38. Filmmaker Removed From Project
The shooting schedule gets pushed back.
A director is preparing to shoot a film involving a scene of a child waking up in the middle of the night and looking at the moon. The director is in his mid-forties and has a reputation as a ‘journeyman’ filmmaker — a reliable and flexible craftsman whose movies consistently come in at budget and on time, and whose films always turn a profit, though critics note he has no particular style as a filmmaker. He is competent and fluid, but has no real voice; his aesthetic choices feel anonymous, and there is nothing in particular to commend his films as anything other than middlebrow entertainments.
But on this particular production, he becomes increasingly consumed with the nighttime scene in particular. Though it is a minor scene in the screenplay, he becomes convinced he needs to get the bedroom just right, and winds up commissioning the construction of an entire house on a studio soundstage — a house which, he eventually reveals only to a few trusted colleagues, is a painstaking recreation of his own childhood bedroom.
The shooting schedule gets pushed back as the director demands more and more realism within the staged house; he finds more memories of his childhood home coming back to him, and insists on incorporating those remembered details into the set.
The casting process, too, begins to go long, as he auditions hundreds, eventually thousands, of child actors, until eventually he finds the one boy who is an image of the director himself at that age.
The studio heads have been hearing internal rumors that one of their reliable hit-makers is becoming obsessive. Initially they take an indulgent attitude; after all, he has made so many hits for them that a little excess is allowable. But time passes, deadlines pass unmet, and they finally decide to intervene when it comes to light that the director has taken to sleeping in the staged childhood bedroom, which is accurate right down to the texture of the bedsheets and the scratched painting on the ceiling, with a bedroom window looking out onto an astroturf lawn and a weathered fence, and above those, the moon, a luminous globe riding high in the painted sky of a perpetual summer night.
The director is discreetly removed from the project.
Sidenote: How many artists’ work (movies, music, novels, et al) can be summarized as an attempt, on some level, to recapture the feeling of being in one’s childhood bedroom (for good or for ill)? Methinks quite a bit. I think mine can.
If you like this newsletter, please do tell a friend. And if you want more, may I humbly recommend to you my first novel, The Forest Museum.
