ld yell after, adding a note of farce. He, Pat, and Oakley Lehman, the stunt coordinator, were talking their way through a pivotal scene early in the movie. Paul Walker’s character is being pressed by Maddog to join the Aryan Brotherhood, an evil white supremacist gang that runs the prison, and Paul slashes Maddog’s throat with a license plate.
John asked, “Who’s in here as part of Maddog’s gang to jump on Paul after the slash?” and Pat said, “Well, Tim and Ben will be here.” John looked thoughtful and said, “We should have one more,” and I piped up with, “I think I’m supposed to be in this scene as another gang member.” John looked at me like he didn’t remember who I was, and Pat and Tim waited to see if my little gamble worked. I wanted to be a part of things—I can’t stand sitting around. John nodded okay and started talking details with Oakley.
I got my prison costume: a cruddy pair of jeans, slip-on shoes, and a blue federal button-down shirt (like the stuff I’d gotten from the Washington Department of National Resources back in my firefighting days). I then proceeded to stand around with all the other extras and fighters. And stand around. Moviemaking seems to be a pretty miserable experience; there are only a couple of good jobs on the set. The actors have it okay, and the director and the DP (director of photography, same thing as a cinematographer) are pretty busy, but everyone else does a ton of waiting, waiting, waiting. I drank coffee and ate cookies off the snack table for hours and hours. The DP, John Bailey, muttered to me, “Sit down whenever you can—I learned that from Phil Lathrop.”
Chuck Liddell was a nice guy, big and a little wild-eyed, but friendly and open and exactly “what you see is what you get.” He was somewhat amused by his character’s antics: “If some kid was punking me out like this guy is,” he said, referring to the way Paul Walker’s character was mocking Maddog, “I’d just crack him and lay him out—there wouldn’t be any talking.” Chuck had a prosthetic neck made for the license plate slash, and his abnormally thick real neck had deeply impressed the makeup people. His massive neck had a lot to do with his hardheadedness; a thick neck makes you harder to knock out. Virgil had always been thinking of new ways to exercise a fighter’s neck. The Thais used to do it with a piece of cord tied to weights; you bite down on the cord and do neck curls. I’d never done it. Rory said he’d done it until it started to screw up his teeth.
Chuck was one of the first American MMA fighters to make real money—he’d just gotten a sponsorship from Xyience, a supplement company, and he wore designer jeans and texted restlessly on his Internet phone. He was old school gone new school; he had just kept beating people until they realized he wouldn’t go away, and then the UFC embraced him.
Chuck’s two heavies were Tim and Ben. Tim was an old friend, and although he’d lost a couple of fights since I’d seen him last, he’d won his most recent fight with a spectacular head kick that had KO’d his opponent, Tra Telligman. Pat had heard a funny story: After the fight, in the locker room, Tra didn’t really know where he was. His corner told him that he’d just fought in the UFC.
Tra: I just fought in the UFC?
Corner: Yeah.
Tra: Who’d I fight?
Corner: Tim Sylvia.
Tra: I just fought Tim Sylvia in the UFC?…What happened?
Corner: He knocked you out with a head kick.
Tra: Tim Sylvia knocked me out with a head kick in the UFC?!
Pat had a good time telling this story.
Ben was much younger but still experienced. He’d started fighting MMA in high school, and he’d fought and lost to Tim at nineteen, a fact Tim never let him forget. Ben was huge and played the simpleton, but he was, like all these guys, a lot smarter than he seemed. He liked to hoot and holler and yell “Fuck” in his heavy midwestern accent, but it was an act: He was no fool.
The four of us, along with dozens of prison extras, waited for our scene. The prison was high and cold and empty, the bare unfinished concrete lit by the brilliant klieg lights of Hollywood and patrolled by a half dozen Mexican PAs (production assistants, the lowest of the low, gofers) with headsets, shushing people constantly and taking up the call of “Rolling!” whenever filming was going on. All offscreen chatter was supposed to cease; sometimes it did, but sometimes it would just subside to a low murmur until everyone started yelling, “Quiet please!”
We rehearsed our little scene, with Chuck getting slashed and falling at my feet, and big Tim Sylvia punching Paul Walker down, and the rest of us piling on, stomping and kicking. Oakley was Paul’s stunt double as well as the stunt coordinator, and he went through the motions that Paul would go through, with a wig pinned to his head (Paul’s hair was long for this scene).
Oakley Lehman was a former desert motorcycle racer and horse-packing guide who had been friends with Paul in Burbank as kids, and they had gotten into movies separately, Paul as an actor and Oakley as a stuntman. Oakley’s specialty was first bikes, then cars and horses. When they ran into each other later, Oakley instantly noticed that they had similar builds and complexions, and he asked Paul if he could double him; they had been working together ever since. This was Oakley’s first film as the stunt coordinator, but he was a talented, competent guy, young and friendly in a very L.A. surfer way: “That sunset is bitchin’.” I liked him immediately, and he knew enough to respect Pat and they got along famously. Pat said he’d teach Oakley to fight if Oakley would teach him to surf.
John Herzfeld came in and took a look at the latest rehearsal. “I want something faster, more violent—just a quick smash of Paul,” he said. “Why don’t we try it with just the knee?” So instead of Tim throwing a right elbow and then a big knee, he would throw just a leaping knee—a small thing, perhaps, but it showed me something. The director, a fight fan, was going to put his stamp on the action and modify what the real fighters would have done, fighters who were all consummate street brawlers and had been in these fights a hundred times in and out of the ring. John wanted something that looked a little different—that looked cool instead of being real.
Finally, after what seemed like several days, with the cold desert night settled in like a blanket over the prison, prying at the corners, we were shooting. The cameras went in, and then the extras: about thirty tough-looking guys in prison blues, who all looked a lot rougher than me, older Mexican guys, young white tattooed dudes, and black Muslims. I found myself in the near background with the camera in front of me, and suddenly I had to act. It felt very strange, and unfamiliar. I had acted in high school, but since then hadn’t done anything but the stuff that almost all guys do with their friends—funny voices, stupid girls, movie quotes—the typical screwing off. But there I was, at the forefront, watching Paul fall again and again, and then leaping into Oakley and pounding on him, over and over. You know the camera can see you, so you have to act. You don’t have lines, but you still have to act.
It took hours, but we got through the scene—from various angles, with dozens of prison extras in the background, kicking and stomping Oakley, and then we stomped some cardboard boxes that stood in for Paul, then Paul himself, careful not to kick him too hard. I tumbled to the ground on every take, dragged down or shoved down by a guard. As long as we were doing something, it was fairly entertaining—not something I’d want to do every day, but fun in small doses. It was funny to hear the various assistant directors coaching the extras—“Remember, you’re in prison, you hate it here.” “I want to see that prison walk.” “This is a living hell for you guys”—like the assistant directors had ever been any closer to prison than watching The Shawshank Redemption. That’s one of the problems with movies: You have guys making films about mobsters who have learned about mobsters from watching The Godfather, which is fantasy itself. Movies get further and further away from the truth if their only reference to reality is other films. Later, however, I noticed that John was consulting with one of the extras—who had been in prison—about the way the guards held their guns, so that was good to see. I had a friend in L.A. who was working on a script about a death row inmate, a legal thriller, and he had never been inside a prison or visited death row.
Moviemaking has elements of an endurance test: Can you stay interested and do good work at three a.m.? Finally came the gleeful call of “It’s a wrap!” and we all scuttled for our gear and the vans, like at the end of a rave, desperate to get home.
The days turned to weeks. Pat and I would run on the beach in the morning, and then go to the set for the rest of the day. He’d do some consulting, helping with this or that, how to hold a gun (he’d learned this from all the Controlled FORCE work he’d done), but often just watching and drinking coffee.
Oakley wa