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| Tuesday, November 13, 2007 |
The Essayist: My Life Among the Undead
This is part of our Nov/Dec 2007 issue.
To drool or not to drool. That is the question.
My parents have a new shtick when I visit home. Usually it begins on Shabbat afternoons, after the lunch guests have migrated to the overstuffed velveteen couches to sip tea and swap bulletins on the latest outrages of international anti-Semitism and local community politics. In between rounds of the inevitable, prolonged Ahmedinejad-Haman-Hitler parallel, my dad will come out with his favorite piece of news.
"Did you hear? My son, the yeshiva bochur, is in a porn movie."
"Dad, please. It's not porn."
"Excuse me. 'Adult Entertainment.'"
"Dad. We talked about this. It's a movie based upon Rhinoceros, the famous avant-garde play by Eugene Ionesco, the noted French-Romanian absurdist. Anyone? No? Well anyway, it's a trenchant metaphor for the creeping fascism of our times. Very topical."
"Tell them who the star is."
"No."
"It's Jenna Jameson."
"Who?" asks one of the kindly, pallid rabbinic educators who regularly rotate in from up North.
"Jenna Jameson. She's a well-known porn star."
I have to give my father some props here; just admitting this kind of knowledge no doubt gets you put on some sort of synagogue blacklist.
"Well, I think at this stage in her career 'star' is a bit of a stretch. But I promise you Dad, it's not porn."
"Ok. So what's the name of the movie?"
I pretend not to hear. He is not to be put off, however. This is his favorite part.
"Go on, tell them."
"Tell them what?"
"The name of the movie."
"Oh. Is this danse macabre really necessary, father?"
"Go on."
"Fine ... it's Zombie Strippers. But seriously -- did I mention Rhinoceros?"
It may be hard to imagine, given this level of Hollywood success, but I am not really an actor. Nor am I, any longer, a yeshiva bochur. And to answer the rabbi's inevitable quip ("Nu, so were you a zombie or a stripper?") I was not a stripper. In fact, when not faking knowledge of French absurdists, my job is selling things to dentists. So you might say I have a workaday knowledge of horror, but not one that would really prepare you for the big screen.
The zombie gig came the same way most completely unqualified people get anything -- via dumb luck and connections. In this case a cousin, who after placing third in the Miss Israel Aerobics competition, moved from Tel Aviv to LA to break into "the industry", and somehow ended up as queen of the ironic B-horror genre. We have provided each other couch space over the years, commiserating as she toiled in the fame mines while I hustled through the world of gingiva, so when she hit it big with the unlikeliest of scripts, I was kindly offered a part in the movie. It just happened to be shooting the day after a large dental convention in suburban LA (actual and disturbingly popular lecture topic: "Maximum Cumulative Doses of Sedation Medications for In-Office Use"), so I extended my stay and took my chances.
I should say at this point that the whole stripper/porn thing did indeed give me pause. Not that I'm against it in theory, you understand. Personal enterprise is what makes this country great, so if some entrepreneurial young college girls feel that the local nudity market is being underserved, well, gezunteheit. But the thought of paying for that kind of service is so existentially depressing that I have actually managed never to see a professional naked person. Which makes me unpopular at bachelor parties, but still, it's a streak. Also, my hometown Orthodox community is small and still somewhat Southern, the kind of place where everyone feels free to sit on the porch and discuss my personal habits and lifestyle choices. Did I want to risk providing this level of ammunition to the neighbors and teachers who always knew I'd turn out no good? Perhaps even end up as a cautionary tale in a local High Holiday sermon?
Of course I did. Could I really have lived as the guy who turned down a role in a zombie stripper film? I mean, people go their whole lives doing Ibsen and Sartre in grim community playhouses fantasizing about being in a schlocky naked gorefest like this. And since this was a real movie, distributed by a real big movie company (not porn!) any nudity one happened to stumble upon would be in the service of Art, not paying the rent, right? Did I mention Rhinoceros?
So ultimately, I did exactly what you would do and fled the dental convention early one summer morning to arrive on set, an eerie abandoned hospital in the heart of East LA. I knew that "extras" don't get the same kind of respect as professional artistes like, say, Jenna Jameson, so I didn't waste time preparing a speech thanking the Academy. Nonetheless, the previous night there may have been a few hours spent in front of the mirror practicing eye-twitches and delicate moans, imagining the tortured, nuanced performance I would bring to the role of Freidrich, the undead Viennese med-school student who foolishly volunteered for a secret U.S. government scientific program which tragically took his life before turning him into a monster.
When I got there the assistant director gathered all the zombies in a fluorescent-lit, green-tiled morgue with blood-spattered walls to lay out the rules.
"One: In this movie, zombies are scenery. Not actors. So when I say 'all actors to set' you don't do anything. Just stay where you are. When I say 'zombies to set', you get your ass to the set. Quick. When I say 'zombies twitch, you twitch. 'Zombies drool,' you drool. That's it. But no lazy, half-assed twitching. I want you to mean it. Freak me out.
Two: When they call lunch, you don't get lunch. You wait until the actors are finished and then -- and only then -- you can hit the catering truck.
Three: Stay away from the strippers.
Four: Try not to bleed on the walls. We have to pay for cleanup.
Five: Don't forget what I said about the catering truck. Got it? Now, go to makeup."
So the "scenery" went to makeup. Unfortunately, my shtetl physique made for a very sensitive zombie. Fake zombies, in case you only know real ones, require full eyeball-sized contact lenses seemingly made out of ping-pong balls to look properly dead-eyed. As any normal human should, I have a horrific fear of any eyeball manipulation or insertions, especially the kind that require sanding and hourly top-up lubrication due to their enormous size and industrial manufacture. So after some quick discussions between the producers and the prop team, and I must say a good deal of rather unkind gesturing towards me, I was summarily downgraded from a Stage 3 zombie (fully zombified; able to zombify others, frequently sporting gruesome disfigurements) past a Stage 2 (clearly undead and nicely ripening into zombiehood, yet with some humanoid qualities remaining), straight to a lowly Stage 1 (barely undead; theoretically able to pass on the zombie virus but doubtful in practice; merely queasy-looking, or in the words of t
he clearly irked makeup guy "kind of like an accountant reacting to bad shellfish"). After that it was a quick trip to the plastic room to be doused in blood, and then over to the set.
Eighteen hours and innumerable lurchings, droolings, faux viscera-gnawings and blood refills later, it was over. Yet, because of the magic of the movies, the only person who really got hurt was the unsuspecting Mexican cleaning lady who drove by and seemed to have an involuntary bowel movement on the seat of her '94 Hyundai when Phillips, an especially gory Stage 3, collapsed right onto her windshield as part of an immature hitchhiking prank.
Ultimately, despite my best efforts, it turned out to be a very modest and respectable affair, at least the day I was there. The zombies were kept away from all nudity and Jenna, although in one scene I did get shot by Robert Englund (of Freddy Krueger fame). I didn't even get to go to the cast party or get my name on IMDB.com. But I got paid to drool all day and it was absolutely worth selling my morals and reputation down the river.
In fact, my only real regret is that I was not pulled over by the police on the way home, covered in dried blood and flecks of brain. Officer, I didn't do anything, I swear. It was just a movie. A porn movie. You can ask my dad.
-- Text by Matthew Leader
This is part of our Nov/Dec 2007 issue.
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