THE GREATEST AMERICAN MOVIE EVER MADE
Originally published in Cusper Issue #3, January 2025
September 2018, North Island Naval Air Station.
California sun tans Coronado Island. I’m on the job, loading equipment out of a sea container alone, twenty miles from the rest of the company. Necessary cables are zip tied to the wall. I slip with a brand new blade and jab myself like a fucking idiot. “Always cut toward your buddy” they tell us when we start. Sometimes you forget. Sometimes you are just dumb.
I brace myself against the sidewall, keeping pressure on my leaking hand. I start sliding downward thinking “This is how I become found later.” Two vertical black bars bookend my vision and meet in the middle. I wake a few minutes later on the bloody floor. I wrap my hand in a bandana and finish the work, embarrassed as shit. I don’t tell anyone, supergluing the wound closed two hours later instead of seeing the medic. “What happened to your hand?” a few coworkers ask. “Nothing” I tell them. Four F-18s fly low overhead, capping off the conversation.
“I do lights for movies” I tell women in San Diego bars. I’m at the top of my game. (I do not tell them this.) I’m cocky. I’m optimistic. I’m care fucking free. (They identify this themselves.) It’s 2018, after all. I’m working on the biggest movie in the actual world. I’ve got D.O.D. clearance and a baseball hat from the officer’s bar. I’m walking back to basecamp and Tom Cruise salutes me from his candy apple red Ducati. I salute him back with my good hand. Neither of us have ever served.
Thirty two years after the first one, we started making the second one. This is life as a film technician in twenty-first century Hollywood. Movies in Sundance pay their crews shit. Movies in Cannes aren’t made in Los Angeles. Movies with huge budgets are usually just bad. But who cares? It’s work. Which is what you end up with when the luster of those first few years clouds over. You end up with a job. You are paying the bills with another sequel. You are seldom home. You are not an artist.
I don’t know this at the time, but I am about to fall in love with a woman I knew before. We met a year prior on the Universal backlot where we found ourselves sitting next to each other on a water pipe. There was zero small talk. It was jokes then life. A year passed and there we were again sitting next to each other, this time in a dive bar.
Over the course of production, which took ten months, we talk for hundreds of hours. Wherever we are— San Diego, Lake Tahoe, the middle of two separate nowheres, Los Angeles— we convene to a dive bar every Monday night, we drink shitty beers, and we talk. I didn’t know how close you could get to someone from just talking back then.
She makes me laugh. She listens to me ramble, and asks what I think about the world. She remembers every stupid little thing I say. She squeezes my elbow as she walks past silently to say hello through the din of a crowded room. We talk about kindness, something I am only beginning to learn about three decades into my life. We describe what we were like when we were young. We exchange thoughts on storytelling and discuss beliefs. We establish a canon of inside jokes. I don’t try to control our trajectory. I don’t think she does either. It just happens.
Why did it take ten months? We shot the whole movie twice. Why did we shoot it twice? Tom Cruise wanted to. This is, as best I can tell as someone not involved with those decisions, and only present to fulfill (and endure) their consequences, the truth.
The man has the last remaining Fort Knox of both social and real currency in Hollywood. He has full control from beginning to end. He can fire anyone for anything. He understands how each part of the machine works. He shows up on time, sometimes in his antique fighter jet, sometimes on the Ducati, sometimes in a bulletproof SUV rumored to have a collapsable machine gun turret folded into its roof. He respects your time and labor. He is grateful for it. He is always prepared. Sure, he’s fucking weird. But you would be too.
His is a dying breed, and this movie one of the last of its kind as tech companies bleed the film industry dry, vomiting out hastily written series and greenscreen tentpoles, squeezing labor rates down as small as feeble trade unions will allow, hammering anyone’s golden idea so thin it no longer shines. It’s a strange thing to shoot a movie twice. It’s a much stranger thing to see your industry begin to crumble.
December 2018, Lake Tahoe.
We are four months deep. Tom Cruise is doing one of his favorite things: running in front of a camera. The crew are achieving together, marveling at the strangeness of what we’re doing, rubbing our eyes every morning in line at the coffee truck Tom hired. The morning yin is black coffee, the afternoon yang espresso and tonics.
I turn 31, sharing a birthday with first camera assistant Dan Ming. There are 57 cameras used throughout filming and he is in charge of all of them. I tend not to like camera people, having seen one too many replace humility and personal style with the self importance of their little gadgets but Dan Ming is impossible not to love. He should be the president of the United States of America, but he is too smart for that.
The woman throws a small gathering for us at the nice hotel where the cast and higher ups stay. The gaffer asks me if I want to invite my whole department. Tension between the best boy and I has been hardening since the beginning. We’re having disagreements over what is respectful as a boss and what is not. I tell the gaffer no. I walk over in the snow. My whole department showed up anyway. It’s 30 degrees and falling. I pace around in the dark instead of going inside.
My phone rings. It’s her. I see her five foot something silhouette standing enshrined by warm light and chandeliers in the floor to ceiling lodge windows, looking out at me. She says c’mon. I say I’m thinking about it. She’s says c’mon again, a little differently. I bite my lip and am convinced. I drink one beer the entire time, sneaking outside with her as soon as I can to smoke cigarettes in deck chairs near those rectangular gas firepits you always find at “nice places.”
A few days later we wander through town in long coats. She has a cold and drinks hot toddies at a dive bar that shares a parking lot with a used bookstore whose storefront is painted with Bruegel’s Hunters In The Snow in the style of a tire shop window ad. I glance at her when she’s not looking. She runs her fingers under her red knit hat, brushing black hair away from her forehead, the everyday gesture made beautiful simply by having been witnessed by another. We linger quietly in the sweetness of each other’s company. I become aware something has changed.
Holidays waft to the ground around us during a two week hiatus and we reconvene in January, now filming the attractive millennial supporting cast in real jet cockpits bolted onto a huge hydraulic system used to imitate the movement of flight. The base of this device sits twenty five feet from the water pipe where we met. This was supposed to be the end. It is not.
The cockpit shit is scrapped because it doesn’t look real. They toss the millennials in real jets and photograph dozens of flights, which the Navy calls sorties. One sortie costs tens of thousands of dollars. Who’s really paying for these? We’ll never know. The next five months blur more fuzzy than the first.
We rebuild sets in hangers. We rebuild sets on stage. We split into two full motion picture units shooting on the same stage at the same time— one half daylight, the other night separated by giant black curtains called solids. We engineer an alarming amount of makeshift solutions for a several-hundred-million-dollar movie. The crew begins to Ship of Theseus itself as members leave to start other jobs they were told they’d be available for. Some days are pure chaos. Most days she and I grow closer.
July 2019. Los Angeles.
There is no triumphant finale. There is no wrap party. There is one day of shooting in the basement of a skyscraper downtown eked out by a crew with nothing in the reserves. Six people yell “cut” and the last shot of principal photography loosens and breaks off, drifting slowly into the void like a piece of space station. No one watches it disappear.
Three years later when the movie came out it made 1.5 billion dollars. Millions watched it once or five times. Some people loved it. I was one of them. Others derided it as an overblown piece of Pentagon propaganda, which it certainly is. But none of these people saw what I saw.
None saw me black out and fall in that sea container. None saw me drink cheap beers and fall in love in conversations where I dropped all my walls because I wasn’t trying to impress anyone, where I let everything out and let her in. No one heard me tell her what I told her. No one saw her hook an arm into mine on a neighborhood walk or kiss me in shadows. No one heard us fight when I asked to define the nature of what it was we were doing. Nobody watched as she walked away for the last time. Nobody but me.
There is a version of this movie that is only mine. Me, a normal person. It exists within the one available to anyone else, amalgam of pop culture and military industrial complex, crucible of precision machining and grunt labor, Hollywood myth of legacy and hope for the future. It’s woven with every other crew member’s story into the rag rug Tom and the attractive millennials do their parlor tricks on. Nobody watching is looking at the rug, but you’ve gotta dance on something.
Right now Tom Cruise is probably planning a trip to outer space or jumping out of a plane for the thousandth time, or he’s holding his breath for 90 minutes straight or climbing something unbelievably tall without a harness. He’s firing someone who didn’t show up prepared or telling an accomplished Hollywood screenwriter that his work needs work. He’s zipping around on his Ducati unrecognized, one of the shelters he has from the weird weight of his fame. I don't know. I don’t know what Tom’s up to. I don’t need to know. What’s more is I don’t care.
Right now I’m doing nothing so exciting as that. I’m learning to peacefully coexist with the past instead of dwelling on it. I’m taking pride in the craftsmanship I’ve contributed to over the years. I’m continuing to pursue what it means to love, to be kind. After everything, I became one name on a list of hundreds scrolling at the end, and ultimately what the movie is about has very little to do with who I am. But whenever I see it, it has a great deal to do with who I am. I was there for all of it, and without my asking, it morphed into an avatar for a period of profound personal growth and a fair amount of regular pain. You might call that an arc.
December 2018, Lake Tahoe again.
I’m crouched down, running a cable underneath a steel frame in a hangar. It’s very cold. We’re hurrying as winter light fades. I stand up too soon and hit my head on the frame. A voice behind me says “Woah, are you alright?”
I turn to see Tom in his flight suit. My bell is ringing. If I were a cartoon, my pupils would be spirals turning clockwise. “I…jusssst sssstood up a little quick.” I say. He pats me on the shoulder and with honest-to-God concern in his eyes says “That was a pretty good hit there.” I nod with the kind of smile you make when you do something dumb that someone else sees stretched across one side of my face and I answer the first question “Yeah.”
Yeah, Tom Cruise. I am.