Amour-propre

As I was leaving campus this morning, I came across a small group of people loitering near a pickup truck on the sidewalk. One guy was monkeyin' with a fancy hand-held camera. His T-shirt said, "MTV2--local VJ search."

Small clusters of students at varying distances stopped and stared.

So I figured that the MTV people were on campus to do auditions. I didn't ask questions. I just put my stuff down and took pictures.


My camera seemed to make these people come alive. A very tall fellow with exotic hair walked right up to me. He asked me for a cigarette. "Don't smoke," I said. Why ask me? Do I look like I smoke?

Then I noticed the mask in his hand. He stared at the camera in mine. I asked if he would don the mask. To my surprise, he immediately pulled it over his head. Pretty soon he was voguing:


I trained my camera on the pickup. Immediately, a gal in black--she was wearing some kind of ape or monster mask--jumped out and started posing:



'm reminded of the time that a film crew descended upon UCI to film Mel Brooks' "Silent Movie" (1976). Like many of my colleagues, I loitered at the periphery of the action (near the old "commons"). As I recall, the film crew spent literally half a day filming one measly shot: Brooks racing his motorized wheelchair around a corner. Mostly, they just stood around and waited.

I got a few glimpses of Brooks, who looked angry to the point of silence. He was like that for hours.

"Wow," I said.

Eight years later, I was a grad student, again at UCI, and this time a crew came to the campus to film a Peter O'Toole movie called "Creator." On the day I was there, they were filming a scene in which an enthusiastic Mariel Hemingway runs up to a group of huddling men, joining in the huddle. She did this maybe fifteen times over about two hours. Each time, she looked enthusiastic.

Between takes, she looked like she wanted to kill somebody. The crew kept away from her.

Ten years after that, I was living near downtown Orange. Tom Hanks and his people descended on the Orange Plaza to film "That Thing You Do," which was set in Pennsylvania, 1964. For several afternoons, I walked downtown to check out the action. I saw lots of people on the periphery, hoping to get a glimpse of Hanks or some other famous face. Mostly, they saw only the usual film crew loiterers--no movie stars.

It occurred to me that I was watching a group of people watching a group of people doing virtually nothing.

I took this picture and then I walked home.