Belltown Messenger - Grant's Broiler

10/20: I write this from the main floor of a net-repairing shed over the Columbia River at Astoria, OR. My company Arkham NW Productions is shooting Cthulhu, a gothic, apocalyptic anti-Bush gay horror movie I've been working on the last two years with my writing partner Dan Gildark. There are about 70 people here pulling 12-hour days on the set, not to mention off-hour work on direction, art, script changes, actors' prep, location scouting and casting of extras. Filmmaking is the most elaborate of arts, the most fraught with surface difficulties. Millions of individual choices add up to a two-hour span of time into which viewers will release themselves (we hope) effortlessly, as if into a dream.

The general vibe is of camaraderie mixed with anxiety. The location is difficult: Our lead, Jason Cottle, has to climb down a rickety shaft to a rowboat and push off as 40 Astorians swaddled in black cloth carry lit candles down a catwalk to the shed. This takes several hours to light, prepare, and pull off. Everyone is sleepy, and I can't even write decent prose here. The individuals on this production are so intimate with the details of their craft that their knowledge itself takes on a beauty and significance, even in the absence of an aesthetic. This could be, for many of them, a car commercial or an educational video, but because these skills are in the service of however distant an art, they take on a moving grace.

Tomorrow our "big" star, Tori Spelling, comes again from LA. She is a consummate pro, as well as a charmingly raunchy raconteur - what my grandma would have called a fun gal. I'd never seen her act before my words were coming out her mouth on set, so the nervousness and star-fever that possesses a lot of people in her presence doesn't affect me. She seems a sweet and sophisticated woman who, because of her near-universal recognizability, is living in a one-woman sci-fi movie.

Astoria is full of wonderfully quirky locals, an archetypal dream city full of lefty refugees but in an odd and insufficient concentration to produce annoying hippie self-love. The town has a solid radical working-class history, and is a little nation unto itself. It is changing: The new buildings on the edge of town have big parking lots, and the traffic through town has gone from nonexistent to busy, if not gridlocked, in just a few years.

A couple of distinguishing traits of film workers-the speed of things and the light intimacy that sets in among the crew. One sees immediately the origin of the caricature traits of movie people, their cell-phone speed talk and "babys" and "love-yous." I find myself doing it all, with a hundred decisions packed into an hour and a person I have known for two weeks declaring their love and me repeating it (sincerely) back.

10/21: Today, our third day on the river in glorious 70-degree weather, we rushed up just before sundown to the bluff of the Astoria Column, from which our lead looks out on the devastated sprawl that has taken over his once woodsy home. The sprawl will be painted in. This view is still maybe the best in this corner of the country. I hope people here fight for what is great about this place, its small friendliness and unpretension, its oddball quality, its glorious water and air and trees. But did we? Did we vote for the monorail? I don't know yet; can you call me back in time a week and let me know?

(Wanna talk poetry? Email me at belltownpoet@hugohouse.org. Wanna make a ton of money on a bitchen movie? See www.cthulhuthemovie.com before it's too late and we have to ship all that money to LA.)