Magic Hours Read Online Free PDF

section of the bleachers, leaving huge swaths of seating utterly empty. The trouble no doubt began with the request for extras the Movie People placed in Escanaba’s daily newspaper. There were three provisos.
    Proviso One: No one would be allowed to bring alcoholic beverages. Why this is a problem: Escanaba is the sort of place where family friends earn nicknames like A Liter Later. Booze is, quite simply, a cultural staple.
    Proviso Two: No one would be allowed to wear “any clothing from professional sports teams,” since to do so would force the producers to pony up permissions fees. Why this is a problem: Escanaba is the sort of place where people ( people , meaning more than one) paint their homes the colors of their favorite football team. More often than not, this means the green-and-gold of the Green Bay Packers. It is immensely difficult for many grown-up Escanabans to leave their homes without some NFL logo displayed somewhere on their bodies. Many people’s “good” coats happen to be expensive leather jackets the breasts of which are emblazoned with a gigantic Packers G. This is not to suggest that these people don’t own other, non-NFL-related clothing, only that to forbid it, for whatever reason, is to disapprove of it, and since rural Midwesterners are highly self—conscious, a good way to ensure that large numbers of them will not show up for your movie shoot is to tell them what they can and cannot wear.
    Proviso Three: No one would be allowed to leave his or her seat, not even for bathroom breaks . Why this is a problem: From what I
was able to gather earlier in the day, this simply baffled everyone. A woman I ran into at the mall all but scoffed at the idea of sitting still for four hours “without a bathroom.” The Movie People’s fatal error here was their failure to explain why no one could leave his or her seat. At stake, of course, is the film’s continuity. If people are getting up to relieve themselves, a scene that takes hours to shoot yet occupies thirty seconds of film time will be riddled with hundreds of inconsistencies. So what was a sensible request on the part of the Movie People came off to Escanabans as a veiled if really weird threat.
    Mike and I are not the only members of the press here to cover the film, which is nothing less than the biggest story in Escanaba’s history. The film’s producer, Tom Spiroff, a Michigan-born, Los Angeles-residing man in his early forties, approaches our journalistic flotilla. He is wearing a small fortune’s worth of North Face arcticwear and, in a gesture of superhuman kindness, greets every one of us by name. This includes the pretty redhead from the local television station, a tall fellow from the Flint Journal , and a reporter from a national wire service who interviewed Mike three days ago. Mike, a graduate of a top—flight midwestern law school, has reason to believe that he will find himself cast in the man’s coming dispatch as Escanaba’s rube reporter, which he does not relish at all.
    The remaining two journalists, both locals, ignore the filming entirely and discuss last night’s barnburner between the Carney-Nadeau Wolves and the Rapid River Rockets:
    â€œGood game there, eh?”
    â€œOh, yeah. That was really something.”
    Their accents are rich with the atonal music of the Upper Midwest, so this exchange is more accurately rendered as:
    â€œGood game dare, eh?”
    â€œOah, yah. Dot was reely sumptin.”

    To appreciate just how newsworthy by Escanaba standards, this film is, one needs only to peruse a recently published millennial Escanaba retrospective, which includes in its “Faces of the 20th Century” a local chemist who invented something called “bloodberry gum” and a man who “helped bring natural gas service to the area.” What’s more, the Movie People are here not to use this lonely ore town in