Magic Hours by Tom Bissell Page B

non-geopolitical reasons, taking an accidental bullet in the leg while deer hunting a few years ago. Doug’s femur was shattered, and he walks with a noticeable limp. Doug, I learn, has signed onto the film as its Gun Safety Consultant. I congratulate him on his gig, and he regales me with amused but not at all mean-spirited stories of the Movie People’s innocence in things ungulate.

    The Movie People arrived with the thought of using a tranquilized farm deer for the hunting scenes. But a tranquilized farm deer proved difficult to procure. A mechanical deer was thus obtained from the local branch of the Department of Natural Resources, a notion so oxymoronical I swoon at the thought of it. Why I ask, does the DNR have a mechanical deer? “To catch poachers,” Doug replies. Robot deer are patrolling the forests of Upper Michigan, and clearly I am here covering the wrong story.
    A couple approaches the set with a mixture of trepidation and privilege. They are, it is quickly determined, the owners of the house that a whole troop of Movie People are recklessly stomping into and out of. I ask the woman, Michelle, if she’s worried about her home. She’s not, she tells me, jerking a little as the screen door bangs shut for the fiftieth time. “They gave us excellent insurance.”
    A stressed-looking Jeff Daniels is talking to a cameraman about (what else) lighting the driveway-parked pickup truck he’ll be sitting in for the duration of this scene. Daniels’s co-star, the unfairly beautiful Kimberly Norris Guerrero, most famous for an appearance on Seinfeld , waits nearby with her unfairly handsome significant other. Michelle abandons our conversation and approaches Daniels, asking him timorously if he’s “too overwhelmed” to sign an autograph. It takes Daniels a moment to look at her. When he does, his mouth is smiling but his eyes are cold and featureless. In a patient, considered tone, he tells Michelle he’s working right now, and asks that she wait until he’s done working. Michelle laughs in a nervous, humiliated way and hastens back to her husband’s side. It is hard to fault Michelle much here, since I imagine that, in her mind, it was pretty damned generous of her to cede Daniels her home, but it is equally hard to fault Daniels’s brusque reply, since he was in the middle of a conversation and child-proofing his personal space while on the job is something he shouldn’t have
to do. It is an all-around ugly scene that everyone pretends not to have noticed. Michelle and her husband soon join the phalanx of Escanabans watching safely from across the street.
    Daniels climbs into the cab of the battered Ford pickup and Guerrero takes her place at the driver’s-side window. Both suffer eleventh-hour preening at the hands of a makeup artist. Their conversation will first be shot from Daniels’s perspective, and amassed on the Ford’s passenger-side is a platoon of Movie People: the cameraman, the second assistant director, some gaffers, and the condenser mic operator, each frozen in a differently uncomfortable pose. Providing further distraction is the lights, all perched on thin metal stands called “lollipops,” and a huge white deflector that resembles the screen upon which children are lobotomized by elementary-school filmstrips. Beneath this sensory ambush, Guerrero and Daniels are now expected to have a quiet, character-revealing conversation. One does not need to see their awkward initial takes to grasp how ludicrously difficult motion-picture acting can be.
    The Movie People will try to use as much native sound and dialogue as they can, since post-production redubbing is so expensive. It is therefore extremely important, Gary is explaining to the crowd, that everyone keep very, very quiet and very, very still while the cameras are rolling. The crowd is a cooperative of nods. Gary walks back over to the Movie People’s side