From Bo Keely: Hollywood And Slab City Collide

 
Hollywood has learned much of Slab City, and Slab City of Hollywood in the past week of cinematography.
 
When you compare a movie highlight reel to the blooper outtakes, and it makes you feel worse, you’re on the wrong road leading from Slab City. No great film can compare to its outtakes, as the Hollywood crew of the movie ‘The Slabs’ discovered this past week when I was their ‘fixer’ who rose to assistant director. Bloopers have universal appeal, as movies may be made of them. These are the behind-the-scenes slips that you won’t see from a theater seat.
 
The first morning before the initial shoot, the director asked me to give the crew a Vince Lombardi pep talk over omelets at the Niland Buckshot Cafe. I previewed the dozen, ‘You are entering a Twilight Zone called Slab City. It is a realm of the unknown and mysterious. You may have two responses: to run scared or to embrace the unfamiliar.’ They thought I was acting, but would soon find I cannot act.
 
After breakfast, we piled in their four vehicles and drove three miles east past the guard tower painted in scarlet ‘Leave reality behind’ into the last free place on earth.
 
I had previously located all the movie sets, thought they were not to be filmed in the order of the story line. A movie should have a beginning, middle, and an end, but not necessarily in that order, and that's how the sets are as we begin.
 
Set 1:   Dot’s Wardrobe Bus
 
Dot’s House at the corner of East Jesus has a 1951 school bus that the creative owner has converted to a mobile wardrobe where the female lead fell in love with the clothes on first sight, changing rapidly. It was the first time I had met the lead and South American superstar Bianca Comparator. The two male actors are brother characters in the film who leave LA to bond in Slab City, as one brother stays clean and the other takes the outlaw path here. They are in competition for the beautiful girl.
 
I was doing a little of everything on set, and here held the shirt-side of Bianca in short shorts as Dot scissored a slit up the front of her tank top to reveal a perky navel. Bianca explained that she got her mother’s beauty, author father’s mind for dialogue, and legs from the Rio de Janeiro sport of beach soccer volleyball using the feet and legs to smack a ball over a net. I examined the most developed knee backs, and when the cut was done, the actress deftly dropped a plastic bottle on one thigh, bounced to the knee, and caught it on the foot. She kicked if off into the trash, and walked to the wardrobe bus.
 
The scene has her try on colorful negligees and outfits from the two long racks of hundreds Dot has accumulated over the years from throwaways at the Slabs. There was ample room for the crew as the bus has been gutted of the seats, except for the driver’s, and the hanger racks are the ceiling handholds from front to back. The takes, quite pleasing, consumed four hours for 10 minutes of eventual reel time.
 
In the next scene at Dot’s, the director on-the-spot hired Dot as an extra to play the actress’s stern aunt, advising her niece to avoid the brother on the downhill path. That actor walks in, and the aunt berates him, urges him to act more like his sharp brother, and the whole 5-minutes was done in three takes of adlibs, in which Dot outpaced the actors, who all hugged like an after scrum.
 
As the crew broke set, I learned from the producer that ‘The Slabs’ is a theater feature directed by Ezra with the leads of Bianca, and actors James and Wilder. The two young men told me they had auditioned by Skype for their parts, as is common, with a follow-up dual online ‘chemistry’ interview before they were signed to the parts. The female told me she had been approached via her agent for the lead, and ‘So liked the script that I signed for $13 an hour.’ Likewise, the other two professionals are acting for California minimum wage since they also believe in the script and director. I was shocked, and glanced toward the director who, overhearing, shrugged and smiled beguilingly.
 
I also spent time talking to him. He and his brother on set were door-to-door missionaries in Namibia about the time, I told them, I hitchhiked through the capital Windhoek, and was picked up by a British Petroleum chief. He offered, ‘You fit the part,’ and when I asked for what, he pulled out a gun, stuck it under the driver’s seat, gave me the car keys, an address, and we drove to entrap a rhino horn poacher. I let the owner out behind a tree, left the gun under the seat, and rapped lightly on the door. Whites being a rarity in the predominately black capital, I was admitted, asked the homeowner to buy horns as aphrodisiacs, and as one of his daughters was fetching them, I backed out. I was wired for sound, but wagged my finger to cancel the deal, the smuggler caught the cue, and replied politely, ‘We are fresh out of horns,’ before the daughter returned with them. I could not set up a simple family, and suspected I could have been the dupe. On hearing this, the director of ‘The Slabs’ looked thoughtfully at me, and I knew I would have a deeper part in his movie.
 
Set 2:   Penny’s Bar
 
The second set for that evening I had found at Penny’s Bar across from the Slab Blue Church. This unique joint has a welded dome of scrap above a bar counter set in the bottom limbs of a Palo Verde tree. I was the movie fixer finding all the sets, every major prop, and all the extras. It was understood by all who rented their spaces, things, or themselves that they would be compensated but after we secured each. Otherwise, for example with sets, if the owner of a place is paid in advance, he talks it up among his neighbors who encourage that he is getting screwed and asks for more money before the shoot. 
 
As the set was being prepared by the construction crew, and the actors receiving last touches by a makeup artist, the director and I were driving around town securing props. As would happen before each shoot, his cell buzzed, he read a text, ‘Ready on set’, and we about faced to the set. ‘My god!’ moaned the director as we walked into the bar. ‘He’s already nude.’  
 
Two Slab extras have prominent roles in this shoot. The first is a large Slabber we call Neanderthal whose size and hairiness bely his talent. The second Is Pink Gorilla, who likewise could be his son, and plays the part, having once done a Butterfingers commercial. Neanderthal stood naked and greased under the acute studio lights with a long black cone out over his penis. The director drew a deep breath, shouted ‘Action!’ and the drunk and Pink Gorilla stumble into the bar as the latter videoed his dad on his own cell camera. That footage would later become a classic, because this is what happens as the big camera rolls on both of them. 
 
The wild brother is the bartender and the lead, his girl, a waitress. The Neanderthal staggers in, bellies up to the bar, and orders, ‘Gimmie a drink.’ The bartender balks, ‘We don’t serve drunks.’ After harsh words, the bartender pulls a whiskey bottle and smashes it on the head of the drunk, who falls into a heap, as his son videos, ‘You think you’re tough, old man, and now look at you!’ The first take was so realistic the crew sat in shock. The girl’s eyes bugged out. The director forgot to say ‘Cut!’ The bottle had been breakaway glass, and there were two left, for two more takes, each equally as compelling as the first. The Slabbers had stolen the show. 
 
That was not all that was stolen. While the scene was being shot, I noticed the Key Lady of Slab City at the saloon door slinking back-and-forth. I had previously warned the director to caution his team to beware this Slabber who specializes in light touching keys and heisting the vehicles. The Key Lady list is long and lucrative throughout history, and her vehicles are hired out as rentals for a few months until they get so dinged, or the plate expires, and they’re retired to running brass on the Range. Swiftly the lightman walked into the bar with a flashlight in his teeth and two more in his fists panning every direction. ‘Missing your keys?’ I asked prophetically. He nodded, and I informed him of the Key Lady, now long gone from the door. He begged me to chase her, to post a $300 reward for the return of the keys to his $30,000 2019 VW Beetle Wolfsburg Edition Coup. I refused, as it would bring attention to the crew’s fleet. Instead, he ordered a replacement set of keys, as the white Beetle sat outside the bar. The normal MO of key thefts is to hire a minion to return in the cloak of darkness to steal the vehicle, which we forestalled by hiring a guard to sleep under it until daybreak when a tow truck arrived to tow it to safety. 
 
The important thing is the shoot was a thundering success. It reminds me that I’ve seen the insides of bars across our nation for 3650 straight nights in my youth when I was a teetotaler and acquiring judge of character. I rarely missed a single night for one decade with the main lesson to judge a person not by his words but by his body language. Situational variables can exert powerful influences over character, more so in a bar that we acknowledge. The drama at Penny’s bar was the best seen of my life.
 
If you give Slab City a chance it performs. There are no better actors in America than confidence actors. If you put someone in a room with no script to direct, they’re just going to sit there. But put a bunch of Slabbers under a Palo Verde tree and they start conning each other. Casting calls are so popular in the Slabs that the police once staged a sting to pick up bench warrants, who comprised a quarter the population. The best actors are not in Hollywood. No, they are the Slab residents and politicians in Washington DC.
 
I heard Neanderthal outside negotiating his contract with the producer. 'The only compensation I want is soap and water. A box of detergent costs $10 and 300 gallons of water is $40.' Deal, and he signed a one-day SAG (Screen Actors Guild) agreement. He should parlay it to a full SAG since no one knew if he was actually loaded. 
 
Set 3:   Lemon Grove 
 
The following morning I received a at 6:00am surprise text from the director: ‘The crew and actors were eaten alive by ants at the Slab Hostel. We vacated at sunrise and moved home base to the Niland Oasis Trailer Park.’ I laughed until I choked, and packed up a large can of WD-40 onto my CSC-250 motorcycle. The new home base would mean a daily three-mile commute down the road to the Trailer Park and adjacent Buckshot Cafe to breakfast with everyone. There the blurry-eyed actors filled me in with great animation of the ants went marching in the Slabs. With breakfast on the grill, I walked next door to the trailer park and sprayed around their trailers’ wheels and base stands to prevent any ants from climbing up into their new accommodations, as is done with motor oil on hut stilts in the Amazon. Next I walked a hundred steps kitty-corner in tiny Niland, CA to the post office to look for a Covid test kit mandated by law for film crews. It hadn’t arrived, and the crew except actors when acting must continue to breathe hot air through masks on public sets.  
 
Back at the breakfast table, the director asked me to deliver another pep talk. I minced, ‘Slab City is a lawless town in the sense of having no laws, but there are consequences. There’s little violence, only ingenious cons by some of the smartest people on the planet. I’m sure anyone likes a little mischief, provided you’re not the victim.’ Their second immersion was the early June heat, so I warned, ‘Drink before you get thirsty, eat before you get hungry, and always wear a hat.’  
 
This, and each morning after the breakfast orders were in, the director handed out a single sheet to all, ‘General Crew Call’ giving the starting time of 10am and the daily schedule. At the top was the weather forecast, ‘Sunny, 100-105F.’ Until that moment, only the director, producer, and I knew the day’s schedule. I was privy having to scout the sets prior to the crew arrival for anything untoward. The sheet was divided into columns with the sets, their locations, actors required, props, and mealtimes. The director urged that this overview is not expected to run smoothly. He introduced today that I, as the local producer, am the only person who knows how to get to the sets. Each workday is from 10am - 10pm for five consecutive days. 
 
After eating, I lingered with the two male leads to learn what happens inside the head of an actor who is getting inside the head of his character. They are what American psychologist John Watson would call behaviorists. An ounce of behavior is worth a pound of dialogue. One said, ‘I always try to go back to what would actually be the real situation, the real human behavior in life. The camera isn’t there, just behavior in a situation.’ The other took his slack, ‘People say I make strange choices on camera, but they’re not strange to me. I love unadulterated body language.’ This is the first big break for each onto the silver screen with a superstar. They reiterated the script as the reason they signed on for minimum wage, alongside Bianca. One brother, an exercise scientist, observed, ‘I feel like I’m on the bench ready for the coach to put me in.’ His brother, an athletic also who grew up on stage, continued, ‘I’m spreading my wings in this film expecting it to take me places.’ 
 
An architect worth his psychology will tell you that human behavior changes according to environment. So, I advised the exercise scientist, ‘You have a rare primal quality others like Tom Hanks must train for months to emit. Explore yourself in these characters, and slowly branch out into unfamiliar ones.’ To the stage prodigy I told, ‘Take Aikido, Kenpo, or Brazilian Jujitsu for inner strength of your own character which will carry to all your parts.’ The father of Kenpo Karate Ed Parker, whom I know indirectly, taught Humphry Bogart, John Wayne, Nick Adams, Cary Grant, and other hard-noses because you can convince 90% of an audience that you’re tough with outward appearance, but the other 10% will see through you if you’re not. These stars became the tough guys they portrayed. Human behavior is incredibly plastic. Unfortunately, most is learned observationally via modeling from others. I try to teach others to begin with their own raw material. A true-self-image may flow from there, to be projected onto the camera film. Then when the chin strikes the bosom the audience feels it in his heart. 
 
Each actor is a fluid adlibber, and had me in stitches as I polished off, one by one, the leftovers from the crew plates. I politely explained that I had eaten canned food for seven years at the Slabs, never having heated a single meal. ‘Adlibbing tempts me,’ I urged, ‘Tell me more,’ so I could continue eating, as hobos say, on the plush.  
 
Their phones buzzed simultaneously, with the same text: ‘Actors to set.’ The man called Legs, who is the guy Friday on set, pulled aside in a van and we piled in. Only I, among us, knew the location of the first set of the day in an abandoned lemon orchard on the Highline Canal that forms the west perimeter of Slab City. I had found the mile-square orchard during a southwest hike from the Slabs, following my hungry nose along the scent trail to thousands of trees with millions of lemons. I had given the director a rake to clear a path of branch spines that pierce the soles between rows of trees, and here we would shoot all day, and along the canal and RR, for about 30 minutes of reel time. 
 
We settled in under an umbrella pushing up lemons. It was like sitting a century ago in the Great Depression when Imperial Valley was the fruit basket of America and steam trains brought hobos on the trembling track 200 yards to our west, to pick breakfast from the laden limbs, and pill high the ice cars to be hauled out to the rest of the country. A whistle blew long-long-short-long on the track and a mile-long diesel electric with six locomotives trundled past bound for Yuma-Tucson-Dallas on this old Southern Pacific line that I used to ride each Christmas to visit my folks, who after a half-dozen finally admitted they didn’t mind me smelling like citrus for New Year’s. 
 
It’s a gorgeous set for three reasons. This is the fruit basket of America for the soil as a former sea bottom, the Colorado River water irrigated from the Rocky Mountains, and the unbeatable California sunshine on the skin of the fruit. A camera dolly was wheeled between two rows. It is a cart on a yard-wide track that is used to create smooth horizontal camera movement. The contraption assembles in 20-minutes and the cameraman climbs aboard to move usually toward to zoom, or often backwards to dissolve a scene. The cart is pushed at about one-foot per frictionless second by a grip technician. The dolly in the grove toward the subjects made the lemons grow in front of our eyes.       
 
Any movie shot begins with the director ordering, ‘Quiet on set … Rolling  … Action!’ The grip claps a digital slate with the real time to 1/100th-second, saying, ‘Set Orchard, Scene 1, Take 1.’ At the clap, the director’s next command, ‘Actors’, brings them into the camera frame. The state-of-art camera rental at $200 is double the Jeep daily of $100. The cameraman works the 3’-cube, 40-pound digital camera suspended on a boom from a shoulder harness, to move smoothly about with the actors. This is where moviemaking gets technologically absorbing. The main camera image is radio waved without a 20’ radius to a handheld screen of the focus man who remotely focuses the camera. Simultaneously, that image is radioed to the director’s handheld screen to frame and follow the footage. I watched the shots over each of their shoulders, alternately looking up at the live scene. It donned on me that camerawork is mostly choosing what to frame in or out of the picture. A film becomes great when the cameraman has in his head the eye of a poet, as this expert displayed.  
 
A good director makes a playground of a set and allows you to play in it, where the script is only a guide. And so, when the slate clapped on the lemon orchard, a brother and the smitten girl stroll picking and eating softball size sweet lemons chatting about their future together. The girl picked a big lemon, smelled it, swooned into the arms of her lover, and enacted the most perfect orgasm I’ve ever seen. I thought drama was when the actress climaxed in Times Square, but the drama is when the audience does. The cameraman’s dropped his jaw back in Oklahoma, the crew groaned, and the director whispered, ‘My goodness, cut!’ 
 
Set 4:   Canal 
 
The crew drove from the grove one mile north to the Highland Canal that is the western perimeter of Slab City. There, bobbing high on the 20’-wide stream, set the SS Fat Boy. The director had assigned earlier in the day, ‘It’s a tall order, but I need a boat to hold the cameraman and soundman during the take.’ I had replied, ‘It so happens…’ and explained that five years ago I had stumbled on a 14’ aluminum boat in perfect condition grounded on the sands miles from any water. With the serial number scratched off, it was obviously stolen, and since one may not steal from a thief, I had it trucked to the Slabs where it has sat gathering dust for those years. The director and I had gone to fetch the boat, gave the person I had gifted it to $20 for hire for a day, and he told us to find the boat now at Fat Boy’s across the Slabs. There we were charged another $20 to rent it from the new owner, who had painted his name on the bow, SS Fat Boy. The director didn’t mind being ‘Slabbed’, or conned by multiple ownership into numerous fees, and we got free delivery to the High Line Canal. The craft now floated with the cameraman and soundman waiting for the director to board and shout, ‘Roll ‘em!’ 
 
The set conjures a canal transportation of early America with the boat in the stream center as Legs and the AD on the bank tug it upstream by two-guy ropes fixed to the stern. They lean into the task like mules. Two innertubes floating the actress and actor drag attached by invisible fishlines behind the boat. All that could be seen in the camera frame is the two actors, splashing, chatting until a dark moment when she kisses and then dumps him into the drink, as ducks quack on shore. 
 
The sun set over the nearby Salton Sea, and we called it a day. 
 
That evening we ate at Wrangler's Roost across from the Slab city Music Range where the sage cook delayed our order for two hours as Slabbers piled in to ogled and be seen by the crew, hopefully. Our tables became a casting call for extras. One Tarzan in a Jane brassiere was considered, and two of Slabs most talented musicians, James and Pete, crooned with the strong vocalist actor Wilder, and everyone sang along, as the microphone slowly got stoned.  
 
After dinner, we walked three dirt blocks to the Skate Park to toss one down. General Patton’s former 50-meter swimming pool there now offers ramps of wrecked vehicles for world skateboard competition. On the lip of the shallow end sits the Handle Bar that we enter for a Star Wars buzz at Mos Eisley Bar. Picture a collection of aliens from all parts of the galaxy bellying up to a bar on a remote planet of Tatooine, or the Slabs. ‘Greetings, Hollywood tacos’ smiled the bartender. ‘What’ll it be?’ I shuddered as our grip Legs stepped to the side where a beautiful girl lives in a dog cage, and was offered by a shaggy patron a marijuana Dab. It’s almost pure THC often doctored in town to prompt the smoker to believe he’s god and doesn’t need his wallet anymore. As the universe expanded around Legs, we shouldered him down the road to dilute the effect at the Redemption Taco Stand with one carne taco after another until he came back to earth. 
 
The crew was catching on with bloopers like this that Slabbers view the world apart as a modern Babylon. Like the biblical, it is a cage for unclean spirits who cannot enter our town limit. One is cleansed by arriving and being reborn in the Slabs. Residents when asked for their birthday, reply ‘2019,’ or whenever they arrived. Feeling young at eight years in the Slabs, I curled into a catnap before the following morning shoot. 
 
Set 5:   Tomahawk’s Recycle 
 
Each morning before breakfast and heading out for the morning set, we watched the previous day’s footage in the director’s trailer at basecamp. The shoots were recorded on little digital cards measuring 2×3x½” that each hold 15 minutes of footage.  At the end of each day’s shoots, the cameraman hands about five cards to the director who takes them to his trailer and downloads to his laptop. He selects the best shoots from each set, and the following morning shows them in a 20-minute minute review to the actors and crew. Seeing their creation is a tremendous boost day-after-day to completion. Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater, and this does. They stomped hand hands and clapped their feet, before we walked over to the Buckshot for breakfast.  
 
After eating, we drove in the four crew vans to the first set. A movie set, I learned, is where everyone except the director sits around 90% of the time chatting with interesting people and eating catered food in an oasis of nowhere. The setup crew scampers off periodically to do their specialty. Then there is a flurry of activity as a scene is shot for one minute, reshot repeatedly from different angles, and it’s a wrap. It takes about six hours to set up and shoot a ten-minute scene at each of the sets, and so the week progressed.  
 
I loved going to set each morning. It was like hoboing a freight to wake up in a new exotic destination. The first set of the today was an abandoned warehouse the size of a soccer field overgrown with artistic graffiti through the years. It last saw action holding millions of tomatoes when Niland was the tomato capital of the world, before Baja usurped them with lower prices. This is the first day on set without the female lead Bianca. Her sets shot, and contract complete, she returned to South America. Last night I read her Wikipedia. She looks underage but at 35-years is a young Elizabeth Taylor, only athletic. She is gold in Latin film and TV series. Yet, even the best needs re-exposure and put into the world again. Slab City has polished her clean, where her performance is superlative to a sampling of two dozen trailers I watched. She shines because she had fun! 
 
The two brothers are strong character actors, a Jekyll and Hyde. After she left, I got to thinking. She filmed only with one brother, and none of their dialogue mentioned the other. It was only when both brothers were together that the second one, the Jekyll, existed. I watched set-by-set the movie turn into a psychodrama of dual personalities in Slab City, where it is the norm among methamphetamine users. By this day four, the brothers Jekyll and Hyde were in a fight for control of the same body on set. 
 
With the superstar gone, I picked up today’s local female lead, Slabber Tomahawk, at her camp on the back of my CSC motorcycled. Her horse-trained thighs squeezed my hips and parachute cord fingers held my waist. Tomahawk was raised barefoot in the New England woods, ran to become the Massachusetts sprint champ, bailed out of Army Airborne, and landed in Slab City where she became the town peacemaker. She was the director’s first choice to cast as the recycle center clerk. At the last minute, the set moved from a graffitied warehouse to the old Niland fire department, now also abandoned, with a dozen 1950s firetrucks gathering dust but not rust. The town gave us permission to enter and shoot.   
 
In this scene, surrounded by a dozen red firetrucks, the crew hastily assembled a set of a table, grain scale, air conditioner, and sign ‘Tomahawk’s Recycling’. The camera rolled as an actor brother walked onto the set, there is a short exchange with the clerk and he trades a 40-pounds bag of spent brass for an air conditioner. With the market price of brass tipping $2.00 a pound, it was a fair deal. Tomahawk says, ‘Brass is up, I can give you that used AC.’ The brother replies, ‘Deal!’ and totes it off. I make a 3-second Bob Dillon cameo walking in as he strides out. ‘It’s rough out there,’ cautions Tomahawk. ‘Be careful.’ 
 
It was over in a blink, and the fence of the old station locked behind us. The crew scurried off in the vans to the next set, leaving the makeup artist, two actors, producer, assistant director, makeup artist, set constructor, and me sitting in the shade of an umbrella sipping iced tea and chatting Hollywood. That kind of conversation is bizarre to me, so my ears leaned from it, and my eyes fell on the makeup artist. One-at-a-time before the set the actors seek her for touchup, where she herself wears gobs of makeup like Morticia Addams. I was astonished to see her the first time fresh-scrubbed out of makeup. She is a runway model offset that must be, bored with her own beauty, matches her persona using makeup to the theme of a movie set, and in this case Slab women.   
 
To one of the brother’s knees she dabbed fake dirt from a bottle, which was off-color for this Salton seabed, so I licked my knees via one hand, and fell to my knees in front of her, then standing for inspection. ‘Perfect!’ she rejoined, and ordered the brother to do the same. Not because of that, but I was saddened under the umbrella to hear the artist announce her flight from the heat and running makeup back to LA. The set constructor, sitting with his feet in a bucket of ice water, also called it quits. Legs bowed out too, but hung on the fringe of the sets and heatstroke.  
 
Now the assistant director (AD) lowered the boom! ‘I quit,’ he muttered. He put his hand on my shoulder, and opined, ‘It’s up to you.’ An AD handles the logistics of running the set during production. He is the liaison between the director and crew. He creates and manages the shooting schedule. I had been doing most of these things anyhow, so nodded, and stepped shocked into his shoes.  
 
He threw back his head and laughed. ‘I owe you’, he avowed. ‘What for?’ I wondered. I had just told him the backstory of how on finding the SS Fat Boy I had given it to Domino Dick and the rust bucket of fu__s for his girls-in-waiting to sit. Domino Dick is the only Slabber I know who got a prison woodie of dominoes inserted under his foreskin. There is one for each of six positions, and strategically placed if his girlfriends’ tributes count. The AD had shot to his feet and circled the umbrella, repeating, ‘Domino Dick and the rust bucket of fu__s!’ He finally sat down, ‘That’s going in the book.’ ‘What book?’ I asked. ‘I can afford to quit as AD because I’m a screenwriter.’ He swiveled in his chair to his producer, and bid, ‘Honey, I’ll get a ‘Transamerica’ if you buy it.’ She nodded, and they penned the tattoo from flank-to-flank on his backside. 
 
Being on a movie set is a wonderful experience, but it’s a bubble. It popped today when half the crew left town. You will either step forward into growth or you will step back into safety. As the sets and days wore on, each brother slowly was becoming the character he portrayed: the Hercules grew stronger as his addict brother gradually gave his mind to the Slabs. The remaining crew got Slab-minded and the knack of living without laws in Slab City. I told them that one doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of their shore of civilization, for a long time. As AD, I comforted my director, ‘The people who don’t believe in you today, will tell everything how they met you after the film comes out.’ Then I ordered another round of iced tea, and we packed coolers of ice and drinks for the remaining crew at the next set at Camp Enchantment. 
 
Set 6:   Enchanted Camp 
 
I had discovered the unknown Camp Enchantment with a Slab City coyote, a person who runs illegal Mexicans called mojados on quads from the border 30 miles at the south to skirt Slab City here between the Coachella Canal and Chocolate Mountains, and continue north another 40 miles beyond the last US Border Patrol checkpoint to the town of Mecca. The coyote had showed me the camp of spooky cedars and twittering birds on the eastern bank of the canal, saying, ‘No one will ever find you here.’ The drainage of two washes allows a cluster of Salt Cedars an acre thick that, once in, closes around and clutches like an Ent Forest. When I first revealed it to the director he smacked his head in approval, and when we entered an old secreted camp of illegal aliens he sat on the two-inch thick needle bed and nearly cried for its perfection. 'Camp Enchantment,' arose from his mouth. The perfect spot for the meaningful scene to be filmed without detection.      
 
In this set the two brothers argue, as they drift apart in brotherhood. One grills hamburgers on a fire as the other sleeps. The take was shot twice, so I got my full of burgers. The cook awakens his sleeping brother with a clang of a spoon on the frying pan to announce dinner and his departure. He makes him do pushups before giving him relish. They face off nose-to-nose in a fray I thought would come to blows, the acting was so strong. The cook stomps out the camp with all his earthly belongings in a knapsack.  
 
Left alone in night camp, the brother goes whacko, grabs an axe, raises, and smashes the air conditioner. This was not the rented air conditioner from the don of the Slabs, but a microwave dressed like one that I had found in a wash. As the axe nearly halved the AC, I studied the actor’s face and was disturbed. Was he method acting, or had he scooped too hard into the methamphetamine persona? Method acting is employed to evoke real emotions into a performance by drawing on personal experiences that simulate the character he’s playing. However, when these dredged emotions are not compartmentalized, they may encroach on the acter after the cut.  
 
‘Cut!’ yelled the director. ‘Great job guys. Now split up and take a breather.’ I sat protected behind a salt cedar entertaining that the more successful the villain the more successful the picture. And wondered, should every film have a psychologist on set to keep the method actors on even keel. But, I thought, who is the director’s psychologist? There is no job more demanding than directing a movie like a traffic controller at an airport. Incoming and outgoing, continual stress, and beat the clock, without being able to pop a cork.  
 
A quiet fell on the set, with an axe to grind by the soundman. He asked Legs and me to muffle from the boom mic the two generators powering the lights. We dragged one machine behind a van that quieted it. However, the second bigger one the lightman, a city slicker, had set up inside a stand of trees and could not be moved. Legs and I tugged, as the lightman rushed up livid, ‘Hands off my equipment!’ since electric was his domain. I shrugged, and after he left drank in the moment. The industrial generator blasted hot air 3-feet directly onto dried cedar needles that were blackening, yet not aflame. The crew had committed so many blunders of terrain that it is sad but I refused to correct this one. This is the Koehler Method of training that a person’s learned behavior is an act of choice based on his own learning experience. He is shown how to do something once, and then left on his own. The woods could have gone up in flames. 
 
I walked away 500 yards to the Cabin Solitude that was to be used in the next scene.  My formula for movie making is 50% script, 20% getting good actors, 20% relies on the cameraman, and 10% importance is attached to sets. I also believe in shock value. This story is excellent, the actors staller, the cameraman is Merlin’s eye, and throw in the best outdoor sets Slab City offers. I had told the director, ‘You have a box office hit if Slabbers don’t turn it into a blooper by burning out the sets, stealing the equipment, or kidnapping the actors. So we had set locations on the mum. One of the deepest moments of the movie in a farthest desert toe out past the Slab Golf Course was the Cabin of Solitude. A thoughtful, long-gone hermit had built the hut of wood pallets and inscribed memorable quotes of solitude and finding oneself on each of the hundreds of slats.  
 
Now it is vanished!
 
The explanation I read by the journal of tracks is that the palate cabin had been dismantled, as the Johnny Cash song goes ‘One piece at a time,’ and removed by a backlash of young brassers bent on ruining the production. They had warned me they didn’t want their illicit activity portrayed on the silver screen that might defeat their livelihood. In counterattack, they had taken Cabin Solitude. Brassing is not rocket science. You keep one eye on the ground for shells and the other in the air for wings, and let fly. Many young men arrive penniless and eager to the Slabs, befriend a mentor who teaches them the ways of scrapping on the back of his quad, and in a month he has a stake to buy his own used ATV and begin an independent operation. These young brassers’ faux pas is that they had light touched a sacred site that had the support of all the old pioneer scrappers who had taught them their brass ropes.
 
When I walked back to Camp Enchantment, drawn by the lights, a US Marine helicopter swooped and hoovered 200 yards overhead. The set lights could be seen for miles, and the gunship sniffed to consider. Our action below paused, as I instructed some of the crew, ‘Climb on the vans to wave and cheer them!’ Five did, and in seconds the chopper zipped off. 
 
At that, Camp Enchantment cleared, and everyone returned to home base except the director, cameraman, one brother actor, and me. There were two more shoots as transition sets with this midnight skeleton crew. We drove into downtown Slab City for the first, a quick walk-by of Mojo’s Camp. It becomes a fantasyland after dark of colored lights, and easily the prettiest camp on the slabs. But a Great Dane the size of a pony came bouncing out the property into the road barking. ‘Hark, hark, the dogs do bark, the tramps have come to town,’ I quoted hobo posey placing myself between the snarling Dane and the shooting crew. I kept yelling, ‘Hark, hark,’ like a Doberman with a lisp, until the dog looked at me quizzically, shut its mouth, and nuzzled my thigh. It remembered months earlier biting my right hand, as my left hook caught it in the chops. Now we are friends, and I pet him fondly.  
 
Hollywood scripts are not set in stone but evolve during the production. After the walk-by, the film had to see the brother leaving the Slabs on a freight train. I navigated the crew van through Niland four miles along the old Southern Pacific line that I used to catchout on. There sits an old RR siding with a 1950s water tank and long string of black oil cars for the set. We slid silently around a gate like real hobos and hiked the track a quarter-mile to frisk the drag. I’ve done this a thousand times about the country, truly looking for a ride out of town. The brother walks rapidly along the track, looking over his shoulder for a bull, and the other way for an imaginary locomotive to whistle cannonball. He is hitting the rails with the shirt on his back to leave his brother and lover to the jaws of Slab City.  
 
He climbs a tanker as the big camera rolls. ‘No,’ I inserted, ‘it’s like this,’ and monkeyed up the rungs having always three appendages on them, took the platform, grabbed a rung, and leaned out gazing at the star-spangled sky. I said to the man in the moon, ‘‘Pee off a freight car once and you're hooked.’ Something clicked in the actor's head - he got it- and perfect action.  
 
I favor the scene because the character is up against a wall of cars with few alternatives, as the clock ticks. And that's, I guess, what interests me in human behavior under pressure. Strength grows in the moments when you think you can’t go on but you keep on going anyway. Once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through to survive. But one thing is certain, when you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. We left my turf, stepped in the van, and called it a night at 1:00am.  
 
Set 7:  The Range 
 
The next morning was like waking from a nightmare into a heaven. I had dreamed of big dogs and bulls of the days of yore, but faced the pleasure of getting on my CSC-250 and riding to breakfast in the best Niland has to offer. The director and actors confessed they had stayed up into the wee hours grappling with the script to make this, the final shoot at the gunnery range, the best can be. I mentioned they should have called me. ‘If you have someone on set for hair, why would you not include someone for words?’ The original script was written by the director, which means his direction becomes perfect since he already imagined each set in his brain during the writing. He insisted to me, ‘Movies are driven by script, characters, or sets. Mine has all three, but the weak link was the script, which we fixed.’  
 
Plus, a twist is appreciated in audiences on the edge of their seats. A strange turn of events occurred after breakfast as our convoy passed Salvation Mountain on the way to the Chocolate Mountain Gunnery Range. A tremendous film set, 5-times larger than ours, with semi-vans and 80 crew swarming the Mountain, was taking stage. I stopped the motorcycle to ask a roustabout in a bowtie what it was, and his reply ‘Array!’ shook me to the soles. ‘Array’ is a TV film series as a way to keep audiences enlightened and entertained during social distancing and quarantine. The weekly digital series includes independent films from the Array release rooster of global features. They had selected Salvation Mountain for the next. 
 
Rather than be intimidated, our own crew vans parked competitively in front of the Mountain and as the Array cameras rolled, ours churned. The scene pans from the painted Mountain to the Array crew to our actor, flipping them the bird over his shoulder. I suggestion as AD, ‘The success of our movie is now assured. Discover the release date of ‘Array: Salvation Mountain’ and preempt their premier with ‘The Slabs’. Our director scratched his chin making a mental note. I proposed the footage as a Woody Allen effect that suddenly disarms the theater viewers out of their seats, and plants them back in it with the next scene. 
 
That next scene was at the Chocolate Mountain Bombing Range, largest in America with hundreds of square miles that is shot ‘hot’ with daily strafings and bombings. The schedule is known only to the military CO, as our daily itinerary is announced when the action starts. I had chosen this set on one side of a thin 20-mile line of signs ‘No Trespassing - Live Bombing’ coursing from the Slabs east to the Chocolates. On the north side is live bombing, while the set was built on the south side BLM land 50’ from the line, which is problematic given the US military’s accuracy. The director scanned the skies for incoming as the crew set up. 
 
This team has balls, enhanced by Juul refillable plastic nicotine cigarettes. Most of the crew lit and smoked them during tense moments or to stay awake at night. It was sunset, at the bombing range, as both factors came into play and they pulled and expanded their minds to fit the situation. Legs explained that Juuls are indispensable on Hollywood sets, and that one refillable flavored pod per day equals a pack of cigarettes. ‘Besides,’ he elated, ‘they’re fashionable.’ I took a puff and gagged.’ I stumbled off to clear my head with one of our Slab extras, Dice, with a 7-iron. He teed a golf ball on a lump of sand, strode it like Tiger Woods, backswing and bang! The ball sailed straight and true for 160 yards. Orange, we found it easily near a gopher hole. He instructed, ‘Each iron should hit the ball ten yards less as you progress from the lower numbers to higher ones, until you come to a rattlesnake. I prefer the 7-iron and have teed off on six this season.’  
 
Our other point expert on set is Worth, a scraper since birth of this range for brass shells and aluminum bomb fins in perhaps the largest recycling operation on the globe. It was sunset, the bewitching hour of the strafing by helicopters and jets, at random. Worth offered, ‘We are legal on this side of the sign line, but stand a 50-50 chance of getting raided by the military before the night is over in Humvees and choppers.’ 
 
A drone flew lazily overhead. ‘Dice saluted it with his golf club. Worth tipped his camouflage cap. They uttered nearly as one, ‘They know us at Navy Seal basecamp Billy Machen’ three miles to the northeast, where a Seal sits watching this spectacle, wondering whether to ring the bell.’ The drone hoovered ¼-mile overhead for five minutes like an omniscient eye, and darted off on patrol. 
 
Promptly, the director collared the cameraman, me, and Dice. ‘Fortune favors the bold,’ he announced, which was our cue to drift from the rest of the crew for a private mission into the live Range. Two miles inside the sign line lies a main target called The Airport. The cameraman rode in Dice’s dune-buggy for a smoother focus, and a faster getaway, while I rode shotgun on pins-and-needles in the director’s rented 4-wheel Jeep. We had already discussed the probabilities, risks, and payoff of taking this first theater footage inside the range of a target. 
 
The Airport is a half-mile long strip that from above or even a quarter-mile to the sides, for all appearances, is a third-world airport lined with dozens of buildings. On closer view, the structures are hundreds of single and double-stack containers riddled with millions of bullet holes up to 2-inches in diameter. There are also real tanks, 6×6 trucks, and other scrap military vehicles. I watched Dice drive with one eye on the road, one at the sky, and slowing and speeding to get the best footage in the least amount of time. We spent about 20-minutes at the airport, until hisss…. 
 
The director braked the Jeep, turned off the engine, and asked, ‘What do you hear?’ ‘A leak,’ I replied. I never saw anyone move so fast. He pulled out a stick of Juicy Fruit, popped it in his mouth, hopped out the car, ran chewing to the left rear tire, and plugged the hole with the gum. I strapped a black Covid mask over the license plate. He smacked his lips in satisfaction, ‘Let’s roll,’ and raced the dune-buggy off the Range to the safety of the sign line with our valuable footage. 
 
The lesson in this is to weigh risk vs reward, and default toward the daring. If you compromise what you’re trying to do a little bit, you’ll end up compromising a little more the rest of your days, so when you lift your head you’re suddenly far from where you’re trying to go.   
 
Back at the set, in the dusk light that makes cameramen froth, the crew had set up a realistic scrapper set of a trail of brass shells toward a burnt-out vehicle. In actuality, this is what happens: the chopper or jet flies low toward a target with guns blasting hundreds-of-rounds per minute, ejecting the spent casings. Now our actors with headlamps pounced on the vein of brass, collecting a hundred shells, and reached the burned auto. ‘Cut!’ yelled the director. It was a perfect take, setting up the final scene of the night.
 
Our two Slabber extras peeled off to scrap the range to pay for gas on tonight’s outing. They are the best of the best, pulling in daily more than each cares to admit. There are about 15 brassers who regularly ply the Range for shells and fins. They observe the shooting and bombing during the day, and enter in early evening to begin an Easter Egg hunt among sidewinders that is so addicting that I quit. It is the only community income that keeps the town afloat in summer. The military turns a blind eye to them, so long as they vacate the targets on the first pass from the air.
 
But we stuck out like a sore lit thumb on he edge of the Range. The Herculean brother draped three yards of live ammo around his shoulders like Slab Villa as his sibling knocked dirt out the shells that the recycle center refuses to weigh. Once the shells were routinely cleaned, the zany brother is to smoke a meth pipe. The fake pipe was called for. The set designer had taken the pipe and heatstroke back to LA, but left with me a baggie of replica meth. He had cooked it from cornstarch, sugar and water, cooled to gray rocks. ‘There’s enough meth in this baggie to get Slab City high for a half-day,’ I said producing it. ‘Only it’s fake.’ As for the pipe, we had to drive three miles back to the Slabs. It was like locating a straw in a needle stack at the corner of Coachella Canal and Beal Roads. I rapped on the first door. ‘I need to rent a meth pipe for a movie.’ The response, ‘$5.00 for the night and the promise that it will star.’
 
In minutes, we returned to the set where it was discovered no one really knew how to smoke meth, or wouldn’t admit it. ‘Look on YouTube,’ I suggested. In five minutes we all knew how. The camera rolled, the dolly moved in, and the actor puffed like a pro. I had given him a lesson on how to inhale to ‘push’ the smoke out his lungs into the alveoli, which he enacted perfectly.
 
As he gazed about the star-spangled sky, I heard a rumble of engines reflect off the mountains and grow louder. It was a definite invasion. ‘Stop the shoot!’ I dared yell. Possession of live ammo is a federal felony with automatic prison time and vehicle confiscation. As I opened my mouth, Legs sprinted into the set with his mobile phone extended, ‘Stop the camera!’ ‘Cut!’ shouted the director, passed me a hard stare, and took the phone. We watched him pale and could hear the producer berate, ‘I found out you have a real meth pipe and live ammo on set. Stop, and pack up. My production company at risk. I’ll never speak to you again.’ 
 
‘Comfort meeting!’ ordered the red-faced director, circling his fist like a CO. A comfort meeting is where each member is asked, ‘Do you feel stress? Is there something to talk out?’ They were so absorbed in mutual relief that they failed to note the roar of two engines from the east. ‘Sir,’ I shouted. That’s the Marines, Border Patrol, or other scrappers. Bury the live ammo.’ He dug like a terrier and in two minutes, as the two Slab extras breezed by waving brass on their ATVs, it was gone. Lights approached from the west. It was an actor rescue car to get them out of harms way from the best times they had had in their lives. The set was cleared, and left to the coyotes’ howls. That’s the great thing about filmmaking. Things happen you don’t know are going to happen at the end.
 
Tall, angular, and eagle-eyed, the red-haired director ran slaloming the no-trespassing sign line for the first fifty yards as I drove his Jeep toward Slab City. He stopped, heaving in the hot night air, and I the AD gave the director the wheel. ‘To be a filmmaker, you have to lead,’ He explained, as the three other vans paraded behind us. People always like the easy route. You have to push very hard to get something unusual, to top expectations.
 
The Wrap
 
These have been some of the best days of my life in a decade. And this is where the collision of Hollywood and Slab City gets weird. I believe the movie is a double production, each a psychodrama about a set of brothers who come to the Slabs to sort out their differences. The main feature has a script with two actors, and the other backstage documentary is directed by the main director’s brother using bloopers. I was so certain of this duel that I asked the director at our last breakfast, ‘Is your brother sabotaging the sets so his outtake film wins the awards?’ He smiled, ‘I can’t speak for my brother, but that’s the way I think.’
 
Further, I suspect the producer, AD, and some of the crew quit to distance themselves from the project due to multiple illegalities. They are all actors so talented as to fool each other, and I believe they will reconcile after the films are produced by another company and become box office smashes.
 
And, if you want a happy ending, that depends on where you stop your story.
 
My parting shot to the directors rang in tune with the liberty bell. I told them to return for a sequel using only Slab actors on freedom, free rent, and individuality in a fascinating bohemia called Slab City.

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