It's All In the Playing (24 page)

The crew seemed remarkably calm about what was to transpire. They were not the same crew that had conducted the screen test.

The camera crew was interested in the science of energy surrounding the event, while makeup, hair, props, grips, and production people were simply intrigued as to why Brandon Stoddard and ABC would put up millions for this stuff.

Kevin sat in front of me. He was perspiring under the lights. Tina, the makeup artist, came in and wiped him off. I wondered how she’d feel about wiping off Tom McPherson or John. She rolled her eyes slightly as she turned from Kevin and returned to her place behind the camera. I saw she and Kisuna exchange a hostile look. I didn’t understand. I had noticed that Tina made one or two remarks about Kisuna on the set, but had just put it down to between-scenes byplay. Tina was a petite blonde with a strong personality and professional workmanship who could sometimes be insensitive to other people’s insecurities. I recognized that because I was the same way. She was in charge of the makeup trailer, which included other makeup artists, body makeup, and hairdressers. As far as I could tell, she ran a tight operation by never overlooking anything anybody else did, and thought everyone else should too.

As Kevin went into trance I wondered about the exchanged glances between Tina and Kisuna. On-the-set nuance in relationships always intrigues me. A movie set is a mini-society. It has its leaders and its followers. It has people who need and love power, and others who simply do their work for the sake of it. Since jobs are difficult to come by, you can sense a priority of survival permeating
the ranks of the crews. Each crew member is utterly professional, yet each also watches the professionalism of fellow workers. What I find most interesting is how each member deals with the mistakes or unintended lack of professionalism of a co-worker. No one wants to be responsible for the dismissal of anyone else, yet they all know that the chain of a crew is only as strong as its weakest link. And the watchful surveying eye of management is ever present, sometimes even present in the personage of the stooge who has been singled out to report everything.

The crew
is
the movie business. As I’ve said, they are artists and mechanics combined. Not one person who makes the deals or handles the money can hold a candle to the artistic expertise required of a lighting technician.

Yet, as I watched them prepare for our scene I was once again reminded that the crew secures all the time it needs to insure a good take, while we actors are the least prepared and somehow are never given enough time to improve what we do. We can rehearse in our trailers all we want, but it’s not the same when we find ourselves on the set with lights, props, scenery, and camera angles to deal with. Yet we are self-conscious about asking for more time to acquaint ourselves with our roles and the technical adjustments necessary to playing them well.

A cameraman can stop a take because we actors lean into a shadow. A makeup person can take twenty minutes to redo a face while everyone waits. But if an actor stops and says, “Wait a minute, I don’t feel it yet,” everybody thinks he’s temperamental.

For those reasons, even though Kevin was cooperative, I wanted him to complain if he felt uncomfortable, ask for another rehearsal if he felt unprepared with his lines. But he, like most of us, felt that the fifty crew members waiting and prepared were more important than what the audience comes to see—the actors on the screen.

Kevin closed his eyes and began to breathe deeply. The cameras rolled. The clapper boy signified the take for each camera. I looked around at the crew. They were spellbound, and suspicious.

Within a few minutes John came through and proceeded to greet me according to script and as though it were the first time we had talked together.

A still-camera man hired by ABC publicity was shooting stills with a “blimp” on his camera so the shutter wouldn’t be heard by the sound man.

Brad and the camera crew sat fascinated as Kevin’s personality seemed to change completely. They strained at the biblical lingo coming out of his mouth.

The scene with John completed, Tom McPherson came through. He immediately asked for a blindfold and then stood up. The focus puller quickly adjusted for the change of move. Tom walked around the room to a closet concealed in the wall and pulled out a glass mug. Then, with the blindfold tightly tied, he poured tea into the mug from a distance of about a foot above it. He said he saw the water as luminescence rather than liquid. The crew was astonished that he didn’t spill the tea. So was I. He walked to the fireplace and, still blindfolded, extracted a poker from behind a chair and began to poke the fire as he delivered his lines. The focus puller adjusted again. By now the crew was open-mouthed. Tom returned to his original position in the chair, finished his lines, and left Kevin’s body so that John could return and complete the scene.

The scene ended, and before Butler said “Cut,” John looked at me and said, “Will there be other requirements of channel speaking or is the scene terminated?”

I looked around at the crew. The cameras and lights seemed to be operating independently of them.

“Does anyone have anything they’d like to ask John or Tom while we’re here?” I asked.

Nobody said anything. Then finally Stan said, “Ask what kind of response this show is going to get when it goes on the air.”

I turned back to John. He thought a moment.

“It will sufficiently change the consciousness of those who view it,” he said.

I sat forward.

“Will that be all then?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Except for one more thing.”

“Yes?” he said, cocking his head questioningly.

“Some of the crew wonder if you and Tom would come through later after work so they can ask you questions. But only if Kevin is not too exhausted.”

“Yes,” said John. “However, the instrument’s subconscious is jumbled at the moment. We suggest a rest period before our meeting later tonight.”

The crew murmured thank-yous, John left, and Kevin rolled back to consciousness.

The crew applauded and we knew that an event in movie-making had been captured.

But it wasn’t to be that easy. At least not for me. When the cameras came around on me for my side of the scene, the decision had to be made as to whether Kevin would go into trance again so that the entities could give me their stage lines.

Kevin was too tired and the entities had said it was difficult to access Kevin’s subconscious (where the lines lay) anyway. Kevin couldn’t sit there and play the entities himself, because he didn’t know what they had done. And when he made a well-intentioned attempt at it, it was too funny for me to react to. So the only solution available to me was one that had often happened when I worked with an uncooperative actor who wouldn’t stick around for offstage lines on my close-up. I said my own lines to a blank wall while Kisuna, the script girl, read the lines of the entities.

*   *   *

Later that night, after shooting, some of the crew remained for the promised session with Kevin.

I checked with the teamsters out on the road—the guys who drive the trucks carrying all the gear—inviting them also. Most of them declined with that “thank you, but we think it’s weird” expression on their faces.

Then, just as the session was about to begin, Sachi and Simo came in with a bundle of white fluff curled in a basket, blinking its jet-black eyes and wagging its tail. He was an American Eskimo puppy, the likes of which I had admired in a house where we shot. Simo was giving it to me as a late Christmas present. The little puppy brought everyone comfortably down to earth and the woman whose house we were shooting in insisted on holding him because his relaxed energy was so calming.

Sachi had a date, but Simo stayed to watch the session.

The crew took comfortable places along the walls and on the floor of the living room at Kevin’s feet. There was a hushed respect about them, as though they knew they were in the presence of a phenomenon that they acknowledged but couldn’t quite understand. I could feel them look to me as a common leveler. They were seeing me in my element—the element that had motivated me to write the book and the script. They knew I was one of them, but I also had become part of the “other world,” as they put it.

I sat next to Kevin. Kisuna sat a few people away from me to my right. Tina sat on the couch across the room next to Jach Pursel, who seemed to be enjoying the techniques of another trance channeler. I had felt Jach’s energy balancing the set during the shooting that day, as some of the more astonished members of the crew were attempting to sustain their equilibrium during the time the entities were using Kevin’s body.

Cynthia, the owner of the house, held Shinook on
her lap. Some crew members were drinking, some smoking, some simply there to go along with the spiritual ride.

Kevin explained the phenomenon of trance channeling in a little more detail than we had had time to outline in the screenplay. The crew asked him what was appropriate to inquire about. He said most anything. While acknowledging the presence of Shinook, Kevin thought it was as good a time as any to explain that animals reincarnate, too, but always as animals. They belong to a collective soul group and are here with us humans on earth for karmic reasons which could easily have to do with experiences we had with them in lifetimes past. I, by the way, felt such feelings for Shinook the moment I laid eyes on him.

So Brad, his camera crew, a few teamsters who had elected to come, and most of the rest of the production crew sat respectfully silent as Kevin went into trance once again for our benefit.

When Tom came through, several people asked about past lives either with their children or people they were involved with.

One man asked if he had had a lifetime as an American Indian. Another woman asked if her son was her soul mate.

Then something happened that was personally revealing for all of us.

Kisuna raised her hand, brushing her blond hair from her eyes and sitting in the lotus position as she talked.

“Excuse me,” she began, “but I find myself involved with a very uncomfortable relationship on the set.”

We all looked around uneasily, some no doubt wondering whom she meant. She rapidly made that clear.

“I desperately need clarification as to why Tina is acting the way she is toward me. Her attitude is very difficult for me to work with.”

Tears streamed down Kisuna’s face. She choked slightly before going on. “I realize in many ways,” she continued, “that it is inappropriate for me to bring up publicly, but I need some help because I am making more mistakes than usual in my work and I would like to settle it with her with love.” She hesitated. “Tina?”

Everyone’s attention immediately shifted over to Tina, who was chatting sotto voce with her neighbor as though she took neither Kisuna nor the spiritual session very seriously. She stopped when she was directly addressed and suddenly looked acutely embarrassed—the more surprising because she was usually so well in control of herself.

“Please, Tina,” Kisuna was saying, “I would really like to know why you are doing this to me.”

I had never seen such an intimate movie-set problem made public like this before.

Kisuna was laying out all her feelings in front of the crew, and because of her honesty, Tina was in a position of public scrutiny. I felt deeply for both women.

But Tina said nothing.

“Could we talk?” asked Kisuna.

Tina, understandably very uncomfortable, looked over at her. “We have nothing to talk about,” she then said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Kisuna looked to Tom for direction.

Tom responded. He sat up.

“Please,” he began as the room full of people watched, riveted. “Would you, Tina, please come forward?”

Tina remained in her seat. I felt slightly sorry for her. Public airing is never easy for anybody.

Tom turned to Kisuna. “Would you stand and come forward, please?”

Kisuna stood up. She walked to the center of the room in front of Tom.

“Tina,” repeated Tom. “Would you please come forward?”

Tina looked at me. I gently gestured she should do it. She shrugged and slowly stood up. Then she moved toward Kisuna.

“Now, ladies,” said Tom. “Would you please embrace each other?”

Neither of them moved.

“Oh,” said Kisuna, “I find this extremely difficult. But I will.”

She raised her arms.

“Tina?” said Tom.

“No,” said Tina.

Kisuna, her arms outstretched ready to embrace Tina, found herself being stared down by a defiant look.

“It would,” said Tom, “be a way of starting to resolve this conflict. Perhaps if you just looked at each other and mentioned the word
love.”

“No, I can’t,” said Tina.

At that moment Kisuna embraced her—but Tina’s arms remained at her sides. I was shocked. I had not realized their relationship had deteriorated so badly.

Kisuna finally dropped her arms, her attempt at reconciliation thwarted. Tina quietly turned around and returned to her seat.

Tom said nothing. It was clear that even spiritual entities could contribute only so much to solving human problems. After that it was up to the people themselves.

Kisuna returned to her place. There was nothing more to be said. After an awkward moment of acknowledged conflict, Yudi Bennet, our female assistant director, spoke up.

“I would like to know, Mr. McPherson, who is doing the stealing in this company. As we know, quite a few prop items necessary to filming are missing, and is there anything I can do to stop it?”

Tom was on the spot. It is karmically an invasion of privacy to expose someone from a perspective more knowing than our own.

“It is up to the persons involved to decide whether they will continue,” he said. “Let me say, though, that nothing will seriously prevent the shooting of this film from continuing. You are all together on this venture because you have been together before. You are involved with innovative communication and you will accomplish it. More than that, the goal of the project is your own individual growth. The project will serve as a catalyst for that growth. Be aware of yourselves during the shooting and you will understand what we mean.”