People who knew about these things told me that a week was a long time to hang around a movie shoot with nothing to do. In fact they told me that life on a movie shoot was boring at the best of times, and sometimes it could drive you absolutely insane. I didn’t doubt that, but like most writers I reckoned I didn’t bore easily and I’d always been very good at finding things to amuse myself. I thought I’d be able to cope. In any case, weren’t movie shoots supposed to be arenas of debauchery and bad behaviour? No doubt that would relieve some of the boredom.
There had been talk of my girlfriend Caroline coming with me to Fontinella but in the end she decided to stay home. It didn’t sound like much of a holiday, she said, and I agreed. She told me to bring back something nice for her from Rodeo Drive. I said I would, though I didn’t know quite where Rodeo Drive was, or how I’d get there. I also said I’d call her often and promised I wouldn’t ‘get up to anything’, all the time hoping there’d be opportunities to break that promise.
The ticket was for economy class, which was something of a disappointment, and the flight wasn’t for Los Angeles, but for Ontario, not the Canadian one, but a place in California that was apparently convenient for Fontinella. That was the only thing about the flight that was convenient. It involved three separate planes and two awkward changes, one in Charlottesville, and one in Phoenix; a route that only made sense as a way of bringing down the ticket price. The movie was evidently on a tight budget, but that didn’t come as a surprise.
I survived the flights, but it was nearly two in the morning before I’d picked up my luggage and stepped out into the arrivals area of Ontario International Airport, a space both homey and futuristic, where a small, delicately wiry, big-eyed young woman was holding up a sheet of cardboard with my name on it. She was ebony-skinned, black, African-American, of colour — or whatever the acceptable term is.
“Hi, Mr Blackwater. Welcome to America,” she said.
“Call me Ian,” I answered.
She smiled uncertainly, called me Ian, and told me her name was Cadence. “You know, just the usual spelling,” she said, and then she quickly added, “Wow, meeting the writer. This is so cool.”
“Only the writer of the book,” I said. “I’m sure the writer of the screenplay is much cooler.”
“Oh no, books are way cooler.”
She seemed like someone I could do business with.
“So are you excited?” she asked.
“Well, I have some trepidation if that’s what you mean. Or I would do if I weren’t too tired to think.”
She offered to carry my bag and I was enough of a gentleman to decline. She led the way through the airport, out to the parking lot.
“Good flight?” she asked hesitantly. It sounded as though she knew that was the kind of thing you were supposed to ask people when they’d just got off a plane, but it didn’t come naturally to her.
“Not really,” I said.
“I don’t suppose you fly too much,” she said.
“Enough to know a good flight from a bad one.”
“So this is your first time in America?”
“No,” I said. I’d been there half a dozen times before, one way and another.
“But your first time here on the West Coast.”
“Actually not,” I said.
She sounded disappointed. I felt I was letting her down with my cosmopolitanism.
“But it’s my first time flying to Ontario International, to go to Fontinella, in order to be on the set to see one of my novels turned into a movie.”
“Good,” she said, “that’s very good.”
I got the feeling that she wanted me to be some tweedy old professor who seldom left his book-lined study, much less his country. She seemed to think that having my own hair, teeth and limbs might be an indication that I wasn’t quite a serious enough writer. Whether a tweedy, serious old professor was likely to have written a book like Volkswagens and Velociraptors was another matter.
We approached our ride, her car, a battered old Toyota. I hadn’t really been expecting a limo, much less a Volkswagen Beetle, but I had been expecting something with fewer scrapes and dents, something on which the doors opened and closed without the major negotiations we now had to go through before we could get inside.
“Sorry it’s not more glamorous,” Cadence said. “And I guess it ought to be a hybrid to be politically correct. But it’s mine and it’s paid for.”
“I thought the film company would have given you a car,” I said.
“Yeah, you’d think that, wouldn’t you?” she agreed.
She started to drive, purposefully but not very fast, out through the convolutions of the airport roads. I was so tired I was seeing things, flashes and dark shapes at the edges of my vision, but it seemed only polite to keep talking.
“How are things on the shoot?” I said.
“Well, I can’t really say.”
“Is it a secret?”
“No, I mean I never worked on a movie before. I’m just an intern. I’m a nobody. They don’t let me do much. Just shit work.”
“Like picking up the author at the airport.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s OK.”
“So I don’t have much to compare it to.”
I knew her reticence was saying something, though I couldn’t tell what, and then she couldn’t resist adding, “Things seem a little tense. But maybe it’s a creative tension.”
“I’ll bet that’s it,” I said, too out of it to know if I was being sarcastic or not.
We were free of the airport now and we drove for fifteen minutes or so, and then we stopped somewhere, although frankly it looked very much like nowhere. We were at a trailer park. A sign on the gate said ‘Idle Palms’ and it was true, there were a couple of gangly palm trees growing inside the entrance, and they weren’t doing much. They were a bit ratty and careworn, but to a man who’s just arrived in California from England they still seemed perfectly exotic.
In fact the trailer park itself was a little oasis of greenery and humanity, neat, clean and well ordered. Individual trailers were lined up in geometrically precise rows. Some had carports and canopies, and potted plants by the front door and ornate fake street-lamps.
Outside the walls of the park however was a chaos of concrete and metal. On one side was a raised freeway that hummed and growled with traffic even at that time of night, and beneath it was a scrapyard stacked high with dead cars. On the other side was a small stadium, a sort of motor-racing circuit that called itself the Fontinella Speedway, visible but impenetrable behind receding planes of barbed wire and chain-link fencing.
We drove in through the gateway of the trailer park and immediately I saw a row of Volkswagen Beetles lined up inside. They’d been gleefully hacked about and customised. Various crucial parts had been amputated and replaced with exotic prosthetics — wings, fins, spoilers, spikes, battering rams — then the cars had been painted in gloriously clashing colours and decorated with cool though unfamiliar symbols and logos, some of them just a little like swastikas. I was enough of a petrol head and a Beetle freak that the sight did my heart good. It made the movie seem infinitely more real.
“These are for the movie, right?” I said, and I realised that was a silly thing to say. What else would they be for?
“Sure, it’s all for the movie,” Cadence said. “That place over there is where the velociraptors breed. Over there’s where the Volkswagen warriors live.”
“So? What?” I said. “This is the movie set?”