Gravity’s Volkswagen

Six

I gathered together a few feeble breakfast remnants, picked at them, and waited for something to happen. I suppose it did eventually, though I soon saw I might have to redefine my notions of ‘something’ and ‘happen’. A lot of slothful, half-hearted activity eventually coalesced around one of the trailers. A scene was being shot that I could just about recognise as having something to do with my book. It was based on an episode from early in the narrative when two of the Volkswagen survivors first discover what turn out to be velociraptor eggs. In the novel the discovery is made in the ticket office of a wrecked London Underground station. But here the eggs were to be found clinging to the underside of a Baja Beetle: a particularly fine, rugged, bright yellow example of the breed was being used.

The ‘action’, and there’s an interesting word, now consisted of Natasha and Ronnie the dwarf lying on the ground shining torches up under the Baja’s chassis, saying very little but doing a whole lot of reacting. At least that’s what I was led to believe. Actors, crew, camera, lights, sound boom, were all arrayed at ground level, and what with all the reflectors and tripods and ancillary people standing around, I couldn’t see a thing.

Certainly to the untrained eye, such as mine, it seemed that nothing was going on, but then I had only the vaguest idea of what was supposed to be going on. Movies, I knew, were created by a slow, painstaking process. Perhaps everything was going absolutely to plan. True, Josh Martin looked stressed and manic, but from what little I’d seen, that might well have been his default mode. Everybody else looked untroubled, or at least indifferent.

Hours went by, and I realised that nobody had lied about the essential dullness of hanging around a movie set with nothing to do. In fact even those people who did have something to do seemed to be finding it pretty dull too. But I did get my first glimpse of how the movie bought its silence. At rare and widely spaced intervals they were eventually ready to do a take, at which time there was much mumbling into walkie-talkies, and then someone, usually Cadence, my greeter from the previous night, hopped on a bicycle, carrying a small bag of money, and pedalled off to the speedway next door. Shortly thereafter all the noise stopped, there was a shout of, “Action,” the cameras rolled for perhaps thirty seconds, the actors acted, then there was a shout of, “Cut,” perhaps followed by, “Let’s do it again,” or, “Check the gate,” and when they were finished, at most a couple of minutes later, there’d be more use of the walkie-talkies and then the noise from next door would start up again. It seemed a mad, laborious and ramshackle system, but evidently a workable one.

Events continued to unfold slowly, and most of them barely counted as events at all. Actors and crew moved from one area of the trailer park to another.

Shots were set up, silence fell, performances were given, then it was over for a while, and then the process repeated itself again, and again. It wasn’t glamorous and it wasn’t any fun to watch, but why should it have been? It was an industrial process, like making pig iron.

I amused myself briefly by looking at some of the Beetles that had been created for the film. They now looked a lot less impressive than they had last night. I could see that the spoilers, fins and so on were flimsy constructions, made of cardboard and papier mache, and glued clumsily to the underlying car bodies. The essential blotchy, ham-fistedness of the painting was now visible too. Still, I told myself, it might all come over very different on film. I also looked around hoping I might see the models or ani-matronics or robots or puppets or whatever they were using to replicate the velociraptors, but there was no sign of them anywhere.

I was treated well enough by the people I encountered. At the beginning of the day, naturally enough, they didn’t know who I was. I could have been an accountant or a union official, and they viewed me with the appropriate suspicion. But gradually word got out that I was ‘the author’ and everyone treated me far more sympathetically, although sometimes they displayed the sort of chilly kindness you might extend to a sickly old man you knew wasn’t long for this world. I smiled a lot, and exchanged the occasional word, but I certainly didn’t have anything that counted as a conversation.

Eventually the long day came to an end. The shooting was declared to be over and we had dinner.

It was a surprisingly humble affair. Weren’t directors supposed to cook huge spaghetti dinners for the whole cast and crew, and thereby create an aura of festive and artistic bonhomie? Not here. A number of picnic tables had been set up in one of the slightly pleasanter corners of the trailer park, but these things are only comparative. Worse than that, there appeared to be a fierce hierarchical structure at work. The bright, lean, hip, young, multi-ethnic crew members crowded together at one of the tables, while the surly, stocky, older white men sat at another. Meanwhile the ‘talent’, which included the actors, Josh Martin and what looked like an inner circle of his cronies — cinematographer, assistant director et al. — were at another. Each table tried hard to avoid all contact with the others.

I didn’t feel I belonged in any of these groups but I sat with the ‘talent’, between the two actors playing Natasha and Ronnie: I had no idea what their actual names were. Nobody was very chatty, certainly not with me, but not much with each other either. They did talk just a little bit about work, about acting and film-making, but not about the work they were actually doing here. They talked about other jobs they’d had, about jobs they hoped to get in the future, about the times they’d worked with David Carradine or Sally Kellerman, but they didn’t say a word about the film they were actually making.

Given how slowly things had happened during the day I was amazed at how quickly everybody ate and left the tables. It was like a school canteen. There was nothing for me to do but go back to my trailer. I was tired: the jet lag, the strange surroundings, the endless smiling at people I didn’t know. I thought about calling my girlfriend back in England, and realised I should have done it much earlier. In England it was now the middle of the night. She wouldn’t want to hear from me that much.

There was a TV in my trailer. It only got half a dozen stations but they were all strange and foreign enough to keep me entertained, or they would have been in other circumstances. As soon as I started watching I dozed off, and then kept waking up with a start, not knowing where I was. I also kept hearing, or thought I did, loud, violent, not quite identifiable sounds, though I couldn’t be sure whether they were coming from the TV, the outside world or my dreams.

And then there was a knock on my door. It was gentle, considerate, definitely not a Josh Martin production. I opened up and there stood Cadence.

“How you doing?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said.

“Jet lag?”

“Sure.”

“Bored?”

“Oh yeah,” I said.

“Thought you might be. Here.”

She was carrying a couple of bottles of Mexican beer. She handed me one and kept one for herself.

“I guess you have beer in England. But this is a little bit of Americana.”

“Mexicana?” I said, looking at the label on the bottle.

“Same difference.”

I wasn’t really in much shape to make cheerful conversation, and Cadence seemed less than a great conversationalist; still I wanted to be friendly, and on my first full day in Fontinella it seemed rather more civilised to be talking to somebody than to be sitting alone and falling asleep watching TV.

“Come in, sit down,” I said.

She did and looked around with a mixture of envy and resentment.

“This is really comparatively luxurious,” she said. “So, do you want to talk about literature?”

“Er, maybe another time,” I said.

“OK. Want to talk about Volkswagens?”

“Why not?”

“I’d never even been in one till I started working on this movie.”

“No?”

“No. It’s not really a car the brothers drive.”

“That’s true in England too.”

And then she asked me a terrible question: “So what kind of Beetle do you drive?”

The fact was I’d owned and driven a lot of Volkswagens in my time, a number of Beetles, a camper and one very smart Karmann Ghia. Some had been good, a couple had been lemons, but on balance I was still very Beetle positive. However, what I liked best about Beetles was their past, their back-story, and the fact that they brought with them a trailer full of cultural and historical baggage. I wasn’t a full-blown Beetle obsessive myself, not really, not compared to some of the obsessives I’d met, but I completely saw how you could be. Above all, I thought, Beetles were great fun to write about; rather more fun than to own or drive. And as I said, Volkswagens and Veloci-raptors had been written a while back. I had moved on, not very far, and certainly not any great distance upwards, but the sad truth was that these days I drove a Ford Focus.

I tried my best to explain this to Cadence, but she didn’t like it. She really didn’t. I was disappointing her all over again. Back in England, not driving a Beetle had never seemed like a cause for shame, but here and now, in California on this movie set, it seemed to demonstrate that I was a complete fake and trifler.

Cadence finished her beer and said, “I’d better be getting back.”

“Must you?” I asked.

She shrugged. If I wasn’t a real Beetle enthusiast then it seemed I wasn’t entitled to her company. I went to bed but I slept no better than I had earlier. I heard the same sounds as before, though now they seemed much stranger. Some of them were definitely human voices: it could have been the sound of partying, of people whooping it up and having a good time, but it could just as easily have been the sound of angry people arguing and shouting at each other. And sometimes it didn’t sound human at all, as if it might have been dogs or wolves, or for all I knew, velociraptors.