The true stories

I’m standing outside Il Buco, a classy little restaurant on Bond Street in the East Village. It’s snowing…kind of.

We’re shooting a winter scene. In the script, it’s a night in January. There’s a thick layer of foam covering the street. There are two lifts on either side of the camera. They stand 12 feet from the ground with two fake snow machines on top. It actually shoots big bubbles and a large fan to the left of the lift blows tiny pieces of plastic up into the air.

From the side, it doesn’t look that good. The snow falls in layers. But through the camera, it looks fantastic—it looks like it’s snowing.

After the first couple of shots, it starts raining. The foam begins to melt. The special effects crew keeps trying to reapply the foam, but it keeps melting. But the bigger problem now is that the wind has picked up and is blowing the snow past the camera. We keep moving the lift and changing the angle of the snow machine. When we get it right, the wind changes. It’s getting late, and we’re now behind schedule. We’ll probably be fighting the sun—so much for the night in January.

As moviegoers, we sit in darkened theaters. Caught up by flickering lights reflected through celluloid, the sound booms and we are transformed. But movies aren’t true. They aren’t real. We all know that. The characters on screen are actors, reading lines from a page. The things that happen to them don’t really happen.

It’s not really snowing when we shoot this scene.

But sometimes an actor can play a part, a writer can tell a story, a director can craft a performance that’s so good we believe it. We feel it through the character. We care about him. We like him or we hate him. Those are real feelings.

Not unlike the movies we watch in theaters are the stories told to me behind the scenes. Perhaps it’s because I’m enthralled with all the characters of this story—the stars, the producers, the studio executives, and the homeless men who are known for coming to the set for food. They are all interesting because they exist in a world unknown to me.

One of my newfound friends approaches. He drinks a cup of coffee. It’s steaming as he brings it to his lips.

“Cold?” he asks.

“Uh… yeah,” I reply.

“Wanna hear a story?” He begins without waiting for a response.

A production assistant on a popular television show is driving the show’s producer over the 59th Street Bridge. The traffic is terrible. The car sits in the middle of the bridge for 45 minutes. The whole time the producer is complaining into multiple cell phones, screaming at everything. Now, the PA has had a long day. He’s probably driven over the bridge and back a couple of times. About three quarters of the way back to Manhattan, he gets to the point where he can’t take it anymore. He puts the car in park, turns it off, takes the keys and throws them in the river below. He strolls away—the greatest man on earth, a hero and a legend.

Maybe it’s the way my friend tells it, but it cracks me up. He doesn’t quite act it out, but changes his demeanor just enough to indicate the two characters. I know that he tells this story a lot. He likes telling it. When the producer speaks, my friend holds his hands to his lips and yells into them. When he’s a PA, he’s quiet and holds his hands on the wheel.

And even now, at three o’clock in the morning, in the rain, when I think about the producers sitting in the car watching this all take place, my thoughts turn away from the long night ahead to the guy on the other end of the producer’s cell phone, or the producer walking the rest of the bridge on foot, cursing the whole way. I can’t help but smile.

Since then, I’ve been told the same story a couple of times—the PA, the bridge and the car keys. Sometimes it takes place on the Brooklyn Bridge, sometimes the George Washington. Sometimes it’s the producer of a different television show. Sometimes the storyteller knows the PA, sometimes it’s his friend, sometimes it’s himself.

The wind dies down, the foam doesn’t melt, and the magic is brought back to life. The snow looks good on screen. And even though we know it’s fake, it feels real.