Cinematic ’Stache

During production on the artsploitation flick Pill Head, I ran to the local deli to pick up sandwiches because, this being a nano-budget indie, it was sandwiches for dinner personally delivered by yours truly, the director.

Fresh from the set, I must have entered the deli aisle with an added flourish-after all, I was in the midst of directing a feature film. The young man behind the counter eyed me as if he recognized me or at least recognized something about me. After a beat he innocently asked, “You’re someone important, right?”

Despite being the sandwich-boy auteur, I relished the moment. How could I not be someone important? I had a bag of sandwiches, a waxed mustache and a scarf billowing off the shoulder of my black blazer.

Then he asked, “Are you a magician?”

From a certain angle-like, from behind a deli case hovering with hands outstretched over the bologna and pimento loaves-yes, I look like a fricking magician. It’s the mustache. And the invisible horn section that toots “Ta-da!” whenever I gesture.

I didn’t resent this. In fact, I found it affirming. Like many kids in my generation, I had a magic kit as a kid-a wand, rings that linked, a cheap top hat, etc., and as Francis Ford Coppola once said, “I think cinema, movies and magic have always been closely associated. The very earliest people who made…