Fontinella, and the writer’s life, back at my desk, back at my computer, seemed especially plain and uneventful. Doing spellchecks and word counts, you’ll be unsurprised to hear, doesn’t contain quite the same raw exhilaration as launching a Volkswagen Beetle into the void.

I didn’t bother to tell people back home much about what had happened to me in Fontinella. Of course I told them that the production had ended in chaos, that Josh Martin had been a crazy man, that it had all been insane and unsatisfactory, but I didn’t tell the half of it. I didn’t mention my involvement with the automotive freak show, and I very definitely didn’t mention my brief, tarnished moment as a trans-vestite stunt jumper. I didn’t even tell my girlfriend Caroline about that. I thought it would sound either too fantastical, like I was making it up, or worse, that I was boasting.

Before the cast and crew of the movie went their separate ways, we all exchanged email addresses and promised to keep in touch. Nobody from the automotive freak show made such promises, and naturally nobody from the movie kept in touch with me, but after a month or so I did get an email from Angelo Sterling with a link to an online news item about a dead body that had been found in the burned-out wreck of a stolen Volkswagen Beetle that had spun off the road and ended up at the bottom of a canyon some way north of Los Angeles.

At that moment Josh Martin was still missing in action and Angelo thought it might be him. I had my doubts. It seemed too neat, a little too laden with poetic justice. And for what it’s worth, I was right. A week later I got another email from Angelo. They’d identified the body as that of a former security guard and tow-truck operator, though they didn’t mention his brief career as a snake wrangler, which I thought was a shame.

And shortly thereafter Angelo did manage to track down Josh Martin, who, as it turned out, despite being broke, was alive and in some ways perfectly well, and with Cadence’s help was in the process of reinventing himself as a maker of music videos for Latino rap bands. I learned this in another email from Angelo, but I didn’t read much into it, even though he told me I should stand by and ‘await developments’.

And then I got a very unexpected phone call from him. The production of Volkswagens and Veloci-raptors was suddenly back on, he said. He’d been busy. Having found Josh Martin he’d made him an offer he couldn’t, and certainly didn’t, refuse. I wasn’t party to the fine print of the arrangement, but I think Angelo must have agreed to pay off some of Josh Martin’s debts, and in exchange he took over ownership of the movie.

It sounded like a pretty good deal for Josh Martin, though far less good for Angelo, I thought. I couldn’t see that Volkswagens and Velociraptors was anything worth owning, but what did I know? The next thing I heard, Angelo had managed to find backing from one of the mini-major studios and then we were back in business. Well, I wasn’t, not really, not personally. Grateful though Angelo was for all the work I’d put in revising the script, he was taking the movie in a different direction. He’d written a new draft of the screenplay, and although it was very different from the novel, it was, he said, completely faithful in spirit. He thought I’d be very happy with what he’d done. He was now writer, producer, star and director of the movie. I guessed it was what he’d always wanted. He said I should come out for a week, visit the set, maybe bring my girlfriend, come and see that not all movies were made the way Josh Martin tried to make them.

♦

And that’s why, in the loose company of a lot of other people, I’m standing here in Burbank, on the sound stage, waiting for a Volkswagen Beetle to be filled with cement, a scene that bears not even the slightest resemblance to anything that happened in my original novel. That’s all right by me. I have no false pride, not much real pride either. We’re in the world of illusion, naturally, and it comes as no surprise to learn that the car here is not really being filled with real cement. They’re using some kind of lightweight, silicon-based, non-setting, but nevertheless utterly convincing, substitute. They have experts who specialise in this stuff and make it look authentic: nice work if you can get it.

In fact there are now video clips on the web that show what actually happens when you fill a Beetle with cement. Nothing at all happens for quite some time until the tyres blow because of all the increased weight, then the windows pop out from the internal pressure, and then cement flows out through every seam and crevice of the car; slowly at first, then very rapidly. It’s sort of interesting though it’s really not all that exciting.

But this is the movies. This will be far more dramatic, more visually intense, far cooler. I know this because I’ve seen the storyboards. This movie Beetle, which isn’t a real Beetle at all of course, just a prop, just a construct, will fill up like a balloon. Tyres, windows and windscreen will remain miraculously intact, and the car will bulge, expand, become stretched to breaking point, until it is close to spherical. There will be all sorts of tension. Then the car will explode, violently, disastrously, but gracefully, in ultra-slow motion, seen from multiple angles by multiple cameras. Cement and Volkswagen components will then fly in all directions, carving parabolas of glittering, spinning debris and light as they’re propelled from the centre, expelled outwards, falling with infinite, balletic slowness, each following its own natural trajectory.

And then, just when things are starting to settle, from the centre of the explosion, from the heart of the remains of the exploded Beetle, a figure will very slowly emerge, a man, a man covered in glop, his features and body caked in cement substitute, but even so you can see he’s no ordinary man. He is a big man, strong, dense, heavily muscled, a mountainous monster of a man, and if you know your freak-show personnel you will certainly recognise him as Motor-head Phil. He looks good. He’s been working out a lot. The muscles are bigger and more pumped, the bulge that used to be around his waist is long gone. He’s a man who’s found his second act.

He stands there alone, very still, very powerful, the fake cement running down him like lava, evoking a world of movies of varying degrees of cheapness and popularity: The Incredible Hulk, Swamp Thing, Hell Boy, and no doubt a lot of others that I’ve never heard of. This, I’m told, is perfectly intentional. It’s playfully, knowingly self-referential: it’s a homage. The kids love this stuff. But here’s the twist. While Motorhead Phil is pulling himself together, shaking off the effects of the explosion, he’s suddenly attacked from all sides by velociraptors, swarms of them, a pack, a horde, an exaltation, a murder. He’s doomed. It won’t end well. Or quickly.

Of course we won’t see all of this today. We won’t see very much of anything. But we will, at least, sooner or later, see the car being filled. That, at least is being done for real, in real time, here on the sound stage. The explosion will be done later, elsewhere, using a scaled-down model. Then it will be computer enhanced. Then the shots of Motorhead Phil will be cut in. Then the velociraptors will be digitally inserted. What we’re watching here and now is a necessary part of the process, but in truth, at least when you’ve been standing around for half a day, it certainly doesn’t seem like the most interesting part.

I’ve come back to California by myself. Again Caroline decided not to come, and I didn’t try to persuade her. She said she’d feel like a gatecrasher, and she had a point. I feel much like a gatecrasher myself, even though without me there’d be no party at all.

There’s been idle talk that some later scenes may be shot on a beach in Baja, in Mexico, where the living is easy and the union regulations lax. There’s a trailer park down there they could use. How this would fit in with what’s already been shot in Fon-tinella I have no idea. But if it happens then we’ll all go down there and perhaps Caroline will join me at last; or perhaps she won’t. I find myself vaguely wondering what Josh Martin would have thought about the movie being shot in Mexico, but in general I’ve stopped wondering what Josh Martin would think about anything.

Beside me on the sound stage, watching events, or non-events, are Leezza and Barry. They are together, happy together, a couple, an item, a partnership, a love thing. Who’d have thought it? Well, lots of people probably, the sort of people who understand the human heart a little differently from the way I do, the sort of people who like happy endings.

It turns out Leezza wasn’t trying to kill Barry after all. She was trying to motivate him, trying to give him an incentive to lose weight, to encourage him to get out of his car, to do something with his life. Having sex with me all over her Beetle while forcing Barry to watch was part of the same battle plan. Go figure, as they say. It worked too, I suppose.

Leezza is now employed on the movie as a stunt driver, a good career move for her, and the kind of obvious, sensible use of resources that might even have occurred to Josh Martin. And Barry? Well, Barry has indeed been losing weight, effectively and decisively, but under medical supervision so as to ensure that it’s not too much too fast. He looks better: how could he not? He’s got a long way to go, no doubt, but he’s cleaned up his act, cleaned up himself. At least he’s moving around now, walking, driving, getting back to his own self, whatever the hell that was.

He now turns to me with a warmth and friendliness I find surprising, considering all that’s happened between us, and says, “So, Ian, is this the way you imagined it?”

If you hear a screaming that comes across the sky, across the tarmac, across the speedway or the sound stage, you shouldn’t worry. It’s probably not a flying bomb. It’s probably not heralding an explosion. The chances are it’s just the engine of a Volkswagen Beetle being stressed to breaking point, being thrashed to within an inch of its air-cooled life. Alternatively it may be the sound of the poor author trying to express himself.