When I was approached to work with MAC cosmetics on their “Cult of Cherry” video, I balked. For someone so obnoxious, I’m actually very shy; I didn’t think I had the nerve. I kept telling them no, but James Gager, MAC’s creative director, apparently doesn’t take no for an answer. He doesn’t even entertain no.
Instead, he told me to think about cherries, because I would have to talk about them for the camera while making a cherry pie—Gourmet’s July 2007 cover, no less. But cherries weren’t in season at the time, so I looked for inspiration wherever I could get it. I saw someone’s basket of cherry-patterned sheets at my local laundromat and snapped a quick photo, praying no one was looking. I was desperate. Then, like that Wizard of Oz moment when everything goes into color, cherry trees started to bloom all around the city. Displays of bright cherries began popping up in all the markets. As the time for the video shoot drew near, I felt like it was raining cherries.
Thus inspired, I tried to gear up to face the camera. What I lacked in on-screen confidence I thought I could overcome with pie confidence—I have plenty of that. For one thing, I had styled that July cover photo (the recipe was developed by the talented Melissa Roberts), along with my friend and fellow stylist, Jeffrey Miller, who was also going to be involved in this project. We emailed each other with supportive, calming thoughts. But he’s far braver than I am: He did a lovely job in the video, while I squirreled out of showing my face. Only my hands would appear on camera, accompanied by my voice-over.
The day before the shoot, a stream of buff young video assistants kept dropping by the Gourmet offices bearing pie dishes, which I was supposed to fill with cherry pies—seven or eight of them. The pies would be taken to the shoot location, accessible only through a maze of stairwells and a series of narrow hallways that led you to a cavernous soundstage next to Chelsea Market.
The shoot started late, around 11 P.M., and it stretched until well after midnight. The video crew’s energy was remarkably boundless. On the set, “baking” took on a whole new meaning. I was assembling a pie under blazing-hot lights, working deliberately and passing the dough sporadically to my pie-assistant, Greg, for our well-intentioned yet useless attempts at chilling, all the time trying to appear cool and chic—this was MAC, after all.
After the cameras captured pie-making from all angles, it was on to sound. They cleared the set for me, and a furry boom mike was hoisted above my head. Time to talk cherries. Gager and Floria Sigismundi (the video’s director/star) coached me through the cherry chitchat. They encouraged me to say whatever came into my head, promising it would be magically edited together later. I let loose, stammering lines that narrowly bordered on phone sex as Jackie Terrebonne, Gourmet’s special projects editor, looked on nervously: In the magazine we almost never say anything unless it’s been cross-tested, fact checked, proofread, and otherwise approved. But as for my cherry-babble, I can’t swear that cherry trees grow in your stomach if you swallow the pits, and no one has cross-tested whether a lattice pie top can be used as a net to snare a man.
Pinterest
