Chuckerman Makes a Movie Read online

  “Welcome to Drama for the First-Time Film Writer,” she said. She was applauding. “I’m excited to have you all, and I promise that if you commit yourselves to me and open yourselves to my process, you will leave at the end with a script in hand.”

  As she began her welcome speech, my eyes went to her boots, the same dirty-brown shit-kickers I’d seen through the window of Marcy’s bakery. I’d assumed the Rodeo nickname had something to do with her footwear. Perhaps the association stopped there, because I was at a loss after the shoes. She was tall and thin, not big and buxom. Although her breasts were nice. And they were real. Most of my clients’ boobs, they didn’t budge. A bus could whack Share broadside, and her breasts would not so much as jostle. But the Mormon Rodeo’s bounced beneath her T-shirt as she now paced the front of the room—as did her hair, which was wild and curly, with a considerable layer of frizz outlining her head. Her face seemed nice enough, from what I could see beneath the hair. She didn’t seem to know from makeup or accessories, other than a thin gold necklace. She was jeans and T-shirt. Au natural. I might have gone so far as to label her granola, had I not had my new classmates to compare her against. They—primarily the faction in the front rows—took crunchy to new levels. A ring in every nose, a sandal on every foot. Against the backdrop of my peers, this teacher was a conventional beauty.

  But would I, I asked myself as she promised to teach us the nuts and bolts of the craft, like to, you know, get her in the proverbial saddle?

  On looks alone, probably not. Clearly, I assumed from his choice of names, Broc had come to a different conclusion.

  When I tuned back in, the Mormon Rodeo had moved to the front of the room, her hands in prayer position. “To write stories that are real and true is to take an unpredictable journey,” she was saying. “We must be prepared to go deep, to entrust ourselves to the organic nature of the process, to throw away our outlines if our characters go a different way.” She moved her hands into her back pockets and again began to pace the front of the room, her hips moving in a motion-of-the-ocean sort of way, matching the measure of her speech.

  “We will start by getting to know each other. I want you to think of this class as your home, a supportive place in which we all feel safe to share our work and bare our souls.” Her body turned back to the front of the room, her hands came back to prayer. “If that sounds good to everyone, let’s begin.”

  The plan did not sound good to me. Had I not been jammed into my chair like a piece of dental floss, I would have bolted. I did not soul bare.

  Neither, apparently, did my neighbor Don, who, I would soon learn, was from Long Island and a member of the seniors couples club that had settled itself around me. He snorted and whispered something that prompted Helene, his wife, to turn her back to him and the woman behind him, his sister Susan, to give his chair a shove. This activity occurred as the Mormon Rodeo set forth the ground rules for our introductions and sweat began to conveyor down my sleeves. We were to say our names, share where we were from, explain our movie concept, and reveal an interesting fact about ourselves.

  “I’ll go first,” she said.

  “Well, I’m certainly not going first,” whispered Don.

  His fellow couples club members chuckled, but those in the front row, the group going for their master’s degrees, turned around and snarled. The first lesson wasn’t yet underway, the first introduction not even made, and already, a rift. I felt like telling the Mormon Rodeo to save her breath. We could play getting to know you ’til kingdom come, and we were still going to be a house divided. The goody two-shoes versus the nogoodnickas, a word coined by my Grandma Estelle to define a lesser form of scoundrel and most of the members of my family.

  The Mormon Rodeo turned out to be Laurel Rene Sorenson, a thirty-three-year-old native of Manti, Utah—which, she said, was south of Salt Lake City and home to the annual, two-week-long Mormon Miracle Pageant. She’d been living in New York for fifteen years and teaching for ten, and was now writing a movie about a Mormon father of nine who commits suicide in order to provide his family with insurance money after he loses his cattle fortune in a pyramid scheme involving dietary supplements.

  “Oh my,” said Helene, whose high voice did not jibe with her significant height. “What a terrible tragedy. I hope it’s not auto-biographical.”

  Laurel smiled at Helene as she gathered her hair into a sizable mass and clipped it to the top of her of head. The rearrangement made an immediate improvement, as I’d suspected. Out of habit, I’d been making a mental list of how I’d go about transforming Laurel Sorenson if she ever stepped into my office asking for a makeover and an eponymous fragrance. Tinkering with her hair—smoothing her frizz and possibly highlighting the blond—topped the list. I wasn’t yet sure what to do about the boots.

  “Helene, you hit the issue of the day on the head. Is my story true?” She turned her gaze on the rest of the class and asked, “What is truth when it comes to writing? Are we talking about actual truth? The essence of truth?” Her voice and arms went higher with each question, like a preacher with laryngitis. “We could discuss it for days,” she said. “But for now, let’s be patient.”

  “What about your interesting fact?” Don reminded her.

  “Right,” she said. She pulled the charm on her necklace back and forth while she thought. “Here you go: I am Mormon by birth but I’m taking Jewish conversion classes.”

  As a vigorous reaction to this news rippled through the couples club, I made a note to tell Broc that the Mormon Rodeo might not be Mormon, and Laurel called on her first candidate.

  Rhonda was an Asian woman who wore a red bandana around her forehead and was writing about a girl who drops out of college to help her parents run the family store. Rhonda was followed by Judd, who explained that he was writing a movie about teenagers who sneak into the Central Park Zoo after hours and find all the animals dead. “It’s going to kick off with this totally vile scene,” he said, tucking a piece of hair behind his ear. “Working title is Vile Bodies.”

  As I wondered whether he was working from a place of actual truth, Laurel commented that the title seemed appropriate, given his description. I thought she might have said “ironic,” as Judd’s own body was covered only in a yellowed undershirt, jean shorts, and the aforementioned Birkenstocks, and nothing is more vile than sandals on guys.

  The introductions revealed a real mishmash of folks. A conglomeration of undershirts, attitudes, NYU undergrads the same age as Share, senior citizens far older, two women in burkas, and finally one asshole in an Armani suit. Me.

  I stood out of habit. “My name is David Melman.”

  “You don’t need to stand.” This was Candy, who’d introduced herself right after Judd and whose sweet name, I could tell already, was an oxymoron.

  I dropped back to my seat, embarrassed and still apparently susceptible to being bossed around by girls, the effect of growing up with older sisters.

  “I usually stand when I present to clients,” I explained to my new friends in the couples club. Then I told the class that I’d be writing about a perfume maker named Mort Chuckerman who loses his sense of smell.

  My concept was met with silence, and finally broken by the clomp of cowboy boots as they headed down the center aisle. I held my breath as the Mormon Rodeo came at me. She paused when she reached my desk and nodded slowly to herself as she sized me up, as if for the first time appreciating the magnitude of the mess she’d volunteered to take on. Then, as the class stared and I loosened my tie for more oxygen, she smiled.

  “So you are Marcy’s brother?”

  I heard Don ask his wife, “Who’s Marcy?” as I exhaled and forced myself to look up at her.

  “For better or worse, I am.”

  She tucked a clump of fallen frizz behind her ear. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” She held out a hand, and I quickly wiped mine on my pants and held it to hers.

  Firm shake, soft hand. Part Rodeo. Part not.

  “It sou
nds like you’re writing a real tearjerker.” She winked.

  Was she flirting with me? Flirting was familiar ground. I regrouped. “You never know, Miss Sorenson, I might have Mort Chuckerman commit suicide at the end.” I winked back.

  Laurel shook her head up and down and played with the charm on her necklace, which I could now see was a Jewish star. “Touché,” she said.

  I wondered how far along she was in the conversion process, and if she wanted my professional help, because the last thing she looked like was a Jew.

  She smiled, all Utah-friendly. “You are right, Mr. Melman. You never know what might happen. I should withhold judgment.”

  “As hard as that may be,” added Candy, the bully.

  Laurel came to my defense by telling Candy to withhold the commentary. Then she ordered me to issue my interesting fact.

  “I’m not sure I have one. I have a lot of facts, I’m just not sure any of them rise to the level of interesting. The rest of the class set the bar pretty high.” I was speaking in earnest. Don had survived prostate cancer; Susan, his sister, was recently widowed; and Candy had just revealed, naturally, that she’d donated a kidney to her dying brother, only to have him die anyway. How could I compete with that?

  “I find that hard to believe,” Laurel said. “You think about it. I’ll get back to you.”

  Forty-five minutes later, we came to the end. Laurel turned to the blackboard, apparently having forgotten my missing fact. “All of your topic ideas,” she said with a knock on the blackboard. “Take a good look.”

  People did as told: eyes went to the board. As they did, Laurel grabbed an eraser and with a few swoops of her arm, did away with our entire collection of intended works.

  Her tush shook as she erased. I couldn’t help but notice. Don did too. He elbowed me as Laurel said, “Kiss your concepts goodbye,” and the class gasped.

  “She’s got one hell of an ass,” Don whispered.

  Helene kicked his seat again, while the recently widowed Susan tapped my shoulder and asked, “Are you single?”

  I nodded yes. Was she hitting on me? She was old enough to be Share’s grandmother.

  “You’re adorable,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said. I wondered if Marcy would be happy if I came home with Susan.

  Don leaned toward me. “You should go after the teacher.”

  “She’s not my type,” I whispered. “Besides, she’s converting to Judaism. She must be engaged. Why else would you convert?”

  “He has a good point,” Helene told Don.

  “Maybe the conversion has something to do with the suicide,” Susan suggested.

  Helene pointed out that she wasn’t wearing a ring.

  I said I hadn’t noticed.

  Susan told me she had a single daughter in the city, Betsy. “I have a good feeling about you. You should take her out.” She wrote Betsy’s number on a corner of her syllabus, ripped off the corner, and handed it to me.

  Because I was passing notes, I didn’t hear the portion of the lecture during which Laurel informed us that instead of writing a script based on our movie ideas, we were to write about our interesting facts.

  “New writers tend to start with stories they think they want to tell, but those aren’t the stories asking to be told.” She grabbed a syllabus from Judd’s desk and read, “Lesson 1: Familiarity v. Discovery: What Does It Mean to Write What You Know?”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. In my experience, stories don’t ask to be told. People just tell them.

  “Let’s take the couples club, for example.” Laurel nodded toward the group. “You want to write a movie about a cruise ship that runs aground in the Greek Isles?”

  The club, all five of them, nodded and smiled.

  “My guess is that your own cruise ship ran aground in the Greek Isles.”

  “Just like the Titanic. Except our boat didn’t go down,” Don said, and the rest of the club laughed.

  Laurel rested herself against the empty desk next to Helene. “And you plan to recount the episode.”

  The nodding and smiling continued.

  Then came the Mormon Rodeo’s knife. “Rule number one: writing what you know does not mean recounting an experience. You folks could probably tell us the tale of your trip in five minutes. We’d all have a good laugh and that would be that.”

  “It’s one hell of a story,” said Don.

  “I don’t doubt that it is,” said Laurel, “but the purpose of writing is not to simply inform but to discover something about yourself or life in general, and you can’t discover when you just retell facts.

  “Likewise,” she rasped, “you cannot discover when you write about characters or situations to which you have no connection or know nothing about.”

  Medical school was less confusing, I was thinking, when I heard my name.

  “David. Tell me a little bit about your idea. Mort Chuckerman, the perfume guy. Why are you interested in writing about him? What is your personal connection?”

  I held back that Mort Chuckerman was the name I gave my medical school cadaver. Although, as far as interesting facts go, I could have gone toe-to-ugly-toe with Judd if I’d offered up my obsession with that cadaver, an obsession that’s likely connected to my dropping out altogether.

  “Mort and I both market fragrances for a living,” I said.

  “Okay.” She nodded and hopped on her desk. “Anything beyond what you do for a living? Is he married? Where does he live? How old is he?”

  “I haven’t ironed out the details,” I admitted.

  Candy groaned. Laurel nodded again and told the class that my idea was a perfect example of writing about what you don’t know.

  “Discovery lies in a middle ground between what we know and what we don’t. When we stick only to the familiar, we don’t give ourselves a chance to discover. On the other hand, when we have no personal connection to the story we are creating, we cannot reach a higher truth about our lives, ourselves, our predicaments. Face it, that’s the reason we write: to discover, to be enlightened.”

  Her suggestion to us was to build stories out of the bits and pieces of ourselves and our experiences that we found interesting. “Infuse your characters with what you know,” she said, “and put them in unfamiliar situations that force them to act or confront or decide. What happens to Mort Chuckerman after he can’t work in perfumes anymore and is forced into a new job?” She didn’t look at me for an answer, thankfully. I didn’t have one. “That,” she said, “might allow for some discovery.”

  I spent the rest of the lecture stewing on what would happen to Mort. He would probably retire, I decided, not being able to imagine Mort as anything younger than a cadaver. He’d move to Miami, or at least winter there, like my grandparents did. Unfortunately, due to his sensory loss, he wouldn’t be able to appreciate the salty air. But he would be able to get out, take walks, play cards. Maybe he’d make a lady friend. I thought of Susan.

  A wave of protest interrupted my thought. Laurel had written our new assignment on the blackboard: “Take your interesting fact and incorporate it into your movie.”

  Candy was talking. “What if our movie idea and our interesting fact are one and the same?”

  Now I groaned.

  Her film, she said, was going to explore the reality of living when a piece of you (metaphorically, her brother; literally, her kidney) was already dead and buried.

  “Consider yourself lucky,” Laurel said to her.

  Follow-up questions came in a deluge. Do we need to use the interesting fact we told in class or can we choose another? Can we combine the interesting fact with another interesting fact? What about format?

  Laurel said to do whatever we needed to open the floodgates and to not worry about format.

  Then came the money question, the one I’d been planning to ask privately in the after-class office hours advertised on the blackboard: “What if you have no interesting fact about yourself?” Don asked, slapping my
shoulder.

  “You get to pack up and go home,” I said.

  Again, the Mormon Rodeo came my way. One hand on hip. The other on her necklace. “I happen to have it on good word that you drive a 1977 Cadillac.”

  I nodded, realizing immediately where she was headed and that I’d been outsmarted by Marcy. A first.

  Laurel explained to the class that the Cadillac had once belonged to my grandfather, I inherited it, I still drove it, and every year I celebrated my grandfather’s birthday in the car with my niece and nephew. She finished by saying, “I want a show of hands. Does anyone think that fact about Mr. Melman is interesting?”

  Only a few nods issued from the front of the room, but the men of the couples club came to life. Don reminisced about his ’79 Caddy while I fumed, more angry with Marcy for getting me into this mess than with the Mormon Rodeo, who seemed to be earning her name. No matter how hard I bucked, she would not be thrown.

  “As I suspected,” Laurel said, nodding along with the most enthusiastic of them and smiling at me. “And I agree.” She put a hand on my shoulder. “Write about the Cadillac.”

  “I already know everything there is to know about the Cadillac,” I said. “You said we’re not supposed to write what we know.”

  “Factually, I’m sure you know everything there is to know about that car. But why do you still drive it? Is it symbolic? What would make you get rid of it? That’s where your story is, David. Make your car a character. I guarantee you’ll end up with a movie.”

  CHAPTER 3:

  The First Scene

  Marcy’s bakery, like Marcy, is hard to take seriously. Two of the walls are painted bright pink and two are bright yellow. Estie and my sister Rachel’s oldest child, Julia, chose the colors when Marcy first opened her doors seven years ago, back in 1995. Estie and Julia were both five at the time. Slip, who was also at the grand opening, was near ninety. He’d flown in from Chicago with my parents and Rachel and her family for the event. This was the last trip he’d take—I think he knew it would be.