Day 116 - Bollywood in Budgee Springs - Chapter 12b (2735 words)

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Bollywood in Budgee Springs

Chapter 12b

Ella is given a directors chair next to Nathan as they prepare for the next scene to be shot, she is amazed by the amount that is happening at the same time. The cast and crew are blocking in a shot for the modern scene, and Ash was constantly talking into a walkie talkie, setting in motion remote assistants to do his bidding. It was clockwork in motion, but with human parts and in chaotic directions, yet an orderly outcome.

Kiran was checking on the digital monitor they had set up on the previous takes and was making notes, conferring with Ash when she had distilled the point she wanted to make, in this case an error to be rectified. Ash whispered a few more missives to his unseen hands in an Indian language that sounded much like the gobbledegook that he had so self deprecatingly spouted when talking to the town previously.

He looked over the footage again with Kiran and shrugged his shoulders, she rewound a section and pointed at something on the screen, making him swear, a barking sound in a foreign language that Ella did not understand directly but in a tone she recognised immediately. Kiran tapped the swearing director's arm while he creased his brow and showed him her notes, something in the caught his eye and he stopped and nodded. He questioned her and then in the middle of speaking looked up and straight into Ella's eyes, staring her down while talking to Kiran.

Ella, on the spot, blushed but refused to look away, unsure of what the problem was and why he had suddenly fixated on her all of a sudden. She held Nathan's hand and squeezed it tighter than she had intended which made him squeak a little. She let go immediately but did not break her gaze away from Ash's visual challenging.

“What are you staring at?” She said to him with a steely edge in her voice, upset that she had been put in the spotlight of his gaze, that she had blushed so readily and finally that she had inadvertently hurt her grandson. It was a discomfort more than an injury, but it had happened none the less.

Ash broke into a very wide smile at her reaction to him and he waved slightly as if to apologise then broke the spell between them by turning to Kiran and rewriting the notes she had made, and nodding as he did so. Kiran read them, looked over at Ella who was even more confused than before , querying her director's instructions and getting a dismissive wave of the hand Ella before taking the walkie talkie and doing both of those things in another direction.

“What's going on Love?” Ella asked her grandson, who was still rubbing his hand and giving his Nana a hurt look, though it was a habit to play up the injury and he was not really that affected.

“I don't know, Kiran will tell me, hang on.” He didn't wait, just jumped up and ran to his new friend and started talking to her animatedly.

“It's all very exciting and glamorous, our town …. I don't even recognise it, I can't believe it can you?” Julie was in a seat with them in the same spot, Ella had forgotten for a moment that she had not come there alone.

“It is, what was all that about do you think?”

“What dear? All what about?”

“That business just now, with that man, Ash staring at me an pointing?”

Julie looked at her with no expression.

“Don't tell me you missed all that did you?” Ella was flabbergasted, but her friend was lost in her own perceptions and not hanging on the intimacy of a look between two other people not directly in front of her.

“Nana, Nana!” Nathan and Kiran came up and the second director crouched down in front of Ella and Nathan stood beside her bobbing up and down unable to contain his excitement.

“What is it dear? I'm sorry is there a problem? We can leave if we are causing a problem, I don;t want to be any trouble for you with...”

“No, no, no that's not it.” reassured Kiran, “It's the complete opposite in fact, we need you to help us, and you are in the exact right place at the exact right time.”

Ella was no better off after that than before she looked at her grandson who was bursting to say something. “What ever is the matter Nathan love?”

Nathan's outburst was all over the place, he could barely string the sentence together. “They want to put you in! The Movie! In the Movie! You are going to be in the Movie!”

Kiran hand Ella a clipboard with a release waiver on it and a place where she could sign. Ella was trying to read but it all was just words swimming before her and she could not focus on it for more than a second or tow before she lost her way and started again. Eventually she gave up trying to read it and just signed, which excited her grandson even more. “What do you need me to do?”

Kiran stood up and gestured for her to come along and follow her, she invited Julie to join them on the little adventure. As they walked to the make up station Kiran explained what they needed.

“There was a problem in the scene we just shot and we can use maybe seventy, maybe eight percent of the footage but we had a part of the establishing shot unusable, and while we could just reshoot that the issue is that the customer in the scene has moved to the next scene and we'll have to wait fir that scene to break and then re-set this one and go again. But, and this is a sign of just how good Ash is,” Kiran sighed a little, not in a lovesick way but in a manner that suggested there were layers to her feelings for her boss, Ella saw that immediately there was a respect for his art and his judgement, but also something stronger and deeper there. “...He saw an opportunity to cut in a new scene, a quick pick up we can do right now with the actors we have and the addition of a tourist character in a fifteen to twenty second clip of a vendor, a new customer and a rip off, and the customer being upset, and cut that in to the montage of the previous bits we can use and the whole scene takes on a new dynamic and a... here we are...” Kiran sat Ella in the make up chair and gave some instructions to the make up man, who started on Ella straight away with the lightest of touches.

“Oh.” Was all Ella could muster in repsonse.

“Well anyway, you are dressed for the part already and Ash, he was sizing you up to see if you would work or if we had to find someone else, re purpose someone or... well … it was a thing … anyway when you barked at him?”

“I didn't mean to be rude, he was just staring at me like I was in the way, and I … this is my home town, all the sets and the colours and the … I felt like a stranger in my town and this man was staring daggers at me and I...” Ella was flushed and getting agitated again.

“Ella that is perfect that is just the reaction we need in the scene, keep that! Use that! I love it! I see what he sees in you, the edge of steel in you. Oh my oh my!” Kiran held her hands to her face to hide her glee and Ella could pick that some of that deeper feeling towards her Boss was definitely for his eye as an artist, an auteur. Not all of it, there was more there, but she saw talent in him and there was respect or envy in it, maybe jealousy, certainly a strong emotion.

“Oh.” Was her only response once more.

A few minutes later and she had been transported maybe fifty yards from where she had started, but it felt like she had been transplanted half a world away in a marketplace in the heart of India, deep in the set dressed to look as real as possible from the best angles, where she stood was an immersive experience. Kiran had told her that there would be no sound being shot, it was all visual and establishing, they would try rolling the film and moving her in and out of the frame, calling out when to do certain things and starting again and again to get the footage they could cut together later now that it was a montage, they would be more forgiving with takes.

She was to walk up to a stall and take a scarf, try it on and then hand over money to a street vendor and then haggle with him, eventually arguing and then looking cross and storming off. The very look that she had fired back at Ash with the “What are you looking at?” was what had got her here, she wondered if perhaps she should have just kept quiet, but there was no turning back now, make the best of it and she'll be in a film.

She'll be in a film, and it hit her that she really would be a film star, though star was a relative term. It made her smile and feel light on her feet, she was going to be in a film! They did the scene over and over again. The man she was acting opposite was supposed to be a nefarious thief that cheated wealthy and unsuspecting customers, the heroine for one in the scene they had just shot.

The man was very dark, swarthy was the way they used to put it when she was younger and now who knew how to say such a thing? But he was tall, dark and mysterious, never once looking at her directly, looking everywhere but at her with lots of nervous hand wringing and gestures that made her mistrust him right then and there even though they were just acting. She thought he was very good, to portray that without even saying a word to her or even look at her to convince her of anything. He wore a Turban and a robe that showed her very little of who he was or what he was like, instead she got a shimmying layer of material and avoidance of her gaze. It was like a vaudeville performance, he even had a large black moustache waxed to pointed tips that could have been twirled like 'Dishonest John' to convey even more cartoonish villainy.

“Cut! Cut!” Kiran came up and took Ella aside a little from the stall. “Look Ella, I know this is exciting and all, but can we get some of that fire you had before? You look like a schoolgirl, all happy to be there and 'acting' the part, you can't do that, you can't act 'angry' but be smiling all the way through it, that's just too much for the audience to swallow. We can cut around it, but we just need you to tap back into that feeling.”

Ella nodded and said “I'll try. I will I promise.”

They came back to the stall and Kiran leaned across the counter top to talk to the actor playing the Vendor.

“You're doing marvellously Charlie, marvellously.” And she scurried away again.

“Charlie?” Ella was flummoxed, a man she had known nearly all her life had been standing not three feet from her and she had not seen him there, she had seen the dark skin and the clothes, the turban and saw what she expected. No wonder he had not caught her eye, now that she knew it was him she reached across the counter and held him by the chin and twisted his face to her, eye balling him and seeing him underneath the make up, the clothing and the disguise. “Oh my Lord it is you!”

“Shhhh!” Charlie motioned to keep her quiet.

“I can't believe it, Oh My God.” Ella ignored his protests.

“Be quiet woman! For god's sake! I'm wearing make up! What kind of bloke wears make up!”

Ella laughed in his face, the suggestion that this equated with women's make up was laughably inane. “Oh don't be silly Charles Clarke.” the edge of disapproval came back to her voice, along with that look she had given the director before.

“Perfect! More of that please!” Yelled Kiran into a megaphone.

Charlie, now outed sighed and slumped his shoulders, unknowingly giving them just what they wanted. Which is exactly how he ended up in the film in the first instance, somewhat ironically. “At least no one will recognise me dressed up as a Coolie.”

Ella started at his archaic racist term, she had never heard him speak like this before and his discomfort was no excuse. She had balked at starting it with Julie, she regretted that but it was too hard and too much to get into then, but she had a mark in her ledger she needed to balance out and here was Charlie, a man she thought better of casually dropping it into his embarrassment justification.

“Charlie Clarke watch your mouth!”

Charlie froze, and he knew that the word was wrong when he uttered it. He wasn't being racist, he was being descriptive. They used to call Indian workers at the Gully Mines 'Coolies' when he was a child, it was not a term her regularly used, but he remembered a few of them he saw when he was very young and would go with his father on delivery runs. His Dad and his mates called them 'Coolies' back then and it was not a mean word, it was just THE word. This is what they looked like, this was exactly what they looked like and it was the first thing that occurred to him when he saw himself dressed up. He didn't recognise himself at all, which was disconcerting, but he recognised what he was meant to see.

He had said to Ash “Am I supposed to be a Coolie?” at the time and the oddness of the look that he got now came home to him, it was a word that meant more to others than it did to him. He was not trying to be racist at all, and now he had offended the director, a guest in the town, and the women he... Ella, he had offended Ella, a woman he had known all his life.

He tried to dig himself out of the hole. “Now, Ella Riddell, I was not being racist. You know I am not a racist, but...”

There was the in that she wanted and she left fly all the rage and disappointment she had in her friend that she didn't take to task beforehand. She was still raging at him while he sputtered and argued with her badly, simultaneously trying to quieten her, until Kiran yelled “Cut!”

Kiran ran in with a big smile on her face and she saw the red in Ella's eyes, the driving force of her anger at Charlie, and she stopped smiling as it broke that they were not acting.

“We got what we need thank you, that was perfect. There was so much 'emotion' in that it's hard to believe it's not real?” She framed it with a high rise terminal to defuse the tension with a question for Ella to consider rather than reply to.

“Yes, it is hard to believe isn't it.” Ella turned and walked away as dignified as she could while Charlie just stared after her.

“Is everything OK?” Kiran asked the man in the heavy Indian make up.

“Oh, she'll get over it when I apologise enough, maybe four or five... hundred times. Speaking of grovelling though, can I please talk to Ash, I think I owe him an apology too.”