The "Body"
(Originally published April 25, 2011)
CLEM DARLING DROVE down to Phoenix for a show two nights before our music video shoot. Much like The Tasting Room was supposed to be a concert venue but was actually a wine store, he arrived not at a club but a large trailer home. As I understand it, the guy who booked him just wanted a show for his family to watch in their living room. They made Clem dinner and everything.
Where it got crazy was on the drive back.
Clem passed the California/Arizona border around 3 AM when he hit a tire lying in the road. He stopped and called AAA. “Where are you?” the lady asked.
“I don’t know,” Clem said. “Can’t you trace my call with GPS or something?”
“No.” Instead, she asked him to describe signs or landmarks he’d seen. He walked about a mile looking for some kind of marker. When he found one, she said, “Oh God, you’re near a prison.”
“What?”
“Maybe you should get back in your car right away, and lock your doors until help arrives.” This was worrisome, because Clem had left his car a mile back to locate the sign “DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS.”
Clem got in his car and waited. It wasn’t a AAA-dispatched truck that found him but a Good Samaritan traveling aimlessly between California and Arizona in the middle of the night. The man stopped and asked what the problem was. He returned to his vehicle and came back with two hunting knives. He crawled underneath the car and instructed Clem to do the same, so they could saw off the protective sheath for the engine that had come loose and was dragging on the road.
Clem later described the act of being under his car with a stranger in this manner as “weirdly intimate.”
(Note: if you ever want to frame someone for murder, do what this guy did, except stab yourself to death while under the car. Clem’s fingerprints would be all over one of your knives, and there’s no way what actually took place would be believed by a jury, or anyone else for that matter.)
They finished. Clem tossed the sheath in his trunk and thanked the man – who might’ve been an escaped convict – and got going again.
Two hours later, a police car pulled him over.
The cop saw a scrape on the side of Clem's car from a minor accident a month earlier, and took it upon himself to solve the mystery:
“You been drinkin’?”
“No.”
“You get this scrape tonight, while you were drinkin’?”
“I wasn’t drinking.”
“You can tell me if you were drinkin’. I won’t care. It’ll be totally fine.” (It would not.)
The cop eventually let Clem go but ordered him to take a nap at the next rest stop and “wash [his] face.” Clem didn’t understand until he found a bathroom, looked in the mirror, and saw his face was black with oil and dirt from being under the car. The color of his face may also explain why he got pulled over without cause.
Clem went through all this, got almost no sleep, had a full day Sunday, and still had enough worry about our music video shoot to call me that night about changing our ending and pushing the shoot date back. We argued for two hours. I figured he must have had good reason to feel the way he did, so I disputed all of his points aggressively and refused to give ground.
After sleeping on it, I realized he was right. We moved the shoot back two weeks.
* * *
Time caught up with us, and soon we found ourselves at Home Depot buying last-minute props.
“Excuse me. I’m sorry to bother you guys, but I have to ask... What are you doing?”
One of the employees in the paint aisle had just overheard the following conversation:
“What size tarp do we want?”
“8’ x 10’ should be enough.”
“I think 14’ x 16’.”
“No. 8’ x 10’ will leave plenty of room for the body. And it’s almost half the price.”
“I don’t want us to get back and find out the body doesn’t fit in it. Let’s get 14’ x 16’. We can tie off the end with a rope so she doesn’t slip out—" (This is when we were interrupted by a Home Depot employee on a stepladder).
Clem said, “We’re making a music video.” I nodded to confirm.
“Oh,” she said, and went back to stocking paint.
Three weeks earlier, Clem called to ask if I wanted to make a music video for the title track off his EP, We’ll Be Fine. The song’s lyrics are about a guy who loves a girl who doesn’t love him back, so he kidnaps her and ties her up and has a romantic date with her against her will. (Nothing sexual, just a nice, pleasant date). We wanted to base the video off Clem’s album cover, a cartoon drawing of a tied-up girl and a guy with a martini sitting in beach chairs as the tide rises, and we wanted an extended sequence of a guy retrieving a “body” – in either a duffle bag or a tarp – and dragging it through the sand.
I can see how discussing this in public might draw attention to us, but in LA you can say “it’s for a music video / movie / student film” and get away with anything. I thought it was bad enough we were purchasing two tarps, a length of rope, two different bundles of smaller rope, electrical tape, duct tape, and a box cutter, but then we added three bags of fertilizer to the order. Surely that would put us on some kind of watch list.
No one cared. In fact, they were helpful.
“When you cut the rope, the end is going to split, so make sure you sear it with a lighter so it looks clean,” one employee said. Clem and I laughed. I figured we’d have to ask which aisle contains “rape knives” or “murder hammers” for someone to pay attention to us.
Our final stop of the day was H&M. Our actress had given us measurements and we needed to buy her a dress.
Our actress was Jennifer, a woman from my improv class with an extensive TV acting resume. I emailed her about the role after going the free route on “LA Casting.” Our posting had plenty of views but no responses. Something about “you will be tied up and gagged” and “wear a dress you don’t mind getting wet in the ocean” may have turned people off. Since we needed a name for the role to post on LA Casting – and couldn’t just say “kidnapped woman who dies” – I suggested “Jennifer,” so maybe I knew she was the right choice all along.
Anyway, H&M had affordable clothing. That we expected. What we didn’t expect was that all of it would suck.
We found one good dress, but it was on a model on a poster on the wall, not in the actual store. “Sold out,” the cashier said. Obviously. Everything else was animal print or tailored for women in their ‘30s with designs for women from the ‘30s. Clem and I settled on a blue dress with the floral pattern of a nursing home bedspread. We reasoned that even though an attractive woman would never wear it, our lunatic protagonist might have dressed her that way.
We had the dress, so we were close. The reason we needed to push the shoot back two weeks was that we couldn’t find an actress. Until we did.
Then we couldn’t find a cameraman. Until we did.
Then we couldn’t find a camera.
We were promised we could borrow one from a friend at a production company, but three days before filming he changed his mind. This friend recommended we talk to a guy he knew who had a spare, but that guy was “busy” and couldn’t meet at any point over the next several days to make the exchange. This was a bullshit lie, but we couldn’t do anything about it, so the day before the shoot we set out to rent one.
Turns out I live in the unofficial “camera district” of LA -- east of Samy’s Camera, southwest of Simon’s Camera, and two blocks from a place called “Pix.” We went to Pix. I asked about renting a camera and the three lenses our cameraman recommended. They quoted us a two-day rental price – which was reasonable – and suggested we come back at the end of the day to pick up the equipment, and, since we didn’t have insurance, put down a $10,000 deposit.
“We’ll come back,” Clem said.
We left in a daze. “What do we do?” Clem asked. “I don’t have that kind of money.”
“Let me see if I can move some things around...” I said.
We stopped by the bank. If I took everything out of my savings and put it into my checking account, I had just enough to cover it. Good thing I live frugally and spend next to nothing on anything but rent, utilities, groceries, and strippers.
We then went to CVS to buy bottled water and sunscreen. Then we assembled the “body.”
It took multiple trips to get the three bags of fertilizer -- two of at least thirty pounds -- tarps, tape, and rope out of Clem’s trunk onto my studio apartment floor. Eventually we got the bags duct-taped together, set them on the tarp, and wrapped them up tight; our “body” looked like a body! While Clem cut the rope and seared the ends, I started playing “Maggot Brain” by Funkadelic on my iPod stereo. The long, creepy guitar solo, plus the hazy air on that hot day, made the whole experience into a hellish acid trip. (“Maggot Brain” is a versatile mood-setting song, from everything to slow sex to the aftermath of a murder.)
The “body” looked good, but now we had to move it. Given that police will pull you over for just appearing to be black, we were nervous about dumping a human-shaped object into the trunk of my car. It couldn’t go in Clem’s trunk, because his was full of props – along with a piece of his car he and a stranger had sawed off near the California/Arizona border – so we had to carry it all the way down the street to mine.
Just like at Home Depot, no one cared.
I picked up our camera and dropped off the dress with our actress that night. She went in the other room to change, and came out to model it for me.
“Is this what you want? If you’re going for ‘funny,’ this might work.”
It looked awful. I know nothing about fashion – particularly women’s – so Jennifer had to explain how getting the right size doesn’t mean anything. For the dress to fit well - not even “look good;” because that would be impossible - the shape of every single part of her body would have needed to be different.
She took a dress of her own out of the closet and we went with that. It looked like the one H&M featured on the model in their in-store ads but couldn’t bother to keep in stock.
We were all set.
* * *
I GOT TO Clem’s at 8:45 the next morning. We didn’t need to be at the beach until 10, but we had to stop at a flower shop nearby to buy props and secure a location. Clem had gone many times to ask if we could shoot there “for like 20 minutes, with almost no crew,” but the owner was always out. This time was no different. But we needed to film there the next day, so Clem had to stay until the owner showed up.
I left for the beach before the owner came back, but Clem called me on the way:
“We got the location, but the lady at the flower store apparently didn’t understand any of what we were saying. You know how we told her we were shooting a ‘student film’? (This is how you avoid being asked to pay full price for locations and equipment.) She got the owner on the phone and said, ‘Hi, I’m here with a USC Professor who wants to bring his class here to shoot tomorrow…’ I had no idea what to do. I didn’t want to get on the phone and say, ‘Um, hi. Everything you were just told was wrong...' but that's what I did.”
I got to the beach – a spot past Malibu called “Point Dume” – promptly at 10AM, and met our cameraman, Brandon. We’d hoped to start scouting the beach before our actors arrived, but were held up by a Wildlife Rescue team that was trying to save a beached sea lion. It was amusing to watch people cheer them on right up until the actual rescue, which involved violently subduing the sea lion and stuffing it into a cage.
While Brandon and I waited, I applied sunscreen and proudly popped my trunk to show Brandon “the body.” Then I wondered, again, what we were going to do, as the beach was fairly crowded and we didn’t have a permit to shoot there.
Once again, it didn’t matter.
I was reminded of the case of Catherine “Kitty” Genovese, a woman who was stabbed to death outside her home in Queens, and called for help the whole time while several onlookers watched – so the story goes – yet no one called the police because everyone assumed somebody else would. It occurred in 1964 and prompted an intensive study of what was termed “the bystander effect,” or, later, “Genovese Syndrome.”
(I always thought the judge’s sentencing in The Shawshank Redemption – “You strike me as a particularly icy and remorseless man, Mr. Dufresne; it chills my blood just to look at you" – was over-the-top, until I read Wikipedia’s description of the sentencing of “Kitty” Genovese’s killer:
“On Monday, June 15, 1964, when the death sentence was announced by the jury foreman, ‘The [court]room erupted into loud spontaneous applause and cheers.’ When calm and returned, the judge added, ‘I don’t believe in capital punishment, but when I see this monster, I wouldn’t hesitate to pull the switch myself!”
Awesome.)
We dragged the “body” up and down the beach for hours, mostly in front of families and children. It helps if you have a cameraman so people believe they’re watching a movie be made, but that may not be necessary; if you do something unbelievable in broad daylight with witnesses, most people simply can’t process it. Toward sunset, with Jennifer tied to a chair with her mouth taped shut, a guy in a Tommy Bahamas shirt and shorts walked by, chuckling. “You guys need any help?”
“Maybe you could help us dig a grave,” one of us said.
“I’ll get the shovel,” he said, and chuckled again before walking off.
It wasn’t hot but the sky was totally clear, so the sun snuck up on us and sapped all our energy. I barely had enough left in the tank to call in an order for two Umami burgers and a side of onion rings – and eat them all – before passing out early that night.
I awoke the next morning to a text from Clem. Joe, our actor – and Clem’s roommate – had terrible sunburn all over his face. Jennifer, Brandon, and I were the only ones who’d used the sunscreen; Joe and Clem went without, and paid dearly. Clem’s text was followed by an email with graphic photos of Joe’s face with the subject heading “WHAT DO WE DO?!”
Clem suggested buying makeup. I stopped at CVS on the way over, guessed the color of Joe’s face, and bought some. Joe applied it moments before we were set to start and it worked like a charm. “Makeup is great. It helps make women look beautiful and transform them from the freakish monsters they actually are,” he remarked. (I initially didn’t attribute this quote to Joe because I didn’t want him to be offended I quoted him, but after he read the first draft of this story, he insisted I give him credit.)
The rest of the shoot went without a hitch. Everyone did a great job and I wouldn’t want to spoil the viewing experience by giving more away. Maybe, instead of having read this, you should’ve just watched the video:
...There ya go.