The Martini Shot

by George Pelecanos

  As we neared the start of the first shot, the executive producers arrived, and immediately the tenor of the crew changed. People stood straighter and worked faster. There was less joking around and grab-assing than there was when I was in charge of the set. The big guns were in the house.

  Bruce Kaplan was the show’s creator, head writer, and showrunner. His partner was Ellen Stern. Ellen was not a writer but rather a general of sorts who hired and fired crew, kept the trains running on time, negotiated with the vendors, and brought the show in on budget. They complemented each other and made a good, efficient team. The credits listed five executive producers, but Bruce and Ellen were the only two who actually worked on the day-to-day production. Today they looked very tired, with black circles under their eyes, ill-fitting clothing, and uncombed hair. The hours and craft services were a killer for everyone, and they had the added pressure of bringing the show in on budget and taking the calls of the cable execs.

  I had no desire to do or learn Ellen’s job, and no ambition to become an EP, so there was little friction between us. I had a decent relationship with both of them, though I was “just” a writer/producer and was kept out of the loop on major decisions. As for Bruce, he was respectful to the writing team but tended to rewrite our scripts in a rather mercenary fashion. I was good with that, for the most part; I knew that there had to be one voice for the show and uniformity from episode to episode. But my ego was such that I felt he cut some of my best stuff at random. On the other hand, he sometimes made my writing better, and unlike other showrunners, who put their name on scripts they reworked, he always gave me sole credit. After a while I learned to beat the game and began to write in Bruce’s voice rather than my own. It was another thing I’d given up. I was a long way from my youth, when I’d wandered the stacks of the county libraries and dreamed of someday being a published novelist. I had become a writer, in a manner of speaking. But mainly I was a well-paid hack.

  I said hello to Bruce and updated him on our progress. “We’re just about to shoot.”

  “You have a laptop?” he said.

  “There’s one in my trailer.”

  “I’m gonna need you to do a little rewrite on scene forty-two.”

  “Hold up.” I fished my blue script (the blues) out of my book bag and turned the pages to the scene. It was a restaurant scene (INT. CAFÉ, UPTOWN—DAY) where Tanner and Hart discuss a case in dialogue overripe with lame double entendres. Brad Slaughter was a pro and would read the lines. Meaghan O’Toole would be the problem.

  “Meaghan called me first thing this morning,” said Bruce. “She thinks the scene makes her out to be a slut rather than a professional.”

  “What’s her beef, exactly?” I asked, disingenuously.

  “I’m guessing it’s the part about the in-box.”

  I pretended to study the lines, but I already knew the trouble spot. In the scene, Mackenzie tells Tanner that she needs the arrest report A-SAP so she can get started on the prosecution of the case.

  TANNER

  Where do you want the report?

  MACKENZIE

  Just put it in my in-box.

  TANNER

  It’ll be my pleasure.

  “Oh,” I said. “That. How about if I just have her say, ‘Shove it in my box’?”

  “Asshole. And what’s that bit about what he’s gonna have for lunch?”

  “What? All he says is, ‘I’m partial to fish.’”

  “And then the action says, She smiles demurely.”

  “I’ll change it, boss.”

  “Get it done. We’re publishing pinks today, and the scene’s up this afternoon.”

  “Right.”

  “Crazy fucker.” Bruce smirked a little and went off to craft services for a Slim Jim and some peanut butter crackers.

  We were ready to shoot. The second second called “last looks,” and the hair and makeup crew went in to touch up the actors. Lomax and Lillie were in the first row of chairs, right in front of the monitors. I was in the second row, behind them. The second AC slated the scene on camera by slapping the sticks.

  “Camera.”

  “Speed.”

  “Action!”

  We rolled. I watched the first take to make sure Lomax was getting what we needed. Among the actors, there was one dreaded ham.

  “Anything, Victor?” said Lillie, after Lomax had cut it.

  “Tell Board Member One to say his lines as I wrote them,” I said, referring to a day player who was being far too creative.

  “I’ll do that,” she said, and went in to give him the note.

  “He’s playing it too defensive, right?” said Lomax, turning to me.

  “Well, he did kill the teller,” I said. “But we don’t want him to telegraph it. It’s a reveal for later on.”

  “He’s making a meal out of it.”

  “Yeah, guy thinks he’s Larry fucking Olivier.”

  “I’ll tell him to bring it down,” said Lomax.

  When Lillie returned to the Village, I told her I was going to my trailer for a little while. She said she’d call me if anything came up.

  I saw Annette out on the street, showing Ellen something she had drawn in a sketchbook. Ellen was nodding her head in encouragement while giving Annette some suggestions. Ellen’s cell rang and she walked down the block to take the call. I approached Annette, who was wearing brown velvet pants tucked into dark brown, buckled boots, and a tan newsboy cap with tiny mirrors across the bill.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hey. What are you up to?”

  “Just showing Ellen how I plan to dress the nightclub in one-thirteen.” She opened the spiral book and showed me some sketches. “What do you think of these?”

  “They’re beautiful,” I said, looking at her breasts, standing up firm in her scoop-necked shirt.

  “Stop it,” she said. She had instantly blushed.

  I lowered my voice. Crew was walking by us, standing about.

  “I can’t help it,” I said.

  “People are looking at us.”

  “No, they’re not. Remember last night?”

  “I’m not an amnesiac.”

  “It was good, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m hard as a two-by-four right now.”

  “Victor.”

  “And thick as a can of Coke.”

  “Vic.”

  “Okay, I’ll stop. But damn, girl, you were hot.”

  “We were.”

  “Will I see you later?”

  “I’ll be around. Where you off to?”

  “I’ve got to rewrite a scene for Number Two.” We were supposed to call Meaghan O’Toole “Number One,” since she was the lead actress in our show. But we often called her Number Two. As in, doo-doo.

  “Good luck.”

  “Check you later, beautiful.”

  I watched her walk toward her car.

  My trailer was around the corner. I went there and rewrote the scene.

  The company moved for the next two scenes to a café uptown. The first featured Meaghan O’Toole and a day player, cast as a confidential informant who was also a possible suspect in a rape/murder case, the B-line of this episode. The second featured O’Toole and Brad Slaughter, meeting that same night to discuss the information conveyed in the previous scene, as well as to go back and forth with the aforementioned double entendres, now softened to accommodate the actress. It was improbable that both scenes would occur in the same café, but for the purposes of logistics and scheduling, I had written them there.

  Meaghan arrived on set, regally stepping out of her van, trailed by the hair and makeup crew and their Zucas, storage containers on rollers that they also sat on. The makeup department head, Donna Yost, had phoned me on my cell and given me an update on Meaghan’s mood. The hair and makeup trailer was a good source of information for the temperature of the actors on any given day. That morning, Meaghan had been complaining about her trailer, how it was smaller than
the producers’ trailers and smelled of “sewerage,” so I knew her knickers would be up in a twist.

  She was in one of three rather dowdy outfits that she insisted upon wearing, which drove the cable execs and the costume department batty. She favored black slacks and vertical-striped shirts worn out to cover her widening bottom, and comfortable, asexual clogs on her feet. Meaghan, black-haired with emerald green eyes, was an attractive individual by most standards. In fact, if one didn’t know her, a person might even find her desirable. But we knew her.

  In the middle of the first rehearsal, she stopped reading from her sides and waved her hands in a theatrical show of impatience.

  “Who writes this shit?” she said, musically, with a smile, looking around at the crew for some reaction to her joking tone, as if that excused her insult.

  “That would be me,” I said, standing nearby.

  “I know, darling,” she said. “And ordinarily, Victor, I love your words. Of course, I’m no writer, but…” Here she pretended to carefully study the dialogue. “Why in the world is she asking this guy if he likes her shoes?”

  “Well, she suspects he’s a rapist and a killer. She’s trying to determine if he has a shoe fetish. The victim was redressed after her murder. She’d been wearing flats because she’d just come off work. She was a cocktail waitress and she wore comfortable shoes. But when her body was found, she was wearing ankle straps with four-inch heels. Remember? ”

  I was asking if she’d read the entire script, and not just her scenes.

  “Of course I remember.” Meaghan’s eyes went from reason to ice, a change I knew well; it was as if some inner switch had been thrown, like the tilt light on a pinball machine. “But when I ask the CI if he likes my shoes, it makes me out to be some kind of vacuous shopping queen or something. I’m an assistant district attorney, Victor, an A-D-A. I’m not a fucking housewife.”

  The day player had reddened a bit, and grips and electric, bored with her antics, had settled in for what they thought might be a long argument. Some even stepped away from the set. When Meaghan’s name was on the call sheet, the morale of the crew went down the toilet.

  I could have been contentious, but I had to pick my battles, and wasted time on a shoot meant overages and expenses. Keeping my cool was where I earned my money.

  “Okay,” I said. “What would you like to say, Meaghan?”

  “You’re the writer.”

  “How about, ‘Do you like shoes’?”

  “It’s rather generic. I mean, everyone likes shoes, don’t they? But I suppose that would be fine.”

  I was always defusing bombs and putting out fires with her. When she was off her meds, it was even worse. Mostly, she just made us all tired.

  The rehearsal ended, the crew had the set, and a half hour later Meaghan returned from her trailer to do the scene and get into her position. We waited for her to do her mouth exercises, and then we shot it. It took a long while; the day player was nervous in Meaghan’s presence, and when we turned around on him he continually flubbed his lines. He grew more nervous as she coached him on the finer points of acting, and then directed him, to the annoyance of Lomax, our actual director. Now we were behind.

  The next scene, between Meaghan and Brad, had to be lit day-for-night. The camera crew changed lenses and filters, and the grips laid down the tracks. I watched my friend Skylar directing his lamp operators, rigging gaffers, and rigging electricians as they set up the lights. I could tell that he was listless and off his game. And then I saw his girlfriend, Laura, approach him, fresh out of the wardrobe trailer, carrying some shirts on hangers.

  Laura Flanagan was a slight young woman who today wore oversized aviators, a shirt off one shoulder, skinny jeans, and leopard-print spectators. She was in her early twenties, but she looked seventeen. The two of them had a brief, joyless discussion before she moved away and walked toward me, her head down, attempting to hide her emotions. I could see tears behind the amber lenses of her shades.

  Lunch, scheduled six hours after call time, was in a church auditorium near the second location. Our caterer did a good job of feeding our army, but even a Parisian chef would have trouble pleasing this crew after several months of shooting and eating the same-tasting food, day in, day out.

  We served ourselves cafeteria style, with two lines of people filling their plates on either side of a long table. Salad, bread, vegetables, pasta, beans and rice, chicken, beef, pork, fish, and dessert were usually on the menu, with some half-assed food event (Taco Day, Burger Day) thrown in on occasion. Sometimes we just couldn’t face the catering grub and went off to nearby restaurants or fast-food joints, and sometimes we substituted naps for chow. The best that could be said about lunch was that the food was free, plentiful, and filling. It was also a needed break in our day.

  Tables had been set up, and normally people sat with their friends, which generally meant the ones within their departments. The Teamsters were fed first, per their contracts, another source of Lazy Teamster jokes that went around from shoot to shoot.

  What did Jesus say to the Teamsters?

  Don’t do anything until I get back.

  What do Teamsters’ kids do on weekends?

  Stand around and watch the other kids play.

  Teamsters were easy to ridicule, unless you needed one in a pinch, and then they came through. They were some of the most genial people on the crew when you got to know them, and also the toughest, along with our security staff, the gaffers, and the grips.

  Some days I sat with Annette and her contingent, if they were around for lunch, and other days I sat with the hair and makeup folks, mostly women, the best-looking and most stylish people on set. I was just a man, no deeper than any other, and I liked the company of nice-looking females when I was breaking bread. But their table was full that day, so I sat with my boys, Van and Eagle, and a few other folks we liked: Kenny “G” Garson (picture car coordinator), Jerome Hilts (a camera dolly grip), and Victoria Lewis, our locations manager, who was normally out scouting but had stopped in for lunch. Lomax was eating with Ellen, Bruce, and the lead actors at another table. Skylar had disappeared.

  “When’s the next script gonna drop?” said Kenny, looking across the table at me. He was fifty-five, with a gray Vandyke, short gray hair, a barrel chest, and a bearish belly. Kenny found us the cars that were featured on camera. If I was to have another job on a film crew, it would be his. It seemed to me that it would be fun. But he had his pressures like everyone else.

  “Yeah, Vic,” said Victoria. “When?”

  Like all department heads, they were eager to get the next script as early as possible, so they could get a jump on their prep. It was counterproductive to give them the details I was aware of, because more often than not, scenes and locations changed. At night, Annette prodded me for the same information, but she had an advantage over them. I spilled for her.

  “I don’t know,” I said, and then, by way of explanation, “Bruce is writing it.”

  “Ugh,” said Victoria, a savvy local who knew the city and its players, and seemed to be able to get us in damn near every door. She also knew that Bruce Kaplan always wrote his scripts at quarter to midnight.

  “Sorry,” I said. “The good news is, we’re going to beat out one-fourteen tomorrow, and then I can go off and start writing it. So if I have any intel on that one, I’ll let you know.”

  “So the brain trust is about to meet,” said Jerome, our grizzled dolly grip. Jerome was the senior member of the crew. While producers could work well into their sixties, most crew who worked on-their-feet jobs didn’t make it past their forties. The work was just too taxing on the body, and the hours were ridiculously long. Jerome was fifty-eight, an avid reader, curious about politics, with the weathered, leathery face of an old sailor, the under bite of a Cro-Magnon, and the forearms of Popeye. He was an intellectual and a bull.

  “What do you guys do in that writers’ room?” said Kenny, with a twinkle in his eye. “Discuss, yo
u know, character motivations? Do you talk about your feelings and stuff?”

  Kenny, like much of the crew, thought a writer’s job was easy, which was not true, and less physically demanding than the jobs of other crew members, which was. Crew liked to believe that writers were soft, which was one reason I did two hundred push-ups and sit-ups in my room daily, without fail, no matter what time I wrapped. It confused the grips to see a guy in my profession who was also in shape. Plus, I was vain. When I stripped off my shirt at night and walked toward Annette, waiting in my bed, I wanted her to want me.

  “Yeah,” I said, “we bounce idea balloons around the room. And we wear togas and crowns of ivy, and we tickle each other and laugh a lot, and then we eat grapes.”

  “What happens when you get sleepy?”

  “We lie down on our sit-upons and take naps.”

  “You guys have the best job,” said Kenny.

  “I know.”

  “But you must get tired sitting in that chair all day. With your name on it.”

  “It hurts my back a little. I think I need one that reclines. Like a La-Z-Boy.”

  “If it was motorized, that would be my department,” said Kenny. “Maybe I can find you one with an engine in it.”

  “That’s kind of you, man. That way I won’t have to walk, either.”

  “I wish I was as smart as you, Vic.”

  “You don’t have to be smart. Being a writer is easy. Anyone can do it. You should give it a try, Kenny.”