I dreamed I was an actor in a Western movie. Two families were feuding, one headed by Brian Dennehy, the other by Johnny Depp. I was playing Johnny's loyal cousin and number-two in our family's chain of command.
The two families' houses were very close: sometimes within a quarter mile or so, at other times literally parts of the same building. The fight scenes were often room-by-room gun battles.
For the most part, everything in the movie, countryside, sets, decor, costumes, was classic Hollywood Western, inspired by a notion of the late 19th century. However, my revolvers, instead of the historically-accurate long-barreled single-action variety, requiring that the hammer be cocked before every shot, were double-action snubnosed .38's of the kind seen used by plainclothed cops in mid-20th-century movies and TV. The hammer on a double-action revolver can be cocked between shots, resulting in a trigger which shoots with a lighter pull required -- single-action -- or the shooter can pull harder on the trigger with cocking it first, and the gun will still fire -- double-action. I was packing two of those snubnosed .38's, each about half as long as an authentic single-action revolver of the Old West.
Partway through the script, Dennehy's character devolved into a plain coward, and the action consisted mostly of us chasing him through his, house, firing enormous amounts of bullets at him -- and always missing, or else the movie would have been over too soon.
At one point we had him cornered inside a glassed-walled segment of a room in his house. Several of us stood outside the glass-walled compartment, about a dozen feet square, and pumped dozens of bullets at the glass. The glass not only didn't shatter -- it was barely scratched. I felt this to be a particularly unrealistic bit of movie-making, and began to lose faith that this might turn out to be a good movie.
Suddenly all of the actors, those in Dennehy's family and in Depp's, stopped acting, and instead they just sat around and turned into Marxist jerks who were unkindly, and wholly inaccurately, criticizing me. They all agreed that I was the sort of person who would go to Milan during peak tourist season, fetishizing the ultra-expensive cars of the super-rich, and their boats on Lake Como.
Their criticism could barely have been less accurate: I don't like crowds, I like crowds of tourists even less, I don't envy ultra-cars, in fact I find them rather ridiculous, I lost my fascination for them decades ago, and the next time I really enjoy being on a boat will the first time.
But before I could begin to defend myself from this inaccurate Marxist criticism, I woke up.
No comments:
Post a Comment