It Chooses You - Miranda July [35]
Now that I was counting on him, Joe’s entire existence suddenly seemed pretty precarious. Needless to say, he didn’t have email or a cell phone. I gave his number to my producer, but Joe never seemed to answer. Eventually Alfred drove over to his house and discovered their phone had stopped working and they hadn’t gotten around to fixing it. Alfred bought him a new phone, and I bought a La-Z-Boy chair for Joe’s wife, Carolyn; she had diabetes and the doctor said she needed to elevate her legs. I almost never saw Carolyn – she was a mythical muse to me, the subject of hundreds of poems. I’d read about her titties and even her twat, but she was always in the bedroom with the door closed.
I kept Joe out of a lot of the preparation leading up to shooting. I didn’t really rehearse with him like I did with Hamish Linklater (Jason) and David Warshofsky (Marshall). I didn’t even show him the script, actually. My feeling was that Joe was pretty much going to be Joe on the shoot day, and there was nothing I could do to change that – which was why it might work. I didn’t ask him to participate in the screenplay reading I did a couple months before the shoot; it would be long and agonizing and might give him some bad ideas about what acting was. An actor named Tom Bower read the lines I’d sketched out for Joe. I asked Tom to also read the lines for the Moon; some roles hadn’t been cast yet, so a few of the actors had to play more than one part at the reading. We all muddled through it, and afterward I met with a friend to get her notes. They were many, but she did think I’d made some good changes, especially my idea for Joe to also be the Moon. Which he was, from that moment on.
I’d rather not describe the first week of shooting. When I am anxious I lose weight, and I lost seven pounds that first week. Everything that could go wrong did. Except, and I pointed this out at the end of each day: no one had died.
Then, at the end of the week, my producer, Gina, said she needed to tell me something; it was about Joe. My heart sank. He was okay, but when the location scout was looking at his house, Joe mentioned he’d just gotten a diagnosis of cancer from the doctor and he had only two weeks to live. We were shooting his scene in a week. Gina said she’d talked to him and he insisted he really wanted to do it, but that it was up to me. All our movie problems went away for a moment, and there was just sorrow, a terrible ache for this man and his wife. And I knew there was no way we could go forward with him; it was irresponsible and frankly just scary.
So that was that. I called Joe from the set. He said he felt fine, and I said I knew he did but that I just had to do what I thought was best. “Well, you’re the boss,” he said glumly. I had been used to his chatty bluster, but in that moment I heard the man who had painted buildings for seventy years, a hard worker who was used to being part of a team and doing what the boss said. Some bosses had probably not been very nice.
That weekend I sat in a room and watched elderly actors read Joe’s lines. I was so exhausted that my personal goal was just not to cry during these auditions. The whole idea for the role of Joe was Joe. Most of the lines I’d written didn’t matter; they were just placeholders for where Joe would improvise. When these old men improvised, they drew upon their personal histories – as lifelong actors. They weren’t a boring group of people, but none of them had met their wives at Lake Paw Paw.
After watching one particularly frail man hobble through his reading, I complained to Gina that these eighty-year-old men actually seemed sicker than Joe; who was to say that all of them didn’t also have cancer and just two weeks to live? It also occurred to me now that Joe had been counting on the checks we were about to give him, for his work and for the rental of his house. Had I come into his life, gotten his hopes up, and then let him down – left him to die?
After the bleak auditions, I asked my husband to come with me to meet Joe; I