Crossing the Line

Matthew Rowland

Description

Not all evil dudes are the same. And not all lines must be crossed. But Milton J. Milton must be stopped. And Samson knows it. This line must be crossed.
For the third time, Samson Agonistes is in over his head.
And as if things couldn’t be worse, this time he’s blind.
Literally, as in, if you-don’t-stop-that, blind.
Meanwhile his arch nemesis Milton J. Milton hasn’t lost a step.
He’s got a new bag of evil-civilization-destroying tricks.
But Samson’s hot on his trail even if he can’t see where he’s going.
His girlfriend Achu, his partner Una, and his daughter Hildy, all think that Samson’s crossed the line.
But soulless villains, mad scientists, they can’t be allowed to determine our future, can they?
Samson won’t let that happen.
The line must be crossed.

Sujets

• Thrillers
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: iUniverse
• Date de parution: 20 mars 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781663248176
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

CROSSING THE LINE
MATTHEW ROWLAND


CROSSING THE LINE
 
 
Copyright © 2023 Matthew Rowland.
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
 
 
 
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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
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ISBN: 978-1-6632-4816-9 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-4817-6 (e)
 
 
 
iUniverse rev. date: 03/20/2023

Also by Matthew Rowland
Forced Calls Final Touches
Cinematic Immunity
King Me

For Liza—
“Focused and drawn in by what barred the way.”
Seamus Heaney
From Seeing Things

What It’s Come To
There was this fight once, on the set of a picture I was keying, between the DP—Director of Photography, guy I’d never worked with before, but got along with O-Kay—and the Script Supervisor—woman who’d been on a bunch of my shows and who I had a ton of respect for.
A real knock-down, drag-out.
Not actual blows. Just words. And silence.
Course it might have been better if there had been violence since after the blow-up it turned cold war; Scripty and that DP wouldn’t even look at each other, forget about communicating. Cold wars can fuck up a set. For a while, the Director and First Assistant Director had to play UN Security Council on every new deal.
What’s next?
The First would ask video village–fake, peace-in-our-time positive–
Push in for the single? Time to turn around? Go for a reverse master?
Meanwhile the Director’d be puppy-dogging from Scripty to the DP and back to Scripty.
Do we need a reverse master? When would we cut to that?
He’d say.
But Scripty’d only smile
Up to you, guv.
The DP’d stick to his script
You are boss, boss.
And we’d be stuck in the cold. No peace. No shot list.
That was how it went. Until the day Scripty quit. As it happened it was the day after we finished the reshoot to fix the DP’s continuity fuck-up. The fuck-up that caused the knockdown drag out. She said she was going to a job on a Spielberg picture that was starting prep. Which was true. She was one of Steven’s must-haves. And she’d always known her next gig was with Steven. But that wasn’t why she quit. Script supervisors don’t usually need ten weeks prep.
No, she quit because even though she’d been right, even though the DP had been the one who crossed the line and refused to cross back, he wasn’t man enough to apologize, to own his fuck-up. Or quit himself. Even when it cost production and the director time and money to clean up the continuity.
Life’s too short to waste time on a dipshit like that
Scripty whispered to me one day at craft service. Course she could have said but didn’t, that he should’ve been fired, not for his mistake but for the way he acted. But firing him was never going to happen. So we all had to pretend instead. Look the other way. But Scripty couldn’t look the other way. Not when it came to continuity. It was her job.
Continuity. Hard to believe that anyone would care that much about something most people’ve never even heard of.
What is it exactly?
Well, even though continuity’s Scripty’s responsibility big time, everyone on set helps where we can; Cast, Crew, Above and Below-The-Line. Make-up, Hair like my Ex, Props, Set Dec, we are on the front lines with Scripty cause the nits and picks of continuity need everybody on the lookout. Cut to cut, a story’s got to be continuous to the audience if they’re gonna buy it. And keep buying it. Which is the point of entertainment, right? Someone buying it. We make, you buy. And that’s not easy, cause movies, despite how they might seem, aren’t shot the way you live your life, one minute leading to the next, to the next, unless you’re a freak director like Warren Beatty who shoots his movies as if the stories we tell like the lives we lead only tick in one direction. Most film shoots jump all over the place, shot by shot, location by location, forward and back in the story, out of order, shooting according to a budget and schedule and place and time of day, not shot from Beatty’s fade in beginning straight through to his fade out ending one hundred twenty minutes of movie later. And all those jumps forward and back in time and place have to cut into a believable story. That’s where continuity rules.
Course there are slip-ups. That’s human nature. Just like it’s human nature for you to want to catch our continuity mistakes, to point out how the car in the B.G.—sorry, the background— switches from red to blue and back to red, or that it’s raining in one actor’s close-up but not in anyone else’s. But take it from me, continuity’s not just about making sure an actor’s hair is mussed the same in every shot. Continuity’s storytelling. Good continuity is the same as good storytelling. The point of which is making sure that you, Jack and Jill Moviegoer, aren’t confused about what’s going on up there on the screen. You aren’t taken out of it.
You’ve probably figured that for continuity crossing the line’s a major no-no. And you’re probably figuring you got a good idea of what I mean by that. But you don’t. Unless you’re in the movies yourself. Or are married to a Scripty.
Easiest way to think about it is to picture a pair of gunfighters in a classic like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. First, there’s the White Hat aka Jimmy Stewart, standing on the left side of the screen in the climactic scene, half in and half out of the shadows–side note: Stewart’s more accurately the white apron not the white hat in this picture; John Wayne’s the white hat, at least in the shootout, but that’s something you only find out much later. So anyhow, there’s the nemesis Lee Marvin, Black Hat, a.k.a Liberty Valance, stumbling drunk out of the saloon screen right. In the wide shot from behind White Apron, you, Jack and Jill Moviegoer, see where White Apron and Black Hat are in relation to each other, left and right, near and far. That master establishes the geography of the whole scene so that when Black Hat walks toward White Apron or looks at or shoots at him, first to shoot out the hanging lantern next to his head, then to shoot him in the arm, he’s always shooting toward the left side of the frame which is from the audience’s point of view, left on an imaginary line that could be drawn between White and Black. And yes, that’s the line we don’t want to cross. On the other hand, White Apron walks, looks, and shoots right towards Black Hat. When he shoots Black Hat in the wide shot and Black Hat dies, he’s on the right side of the frame the whole time as White Apron walks toward camera on the left. And that’s how the story’s told, clear and simple, White Apron/Black Hat, left on the line/right on the line. No confusion. Good Continuity.
Okay of course it’s not so simple cause we find out later in the movie that it’s John Wayne, White Hat not White Apron, who kills Black Hat. But that’s not crossing the line in the continuity sense, even if it might be considered morally questionable. Because each time Jack and Jill Moviegoer see the scene play out, he and she are never confused about how the gunfight happens. Which way the bullets are flying. And when we finally get the scene where Wayne shoots Marvin, Wayne’s on the same side of the screen as Stewart. So, when White Hat looks and shoots at the same time as White Apron, he’s shooting in the same direction, to the right on the line. Everyone stays where they belong.
No one crosses the line.
But say, for argument, they did. I mean say the director and the DP ignored Scripty and fucked up the geography and had White Apron and Black Hat and White Hat all over the map, in no clear spot on that all-important line. Say all three men were walking and looking from Jack and Jill’s left hand to their right, all three shooting at someone who was on their right. Or, worse, say White Hat had been filmed looking and shooting to the left side of the camera, like Black Hat, which is where everyone knows White Apron is. It would look like White Hat was killing his best friend and not the bad guy. And we’d all leave the movie wondering what the fuck just happened. Jack and Jill wouldn’t know who had shot whom. Or if it was some kind of bullet-bending Angelina Jolie Wanted trick shot that killed Black Hat. And they’d both be scratching their heads, having no idea what they were supposed to think about anything: White Hats, White Aprons, the personification of evil, the immorality of lawless vigilantism, the possibility of real good in the world, in other words, life. Crossing the line can fuck up everything. Which is why not crossing the line is important. Safer not to do it. Course you can. But only if that’s your intention, if it has meaning and purpose in the story. Not if you don’t have a clue. Not if it’s just a lazy accident.
What happened to provoke the fight I was telling you about earlier wasn’t intentional. But the tricky thing about that was that even though continuity is Scripty’s main job and continuity has a lot to say about ‘the line,’ even so, where to pu