Working With Savages: The Confessions of a Film Biz Lackey

Dustin Beall Smith

lackey —n. 1 derog. a: a servile follower b: an obsequious, parasitical person


The first full-length feature film I ever worked on was a low–budget Merchant Ivory production called Savages, starring Sam Waterston and Susie Blakely. Shot in 1971, Savages begins with a series of intertitled black-and-white sequences purporting to show the activities of a Stone Age forest tribe called the Mud People.
    One day at dawn these masked and mud-covered savages prepare for their annual human sacrifice by feeding a powerful narcotic leaf to the consort of their queen. Just as the sacrifice is about to be carried out, a small spherical object comes sailing over the treetops and lands on the forest floor. Naturally the queen of the tribe sees great significance in this. The Mud People abandon their sacrifice and follow the mysteriously rolling object—a croquet ball as it turns out—through the woods, until it leads them to a well-manicured clearing in which sits a huge colonial mansion. The tribe cautiously enters the mansion, led by its youngest member, a girl. You can see the wonder in the girl’s eyes as she takes in the wide central staircase and the huge chandelier, and you can imagine her thinking, Wow! This is a happening place!
    The Mud People explore the lavishly furnished but inexplicably abandoned rooms of the mansion. One of the women discovers a preppy-looking boy in an oil portrait and licks his face; another tries on an evening gown and learns how to use scissors. The queen herself places the croquet ball at the base of a statue of a naked woman, thus creating an altar. One of the men figures out the purpose of a pair of spectacles and puts them on. Predictably the savages are seduced by the material comforts they find in the mansion. As they remove their primitive masks and wash off the mud, they are transformed into recognizable early twentieth-century stereotypes—a songwriter, a capitalist, a hostess, a debutante, and so on. You can see, perhaps, where this allegory is heading.
    I should explain at this point that while I was hired to work full-time on Savages, I did not yet aspire to a career in the film business. I loved movies but had no particular urge to work on them. I dreamed instead of being a writer—not that I was doing very much writing. At age thirty-one, I had a wife and two children, the youngest of whom, my one-year-old son, had a serious and inoperable heart condition. To make ends meet I had been driving a New York City taxicab full-time and picking up a few bucks on the side with freelance photography. One day a few months before Savages started filming, I volunteered to help a friend who was shooting the tag end of a low budget feature. When word got around that I was a hard worker, other cameramen started employing me as a kind of all-purpose crew member. Soon I was able to give up taxi driving.
    When I first arrived at Beechwood Mansion in upstate New York to begin work on Savages, I was pretty much following my own personal croquet ball. Like the Mud People I was propelled more by curiosity than ambition. There was a lot of social upheaval in 1971—exploding racial tensions, widespread alcohol and drug use, rampant sexual experimentation. Domestic life seemed pale in comparison. Working on a feature film—away from home, away from the lonely prospect of writing and the reality of my son’s illness—offered a welcome diversion. The pay stunk—$150-a-week, flat—but it was enough to keep my family happy in a two-bedroom apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
    That first day at the mansion, just as dawn was breaking, our three-man crew unloaded a standard package of lighting and grip equipment and staged everything in the house. My immediate boss was the gaffer (the head electrician), a fellow who called himself Bobby V. Bobby, who had done jail time in Chicago for burglary and car theft, looked like Ichabod Crane—tall, gaunt, and intimidating. He was nervous this day because his own boss was none other than Walter Lassally, a British cinematographer who had recently won an Academy Award for his work on Zorba the Greek.
    I just kept my mouth shut and proceeded to lay out long lines of electrical feeder cable, dropping the coils at the generator and dragging one end across the lawn and into the mansion. At 7:00 a.m., everyone else showed up. The cast disappeared immediately into the wardrobe room right off the main lobby. I helped the best boy electrician set up the tungsten lights on rolling stands. Knowing nothing about electricity, I scurried around connecting extension cables to the light heads and plugging the extensions into the stage distribution boxes located in the hallways. Soaked with sweat and streaked with dirt, I taped up all the connections, while James Ivory, Ismael Merchant, and Walter Lassally floated effortlessly around in leather sandals and clean linen clothing, making artistic decisions. I had always thought of myself as a creative person, but I relished this physical labor. Here was a job—unlike novel writing—that had a substantial shape to it. Compared to facing a blank sheet of paper in my typewriter, the task of setting up film equipment was a huge relief.
    None of us had seen the film script, written by George W. S. Trow. And I for one had no idea what the movie was about. That it might be an allegory mattered as little to me as the broader purpose of a war matters to a soldier on his first day in combat. Being a lackey at heart, it was enough for me that the actors had awesome theatrical reputations—people like Lewis J. Stadlen, Thayer David, Salome Jens, and Kathleen Widdoes. And of course there was Susie Blakely, who today would be called a super model, Sam Waterston, currently the star of Law and Order, and Ultra Violet, a veteran actress in Andy Warhol’s films.
    When the cast made its first grand appearance on the set, I happened to be on my knees, struggling to jam a bent stage plug into one of the distribution boxes. Blue-and-white sparks flew from the box every time I tried to insert the thing. Half-blinded by arcing flashes of electricity, I looked up and saw the entire cast fanning out from the dressing room door into the wide entranceway of the mansion—all sixteen of them, ranging in age from fourteen to eighty, stark naked except for their mud masks and, in a few cases, loincloths. My jaw dropped.
    Just then Susie Blakely, wearing neither loincloth nor mask, approached me with two dripping gobs of gray mud, one in each hand. She looked for all the world like the biblical Eve bearing an offering of two apples. She stopped and stood in front of me—me on my knees like some supplicant beggar—and she smiled her all-American smile and said, “There aren’t enough makeup people. Would you mind rubbing this mud on me?”
    My first thought was that I had electrocuted myself. It was a writerly kind of thought and, as such, slow and ponderous, and in the several seconds it took me to think it, Bobby V. swooped in and grabbed both gobs of mud from Susie’s hands and announced: “I’ll take care of this.”
    Susie, clearly sensing my disappointment, transferred what little mud was left from her hands to mine—mine being absurdly outstretched in her direction. “You can do my ankles,” she said. And I did. I settled for Susie’s ankles.
    There are experiences in life that, when we look back at them, can be seen to contain the seeds of everything that follows. No matter how long we go on kissing the one we love, it is the first kiss we remember. So, too, no matter how many days we show up to perform the work we decide to do, we are basically refining and polishing the original thing—the prototypical experience. In this way the shape of a whole career can be divined from a single moment of work. In my case my lackey position in the hierarchy of the film business was set in stone when I agreed, that day, to remain on my knees, massaging mud into the ankles of a naked fashion model, a woman who—like Eve—offered nothing if not the prospect of lost innocence.

We shot the black-and-white scenes first. Then we got into the long second act of the movie—which we shot in color. The second act begins with a dreamy sequence titled “In the School Yard,” which opens with the beautiful and scantily clad Salome Jens swinging happily on a huge outdoor swing. The allegorical implication is clear: many of the impulses that led to what we call civilization—like many of the impulses that led me to a career in the film business—were childlike, playful, and pure. There was a time, the movie seems to suggest, when wonderment and gaiety and joyous participation outweighed the forces of cynicism, morbidity, and socially sanctioned greed.
    For me the first week’s work on Savages exemplified such a time. The more responsibility they dumped on me, the more eager I was to work. In addition to my duties as an electrician, I was given the position of dolly grip, which meant that I got to work directly with Walter Lassally whenever the camera moved during the filming of a scene. It also meant that I had to work twice as hard for the same amount of money. But no one—not even Walter—was getting paid very much. This infused us all with a wonderful no-strings-attached egalitarian spirit —both during and after work. That I was a sweat-covered neophyte did not prevent Sam Waterston from sharing a joint with me when the day was done. That Kathy Widdoes was an experienced actress did not deter her from asking my opinion of her performance.
    The harder we worked in those first days, the more intimate the cast and crew became. I began aggressively to seek the company of Kathy and Ultra and Susie and Salome—sometimes all four of them at once—which is to say that I very quickly began to envision a more exotic social life than that of a wanna-be writer and financially strapped family man. To sustain this fantasy I happily added four hours of intense partying to my sixteen-hour workday.
    But since a more exotic life was not really available to me—I mean nothing in my life had actually changed—the fantasy soon became exhausting. I was not alone in this exhaustion. No one likes to be overworked and underpaid—not even actors, who stand to achieve immortality in the bargain. After about a week the wonderment of selfless community and egalitarian good times finally gave way to the forces of cynicism, morbidity, and greed. Needing—all of us—to position ourselves professionally for the long haul, the cast retreated into its shell of creative superiority and the crew into its shell of servitude.
    The schoolyard sequence of Savages ends when the newly sophisticated savages discover a dead wolfhound lying on the steps of the garden. They don’t know what to make of the dog’s death. But we do. It is the death of egalitarianism. Equality is not enough for the human spirit. Neither is innocence or gaiety. In the background of the dead wolfhound scene—in the dusk—the lights of the mansion blink on and off, beckoning the new sophisticates to the next sequence, announced by a title card reading: “The Dinner Party.”

It has been said that working on a movie is like being in combat, with its long periods of waiting and its sudden bursts of urgency. But it is also very much like attending a cocktail or dinner party. Imagine if you can being face-to-face in tight quarters with the same fifty people, sixteen hours a day, six days a week. Movie stars and principal actors are allowed to retire to dressing rooms and trailers. But everyone else on the set must be prepared to relate to each other at all times. This requires maintaining a persona throughout the day, and to maintain a persona, you need the appropriate constructs: a solid self-image of some kind and a recognizable position in the hierarchy of the company. To get a seat at the dinner table, you must demonstrate some kind of authority.
    On Savages I had felt perfectly content, at first, to be whatever anyone wanted me to be—electrician, grip, gofer, I didn’t care—as long as everyone else was willing to do likewise. But I soon learned that if I wanted to maintain my distance from the domestic scene and prolong my avoidance of writing—and by this time I felt an urgent need to do both—I would need to define myself in some recognizable way. As it happened I had a natural instinct for rigging, and Walter Lassally loved my dolly moves. So I began to flirt with the idea of becoming a key grip.
    A key grip is the head grip, meaning that he or she runs the grip department. The grip department is responsible for rigging all the lights—on ceiling grids, construction cranes, scaffolding, and so on—and for all the subtle diffusion of light, both artificial and natural. Grips are responsible, too, for the construction and placement of set walls, as well as for all the dolly shots, car rigging, stunt preparations, set safety, and so on. The key grip is the chief problem solver on a movie set and as such needs to be able to analyze things quickly and make snap decisions in matters that affect many other departments—and often a great deal of the producer’s money. People always need a key grip’s advice. If you are a timid writer who has lost all hope of a readership, become a key grip. It will change your life. Famous directors and cameramen will ask your opinion of things—will this or that shot work? Movie stars, knowing that your concern for their safety is an integral part of their immortality, will address you by name and ask if you had a good sleep the night before.
    I remember one job—a Jell-O commercial—where I had to drive a large camera crane, quite fast, right up to Bill Cosby’s face, take after take after take. Cosby, who can be very curt to people who work with him, spent half the day following me around and making small talk in order to assure that he remained on my good side. We were the best of buddies, Bill and I.
    Notice that I have dropped a celebrity name. Without the reference to famous directors, and the inclusion of Bill Cosby’s name, my job description would read like a help-wanted notice tacked on a bulletin board at a construction site. This raises the very real possibility that if the movie set of Savages had in fact been an everyday construction site, I probably would have concluded that the brutal hours and low pay were exploitative and cruel, and I might well have retreated into writerly anonymity—free then to examine my soul and produce volumes of creative work.
    But this phenomenon of fame by association is a powerful and seductive drug. It loves a creative void. Freud would probably liken it to libido. I liken it to static cling. Once you have experienced it (people describe heroin this way), the bar is set for life.
    I did not return to writerly anonymity when we finished shooting Savages. I began billing myself as a key grip, even though I had never even met a real key grip. There is some precedent for this kind of moxie. I once asked a Native American medicine man what you had to do to become a medicine man. “The first step,” he said, “is to call yourself one.” By calling myself a key grip, I made a place for myself at the dinner table. Like one of the sophisticated savages, I could now walk the walk and talk the talk. And my brand of medicine seemed to work. Producers like to see confidence in their department heads, and I exuded confidence. I wore a red kerchief around my neck and sported a large bowie knife on my belt; at one point I even wore a cowboy hat. If, during a job interview, the producer questioned my experience, I would simply distract him or her with a reference, say, to Kierkegaard or Camus. This would nearly always leave a producer blinking.
    I joined a young film union to make my job title official. The pay got considerably better. I bought a small truck and stocked it with specialized rigging and grip equipment. In partnership with a cameraman, I started a film equipment rental company called Feature Systems. It was exhilarating. For every film I accepted, I turned down five. And between films I worked on hundreds of commercials, where the real money was.
    In the early seventies, when competent film crews could be found only in Los Angeles or New York, we traveled all over the country to make movies and commercials. We went to Georgia, Texas, Florida, New Mexico, South Carolina, Massachusetts, Vermont, Haiti, Bermuda, the Dominican Republic, the Virgin Islands. We invaded and occupied small towns, wowing the women, ravaging the supplies of liquor and beer, hiring local police forces as our security personnel. We turned paved roads into dirt and paved over dirt roads; we built false-front facades on main streets, then tore them down. We transformed spring into autumn and summer into winter, caused rainstorms and produced lightning. Then when we had had our way with a place—when we had infused it with static cling—we would pull out in a cloud of diesel exhaust, leaving behind piles of used lumber and stacks of broken hearts, the way traveling circuses used to do.
    Over the years I worked on the breakthrough films of actors like Susan Sarandon, Jeff Goldblum, Michael Moriarty, Paul Sorvino, Treat Williams, Samuel L. Jackson, John Heard, Tim Robbins, John Turturro, Raul Julia, Margaux Hemingway, Rick Belzer, Chevy Chase, and Matt Damon and his buddy Ben Affleck, to name a few. If pressed to do so, I will gladly call attention to my having rubbed elbows with iconic figures like Robert DeNiro, Gwyneth Paltrow, Martin Scorcese, Charlton Heston, Sylvester Stallone, Spike Lee, Irene Worth, Anjelica Huston, Mick Jagger, Ice T, Elliot Gould, Woody Allen, Warren Beatty, Gene Hackman, Carly Simon, Raquel Welch, Catherine Deneuve, Marcello Mastroianni, Chuck Yeager, various Apollo astronauts, Henry Kissinger, several U.S. presidents, Pope John Paul II, and, oh yes, the supermodel Elle MacPherson.
    If one of these celebrity names comes up in casual conversation, I usually cannot resist mentioning that I ‘‘worked with” him or her or that I ‘‘did” his or her film. Dropping a celebrity name makes me feel better about myself. I could come up with more names, too—writers, directors, producers, musicians. But as Bob Dylan said in a slightly different context, ‘‘What would it matter, anyway?”

In the dinner party sequence of Savages, the former Mud People, done up in tuxedoes and evening gowns, gather at a long table and spend a large part of the evening posturing for each other and dropping names, as I have just done. The relationships between the guests are discernible only in terms of the power one person exerts—or does not exert—over another. Innuendoes rule the conversation. Subtle and not-so-subtle insults are hurled, and grand pomposities articulated.
    When the women retire to the library, the men light up cigars, and Sam Waterston’s character tells a story about a mysterious Stone Age tribe called the Mud People. His intellectual affectation prevents him from quite remembering that he and his fellow sophisticates were, only twelve hours ago, Mud People themselves.
    When we cut to the women having coffee in the library, Ultra Violet tells Salome Jens that one of the older men at the table had seemed to be a very powerful person.
    ‘‘Otto is a bluffer,” replies Salome. ‘‘We are none of us very powerful here.”
    ‘‘But he’s treated with respect by our hostess,” says Ultra. ‘‘He’s deferred to.”
    At this point Salome leans toward Ultra and delivers one of the key lines in the film: ‘‘You do know,” she says, ‘‘it is all going on somewhere else.”
    ‘‘What is?” says Ultra.
    ‘‘Everything,” says Salome.
    And there it is. For all the hullabaloo and dinner party atmosphere of filmmaking, the lived lives of the participants happen somewhere else. As hard as I tried to mask the inevitable with newfound ambition, hard work, and a film biz moniker, my son died four months after Savages wrapped. My daughter was six at the time. My wife and I got an amicable divorce the following year. Like many of my fellow workers, I got caught up in drugs and alcohol and reveled in mediocre revolution for a decade. I embraced promiscuity and dabbled in the occult. I gave up my equipment company and traveled to Chichén Itzá to sit on a pyramid. In the early 1980s I quit using drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes. I got married again, this time to a woman who was also in the business. We bought a house in the country and one hundred acres of land, and planned to have a child together. I spent my weekends mowing the lawn and raking leaves and shoveling snow. My daughter graduated from high school. Between film jobs I started to write again. I completed a novel about a film producer. It was judged by publishers to be quite well written but ultimately disappointing-perhaps because I had never been a film producer myself. My daughter graduated from college. I got divorced again. My parents died. Then one day I looked around the movie set, and suddenly everyone seemed terribly young.
    I do not mean to suggest that working around movie stars was devoid of life and familiarity. I shared genuine moments of casual intimacy with certain of the celebrities I have mentioned. At the very least I retain snippets of memory about each of them—tidbits that have survived my twenty-seven-year stint in the business. Some of these memories seem almost surreal now, like the time Bobby V. and I, in the company of Treat Williams and his girlfriend, snorted cocaine from a silk tablecloth in one of New York’s famous four-star restaurants, while the head waiter and patrons of the place looked on, mesmerized and appalled.
    Let me sketch two brief scenes that convey the extremes of intimacy available on a movie set. Perhaps these sketches will demonstrate, too, that work in the film business—like all work—is more easily suffered when transformed into story or treated as metaphor.
    At the cool end of the intimacy spectrum, take the movie Copland:

    ext. police plaza, lower manhattan—day.

    It is the first day of shooting. From my position behind the dolly, I am trying to size up Sylvester Stallone, who is standing a few feet away. His muscular back and ropy shoulders suggest a well-developed shell. His posture exudes rigidity. His sinister reptilian eyelids veil surprisingly sad eyes. How much of this is Stallone, and how much is Freddie, the character he is playing, is hard to tell. In any case I am secretly hoping for some eye contact—something to break the ice—since, after all, we will be working in proximity for the next two months. Basically I am gawking, of course, just like one of the many spectators held at bay behind the police barricades. Suddenly Stallone’s eyes sweep my way, too fast for me to affect professional disinterest. But I needn’t worry; his gaze passes over me like an unmanned beacon in a prison yard. The effect is chilling.
    Just then, the young director, James Mangold, approaches Stallone and asks him to tone down the sadness he had been projecting earlier during rehearsals. ‘‘Remember, Sly, you aren’t really depressed yet, at this point in the script. What you really are at this point is . . .”—and here Mangold pauses for effect—‘‘. . . what you’re really feeling right now is . . . lugubrious.”
    ‘‘Lugubrious?” says Stallone.
    Our eyes never do meet—Stallone’s and mine—even on the smallest of sets. But from that day on, in every on-set interview he gives to the media, I hear him interject his newfound bit of vocabulary: lugubrious. Perhaps because of this I actually like him.
    At the warm end of the intimacy spectrum, take the movie Compromising Positions, starring Susan Sarandon and Raul Julia:

    ext. east hampton. a fine summer day in 1984.

Susan is sitting in the driver’s seat of a car rigged with lights and cameras and diffusion frames. My crew is attaching the car to the tow vehicle, getting us ready to head out on back roads for a running shot. I knock on the driver’s side window to give Susan instructions about what not to do while we are on the road—don’t use the brakes, let the car steer itself—but for some reason Susan moves over and beckons me to sit down next to her. I open the door, slide in beside her, and close the door behind me. The commotion outside suddenly sounds far away. Some of the guys take their tools and move away from the car. Susan sidles closer to me, hooks her arm in mine, then rests her head on my shoulder. She is four months pregnant with her first child and has decided not to marry the child’s father. My second wife has recently discovered she cannot have children. Susan and I know these things about each other, but neither of us says a word. My left hand clutches the steering wheel, my right foot presses the gas pedal. For one long hallucinatory moment, we drive off into the sunset together.

As the dinner party sequence of Savages ends, a strange new title, written in classical Greek, comes at us from the depths of the dark screen and sparkles for several seconds before it disappears: Olesi-Karpos. Olesi means ‘‘to destroy.” Karpos means ‘‘fruit.” Karpos is not just any kind of fruit; it is the bounty the ancient Greeks offered to the gods—the sacrifice. The phrase olesi-karpos shows up in the tenth book of Homer’s The Odyssey, where Circe tells Odysseus that if he wants to enter Hades and survive to tell the tale, he must first make a sacrifice. She instructs him to make that sacrifice when he comes to a place where tall poplars and ‘‘fruit-destroying” willows grow.
    The connotative meaning of the phrase olesi-karpos, the one that applies to our savages—and to me—is this: they drop their unripe fruit, they squander their substance. Distracted first by the croquet ball and then by their new lifestyle, the savages completely forget to offer up their sacrifice. As a result they proceed immediately to squander their substance—their potential as civilized human beings—just as I squandered my potential as a writer. Having lost touch with anything more important than their own affect, they find themselves adrift. Which is why everything seems to them to be happening someplace else.
    Following the dinner party the hostess Carlotta (the queen of the tribe) gathers everyone in the library and reads the future from an over-ripe piece of fruit—the karpos. As if peering into a crystal ball, Carlotta intones her dark vision of the future with words like: duplicity, abasement, remorse, obscurity. Her fellow sophisticates listen raptly, but they have no clue what her prophecy means. Susie Blakely’s character simply giggles. If the notion of a neglected sacrifice occurs to anyone, it is only subliminally. They drift away and play records on a windup Victrola. The Lewis J. Stadlen character—the songwriter—performs one of his new compositions. Carlotta judges the songwriter’s work to be—like my novel—quite well performed but ultimately disappointing. The group disperses and everyone goes outside to have drinks around the swimming pool. Everyone, that is, except the songwriter—who, after his failure in the hoopla world of the mansion, decides to absent himself from all the hype, choosing instead to play his cello—alone—in the night-enshrouded solarium.
    After that everything begins to fall apart for the others. Sam Waterston’s character drowns himself in the pool, intentionally and in front of everyone. No one stops him, which makes his death a perverse and unconscious sacrifice. His girlfriend is found hanging by her neck from the limb of a tree, another unsuccessful sacrifice.
    In the wee hours of the morning, the sophisticates join together in a round of yogic chanting and partake of a powdered drug. Then they file down into the basement (Hades), where they engage in ritual exhibitionist behavior and game playing. They rediscover the ancient symbol of the spiral, as things continue to spiral downwards. They fight over possessions and bright jewels. They humiliate and degrade each other and squabble over the carcass of a chicken.
    When dawn finally comes the now unsophisticated savages rush up from the basement (from their own abasement) and after smashing all the Victrola records (the records of civilization), run out onto the lawn to play a rowdy game of croquet. They smack the balls into the pasture and, in a spirit of wild abandon, follow the rolling balls back into the forest—presumably back to their Stone Age lifestyle. There, we imagine, they will forget all about their experience with civilization and pick up where they left off with their primitive sacrifice, which consists of crushing the skull of the queen’s consort with a huge rock.
    Only one of the savages lingers at the mansion: the songwriter. Or, let us just say, the writer. Before running off into the forest himself, the writer watches bemusedly as his fellow savages flee the experience of civilization, and he takes a moment to ponder what that experience might mean.

After thirty-odd years I am struck by Susie Blakeley’s almost biblical offering to me. Looking back on it now, I think her enticement—two gobs of gray mud—can be seen as a vision of alternative possibilities. In her one hand she carried the mud of creation, in her other the mud of the grave. Take your pick, she might as well have said: creativity or obscurity. Write or die.
    Did I really have such a clear choice at the time? I doubt it. I was on my knees from the get-go, the seduction and my acquiescence to the seduction having occurred nearly simultaneously. Still I sometimes marvel that I spent the prime of my life in a servile relationship to an art not my own. After all I can never get those potentially productive years back. What did all that servitude mean? Would Susie Blakely—or, for that matter, Susan Sarandon—remember my name today? Probably not. Would Sly Stallone? Certainly not. Would the Pope or supermodel Elle MacPherson? Nope. So if my relationship to celebrity was more contractual than reciprocal, what purpose did it serve? What was I doing there all those years?
    Recently I called the gaffer Bobby V., whom I had not seen for years. I guess certain statutes of limitation have run out, because he goes by his real name now: Robert Vercruse. He lives with his wife in the country and works only occasionally on films. I asked him why, thirty-three years ago, he had made the seemingly fantastical leap from a career as a cat burglar and car thief in Chicago to working as a gaffer on movies in New York.
    ‘‘That’s easy,” he said. ‘‘The adrenaline rush of working on movies was better than stealing.”
    That says it. But as a writer I would take it one step further. For me working on movies was stealing. Call it a prolonged apprenticeship to Hermes, patron of thieves and commerce, inventor of the nine-stringed lyre. Under the cover of servitude, I pilfered the sensation of celebrity; appropriated by association the identities of the famous; embezzled the ambition of the powerful; borrowed funereal episodes of despair and grief; pinched moments of hysterical laughter and promise; lifted for weeks at a time the lifestyles of the rich; hijacked the desperate environment of the poor; pocketed plots and structure; and made off with meaning and arc. It was all about story, all along. The sacrifice—the offering up of story—that comes here, at the end.

Dustin Beall Smith says, ‘‘There’s not much to say, but I will have completed my MFA requirements by early May. I don’t want to say I have an MFA until I have it in hand. In any case, as of the end of this semester, I will once again be at the mercy of the cruel world.’’

“Working With Savages: The Confessions of a Film Biz Lackey” appears in our Autumn 2003 issue.