(Prompt & Picture: First sentence: The hotel was more majestic than expected and took me back in time.)
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The hotel was more majestic than expected, and took me back in time.
It was an exact replica of Moritzburg Castle, down to the (synthetic!) Feather Room, and an imitation set of the film Three Wishes for Cinderella (the one with three magical hazelnuts), in which I had played a minor part.
But the reality was… different.
This was the Off-Peak Season (November to March) and we were not going there to hunt and fish. We had other, more important things in mind.
We were here to shoot another film – one based on reality, because what would be happening would save us loads of money in prosthetics and special effects.
It is a trade secret that the big names in hospitality try and make the most of the space in the hotel when they don’t have clients. They host seminars; they hold conventions and wedding receptions; they use the kitchens to make food for franchises… or they hire out the space to anyone who will rent it.
Here we were, shooting our Horror series for local television, on a shoestring budget.
A friend of a friend of a friend had said that for the following five months, the hotel’s would be hosting, if that is the correct word, some 400 physicians, to train on cadavers and body parts, and bio-safety risks be dammed.
The same friend of the friend and his coterie had pulled strings to get us permission to shoot any macabre scenes we wanted, against a fee, of course, without having to go through the process of constructing our own set and producing our own dummies… because then bodies were for real.
No one knows who is inside a Haz Mat suit, especially when the angles to shoot a scene are chosen well… so the doctors could be extras, too. If all went according to plan, we could have the series in the can way before the five months were up.
The way the event rooms were set up, made them a perfect backdrop for our purposes. The Emergency Room windows were draped in cobwebs, and the serving staff uniforms doubled up as medical uniforms, with the judicious use of face masks, clogs, scrub watches, and important-looking folders. Some of the actors wore scrubs, for more verisimilitude.
So, there we were; doctors and students from the medical schools, film crew, actors, hotel Management… and cadavers… one big, happy, family.
Since I was responsible for writing up the blurbs, and articles for different media, I had to ask a few questions. Make that a million. I discovered that the cadavers (a word that was preferable to ‘bodies’) are mostly (mostly?) acquired through body brokers.
These latter-day, sanitary version of grave-diggers, are organisations obtaining bodies donated to science. I was wryly amused to find out that these companies call themselves as “non-transplant tissue banks”, thus neatly side-stepping the regulations that engulf the organ-and-tissue-transplant field that has to abide by draconian rules.
What actually happened is another story for another day.
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