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Journal Snapshots
by Marvin
Payne
Look at the back
of a snapshot and tell me what shape it is. You might say “rectangular.”
I ask, “What are its limits?” You answer, “I wouldn’t
expect to see anything outside a three-by-five inch plane.”
I ask, “How deep is it?” You answer, “Whadayya
mean ‘deep’? You want that in microns, or what?”
(Actually, such considerations are rapidly growing archaic. These
days, all your answers to snapshot questions would be in megs and
pixels. And the mere question of whether or not the “back”
of a picture even exists would require the input of both a physicist
and a philosopher to explore.)
But turn the
picture over. Hey, it’s your daughter (who’s about to
graduate from Weber State University) when she was two years old,
standing in a tire swing with the afternoon sun roaring across the
field out of the west and igniting her hair like a halo--about the
brightest thrust of light that film can catch, except that she’s
smiling at her dad, who’s holding the camera, and that smile
is the brightest element in the picture. (“Brighter far than
noonday sun” is a phrase that suddenly seems not the least
bit like poetry, but perfectly comprehensible, even mundane.)
Now tell me
the limits of the picture. Can you see anything beyond the edges?
How deep is the image? How far can you see?
When you sit
down with your journal, remember that you can’t write your
life. You can only paste in snapshots of it. But to the extent that
the snapshots are of things you really love, or that really affect
you, the edges will recede, and your reader, even if it’s
only you, will see far into a life.
Here’s
a little suite of snapshots. About ten years ago, a couple of guys
I got acquainted with on movie sets asked me if I would act in a
little cowboy film they had in mind. One of the guys was Bill Shira.
These guys were prop and art department guys, and they’d built
a cabin (indoors) for a Disney film (which I also was in, called
“The Witching Of Ben Wagner”). Disney was done with
the cabin, and it was about to be dismantled. These guys wanted
to re-dress it from the quaint cottage of a good witch into an abandoned
miner’s cabin and shoot a movie in it, real quick--in fact,
on the one night between when Disney was done with it and the morning
on which it was to become a stack of lumber again. So in the course
of a few hours it was stripped of quaintness and lace and adorned
with dust, dead mice, and cobwebs. (Cobwebs are made from rubber
cement spun off the end of a power drill. Rubber cement is also
what pyrotechnic crews paint all over scenery that has to appear
to be burning violently, which is what we did on another Disney
picture, “Secret Of Lost Creek,” which I also was in,
the mine set of which Bill borrowed for the cowboy film and magically
re-installed under the witch’s cabin forty miles south which
by then had disappeared.That’s the manner in which we made
three short films over the space of a couple of years, all of which
won festival trophies but no money. But they got Bill enough attention
to attract some investors. Which brings us to these journal entries.
I have the idea that most people think making movies is frantic,
constant, bone-wearying work. Well, it is. Except for actors, whose
experience is more typically as follows.25 July 2002Idaho panhandle,
near Grangeville, population 3228, in a Bill Shira film. It’s
called “Where Rivers Meet,” and we all hope it does
well for Bill. Like all his films, this is a family project. The
meals are all prepared by little old ladies in Bill’s mom’s
ward. She herself is the executive producer, a widow with a flower
shop. Heaven only knows what she had to hock to pay for all this.
We shot this
morning in a little frame chapel with a steep tin roof, a hundred
years old, that belongs to the Nez Perce Indians. “Nez Perce”
means “pierced noses.” Some of our grips would feel
right at home among them, being pierced to the degree that they
would draw lightning and also might not be allowed to board airplanes.
The whole area
is abuzz about a movie happening here. During a break before lunch
an old cowboy came into camp enthusing about local talent. Bill
and I hopped in his pickup and drove downriver a couple of miles
to check out a bar for a possible location and listen to the owner
strum us a couple of songs on his old telecaster. We are perceived
as very important. Most of the locals seem tickled--others are looking
for a fight or, even better, a lawsuit.
This is extraordinarily
beautiful country. I’ve never seen anything like it. Fields
of grain stretch out like oceans and then rise and roll in hills
that are crowned with pine forests. Rivers run through this, and
down occasional canyons like the one I’m sitting in now, waiting
for a ride back to Grangeville.
The deer are
a pretty brown. They are white-tails, and as plentiful as our gray
mule deer. Driving home the other night, one of our crew almost
hit a black bear.
Until now, my
only memory of Grangeville is that nearly thirty years ago we were
on our way to Portland and sort of got lost. After dark we came
upon Grangeville and stopped for dinner. I asked the waitress what
kind of soup they had and she said, “Chicken noodle and mine
strone.” (Rhymes with “pine cone.” I’m really
grateful that, regarding Grangeville, my horizons have been advanced.26
July 2002Writing that last entry is about the most active thing
I’ve done in the three days I’ve been here. My part
is small, but is played in several locations, so they have to keep
me around.
I got here so
tired and battered from work in Utah that the first day on location
I slept for awhile on the back seat of a van, for awhile in the
changing room of the trailer, for awhile on a sleeping bag under
a pine tree, and for awhile on a church pew that had been carried
outside to make room for equipment. I actually got the most sleep
on the pew, and wondered if maybe it flowed from a long-stifled
urge to sleep in church.
I woke up at
11:00 this morning after a 13-hour sleep and rode out to a new location,
a tiny town on a ridge called Clearwater. When it became evident
that I wasn’t going to be acting (they were still building
my sheriff’s office), I sat down on a chair on the front porch
of a disused store. There was nothing across the street, and I looked
out on the descending landscape to the distant golden ridges beyond
the Clearwater River, and into the sky, built of clouds. I sat there
for four hours, gazing, dozing, letting my mind go wherever it would,
letting it sleep. It became so clear to me that I’ve been
wound up tight as a rattlesnake for a long, long time.27 July 2002Today
the front porch of my Clearwater store was swarming with cast and
crew--the site of lunch. Yesterday all I could hear from there was
the flapping of a flag on a porch post, and the flapping of another
flag over the volunteer fire station down on the corner. That and
an occasional crow, an occasional cow, and, when an occasional car
drove into town, an occasional dog barking. I can’t listen
anyway, I’m acting all day, and into the night.End of journal
writing, back to Meridian column writing.Something what frustrated
me about my experience in Idaho was that I didn’t think I
could capture the beauty of it to share with my family. On my last
day I resorted to buying one of those little use-it-and-toss-it
cameras from the drug store, just to bring home a glimpse. When
I saw the pictures (before I left Idaho), I was still frustrated.
Then that night I was watching some of the footage from the previous
day’s work and a thought you might think obvious sort of fell
on me like the proverbial ton of bricks. “Duh, we’re
making a movie.” The whole reason we were the heck up there
was to point a very high definition motion picture camera at it
all and show it to people.But you can’t make a movie of your
life. At least, few of us have dangerous or glamorous or morbid
enough lives that investors would find them attractive. A few segments,
maybe, but not our whole lives. So we take snapshots. But we can
take them carefully, with an eye for what they might catch and reveal.
(Hey! This could be a profitable bumper sticker: Catch and Reveal!
Especially in Idaho.)
Here’s
a kind of model, again from film. On every shoot, you’ll be
acting along merrily and between shots somebody from wardrobe or
script supervision pops out of nowhere, yells “Flashing!”
and takes your picture with a clunky Polaroid camera. It’s
so when you come back in two weeks to shoot the next couple of minutes
of action, which is often the remainder of the same scene (twice
in my career it’s been come back in a year), you’ll
be wearing your turban right-side-front and have the emerald ring
on your right hand and the ruby ring on your left, rather than the
other way around. It’s all kind of technical and flat, but
the power that drives all those Polaroids is a devotion to the truth
of the story, or, of course, the appearance of truth.
Journal connection
(with a whole new metaphor! This is called “value-added”):
Relax, you’re not making a feature film, you’re only
taking snapshots. You’re not building a house, you’re
merely building a window into a house that the Lord has spent your
whole life building. Honesty and care in the handling of your tools
will ensure that it’s a clean window, one that doesn’t
mess up the view. And there’s not one of you who isn’t
more beautiful than the grandest parcel of northern Idaho.
(Oh yeah, my
family loved the snapshots. And now, a month after my return to
Utah, I do too.)
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marvinpayne.com!
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unto Christ, and lay hold upon every good gift..." (from
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