Part 3 (1/2)

”I don't need help,” I repeated. ”You guys sound like you're the ones who need the help. Why don't you talk to Father Franklin?”

”We can all talk to him together if you'd like.”

That was all I needed. Three against one!

”No, that's okay,” I said.

”So you'll talk to him?” my dad asked me.

At that point, it seemed like there was only one thing I could say to get my parents to shut up. Besides, they were my parents. What could I do?

”Yeah,” I said. ”I'll talk to the d.a.m.n priest.” 45 CHAPTER FOUR.

That Sat.u.r.day, we had our first day of extra work on Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies. We had a 46 wardrobe-and-makeup call at eight in the morning, so Gunnar and Em picked me up at seven-thirty. Min wasn't with us-she had her own car and lived on the opposite side of town anyway.

I felt like c.r.a.p on a cracker. I am so not a morning person. As we drove to the shoot, Gunnar enlightened us on another aspect of moviemaking.

”That board they knock together before every scene?” he said. ”That's called a clapper board. They use it to keep track of each take in postproduction. They record the sound and the film image on two different machines, you know? So they need some way to make sure that the image matches up with the right sound track.”

”I thought they rerecorded all the dialogue anyway,” Em said.

”Not always,” he said. ”Sometimes they try to keep the on-set dialogue, because it looks and sounds more natural.”

We drove into the school parking lot, and I spotted Min and Kevin over by his car. It looked like they were talking. I wondered what they were talking about.

We pulled up next to them, and I climbed out of the car.

”Hey,” I said.

”Morning!” Kevin said.

Min just rolled her eyes. I wasn't sure what that was about. Had they been talking about me? 47 We walked toward the school as a group.

”Why do we need makeup anyway?” Kevin said, a little too loudly. ”They're not turning us into zombies yet. Aren't we just normal teenagers today?”

”It's so our faces don't s.h.i.+ne in the movie lights,” Gunnar said. ”It won't be full makeup.”

”Well, what about wardrobe?” Kevin said. ”Don't we already dress like normal teenagers? We are normal teenagers.”

Even Gunnar didn't have an answer for that one.

Soon I found myself walking side by side with Kevin. ”Isn't it funny?” he said, talking too loudly again. ”We get up this early every morning. But today it seems early. Is it just because it's Sat.u.r.day?”

”Probably,” I said. But to myself, I was wondering why I hadn't ever noticed before how Kevin's voice got louder when he got nervous. What exactly was he nervous about?

Just inside the school, there were a couple of production a.s.sistants waiting for us at a table. They took our parental release forms (I had told my dad it was ”a school project,” which it sort of was). Then they gave us each a plastic number, and said they'd call when it was our turn to be made pretty. I was number two.

Finally, a production a.s.sistant led us to the school cafe 48 teria, which she referred to as the ”hospitality suite.” There was only one other person waiting inside, a girl. Min immediately dropped her plastic number. I bent down to pick it up for her. ”Oops,” I said, giving it back. ”You dropped this.”

She didn't answer.

The producers had set out some food-doughnuts, bagels, fruit, and juice-on one of the cafeteria tables. Min headed over to check it out. Maybe it was early morning hunger that was distracting her.

Meanwhile, Gunnar was still talking. ”I bet they storyboarded this whole movie,” he said. ”That's when they ill.u.s.trate the film, like in a giant comic book. They show all the angles, and how the camera is going to move. It's especially important on a film like this one, one with lots of action.”

”I made a comic book once,” Kevin said. ”In the sixth grade. Problem was, my teacher wanted it to be about Jamestown, and I wanted it to be about Batman.”

”Sometimes they storyboard the whole movie,” Gunnar was saying. ”And sometimes they only do it for the action scenes. It depends on the director.”

”I did the whole story of Jamestown,” Kevin said. ”But if you look in the background in some of the panels, you can see Batman in the distance.”

My head throbbed. It was only eight fifteen in the morning, but between Kevin's nervous prattle and 49 Gunnar's ongoing film seminar, I was almost ready to call it a day. It was true what they say about making movies: it's mostly just a lot of sitting around. But for a newbie like me, just watching them arrange the lights and position the cameras was interesting.

For Gunnar, meanwhile, it was like a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p had descended from the sky in the shape of a gigantic electric birthday cake, and aliens had emerged in the form of naked women with enormous b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

They had made us extras up as members of various high school cliques (which is why we couldn't just wear our own clothes). They'd dressed Gunnar and me as computer nerds, and Kevin as a jock-both arguably decent casting choices. They'd also given us all green socks. I wondered what the socks were about, but being a lowly extra, mine was not to question why. . . .

As for the girls, they'd pegged Em as a goth girl and Min as a cheerleader. (And for the record, just seeing Min dressed up as a cheerleader made this whole moviemaking experience worthwhile, no matter what happened next. She looked completely stunned by her costume a.s.signment, like a cat who'd just fallen into the bathtub!) 50 According to Gunnar, the scenes of most movies are not shot in the order in which you watch them. But in our case, the first scene they shot really was one of the very first scenes in the movie. It was the scene where the main character, a new kid in a small town, comes to his new high school for the first time.

We extras were just supposed to mill around in the hallway, acting like members of our various cliques. Meanwhile, to play the jocks and cheerleaders in the foreground, the ones with speaking parts, the producers had hired real actors (who, incidentally, looked nothing whatsoever like real high school students; I doubt any of them were under the age of twenty-five or had even a single zit).

The production a.s.sistants got everything set up for the scene, with all the extras and ”real” actors in place.

Then the star of the movie walked onto the set.

Declan McDonnell.

Yes, that Declan McDonnell! The one who played the womanizing best friend of the star of that big sitcom a few years back? He'd also done a few movies, but nothing breakout.

He was totally dreamy. He had straight black hair that he parted in the middle, a crooked smile, and blue-green eyes that were supposedly the color of the ocean. (Full disclosure: I had a picture of him, s.h.i.+rtless, in My Pictures.) 51 I desperately wanted to meet him. Thing is, I knew that could never happen, even if he wasn't an internationally famous movie star and I wasn't a complete n.o.body. After all, they had specifically told us that we couldn't talk to the stars.

I pulled Gunnar aside. ”That's Declan McDonnell!” I said breathlessly.

”Who?” he said.

It figured he would know nothing about movies that had anything to do with actual human beings.

”He's famous,” I said, deliberately dialing it down. ”He's been in movies.”

”Oh,” Gunnar said. ”Huh.”

Right then, the director called ”Rolling!”, which meant that we extras were supposed to start doing our ”extra” thing, acting like high school students. The ”jocks” started strutting around like jocks, the ”cheerleaders” twirled and flitted like cheerleaders, and the ”nerds” like Gunnar and me crept back and forth like antisocial computer nerds.

The director called ”Action!”, which meant the real actors were supposed to start acting.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the scene in the foreground unfold. Declan McDonnell entered through the front doors. The ”real” jocks and cheerleaders, the ones 52 played by actors, all laughed at him for wearing white socks, not green ones.

A few minutes later, the director yelled, ”Cut!” Then we had to do it all over again.

But this time, one of the ”extra” jocks, probably taking a cue from what was going on in the foreground, decided it would be more realistic if he started picking on the nerds-namely, Gunnar and me.