As a famous film director meticulously plots the greatest and most massive epic action sequence in history, his life quietly unravels, shot by shot — straight to the heart.  Short story by JP Jordan, used by permission. All rights to photos and media retained by their proper owners, and no rights are asserted to the media herein except under fair use standards.

THE FINEST FILM MICHAEL BAY NEVER MADE 

There is. First of all. The claustrophobia of a massive blockbuster film shoot.

It’s a weird word to use, claustrophobia, but it describes the feeling well enough right now that Paul Vicer thinks of it.

Because he can’t breathe.

Because things are a little out of control.

Except they can’t be.

He’s the director. He’s the lord of this crazy realm, king of chaos. So he better shut up his brain and get back to—

“Dummy bodies,” someone yells, “Bodies coming through, make way…”

And crewmen come marching by with realistic human figures in their arms, getting ready to spread them out everywhere on a Los Angeles street.

A street Paul now rules. Because he is the king of chaos.

“The finest film Michael Bay never made,” Jim Harrod says. “That’s what this is going to be like. Faster, leaner, meaner—and smarter.”

Jim Harrod is the producer. And right now, very unwelcome.

Because Paul is trying to concentrate on the aircraft carrier thrown onto the street.

And the largest, most complex, expensive and long-take-oriented action sequence in the history of Hollywood.

Claustrophobia.

Anyway, he doesn’t like the Michael Bay comparison, never has. Paul is from Texas. He is, he thinks, the soft-spoken, tolerant, smart kind of Texan who has learned to navigate volatile tempers and indecipherable logic, at which Texas excels on both counts. It so happens he’s also not particularly comfortable in L.A. He is not a surfer. He does not like EDM remixes. He does not visit Miami if he can avoid it. He reads Elmore Leonard, not the trades.

He squints in the sun, down at his little binder, the movie in storyboard form, perfect, every line and sinew of its body without flaw right now, before the cameras roll, before the compromises and mistakes savagely mark it up. Before the movie becomes either a triumph of problem-solving or a Lady Gaga dress made of excrement you have to wear forever. Budgets are not unlimited; collaboration is always compromise. Reality is the true god of cinema.

“I need everybody with me right now,” Paul shouts. And the lingua franca of movieland has taught the crews of the world this means we all gather up and take a look at the nightmare about to unfold.

One more time to lay it all out. Paul leaves the L.A. street—which is one long stretch of total astoundments including part of the aforementioned aircraft carrier lying on its side, a massive 22-car pileup with two semis involved, 350 members of the National Guard both real and fictional that will be augmented digitally to be 3000 members, 13 dinosaur animatronic puppets and operators, a team of hapless, bloodied cheerleaders, a martial arts assault team direct from Indonesia, and one smoldering dead alien shape, the sum total of our success in the battle against the Raagna hordes in this scifi masterpiece. And he enters the industrial-building offices that are serving him for a headquarters today.

It is his womb. It is his safe place. It is his command post and refuge.

Except it isn’t.

As his intense and worried staff flows in around him, he cannot help but notice her.

Shit on a biscuit. She’s here.

Dinah Mears is easy to miss. At least, among the dazzlement of starlets who look like mud-flap figure perfections, Dinah might be easy to miss. But not for Paul. For Paul, she always stands out like a fireworks show on a snowfield, and while people might think it’s odd or surprising or novel that the affair he ended up having was with her, a babyfaced intellectual blonde as opposed to a babyfaced bubbleheaded blonde, for him, it was sad, and energizing, and quiet, and raucous, and sensible, and insane, and three years ago in that Greenwich Village bookstore, she had him at, “if Godard had made Star Wars, we might never have recovered from awe.”

It’s his wife’s bad luck that Dinah actually lived in Santa Monica, not far away.

It’s his own bad luck that his wife is now 117 steps outside the door behind him.

“Let’s take it together from the top,” Paul tells the team. But his eyes are on her. She moves toward him and he tries very hard—admirably hard—to focus on the heaven and hell that is the screen displaying his storyboarded action sequence.

“Paul,” Harrod laughs, “this isn’t just some huge-ass, billion moving-parts, drugged-out, batshit crazy expensive and dangerous action sequence… it is THE absolute, record-breaking most huge-ass, billion-moving-parts, drugged-out, batshit crazy expensive and dangerous action sequence of all motion picture history.”

God, how Paul wishes he would shut up.

As his team walks through each shot, a plan that both Patton and Michelangelo would have envied in its detail and brilliance, Dinah snugs in behind him and whispers, “It’s over.”

“Bang! Boom!” yells the visual effect supervisor, who is mentally enmeshed in the storyboard sequence.

Paul’s heart seizes. He can’t handle this right now. He can’t handle this.

“You got to at least give me today,” he wheezes out in what he wishes was a stronger-sounding whisper.

He can see out of the corner of his eye that Dinah winces, but he doesn’t know how to take that.

Just like he doesn’t know how to take the arrival of his wife: French, towering, beautiful-at-her-age, Yoga-Zen-obsessed-and-not-in-a-vomitous-way, politically-active-for-international-causes, Joni-Mitchell-listening, House-of-Cards-latecomer-binge-watching Marie…

Mother of his child, his teenaged confused adorable mess, Clea… who is playing with her hair nervously at the door of the dim-lit industrial building that used to be his womb and command center…

But now is a snakepit.

Dinah does not move back discreetly. Marie moves next to Paul, looking at her, never having seen her before as far as she knows, and wondering who this young woman is next to her husband.

Please God I need to concentrate… Paul is thinking. Except it’s really only an approximation of thinking, because the pressure, the dollar signs of the sequence in bit-by-bit pieces flowing in his head, the awareness of that stuntman’s death last week in that Columbia mess makes real thought that is actually useful and worthwhile totally impossible and —

Why is his daughter here?

He refocuses back to the sequence and the DPs remarks and at least his wife knows not to say anything for right now.

            It’s like two hours later before he realizes just about everyone’s gone, working on their individual piece of the machine, and his wife tells him, “The tests came back. It doesn’t look good. They want to do a biopsy.” He’s going to cry. He’s going to fall the hell apart right now, and then Marie says, “That is not your assistant.”

She means Dinah. And Dinah, who is over by the monitor and only heard that small piece of the conversation says: “I’m sure as hell not.”

So Paul says, in a marvel of obvious diversionary tactics but honestly meant, “Why is Clea here?”

Marie says, “She was keeping me company at the doctor’s since you couldn’t, and she wanted to meet Selena McBride if it’s possible.” There’s an edge in her voice.

“Yeah, of course,” Paul says, and his voice shaking he adds, “We’re going to get through this. Everything is going to be fine. It is.”

He leads Marie over to Clea and then moves them out to get them to Selena’s trailer, glancing back at Dinah, who looks both angry and confused.

He is not a bad person. He really isn’t. He loves both of these women, loves them absolutely, and there just has to be some kind of societal solution to this kind of thing that hasn’t been invented yet.

            He manages to slide around the set for another few hours as if they were seconds, haunted both literally and figuratively by Dinah Mears, until the moment comes.

And just before they’re about to do the first take, his daughter tells him, “Dad, I’m pregnant with Ashton Majors’ baby and I think TMZ knows it.”

He just stares.

He doesn’t know what he would do if they were alone—he’s a very mild-mannered, deliberative sort of guy, it always surprises the interviewers—but at this particular second, he is a total blank.

“I know when it comes out, it could really cause problems for your shoot,” she says apologetically, “being that it’s illegal.”

The A.D. says, “We’re ready.”

            Paul thinks Jim Harrod echoes the statement annoyingly, but his hearing may not be functioning properly.

Paul’s daughter moves back away from him, over towards mom, understanding, it’s time.

The only person who does not seem to understand that is Dinah—and Paul doesn’t really understand why she’s still here if she’s through with me and it’s over and everything has collapsed and did I hear her right—but suddenly she sharks in right next to the video assist.

And everyone is ready, everything is tensed like horses at a starting gate, and Dinah murmurs to him, “Today I’m going to kill myself right here on your set.”

But his mouth is already open, and his head is in half-turn…

And Paul completes the turn, and the most elaborate action sequence in the history of the world unfolds.

He just says action, and the disaster is unleashed.

To be honest, he’s not even sure what Dinah just said.

Listening is hard when a 240 million dollar movie is at stake.

This will be an 8-minute sequence, a tour de force in which one of the cameras records it all in long-take, like a perfect Rube Goldberg machine, this falls, that flies up, this goes off, those guys tumble in there, boom, smash, flip, crash, and the other cameras everywhere will re-tell this magical Big Bang explosion in later flashbacks in the movie…

But the first take—and, let’s be honest, you’ll be lucky if you get three shots at doing this really right the way you envision it—fizzles by the third step in.

Because here’s what happens.

It’s supposed to go: stolen Tesla crashes out of car showroom, zooms past lady with the baby, is halted by half-dead alien invader in the street, just as running, screaming cheerleader forces the car to veer onto a ramp that sends it flying upward as the half-real/half-digital-later 747 jumbo jet comes crashing into the scene.

But it doesn’t, because the alien invader puppet falls the wrong way, sending the National Guard troops stumbling back, knocking over a big fake billboard, and the Tesla squeals to a halt.

Everything just stops.

The crew erupts into action, Thank God. We’ll be up for take two any second.

What did she just say? Paul turns and his eyes hunt for Dinah, but he can’t see her. She’s ducked away somewhere. What the hell did she just say to me?

So Paul takes the moment to run up onto the set—really running away from everything in his life behind him embodied by the three women—and to consult with his gigantic stars that pepper the opening part of the sequence.

Dwayne Johnson is the lead National Guardsman with Channing Tatum at his side as the angry L.A. businessman who joins up with him, and Paul checks in with them both as his cheerleader lead Arianna Grande asks him, “Was I supposed to wing it and fix that or something?”

And then this happens.

Paul is showing his cheerleader team how to back up in terror (but rapidly) from the half-dead alien invader as a commotion begins to sound from behind him. And he’s not really thinking anything of it, because there’s already so much noise and this and that, but it’s getting louder, and pretty soon he’s blocking the side street just as a new-model Mustang roars up behind him and screeches to a stop.

These guys get out, shaggy and freaked-out and holding all manner of armament, and they stare at him, they stare at the whole situation, and it is the weirdest thing Paul has ever seen. They look so authentically horrified and baffled that it’s priceless. Except that these guys are not supposed to be in the scene and Paul is starting to realize that they have driven their way onto the set from a long way off, and the security people way up the hill are hustling after them all shit-panicked.

They’re screaming something to him, the security guys are, but Paul can’t figure it out.

And then suddenly, these confused weirdos throw Paul into the Mustang with them and drive off.

And Paul looks up to see a big .45 in his face.

And he realizes the security guys were screaming, “Bank robbers—bank robbers—real f—ing bank robbers—”

And this sort of starts to form in Paul’s mind as a possible explanation for the weirdness. Bank robbers, bank robbers, real f—ing bank robbers.

Paul looks back, as if in a dream, as if in slow motion, as if in the greatest movie Michael Bay never made, and he sees—he actually sees—some of the best guys in the stunt business yelling and hopping into their cars, and coming after him to help him. Or some shit like that.

            And then Paul looks back at the crazy mofo with the gun in his face, and the guy is covered in flop sweat like Richard Nixon never dreamed of, and the guy takes the pistol and wipes his brow with it like this makes any kind of sense, and then thrusts it back in Paul’s face, and Paul sees the gun, like, the nozzle of this gun, with a big drop of sweat falling from it.

And Paul realizes this is real. This is happening.

And he turns as if hypnotized toward the front of the car, where through the windows he can see it unfolding, sent into motion by total confusion and over-exuberance, or the shouting of an A.D. screaming “Action” out of some kind of panic, but it’s going, it’s taking off right in front of him. The absolute greatest action sequence in the history of the world.

The automated velociraptors spring out all around the car and rush past in vivid blurs.

The jumbo jet mock-up front end crashes down next to the scrambling Los Angelenos.

And held hostage in this real car with real insane bank robbers who just happened to smash through his set on the worst day of his life, he realizes. It is not likely he will get out of this alive. But the cameras are probably rolling. Something amazing just might be captured forever and ever and ever. Today—just maybe—could in fact be a good day to die. His own words hit him like a Joel Silver punchline in an ‘80s blood-spattered glory machine.

Reality is the true god of cinema.