You're on an Airplane Read online

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  I introduced myself to Dr. Lad after the class and told him about The Eye—that I was playing a part in which my sister had the eyes of a visionary who committed suicide. I told him I was an actor, but he wasn’t a movie person, so he didn’t recognize me, and he took what I said at face value. So I was taken aback when he made an announcement to the class that there was an actor in the room and singled me out, which made me feel exposed. He thanked me for the work that I do, and spoke of entertainment as having an important place in healing. Or something like that. I blocked out the flattery because I didn’t want the other students to resent the extra attention I was getting—I wanted to be independent of that.

  I sat in on some more classes and took yoga with the students. During one class we all lined up against a wall and kneeled down, facing front, eyes closed, with our hands behind us, against the wall, while making buzzing sounds, like insects. I heard the clank of keys opening the door, and I opened my eyes to see the mailman coming in to drop off the mail. Here was a room with thirty people, backed up against a wall, making loud collective insect noises. I couldn’t stop myself from laughing, which I did, alone.

  I went to a few house parties and sensed the different levels of tightness and silence that people exhibit as they are suffering. There was lots of looking down while talking. Mainly, though, I hung out with Prakash and learned some recipes from him, like how to cook bitter melon, which is extremely bitter, but once you get used to it, it’s alright. And it’s a great system cleanser, if you know what I mean. I also got turned on to this stuff called triphala, which is a plant medicine that really cleans your system, but not in a scary way. I took a tablespoon in powder form and shot it down with water while not breathing through my nose, because it tastes like ground furniture.

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  One day Prakash and I drove to Taos for the Hanuman festival. Hanuman is the monkey god in Hindu mythology, and he has a blue face and is extremely devoted to his own god, Rama, for whom he’ll run errands and move mountains. Prakash told me that George Harrison brought the giant, however-many-tons Hanuman statue to America and drove around with it for some time while looking for the right home, which turned out to be Taos. I don’t know if this is true, but I know the Beatles turned this country on to India in the sixties. There’s a Hanuman pose in yoga, which is the splits as you hold your arms back together above your head to grab your foot. I can do this, not to brag. But I will go out on a limb to tell you I have had past lives in India.

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  Julia Roberts didn’t show up at the festival, but we did—with a giant bag of lentils, ready to feed a hundred hippies and Hanuman devotees. When we opened the first bag, hundreds of bugs came out, so we walked into some open land and dumped the lentils there. Luckily, we had another bag, and I helped Prakash make dahl. We ended up having just enough for everyone, and it was such a cosmic handshake that we were like, “Right on, brother.” I live for moments like that.

  8

  Vampires

  About four years before The Eye, I was in Blade: Trinity, which is the third film in the series based on the fictional Marvel Comics character. When I took the first meeting for that film, I was like, “What’s with these vampire movies? These are B movies, not serious movies, not adult human-being movies that people can relate to. Just who is going to want to see people with vampire teeth being all serious? It makes me laugh just thinking about it!” I didn’t say it out loud to the writer and director, David Goyer, but that was my attitude.

  I may have been wrong about a few things in my career, but who’s to say, really? I passed on Girl, Interrupted, the Angelina Jolie part, and remember saying in my defense, “Who cares about a bunch of depressed white girls in the sixties? What about civil rights? Hello!?!”—an attitude I remember Liev Schreiber calling “self-sabotaging.” It’s alright, though; it’s not like she won an Academy Award for that performance. At my Speed audition, I used a paper plate as a steering wheel as I “drove” the bus. I couldn’t pretend to drive a bus by gripping the air, and the plate was just sitting there on the table. I thought it was a good choice, since the character was initially written as a stand-up comedienne, but the director wasn’t laughing. Keanu and I became friends, though, and I think the movie did a lot for Sandra Bullock’s career. I auditioned with Robert De Niro in a hotel room with a camera in it, and he taped me for Meet the Parents. There was a line I couldn’t say, which was, “I’m not your Pam-cakes anymore, Dad.” I wanted more lines to say, and the fact that this was my movie moment with Robert De Niro made me laugh and roll my eyes. I remember Mr. De Niro saying, “If you could just commit,” and I couldn’t. I think those movies did really well, and weren’t there sequels?

  So in regards to Blade, my agents were like, “It would be good for the studio to see that you want to participate. These movies do really well. It’ll be good for your career.” And I thought, “Hey, just because it’s not my bag doesn’t mean it’s not in my makeup bag.”

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  This was the beginning of everybody being werewolves and superheroes and living in Middle Earth—around 2004—in movies. Wait, maybe it wasn’t only in movies. I was walking around thinking, “What’s happened to people?” But when my agents asked if I would take Blade: Trinity seriously, I said, “Of course; I am an actress!” My boyfriend at the time thought it was rad that I was playing a vampire, and he was proud of me. He was younger and liked those movies (and video games, metal music, and Godzilla).

  I was skeptical about Blade: Trinity but when I got my fangs, I got more into it. I put them on and ordered a sandwich at the deli and walked the sidewalks in the East Village, doing errands and acting natural—just another reason to love New York. I got on the phone with the wardrobe designer and shared all these ideas about what a thousand-year-old vampire would wear: talismans of various skulls of the people and animals she’d sucked the life out of, multinational monk garb, crucifixes, grunge Elizabethan, a monkey’s head on some monk beads that she’d swing around like Bette Davis. I wanted to be a dirty and chic cavewoman with hair extensions that varied in length and texture—for my vampire to be moody and nihilistic, yet romantic and emotional. I went to set only to have all this nixed, and I ended up as a corporate vampire. I wore designer clothes and dyed my eyebrows blond, wore blue contacts, and sported mainly a tight all-business ponytail. It was actually enough of a change to get me going.

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  I was playing the part of Danica Talos, who the Blade Wiki describes as “an ambitious vampire, whose aim is to rule over the vampire world . . . She’s violent and cruel, but she’s also a strong leader.” My first scene was with Wesley Snipes, who wasn’t actually there, so I acted with his double. I asked David Goyer if I could say, “What’s with those tattoos, do they mean anything?” and he liked that. Danica Talos was deep and dry and tired of being a vampire.

  There was an art-imitating-life thing going on with Blade. Wesley was possibly losing control of the franchise to the younger (and whiter) Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel, who both starred in the third film. And even though I didn’t get the full story, I knew it was intense because David had Triple H as his bodyguard. Triple H’s arm was as big as my thigh and he was such a nice man. We actually did another movie together a few years later called Killing Karma or Inside Out and produced by WWE. He said all he had to do was swing his hair out of his face and fifty thousand people in the wrestling arena would scream and cheer. He was surprised how boring acting in movies was but he was good-natured about it. I remember talking about pergolas and how he liked Splenda in his Starbucks iced coffee because it melted more easily than sugar. And I did, too.

  Wesley and I were both accepted in the acting program at SUNY Purchase. We went at different times, but had the same mentor, Joe Stockdale. Joe told me how remarkable Wesley
had been onstage but was frustrated with the character parts he got because of his race, so he started a company outside of the acting program, which was nothing short of righteous. When filming started, I’d just finished doing a play myself, so I asked the first AD if I could visit Wesley in his trailer when he was around, to talk about Joe and to bring it back home for him—his acting, the theater. The Waterdance, an old indie movie he’d done in the nineties, was so beautiful. Wesley had an entourage of maybe twenty friends and sometimes at work I’d get hit on, like I was in a nightclub.

  After I got the go-ahead, I knocked on Wesley’s door and sat at the table in his trailer. I told him what Joe had said, and he laughed a little—at me? I’m not sure—and I could tell he was in battle mode, because his sunglasses never came off. He finally said something like “You don’t understand, you don’t understand the whole story.” How can anyone understand the whole story, of anything? He was taken by the part of Blade and battling in a vampiric world.

  Being a vampire leader, I wasn’t afraid of either of them. He’d keep us waiting late into the night, and when he’d finally come to set I’d whine, “Where have you been? This has been so boring because we’ve been waiting . . .” He’d give me a “You don’t understand,” and I’d give him a “I know, I’m sure.” Being a vampire sucks. I’d walk around set in my vampire getup and think, “I should make a calendar of Danica doing simple things like mopping the floor or playing solitaire.” I didn’t have a camera so it didn’t happen. But one night, when we all went to a basketball game, I did start a cheer: “We say Blade, you say Trinity. Blade!” “Trinity!” “Blade!” “Trinity!” Can’t forget to have fun!

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  One day I was acting out on set and gnashed my fangs at my makeup artist and she started crying. I hugged her afterward and told her I was joking and just acting out. That was a fun day. Then, the next time I flew to Vancouver, she’d dyed her eyebrows blond and sported a tight all-business ponytail. Since I already had a body double for stunts, this made the day even stranger because there were three of me there.

  There’s a fine line, I’ve found, between being playful and becoming inappropriate or even difficult. As the shoot progressed, I kept wanting to make things more sci-fi. Like, “At this point wouldn’t Danica have developed a psychic skill to open this door with only her mind? So why press the intercom?” The idea got shut down like a bat seeing sunlight. There was also a seduction scene between Dracula and me in his bedroom, where a wind blew through a large gothic window lit by a neon moonlight. It reminded me of a Heart video from the eighties, as my shins caught the billowing lunar-blue sheer curtain and I leaned to catch the wind on my face from the giant fan, set up in the soundstage. My hair had been let loose and rocked out, as I stood bored and not feeling it that evening. To seduce me, Dracula spoke in that sexy and slow, hypnotic way and said, “I was around at the time of Jesus,” and I ad-libbed, “Oh yeah? I was around at Woodstock.” I was able to be sexy and serious about it but the whole scene got cut. I think David appreciated the commitment that I gave throughout the film. Who cares, really? No one. When I took my torture scene with Ryan seriously, though, I got a heartfelt hug from David and he thanked me. That was nice.

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  –

  Even though we were working in a studio, there were a lot of night shoots because we were running behind by the end of the week. I zipped in and out of town for my part so it wasn’t as difficult a shoot for me as it was for the others. I’d get tired, and my feet would hurt from stomping around in pumps, and my eyes would get dry from the contacts, and I’d get headaches because the dry contacts would blur my eyesight. If only complaining weren’t so exhausting. One night, I filmed a scene in which I had to shoot someone on a balcony while gliding purposefully sideways and shooting a gun through the air. It was important to me that I appeared to be floating like vampires do. To prepare, I lay on the floor with my legs up against a wall to get my blood flowing and napped using my purse as a pillow. When they finally called the scene, I got it together, ready to glide sideways with that steady vampiric grace and intensity, ready to shoot, pshew pshew pshew, with my gun. We did a take, and the director came up to me after and said, “That was great, but you were making sounds with your mouth when you shot the gun.”

  “Really?” I said. “You could see my mouth move?”

  David nodded. “And we can hear you.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know what to do. I mean . . . that’s the sound you make when you shoot someone. I’ve never shot someone for real . . .”

  It was my last day—or night—and I got back to the hotel just before dawn. It was good timing since I was playing a vampire and there I was, watching the sun come up.

  9

  The Death Star

  I used to be with a big agency called CAA. “The Death Star,” as it’s called in the biz. When I hear “You know they call it ‘the Death Star,’” it’s been delivered in midstride, with excitement and knowingness—like Han Solo in Star Wars—and there’s conspiracy in the air. Han Solo knows the force and the machine; he’s in on the game and mission. He is cool under pressure.

  I signed with CAA in the early aughts when I heard they “package movies.” And the big stars were there, and stars get movies made, and if your agent is friends with someone else’s agent, or if they like the same kind of coffee, you have a chance of being squeezed into a supporting role. And that’s a crapshoot. What was also happening was “a paradigm shift,” as those in the biz called it, in the types of movies getting made. Whoa! was me when I heard about The Lego Movie. I had a hard time wrapping my head around that one. I tried to imagine it: I’m going to my friends’ house. They have kids and their elevator opens to the apartment. I step out of the elevator and see a bunch of Legos on the floor. I holler out, “You need help cleaning this up?” No, I know they made the Legos talk to each other. I didn’t see it but I wonder if their teeth clattered. Anyway, yay for the plastic arts and new forms!

  I went into one of the conference rooms on the Death Star and met with my agents and manager to talk about “projects” and what was “in the pipeline” and “setting up meetings” and what they were “tracking.” This is agent-speak and my agents were cool. I liked them and thought of them like brothers—we rolled our eyes at the same-same-like movies being produced around town. They’d say rhetorical things like “Well, the studios need to make money,” and “Making a remake guarantees an audience,” and “There’s a paradigm shift,” and I’d ask rhetorical questions like “Why is it like this? Will it always be like this? Is it ever going to change?”

  It’s harder for agents to have creative agency since genre films—like horror or action films and kid-friendly movies—are what the studios want, since they make the most money around the entire world. I think about all this same-like and then about industrial agriculture and what it did to farmers and everyone’s relationship to where food came from. And then I think about porn—terror porn, action porn, news porn—anything that speeds up our hearts and minds to consume and to remedy a quick fix, when there’s nothing to fix. It all started with that gosh-dern remote control! It’s nice to be up in the air and away from all that.

  At the meeting, one of my agents had a dark orange tan, fresh from vacation, and I kept thinking he used a self-tanner as well as the sun. We all did. I think Ben Dey, my point-person agent, brought it up first and we discussed it for a spell, the reasons for the double-extra glow—perhaps to convince himself his vacation had lasted longer. We all poked fun and goaded him, “Are you wearing makeup?! There’s a streak mark from your tan wipe!” I told him he looked like an actor in a cigarette ad from the seventies skiing down a slope to stop for a drag of a menthol, and I lit his imaginary cigarette. I liked those guys.

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  It was around this time that I ran into Nora Ephron at the airport, just after she w
rapped Bewitched, a movie remake of the TV show from the sixties. I remember that trip because Gracie pooped in her travel bag from the hard drugs that the vet in LA had given her to relax her on the flight. Valley of the Dolls was a favorite book and movie of mine—Gracie’s favorite, too—but these dolls were too much. Her eyes were glazed and she was swaying, like a drunk dog leaving one of those Dogs Playing Poker needlepoints. The flight attendant was exceptionally cruel and condescending about Gracie’s being zipped up all the way in her bag before we took off. So much so that I started crying, and when we got to the altitude where we could walk around, he knelt down beside me to apologize. “I didn’t mean to insinuate you were a bad mother,” he said.

  “But you did,” I said, and blabbered how in our lifetime we’re going to see people’s need to interact with animals as healing beings that help us be calm, and especially on flights; they will help people deal and everyone will be nicer to each other because of it. I know he was having a bad day but my day was worse.

  If my crystal ball hadn’t been confiscated at the security checkpoint before that flight, I would’ve been able to tell him, “Just you wait, mister, you will see emotional support ponies on flights by 2018!” Now, there’s a show I’d like to see, Mr. Ed style—that TV show from the early sixties where the star is a talking horse. In the remake, our pilot is also named Mr. Ed but he is a pony. What a small world it really truly is because, as fate would have it, he’s the uncle of one of the other emotional support ponies on board. Her name is Make My Day and she and Mr. Ed have a nice conversation about her mother, Already-Winning, who’s feeling better now that her master is coming out of depression and has started to leave the house for walks with her.