Pompeii Elementary

Note: This story may contain mature themes and adult language.
If you are offended by such material, you might want to turn back.

Close your eyes. Can you tell the difference between the sound of a watermelon dropped from a three-story building onto a wet sidewalk and the sound of that same watermelon landing on a dry sidewalk? If you can't hear it, you couldn't be me. Maybe you've never heard a watermelon landing on a sidewalk, wet or dry. But if you saw the scene in White Collar Mutants where the insurance adjuster hits Maggie in the back of the head with a sledgehammer . . . wet sidewalk. Maggie's little sister getting hit in the forehead-dry sidewalk. My daughter Rachel dropped the melons for me. She loves exploding fruit.

Anybody with a good ear and the right training can be a Foley artist for big-budget films. You get expensive recording studios and rooms full of sound effects equipment. Me? I do direct to video-the stuff that used to play at the drive-ins. The world is my studio, and I'm the best. I know exactly how long to defrost a leg of lamb so it will take a knife like a grown man's stomach. Stab a guy higher, and you have to use a turkey-you may not hear the knife scraping across the ribs, but it's there.

If you ever rent videos from the back of the store, you've heard my work. You've heard the sound of limbs being severed and necks being broken. You've heard hot irons being pressed into cold flesh and fingers being bitten off. You've heard every sort of human mutilation you can imagine-and quite a few you don't care to-and I did it all with common household objects and trips to the right supermarket. Go ahead-try it. Go down to the kitchen and make a sound, any sound. Then see if you can tell what sound it was, what crime, what gruesome act that never should have happened.

It's not as easy as you think, is it?

Can I shoot horrified children? Sure. I practice on Jennifer all the time. She's my eight year old. It's all a matter of extreme camera angles. Low is easy. Cheap, too. Nothing like a stampeding of little Keds and Mary Janes coming right at the camera. A classic shot. Makes the kids looked panicked, out of control, desperate. I do a shot like that just right, and I'm a cinematographer, not just a camera man. High is good too. I know, I know, we don't have the budget for a crane. But you know what I can do from the top of a building. Remember Can Johnny Come out and Die? Didn't even use a boom on that one. The height makes the kids look even smaller, more powerless, totally vulnerable.

TREATMENT:
Little Amanda lives in one of those suburbs packed with identical $215,000 houses with four bedrooms and a three-car garage, in a development with a name like an English hunt club, where neighbors judge each other not by the color of their skin (there is too little variation in that barometer) but by the quality of their lawn and where the slightest outcropping of dandelions or clover can lead to ostracism.

We open with a long helicopter shot (if we can afford it), the camera exploring the warren of cul-de-sacs until it finds Amanda's house. Then we zoom in, pierce the Tudor facade of the house the way we will pierce Amanda's own outer personality of smiles and giggles. No one is home. We explore empty rooms, so perfectly decorated, cleaned and organized that we begin to suspect we are in a show house-a model home, sample of the developer's wares. Then, in an upstairs bedroom decorated with pink and white striped wallpaper, we find a sheet of paper lying on the bed. A set of math problems with a name at the top-Amanda Spears.

We cut to the schoolyard where the children's jackets are as identical as the houses we saw earlier. Here we find Amanda, playing alone in the sand box, and from here we follow her through a very trying day.

Amanda, we discover, is afraid. What she fears changes from moment to moment-that no one will play with her, that her pencil will break, that they'll serve liver for lunch, that Mrs. Forster will make her clean the erasers-the specific fears are not important, I can re-write them to fit our props closet. But whatever Amanda fears, happens. Though she doesn't realize it, she has the power to call an event into being just by being afraid of it.

Where do your ideas come from? Is it an abuse of writerly powers to feed on the misfortunes of others? But didn't your neighbor received an anonymous letter complaining about the poor quality of his lawn? A wasn't it a tour of MGM Studios that taught you about Foley artists? And isn't your daughter afraid?

"Daddy, have you ever been afraid of something?"

"Sure, Sarah, especially when I didn't want to go to bed."

"No, it's not that. I mean really afraid that something terrible was going to happen."

"Well, sometimes I'm afraid I won't be able to handle you when Mommy's on a business trip."

"Daddy! I'm serious."

"OK, OK. No, I don't think I've ever been afraid that something terrible would happen."

"What about all those things in the movies you write?"

"Hey, you haven't been watching my movies, have you? I told you the videos on the top shelf are for when you're older."

"No, I haven't been watching your silly movies! But I know scary stuff happens in them, so I thought maybe it was stuff you were scared of."

"No, sweetheart. Those movies are just make believe. They're not any more real than your fairy tales. Daddy just made up a lot of scary things that could never really happen."

"So you're not afraid of something if it could never happen?"

"Of course not, now go to sleep."

"Daddy?"

"What is it now, Sarah?"

"What if you are afraid of something that could never happen?"

"All right, honey, let's stop all this hemming and hawing and why don't you just tell me what you're afraid of."

"Volcanoes."

"I beg you pardon?"

"Volcanoes."

"Honey, we live in Chicago. It's a thousand miles to the nearest mountain. Why would you be afraid of volcanoes?"

"Well, in sharing today Rachel told us about this place her family went on vacation and all these people lived there a long time ago and there was this mountain and one day it blew up and they all got burned up with melted rocks and buried in ashes and they all died and some of them turned into statues and some of the statues are even still there."

"Mount Vesuvius."

"Jennifer said that could never happen, but Rachel said it was true and she saw the statues and Miss Allen said Rachel was right and besides she had pictures."

"So now you're scared of volcanoes?"

"Well what if we were out playing on the playground and all of a sudden there was a volcano and we got burned up by melted rocks?"

"Sweetheart, there is one big difference between those people and you."

"What?"

"They were Italians."

"Daddy!"

"Seriously, honey. They lived at the foot of a volcano. You don't. Being afraid of volcanoes in Chicago-that's like, being afraid of typhoons in Chicago."

"What's a typhoon?"

"Forget about it."

"So you don't think I should be afraid?"

"Of course not, sweetie. There are no volcanoes anywhere near here. We're perfectly safe. So don't be scared, OK?"

"I'll try not to."

"Goodnight, Sarah. I love you."

"I love you too, Daddy. Good night."

And aren't you so delighted by her fears that you assure her, in perfect film cliché, that there's nothing to be afraid of, and then stay up half the night writing?

TREATMENT:
So Amanda is lying there in her bed staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling and we hear the voice-over of her father saying, "They're no more real than your fairy tales." Then we pan down from the stars to the window and sitting on the limb outside we see this human-like wolf (we can use the wolfman costume from Time to Take Your Bloodbath) eating chocolate chip cookies out of a basket and drooling. Then cut to the next morning.

Exterior long shot of Amanda's cul-de-sac. All the kids are being sent off to school. Dads are dressed in their charcoal suits and are finishing their mugs of coffee. Moms are zipping kids' coats and stuffing lunch bags into backpacks. Slowly we pick Amanda out of the crowd and zoom in on her. She walks alone. We hear a slight rumbling and Amanda stops, but the other kids keep going right past her. They obviously don't hear what she hears.

Later in the day and Amanda stares out the window of her classroom. The set should be sickly cheerful-Big Bird on the wall, that sort of crap. Mrs. Forster is drawing a picture of Vesuvius on the chalkboard with different colored chalk for different parts of the volcano. The sky outside darkens and we hear a much louder rumbling. Mrs. Forster assures the children it is only thunder. She tells them not to be afraid. Close-up on Amanda's face. Terror.

The playground. Teachers stand with their backs to the children gazing west where smoke billows into the sky. Through the haze we see something that might be a mountain (get Charlie to do a matte painting, I think-that model we have is too cartoonish for this one). The horizon explodes. Cut to screaming children being pelted by ash, rock, and flecks of molten lava. Pandemonium. Our usual climax scene-lots of extreme closeups of kids being knocked out, buried, burned (we can use some of the footage from Armageddon Elementary). Four minutes later, the lava flow arrives.

I think the low angle. For the last shot in the sequence the lava flows right over the camera to take us to black. That way we get darkness as a final image and when you get right down to it, the one thing every kid is afraid of is the dark. I know it's true for my little girl Jennifer. She'd be more afraid sleeping without her nightlight than of watching one of our movies.

Sizzling flesh is no big deal, I've done it plenty of times before. The trick is that this film calls for a very specific type of sizzling flesh-a young girl (age never mentioned in screenplay, but I assume about seven or eight) getting her legs cooked by molten lava. Little girls have skinny legs and molten lava is hotter than anything I've ever burned flesh with before. How long would her flesh sizzle before bones started to crack? And at what point would her body simply ignite like a blowtorch? I love breaking new ground.

How would you do it, if you had to guess? Toss a pork chop into a hot pan? Fat content is too high for an eight-year-old. Pour warm Coca-Cola over ice? You might get the cracking bones, but the burn wouldn't be right. I tried both of those and a whole lot more, but nothing transported me the way a perfect sound effect does. When I get one right, I can close my eyes and see the film and think of nothing else but that moment in the scene. But if I see pork chop or Coke or ice cubes for even a second, it's back to work.

There's only one place I know of where I can get hold of a seven-year-old girl, so I call my daughter Rachel up from her playroom. She likes to help when I'm dropping fruit off the house, but not so much today when I was measuring her calves, prodding them, twisting them, trying everything I could to become one with the object I had to destroy.

"This is boring, Daddy."

"I know, honey, I just have to learn what little girls' legs are like so I can make one."

"What happens in this one?"

"You know I can't tell you that, Rachel."

"Something bad happens to a little girl's legs."

"Let's just say something noisy."

Two hours later Rachel is reading one of those science books she obsesses over and I am getting ready to plunge a perfectly carved slab of extra-lean beef into a lobster pot full of boiling oil (a mixture of corn, peanut, and bacon grease, but if you think I'm telling you the proportions you can forget it). Keeping the oil from splattering on the microphone is no simple matter. I have booms all over the kitchen, and wires running over to a bank of equipment on the breakfast table where Rachel sat. 

The beef has a green pine branch, full of sap, running through its middle and the whole concoction is wrapped in a big sausage casing. It's ugly and it smells, but I pray to God it will work because the damn meat cost me close to forty dollars.

There are a few perfect moments in a career. I tell Rachel I am recording and to stay quiet and then into the oil we go. 

Close your eyes when you listen to the tape. Hear the skin peel back, the raw exposed flesh sizzle and start to smolder, then the cracking of the bone, the popping of marrow and . . . something else. I didn't intend to get this on the tape, but accidents sometimes make the greatest art, and Rachel's scream from across the room was the most glorious I have ever heard from her or any other child. Rachel is not an actress—her scream was for real and it was beautiful. Anguish, despair, and pain all tied up in a perfect package. I edited out everything else—my fatherly voice calming Rachel down, the smoke alarm going off, Rachel's laugh when she finally decided not to be scared anymore. But you know what she said when she was still crying? "It's the children at Vesuvis Daddy, the children being burned." Like I said, a perfect moment.