Sigrid took one look at me and said “I thought you were going to have longer hair.”posted by Neil Gaiman 10:33 PM
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She looked very disappointed.
“No,” I said, apologetically. “I don’t.”
She sighed. She shook her head. I never quite found out why this messed things up as much as it obviously had.
Sigrid had a plan for a photo. The plan involved a lot of smoke. Her assistant held the smoke machine. Kelly Notaras was drafted in to hold a piece of cardboard to waft the smoke. And I stood there while Sigrid shouted “Smoke!” at the assistant holding the smoke machine, and the machine would belch huge gusts of white fog at me, and then she’d call “Waft!” at Kelly and Kelly would wave the paper and try to get the smoke off my face.
And that’s what we did for the next four or five hours. We did it with my leather jacket on. We did it with my leather jacket off. We did it with me standing up. We did it with me sitting down. We did it with me peering coyly from around the side of a huge sheet of paper. And all through this, the smoke was belched, and then the smoke was wafted. (Jennifer did some fine smoke wafting, too.)
Merrilee exerted an agent’s traditional prerogative and ran up between smoke belches and tried to tame the hair on my forehead. It didn’t tame, but she did her best.
And I began to understand what a kipper must feel like, at the precise moment it stops just being a herring, and realises that it has been smoked. For me that moment occurred at the point where Sigrid decided that it might be more. . . more whatever she was going for. . . if the smoke was splurted directly at my head, rather than just generally belched out around waist level.
I’d hold my breath and smile and be told that I shouldn’t smile, not for the kind of photo that Sigrid had in mind. So I’d stop smiling, and the smoke would splurt and Kelly or Jennifer would waft it and Sigrid would click away.
Days would pass before the taste of the smoke machine finally left the back of my throat. Still, it could have been much worse. There was no builder’s sand involved, nor was I being warned not to get too close to the candles or my wings would go up like tinder and burn
my bare skin.
So a few weeks passed, and one day the contact sheets arrived. Lots and lots of photos of me. And smoke.
My son took one look at the contact sheet and said “Was your head on fire?”
“No,” I said.
“It just looked like it was, that was all.”
And he was right. All the smoke being let off at head level had managed to create a set of photos in which it was perfectly obvious that my head was indeed on fire.
Claudia Gonson (of the Magnetic Fields) was staying with us over Christmas. I showed her the contact sheet.
“They make you look like your head’s on fire,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “It’s a special effect.”
“And all the ones of you not wearing the leather jacket make you look like David Copperfield.”
“Yes. That’s a special effect too.”
“You don’t want to look like David Copperfield, do you?”
“No, thank you. Let’s stick with the ones with me with a jacket on.”
We picked one black and white photo, and one colour picture. The best thing about the black and white photo was the smoke in the background, which, far from looking like my head (or indeed any part of me) was on fire, looked instead like a mysterious sort of background, which might be clouds or mountains or, well, anything really.
I think they’re pretty good photos. I still feel vaguely guilty about getting the haircut, though. I just wonder what Ingrid could have done, if my hair had been longer. And whether whatever it was would have required quite so much smoke.
posted by Neil Gaiman 10:33 PM
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Saturday, May 12, 2001
I was doing a telephone interview about American Gods when I saw it on the screen. The interviewer was in Tokyo where it was gone 1:30 am.