Read Online Dog Beach by John Fusco - Free Book Online Page B

walking across a barren lot, hands jammed deep in the pockets of a blue windbreaker he’d picked out of Troy’s closet.
    Creeping backward with his old-school Arri 435, Troy’s baggy shorts bulged at the pockets with lenses, motors, and compressed air. As he picked up the “John Ford shot” hand-held and backlit, T-Rich caught the long shot in HD wide-­angle from the second floor of an abandoned warehouse.
    This would be part of the film’s opening title sequence, Cho returning to the neighborhood where he once lived to find that things had changed. The voiceover that Louie would record later was along the noirish lines of, “After twenty years in the slammer, I was a free man, no longer in the cage. Not the prison in Mexico, nor the cage that put me there.”
    Louie would struggle with the word “slammer,” so they switched to “jail” and finally to “the pen” with good results. Louie savored the opportunity to simply stroll across a lot, no running or jumping. No going up in a harness and getting stuck up there until lunch. Today, all he had to do was walk like James Dean, shoulders hunched against a slight breeze. He felt young again, empowered. So much so he tried not to smile in the shot.
    â€œNice, Louie,” Troy said, after shooting more than four hours of the walking scene from various angles, tons of coverage. The sun was getting close to magic hour, and he wanted to close out the first day with some vintage Louie Mo. He rubbed his hands together, smiled at Dutch. She was sitting on the hood of the Chevy, dangling her feet and smoking a cigarette.
    â€œWhat do you think? Ready to light it up?”
    Dutch stubbed her cigarette, slid off the hood. “Box ninety?” she asked.
    â€œBox ninety right into the lot. Hit your mark, Louie will roll over the hood. Come down and go right into the blow-for-blow with Matty. T-Rich will sit up front with you and shoot the reverse. Give me some twitchy cam, T.”
    â€œLike 24 ?”
    â€œFuck 24 . I want French Connection .”
    â€œWe’re losing our light, dude.”
    â€œNo worries,” Troy told him. He’d just overcrank the camera and shoot at 8fps instead of 24fps, draw more light on the film.
    â€œWant some smoke?” Malone champed from the sidelines, scooping some Pyrolite in a flour sifter.
    â€œNot yet.”
    Matty Ng, a beefy young Thai, smiled from under his black hoody, his hands bound in filthy fighter’s wraps. Troy had scouted him at a Muay Thai gym downtown and offered him a nice little purse to play one of the young MMA thugs trying to make their name by beating Cho. “You get to be in a fight scene with Louie Mo,” Troy offered as a perk, but Matty had no idea who Louie Mo was; he just liked the idea of fighting in a movie, showing his girlfriend the check he got for it. Louie walked up to him now, and with just a nod, cued him to practice their fist exchange at slow speed. Troy watched, clearing his throat excitedly. This was pro stuff and Louie seemed in his element. But when Matty finished up the practice routine by faking with a knee, Louie shoved him backward. “No playing around on movie!”
    The set went quiet. Matty recovered, took a cocky step toward the aging Chinese stuntman. “Yo, dude, easy.”
    â€œSafety first!” Louie yelled back.
    â€œOkay, bro, got it.”
    â€œNo joke!” Louie pressed a finger. “Time is money!”
    Troy felt he better step in or Louie could go on with his union rules until after dark. “Let’s roll, Louie.”
    On “action,” Dutch sped down Western Avenue with the roaring, “controlled uncontrollability” of a precision driver. Wearing a skull cap as a double for a bad guy, she hit her E-brake and executed a deep, long skid, carving a turn at a perfect ninety degrees as Louie ran into frame, hit metal with his knee, and pitched himself into a roll