Calgary, People!
I snuck away to Calgary for a few days. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to get too jealous.
Magpies and rabbits everywhere. It’s a strange thing when you travel out of the states and notice things. I notice birds all the time. I think I was in Sydney and there were cockatoos everywhere. How am I not going to notice that? In the states that’s exclusively a zoo or pet store thing. Granted, magpies and rabbits aren’t as exotic as cockatoos but they are pretty cool. I have rabbits in my yard but these were different, scrawnier, bigger. I also have parrots around but not cockatoos.
It was a bit sad to get to Canada and see that the air was orange and smoky. There were fires burning out of control in Alberta and the smoke was hanging in the air in Calgary. It was all too familiar to me from the almost-ongoing fires in California over the last few years. No place to run. No place to hide.
I was in Calgary for a specific reason. To get riddled with bullets.
I was offered a role in a film about the white supremacist Nazi group from the eighties, The Order. I was asked to play the Denver talk radio host Alan Berg. He was an outspoken Jew and The Order massacred him in his driveway in 1984. It was a heinous murder. He was killed for his beliefs and point of view by domestic terrorists here in America. Now, that ideology and people who sympathize with it are no longer a marginalized point of view but one with defenders and supporters in the GOP and there are many more active groups with boots on the ground. It’s happening. They are killing Jews, Asians, Mexicans, Blacks and more with regularity. Yet it still seems not to land in the public consciousness that this is an organized political movement that could take hold of the country.
That’s the reason I had to take the role. Honestly, being shot for being an instigating, loudmouthed, lefty Jew has always been a fear of mine. One of my top three. I know, I am paranoid, but there is precedent and Berg is the most identifiable to me. So, the opportunity to play him enabled me to get into the skin of a guy, not unlike me, and live out a nightmare. Then play it out in fiction and hopefully keep it there.
I took the role because I didn’t think anyone else should or could play the guy. I am that guy in a way. It’s not much screen time but it means something. It means something to me and gives even more context to the fascist shit show unfolding in this country now.
I only have a couple of scenes in the film. There’s me talking on the mic. There’s me leaving a diner. There’s me driving home. There’s me being shot in my driveway with an automatic weapon.
We shot the shooting part this trip.
I had never been shot on camera. I had never been rigged with squibs. Now I have. The feeling of the squibs blowing up under my jacket and blowing blood out of holes in my back was intense. Being confronted by someone with a machine gun is horrifying. Lying in a pool of blood, dead, is messy, sticky and uncomfortable because I wasn’t really dead and it wasn’t real blood. I saw playback of the shooting and it was disturbing.
Great conversations this week. Today I talk to Smokey Robinson. What an honor that was. Thursday, I talk to Amy Sherman-Palladino who is the writer/creator of The Amazing Mrs. Maisel among other stuff.
Enjoy!
Boomer, Monkey and LaFonda live!
Love,
Maron
Shot on Camera.
