We ignored Willoughby’s snoring and lit another cigarette and Clark started to tell me the story of some movie he’d stayed up late watching on his mother’s ancient RCA television. It was a movie about a bunch of guys making a movie and it had given Clark the idea that he should really make a movie himself and that the way to do it was to string a video camera up on every streetlight on the block and then you could just act out the story on the street and it would be like a big sound stage with all angles covered.
“I’ve figured the whole thing out,” he said. “They’ve got these radio mikes so that you can capture the sound from anyone anywhere on the street and mix it all together like a d.j.”
“But what’s the story,” I asked.
“I don’t know, you tell me,” he said, but it sure would be cool and cheap to film and, “Isn’t there the guy at the bar who works at CBS, or ABC, or one of them? We could tell him about it, I bet he’d want to work on it too.”
“I think he drives a truck for them.”
“He must know people,” Clark said and he got very excited about the idea of doing a movie on the street and suddenly I was in charge of the story idea, because he’d already come up with the master plan of cameras and the street lights and after all I had to contribute something if I wanted in on the ground floor of the whole production.
“It’ll be Like surveillance,” He said
“Who’d want to watch it,” I asked. “Unemployed security guards?”
“That’s not a bad idea,” he said.
“What isn’t?”
“Shoot the whole show from an ATM machine camera… it all takes place in that little glass cage… money, sex, danger.”
Then he was off on the ATM movie and forget the streetlights and we’d pitch it to CBS, or
ABC, or whatever.
