my latin prof was a movie star and so was i
I have been in a movie. I got the part because I knew the writer/ director/ star. He was my Latin professor in college, and I’m realizing now that, while it sounds pretty impressive, “Latin professor” for him was like my “part time job at the grocery store”—just something to pay the bills.
In Latin 102, he told us about doing stand-in work for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. Because I didn’t super understand what “stand-in work” meant, I assumed he was big time famous. The people in my class found him in an Adam Scott movie. He showed up unexpectedly while I was watching Treme once. He was in a syfy movie about a volcano, which I never could find. Every time I saw him on screen, I’d shit my pants over knowing someone who could be described as on screen.
He was caught between syfy volcanoes and ancient Roman volcanoes. My friend Cam and I spent a lot of that summer discussing both Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 CE, as described in a letter by one of the Pliny’s (Elder or Younger, I can’t remember) and our prof’s IMDb page.
This next part is tangential, but important for understanding who I am as a character in this story: in that summer class, we had a TA from Russia. Her name was Anna, and she was so beautiful. I wasn’t a natural at Latin, but I spent hours and hours and hours on the translations, trying to impress my movie star teacher and the other snobs who decided to spend their summer studying a dead language. I let Anna convince me I had an aptitude for languages, and so with my inflated ego, I signed up for a Russian course in the fall.
My desire to learn Russian once I was in that class lasted less than an hour. I was essentially slapped in the face by the aptitudes of the people in that class who actually had aptitudes for languages. I was intimidated, and I knew I didn’t have enough hours in the day to pretend to be good at Latin and Russian.
The Russian prof was a native of my college town, returning after 30 years in Japan. On that first day, he kept getting Russian and Japanese mixed up, which I knew I would never be able to follow. He also kept emphasizing the importance of conversation in language learning, which scared the absolute shit out of me. One of the reasons I picked Latin in the first place was because I knew I’d never have to have a conversation in that wonderfully dead language. I walked out of that room and dropped the class on my phone. I have never regretted it.
While I spent my summer learning Latin my prof spent it writing his screenplay. He wrote it during somewhere between 3 weeks and 3 months, which I thought was tremendously cool at the time, but I later realized is absolutely not enough time to create a fully formed feature film.
During the whole movie process, I had kind of a double inside scoop. I was taking his classes, and I had a student job in the college library, working with the brother of a girl my prof used to date. From my coworker Adam, I discovered that my Latin prof had changed his name when he went off to theater school and had rich parents who were doing a lot of the financing work for his movie. I loved my prof, and I loved my coworker, and we would just gossip to death about the whole process. (I found out from another coworker that my Russian history prof, who had a faint and mysterious Eastern European accent, was in fact from Philadelphia.)
So not only does my prof write this movie, but he also gets it financed and so obviously casts himself as the lead and his much younger girlfriend in a supporting role. She played an administrator at the university in the movie, but in real life, she was a grad student studying the same topic as my prof/ her boyfriend, but not technically his student, even though he was the only prof who taught in the classics department. The whole student/ teacher forbidden romance thing skeeved me out. She was also incredibly nice to me, and I was grateful for the ways she helped me not feel like such an imposter by including me in things.
Almost everyone I talked to about my prof thought he was gorgeous, but honestly I couldn’t even let myself see him as a person, let alone a pretty person, because I had to meet him during office hours sometimes and I never could have handled it otherwise.
My prof was also the faculty chair of the history honor society, which of course I was a member (Vice President) of. Another Classics minor was a little bit in love with him in probably a platonic way and she guilted him into taking it on after the previous faculty chair left the university. Before, our only fundraiser had been a garage sale. For my first one, when I was dying to make a good impression on these brainiacs, I set 2 alarms to wake up in time, and neither went off. My phone was set to pm instead of am, and my alarm clock reset when the power went out in the middle of the night. I swear. I wasn’t late on purpose, and it still haunts me to this day.
During his leadership of the organization, we decided to host a fundraiser for his movie at a bar on Valentine’s Day. I got put at the raffle table where I tried to talk drunk college kids out of their dollar bills for a chance at a prize like being an extra in the movie or a free t-shirt. That was the first time I heard a drunk girl puke in a public bathroom, and I was all pissed off because I missed my long-distance high school boyfriend and I couldn’t drink because I had to drive myself back to my lonely apartment.
At the end of the night, we pulled the winners, and one of them was me. The odds were actually pretty high that would happen because I was terrible at convincing drunk people to give me a dollar. The prize I won was for a ticket to the premiere, which I could have gone to anyway. When they pulled my name, my Latin prof and my friend Cam--both drunk--cheered for me and started quoting Shakespeare at each other and it was the least like a fraud I ever felt in Latin--even though it wasn’t in class and I actually was v good at latin and should never have felt like a fraud in the first place. (I think I realized I could stop feeling like a fraud towards the end of college when my Latin prof saw me drinking a bright pink Seagram’s Jamaican Me Happy at an honor society meeting and said he was disappointed. He thought I’d be a single malt scotch kinda girl. I realized in that exact moment what an incredibly sexist thing that was to me and all women, and I was 21, and of course I loved Jamaican Me Happys.)
The whole raffle, it turned out, was a scam. As a winner myself, I never received notice of how to claim my prize, so I image none of the other winners knew they even won. There’s a good chance nobody even wrote down the winners that night. Whatever, everyone was drunk (except bitter me). When the time for the premiere came, I’d have to email my friend, the one somewhat platonically in love with my prof, to ask if I could still come.
Before that, though, the thing had to be filmed. The whole college, it seemed, or at least my small and biased piece of it, was talking about this movie. We were all invited to be extras, and I saw this as my one shot at stardom.
It was, of course, so much less glamorous than that. The whole day was just kind of sad, with a few truly cool parts mixed in. It started with me downing 2 packets of top ramen--not so much because I was broke but because I loved eating them for breakfast--that made me feel bloated like a balloon for the rest of the day. I hated the outfit I was wearing (I’d picked it out myself out of my own closet), and I hated that somebody had to take a picture of it for continuity’s sake. I hated that we were shooting in an abandoned building that used to be my favorite restaurant. I hated that we all had to pretend to be dancing in a crowd in a bar drinking from empty and unlabelled bottles of beer. I was honestly worried I would lose a job or something if somebody saw me drinking during this, my breakout role. I hated that there was a band there but no music and we had to pretend to be dancing to music that wasn’t there and acting is embarrassing. I hated the part where I sat across from Cam, mouthing silent nonsense words to each other because I got paranoid and decided that he was telling me “you’re fat, you’re fat, you’re fat.”
I hated that we were there all day. And it was a long day. I hated how pretend all the action seemed to be. It was disjointed, out of order, mostly silent. We would film a crowd dancing and then be at tables eating on a different day and then William Sadler would be on a balcony giving reaction shot after reaction shot. I had gone to see Iron Man 3 the night before, where Mr. Sadler plays the president, and then that day I got to dance next to him, an honest-to-god celebrity who was delightful.
I met someone who worked from the local news. He’d been promised a small part in addition to his extra work, but he wore a shirt with words on it and so got immediately recast. They wouldn’t let him leave and come back with a new shirt because being on a set is a teensy tiny bit like being in detention. (I’m assuming; I’ve never actually been in detention. Although I’ve never been to prison either, that was the first word that came to mind. But I decided against it because I hate it when movie stars--LIKE ME--complain about their lives or compare their trivial experiences to actual hardships).
I left at the very first opportunity, probably 12 hours after I’d arrived, starving to death. The guy from the local news found me on FB, and we’re still friends there. He moved to NYC to follow his dreams of being a stand up but--this is probably the meanest thing I’ve ever said--he is not funny. Every jokey post from him is a reminder of that weird, weird day. But that was also such a cool experience, of being on an actual movie set. It really did a lot for our town, brought work to a lot of people, and let us all feel like movie stars. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
...EXCEPT a different fucking movie. I really got my hopes up for the premier. I wanted to see myself on the big screen, I wanted to finally find out the plot of the movie we’d all been talking about, and I wanted to be able to describe the whole thing to my coworker Adam, who’d known my prof for most of his life.
Here’s the gist (*spoiler alert for a movie you will never see): my prof plays a prof (surprise) whose life is kind of falling apart (dying dad, wife leaves him after a miscarriage). He’s into this student (surprise) who gets raped by William Sadler, the head of the department. Building to that, the student is caught between my prof and Sadler and wanting to be a serious classicist. But then she is raped and my prof tells her that’s part of the pain and hard work it takes to become an academic the end.
Fuck. That.
What kind of sexist fucking bullshit is that, that a woman being raped by the head of a department is in any way anything other than a crime? That for a woman to be taken seriously in academia, she has to be raped, initiated in this most violent and inexcusable way?
That plot came from the mind of a man I’d been studying under for years, someone I’d looked up to. I felt sick.
I also looked pretty sick up there (sick in the good way), dancing and nonsense word talking and taking comically quick sips of nothing from my unmarked bottle.
So yeah, I’m in a movie. I can do the Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon on myself now. I ended up there because I was the least confident classicist I’ve ever met and seeing the movie shattered something inside me, but it was pretty cool, I think?
In Latin 102, he told us about doing stand-in work for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. Because I didn’t super understand what “stand-in work” meant, I assumed he was big time famous. The people in my class found him in an Adam Scott movie. He showed up unexpectedly while I was watching Treme once. He was in a syfy movie about a volcano, which I never could find. Every time I saw him on screen, I’d shit my pants over knowing someone who could be described as on screen.
He was caught between syfy volcanoes and ancient Roman volcanoes. My friend Cam and I spent a lot of that summer discussing both Vesuvius’s eruption in 79 CE, as described in a letter by one of the Pliny’s (Elder or Younger, I can’t remember) and our prof’s IMDb page.
This next part is tangential, but important for understanding who I am as a character in this story: in that summer class, we had a TA from Russia. Her name was Anna, and she was so beautiful. I wasn’t a natural at Latin, but I spent hours and hours and hours on the translations, trying to impress my movie star teacher and the other snobs who decided to spend their summer studying a dead language. I let Anna convince me I had an aptitude for languages, and so with my inflated ego, I signed up for a Russian course in the fall.
My desire to learn Russian once I was in that class lasted less than an hour. I was essentially slapped in the face by the aptitudes of the people in that class who actually had aptitudes for languages. I was intimidated, and I knew I didn’t have enough hours in the day to pretend to be good at Latin and Russian.
The Russian prof was a native of my college town, returning after 30 years in Japan. On that first day, he kept getting Russian and Japanese mixed up, which I knew I would never be able to follow. He also kept emphasizing the importance of conversation in language learning, which scared the absolute shit out of me. One of the reasons I picked Latin in the first place was because I knew I’d never have to have a conversation in that wonderfully dead language. I walked out of that room and dropped the class on my phone. I have never regretted it.
While I spent my summer learning Latin my prof spent it writing his screenplay. He wrote it during somewhere between 3 weeks and 3 months, which I thought was tremendously cool at the time, but I later realized is absolutely not enough time to create a fully formed feature film.
During the whole movie process, I had kind of a double inside scoop. I was taking his classes, and I had a student job in the college library, working with the brother of a girl my prof used to date. From my coworker Adam, I discovered that my Latin prof had changed his name when he went off to theater school and had rich parents who were doing a lot of the financing work for his movie. I loved my prof, and I loved my coworker, and we would just gossip to death about the whole process. (I found out from another coworker that my Russian history prof, who had a faint and mysterious Eastern European accent, was in fact from Philadelphia.)
So not only does my prof write this movie, but he also gets it financed and so obviously casts himself as the lead and his much younger girlfriend in a supporting role. She played an administrator at the university in the movie, but in real life, she was a grad student studying the same topic as my prof/ her boyfriend, but not technically his student, even though he was the only prof who taught in the classics department. The whole student/ teacher forbidden romance thing skeeved me out. She was also incredibly nice to me, and I was grateful for the ways she helped me not feel like such an imposter by including me in things.
Almost everyone I talked to about my prof thought he was gorgeous, but honestly I couldn’t even let myself see him as a person, let alone a pretty person, because I had to meet him during office hours sometimes and I never could have handled it otherwise.
My prof was also the faculty chair of the history honor society, which of course I was a member (Vice President) of. Another Classics minor was a little bit in love with him in probably a platonic way and she guilted him into taking it on after the previous faculty chair left the university. Before, our only fundraiser had been a garage sale. For my first one, when I was dying to make a good impression on these brainiacs, I set 2 alarms to wake up in time, and neither went off. My phone was set to pm instead of am, and my alarm clock reset when the power went out in the middle of the night. I swear. I wasn’t late on purpose, and it still haunts me to this day.
During his leadership of the organization, we decided to host a fundraiser for his movie at a bar on Valentine’s Day. I got put at the raffle table where I tried to talk drunk college kids out of their dollar bills for a chance at a prize like being an extra in the movie or a free t-shirt. That was the first time I heard a drunk girl puke in a public bathroom, and I was all pissed off because I missed my long-distance high school boyfriend and I couldn’t drink because I had to drive myself back to my lonely apartment.
At the end of the night, we pulled the winners, and one of them was me. The odds were actually pretty high that would happen because I was terrible at convincing drunk people to give me a dollar. The prize I won was for a ticket to the premiere, which I could have gone to anyway. When they pulled my name, my Latin prof and my friend Cam--both drunk--cheered for me and started quoting Shakespeare at each other and it was the least like a fraud I ever felt in Latin--even though it wasn’t in class and I actually was v good at latin and should never have felt like a fraud in the first place. (I think I realized I could stop feeling like a fraud towards the end of college when my Latin prof saw me drinking a bright pink Seagram’s Jamaican Me Happy at an honor society meeting and said he was disappointed. He thought I’d be a single malt scotch kinda girl. I realized in that exact moment what an incredibly sexist thing that was to me and all women, and I was 21, and of course I loved Jamaican Me Happys.)
The whole raffle, it turned out, was a scam. As a winner myself, I never received notice of how to claim my prize, so I image none of the other winners knew they even won. There’s a good chance nobody even wrote down the winners that night. Whatever, everyone was drunk (except bitter me). When the time for the premiere came, I’d have to email my friend, the one somewhat platonically in love with my prof, to ask if I could still come.
Before that, though, the thing had to be filmed. The whole college, it seemed, or at least my small and biased piece of it, was talking about this movie. We were all invited to be extras, and I saw this as my one shot at stardom.
It was, of course, so much less glamorous than that. The whole day was just kind of sad, with a few truly cool parts mixed in. It started with me downing 2 packets of top ramen--not so much because I was broke but because I loved eating them for breakfast--that made me feel bloated like a balloon for the rest of the day. I hated the outfit I was wearing (I’d picked it out myself out of my own closet), and I hated that somebody had to take a picture of it for continuity’s sake. I hated that we were shooting in an abandoned building that used to be my favorite restaurant. I hated that we all had to pretend to be dancing in a crowd in a bar drinking from empty and unlabelled bottles of beer. I was honestly worried I would lose a job or something if somebody saw me drinking during this, my breakout role. I hated that there was a band there but no music and we had to pretend to be dancing to music that wasn’t there and acting is embarrassing. I hated the part where I sat across from Cam, mouthing silent nonsense words to each other because I got paranoid and decided that he was telling me “you’re fat, you’re fat, you’re fat.”
I hated that we were there all day. And it was a long day. I hated how pretend all the action seemed to be. It was disjointed, out of order, mostly silent. We would film a crowd dancing and then be at tables eating on a different day and then William Sadler would be on a balcony giving reaction shot after reaction shot. I had gone to see Iron Man 3 the night before, where Mr. Sadler plays the president, and then that day I got to dance next to him, an honest-to-god celebrity who was delightful.
I met someone who worked from the local news. He’d been promised a small part in addition to his extra work, but he wore a shirt with words on it and so got immediately recast. They wouldn’t let him leave and come back with a new shirt because being on a set is a teensy tiny bit like being in detention. (I’m assuming; I’ve never actually been in detention. Although I’ve never been to prison either, that was the first word that came to mind. But I decided against it because I hate it when movie stars--LIKE ME--complain about their lives or compare their trivial experiences to actual hardships).
I left at the very first opportunity, probably 12 hours after I’d arrived, starving to death. The guy from the local news found me on FB, and we’re still friends there. He moved to NYC to follow his dreams of being a stand up but--this is probably the meanest thing I’ve ever said--he is not funny. Every jokey post from him is a reminder of that weird, weird day. But that was also such a cool experience, of being on an actual movie set. It really did a lot for our town, brought work to a lot of people, and let us all feel like movie stars. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
...EXCEPT a different fucking movie. I really got my hopes up for the premier. I wanted to see myself on the big screen, I wanted to finally find out the plot of the movie we’d all been talking about, and I wanted to be able to describe the whole thing to my coworker Adam, who’d known my prof for most of his life.
Here’s the gist (*spoiler alert for a movie you will never see): my prof plays a prof (surprise) whose life is kind of falling apart (dying dad, wife leaves him after a miscarriage). He’s into this student (surprise) who gets raped by William Sadler, the head of the department. Building to that, the student is caught between my prof and Sadler and wanting to be a serious classicist. But then she is raped and my prof tells her that’s part of the pain and hard work it takes to become an academic the end.
Fuck. That.
What kind of sexist fucking bullshit is that, that a woman being raped by the head of a department is in any way anything other than a crime? That for a woman to be taken seriously in academia, she has to be raped, initiated in this most violent and inexcusable way?
That plot came from the mind of a man I’d been studying under for years, someone I’d looked up to. I felt sick.
I also looked pretty sick up there (sick in the good way), dancing and nonsense word talking and taking comically quick sips of nothing from my unmarked bottle.
So yeah, I’m in a movie. I can do the Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon on myself now. I ended up there because I was the least confident classicist I’ve ever met and seeing the movie shattered something inside me, but it was pretty cool, I think?
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