The very first scene on our very first day was a long and complicated tracking shot on the street near the West Side Highway that involved almost the whole cast. After each take, we’d just stare at each other, waiting to hear if we needed to do it again. I didn’t know it then, but that’s sort of how it always feels. I heard Todd laugh that the people at Killer Films were going to be pissed when they saw the footage, because there was no coverage (I knew what that meant!).
That first scene was the only thing we shot in Manhattan, and when we finished, we piled into vans and drove up to a vacant camp in the Catskills, the real Stagedoor Manor, where we would shoot the rest of the film. In interviews, lots of actors say that making a movie is “like sleepaway camp.” They have no idea.
There was no phone, no TV, no internet, and no cell reception. If you weren’t working on a certain day (or a certain week), too bad. No one had a car, so you weren’t leaving. We got paid seventy-five dollars a day on the days we worked, and only on the days we worked. This is why unions matter.
The blessing was that the other cast members were wonderful. Without the aid of cell phones, we spent our days off wandering around the camp to see who else wanted to hang out. It was as close as I ever got to having a gang of neighborhood friends, like I’d seen in movies from the nineties about growing up in the seventies. Our ages ranged from twelve to twenty-five and our interests ranged from musical theater to music. Or theater.
We found a few board games in the main offices but got sick of them quickly and spent most of our time engaging in general nerdery. We held Waiting for Guffman trivia competitions and took makeshift dance classes from a cast member who had obsessively collected bootleg videos of Twyla Tharp shows. Sasha and Tiffany, the two best singers, taught each other riffs and tested them out in parallel harmony while the rest of us listened in disbelief. Casual singing became so normalized that when I went home, it took me weeks to stop peppering my conversations with melodic interludes.
I shot my first real scene about a week into our stay. That morning, I got into my awful wardrobe, a woman rubbed down my frizzy hair with fistfuls of men’s pomade, and I went to the set (a.k.a. I walked three minutes to a different part of the camp).
We did a few final rehearsals in the set of “Jill’s” bedroom, and Todd told us we were going to film the next one. Someone yelled “last looks,” which meant that three people came into the room and poked at me: the wardrobe department pulled my sleeves back down to my wrists, the hair department gave me another handful of grease, and the makeup department looked me over to make sure I hadn’t secretly applied lip gloss again, like I’d done the first day.
This new ritual of last-minute touch-ups taught me that actors could become unfilmably ugly at any moment and needed to be beautified at ten-minute intervals. At first, it felt like pampering, but very quickly it became the standard by which I measured how insecure I should feel that day.
The scene was really just a conversation between Fritzi, my character, and Jill, the object of her obsession. It was creepy content, but pretty straightforward in terms of filmmaking. Back on the first day in the city, we had filmed the whole scene at once, in an open space, with complicated blocking. It had felt like a piece of theater. This was just two people in a room talking at each other.
Once Jill had been glossed, fluffed, and shimmered and I’d been, well . . . greased, we stood on our start marks and waited for “Action.” We did the scene, just like we’d done it in rehearsals, and eventually heard Todd’s voice call “Cut” from the next room.
That was it; that was my first time filming a scene in a movie. It might have driven me to distraction had it not been so . . . ordinary. I’d only ever performed in front of an audience before. The audience was a barometer of your success or failure. The audience gave you energy; their presence filled the room with a kind of electricity that told you, This is it, this is happening! The “audience” on a film set was just your director and the perpetually bored crew. Filming a movie felt exactly like not filming a movie.
I’ve come to love film sets and see the low-key environment as an asset, but it’s still unnerving that you can finish a scene and not know how it went. Things that crack you up while you’re filming can go over like a lead balloon in the movie, and things that feel stilted and boring on set can be tense and exciting for a viewer. While you’re shooting, you rely on the director to tell you if it’s going well, and you have to trust that they’re right. With my favorite directors, at least four times per shoot I’ll think, That is a fucking terrible idea, let’s do it.
I went back to my room and wondered what we’d done. I couldn’t ask anyone for advice because none of us had ever been in a movie before. My next scene involved six actors and was my first lesson in what it feels like when a scene is not going well.