Working on a film job sounded like great fun when the position came up, so I accepted it excitedly. The timing was terrific, too, as it was scheduled after Richard’s and my gig in Colorado, and it was going to take place in NYC, of which I had become very fond. The crew was from Germany and consisted of the director (his pretty wife ended up coming along, too, for the ride), a production coordinator, the director’s assistant, the art director, and the lead actor. The film was a suspense thriller for German television whose story took place in Manhattan. The person in charge of putting together the NY team was my friend Kayla, who had successfully helped another German crew film a segment of their documentary in New York. That crew recommended her to this one.

 

Unfortunately, other commitments meant that Kayla didn’t have much time before this film crew arrived to get everything organized. It was a scramble to find a van at the last minute, as well as a gaffer, cameraman, sound man, and clapper loader (the person who loads the raw film stock into camera magazines). I was to serve as continuity, which I figured was something I could handle, but I was also supposed to do makeup and wardrobe. Makeup was something I hadn’t bothered with personally since high school, let alone the fact that I had never had any experience with applying makeup for a camera, so that didn’t seem like a good fit; but Kayla assured me it would be easy. The wardrobe position on this shoot simply meant that I needed to keep track of the clothes that the film crew brought with them for the actor, she said.

 

The director had been looking for a bargain and that was why he hired Kayla, with her scant experience. And he was looking for non-union labor as well. Kayla, taking very seriously his desire to keep expenses as low as possible, also figured that I could stand in as the actress starring opposite the lead male character for the one scene in which her appearance was required. The director and producers hadn’t wanted to pay her expenses and fees for such a small bit of work. When Kayla suggested this, it didn’t sound particularly onerous—maybe even kind of a kick—so I agreed to that as well.

 

I was staying with Kayla during this job and helped her as best I could to prepare for the shoot, but I didn’t have many skills or contacts to offer. For the wardrobe, Kayla rigged up a wooden closet rod along one side of the interior of the van using duct tape. This looked a little dubious to me, but what did I know? We also had to scramble to find places where we could shoot, as Kayla was serving as the location scout and had been out of town until a couple days before shooting was to start. She persuaded a friend who had a convertible to ride around with her with the top down, though, so that she could spot some good places, and she managed to get some permissions to use some decent locations. This seemed promising.

 

Still, everything was seeming so kluged together that I was feeling nervous, but I knew that Kayla was bright and capable, so I figured it would all come together at the last minute. And I knew that the last film crew had been thrilled with her work, which was why they had recommended her.

 

The crew arrived and I was relieved to find that the actor seemed like a nice guy. I spent the most time with him, even somewhat embarrassingly intimate time as I often helped him to get dressed in some bathroom in some office building, tying his tie for him (thank God Kayla taught me how to do that before the shoot), and handing him his clothes to change into, taking his other clothes to hang neatly on hangers. I powdered his face to take off the shine, but other than that, I didn’t do much makeup. I don’t know if the filmmakers could tell I didn’t know what I was doing and figured it didn’t matter with a male actor so much anyway, or whether they hadn’t planned on doing much in the first place. I hoped it was the latter.

 

I had a Polaroid to take pictures for continuity, and that seemed to go reasonably well. I ended up doing pretty much everything that they didn’t have someone else assigned to do, actually, as the low person on the totem pole. After I did my continuity check and the crew started filming, I would sometimes guard the van, a necessity when shooting in Manhattan. The gaffer turned out to be a good guy, teaching me about lighting and gels as the job progressed. The German production coordinator seemed sort of goofy, reminding me now, as I think about him, of that Sacha Baron Cohen character, Brüno, if Brüno wore Buddy Holly-type glasses. The director was a grumpy classic, imperious and terse, looking a little like Otto Preminger with a Van Dyke beard. Van Dykes were hip back in the late Eighties.

 

The days ended up incredibly long. Because the director wanted to film on the cheap and we weren’t union labor, we just got paid a day rate and he could have us work as long as he wanted, sometimes 18 hours. We often grabbed food on the fly, gobbling down something we nabbed from a deli on the street where we were parked to film a scene. At one point, I was trying to snatch a quick late-night bite as I was famished and we had been working since sun-up without any breaks whatsoever, and the duct tape that held up the clothes rod peeled off, dumping the expensive wardrobe onto the dirty floor of the funky van. “You must take care of the wardrobe,” the director informed me crisply.

 

I felt totally mortified, and that night, since Kayla had other plans, I needed to find a place to park the van on the upper east side of Manhattan. It was a big old clunky thing, not easy to parallel park, and most of the available spaces were only large enough for a Smart Car. Miraculously, I found a place, but I was feeling so stressed by this job that I went to Kayla’s apartment and cried. My usual way of dealing with stress.

 

But the job was only half over. The next day, I had my stint as the stand-in for the actress. They put me in a blond wig and a black velvet cape, and they filmed at night, having me look away from the camera. The director’s assistant coached me, telling me that, although they wanted my right hand propped on the dashboard, they wanted me to curl my fingers so that my nails wouldn’t be visible. It was then that it really sunk in what a bad idea it had been not to hire a professional actress. I had the hands and fingernails of a carpenter and mountain biker. An actress would have had well-manicured and polished nails, hands that looked smooth and feminine. I was starting to feel like I was in one of those dreams where I have to take a high school Chemistry test and not only had I not studied at all, I’m wearing only my underwear.

 

Then one day as we were filming near Times Square, the director needed me to stay on the set in order to do continuity checks; so we left the production coordinator to guard the van. We had found a parking place unexpectedly easily, so we had to scramble to film, and instead of stashing my purse out of sight the way I normally would have, I left it on the seat. I figured it wouldn’t matter since the production coordinator would be guarding the van anyway. Imagine my unease when I saw him strolling onto the perimeter of the shoot, his hands in his pockets. I asked him who was guarding the van and he said it was fine. I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but I needed to pay close attention to the filming so I wasn’t able to pursue it.

 

When we needed to change the actor’s wardrobe for a separate set of scenes, he and I hustled back to the van. When we climbed in, we found that someone had broken in and stolen my purse and his bag, which contained his wallet and an expensive camera and Walkman.

 

For anyone who has never had their purse or wallet stolen, let me tell you, it is one the biggest pains-in the ass that you could ever imagine. Fortunately, someone on the set had an early cell phone, so I was able to call Richard at home and have him cancel all our credit cards immediately. This also included my debit card. But I had also lost my address book with all my contacts, including the publishing contacts that George Garrett had given me to approach about my novel, my journal—where I kept track of absolutely everything—my asthma inhaler, my favorite pin at the time, the cutest, most compact little umbrella I’d ever owned (a gift from my aunt Connie), and all my cash. That wasn’t a lot in absolute terms, but in relative terms, given how little Richard and I lived on in those days, it was significant.

 

Usually, whenever I was in New York, I took half my credit cards out of my purse and stashed them in my pocket in case my purse got snatched, but ironically, I was scrambling so much on this job that I worried they might fall out sometime without my noticing; so I had put everything back in my purse. Fortunately, I did have my keys in my pocket. But that was all.

 

The actor was furious at his loss and the production coordinator only slightly chastened, because, evidently, he was a moron. Plus, he hadn’t lost anything. It was a depressing development but on the last day of the job, when it looked like maybe everything was going to turn out okay and the director was going to end up with the footage he wanted and he was starting to show a sliver of bonhomie, we suffered another serious setback: The inexperienced clapper loader flashed the film as he was loading it into the cartridge, ruining it. This plunged everyone on the crew into a deep state of gloom. There was no time to re-shoot what had been lost.

 

That night, as was tradition, the producers paid for a nice dinner for everyone on the crew. Since the van needed to be guarded and the hierarchy in film is quite structured, I ended up being the one to guard it. The art director, who was a very nice man, came out with a meal for me to eat in the van. I had never been so glad for a job to end in my life. And by now, I had worked some pretty funky jobs.

 

When it came time to get paid, I was fortunately paid in cash because I had no credit cards and no debit card. The production coordinator made a big deal of counting out every single bill, including a couple of hundred bucks they threw in so that I could replace my purse and its contents, and pretended to withhold the last two, snapping them theatrically in the air, so that I would have to stand with my hand out longer than was necessary. What an asshole.

 

But there was actually a happy ending. During one of the times we were filming on the street, a friend of one of the New York crew came by and stopped to chat to her friend. I was introduced to her and it turned out that she was an art curator. She had curated an exhibit of Guatemalan fabrics to be held in the vast lobby of some big deal corporate offices, and when she heard that I had lived recently in Costa Rica, she gave me an invitation to the reception, which included a guest. Richard was flying in right before the opening (he was getting ready to help Paul drive a rented truck full of antiques from NYC to San Francisco), so I met him at the airport and we went directly to the show, which had exquisite fabrics on display and delicious finger foods to eat. The bouncer at the door gave Richard and me a suspicious look when we arrived—we definitely didn’t fit the profile of most of the guests—but when he saw our invitation, he waved us in. We had a blast!

 

The next morning, I dropped off a couple of cover copy blurbs that I had managed to work in while I was in New York. Then I was on the plane to Denver, where I would pick up our car and meet up with Richard and Paul when they came through on their way to San Francisco.