Page 53 of All That Glitters
The camera then showed the execs setting up shop, transforming the peaceful cemetery into something resembling a construction site crossed with a tailgate party. A construction crew of fellow ex-con bikers nailed haphazardly cut boards to the side of a stone mausoleum, creating a makeshift production office straight out of a cartoon.
“That there’s our production office,” Roy explained. “We’re attachin’ it right to a real crypt ‘cause the stone walls keep the beer real cold.”
The lens drifted, finding Carrie sitting by a rickety old trailer, trying to memorize her lines. Even through the poor video quality, it was obvious that she was both stunningly beautiful and utterly miserable, her expression suggesting she was contemplating both the script and the Starbucks career she passed up for this.
The camera did a clumsy, unsteady zoom in on her ample chest, held for a beat too long, then tilted up to her face. She frowned, her eyes locking onto the lens with a look that couldlevel a small forest. She stood up and stormed right at the camera, her angry face filling the entire screen before the image swept wildly up to the sky and dropped to the grass.
“I was just checkin’ the focus!” Roy’s voice squeaked as the camera recorded nothing but a worm’s-eye view of clouds.
In the next clip, a hillbilly-type inmate in overalls, Jethro, was nonchalantly buzzing through the branch of an ancient oak tree with a chainsaw, sawdust flying everywhere.
“We need that branch gone for the shootin’ angle,” Roy explained as Jethro continued his assault on the venerable oak. “Plus, Jethro just really likes chainsaws. It’s like therapy for him.”
Nearby, Todd and Carl were laying dolly track with the precision of men who had clearly never seen dolly track before and were working from a verbal description at best. The metal rails zigzagged across the cemetery ground like a drunken snake, occasionally disappearing into open graves before reemerging at improbable angles.
Craig stood a few feet away, shouting at something just off set, his face turning an alarming shade of crimson. The camera panned right to follow his look, catching Elvis, the Labrador, dragging a thousand-dollar movie light across the lawn by its power cord as two inmates, Kevin and Steve, chased futilely after him.
“Elvis! Drop it! That ain’t a toy!” Steve yelled, diving for the cord and missing completely, face planting into a freshly dug grave with a muffled curse.
“He thinks everything’s a chew toy,” Roy commented as the dog continued his gleeful destruction of expensive equipment. “Last week he ate half the script. Craig said It was an improvement.”
The next scene opened on Carl backing his pickup truck across the cemetery lawn to unload equipment. Suddenly, the rear end of the truck dropped out of sight with a sickening crunch, the tailgate disappearing as if the earth had taken a bite out of it. A shaky zoom-in revealed Carl in the driver’s seat, his mouth forming a series of very creative and silent curse words that required no audio to be thoroughly understood.
“He done backed into a grave,” Roy explained unnecessarily. “That’s the third time today. You’d think he’d start lookin’ behind him, but Carl ain’t big on learnin’ from experience.”
A bit later, the truck was still stuck, its rear wheels spinning uselessly in the open grave like a turtle on its back. The camera captured the Rif Raf team’s solution to this predicament, which involved engineering principles that would make actual engineers weep into their calculators.
Steve had tugged the truck’s winch cable over to a large, beautiful marble angel statue, and wrapped it securely around the angel’s neck. He secured the cable and gave Carl a thumbs-up to turn on the winch.
“This is gonna work like a charm,” Roy assured the future viewers. “Steve used to be a tow truck driver ‘fore he got arrested for towin’ cars that weren’t actually parked illegal.”
The winch whined, pulling the cable tight. Slowly, the truck began easing out of the grave, the backend rising inch by excruciating inch. For a glorious second, it worked. And then, with a cracking of marble, the angel toppled over and shattered into a million pieces on the ground. The truck, its winch cable now gone slack, slid right back into the grave.
The camera captured the team’s collective expression of horror — pretty much one big ‘oh crap’ moment.
“Okay, so Plan A had some flaws,” Roy admitted as the dust settled over the decimated angel. “But Craig says we just gotta put it back together ‘fore anyone notices.”
Later, the footage showed a tow truck, a real one this time, successfully pulling Carl’s pickup from the grave. The tow truck driver, a burly man with the weary expression of someone who thought he’d seen it all, counted the wad of cash Craig handed him before unhooking his chains.
Craig, his face a mask of frustration, looked over and saw he was being filmed. He shouted something that was thankfully inaudible and made a threatening gesture at the camera that involved several fingers and a promise of anatomically unlikely consequences.
“Craig’s just expressin’ his artistic temperament,” Roy explained hurriedly as the camera quickly panned away to safer subjects.
Later, the camera found Steve and Carl on their hands and knees, diligently gluing the angel statue back together. The reassembly wasn’t going so well. The once-beautiful sculpture now looked like a cubist nightmare that even Picasso would have found bizarre. The pieces didn’t fit right, giant smudges of epoxy oozed from the cracks, arms twisted at anatomically painful angles, and, in a stroke of artistic genius, the head was on backwards, the angel’s face now gazing at its own wings.
“Somethin’ ain’t quite right there,” Roy commented from behind the camera, “but can’t quite put my finger on it.”
Carl offered a gesture that was decidedly un-angelic in response.
That night, the production was actually filming. The camera’s viewfinder showed Carrie and her co-star, Kevin, creeping along the set. A thick, eerie blanket of fog shrouded the tombstones, creating an atmosphere of genuine gothic horror that was surprisingly effective given the chaotic preparation.
“We’re doin’ the scene where Carrie’s character discovers the vampire frat house is actually usin’ the cemetery as they’s huntin’ grounds,” Roy whispered, apparently having decided that whispering was appropriate even though he wasn’t actually on set. “It’s a real pivotal moment in the story.”
The camera followed the ‘fog’ just off-set, revealing its source: the thick, black exhaust pouring from the tailpipe of Carl’s truck, which was parked just out of frame with its engine running. A garden hose had been duct-taped to the exhaust pipe to direct the fumes more precisely.
“That there’s our fog machine,” Roy explained with evident pride in their ingenuity. “Craig says it’s how they did it in the old days, ‘fore digital effects ruined cinema.”
On set, Carrie coughed violently between takes, waving her hand in front of her face and shouting something about “carbon monoxide poisoning” that the crew seemed to be oblivious to.
