The World is a Big Box

(The following is the last part of a two-part series.)

NORA did not want to spend the night in the cabin, and so she didn't. She, Tommy, and Eric drove back to Cambridge to grab a few hours sleep. The mist was worse than ever at night, so the ride back was scary. At one point, Nora told Tommy, who was behind the wheel, that they were driving into a brick wall. She was speaking figuratively, but Tommy took her literally, slammed on the brakes, and nearly sent Eric through the windshield. "We almost got killed," said Nora the next day, "It was really funny."

That left Tim, Phoebe, and myself at the cabin Friday night. We sat by the fire after the others left, playing poker with a damp pack of cards Tommy had found, using sugar cubes for chips. Tim drank, which he almost never does, got rosy-checked and high. He said nothing about the night's shooting--and instead talked only about poker, as he slowly cleaned Phoebe and me out.

Early the next morning we went to town to wash up in the gas stations and eat breakfast at one of Milford's many greasy spoons. Today was to be a big day in the final New Hampshire shooting of the second segment of Prophetic Pictures, Eleanora. We were going to shoot some scenes on the highway during the day, at a horse stable in the afternoon, then Nora's ghost scene at night.

IT WAS A nice day. The mist was gone; the air, if not warm, was at least only faintly chilly. In my mind I was trying to piece together what had happened during the filming the night before. But it was like a dream: Too many of the parts were missing. And now, in the sunlight, the people working on this film seemed different. It was morning, and that is no time to think of ghosts. For a while anyway, last night faded out of my mind entirely.

Tim and I were returning from Peterborough in a newly rented jeep. Tim drove fast and the scenery zoomed by us. Neither of us had been in a jeep before, and we were enjoying the ride. New England villages unfolded in the distance, like Grandma Moses paintings, and we remained silent and let the chill exhilirate us.

At noon the others had arrived. We were doing the first take of the day: Steven (Tommy) speeds down the highway passing Eleanora (Nora), who is hitchhiking. He gets about a hundred yards past her, does a take, slams on the brakes, skids, shifts into reverse, backs up, picks up Nora and rides off into the distance.

To film this, Tim set up the camera by a stop sign on a small road that intersected perdendicularly with the highway. Tommy was stationed further down the road, within sight of Tim, who waved to him each time he wanted to start a take. Nora, wearing jeans and a Levi jacket, stood across the highway from Tim. Eric, near the camera, held the mike out towards the highway, and Phoebe and I leaned on the rented Dodge station wagon, parked behind the stop sign.

THE TAKE was hard. Tim wanted Tommy to wait until there were two cars in front of him before he started down the highway. This created problems: sometimes passing drivers would see the camera and slow down to find out what was going on; or, if there was a car behind Tommy's jeep, there was a possibility of collision at the point when Tommy suddenly lurches into reverse. Meanwhile, the sun kept going in and out of the clouds, necessitating constant shifts in the lens setting.

The run-through, however, went great. When Tommy shifted into reverse, the jeep nearly slid off the road, made a hell of a screech, and kicked up some dust. Tim looked at Eric and smiled; Eric returned with a big grin.

But, once the real takes began, the problems came out in force. Not only were there long periods when no cars appeared, but when they did, the drivers more often than not looked into the camera, ruining the shot. Once, a car ahead of the jeep stopped to give Nora a ride.

After noon, it got colder and the humor of the frustrating takes began to wilt. Phoebe, who had been talkative at first, started to withdraw from the group. She stood by the stop sign in silence, clutching her clapboard, waiting for each take to begin. As Tim put it, it was becoming a drag. But at 2 p.m., after 13 takes, the shot was over.

WE DROVE to another road to film the end of the scene--a conversaiton between Tommy and Nora in the parked jeep.

"Why aren't we using the same road as before?" asked Eric in Tim's absence. "Well, it's his prerogative. He's the only one who knows what he wants."

"I suppose," said Phoebe.

"I hope," said Eric.

As we arrived at the new road, also perpendicular to the highway, the group fell into silence for a while. We were away from the cabin and from the night and from the ghosts, I thought.

The sun came out again. A small dog started to trot over from a farm across the street while Eric and Tim set up the new shot. He walked over to Nora, who tried to pet him. The dog barked twice, and retreated fast to his home.

"Come back here and bark like a dog!" yelled Tommy. He turned to us. "That's something," he said. "Dog comes over, barks twice, and takes its leave. The dog of two barks."

The take went well and now we were back at the first road. It was almost three o'clock. No one talked about lunch, no one could even think about it, for this new shot was going to be murder.

TIM WAS to be roped to the front of the jeep, and, with the camera mounted in front of him on the hood, would shoot a conversation between Tommy and Nora as the car sped down the highway at 25 m.p.h. Eric would crouch in the back of the jeep with the tape recorder, holding the mike below the range of the camera.

It looked bad. The cold was increasing and the imperceptibly increasing greyness told us that it was getting late. We were behind schedule. It would take time to tape the camera to the jeep, rope Tim, wait for the right highway conditions. And Nora and Tommy were still unsure of their lines.

Phoebe and I sat in the station wagon, listening to the radio ("Secret Agent Man") while Tommy and Nora walked down the road going over dialogue. They walked quickly, down opposite sides of the street. Suddenly Tommy did a quick about-face. Nora followed suit. She had picked up a twig and was smoking a cigarette. They met up with Tim, and he went over the script with them.

"I've got to get this in 40 minutes," he said. He smoked a cigarette, the only time he did so the whole weekend.

As the run-through approached, there were more problems. Tim found that the camera caught his own reflection in the jeep's windshield. Eric had brought the wrong mike and had to drive back to the cabin to get the right one.

At 4 p.m., the problems seemed corrected. The jeep, with Tim on the hood, started down the highway. But the mike was distorting, and the camera reflection still apparent.

It was getting greyer and greyer. Phoebe was cold. I was cold. Nora was cold.

"Why don't we do it inside?" she said, only half-smiling. "I think it's a wonderful idea. We could use moving scenery and we'd have nice warm warmth."

Warmth. There was none of that now. Eric and Tim fooled around silently with the jeep. Tommy was smoking and still. Phoebe and Nora went to the station wagon, turned on the motor and the heat, and sat silenly inside. The sun began to set. And at 4:15, a Milford cop car pulled up, its blue roof light flashing.

Eric talked to the cop, who checked the registration of our cars. After a while he left. No one in the group had paid much attention to him. Eric said, "He just wanted us to prove that we're doing what we're doing."

A few minutes later, Tim threw up his hands in irritation. Eric was still trying to fix up the camera. "Forget it," said Tim. "Let's do something right. Pack up. We'll go to the stables."

TIM WANTED some shots of Tommy on horseback surveying the snowscape after Eleanora's death. Driving there, Tim and Eric talked a little about possible solutions to the jeep dilemma, but, after a few minutes, the only noise in the car was the low, static-filled sound of the radio. Outside it was gloomy. The beauty of the day was transformed.

And, when we arrived, we discovered that we were too late: the owners had given up waiting for us and left. Eric, Tommy and Tim would have to return the next week to get the shot.

Suddenly, Tim said, "I want to break for the day. I'm unhappy and mean. I want to be nice and mellow again, like I was this morning."

Tommy smiled for the first time in a while and pumped some enthusiasm into his voice, "Let's take everyone to eat."

We got into the cars. Phoebe, entering the Dodge, yelled at the Volkswagen, "Hey, Tim, there's still some bourbon."

"We will avail ourselves of it presently," yelled back Tim, and he slammed the car door.

After dinner in town, we headed back to the cabin. Eric had gone back earlier to set up for the evening's shooting. When the rest of us arrived, around 6 p.m., the cabin's road was chain-locked and inaccessible. The chain was the province of the granite quarry next to the cabin, and Eric had our key. Rather than walk up the road to get it, Tommy and Tim decided to walk straight through the snowbound forest.

NORA, PHOEBE, and I waited in the car for them to come down and open up the road.

"Another case," said Nora. "They always do things the hard way," said Phoebe.

"We make suggestions, but they always have to do it their own way."

Silence. Suddenly Eric appeared on the road in the jeep. He had left the cabin just before we got to the road. We tried to honk Tim and Tommy down from their climb up the mountain of snow, but failed. Eric unlocked the chain and we went to the cabin.

It was totally dark now, but not like the night before. It was clear; as we walked into the cabin, we could see the stars. We could also see the haunted quarry.

Nora stood against the wall adjacent to the fireplace. Tim was shooting Eleanora from Steven's point of view, just after he discovers her, his dead lover returned. Nora was beautiful. She wore a long red dress that complemented her long red hair. Everyone stared at her, but she could not tell. The lights on her were too bright.

"Here's some bourbon," said Phoebe to Tim.

"To stay alert?" he asked.

"It helps you stay alert."

"Screw that," Tim said grinning.

NORA shifted her eyes back and forth and no one spoke. Who is this girl? I asked myself. I wanted to look at her, feast upon her--but something scared me. This haunting face, the eyes, the silence in the room, the shadows, the fire, the quarry outside where men had plunged to unearned deaths, the black trees, the snow, the strange story that Tim was filming, these people who did not talk to each other.

"Tim," said Nora, breaking the silence and my train of thought. "Tim," she said, "I'm beginning to feel like a ghost."

Tim had turned his attention to the lighting. "Ghosts don't have shadows," he said. And then the lights blew.

"Tim," said Nora, the tremor cutting through her voice like a knife. "Someone turned that light off. I'm not doing any more." But when the circuit was fixed, Nora continued to act.

At about 8:30 we were shooting Steven and Eleanora's embrace.

Steven: Can I touch you?

(She embraces him tightly.)

Eleanora: I've missed you, Steven. I still miss you.

For a while, Nora had trouble getting her speech right. Tim gave her some more direction. The next take was way off.

"Nice try but no cigar," said Tim. "Eleven million they spend for this picture and all of a sudden it's for borscht?" He did this in a flamboyant Hollywood accent. The quote was from a Jane Russell picture called The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown. And after that, the takes went beautifully.

TOMMY and Nora were to embrace to the side of the camera, with Phoebe catching their reflection on a piece of semi-reflectant tinted glass held in front of the camera lens. The lens was pointed towards the fireplace, so the embrace would be superimposed on the flames. Someone said this shot had been done before, in a Melina Mercouri picture.

"This has been done," said Tim, with mock concern, "In a Melina Mercouri picture! Which movie?"

"You know," said Phoebe. "The one with all those Greeks."

"They all have Greeks."

"It's Phaedra."

"Phaedra, "shouted Tim." Phaedra! Phaedra we don't have to worry about. A cultist picture, for Tony Perkins fans."

So the shot went on, and without much trouble. After finishing it, Tim decided that he would record some voice-over narration of Nora's.

As Tim and Nora went to the bedroom to go over the lines, I looked through the living room's glass doors. The clear night kept them from being opaque and black, as they had been the night before. And instead of seeing only reflections from the living room in the glass, I could see the stars, a crescent of a moon--and the quarry: a vague white cloud floating in the landscape.

SHORTLY after eleven, Tim decided to call it a night, leaving voice-overs to another time. The past hour or so had been boring to everybody, it seemed, and the frustrations of the day's shooting had taken its toll on the unit's vitality.

Still, this night had gone quicker than the previous one--or at least differently. The change in the weather, the fact that no one would have to spend the night in the cabin, the speed with which we moved through the shooting schedule--all these things made Saturday night closer to a working experience, and far removed from the ghosts that seemed to have taken over the night before.

When Tim decided to pack up, I expected that I would finally see these five people totally relaxed. I was wrong. As we started to pack up the lights in the big trunks, gather the camera and recording equipment together, and clean up the place, a pall fell over the cabin. No one spoke, except to ask Eric questions about the storage of the apparatus. There was no sense of relief in the air--even though all the interior shooting, at least, had been completed.

Each light was in turn dismantled and packed up. With each dismantling, the room got darker. Tim sat on a bench next to the nearly dead fire. He looked at no one. He said nothing. He was totally in shadows.

NORA, when she wasn't silently helping with the packing, sat on the other side of the fireplace, smoking and gazing. Tommy was going to take the first load of stuff on the ski-doo up to the cars. He asked Nora which trunks were ready. She pointed to some boxes which contained props. Tommy picked them up and started out the door. Nora smiled into space and said, "The world is a big box."

After several trips, Tommy had taken everything up to the road. Now the room was almost totally dark. We had found some tiny holes in the wooden ceiling, and it turned out that these holes were lights controlled by a dimmer near the door. We turned them on, and pools of pale light fell on the flagstone floor. No one spoke; everyone stared out the glass doors or at the floor or at nowhere in particular.

Gradually we left for the cars. One by one, the others filed out. I was the last one left in the cabin, and I was nervous about it. I turned off the lights and started out. I tripped in the snow, in my haste. My eyes did not adjust right away to the night, and now that the cabin was dark I could see nothing. I called to the others, but when they answered I could not determine where their voices came from or how far away they were. I took another couple of steps.

Then I looked up and saw the stars. Staring ahead of me again, I felt a bit relieved. The forest appeared: a nearly luminescent white earth, gigantic black trees spreading out before me like prison bars. I looked for the rest of the group, and slowly each of the five came into view. They were walking quickly. And no two of them walked together. I followed. I was frightened by the isolation. This forest in the middle of nowhere at midnight Saturday night. These people stalking through the snow, each man to himself. But I wouldn't let myself think about it. We were going home.

A COUPLE OF DAYS later I had coffee with Tim and Nora. We talked, and I tried to put the pieces together. What brought ghosts to this cabin in New Hampshire? Could making a movie require so much that one had to die a little to do it?

Tim was in the kitchen of his apartment for a bit, so I sat alone with Nora in the living room. Here she was: a girl, 19. A big girl, a beautiful girl--but no longer Eleanora.

"I'm so glad it's all over," she said. "I really got to hate the place. I just couldn't sleep there. It was so awful. You should have been there at the beginning." She smiled a bit. Her voice, a little shaky as always, steadied somewhat: "It was fun then. Everyone was laughing." And now, a little softer, a little sad: "But it got grimmer and grimmer as we went on." Her face went blank: "I'm happy it's over."

Tim came into the room.

"You know," he said, sitting on a chair next to Nora, "I think I'm a human being when I'm working--a rational human being with the same objectivity, the same responses, the same everything as when I'm not. But then I take a few days off and I realize I was wrong. I realize I wasn't human. I had no idea where I was at."

Nora made no perceptible response. Her eyes were wide open, but she wasn't looking at anything or anyone.

Tim talked about 3 Sisters, his last film. "Each production has a different atmosphere. 3 Sisters was an obsessive film, a deranged thing, but the process of making it got very calmly caught up in group morality. A kind of working morality developed and almost all of us got caught up in it.... I can't explain it well."

IN Eleanora, updated to the present from Poe, Tim has had to accept the supernatural element more than Poe did. Poe suggests that Eleanora's appearance from the dead came when the narrator (Steven in the movie) was hovering on the edge of total insanity. It was, perhaps, the power of his mental abberration that brought his lover back.

Tim, though, firmly believes that "the girl comes back from the dead....It's not in any way a dream. I believe every second of it. On this level, one speaks in terms of the supernatural as one speaks in any terms."

I did not understand. I could not accept the supernatural the same as anything else. It was inconceivable to me that one could cross the line between the real and the unreal, and dwell there. I could not see that one could merge his soul with a haunted quarry--to make a movie.

Tim explained, "When you get to work, you get to work. To some extent the project takes over. You have to immerse yourself in it without qualms--although I think there is something dangerous in that...it gets rough."

"And then I hit the bottle," said Nora.

"You started to resist the part," said Tim.

"That movie started to scare the shit out of me," she said now, "that's really what it was...."

And Tim repeated: "I'm not human when I'm working. It scares me too. It's not good to lose yourself in these things, there's got to be a pay-off somewhere. If Eleanora turns out to be a stinker, I think I'd go into a corner for a year and a half."

Now Tim would edit his film for six weeks at WGBH. Like him, I wondered if the ghosts of New Hampshire would be as real for the people who would watch the movie as for the people who made it