The Movies
by George Gauthier
Chapter 8
Movies Again
I have lunch or brunch once a month with my friend Sean Danaher. At eighty the man entertains me with his endless repertoire of stories drawn from his own life as successively a soldier, a carpenter and electrician, a contractor, and a property developer not to mention husband and father. His marriage was a great success. It lasted more than fifty years and produced two sons and a daughter, all fine persons well established in their fields. Sean always asks what I have been up to since last we met, so I filled him in on the latest developments in my new career as an actor.
I mentioned that in recent weeks the five of us fledgling actors had finished two more episodes in the "Naked Prey" TV series. One was a western, the other a science fiction adventure.
"And before you ask, Sean, we actually wore costumes in most of our scenes in the western, though obviously there were scenes where we we entirely unclothed. For some reason our scripts always have us skinning dipping, showering, or sleeping in the nude."
"You couldn't get away with scenes like that when I was your age. The closest you could come in a western was a nude bathing scene in 1958's "From Hell to Texas" where a young Don Murray is discomfited by the arrival at his campsite of a miner and his nubile daughter. We see Murray sink into the shallow stream and stretch out on his belly to conceal his manly parts, though his very presentable rump rose above the water level. Very naughty for the times."
"Thanks for mentioning it. I'll add that one to my watch list."
Aside from such mild titillation, movies were made under the Hays Code till the mid-sixties. In movies even married couples slept in twin beds separated by a table and lamp. And movies like Hitchcock's 'Rope' could only hint at same gender couples. The end of the code made movies less artificial. Even male frontal nudity showed up on TV. Disappointingly though the American broadcasts of "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth" cut out the nude scenes. When I was stationed in Europe following my combat tour, I watched the original director's cut.
"So far the channel has streamed only your first four episodes. I watched them all and look forward to the broadcast of the rest. That TV series of yours is terrific, and don't let anyone else tell you otherwise. And if the principal characters can't seem to keep their pants on, who's complaining?"
"Not us, Sean. The four of us are very gratified by the success of the series. We did get some flak about why none of the five principal roles was filled by a black person. the complaint was all quite pointless. We were not cast to fill specific roles in scripts already written. It was the other way around. Franklin Dyson picked four of us as a group then had his scriptwriters write with each of us specifically in mind for each of the four principal roles."
"Then we added Ramón to give us a supporting actor who could play ethnic roles. So now the five of us include two immigrants, both now naturalized citizens, and for whom English is a second language, and an Hispanic slash Zapotec Indian. And none of us is straight. But that kind of diversity is not enough to satisfy Woke Hollywood. Only black faces will do. Some Brits are even complaining about a new production of "Wuthering Heights" in which the lead role of Heathcliff will be played by a white actor. Activists claim that he was always a person of color."
Danaher shook his head.
"That would be news to Emily Brontë. Her novel was controversial enough in its time for depicting mental and physical cruelty and domestic abuse. It boldly challenged Victorian morality, the Christian religion, and the English class system. How much more controversial it would have been if Heathcliff had been portrayed as a person of color. It is beyond idiotic to think that no one back then nor critics nor readers in nearly two centuries since have somehow missed that important fact. Miscegenation was illegal in those days. Yet here we are in the twenty-first century and only now have the race grifters and only them taken notice."
I nodded my agreement:
"Thankfully there are signs that audiences are rebelling against that style of in-your-face race based casting, showing their displeasure in the only way really gets attention, at the box office."
"It's actually because our pictures have bucked the trend that they have been so successful. We give the audience what they want, namely entertainment and excitement, not messages, virtue signaling, or propaganda. Advertisers are happy with the demographics of our target audience and with the way subscriptions shot up in the wake of our first four episodes. The plan is that next year Palimpsest Pictures will re-release of all eight movies to theaters counting on the big screen to show the movies in the very best light which will prime the audience for season two which is already in the planning stages. We may even do twelve episodes and likely bring in a sixth regular, likely an East Asian actor skilled in the martial arts."
I went on to explain to Sean that our western was a gay themed remake of "Young Guns" with Ramón, Kyle, Paolo, and myself playing four bounty hunters. Paolo's role was not much of a stretch for him since he played to type as a lawman Deputy Sheriff Luke McCall who volunteers for the job of tracking down a Comanche youth named Natoweh, wanted for stealing a horse. Luke figured that any other white man would summarily shoot an Indian for a horse theft.
Why this concern for a young Indian charged as a horse thief? It seems that Natoweh was none other than Lukes's blood brother and secret lover. He was played, of course, by Ramón.
Fortunately it turns out that once Luke tracks Natoweh to his camp, he finds out that he does not have to bring his lover in to face trial. Natoweh had indeed taken the horse, but that was only to borrow it briefly, his sole purpose being to count coup, which was the way Comanches showed their courage by riding in virtually unarmed and touching an armed enemy with a stick without harming him. (He had picked a rancher who was a notoriously bad shot).By the time Luke tracked down his blood brother, Natoweh's uncle had already returned the animal to its owner along with a fine bear robe as compensation for his trouble. So all was settled on that score.
The two boys realize that, with their young manhood upon them, that it was only in the white man's world that they could stay together. As to making a living, neither of them was cut out for a sedentary life. Luke certainly could not see myself as a shopkeeper or farmer or rancher, much less the Indian boy. So in the short term they decided to work as bounty hunters but only long enough to accumulate enough capital to set themselves up as expeditionary guides for Easterners and Europeans eager to visit the Wild West.
Luke took a leave of absence from his job as deputy sheriff but remained sworn-in as a lawman and continued to wear his tin star. He also carried a letter of authority from the sheriff and the county judge which made Natoweh a special constable, so there was no nonsense about why he was not confined to the reservation.
I played one of their quarry, Owen O'Hara, a youth their own age who had attacked his older cousin with an hatchet, maiming him terribly. It turned out that the man had been sexually abusing the slightly built youth for several years even pimping him out to miners and teamsters. The boy was too ashamed of being turned into a punk to explain and justify his action in court and had fled town. Luckily it was Luke and Natoweh who caught up with him.
On the way back to town they coaxed his story from him. Sympathetic to his plight, they soon found a way to get the charges dismissed on the strength of the man's own incriminating diary where he recorded the story of the ongoing degradation of his young cousin. To spare Owen the ordeal of a trial, the man was exiled, put aboard a stage coach and told to never show his face in those parts again. The next few scenes showed us three boys bonding as friends and lovers and training Owen as a bounty hunter.
Then came a series of adventures, some serious some comical. We three bounty hunters generally avoided killing by making it known that we would try to bring bad guys in alive, no matter what the wanted poster said. That tactic made it likelier that wanted men would surrender if caught in one of our clever traps rather than try to shoot their way into the clear.
Luke and Owen filed on two adjacent homesteads which gave us two quarter sections or 320 acres, or one-half a square mile located well outside of town. One home stead still had its original cabin, though long since abandoned. In the share out of the chores it fell to my character Luke to cultivate our kitchen garden which was fine by me since, like Luke, I actually preferred gardening to working with livestock anyway.
So there I was on hot day in June, weeding and pruning, in the rude nude, a pretty blond boy working away without a stitch on. The camera loved me as it followed my sexy body flexing and bending unselfconsciously erotically. Well, maybe not entirely unselfconsciously, but I really was tilling the garden not just faking it. We were taking greens from that garden for my kitchen at our spooky old mansion. Nothing like realism to look real.
There was no mistaking the predatory look of interest I got from a pair of teamsters who passed by. They were played by two well-known character actors whom the audience would instantly recognize as heavies from their many prior such roles. Mistakenly assuming that a pretty blonde youth like Luke did not speak Spanish they joked roughly that on their way out of town they would capture Like and drag him away to turn him into their household punk, like the boys they had abused in prison.
Unfortunately for them, we were ready or them. After Luke and Natoweh returned to our homestead we all three laid in wait for the two ex-convicts and captured them in the act of kidnapping me. It turned out there was paper out on both of them so we collected rewards totaling four hundred dollars.
Sean was pleased with my oral preview of the western movie and looked forward to watching it and the science fiction picture too.
"I don't expect your characters would have much call to run around naked in outer space."
"You obviously don't know how inventive Hollywood scriptwriters can be when they put their minds to it. In our movie clothing will be simply superfluous in the climate controlled hull of a space ship and simply impossible inside the armored space suits which we spacemen will slip into entirely naked. The suits will be powered armor just as in Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" which amplify every movement giving us eight times normal strength. In the movie it is described by saying that if we traded bear hugs with a Kodiak, it would leave the bruin crushed."
I told Sean that ostensibly the suits would have connectors to the plumbing required to handle bodily wastes. Naturally the movie would tastefully suggest such accommodation to human frailties rather than openly display connectors and attachments, a subtle approach suggested by the scene in "2001: A Space Odyssey." where a bemused scientist stares at the instructions for the zero gravity toilet aboard a space transport on its way to the moon.
After the movie talk I indulged myself in mild grumbling about my recent summons to jury duty, which has happened eight times over my last three incarnations. Never once was I actually picked for the trial jury, neither in a criminal case nor in a civil lawsuit. One side or the other always found an excuse to have me dismissed, or counsel simply invoked a peremptory challenge.
No one wanted to seat an obviously gay twink in the jury box. Not that my dress or demeanor were blatantly obvious. I always respected the decorum of the court and showed up in sober garb. It made no difference. A cute twink in a suit and tie was still a cute twink. Nor did it help that I looked several years younger than the early twenties of my documents.
Sean assured me that jury duty might be a civic duty, but that did not mean that we citizens were obligated to embrace their role with enthusiasm. After all, our obedience to the jury call was compulsory and obligatory not voluntary. It was like filing your annual tax return and paying the outstanding balance. Citizens had every right to grumble about such duties, if only to vent.
Once he reached seventy, Sean had little trouble convincing the jury office that he should be excused on the grounds of advancing years and ill-health. Not yet sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, Sean stretched the facts more than a little.
"With admittedly more than a tad of exaggeration, I claimed to have detected in myself early signs of cognitive decline. I had increasingly been having trouble following the plots of novels or keeping the characters straight. And I really needed those regular mid-afternoon naps of mine lest I doze off while sitting in front of the TV or with a book in my lap. My gray hair, cane, and an exaggerated limp sealed the deal."
"You didn't really fool anyone, did you?"
"No, of course not, but no prosecutor would dare impanel such a juror as myself. It would allow defense counsel to argue on appeal that his client had not had a fair trial, not with some dozing dodderer on the jury."
"You sly dog!" I told him admiringly, adding: "More power to you!"
Sports Car
A second season of the Naked Prey TV series was already in production which gave Ramón enough confidence in his much improved finances to indulge himself in upgraded personal transportation, namely a two seater BMW Z4 roadster. Definitely a young man's car with lots of zip, it was a convertible with a distinctive double bubble tonneau instead of the retractable hard-top of earlier models.
The latest model had regenerative braking, electric power steering, an electric parking brake, and directional headlights. Ramón elected for a sober dark green paint job rather than flashy red which would likely attract unwelcome attention from the highway patrol.
Sure it was pricey, but Ramón saved a lot on taxes. Instead of buying it with after tax dollars he negotiated for it as partial payment for acting in season two. Palimpsest Pictures bought the car then made the title over to him as part of his compensation package. This tax gimmick was fully legal as tax avoidance rather than tax evasion.
Ramón was inspired by deals like the bargain Arnold Schwarzenegger once made to get a twelve million dollar executive jet instead of cash for a movie role, a win-win situation for actor and studio, if an opportunity loss to the IRS.
By now Ramón was an excellent driver. He was a natural with machinery, a skill which we displayed in our recent monster movie which was released theatrically. Ramón played a farmhand and I the landowner's son as we battled dinosaurs suddenly released from suspended animation by the collapse of a gargantuan sink hole in Nebraska. In the climactic battle scene it was Ramón and I against a pair of Allosaurs, which were a carnivorous species built much like the T. Rex though scaled down to maybe thirty feet long, but these beasties were equipped with fully-functional arms and nasty claws.
In a sequence inspired by the old movie "Dinosaurus" where a construction foreman battled a T Rex with an excavator derrick, Ramón and I played two farm kids who pitted the steel and diesel power of a front loader and a hay bale loader against the teeth and claws of the allosaurs.
The edge of the bucket of Ramón's front loader was equipped with a toothed bar which delivered mighty whacks to the chest, neck, and head of the allosaur he took on. The wily beast soon left off its head on attack in favor of circling around to get at Ramón from the side or rather tried to. Thanks to its caterpillar tracks, the front loader's turning radius was its own length meaning that it could spin in place. Ramón got the upper hand when he brought the edge of the loader down on the allosaur's right foot, crippling it enough to drop it onto one knee. That gave the human contestant the upper hand. With a series of blows to the top of its head Ramón literally beat the dinosaur's brains out.
My combat vehicle was a hay bale loader built a lot like a fork lift only with three horizontal steel prongs in the middle, which were designed to pierce hay bales. The longest and strongest prong high up and centered took most of the weight while two lower ones kept it balanced. The prongs were so strong that they could easily take the weight of the large round bales modern hay balers left in the fields, bales which might weigh anywhere from a thousand pounds to a ton.
"I fought my machine like a modern day triceratops and repeatedly charged and rammed the spear-like prongs into the flesh of the monster till one of the points penetrated deep enough to pierce its heart. And yes, it really was us at the controls. No doubles. Of course we were just shadow boxing. Our battles won't really look exciting till post production fills in the monsters."
"We farm boys were never the naked prey implied by the series title but always went about decently clad in cutoffs, sneakers, and baseball caps with sun glasses. We did show a lot of skin, not so much for titillation as to emphasize our vulnerability."
"So if you guys weren't the naked prey, then who was?:
"Four skinny dipping teens, two boys and two girls, whom the allosaurs come upon and slaughtered. Their deaths are portrayed horrifically. All that screaming and fake blood and severed body parts made for a scene more like stock footage from of a horror movie."
"I can't wait to see it," Sean said with a rueful shake of his head. "Sometimes I wonder if something is wrong with us humans that scenes of utter mayhem are presented for entertainment. The same could be said about our morbid fascination with murder mysteries."
I have to say that I am having so much fun in my latest incarnation which is all the better for knowing that I will be spending two or three more decades with my current friends and lovers. Life really doesn't get much better than this, and I am speaking from nearly four thousand years of experience.
Just recently we all went to at upscale Italian restaurant to celebrate Paolo's promotion to corporal which meant that Delaney and Paolo would no longer ride in the same cruiser. Each was now paired with a newly minted officer just out of the academy. With his whole family and our friends and Sergeant Delaney we made a party of a dozen seated around a big table in a private room.
Good friends, good food, and everyone in a convivial mood, what more could you want from a celebratory dinner? I cannot fully express how good it feels to have such fine people in my life. To me they are a family in all but name.
After the festivities Ramón and I were just going out the door when we encountered a well-dressed couple walking toward us. Apparently lost in conversation, the man accidentally bumped into Ramón so hard that my friend might well have fallen had not the man grabbed him to keep him upright then helped him straighten out his clothes. Apologizing for his inexcusable clumsiness the man offered his apology before leaving with his lady companion.
I did wonder about the encounter, suspicious as I always was at any unexpected bodily contact which might be the work of a pick pocket. Ramón himself thought nothing of the accident till a moment later when we reached the valet parking stand to get his BMW for the ride back. The stand was manned by a cute red-head in tight pants, a kid in his late teens. Ramón reached into his shirt pocket for the ticket but came up empty. He tried to explain to the young attendant that though he had somehow lost his ticket and no longer had it on him, he could describe his car. The valet looked skeptical.
"You say that you lost your ticket, but how do I know that this is not a scam to steal a car you can only describe? Company policy is strict: no ticket no car. Now I am just the parking lot attendant. My job is to park and retrieve cars for customers -- those with tickets. I cannot hand a car over to you just on your say so. You will need to prove to security not just to me that the car is yours. Otherwise, if you are not prepared to demonstrate your bona fides, you had better get lost before we call the cops."
"Do we really look like a couple of car thieves." I asked with some asperity.
"Maybe not you Blondie. You've got class. Your friend though hardly looks like the type to afford that fancy BMW roadster which he claims is his."
Ramón held back his anger at this blatant ethnic stereotyping and told the kid to call Security. He could prove ownership easily enough with the registration and insurance in the glove compartment.
The security guard turned out to be a moonlighting city cop, an acquaintance of both Sergeant Delaney and the newly minted Corporal Franco. He asked:
"So where is this car of yours parked?"
Franco reached for his car fob to flash his lights and sound his horn only to find that it and his car keys had also been lifted. Squealing tires alerted them that the larcenous couple had spotted them talking to the cop so they had put the car in gear and made a dash for the exit. The officer tried to flag them down, but the stolen car blew right past him.
"Why didn't you stop them?" Ramón asked angrily.
"What was I supposed to do kid, step in front of a speeding car and dare them to run me over or maybe start shooting? Gunplay would be entirely out of policy. Legally I could not even shoot out the tires, not without some predicate crime like a murder or a bank robbery. Those two were just a pair of car thieves not killers or robbers or kidnappers. The department would never condone such a reckless discharge of my fire arm."
With that the cop called it in. Dispatch put out an alert, but no one spotted the car during the getaway. Surveillance video later tracked it down to a chop shop only five miles away where, within an hour, it had been reduced to spare parts worth a lot more separately than as a whole car. Ramón had to be content with the insurance payout.
For his replacement vehicle Ramón disabled the feature by which anyone with his key fob could start the engine. Now the fob would only unlock the doors or signal the car's location by flashers and horn. He also activated the computer's voice recognition lock. He also would keep his registration and proof of insurance with him rather than in the glove compartment. Finally, just in case clever thieves got around all that, he enabled the model's car tracker feature.
"Now let some thief try to steal my car!" he affirmed confidently.
I pointed out the downside.
"That will work, Ramón, but you should realize that you have ensured that the only way thieves could get your car away from you was either with a tow truck or to hijack it at gunpoint. They might even kidnap you long enough to grill you about passwords and such."
That drew nods from Delaney and Paolo and a scowl from Ramón. A couple of days later I demonstrated to Ramón the tricks pickpockets use to relieve their victims of their valuables. Not just car keys or wallets, a good team could snag the expensive smart watch right off you wrist. One tip was never to be obvious about checking your pockets for keys and wallet. Never do it in a public setting. Be super suspicious if a voice in the crowd yells that someone has just stolen his wallet, a ploy by thieves to get their targets to check their own wallets and unwittingly reveal just where on their persons they keep them.
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