It's a chameleon's life

WORKING ON A FILM is like knowing how long you have to live. In this case, three months. After the last of the Venice night scenes, we would not meet again. If by chance we did, it would of course be as other people. Our personalities, it was understood, were temporary, improvised for the time and for the place, and of the essence of those we were with, as well as of ourselves.

The actors were the only ones with a past. Their identities were self-perpetuating. The comedians were comic (Marty Ingels wore paper watches in Switzerland because the real things were too expensive) and insecure. (To which of them would Charlie Chaplin grant an audience?) The drunkards stayed drunk, the kind old ladies went to bed early, and the young love interest people pursued love--though not necessarily with the one prescribed by the script. Murray Hamilton (remember The Graduate) gave us sheer good times, singing to us late at night in the bar.

Production people with each new film had discarded their old tunes. Memory went back only as far as the beginning of this film. Maybe that's why there was so little talk when they were together. Just shoulders shrugged in common, and sympathetic rubbings of exhaustion. Towards the end of the film, however, this tacit solidarity had grown so strong that members of the local production crews--if they boldly sought to disrupt the way of life of the permanent crew--just saliently, swiftly, disappeared.

Some of the men seemed mutations of themselves. At American expatriate's face had been completely destroyed when he settled in Paris and had been rebuilt on the model of a stranger. One of the photographers had been a rock-and-roll star. The American unit publicist was on leave from a seminary in California, where he was preparing for the Unitarian Universalist ministry, his negotiations with the U.S. government on obtaining the brothel concession in Vietnam having fallen through.

Not everyone had broken so completely with his past. It was not known how many married men were among us, until the wife of almost everyone appeared on the scene during the last week in Venice. One man did greet his with unfeigned ardor. "Props" man was eager to return with her to his English home. Together, skillfully, painstakingly, they would pull up their floors, demolish the walls and the roof. Every year they made this house yield new halls and secret passageways, new skylights and new rooms. It was the best "set" of all, infinitely plastic to their desires.

Venice rotted and went stormy with the end of summer. The last days were bittersweet like the cigarette of a man about to die. Champagne at dawn and sleep through the day. The most proper Englishman of all, burdened by a suspicion of having danced nude at breakfast, did not show himself again. Not many of us said good-bye. There was too much "see you around" in that.