Elf Hookers

By: Jonathan “Cao Cao” Kos-Read


“Get off the elevator!” the producer yelled at the crippled people.

The patients, some of them really crippled like with broken legs and head wounds and shit looked around myopically. The producer made frantic shooshing gestures.

Before I go on to tell the story of how he managed to kick them off the elevator I want to say a short bit about this month’s column.

Somebody once said: the only normal people are the ones you don’t know well. And I think that holds true with jobs also. Scrape under the skin of every job and you’ll find a festering wound teeming with the maggots of peculiarity and strangeness. My job, playing white guys in stupid Chinese soap operas, is no different.

So: my last few columns have been cutsey little anecdotes, all sort of narcissistically about me. I make fun of myself but in a winking, insidery type way and only really to make myself look cooler. Not this time. This time I’ll tell you the story of the last day on my most recent shoot. No cutsey prose. No embellishment. Just the facts. It was a regular day . . .

The Cripples

We were in a hospital. It was the last day of shooting on this dumb movie about archeology. The plot was about how China has five thousand years of history but only an archeological record for like two thousand of them and I was playing an American archeologist who doesn’t believe(!) in the Chinese history and . . . well thrilling right. Anyway, we were behind schedule on this blockbuster and had to finish today or all of the actors would go into overtime.

We were waiting for the elevator. On one side was our crew. On the other side were real, actual sick people. There was a guy with a bleeding head, a really old guy who couldn’t walk, two guys with broken legs and two other patients who looked drugged or retarded or something.

So the elevator came and instead of saying like, “Hey you sick people, yeah you, the ones who are here for a real reason, you get on the elevator first,” our producer actually scampered over and stood in front of them, one arm outstretched to hold back what he must have anticipated as their mad, lopsided shuffle into the elevator. With his other arm he herded our crew in. Mission accomplished he hopped on and then fidgeted and sighed while the sickies shuffled slowly on board. He jabbed the button for our floor. Two sickies got banged by the closing elevator doors. But finally most of them managed to squeeze into the left over space.

Jab. Jab. Jab. Nothing happened. Then ding, ding, ding, a little alarm started to sound. The patients stared at us. The producer stared back. Nobody said anything. The little alarm continued to ding.

“That’s the overweight alarm,” the producer said to the patients.

They didn’t react.

“You guys have to get off see? There are too many people on the elevator,” he said.

Finally, after he’d browbeaten them into a shaky, shambling exodus we headed up to our location.

We shot like crazy and finished the location in four hours. The producer stepped away and let a pissed off triage nurse wheel some bleeding guy past.

He walked over to me and said, “See Cao Cao, Chinese people need to learn to be more polite. Couldn’t they see we were shooting here?!”

The Pretty Trees

The trees were like calligraphy. We were shooting on a lake and there was a whole starkly beautiful section of it where very old, dead trees reached up out of the greenish black water. The trees were white and clear against the dark water. It was really beautiful in the same way dying autumn water lilies are: stark and melancholy. But one of the biggest, most complex of these trees was in the way of a shot the director wanted.

So what to do in a situation like this? I mean you could maybe shoot from another angle, maybe? Or recognize that the tree was beautiful? Or you could make a third choice, like they did. They said, “Hey, let’s run over it with a boat.”

The actress and I were in a separate little rowboat and they were shooting us from the big barge where all the crew sat. They sort of yelled at us vaguely to wait and then they put the barge in reverse.

So the girl and I sat on this little boat and watched them take this huge barge, back it up for like ten minutes then gun it. It started slow, water boiling out the back but then picked up and by the time it hit the tree it was really truckin’ and didn’t even slow down. The tree snapped like a toothpick and wasn’t even there after the barge passed. The producers cheered. Problem solved! We can shoot! The pretty tree is gone!

So we started the scene again. I’m in the boat rowing the actress around. She’s my girlfriend and I’m trying to rekindle our love. I say my line: “Chinese nature is so beautiful.”

“Yes,” she answers solemnly, “we Chinese have respected nature for five thousand years.”

The Sleepy Hookers

So finally we were doing the last scene. It was like four in the morning and everyone was either falling over or wired on coffee and tea and so spazzy. The scene was this bit where the lead guy and I are in a bar and we both sing a song to impress my girlfriend. He of course sings better than I do and so the whole crowd erupts in spontaneous recognition of how amazingly amazing this Chinese archeologist is (Not only is his version of history accurate but he can sing too! Let’s get this party started!) The only problem: we had no crowd. We were supposed to have like a hundred extras milling around and dancing in this bar but when we got to the location the casting director admitted, well, sort of, he kind of, well, forgot. So we had nobody, not a single extra for the climactic scene of the whole movie and even the optimistic casting director admitted that it might be a little hard find a hundred of them at four in the morning like in the next five minutes.

I snickered and thought, “Well I’ll be makin’ bank tomorrow on overtime,” but it was not to be.

Ever resourceful, they thought of a solution. We were shooting in a big KTV. They went to talk to the boss. I was up on the stage practicing my song. Twenty minutes later, in shambled about fifty sleepy, crabby hookers. Behind them, on tiptoes, were about twenty little cooks from Sichuan. The hookers were mostly from Dongbei and so a bunch of them were over six feet tall. The cooks were from Sichuan and so it was like a scene from Lord of the Rings where the Elves and the Dwarves are lining up for battle except here the elves were crabby and selling pussy and the dwarves were wearing greasy chef hats.

The director paired them off. They started to dance. We started to shoot. I stepped up to the mic . . .

And there I was singing my heart into this weird Chinese song and I thought about the day. I saw the crippled people shambling around the lobby and (because they were blind and shit) bumping into each other like billiard balls, I saw the pretty tree, having struggled all these years to grow, slowly sinking into the muddy water and I saw the little cooks and the enormous hookers slowly circling like a Lord of the Rings nerdfan’s wet dream. I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, belted out the chorus and thought, “What a cool job.”