Chapter 64 - The Filmy Play Takes Shape
A few days later David Holmes showed up at The Hall and was introduced to the crew. Sody sat everyone in the chairs and Monique slipped a CD into the sound system player. She passed the CD case around the circle and everyone saw it was the soundtrack for Oceans Twelve. When they'd listened to the whole thing Sody looked around and said, "Any questions?"
Gwen looked at David and said, "You can do something that good for our show?"
He looked back and said, "Better."
So that part of the production was in the bag. Now she looked at Sody and asked, "Have you figured out how to do the entire production in here? We seem to have an action story going, with the assassins attempting the assassination, and George thwarting them, protecting his new squeeze and making it with her, all that stuff. Is this going to be all done on stage like a play, plus the in and out of the screen thing?"
"I don' think so," said Soderberg. "We have to do something more, expand the stage out into the theater. A lot of people are doing that kind of thing, sort of performance art, actors out in the seats, engaging the audience. But we have something special, the in and out of the screen thing, and we can use the rest of the theater for most of the action sequences. The theater's not made for that, but we can adapt it as much as possible. We'll have some stuff going on in the balcony, and in the aisles, and up in the overhead lighting gantries. Some people in the seats won't be able to see some stuff, but we tell them they can stand up, move around. It'll be a little chaotic, and some people won't like it, but, you know, we gotta try it. I'll make the action sequences as simple as possible, and we'll do a lot of stuff on the stage, and remember half or more of the production will be on film. Maybe we should do, like, 75% on film and 25% live. I don't know yet, and I don't feel like I have to figure all that out ahead of time. It will come as we write the screenplay and rehearse things."
Roger said, "What about the other actors? At the very least you need some assassins, right, even if this is some minimalist production, which it seems to be? Instead of your usual cast of hundreds, it'll be a cast of handfuls. Maybe two handfuls."
Sody said, "Minimalism. I like that. Very limited number of characters and actors, like in a play, but with lots of screen time, on film. That's all we can do with the time and sets we have."
"Seems like we do the romance stuff on stage and the action stuff on film," said Wegs. "We express the character and life of the Middle Eastern woman on stage, the talky stuff, and her falling in love with the American. The other stuff about the assassins on film."
Sody said, "Maybe. But I think the assassins have to be live too, in the theater, at least some of the time. All the characters have to be on film and on the stage."
Gale was sitting next to Wegs, and now she took hold of Wegs's hands, and said, "For the romance stuff on stage, the rehearsals, you feel like sharing him a little? If you get tired of it, maybe, I stand in, keep the show rolling?"
Wegs looked at George and said, "What about it, big guy?"
George said, "Not only will we have to rehearse those scenes a lot on stage, but I should think, given our compressed time frame here, less than five weeks now, we probably should rehearse the romance stuff on our own time, after we're done here. Like back at the hotel. I'm up for some sharing like that."
Gale and Wegs high-fived. Monique sniffed, looked disparagingly at her boss, and said, "You're not as young as you used to be. Save something for Sody and the show, ok?"
And that was it for the strategizing session. Two days later three guys showed up, also having flown the redeye from LA, good stunt type actors, two Italians and one Greek that could pass for the Middle Eastern assassins. A day later the remainder of the technical crew showed up, and the team was set. Laleh and Gwen began spending long days in the office, attending to the rest of the production details: PR, payroll, lodging and food logistics, insurance, publicity, ticketing, websites, and costumes.
Gwen told Jinny and Roger they were the security team. One of them was to cover Laleh and the other was to cover everyone else. She said if she was working twelve hour days, seven days a week, so were they. Shim sat up in the balcony with his laptop from morning till night, pecking away, writing and rewriting until Sody and the actors liked the script. Each morning he'd hand some pages to Sody, who'd read them with his morning coffee. When he understood and liked the content, he'd call the actors to the chairs on the stage, where they'd read through the narrative and dialogue together. George and Wegs never saw the script ahead of time, as they did in a normal production. They were winging it just like the musicians did each day in the studio during the Kind of Blue sessions, when Miles Davis handed them his sheets with the day’s arrangements on them. When the actors understood the dialogue and the sequences of the scenes, they would do their best to memorize their lines, and then the action would start.
Sody managed the improvisation and ad hoc realizations of Shim's screenplay masterfully, alternately driving and cajoling the actors into their performances. After a few days of feeling their way through this method and process, everyone knew there would be precious little time for after hours recreation, which pissed Gale off royally. After a ten hour day at The Hall, George and Wegs would head back to the hotel, where they would work through parts of the script they hadn't gotten down on film, or felt weren't ready for live on stage performance.
Gale found herself without any playmates, and Wegs started asking herself how much she was earning for all this hard work, sometimes wishing she was back on her yak searching for her true self in the Himalayan foothills. George was happy to be working with Sody and Wegs again, but at times longed for his patio overlooking the beautiful Italian lake with nothing more stressful during the day ahead than choosing the best wine to go with the lunch his housekeeper would prepare for him and Monique. Roger spent most of his time close to Laleh while Jinny kept watch inside and outside The Hall. He started hanging out with the stunt actors, learning how to take falls that looked realistic without getting injured. When Gale realized her time in bed with George and Wegs was going to be very limited, at best, she also started hanging out with the Italians and the Greek, who weren't chopped liver.
After two weeks of experimentation, Sody had the team and the method down, and had the production process humming along. Shim got used to writing in screenplay form, and was cranking it out, day by day. It was hard work, but new and exciting. And opening night was three weeks away. The filmy play thing was taking shape.