Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [5]
As I struggle out of the plane, the heat hits me like a falling couch. It's not even lunchtime, but the thermometer's already into triple digits.
“Hey—stay there!” Mark calls out to me. Muscular legs in baggy khaki shorts run to a spot several feet away, from where he can shoot me struggling out of the plane door. “Everyone clear the frame. Eric—you need to move back, please. Okay, Cash—go inside the plane and come out again. Quiet, everyone.”
Obediently, they fall silent. They have to. I'm supposed to be alone.
That's the premise of the series we're making. A stranger, dumped in a strange country with no money, no food, no facilities, and nobody to help him find them, has to survive for three or four days on his own. Which all looks very wonderful on paper, but is proving harder to execute in practice than we thought.
For a start, if I were really on my own out here, the show would never get made. Who would tell me where to go and what to do? Who would film me going there and doing it? Who would record the sound? Who would make sure that everyone I talked to along the way signed a legal release form to allow what they say to be featured on TV and to prevent them from changing their mind later? And who would boss the others around until they couldn't stand him any more? That's what we have a director, cameraman, sound technician, field producer, and coordinating field producer for. And the audience is savvy enough to know that. They're aware of the conceit/deceit of reality TV. That it's a group effort and I can't possibly be alone. Yet, in the name of maintaining the illusion and being entertained, they and we pretend I am.
Once the long shot is complete, Mark wants one more rerun for close-ups.
“And remember to act surprised,” he calls out.
“I will.”
Returning inside the aircraft, I re-emerge from the door, surveying the terrain as though I didn't spot it the first two times, looking perplexed, listening, sniffing.
The air here in Vanuatu is strange. That's the first thing you notice. It's unlike anything we're used to in Los Angeles. Can't decide what's so different about it at first. Then, I have it: it contains oxygen. From trees, too, not a cylinder! Can you believe that? As a city kid who grew up in Manchester, England, and is now based in Hollywood, this is a first for me. I suspect my lungs are going to have a problem adapting.
Several feet to my right, out of shot, Tasha's feeling the same way. Taking a moment to absorb the alien wooded landscape around the airport, she soaks up the almost eerie tranquility and breathes in deep lungfuls of healthy air, then combats the evils of both by firing up her iPod and lighting a cigarette.
Behind me, the propellers chug back to life. We're going up again! Just me and Camera Mark this time (and possibly the pilot if he has a few minutes), for a rerun of the landing sequence. That way we can pick up shots we missed on the way in, of my face staring out of the window in horror, with the island in the background. As it is, on this occasion the flight is a whole lot smoother and convinces me that I was probably wrong when I referred to the plane as a clockwork junk heap; it's not as unsafe as I'd first thought. That, or I've become better at not crapping my pants in panic.
Once we're down on the ground, the Twin Otter begins taxiing back the way it came. The pilot's been given orders to circle twice overhead to ensure we get a shot of him flying off. This he dutifully does, before banking away to the west. Moments later, swallowed by clouds, the plane's steady hornet-swarm drone recedes into the distance, its place taken by silence once again. And that's when it really hits us. Even daredevil Mark, I'm thinking. That, land or crash