loving the film

"Film has brought me to some of the most surreal moments of my life," I said to my neighbor from under the brim of my 30's-era newsboy hat.

He, the student writer and director of a film about a Orthodox Jewish vampire who drinks menstrual blood, nodded. "It kind of makes you do things you would never do otherwise."

Our other neighbor, who had scaled a snowy wall earlier that morning before donning his checked fedora, practiced his snarl.

The director yelled action, and the three of us pretended to snap photos as, in the boxing ring, a baby-faced sophomore punched a 110-pound girl to the ground.


I am a film major at one of the most prestigious film programs in the country, and I spent much of the fall of 2005 applying fake blood. Sometimes it was spit out of mouths, as with the 110-pound boxer. Sometimes it was applied to body parts--fortunately not for the film about menstrual blood. In one memorable incident, it was sprayed out of a high-pressure deck sprayer at 4 a.m. in a basement where we did not have legal access. I wore my running shoes to that shoot, just in case.

I was never one of those huge film geeks who make digital videos on weekends, so I'm not sure if students enter film school with high-minded notions of yelling "Cut!' or if they understand the cheap, cold, exhausted reality that awaits them. For the general public, however, I imagine behind-the-scenes documentaries on Hollywood DVDs have given a skewed impression of what filmmaking is like for most of us. Let me put it this way: Steven Spielberg probably never gets pushed up a hill in a grocery cart so he can get a tracking shot.

Needless to say, my personal forays into filmmaking have not met with great success. I took one film production class my junior year, and my final project was a combination ELO music video and iPod commercial that included the aforementioned tracking shot. Turns out, when I got that shot the film wasn't properly exposed, so I didn't wind up using it. My boyfriend at the time, who was pushing me in the cart, had sprained his ankle for naught. With earlier films I made that semester, every disaster that could happen did, from the film loading incorrectly to the lens being out of focus. The very word "reshoot" began to make my blood curdle.

When it came to senior year and time to make a thesis, I thought for a while that I would make my own film. I had visions of dance numbers and fantasy sequences and snappy dialogue, and figured I would pull it together when the time came. Then I came to my senses and remembered how I felt when I found out I had been shooting for an hour and a half in slow motion. I decided to crew other peoples' films instead.

So getting back to this "things you wouldn't do normally" thing. In the course of working on student films, I have inserted a plastic plant into the ass of a man I had only met a few days earlier. I have broken into a basement by actually shattering a window. I have worked for 12 hours and then driven across state lines to work for another four. I have lied to innocent townspeople and pretended to interview them about Osama bin Laden. I have convinced a 19-year old boy to climb an unstable ladder onto a roof coated in ice. Perhaps most dangerously, I've almost put milk into the non-dairy sink at the house of Orthodox Jews. That was a close one.

When all the thesis shoots were over last fall, I thought my surreal life was finished. Being a film student isn't nearly as dramatic as being a student filmmaker, even though the head of the department, one of the most respected names in film scholarship, insists we wear costumes for class presentations. When my presentation date came, I was getting into my French chef costume and heading to the film department kitchen, where we were warming up the lentils and potatoes au gratin we had prepared for the class. Business as usual.

I had never been to the kitchen before, and it was a little jarring to walk from the big, hyper-modern film department atrium into the cozy kitchen that was like any standard 1960's-era kitchen, wallpaper and all. Then I noticed the framed painting, which was actually a map of the U.S. Senate floor signed by the cast and crew of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" and given to Frank Capra as a gift.

I stirred my lentils and stared at James Stewart's signature, intended as a memento for Frank Capra from one of the most successful and best-loved films of his career. Instead it was there for me, a 21-year old college student who had failed in her filmmaking attempts and was relegated to applying fake blood to extras. They say the Hollywood produces the American dream, and there it was, keeping me company in the film department's kitchen.