March 2004
The
Athens 4 and the CarnEVIL!
Okay, so, the company Ed
usually
works for is flying him into Atlanta for the weekend to shoot master
footage of a local carnival that's closing after this weekend.
The plan is for them to incorporate the footage into a carnival horror
movie (entitled "CarnEVIL" -- mwa-ha-haaa!) they'll film the principal
photography of later. He's also having to grab a couple of
extra shots so they can put together a trailer for their financiers or
something. (It's on digital video, so it's no big deal for one
guy to do.) I'm booked Saturday, so I don't get to play with him
until Sunday -- when I meet him and Mark at the Waffle House for
breakfast...
So we're at the Waffle House, and Mark and Ed tell
me about their Saturday -- spent almost entirely at the carnival, Mark
being "Ed's assistant," and Ed getting video shots of the woman making
the cotton candy, lots of shots of the ferris wheel, etc.
Today, however, Ed will need to go to the carnival
to meet up with Ray (the guy who owns one of the carnivals joined up to
make this double carnival and lowbudget filmmaker guy who's in on this
movie -- Ed and Mark tell me he volunteered lots of ideas of how people
could get killed at the carnival -- "And his neck could get caught on
the wheel and it could pull him up... and a rope could grab him
and...") and he'll take us to his "carnival ride graveyard" in Forsythe
to get some location scouting shots for the movie -- then back to the
carnival for some dusk shots and a reaction "sees the monster and
screams and runs" shots of someone (anyone -- he figures it will be the
kid who works the balloon dart booth who wants to be an actor, but
looks 12, according to Ed). Mark, however, won't be coming
with us, because "he has things to do" that I can't talk him out of.
So after our Waffle House breakfast, Ed and I take
off for the carnival after a quick stop at Piedmont Park so Ed can take
a picture of a hillside with the Atlanta skyscrapers poking out of it
-- some image Ed had in his head to snap for fun but couldn't get to it
on Saturday (and I was doubting he could on Sunday, since it was a
PERFECT GORGEOUS day, all sunny and cool with the flowery trees
exploding and little petals wafting to the cars in the breeze and
Piedmont Park being THE place people with cars go to park and hang out
all day -- I wound up babysitting the halfparked car while Ed raced off
to grab his picture before we had to meet Ray at the carnival by 2).
So we get to the carnival -- another cheap carnival
like the one I drug Mark to a couple of years ago, except bigger, this
one next to Turner Field -- park in the $3 lot which is across the
street from the $5 lot, and fight the windy weather while checking
things out. Ed notices some things that were up the evening
before were all ready coming down (it's their last day in town), and
was a little worried that he wouldn't have what he wanted to
shoot. And he shrugs it off.
Ray meets us and tells us he can't get away for
another 45 minutes or so, leaving me and Ed to roam the carnival.
Then Ray quickly reappears and sends us off with his buddy Roy, who
knows the carnival graveyard well and has worked a bunch of lowbudget
movies. (We're glad, because if we had to wait on Ray, it
could be awhile, and this place is a drive -- we need to be back before
dusk, and then there's trying to hook up with Mike for dinner, who'd be
driving in from Athens and probably won't come in because he's got his
skateboard art in the skateboard art auction that evening).
Roy is one of those Marlboro Man types, denim on top
of denim, rough tanned skin, head full of perfectly coiffed white-gray
hair, blue eyes, smoking half-crushed cigarettes and flicking away the
butts before mysteriously holding another one (Ed wants him in FRONT of
the camera, later saying he's Sam Shepard -- but I don't think he's
lanky enough -- and Ed saying more than once, "If he said he was also
working on some poetry, I'd be like, dude!"). The ride down
is going to take at least a half-hour, and the car is dead silent once
we're on the interstate, which I won't have -- this guy's an insider on
the carnies!
So I tell him to tell us carny stories, and of
course he can't think of any, but it's not long before he's musing
about one thing or another. I get him started by saying my mom's one of
those people who says the cars fly off and people die, and he squashes
that pretty fast, saying nobody ever gets killed, and then ticks off
the Six Flags and Disney Land death count (not that many, and always
because somebody broke the rules and stood on the ride or -- what
started this line of conversation and his favorite point -- the guy at
Six Flags a couple of years ago who'd just been promoted to assistant
manager or something, and was killed because he was under the tracks of
one of those rides where people's feet hang down (something like the
Batman ride) looking for change that had fallen out of people's pockets
and some girl's foot had kicked his head when the ride went by -- "He
was just promoted and he's looking for spare change? How much were they
paying him?"
I tried to get the story on Angel the Snake Woman,
the mystery from the big fair at Perry a couple of years ago,
explaining that I didn't want to go in and stare at somebody because I
thought it was mean. And he started in on the Lobster Boy, who he
knew. Said his hands and feet were long and grown together
to look like claws, and he was a wifebeater and an alcoholic.
Mean. Didn't like him at all. (Ed later said he was thinking
"Wifebeater? What did he beat her with?" I said I was thinking
"Wife?") Anyway, he's dead now. He also knew a
bearded lady -- but said they had a girl working a booth last year that
shaved, so there are lots of bearded ladies out there.
The graveyard was located just north of Barnesville
and Forsythe, off 75 near High Falls Park (really pretty river and
little waterfalls). We were driving country roads into the woods
-- Roy said he made the drive there everyday, as he lives on the
property -- and he advised Ed to drive "25 and not 26" around a corner
leading to the High Falls park area, because the cops were watching --
after that, it was pretty whatever you want. When we pulled
off the gray long-ago-paved road onto the lot and down the red clay
road, it wasn't long before we realized it wasn't going to be the
spiritually cool experience of a carnival graveyard that we were
expecting (we later admitted our unrealistic ideas of it being like the
huge dark storage warehouses of the Mardi Gras floats), but out in the
country dumping areas. ("The only thing missing would have been the
trailers," I later told Mark, "except they weren't.")
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