I’ve been in a reflective mood lately, thinking about all the events that added up to equal all that’s happened this year. I directed my first feature film, and that’s not something I ever thought I would do.
To get to that point meant a whole lot of time on other people’s sets doing all sorts of jobs. I’ve been on horror films, short films, trailers, commercials, and even spent a couple weeks on The Chosen set shadowing Dallas.
All of it has been helpful, and all within in the past 8 years. My actual first time ever on a set was many decades earlier, when I had not one single clue what my life would become.
And if you had told my 13-year-old self visiting that set that one day he’d spending his every day doing everything he could to be on set for the rest of his life…he’d have been really disappointed by that.
Just for fun, here’s an excerpt from a book I wrote, The Other Side of Fear: A True Story of Murder, Forgiveness, and the Peace Only Faith Can Bring (available on Amazon, naturally). This is my honest first reaction to the inner workings of making a show.
(A little context: My dad was shot in armed robbery 13 times and lived. This was deemed worthy of recreation on television. You can find the result on YouTube, if you’re curious.)
From Chapter 12 – HOLLYWOOD
Rescue 911 was a network television program that featured true stories of people in trouble who had been saved by the miracle wrought by Alexander Graham Bell and a magical three-digit number. The show struck
a dramatic yet celebratory tone, hailing the work of police and rescue services across the United States. Three reenactments of traumatic and inspiring events were staged a week, buffeted by on-camera interviews with those involved. It was a lot like America’s Most Wanted, except you didn’t pee yourself afterward for fear of home invasion and death by multiple stabbings.
Most rescues ended happily. The show’s sensibility was generous toward both its subjects and its viewers, refusing to dole out guilty, vicarious pleasures by exploiting the victims and their families for cheap emotional drama. It was a reality show before the term was coined and rendered connotatively crass. We watched together as a family, though sometimes it was all too real and Mom felt compelled to leave the room.
To host this weekly exhibition of everyday peril and frantic phone dialing, the producers enlisted the aid of the most talented and powerful duo in all of Hollywood. Together, they had smoked up the small screen for years in such classics as The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and T.J. Hooker. They’d even put out an album or two. Only William Shatner and His Glorious Hairpiece had the skills to guide viewers in and out of the commercial breaks. The Shat. Captain Friggin’ Kirk. It was as though the Rescue 911 producers were gunning for the coveted Bill Heasley demographic.
The show found the subjects of its segments by calling local police stations across the country. Since 911 focused so much on casting local law enforcement and paramedics in a positive light, the Fresno Police Department was quite eager to have this nice, friendly faction of Hollywood swing on by. Even nearly a year later, after hundreds of murders and robberies had made their way through the news pages, the Fresno PD knew exactly which story to pitch to the producers.
For Dad, this pretty much constituted what he imagined to be the greatest thing ever. His longtime devotion to all things Shat and Kirk
finally found its nirvana in the now single degree of separation between them. His first question for the producers wasn’t “How much will we be paid?” or “Will the shoot be catered?” It was, “Do I get to meet William Shatner?”
The answer was, “No, but you do get an autographed picture.”
Good enough.
Dad’s second question was if he could play himself on camera. The producers were adamantly against it. The last thing they needed was a guy who hadn’t properly dealt with his trauma freaking out on set. Dad’s eerie calm, instead of being reassuring, concerned them all the more. There
were many things to worry about during the one-week shoot: filming in multiple locations, interviews with over a dozen of the people involved, and complicated special effects and stunt work. Nowhere on the schedule was there room for recording proof of Dad’s need for therapy.
Dad found their worries to be, quite frankly, stupid. He was tired of other people telling him how he should and should not feel. He begged and pleaded and reassured the production company, the on-site producer, the director—he would have taken his case to the guy holding the boom mic if he thought it would have done any good. Eventually, through measured persistence, reservations were set aside.
Though it’s a scant three hours away from Los Angeles, Fresno is mostly useful to Hollywood as shorthand for Podunkville, USA, in lazily written late-night talk show jokes. With its flat streets and squat, unadorned buildings, there’s just not much about Fresno that’s immediately cinematic. A production crew in town was a big deal. Someone had actually dared to turn a camera on our “little” town of nearly half a million people. They completely took over not only The Shop, but also our house, our lives, and what we talked about at the grocery store. For the entire length of the one-week shoot, we were either on the front page of The Fresno Bee or the top story on the local TV news. At church, a friend took to humming the mostly tuneless Rescue 911 theme song, following me around like a puppy, and asking questions about movie stars I had no connection with.
The men and women in the production crew were something of a disappointment. We had expected egotistical, acerbic Hollywood types chomping on cigars and asking Dad if he would mind having a pet monkey to provide comical reaction shots as he’s shot to pieces. Instead, they were perfectly respectful, lovely people. They took seriously the responsibility to not cheapen the gravity of Dad’s situation while still maintaining some sort of broadcast standard. They wanted us to have nothing but a positive experience and catered to our every need and desire (by which I mean we ate a lot of Kentucky Fried Chicken).
Our every day and night was commandeered by the filming. My regular, half-hearted homeschooling routine was upset so badly there was no need for even the pretense of doing my schoolwork. Hollywood, evil influencer of children, successfully destroyed any lingering ambition I may have had to finish my giant work packet of death. A real-life motion picture show was in town. Now that was something to study.
My father, to his everlasting credit, had instilled in me a deep love and appreciation of all things cinema. He didn’t pore over movie magazines like Starlog or scour the Scholastic book orders for anything movie or (better yet) Star Wars related like I had obsessed myself into doing, but he was known to “work late” now and again. Then, the next day, he’d tell us all about the movie with the confusing title we all had to see together.
“Trust me, Brock,” he said one day in early August of 1985. “You’ll love Back to the Future.”
Even then, I didn’t completely understand what we were in for. I knew that the making of a segment on Rescue 911 would hardly be representative of the experience of what it must be like to shoot a big studio film, but all of the essential ingredients—cameras, lighting, a director, a producer, the sound guy, makeup artists, even a stunt man—were there.
I found out rather quickly that a television shoot is mostly about the waiting. The real work wasn’t in what anyone did while cameras were rolling—that was actually the smallest part of it. Our drab, overly brown living room was transformed into a pleasing, dynamic space through what seemed like endless hours of prep work by the lighting guy and the sound guy and everyone else who pulled on that drapery or closed that window. It took forever. If you blinked, you missed the actual seconds when the camera rolled. But, no worries. Wait some more and soon the scene or the interview or the insert of a car driving down a dark road would be filmed again. And again. And again. Each minute piece of action had to be repeated multiple times to accommodate different camera angles
and the mysterious, punishing demands of the totalitarian director who ordered “Again, one more time,” over and over again.
As bored as I sometimes was by the process, Dad was very much the opposite. Take after take, his smile and stamina never waned. When the time finally came to perform THE moment, the director gave Dad one last chance to back out. If ever he was going to have any psychological or emotional difficulty with the recreation, this was the scene during which that would happen. He would be required to again watch as two men, with guns, kicked in his door and fired their weapons at him. Tiny charges tucked away inside of the glass display cases were ready to blow apart in concert with the blanks fired from the guns. Other charges on Dad’s person would mimic the bullets that hit him. The impact would be nothing like what he felt on the actual night, but there would be strong,
abrupt sensations in the same places and he would need to react and fall to the ground with precision. And without having a freak-out. That it wasn’t real might not matter in the moment.
The stunt man, on call and ready, grabbed a donut and sat down. If anybody was gonna go down in a red haze of colored corn syrup, it was gonna be my dad. He’d bled for this once already and this was his reward. Everyone else could worry about him if that was what they needed to do, but no one would be taking his acting debut away from him. In the spring of 1990, fifteen months after he was shot, my father giddily reenacted his real-life action hero experience.
Logan and I were forced to go hang out in the trailer across the street from The Shop, far away from the psyche-damaging pretend violence. Because of the multiple set-ups and the fact that their screen time was brief, the two actors playing the shooters were already in there, waiting. So, for most of the night, right up until it was time for them to go into The Shop and play their parts, it was just the four of us.
“Hey, hey,” the one closest to the door said as we opened it. “Who’s this now?” They both sat at a little table in what looked very much like my grandparents’ motor home. “Who we got?”
“I’m Brock, and this is my brother, Logan.”
“Well, all right,” the other one said. “Pleased to meet you both. I’m Carl, this is Will. You fellas enjoying the shoot?”
“Yeah!” Logan said.
I wasn’t so sure. “It’s okay,”
“Pretty boring, right?” Carl said. “I feel ya, I feel ya. You know who’s having all the fun is your dad.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I wanna see but they won’t let me.”
“Just as well,” Will said. “They’re gonna run through it thirty times before they’re ready for us. Be glad you’re in here with the pretty faces.”
“‘Pretty?’” Carl asked. “That why we’re wearin’ masks in this scene?”
“Nah, man. We wearin’ masks because we’re too pretty. They don’t want us outshinin’ their dad, the star. Look at this mug, huh?” Will jutted out his chin and stroked it so we could get a good look. Logan and I just grinned. “Why else anybody wanna hide that?Obviously, I should be the guy behind the counter, not the guy with the machine gun. Don’t tell nobody this, but I’m really more of a gentle soul.”
“Fool, look at you,” Carl said. “You hear this guy? Man, their dad is straight up white. You think you’re so good you can play white?”
“Maybe. I got style, man. I’m versatile.”
“You ain’t that versatile.”
“Whatever. Why you gonna bring me down like that?”
“Why you—why you don’t look in mirrors?”
They both laughed uproariously at this, and we laughed with them. It was entirely possible I was looking at the two coolest people I’d ever met. “Hey, you dudes want some Twinkies?” they asked.
How was this a question? “Sure!” I shouted. They invited me and Logan to take the seats beside them.
“We got a lot of ’em. Have as many as you want!”
I couldn’t help but think about how unusual it was to be alone with two adult black men. I’d never had any real interaction with black adults before. At school, my friends had many different skin colors and were from countries whose names I couldn’t pronounce, but I’d never met any of their parents. These men didn’t seem all that different from anyone else I knew, except for the fact that, perhaps owing to their occupation, they were quite a bit funnier. And, they had Twinkies. Lots and lots of Twinkies. Being sequestered in the trailer? Not so bad.
Our family was going to be a piece of entertainment, and I happily broke unnaturally colored bread with the villains. What had been tragedy was now fun. What had been scary was now pretty much amazing. The wait in the hospital, the many visits to the ICU, the day after day of cleaning out Dad’s bullet wounds—none of that seemed to matter as we laughed and ate ourselves into early diabetes with the two men who would try to “kill” my father later that night.
Originally published on Facebook on 7/18/23
You can purchase The Other Side of Fear on Amazon right here.
(Photo credit: Kris Kimlin. From Day 1 of Production on The Shift)
Brock Heasley 