Animator! Carpe Diem! (Part 3)

Animator! 

Carpe Diem! 

(Part 3)

Sachi showed me into a small office and gestured vaguely towards the work piled upon an animation desk. 

“Take a look at the scene,” she said. “See if you can figure out what it needs. Nobody’s touched it since the animator left this morning. We’ve got to finish it by 10am tomorrow and get it to camera. Okay?”

“Okay,” I answered, sitting down at the desk.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” said Sachi. “Want a coffee?”

“Yes, please.” 

Show business, there really is no business like it. 

That morning I’d been at the right place at the right time and showed up with my demo reel, looking for a job. Now here I sat, at another man’s desk to finish his scene. 

A scene urgently needed in a timely manner.

Aha! It’s always better to be lucky than good! 

I rolled through the scene. It was an action scene of a big, burly guy throwing a body into the trunk of a car. I rolled through it repeatedly, trying to visualize it, get familiar with it, seeking its essence. It was quality work. The drawings were solid… the animation smooth and fluid. 

I breathed a sigh of relief. It was a good scene to show what I could do. The animator had used a system I could understand and the drawings were interesting without being too difficult. 

By the time Sachi returned with the coffee I was feeling confident I could finish the scene before the deadline, provided I could work all night.

“Well, what do you think?” asked Sachi.

I sipped my coffee. “Yeah,” I said. “I think I can handle it. It’s a fun scene, and it’s mostly done. All I have to do is not mess it up.”

“Good,” said Sachi. “Anything you need?”

I mentioned working all night and asked if that would be okay. Sachi nodded, saying, “Sure, a few of us will be.”

“Mind if I use the telephone?” I asked. “I’d like to call my wife and let her know what’s up.”

“Help yourself.”

“Thanks.”

Sachi left me to it, and after telephoning I began working on the scene. It was interesting in that the drawings were done straight onto frosted cels with colored pencils. Not graphite on paper, as I was used to. One had to be precise and clean with the drawing, rather than my usual scratch and search technique. I had never seen a frosted cel before and I quickly learned I had to be careful, as any erasing would leave smudges, destroying the drawing and meaning time lost in making another. Also, when handling the cels, soft cotton gloves had to be worn to avoid fingerprints, but I had used gloves before and was used to that.

I got down to work. After a while, I fell into a rhythm and began enjoying myself. I love animating. More than that I love making movies. And if you love doing something, it’s hardly work, is it? When I first started my working life, back at the Ministry of Works in New Zealand, we worked in muddy ditches at the ends of picks and shovels with our muscles and our backs and the sweat of our brows. Physical work! Dangerous and manly, with plenty of cursing! I wondered what the ghosts from my past would think of me now, sitting here in New York drawing little drawings in a Broadway film studio built to resemble a child’s playroom. For sure I knew, wherever they were, my ghostly workmates wouldn’t think that sitting on your ass drawing little pictures with colored pencils was anything remotely like working. 

Rest in peace, brothers. Your work is through.

I stopped for a late lunch, ducking out for a slice of pizza, a bottle of Rolling Rock and a cigarette. The beer was a most appreciated luxury, but I was working now and could afford it. A further luxury was a second cigarette, sitting on a bench in the sunshine, resting my sore leg and watching people go by. 

Funny how much friendlier New Yorkers looked after I’d had a meal, with a full belly and a job to go back to. 

Back at the desk working, I had an idea. The action by the burly guy when preparing to throw the heavy body into the trunk of the car (in animation, this preparing type of action is called anticipation) could be exaggerated more, or ‘pushed’ as we call it, to good effect. The body that was supposed to be heavy would have a much better chance of looking heavy this way, and the viewer would have slightly more time to appreciate what was happening. It would mean making the scene longer to accommodate the extra time that the action would take (a few tenths of a second), something that wasn’t always possible in a tightly edited film, so I would have to check with Sachi about it.

“Okay,” she agreed. “Let’s try it and see what it looks like. But, for now, don’t throw out any drawings and don’t change the original X-sheet. We can shoot it both ways and see which we like best. We’ll change the sheet later if it works out.”

I got down to work again and the hours flew by. I couldn’t see the day ending and the night beginning from the windowless office, but the tempo and noise of the busy studio during the day was gradually replaced by an eerie quiet. 

Around five in the morning, that dreadful hour after working all night when everything is gray and uncertain, including the animator, I struck a drawing I couldn’t get right. It should have been a simple drawing, too, making it all the more frustrating. I tried over and over, wasting cel upon cel, but still it wouldn’t come. I was tired. I decided to take a break. It would do me good to get up and stretch my legs for a bit, to focus my eyes on something further away than the end of my arm, maybe have a cigarette and another cup of ... 

“Coffee! Hey, Rusty, wake up! Fresh coffee.”

I had fallen asleep at the desk. 

“Huh? Who?” I lifted my head from my crossed arms on the desk, blinking in the strong light of the Luxo lamp, which I had neglected to turn off. “I wasn’t asleep,” I lied, and I heard Sachi laugh. My mouth tasted of pencil shavings and pink erasers. The side of my face was hot where it had been exposed to the drawing lamp.

“Coffee?” repeated Sachi.

“Oh, yeah. Thanks.” I accepted the hot coffee with gratitude. “It’s been a while since I’ve pulled an all-nighter,” I said. “Working, that is.”

Sachi smiled and asked how it was going. She looked fresh and awake.

“What time is it now?” I asked.

“Seven-thirty.”

“Two more hours, no more,” I promised.

“Perfect!” she said. 

To be continued…

Animator! Carpe Diem! (Part 2)

Animator!

Carpe Diem! 

(Part 2)

Sachi stopped halfway down the corridor.

“Well,” she said, turning to me. “Today’s your lucky day!”

“Oh yeah?” I answered hopefully. “I like the sound of that!”

I had just been interviewed and had shown my demo reel, hoping to land my first animation gig in New York with the company Sachi worked for, Broadcast Arts.

Now we stood chatting in the corridor.

Sachi said they had a problem, and maybe I could help. Nothing to do with White Cloud bathroom tissue, the job they had called me about which started next month. This was something else, an emergency, but if I did well, then the White Cloud job was as good as mine.

“An audition, eh?” I answered. “Sure, if I can help.” 

What else was I going to say? 

“Call it a chance to prove what you can do,” answered Sachi. She explained that the animator who had been working on the scene, after working more than two days and nights straight, told the boss (Wolf) to shove his deadline, and had gone home to get some sleep.

“I totally sympathize with the guy,” said Sachi. “The hours on this one were murder and getting worse! But, you know art directors, we had to change something at the last minute and now the schedule’s all screwed up! Wolf! He took this job knowing the deadline was crazy. Hope he’s charging them plenty.”

The problem was, said Sachi, they needed the scene now. Right now.

I nodded my head. Sounded like animation in America wasn’t any different from animation in New Zealand… a job fit for lunatics, optimists, geeks and dreamers.

I’ll let you decide which of those I might be.

“I want to ask you something,” I said to Sachi. “I wouldn’t want to steal someone’s job or anything like that. He went home to take a break, right? And here I am, in the right place at the right time. A miracle! You know, like those old movie musicals, where the star twists an ankle and the understudy, in this case me, gets his big chance!” 

“Yeah,” laughed Sachi. “That’s pretty much it.”

My life wasn’t about making movies, I told Sachi, my life was becoming a movie!

“Let’s hope it’s not a tragedy, where we all die in the last act,” said Sachi, and we laughed together.

We had stopped in the middle of the corridor and people streamed past in either direction. The buzzy energy of the studio was very positive, and I felt myself becoming energized too, and swept up by the rightness of the moment.

Now was my chance, I must seize it!  

“Don’t worry about John,” said Sachi. “You’re not taking his job, you’re helping him out.” She looked me straight in the eye for a moment, before adding, “If you can do the work like you say you can.”

“No worries there,” I bragged, trying not to look worried. 

What else was I going to say?

“Hey! Sachi!” Up rushed a young man wearing lab coat and white gloves. He nodded to me before turning to Sachi, saying, “Wolf says where’s the polarizing filters for the big Mitchell? He was sure we had some and I can’t find them anywhere!” 

He didn’t look very well, kind of clammy and quivering. But you see that a lot in the animation business. His gloved hands (he wore soft white gloves for handling cels) were trembling slightly and he had that odd, greenish cast one gets from lack of sleep and too much caffeine. He must have been a camera operator, I figured, because he was looking for polarizing filters for a Mitchell, which is a type of animation camera, and he had an X-sheet (exposure sheet, the guide to how a scene will be photographed) on a clipboard under his arm. With a deadline approaching he’d probably been working long hours, too, like everyone else. Maybe longer. Hours of tedium alone in the dark, adjusting the camera incrementally and photographing cel after cel, frame after frame, painstakingly building up a movie one-twenty-fourth-of-a-second at a time.

Camera operator. I’d done that too, when making my own films. You had to be crazy to do it. Crazy, and geeky because it requires an incredible amount of focus and accuracy.

“We need the polarizers for 18B!” he explained excitedly, adding, “It’s the scene with all the elves!” as if that made all the difference.

“Okay,” said Sachi. “Take it easy.”

He appeared to be a geek on the edge of exhaustion, green and trembling. Just wait till the rest of you starts twitching, I thought. Better ease up, brother, or curl up somewhere and get some sleep. 

I recalled how my dad, exhausted after a ridiculous number of hours on the job, would curl up under his Disney animation desk and take himself a well earned snooze. (He had proudly hauled that desk from the Disney studio in Burbank, where he’d spent seven years animating, all the way to New Zealand when we immigrated there in the 1960s. Later, in one of life’s strange twists, at my dying mother’s request I became my father’s apprentice, and learned animation from him.) When, from exhaustion, his eyes could no longer see and his hands could no longer draw, dad would curl up in the spacious footwell of the giant desk, the chair rolled back out of the way, and have a nap.

“Call me at three o’clock, please, son,” he’d say before closing the door to his office. “I’m going to get a little shuteye.” Inside, he would lift the phone off the hook (purely habit, for who was going to call at three A.M.?) switch off the Luxo lamp above his drawing disc and lastly, turn off the music he always had playing as he worked. 

He would pause for a few seconds with his hand at the recording machine, listening with pleasure, before turning the volume down and off with a soft click.

My father loved music. Country and western music, mostly.

You’d think that I, after listening to my father’s music all those years while I learned animation at his side, would love country and western music too, wouldn’t you?

Well, you’d be wrong.

It was a bittersweet day for me when for the first time I stayed awake and carried on while my father had to succumb to exhaustion and take to his desk for some sleep. Yes, I was proud of myself for having the strength to carry on where I saw my father stumble, but I was also sad because I had crossed an invisible line I knew I could never recross. For the first time in my life, my father seemed smaller than me. 

I hadn’t seen the line or even noticed the crossing of it, but I knew I would never think of my father in the same way again. 

“Okay,” said Sachi to the young cameraman. “Tell Wolf I’ll be right there.” 

He hurried off. Sachi leaned against the wall and breathed a deep sigh. She was tired, too.

“There’s no business like show business,” I said, trying to indicate I understood.

“How would I know?” laughed Sachi. “I used to be a school teacher. Now I work in an insane asylum!”

   To be continued…

A Star is Porn!

This week I thought I'd share my script from the short story "A Star is Porn!"
I say script, because I rewrote the story as a performance piece specifically for speaking aloud..
Which I did at Stardust Video & Coffee in Orlando, Florida.
Last month sometime.
I hope you enjoy it today. 

[Reads from script]

Thank You.

I’m Rusty Pliers.

If you could please hold your, uh, applause,

until the end … 

I’d appreciate it.

Thank you.

(Laugh gently.

Clear throat.

Big breath.

Be Rusty …)

A Star is Porn!

or

How With the Aid of 

Kitchen Counter Serendipity

I Acquired the Non de Plume of … 

Rusty Pliers!

[Prologue]

     It all started in the 1970s when I’d been bumming around Europe for a couple of years, trying to make my living as a film animator.

     I say trying to make my living as an animator because sadly, to be an animator in this world is to learn the true meaning of the term …

   …Art for Art’s Sake.

[Pause]

   So, when I was flat broke in Paris I answered a want ad in a Left Bank newspaper and, after a most memorable job interview (which unfortunately we haven’t got time to go into now)…

  … I was hired as an actor in pornographic films. 

[Matter-of-Factly]

  I signed a one-picture deal with a three-month option and they told me to be in Stockholm by the end of the week.

[Reflective]

  That night, sitting alone on the train to Sweden, I stared out the window and listened to the wheels rolling rat-ta-tat-tat rat-a-tat-tat rat-a-tat-tat …  and I thought, not for the first time since becoming an animator…

   “What have I got to lose?”

[Act I]

[Eye Patch Gag Here?]

   So I found myself in Stockholm with my pants down… trying to make a buck, you’ll pardon the expression, the hard way.

[Pause]

   Ah, but the gods love a fool because while we were filming that week a wondrous thing occurred! 

   A thing called serendipity!

[Pause]

   It was during the kitchen counter fellatio scene.

   While my partner was down getting her close-up I happened to notice, just off-camera beside me on the counter, a pair of stainless-steel vice grips.

   They gleamed beautifully in the bright studio lights.

   Right then and there, serendipity struck me! 

   I introduced the vice grips into the scene.

   My partner, whose name was Heidi, found this quite stimulating … so as the cameras rolled Heidi and I improvised with the vice grips while the crew looked on in amazement and, I like to think, in awe. 

[Slight Pause]

   The scene was very successful.

[Pause]

   Especially the happy ending.

[Pause to let it sink in]  

   We got it in one take. 

[Up Tempo]

   “VOILA!” cried the director, who was French.

   “Bueno!” added the asst director, who was Spanish.

   “My close-up, it was good?” asked Heidi, who was German. 

   “A star… she is born!” predicted the director.

   Only he didn’t mean Heidi.

   He didn’t mean me.

   He meant the vice grips.

[Act II]  

   That night I got to know the cast and crew a little better over a few drinks at Zum Franziskaner, an ancient pub just around the corner from the studio in downtown Stockholm. It was here, in the cozy beer cellar running up a ruinous tab, that I acquired the non de plume of Rusty Pliers.

   Everybody in the business had a non de plume, Heidi explained. Now that I was in the business, I needed one too.

   So we had a few beers and we thought about it.

   “How about Lonesome Orgasms?” I suggested.

   But nobody liked that one.

   “Bob Drillin?”  

   Nobody liked that one, either.

   After about the eighth beer the cameraman suggested Holden McGroin which made us laugh, but then guess what?

   Serendipity struck again and without thinking I said, “How about Rusty Pliers?”

   Everyone liked that, including Heidi.

   “Rusty Pliers,” she purred, trying it out in her luscious porno mouth.

[Pause]

   She said it suited me to a tee.

[Act III]

    At the wrap party later everybody predicted the movie would be a box-office smash. 

   “I smell a big hit!” said the producer, who was Hungarian. He liked it so much he picked up our options and gave the crew the green light to make a dozen more films. 

   That pleased everybody because, as I said at the beginning of my story… it’s a wonderful thing to find steady work in show business. 

[Pause]

   So, over the next three months we made seven toolbox movies in Stockholm, and four in Paris. 

   Oh. And one on the overnight train to Paris.

   That was a quickie, as we called it.

[Pause]

   They even hired a scriptwriter. You should’ve seen the crazy situations he invented to have a man with a toolbox arrive and fornicate repeatedly with a beautiful actress and / or her friends and the hand tools they so desperately craved!

[Laughs]

   Oh boy! It makes me laugh to this day!

[Reflective]

   (Sigh)… Show Business …

   … there really IS no business like it. 

[Pause]

    ….But no animal acts!

    I was very particular in that respect!

[Epilogue]

 Well, that’s the story of how Rusty Pliers got his name.

   If there was any kind of deep wisdom or high moral to be learned from this story… then this would be the place you’d expect to hear it, isn’t it?

[Pause]

   I’d like to thank you for listening. 

   It felt good to tell it. 

   To let it out, so to speak.

   You know, I’ve been calling myself Rusty Pliers for so long I can hardly remember what my real name ever was…

[Big Smile]

   But that’s okay … I like being Rusty Pliers!

[Pause]

Thank You!

You made it fun!

If you enjoyed my story,

Please follow me on social media.

If you didn’t enjoy it … 

… Thanks for not throwing things!

I’m Rusty Pliers!

Goodnight!

[Time; Around 5 Min?]

A Star is Porn

   How I Acquired The Non De Plume

 of Rusty Pliers

and

Incidentally 

Made Porno Movie History.

   I was writing the other day of horses and how they have influenced the Pliers family in one way or another since 1927, when my great Uncle JB was hung for stealing one.

   Later, as a young boy in the 1930s my father fell off a horse and couldn’t go to the toilet unaided for months. Don’t worry, the fall didn’t bust Dad’s kidneys or break his pee pee or otherwise damage his plumbing. That wasn’t why he needed help going to the bathroom. 

   No, in the fall he’d broken both his arms and temporarily couldn’t … reach it.

   That’s why he needed help in the bathroom! 

   Then in the 1950s came me. I’ve never broken anything and have always, ever since I can remember, been able to reach it. Perhaps for awhile in my teens there was even a time when I couldn’t leave it alone. 

   But life has a way of balancing out.

   All that personal interest in my plumbing served me well when I found myself in the porno industry in the nineteen-seventies. Because as in all professions, one must know and rely upon one’s equipment. I’d been bumming around Europe for a couple of years trying to paint. Yes, it was the artist’s life for me and that meant no money, so when I was really broke and couldn’t borrow anymore from anybody I answered an ad in a hippie newspaper in Paris and found myself, after a most memorable screen-test, with a ticket to Denmark and a few francs in my pocket.

   And I thought, not for the first time since becoming an artist, “What have I got to lose?”

   Back then as now, one needed a speciality to set oneself apart. Well, while we were filming I happened to notice a pair of vice grips in the opened drawer beneath my partner’s naked ass as we were humping on the kitchen counter.

   Seizing the opportunity, I introduced the vice grips in our next scenes. To everyone’s surprise the actress found it extremely stimulating so I pressed her buttons so to speak with every utensil in that drawer, including an eggbeater, the ice tongs and a funny little move with a spatula. 

   The scene was very successful. 

   Especially the happy ending.

   We did it in one take. 

   “Viola!” cried the director. He was French. My partner was from Germany. We were filming in Denmark. Yes, it was very cosmopolitan. We’d even had a little Italian for lunch.

   But he didn’t mind.

   “A star, she is born!” predicted the French director, only he didn’t mean her.

   He didn’t mean me.

   He meant the vice grips.

   So that night after a few Danish beers with the German porno actress and the rest of the crew (who were mostly Spanish) I acquired the non de plume of Rusty Pliers. We tried a few others but the German porno actress said Rusty was the best.

   She said it suited me to a tee.

   So my name became Rusty Pliers and my specialty became Fun With Tools. Hand tools mostly. Rusty ones if possible. 

   Ha! Ha! You should have seen the impossible situations they invented to have a man with a toolbox fornicate repeatedly with an enthusiastic partner! Oh boy! It makes me laugh to this day!

   Show business. There’s no business like it. That’s for sure.

   But no animal acts. I was very particular about that!

   One has to draw the line somewhere.

   We made a pretty good living in Europe in the late seventies in the porno industry, me and my tool-belt. But I blew it all seeing the sites and having fun. And I’ll say right now that nobody was ever hurt, in a way they didn’t enjoy, in the making of those great old tooled up XXX videos starring Rusty Pliers.

   But excuse me I wander.

   We were speaking of horses.