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of the street, where he motions to a production assistant carrying a bullhorn.
    A bullhorn-enhanced voice fills the air: “All right, everybody. No walking. Quiet, please.” Although I am standing at least twenty feet away, the block is wreathed with such silence I can hear Guerrero and Daniels’s conversation perfectly. Noah, the sound mixer, a lanky, longhaired young man in a white Irish sweater, sits nearby at his portable digital audio recorder, monitoring the sound levels over his headphones and minutely adjusting
the console’s numerous pots. Noah looks pleased until a neighborhood dog begins barking. The dog barks, in fact, through the entire take, and stops, with mysterious precision, the instant the take is complete. Gary motions for another bullhorned edict for silence, and Guerrero and Daniels begin anew. Five seconds in, the dog is at it yet again. Noah’s eyes roll skyward, Gary is now helplessly scanning the neighborhood, and the production assistant is brandishing his bullhorn in a way that leaves little doubt of its canine-bludgeoning potential. When the dog’s tireless larynx has spoiled the third take, another production assistant is sent on a door-to-door scour of the neighborhood.
    A few minutes later, the production assistant, smiling and a little shaken, returns. The dog’s owner has been confronted. Unfortunately, the man is not one of Northtown’s finer citizens. This is not surprising, since finding an adult male at home at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning suggests dedicated unemployment. The man was unmoved by the production assistant’s request that his dog be taken inside during the filming. The production assistant—wisely, I think—decided to leave it at that, and after everyone talks the situation over it is suggested that perhaps the bullhorn is the dog’s Pavlovian trigger.
    A fourth take is attempted minus the prefatory bullhorn. A weird, fretful aura descends upon the production. No one—not Gary, not Noah, not the crew, not the crowd—is listening to anything but this immaculate, fragile quiet. The dog’s cue comes and goes, but we are no longer attuned to anything so specific. The late-morning twittering of birds all around us seems as raucous as a cocktail party. Footfalls register like exploding shells. It is pure aural anxiety. Near the end of the take, a crowd member’s baby begins to cry. She turns and quite frankly sprints away from the crowd, her wailing infant mashed to her chest. It is as though she has just been gassed. At this, some more loutish crowd members
begin to laugh. Gary stands there, tight-mouthed, while Daniels and Guerrero, wholly alone in the temple of art, finish their take with a soft, scripted kiss.
    On the following take, a school bus grinds gears two blocks away. The take after that is made unusable by an inopportune car horn coupled with a rotten muffler. Several takes, in fact, suffer invasion by questionable mufflers. After what feels like the three-hundredth endeavor to film twenty seconds of human interaction without some spike of unbidden sound, Gary looks up with a beleaguered smile. “Are there any cars in this town,” he asks no one, “that have mufflers?”
    By now a small cadre within the crowd has openly turned against the Movie People. They are men, three of them, and their faint laughter is filled with hyenic contempt. They sport mullets, wraparound Oakley sunglasses, and shiny vinyl jackets with the names of local bars splashed across their backs. They are the sort of Escanaba he-men my friends and I, when in high school, approached outside of liquor stores and bribed to buy us cases of Milwaukee’s Best. No one is paying these men much attention, though some members of the crowd have, in isolationist disapproval, inched away from them.
    The battlements of filmmaking are moved from the Ford pickup’s starboard side to that of its port. Daniels and