Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [6]
“All you have to do is say ‘Hey, Mark, where are you going?’ That’s all you have to say. Why are you having so much trouble with this?” he asked me, unable to hide his obvious hatred of attractive, brilliant children.
“I don’t know,” I said, again. “Something is throwing me out of character.”
This infuriated him. “What are you talking about, character? You’re a kid in a school . . . playing a kid in a school! This is not On the Waterfront.”
We’d been shooting for over an hour. It was a simple setup: I’m walking behind a group of other kids in the hall when I suddenly see my friend, Mark. I pause, turn toward the camera—though without looking at it—and say, “Hey, Mark, where are you going?”
But I just couldn’t do it.
The thing is, I’d known since the men first uttered the words “Tang commercial” that I was perfect for this role. All I had to do was be my natural, born-for-it self. But something had gone catastrophically wrong. In my obsession to be a perfectly natural boy for the camera, I was unable to be even vaguely natural, let alone perfect.
And each time I spoke my line, my voice sounded forced, pretentious, dishonest. These were concepts I’d gleaned from a copy of Acting: A Handbook of the Stanislavski Method, which I’d found in my mother’s bookshelf.
The other problem was that I didn’t feel I had found my character’s own space within the context of the scene. Why was I walking down the hall? Was I going to a class? Or coming from a class? These were essential questions, and the director refused to give me answers.
“Will you shut up and just walk!” was what he said.
“But when I walk, do you want me to be walking with urgency or relief?” was my reply.
“Oh Jesus Christ, can we get another kid?” he shouted over his shoulder.
It was my full intention to be so convincing as a normal school child that when these advertising executives got back to New York City they wouldn’t be able to forget me. Or else someone important—like Carol Burnett—would see me in the Tang commercial and then call my parents and request that I be flown out to Hollywood immediately.
“Let’s try this one more time,” the director shouted as he walked back to his position behind the camera. He shook his head from side to side, as the light drained from the sky.
He shouted action, and I began my walk down the hallway, fully aware of the camera trained on my every move. I concentrated hard on being normal, on making ordinary footsteps. But I could feel it happening. Like being the passenger in a car speeding out of control, I was unable to stop myself. In a high-pitched and overly rehearsed tone of voice, I recited my line and again peeked at the camera to make sure I’d reached my mark correctly.
I winced as I waited for the director to again scream “Cut!” but instead there was silence. And then I felt a rush. Had I done it? Had I accidentally done it exactly right? I had done it right, hadn’t I? I bit my lip to repress the smile that was about to break the surface.
“Forget it. We’ll fix it in the edit. This is a wrap!”
And that was it.
I saw the men in the suits standing in a huddle near the director, smoking cigarettes. The man who loved me, the man with the blue eyes, now glanced at me once sharply, then looked away.
Had I failed him?
The men packed up, leaving behind a piece of paper with the dates and times that the commercial was supposed to run on the air.
At home my mother marked the calendar and counted down the days.
I wondered what I would look like on TV. Would the part in my hair be straight? Would it be shiny? I’d used conditioner every night for a week. I wondered if I’d said my lines naturally, after all. Had I given them enough to work with in the edit? I’d been reading quite a bit about filmmaking, and it was amazing how much could be “saved” by a gifted editor.
Then the day arrived. My mother turned on the Today Show, and we watched for nearly an hour before it came on.
I saw myself for a