“They didn’t talk to anybody else?”
“Well, when we’re actually shooting, there might be like thirty people around…”
“All in that one building?”
“Coming and going, yeah. Grips and sound guys and pretty much anybody who wants to be a part of making a movie. CC loves having a lot of young people around, giving them something to work on, you know, showing them how to make their own movies someday. He says he’s trying to give people something he never had himself. Anyway, I think the agent said he’d try to track down a few of them, at least.”
“I don’t imagine any of them would be eager to drop a dime on your grandfather,” I said. “But you said those people are only around when you’re shooting?”
“Yeah, since we’ve been in post, it’s pretty much just the three of us now.”
“Okay, I get it. So the agent leaves and all three of you are congratulating yourselves on the snow job.”
“It wasn’t like that,” he said. “It was more like we were all surprised as hell to find out what the agent was really here for. Apparently, some people in the UP ended up getting murdered or something. We were all like, damn, what the hell is that about?”
“CC was really surprised?”
“Well, yeah. Wouldn’t you be?”
“Of course, you just said he was a great actor. But never mind. Let’s get to the punch line. I didn’t see your grandfather go into the office today. How much time has he really been spending there?”
“He’s been there. Believe me, he’s been there. I mean, this is his movie, right? When we were shooting, he was on the set pretty much constantly. I could tell it was really wearing him out.”
“When exactly were you shooting?”
“We wrapped right before Christmas.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling an important piece of the puzzle fitting into place. “So as of New Year’s Day or so, what did you say, you’re in ‘post’ now?”
“Postproduction, yeah.”
“But it’s April. How long does that part take?”
“Post can run longer than the actual shooting. There’s a million things to do with the editing and the sound, then the color correction and-”
“I get it,” I said. “So how much time has he spent working on that?”
“Still a lot, but he’s been taking some time off now and then. Like I said, the shooting really got to him.”
“Taking some time off, meaning what? A few days at a time?”
“No, maybe like he’ll work for five days straight and then go home for a couple of days. Show up the next Monday. That kind of thing.”
“But meanwhile, you’re here all the time.”
“Me and my dad, yeah. We’re the ones who’re practically living here now. We actually have some mattresses in the back in case we run really late.”
“Doesn’t sound like much of a life.”
“I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else,” he said. “My mom thinks I should’ve stayed with her and finished college, but come on. Where else am I gonna get a chance to work on a real movie like this?”
“Okay, I get it,” I said. “But when CC goes away and then comes back a couple days later… will he say where he’s been?”
“No. I mean, he’s just home resting. So he’ll come back and work some more, tell us what we should do next. Then he’ll go home again.”
I leaned back against the hard plastic booth. After so many hours sitting in the truck, my back was killing me. I had bigger things on my mind now than a sore back.
“You look like a decent kid,” I said to him. “I know you were only trying to do what you thought was best, but it wasn’t the brightest move in the world.”
“Am I gonna be in serious trouble for this?”
“I don’t think so. If it comes to it, I’ll vouch for you.”
That didn’t seem to make him feel any better. He sat there rubbing his hands together, looking out the window like he was still thinking about making a run for it.
“Tell me more about your grandfather,” I said. “What’s he really like?”
“That’s what this whole movie is about,” the kid said. “Him growing up here, and everything that happened. You ever see Eight Mile ?”
“Was that another movie?”
“Yeah, that was Eminem. You heard of him, right?”
“He’s the white rapper,” I said. “From Detroit. That’s about all I know. I confess I don’t have any of his records.”
“You sound like CC now. ‘Records.’ But anyway, Eminem made this movie about his own life, how he grew up in Detroit. I guess Eight Mile is an important street down there.”
“It’s the northern border.” I didn’t want to sidetrack him, but just hearing that name took me way back. Eight Mile Road, the line dividing Detroit from the suburbs. You cross that street and you go from one world to another.
“That movie was kind of a rags-to-riches story. But CC, his story was more like rags to insanity, to more rags to more insanity, to riches back to insanity again. It’s just called Bad Axe. What do you think?”
“Sounds perfect. But what do you mean by insanity?”
“Well, he grew up right here in town, and apparently his mother and father… my great-grandparents, I mean… I never met them but I guess I didn’t miss much. They were both absolutely batshit crazy. Like seriously delusional, psychotic, pretty much whatever you want to come up with. This was back in the old days, when they didn’t take your kids away just because you were abusing them all the time. I guess he was hiding from them like every day, running away from home and getting dragged back there. The house is right over there on King Street. We even filmed there in the actual house, which must have been kinda weird for CC. If it was, he didn’t show it. Anyway, he says it was the movie theater that saved him.”
“The one right down the street?”
“That very one. He used to sneak into the movies all the time. Actually, the man who owned the place knew he was sneaking in and let him keep doing it. We filmed that scene, too. When CC came back from Hollywood, he bought the theater and fixed it up. Now he’s trying to make this movie about growing up in the town and he’s even talking about starting up a film festival here. Like they’ve got up in Traverse City. The Bad Axe Film Festival. Not bad, eh?”
“So when CC got arrested and went to prison,” I said. “Did you film that scene, too?”
“Yeah, but that happened a lot later. When he was eighteen he finally escaped and ran off to California. Some guy saw him on his bike and liked the way he looked, and asked him if he wanted to be in the movies. I think CC told him to go jump in the ocean or something, but the guy was legit and that’s how CC ended up doing Road Hogs. That was his very first movie, if you can believe it. Nowadays they’d never cast an unknown as the lead in a big film. I mean, you don’t have a big name attached-”
“I don’t mean to cut you off,” I said, “but getting back to that arrest…”
“That was one of many arrests, actually. He got busted out there for marijuana. This was back before anybody could walk into one of those clinics and get it legally. Anyway, he ended up doing jail time and getting himself all messed up. You gotta remember, he came from a family of crazy people. Like he says all the time, it’s in his blood. I’ve got bad blood, he says. I just can’t help it sometimes. Which means maybe I’ve got some bad blood, too.”
“So he’s been arrested more than once, you say?”
“A few times, yeah. After he got bounced out of Hollywood, started making those low-budget horror films on his own. He was always his own worst enemy, but like he says, the movies were always there for him. They always kept him coming back from the edge of madness.”
Now we’re getting to it, I thought.
“So, this last arrest. It was about ten years ago.”
“About that, yeah.”
