After the shoot at Marble House, the production took up residence up the road in Gatsby’s mansion Rosecliff, Stanford White’s petite reminiscence of Versailles’s Grand Trianon.
Has anybody ever researched whether the inevitable crises which speckle a large-scale production correlate in some arcane way with the number of extra (non-crew) people on the set?
On the Newport, Rhode Island location for Gatsby we had a biblical multitude of fully costumed extras, some of whom were locals, genial socialites who’d stepped out of their own mansions to sign up for the fun of it. And probably wore some of their own real jewels. A collection of professional dancers did a madhouse Charleston. Some of the crowd had “parts” — sitting at tables, perhaps, and reacting when a few bit players spoke their few on-camera lines.
Many hundreds of people.
The overt rhythm of a big movie shoot consists of minutes of highlighted excitement and hours of low-lit lull. Lurking behind the lights, though, there’s a lot of off-camera action: agita, skews and adjustments, then more agita, new skews and re-adjustments.
Agita. Before shooting began in Newport, a small group from the film crew came to the city for a recce trip focused on potential exterior shots and lighting. They all stayed at an ultra-non-deluxe hotel, one of a national chain of ultra-non-deluxe hotels.
That night, when one of the guys lay down on his bed, his back encountered a lump under the mattress. He picked up the mattress and discovered a loaded handgun. Next morning, he took the handgun down to the front desk. “Oh yeah,” the desk clerk said, cheerfully, “that was left by the previous guest,” as he took possession of the gun.
Agita. It’d make sense if it was around the night of the gun when an executive from Providence’s organized mob got in touch with the production to offer group services in trucking, film equipment trucking, drivers for those trucks. Something like that. Hank Moonjean took care of the discussion and, whatever was agreed upon, “or else” got deleted from the tacit contract.
Agita. The Providence Hell’s Angels thundered into town and threatened to burn down Nick Carraway’s cottage, my all-time favorite movie construction. Had I been in Newport at the time, I would’ve taken up arms against the Angels. Myself. Instead, we hired security guards. Don’t know who got the Angels to thunder back out of town.
(I wear contact lenses; why was I wearing glasses in this photo of me standing on my favorite viewing spot, the mike platform?) But there I am, bespectacled, watching the crazed dancers outside of Gatsby’s manor, a/k/a Rosecliff…
…as director Jack Clayton yelled at them, “DANCE! DANCE!” And they danced to an amped-up recording of some Jazz Era music, as somewhere in the background Gatsby was introducing Daisy and her husband, Tom, to his perpetual party.
Tom was evidently perturbed at Daisy’s running around alone, for on the following Saturday night he came with her to Gatsby’s party. Perhaps his presence gave the evening its peculiar quality of oppressiveness–it stands out in my memory from Gatsby’s other parties that summer. There were the same people, or at least the same sort of people, the same profusion of champagne, the many-colored, many-keyed commotion, but I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness that hadn’t been there before…
After the exterior night shoot with the dancers, the whole mishpochah moved into Rosecliff’s ballroom for a dolly shot, if I remember, the camera moving with Mia and Bob, as Gatsby, in an exquisitely formal tuxedo, escorts Daisy through the ballroom, she, glowing with mischievous joy, he, with a mix of pride and adoration.
Mia was sort of bopping in one of Theoni Aldredge’s spectacular costumes, a ’20s sleeveless shift spangled with millions of tiny, glittery silver beads. (Must have taken the artisans of Barbara Matera’s great costume shop hundreds or thousands of hours to stitch that dress. I drop that in for a reason.)
Where was I and what was I wearing? I was again against the front ballroom wall, this time sitting on a chair. The bottom of my white jeans had been permanently stained by mud, the mud produced by a combination of seashore weather, once-lush lawns and the churn produced by the thousand feet of those extras, dancers, bits player, socialites, and the raw ground under the tented mess hall where the film crew, including me, ate.
“Mud, mud, glorious mud, nothing quite like it for cooling the blood…”
We who were sitting against the wall were watching that shot, Gatsby and Daisy. A woman I knew vaguely sat down next to me. Maybe Linda was her name. She was tall, composed, WASPishly pretty. Her access to the film was as an extra but her ambitions stretched further. She was, she had told me, working on an article about the filming which she intended to pitch to women’s mags. She was, in short, an interloper and a spy, digging for secrets.
Do you sense I didn’t like her very much? She had once probed me about what she reported was a rumor from the other extra “girls” about Bob Redford. Garbage. And so I had told her.
That night, the set was crowded and all the noises dimmed whatever hope Linda still had of worming a scoop out of me by dropping a unfounded rumor, and waiting for me to give it fundament. Still, during a lull, she leaned toward me and said, “What do you think? Is she or isn’t she?”
“Who is or isn’t what?”
“Mia,” Linda said. “Is she pregnant?”
A reaction was required; I fail to recall what it was. A short while later, I rose casually from my chair, slipped gracefully out of one of the front doors and, in the pitch black night, raced across Rosecliff’s endless front lawn, crossed Bellevue Avenue into a building we’d rented for production offices, and ran into Hank’s office.
Hank was the calmest, dryest film producer I’ve ever known. He was the only calm, dry film producer I’ve ever known, and there he was, sitting calmly behind his desk calmy contemplating the serene universe when, panting, I sat down in the chair facing him and said, “There’s a rumor…Mia is pregnant.”
Remember when I mentioned Theoni’s costume for Mia, that straight, waistless little shift? Waistless little shifts cannot camouflage an expanding baby bump, nor can they be altered for that purpose, no matter how many hundreds of hours artisans spend doing it.
And I’m going to freeze the scene right there, as Hank and I gazed at each other for minutes, minutes, conjuring the future.
Agita.