It's child's play to turn on the engine riding out the trip is hard. The audience is eager to be caught up in something-a story, a vision, a mood-or they wouldn't be there. With movies, just the opposite is often true. Gaston Monescu once observed that beginnings are always difficult. He can see the man who's standing over him except for a blurred reflection in the nearby door, we still haven't. The man in the trenchcoat stops and speaks to him-an older man's voice: “Want a cup of coffee? Want a cigarette?” The young man takes his time looking up, as if he'd been somewhere else, and had already accepted that in that place he would never be spoken to again. There is a young man seated on the ground near the diner entrance, head bowed, legs drawn up to his chest, like a fetus that has learned to sit up. As the engine roar recedes, a trenchcoated back looms in frame right, pauses a beat, then approaches the diner, camera following at elbow level. Fade in on a drab morning, the parking lot of a roadside diner, and the truck itself, a long freighter that hauls itself into, across, and out of a Super-35 frame that, for one satisfying instant, it perfectly fills. Black screen the sound of a truck starting.
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