Dubi is taking too much time setting the scene. We’ve got to evacuate this cellar in two hours, and he’s still stuck in scene three. Rami, the cameraman, is growling under his breath. I’m holding the boom, so I’m being quiet, though I have a bad feeling about this whole thing. Something is wrong, but I don’t know what. Amir, who’s playing the Golem, is really suffering, because he’s wearing this ridiculous cardboard outfit Dubi’s girlfriend created. This is probably the most horrible part of being a film studies undergraduate — having to rely on your fellow students’ girlfriends, boyfriends, parents and, in at least one case I know of, a grandchild, for all the auxiliaries. For poor Amir, of course, the horrible part is right now, being stuck as such an auxiliary, no doubt melting under the two improvised lamps Dubi got in the flea market after finding out that all the university’s lighting equipment was already taken for other students’ productions.
The ground shakes. Dubi says, “Did you feel that?” — and then it shakes again. Some of the stuffed animal heads that we put on the wall (all made of plastic, found at a sale in a costume shop) fall down. Dust is coming up through the floor. Dubi says, “Look at this!” and turns to Rami and says, “Shoot it! Shoot the scene just like that! Is the camera rolling?”
“Yeah.”
“Sound?”
“Yeah,” I say, and raise the boom over Amir’s head.
“Amir, remember your part? You’re rising out of the ground, flailing your hands, but slowly, right? As if you’re in pain. Got it? Scene three take seven, action!”
Amir drops to the ground, into the dust, starts rising up with his cardboard-covered hands above his head, feebly moving, rather pathetic. He starts coughing. I get that loud and clear in my earphones.
Dubi shouts “Cut!” and adds, “OK, we’ll fix this in editing, let’s do another one — ” and the ground shakes again, and in my earphones I hear that something is seriously breaking apart.
“There’s something wrong,” I say.
“Yeah,” Dubi says. “The lighting is all wrong. Let’s try this again with — ” and now there’s another sound, a tearing sound, and I can see, not really believing that I’m seeing it, a gap between the wall and the floor.
“Amazing!” Dubi says. “Is the camera rolling? Rami, are you getting this?”
“Yeah,” Rami says, and my recorder is running too, and in my earphones all hell is breaking loose. Metaphorically speaking. I’m an atheist.
“What’s going on?” Amir says, trying to get out of the cardboard outfit.
“I don’t know,” Dubi says, and there’s that gleam in his eyes, the one like Cameron had when he accepted the Oscar for Titanic, “but this film just turned into a documentary. You’re still rolling, Rami?”
“Yeah,” Rami says. “Keep quiet.”
Everything is shaking, everything is turning loose, and I hear wind building up outside. We’re in a basement, but I still hear it. Then, suddenly there’s no ceiling. The walls are floating, the chairs, the table, the lamps, the camera, we are hovering, and the floor below us rotates slowly. And then I get it.
“It’s a tornado!” I shout. “We’re flying into a tornado!”
“In Tel Aviv?” Dubi shouts back. “Impossible!”
And as the ground below us rolls, faster and faster, and we take off into the sky, and suddenly I think — it’s just like the flying farmhouse in The Wizard of Oz; and I can’t help wondering where we might land, and whether it’ll be in black-and-white or colour.