And cut! megaphones Schlomo “Slo-Mo” Spielgrob, a director touted as The Next Schlomo Spielgrob, even though he’s the one and only — recently rehabilitated enough to be making movies under such an assumed name — he sits down in his foldup chair, strokes his oneday, halfmooned beard, pokes his fingers anxiously through his glasses without lens, then takes from his head that bent brim Yankels or maybe it’s the Metz cap a popular model with the sidelocks attached, stuffs it on the bell of the megaphone he sets atop a cooler between seated Ben and Johannine — His hired and handgreased mouthpiece, His spokesperson recontextualized to spokesmensch, a misrepresentation of public face this graceless humbly mumbly, alldenying interpreter and press secretary, this shuffler of jobs, positions, titles and sheafs of chaff, former Chief of Staff to President Shade, whom you might remember as Ben’s future father-inlaw, here played by a respectably graying, growlingly jowled paunch of an actor whose name might’ve been Oscar itself, who’d done the president in ten previous projects. Ben desultory in His own chair foldedout, its sixpointed star decal peeling from the backing, He’s gnawing at the lip of His foamcup, complimentary with its water or what He’s shvitzed under the studiolights; His script wilting on Johannine’s knees as the latter with quickdraw of the wrist passes highlighter through the lines, for any they want to censor, delete. Security twitchy at their holsters, which are empty when not loaded down with props. A cast of hundreds shivering, coming down with a light fever’s headcold, incipient flu, from yesterday’s hours spent in summery shorts and themed tshirts out on a forlorn frozen stretch of Brooklyn beach, Seagate, was it, the board-walk’s breakdown that’s standing in for Joysey. He walks on water, He steps in dreck. He turns water to spoiled wine, fish into moldy loaves. Around, a mustering of extras for the next scene set earlier, thousands of them and their years bundledup in garb, into centurial gabardine, silken caftans topped with pointy turbans trimmed brilliantly in fur as if in the religious return of the sumptuary and its lex as yellow as fear; others who only look and sound and dress and act like them, or as they were, or as they’re being cast and played, except they’re not getting paid (though neither were the dead)…
