The Real Deal

It's hard to distinguish the genuine from the fabricated in our world today, and especially in wartime. And especially in movies about war.

By Michael Oren

Across the shell-pocked battlefield, the soldier took aim. Alone in his trench, the last of his men left alive, he tipped up his hat and cocked his rifle. This would be his final stand; no artillery barrage or enemy assault could stop him. Not even a wound. Tenaciously, his finger curled on the trigger and squeezed.

“No. No. No.”

“Cut! Cut!”

“Oh, Jesus, not again.”

Perched over the trench and pointing downward, Bolt pronounced, “you cannot use that gun.”

The soldier looked up with his slightly muddied face—the same face that a moment before showed courage—and pouted. “Beckerman!” he cried.

“What now?” Beckerman in an organic cotton t-shirt and stonewashed jeans stomped over. Waving the clipboard that he wielded weapon-like among everyone but Bolt, against whom it served as a shield. “We’re losing sunlight.”

Rising to a height that needed no elevating, still gesturing into the trench, Bolt repeated punctiliously, “He. Cannot. Use. That. Gun.”

“What’s the matter? Too big for him? Too shiny?”

“Hell,” the pseudo-soldier whined. “It can’t even shoot.”

Bolt ignored him as he usually did extras and focused solely on Beckerman. He looked him up and down, an abbreviated gaze, and fixed him in eyes as blue as gunsmoke. His nose and mouth were jackknife thin, his chin mallet-shaped—less a face than an arsenal. His hair was galvanized steel. When he spoke, though, his voice was father-like, as if he were addressing a son.

“He cannot use that gun because it wasn’t invented yet..=”

Beckerman winced in the manner he’d perfected in childhood, denied a third helping of mousse. “Hel-lo?”

“In the year in which this film takes place, the rifle in this man’s hands did not yet exist.”

The wince widened into furrows. “But who cares? This is a movie for twelve-year-olds, Bolt, for retired bookkeepers, not history nuts.”

“And the hat. No person in this period ever wore one.”

“That is the hat that all characters in these films wear.” The director was trying his best to maintain his cool and avoid provoking the consultant. “That audiences expect them to.”

“Audiences,” Bolt observed, “are ignorant.”

“And thank God.” With that, Beckerman scurried back toward his bank of cameras, monitors, and kliegs. “Ready on the set!”

But no sooner had the soldier raised the anachronistic weapon than Bolt was again at the wire. “Not so fast.”

“Oh, no…” The actor, though cast as fearless, appeared on the brink of tears.

And Beckerman looked livid, ready to rant the way he did as a teenager when his father left home with the Porsche.

Ready to fire Bolt’s ass if he weren’t afraid of getting his new browline glasses busted and his recently honed features marred. “Don’t tell me. His pants need buttons, not zippers.”

“Very good, Jason,” Bolt commended him, “zippers would not, in fact, be known to these men. But, no, that’s not the problem.” The director, the actor, gaped. “He needs to reload.”

“But we just ate.”

“Not calories. Bullets.” The voice, once paternal, turned professorial. “I counted how many he’s already fired in this scene. He’s over by seven.”

If the clipboard were cork it’d crumble. “Seriously, Bolt, we’re behind three weeks and way over budget, and this is what you’re worrying about, bullets? Besides, what difference does it make—the enemy’s about to attack.”

“The enemy,” Bolt grinned at him, “no doubt armed with lasers.”

But Beckerman wasn’t up for irony. And he wasn’t in the mood for Bolt, this overpaid security guard in his faux-guerrilla gear, a too-tanned, tattooed nit-picker hired solely for his name in the black screen credits and the hope it would cover Beckerman’s butt. A decorated veteran, so his resume claimed, Bolt was said to have taken out an entire cell of al-Qaqiqa terrorists, to have survived the worst West Asian deserts on nothing but camel parts. A richly paid advisor to blockbusters like Charlie Black Forty and The Day the Beach Hit Back, the industry considered him the real deal. So real, in fact, that one of his cargo pants pockets was believed to hold a loaded .45, its safety switched off. All in the service of truth.

Beckerman looked up at the consultant, at the epaulets level with his head, before snorting and retreating again to his crew. “Action!” he howled, and explosions ripped through the lot.

Aerial bombs, howitzer rounds, murderous stitches of machinegun fire. The valiant actor stood his ground, stiff in his hypoallergenic trench, clutching his ahistorical rifle. That is until Bolt marched out and planted a boot on the parapet.

“All wrong,” he declared.

“Cut!” Beckerman commanded the cameraman and wished he could’ve added “Bolt’s jugular.”

“First comes the report and then the ricochet—that’s backward,” the consultant announced. “As any grunt knows, you never hear the shot that kills you and for the simple reason that projectiles travel faster than sound.”

Not since being caught with a hooker of deceitful gender, did the director shake so violently. It took all his composure to calmly explain to him that throughout the history of cinema, since the first train robber shot the very first engineer, the slug hit after, not before, the bang.

But Bolt was clearly not listening. Instead, he gestured toward a neat row of flash pots in the dirt. “And furthermore…”

“Dear God,” Beckerman whimpered, “there’s a furthermore.”

“Furthermore, machinegun bullets never stitch, they scatter.”

From the depths of his firing hole, the actor pleaded, “Can I get some Veen water here?”

“I’ll scatter you,” the director inwardly threatened. “I’ll blow your brains out and use them as props, even if it means losing my rating.” But all he said was, again, how audiences expect machineguns to stitch, just as they expected bad guys to die and heroes never to get eviscerated. “It’s a trope.”

“Tripe, is more like it,” Bolt scowled.

With a tug of his Dodger’s cap, Beckerman pivoted, just as the production assistant, a recent film school graduate he met on Tinder, called for makeup.

“Excuse me, but is this war movie or a chic flick?”

Bolt was goading him again, smirking in a way that Beckerman could’ve punched if his hand wouldn’t’ve shattered. “He gets wounded.”

‘He’ meant the actor who had meanwhile pulled a cell phone from his uniform and was complaining to his agent. The actor who Bolt had offered to put through three days of basic training to toughen him up, but the young man—his previous roles included small town lawyer and emergency room nurse—merely snickered.

“What kind of wound?” Bolt wondered, for once looking concerned.

“The only kind.” Beckerman was not going to get into this conversation, no way. But “in the shoulder,” he found himself saying and then having to remind Bolt of the unwritten agreement between filmmakers and viewers, the fine print that says that the good guys always get shot in the shoulder and go on fighting, recovering the next day. He made his case soberly—remarkably so, given the delays—and cogently, but Bolt had since ceased listening.

“Do you know how many bones there are in the human shoulder?” he inquired, though not necessarily of Beckerman. “How many nerve bundles and arteries?” He was no longer looking at the director or even at the actor, whose furtive sniffs could be heard rising from the trench. “Do you know how many men I lost to shoulder wounds? Who died right there in my arms?”

Bolt’s expression turned distant, beyond the set and even the backlots, to genuine battlefields of the past. “Sanchez. Riordan. Blake.” He hung his close-cropped head. His boot stirred a puddle of stage blood. “Good men, all of them. Gone.”

This was it for Beckerman. It was it three days ago, when the consultant first broke up a scene insisting that women in those days would never have shown that much ankle and men would never had used the word “retro.” It was it the day before, half of it wasted and at excruciating cost just because one of the soldiers could not have had tuna for lunch. And now this sappy act put on for the crew, and not even a convincing performance.

“Enough of your bullshit, Bolt. I’ve had it!” Beckerman hollered. His glasses gleamed searingly, his freckles sparked. “I’ve had it with your self-righteousness, your eye for totally useless details.” Whatever fear he felt toward the consultant was now overwhelmed by a fury he hadn’t experienced since finding the pool boy in the water with his wife. “This rifle, that cap, nobody gives a rat’s ass about those things anymore. They never did. Only you and your stupid gung-ho getup,” the director bellowed. “You and your dumb dead friends.”

Bolt’s attention returned and with what appeared to be lethal intensity. He glared at Beckerman, winced at him as through a high-powered sight. His hand reached down toward a pocket, the one with the menacing bulge.

Beckerman instinctively stepped back. “Yo, Bolt, I was only kidding, man.” he stuttered. “You know directors, always horsing around. The pressures and all…” He held up his clipboard in surrender. “Easy,” he begged.

“Only a shoulder wound,” Bolt repeated, “Only,” as he reached into his pocket and Beckerman tripped over backward into the trench. The actor yelped and threatened to call his union only to be drowned out by the director’s yowling. The production assistant, the best boys, and the grips and the gaffers all came rushing to save him, as Beckerman coiled into a ball. But too late.

Bolt stood, less rigidly now, quivering slightly, with the handkerchief he’d drawn from his pocket. He dabbed at eyes which suddenly looked harmless, his entire face disarmed. The epaulets rose and fell spasmodically as the former commando, the champion of facts and guardian of authenticity, wept.

Sheepishly, initially in shock, Beckerman lifted his head from the trench. The actor still cowered but the director was soon up and shouting out orders. A fresh hat and gun for the soldier, “same ones, only newer,” and a neat, not-too-serious wound. Yet he totally ignored Bolt, even as he sobbed, regarding him with a hardness born of one too many betrayals, an ingrained contempt for the unreal. “And call security,” he barked at his production assistant. “I won’t have this phony on my set.”