How do you make an actor vomit on camera? This has been a fascination of mine recently, perhaps due to a comment from one of my professors. It's always nice to see a distinguished, elderly academic say something like, "Vomiting on screen is the ultimate form of sincerity." It gives me hope for my future. That said, I'm not going to use this forum to produce the much needed academic essay on screen vomiting. I had to watch 'The Wire' for class, and there's quite a bit of vomiting in that, and we also saw Red Road from British director Andrea Arnold, which has one of the best screen vomiting scenes I've ever seen (and I have to say, one of the best screen sex scenes as well). So it's only natural that I've been thinking a lot about barfing.
Honestly, I'm not completely sure how you go about making someone puke on screen. From my many years of film study, it seems that there are two main ways that it happens: the actor just puts some nasty stuff in his/her mouth and spits it out on cue, or steps are taken to actually make the person vomit. This latter form, clearly the more hardcore of the two, is really going that extra step for 'sincerity.' As a filmmaker, I've only tried the screen vomit myself once, and it was in a movie I worked on in college. I admit, we didn't go all out on the real vomiting, but my actor probably would have if I'd asked. To be fair, his sound effects sold it pretty well.
Mentioning this film in a piece on vomiting is unfortunately fitting in another way, as the mere thought of that film makes me actually want to vomit. Its memory is quite possibly the reason why I am hesitant to help Felipe with his various filmmaking contests, and it's just one of many film-related memories that have made me into the cinematic equivalent of an angry old man.
Back when I was a young 21, I learned that PBR (that's Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer) was holding a contest for local filmmakers to produce a commercial for them, and the winner received a year's supply of PBR. This was amazing, as PBR was my favorite working class beer. That is, until it was co-opted by these assholes. As pissed as I may be about that, I'm not here to badmouth hipsters and how their cheap asses are obviously responsible for the recession. I'm here to be pissed about other things.
I was determined to win my year's supply of PBR, but I knew I couldn't do it alone. I decided to enlist the help of my college buddies, who were (still are, probably) also drunks. I explained the scenario and they enthusiastically agreed. Making movies about beer? Drinking beer for the movies? Getting beer as a result? Immediately I could see the determination in their eyes. I had never witnessed anything like it... the thought of free beer made them into a well oiled machine: they became writers, producers, cast and crew, setting up lights and discussing set design. It was amazing to see them transform from a band of belligerent drunks into a band of belligerent filmmaking drunks. It was kind of like The Mighty Ducks but with drunk idiots instead of kids, and I was their Emilio Estevez. With our powers combined, we managed to produce these two commercials. It's a hell of an accomplishment to make a movie for the first time, and these guys, with absolutely no experience and two 30 packs of PBR in their guts, had done a pretty fucking decent job. I was a proud coach.
Then, the best bit. We submit our films, go to the contest which was conveniently located at a bar, and wait for the screening to start. Some jagoff walks up to the mic. "Hey guys, thanks for coming. As many of you know, the contest has been canceled."
...
Get. Fucked.
I looked over at my lead actor... little Prashant... fuck... maybe the best actor I've ever worked with. I could see the tears in his eyes. He looked at me for some semblance of an answer, like a child upon learning that Santa Claus is really just Jesus. I had nothing to say.
Apparently PBR had canceled the contest for "insurance reasons." If you can't tell, I am currently making the 'jerking off' hand motion. Christ. Even my lovable band of drunks, who had worked so hard on this film just to get a year's supply of beer and pride, had been fucked by the industry. Figures. The bar screened the movies. Well, some of them. The ancient DVD player wouldn't play half the DVDs. Ours included. I sat there, infuriated, staring into my glass of PBR as it mocked me with an unforeseen future of Hipsterdom. This isn't how The Mighty Ducks was supposed to end. We were supposed to be victorious, and go out in a blaze of alcohol-fueled destruction of public property. But no. Here we were, drunk failures, just like when we started. The jagoff returns to the mic, carrying a giant box. "Hey guys, we've got some consolation prizes for everybody who participated." We saw our chance. "Gentlemen," I said, "go get consoled." My drunks muscled their way through the crowd and robbed the guy blind. PBR merch for all! I still wear that PBR hat, my trophy, knowing that that contest was ours to win. Fuck it. A consolation prize is still a prize.
As I look back on those early filmmaking days and watch Lev spit beer into a toilet, I think that perhaps screen vomiting is like screen crying. No physical action need be taken: just the recall of a particularly brutal memory. If I were acting in a vomit scene, all I would have to do is think of little Prashant's face that dreadful night as he learned that all our hard work had gone for naught. Soon enough, the bile and the tears begin welling up. Still, I think about how my band of drunks made a movie and it makes me happy. But it's a bitter happiness. Bitter as the bile of vomit. Bitter as the taste of PBR.
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