The Rough Cut

by Douglas Corleone

Above the chirping of the coqui frogs and whistling of the crickets, I could hear my own teeth grating, my own gut rumbling. I swallowed down the brick rising in my throat.

  The light barely arched over us.

  Seconds later, Brody sighed in relief. Thankfully, as so many of my classmates and colleagues have kindly reminded me over the years, my cough sounds less like the human reflex of throat-clearing and more like the yelp of an asthmatic dog.

  Following a cursory scan with the flashlight, the foursome unanimously dismissed the sound as Tantalus wildlife and resumed their talk. Fukumoto asked a few questions, Ethan grumbled a few answers, then the detective ordered the two uniforms to assist with the search of the house.

  ‘I’d like to speak to Ethan for a minute or two, alone,’ Fukumoto told them.

  The story Ethan told Detective Fukumoto that night would evolve over the next few months. But it always started with Craigslist.

  That evening, at around six p.m., as the sun started to sink into the Pacific, Ethan began to itch. He became antsy and irritable, couldn’t sit still and watch the evening news, even though in all the months they’d been together he’d never once missed Piper doing the weather.

  He logged onto his laptop and punched in the address for the popular classified-ad website. On the Craigslist homepage, Hawaii was already pulled up. He clicked on Oahu then browsed the selections; he’d forgotten how he found Guy, who he’d been using the past several months.

  Ethan checked the personals first: the strictly platonic, the casual encounters, the missed connections. Although internet hookups weren’t really his thing, he knew most of the codes. ‘Fun times’, for instance, means looking for a one-nighter; ‘DDF’ means drug and disease free; ‘water works’, well, that one sort of speaks for itself.

  But Ethan wasn’t looking for sex, and he sure as shit wasn’t looking to get peed on. So he turned to the For Sale section and clicked on Farm+Garden.

  There were plenty of ads for 420, Mary Jane, medicinal and violet. He could score plenty of Molly or Tina, he could even go ‘skiing’. But he saw no H, no horse, no dragon, no mud, no junk. No chiva, no scat, no scag, no sack, no skunk. What was that goddamn term he needed to search for? What keywords had Guy used before he got pinched last week for felony distribution of narcotics?

  Ethan finally happened on it by accident, happened on it because he still technically shared, with four other guys, a shitty top-floor apartment up North Shore in Waialua, where heavy rains had recently caused the ceiling of the bedroom/closet he sometimes slept in to spring a leak. So, on Craigslist, he dropped into the Materials section and clicked on an ad for ‘roofing tar’.

  Roofing tar. That was it. He smacked his head, exhaled audibly and typed a brief email in the hopes of setting up a meet.

  Then he waited. And waited. Paced around Piper’s house for over an hour, refreshing his inbox obsessively.

  No word.

  Since Piper wasn’t hip to the whole heroin scene, at around eight p.m., when he heard her Jag in the driveway, Ethan tucked away his laptop and turned on the TV.

  She kissed him on the cheek, went upstairs, changed into her favorite University of Hawaii shorts and T-shirt, then returned to the living room, where she and Ethan sat together, silently, watching the animated adult comedy Sausage Party on VUDU.

  Hilarious, but Ethan’s mind was elsewhere. So when roughly an hour into the movie, Piper hit pause for a bathroom break, Ethan hastily checked the inbox on his laptop again.

  Sure enough, the Craigslist guy had replied: Call me from a pay phone. That and an 808 telephone number comprised the entire message.

  A pay phone? Ethan thought. Where the hell am I going to find a pay phone?

  Then he remembered. There was one at the gas station where he bought his Zig Zags. Even closer than that, there was one at the top of Tantalus at Pu‘u ‘Ualaka‘a State Park, where tourists went to gawk at a twenty-five-mile swath of the island, from Barbers Point to Diamond Head.

  ‘I’ve gotta run out for a minute,’ he told Piper as soon as she made it back to the living room.

  Depending on when Ethan was asked, Piper either shrugged her shoulders, said ‘Coolio,’ or asked him to pick up some Tampax while he was out.

  Ethan never drove his pickup when he could walk, so he started up the mountain on foot. It took him roughly fifteen minutes to make it to the park at the top. He went straight for the single pay phone nestled between the two restrooms. From about ten feet away he could tell that the silver phone cord was cut. He turned and cursed inwardly, then, without touching the pay phone in any way, started back down the mountain.

  Sixteen minutes later, this:

  911:[A female voice] Where is your emergency?

  JAKES:My name is Ethan Jakes. Hurry! Please!

  911:OK, what’s happened, sir?

  JAKES: [Panicky] My girl, she’s had an accident or something!

  911:What kind of accident?

  JAKES:I don’t know! Maybe she fell, OD’d, fucking electrocuted herself!

  911:Is she conscious?

  JAKES:Her head is bleeding.

  911: Sir, is she conscious?

  JAKES: What?

  911:Is your girlfriend conscious? Is she awake?

  JAKES:No!

  911:Is she breathing?

  JAKES: Hurry! Just … Please, hurry!

  911:Sir, I’ve already dispatched an ambulance.

  JAKES:[sobbing] Thank you, thank you, thank you.

  911:Again, sir, is she breathing?

  JAKES: Thank you.

  911:Sir, is your girlfriend breathing?

  JAKES:No, for Christ’s sake, she’s facedown in the fucking pool!

  911:In the swimming pool?

  JAKES:That’s what I said!

  911: Have you tried getting her out of the water?

  JAKES: What? Oh, God, you’ve got to hurry.

  911:Sir, I want you to get your girlfriend out of the water right away.

  JAKES:Shit. Shit, OK.

  911: But do not disconnect this call.

  [PLUNGE]

  [Eleven seconds of silence]

  JAKES:[Yelling from a distance] She’s not breathing! She’s not fucking breathing!

  911:Sir?

  JAKES: [Barely audible] She’s gone, she’s fucking gone.

  [WATER MOVING]

  911:[Louder] Sir?

  [WET FEET ON PAVEMENT]

  911: [Louder still] Sir, are you there? Sir, I need to—

  [CALL DISCONNECTS]

  FIVE

  It’s 4:32 in the morning when I hear the key in the lock of the door directly behind me. I stab at the keyboard to prevent the 911 call from repeating itself, although at this moment it’s as clear as any song in my head.

  I’m sweating, my palms are wet, the surface of the control panel in front of me is slippery. Despite the heat, I’ve developed chicken skin up and down my arms and legs.

  I stand and turn to face the door. It’s all I can do in this shoebox of an editing room. There’s nowhere to run and hide.

  The key stops, without the door opening. Which suddenly unnerves me even more. Is it a stranger trying random locks, is it a burglar with no key at all?

  I try to convince myself I’m being paranoid, that being locked alone in a tiny room all day and night, watching footage concerning a violent murder, is making my imagination run amok. But if this trial proved anything, it’s that you can never truly know anyone, and that no earthly geographic location is entirely safe.

  The key in the lock again, only this time it turns. The door creeps open and a man’s hand slithers through the crack. Followed by his canvas sandals, his khaki cargo shorts, and finally his furry face.

  ‘Brought you malasadas,’ Brody says.

  Deep breaths. ‘From Leonard’s?’ I ask.

  Malasadas are Portuguese confections popular here in the islands, and Leonard’s are by far the best.

  ‘From the all-night ABC Stor
e down the street.’

  With a heavy sigh, I sit and swivel my chair back to the monitor. ‘Thought that counts and all, BQ.’

  ‘Come on, Rye, cut me a break.’ He glances at the screen. ‘You finished logging?’

  ‘Finally, yeah. There are hundreds of hours of footage and it takes ten times as long to look at, log and label it. And I was doing it all alone.’

  ‘Really? This again?’ Beneath his beard an unmistakable smirk. ‘Who found this case?’

  I chuckle. ‘Pretty sure I would have heard of it.’

  ‘Yeah, the next morning, once you’d missed the shot of the body in the water.’

  ‘There are plenty of crime scene photos.’

  He scoffs. ‘You know damn well the difference the footage I took that night is going to make in this film.’

  ‘OK, fine!’ I throw up my hands. ‘When you’re right you’re right, and you’re right.’

  ‘Was that sarcastic?’

  ‘No,’ I say, sarcastically.

  ‘Riles …’

  ‘Ew, don’t call me that.’

  ‘Then stop calling me BQ, especially in the script.’

  ‘It’s a space saver. Leaves a lot of white paper.’

  ‘I hate that name,’ he mutters. ‘Have you thought about what we’re going to play over that opening shot?’

  My turn to scoff. ‘From, like, the minute I heard it.’

  ‘Church’s opening statement, right?’

  ‘No, the nine-one-one call.’

  ‘Why the nine-one-one call?’

  ‘Because it’s dramatic, because it’s unsettling.’

  ‘Church’s opening is dramatic,’ he says. ‘Church’s opening is unsettling.’

  ‘But this film is about the defendant. His struggle, the question of his fate.’

  Brody shakes his head, steps closer to me. ‘I fundamentally disagree. This film is about Nicholas Church.’

  Hard for me to believe we’re having this conversation at this late stage in the process.

  ‘Nicholas Church has been done to death,’ I tell him. ‘He’s a phenomenal player and he’ll nab the lion’s share of the lines, but there’s already a doc about Nicholas Church.’ I pause, then add: ‘I am not making the sequel to The Prosecutor.’

  ‘I?’

  ‘We, whatever. We are not making the sequel to The Prosecutor.’

  ‘Why aren’t we?’ Brody cries. ‘It was one of the most successful true crime documentaries of all time.’

  I raise my voice till it bounces off the walls of the micro-room. ‘I’m not riding Marissa Linden’s coattails, Brody! I made that clear from the start.’

  ‘You’re not! You’re taking something familiar and adding a twist. That’s how all art is created.’

  ‘How am I adding a twist?’

  ‘Because Church is on the other side. He’s not a prosecutor seeking higher office anymore, he’s a seeker of truth, a defender of the rights of the accused.’

  ‘Marissa’s done updates on Church before, you know. Why don’t you go back to our apartment, spark a bowl, and check them out on Starmax? I have work to do.’

  ‘Marissa hasn’t done another trial, has no interest in doing one. She told us that herself.’

  I finally rise out of my chair to confront him face to face. ‘Do you not get how my film will be compared to hers by every viewer, every critic, every studio in the goddamn world?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So – what if it doesn’t measure up? What if it doesn’t even come close?’

  Brody takes my upper arms in his hands, gently, and kneads each like a kitten before slowly pulling me toward him. Tenderly, he kisses my lips. Lingers like he did in the early days of our relationship.

  ‘We have the footage, Rye,’ he says quietly. ‘You know we do, you were there. This film could be another Staircase, another Jinx, another Making a Murderer.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I say, as I take a step back from him. ‘But it’s not going to be a documentary about Nicholas Church. It’s going to be a film about Ethan Jakes. And it’s going to be titled The Defendant.’

  SIX

  I like to film us, Brody and myself, in the act of making a documentary. I like performing for the camera, like flexing my silver tongue. Like any director, I also like bending the players’ behavior to fit the film I want to make. Or, as Brody puts it, I like playing God.

  Professor Leary forewarned me that the repercussions of this could be calamitous, particularly in this genre of film. ‘Erect that invisible wall,’ he once told me, ‘that unseeable barrier that separates crew from cast. That wall is essential; it has purpose. The less you intrude, the more natural your players will behave. More importantly, the less you influence events, the better your odds of averting a perfect disaster.’

  Sometimes abiding by that rule is harder than others. Sometimes temptations are simply too strong. After all, we do become part of the story, whether we want to or not. From the very beginning, Brody and I remained on call at all times, prepared to capture unforeseen events on a moment’s notice. We attended every court appearance, every press conference, every defense meeting at the Four Seasons. Observed mock trials, listened in on countless conference calls. Over the past several months, Brody and I shared more meals with the defendant and his legal team than most immediate families.

  Naturally, the more time we spend with the individuals we’re filming, the more we want to know them. A good trait, I think. Indispensable even. Because if we want to know these characters, then our audience will, too. ‘Intriguing people are intriguing,’ Professor Leary would say. ‘If they aren’t intriguing, why the fuck are we filming them in the first place?’

  Like any temptation, it’s all a matter of whether we act on it, right? How well we resist is ultimately how well we will be judged. By our audience, by critics, by the internet. Even by the players themselves.

  As editor, sure, I’m given some liberty to polish, to modify, to abridge my own behavior when absolutely necessary. I mean, we all edit our lives to some extent, don’t we? When we tell our story, if we tell our story, it’s limited to the parts we’re eager to tell.

  Hell, even the final story written of us is only ten lines in a local daily, half the lines spent naming our survivors. About us, hardly anything. Our name, our age, our occupation if we had one. Certainly no mention of the laws we broke, of the people we betrayed.

  And in the very end, our lives are pruned to a mere pair of lines: one with our name, the other with our dates. Unless we do something truly astounding in our lifetime. Then we live on, then we leave our mark on the world.

  That’s what this film represents to me. My chance, my fifteen minutes, my moment in the sun. It doesn’t have to be picked up by a major studio, doesn’t have to win an Oscar or Golden Globe. It doesn’t even have to make much money. Just some goddamn form of validation, so that I no longer have to suffer the incessant echo of my father’s voice: ‘See, Riley? I was right, you were wrong.’

  Rational or not, until I’ve created something I’m genuinely proud of, I’ll always feel like I’m no one. With this film, I’m not seeking immortality so much as admission to the human race.

  So it’s only natural to be passionate about the project. To be so rapt by the players that we yearn to alter their lives in some spectacular fashion. Genuine objectivity in this business is simply an impossibility, a pipe dream, a myth. Getting the players so accustomed to us, so disinterested in us, that they ignore us or forget our presence altogether, runs contrary to every instinct we have as human beings. The compulsion is rather to crawl inside these people, to inhabit their skin, to show our audience events through their eyes. Viewing these people as we do – at their rawest, at their frailest, at their most human – isn’t the least bit conducive to emotional distance. No, distance in such instances is pain, is torture, it’s what I imagine blue balls feels like. Why cast ourselves outside just when we most want to be in?

  Is it even possible to resist? />
  I’m in the editing room, rewatching footage, this time with a more critical eye. Since shooting on video is less expensive than buying and processing film, we were able to record far more footage than we need. The downside of having to go through hundreds of hours of audio and images we won’t use is far outweighed by the upside of the dozens of perfect moments – like when Ethan tossed Church and his 6,000-dollar suit into the penthouse suite’s infinity pool – that we wouldn’t have otherwise caught. Our shooting ratio (minutes of footage shot to minutes of footage in the final film) will be roughly 100:1. Which means that for every sixty seconds of brilliant cross-examination from Nicholas Church, there are ninety-nine minutes of bullshit to sort through.

  Because over the length of a criminal case like this one, there is an immense amount of downtime. And that’s when temptation hits hardest. That’s when we most want to spur our players on, push them to act, to react to something, anything. We’re scared witless that a long stretch of nothingness will kill the momentum we so skillfully built from the sidelines. So, occasionally, we do what directors do: we direct. Not in the way that reality TV producers feed their casts lines (I abhor any comparison), but in the sense of merely moving things along, of pushing the players forward, of – in Hollywood parlance – cutting to the chase.

  And then there are times when we inadvertently fall into a power vacuum. Times when there is a complete collapse in front of the camera, and we behind it feel the need to take charge.

  There were several times over the past six months when the defense fell into utter chaos, when communication between Ethan and Church broke down, seemingly beyond repair. During these times, yes, I stepped in. Yes, I broke the rules, consequences be damned.

  But then, as Brody constantly reminds me, it was long before the trial even began that I nudged my first pawn on the chessboard. Even before the arrest and indictment. In fact, if I hadn’t already made myself a part of the story on the night of, I certainly did so the very next morning, around six a.m., when I turned on the television.

  SEVEN

  ‘When you’re filming a unique event such as a criminal trial,’ Professor Leary once lectured, ‘it’s vital to remember that it’s not airing live, that the outcome will already be known. You’re not going to exhilarate your audience with the final score of the 86 Super Bowl. Comparably, in a true crime documentary, you cannot rely on the intrinsic suspense of a whodunit. You need to dig deeper, you need to help your audience fathom the legal process and the emotional toll that it takes on the players. To accomplish that you need to accumulate as much rock-solid visual evidence as possible. And to get it, you need to be ready, willing and able to do whatever it takes, especially these days.’