The Eddy

It sucks ... and blows

Image courtesy of Peter McLennan

Back in the late ‘80s, I spent eight weeks in Oxford, Mississipi working on a feature called “Heart of Dixie,” starring Treat Williams, Ally Sheedy, Phoebe Cates, and the lovely young Virginia Madsen. Like all low-budget features, it was a serious grind: five weeks of long days filming interiors and exteriors — working six days a week, naturally — followed by three weeks of all nighters, toiling from late afternoon ‘til dawn.

Famed as the literary base of William Faulkner, Oxford is home to the University of Mississippi — "Ole Miss" — where the student newspaper has been in publication for more than a hundred years. Since the narrative of our movie revolved around the early Civil Rights struggle to integrate a segregated college, we did a fair amount of filming on the university campus where some of those brutal struggles played out back in the day. Being a typical student newspaper, The Daily Mississippian wasn’t particularly interesting to me, but while waiting between setups one day — there’s a lot of waiting in the movie biz — I leafed through a copy out of sheer boredom. With finals week looming, the student editor published the following quote describing the existential angst felt by students who, ready or not, now faced the year-end gantlet of exams.

“Life is a swirling, sucking eddy of despair brightened with moments of false hope in an ever-blackening universe.”

Those words struck a resonant chord, and instantly became the mantra of my crew for the duration of the shoot — especially once we got into those three weeks of night filming. At first we referred to it as “the swirling, sucking eddy,” but eventually it boiled down to “The Eddy.” Whenever one of us was feeling beaten down by the relentless grind, the question would come: “Are you feeling The Eddy?” A nod in response said it all. What began as an inside joke morphed into reality during those long nights, when our connection to the real world — to anything beyond The Movie, truth be told — stretched to the breaking point. A nod and a look said it all: every one of us felt the pull of that swirling, sucking whirlpool.

Working a feature film or episodic television drama is a marathon of good days and bad days, with most in the netherworld between. On many of the productions I worked over the succeeding years, circumstance brought The Eddy back, tugging at my feet like a strong, cold undertow trying to drag me into the darkness. Sometimes it did, and sometimes it didn’t, but what kept me going was the knowledge that the rest of my crew was feeling the same thing: we all shared the pain of that suffering. I worked with much of the same crew for the next decade, during which we frequently referred to The Eddy whenever a job turned ugly — but the dark beauty of every Hollywood gig is that it eventually comes to an end … whether you want it to or not.

And the damnedest thing is, once the suffering is finally over, you almost miss it.

Go figure.

Me, I blame The Eddy.