Unified Via Film
August 8, 2007
by Joanna Beresford
The cast and crew of "Adopt a Sailor" gathered in a private Palm Desert home this week to shoot scenes for the film, which is written and directed by playwright Charles Evered, of the University of California's Riverside and Palm Desert campuses.
Producer Kim Waltrip invited me to observe a segment of the filming. Directions to the location included secret codes, guarded gates, winding roads, a production assistant with obligatory walkie-talkie, and a ragged hole in the wall, through which I crawled, feeling like Alice in Wonderland. Like Alice, I found a fantastic world on the other side.
When I arrived, Bebe Neuwirth stood in the kitchen, preparing for a scene. Her circle of concentration is wide with a solar intensity that caused me to avert my eyes, and I almost never looked at her except when she entered a scene, at a safe distance from me.
Peter Coyote plays her husband, in a relationship that's fraught with complexity. The story explores the cataclysm of ideas and emotions that occurs when they welcome a young sailor (played by Ethan Peck) into their New York apartment for a day.
The encounter changes all of their lives.
Typically, the set was chaotic. Actors, crew members, a few visitors and piles of furniture and equipment crowded the home's converted living space.
But Evered orchestrated the activity with good nature -- more like a guy hovering over a backyard barbecue than a harried director, managing sophisticated computer and monitoring systems, surrounded by cords and lights, with a set of headphones slung around his neck.
During long shots, you can see the actors from head to toe on the screen, and they seem a little awkward; the scenes feel like a staged play, not real life. But when the cameras move in for medium shots and close-ups, suddenly the viewer is inside, too. The scene is true, or at least it's intimate and close enough to seem true. I took that as a lesson in perspective and it also reflects Evered's theme.
"The story ... is about all the things we have in common," he explains. "Philosophy and political affiliation drop away when three people who are very different become human beings to one another."
They become human to one another through proximity. And all the commotion, the money, the talent and ambition and risks that comprise the moviemaking ritual are, ideally, dedicated to the same task. Bringing audience, actors and characters together, and making us human to one another.
That concept seemed breathtakingly apparent to me as I crouched in a chair, trying to be invisible, and trying to take in the production with the acuity of a camera lens.
In one of my own earliest memories I'm strolling along a moonlit street, grappling with the notion that the world is an enormous place, teeming with a nearly infinite number of human lives. I pause under the branches of an old oak tree, and I'm possessed by a fierce longing to know some of these people, or at least, to feel that we are somehow, indispensably, related.
My visit to the "Sailor" set addressed that persistent longing to feel a connection; I expect the completed film will do the same.
Joanna Beresford lives in La Quinta.
