and fearful.
I tried to see him from my just-departed informant’s perspective. She had to be wrong. The crowd was dissipating now, thinned by the monotony of the action. I made my way toward him.
There had been suspicions about John. When I heard any such innuendoes I put them down to the usual departmental resentments. John could be overbearing. He was overbearing. Gary and Gracie, Mike and I had bitched about him throughout our childhoods. John, The Enforcer.
I had lived away from San Francisco all my adult life. When I looked at John now I still peered with the wary gaze of the teenager I’d once been. For the second time today, I asked myself who was this man.
As if to remind me of the answer, John turned toward me. “Get out of here! Now!”
Instinctively I planted my feet. I have a long history of staying in John’s face. “You want me out of here? Get someone to drive me to the set!”
Normally, he’d have chewed me out loud and long. Now, he grabbed my arm, walked me to a patrol car, and shoved me in the cage. “Take her to the movie set, Jenkins. And don’t answer any questions.”
6
THE GUARD AT the set checked me in.
“Duffy’s right here,” he said, grinning.
He wagged his black stump of a tail. It was a big statement for a dour Scotty. But Duffy adores being on the set. I keep running into people who remember him from this western or that romance. He’s done Fala three times that I know of in FDR biopics. There’s a mystique about him. In a business that puts a high premium on superstition, he’s viewed as such a good luck omen the directors send cars for him.
I’d inherited him when his previous owner scarpered minutes before the sheriff’s arrival on a location set in the high desert. He’d paused only to leave me Duffy and a bag of what I assumed would be dog supplies but turned out to be lock picks and a few other useful items that explained the fellow’s hasty departure. He’d never come back for Duff. On the lam or in the can; I chose to believe the former.
We walked on to the base of California and I stood a moment staring at the eerie sight. The California Street cable car shoots down the slope from Nob Hill nearly to the Bay. It stops abruptly just beyond the corner of Drumm, where the intersection smacks up against Market. Traffic pours down California, shoots across Drumm, then merges in one great lump ready to shove across Market on a light that’s never green long enough. There, old green streetcars with tiny high windows, resurrected from the streetcar graveyard in Brooklyn, and sunny orange cars with big happy windows, retired from Milan, ferry excited visitors up and down the broad thoroughfare. But not tonight. Tonight Market was blocked off, traffic detoured to Mission. Drumm was silent, and nothing moved on California. The last time I’d seen it this still was right after the Loma Prieta quake.
Just above the intersection, a cable car sat empty. At the west end of the block, another was poised to head down. Cardboard mock-up autos, created in studio, lined the downhill lane as if waiting for the light to change so they could shoot across Market to points south and east.
“Running behind,” Jed Elliot, the second unit director greeted me. “Only half an hour.”
I shrugged, trying to hide how relieved I was. Location costs—equipment, salaries, site fees—were big budget issues for producers and no one wanted to be responsible for delays that threw production into the next day.
Elliot and Duffy eyed each other. Then Duffy jumped into his chair. The fingers of fog were reaching over Nob Hill, less than a mile west of here. Thirty minutes was about as long as the thin fog shot would hold. Once it got its elbow over the hill, it would punch down thick and heavy. After that Jed Elliot would be dealing with a night shot and the lighting would need to be reworked, not to mention all the script adjustments. There was going to be heavy pressure to wrap on the first run-through. If we did manage to start at 7:00, we’d be fine, though.
Karen Johnson had been going to meet me here at 8:00 P.M. Instead, where would she be by then? Where was she now? In jail? In San Jose? San Francisco’s a peninsula, so there’s only one way to go if you don’t dare take a hot car across a bridge. And John . . . What had she gotten John into? I’d liked her; but now. . . I just hoped Gary’d picked up my message.
I walked up the block and around the corner to the stunt car, a shiny burnt-orange convertible that would look great in the shots—assuming we still had some light. The modifications had been minor—extra air bags, padded lap harness that wouldn’t show, a good sized weight in the passenger side of the trunk. This part of the gag would be straightforward: around the corner, clip the uphill cable car, shimmy my own ride as if losing control, side swipe a couple junkers, appear to straighten out and crash into the downhill cable car. It was a precision run, meaning it had to be done in one take. The light wouldn’t hold, and the junkers could only be hit once without looking like, well, junkers.
“Straight fiction shot.”
The cameraman laughed.
In the final cut the scene would show the actress I was doubling speeding across Front Street to the corner of California, glancing across at the wedge of the 101 California building that juts toward the corner like a sharp cake knife. Assuming the street made a gentle 45 degree curve, she’d continue alongside the building, not realizing she was in the middle of the intersection. Because the building side road was an illusion, it required, after clipping a cable car, cutting left, sharply and instantly. It’d be a great visual.
A bit of poetic license was the slope. In the final cut I’d be shooting down the steep incline of California Street. That incline, however, was actually four blocks west. Between Front and the Bay, the street was flat. Put a marble on the sidewalk here and it’d stay dead still. Tomorrow I’d drive the incline. Later that shot would be edited in.
I checked the tires, slid under the chassis to make sure everything was connected. This little orange sports car wasn’t new, but it wasn’t a junker of the caliber I’d driven in other gags. The problem with those old cars is there’s a reason they were junked and that probably didn’t happen at the point when they had one hard ride left in them. I’d slid under one and found brake cables dragging.
With this car, though, everything looked good. It was the second unit director’s job to make sure it was. Still, Jed Elliot wasn’t the one who’d be slapping it into two eight-ton cable cars. A stunt double who wants to live triple-checks everything. It scared me how close I’d come to not having enough time. I walked to the corner to eye the slide patch. The slippery base had been laid the width of the cable car plus five feet beyond, to allow me to spin while on it and be off the edge the moment I needed traction to pull out.
I slid in, clasped the belt, visualized the gag: from turning the key, letting up the brake, feeling the pressure of the gas pedal under my foot, to picking up speed as I turned onto California, then hard-righting the wheel to skid right, and sending the tail left to clip the cable car. I ran through it, started again, this time visualizing the front of the cable car, the “60” in the middle of its front end, feeling my arms and shoulders thrust right as I pulled into the skid. I felt the impact, saw the skid, the steering wheel spinning back through my hands, the clutch as I pulled left into the turn, brushing a dummy dressed to represent a terrified tourist. A yard beyond that would be the low ramp. I needed to yank the wheel full left so I hit the ramp already into the turn and got enough centrifugal force for the 360.
Fifteen minutes to go. Ahead, the crew was adjusting one of the
