You're on an Airplane

by Parker Posey

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  I’d get up the nerve to get on wheels again and ride a rental bike to Jill’s Diner to eat breakfast, where the small-town talk of agriculture sounded like radio: “All the rain we’ve had is bad for the onions . . . how’re your onions this summer?” I savored the talk as much as the old-timey breakfast of scrambled eggs and grits and buttered white toast, and a minister I met there even bought my breakfast, as a welcome to town. I rode my bike around Henry Moore’s Large Arch sculpture, which stood outside the main library designed by I. M. Pei—which was across the street from the First Christian Church built by Eliel Saarinen. I’d sit in my car waiting to take Casey under my wing and away from her home to study architecture herself; the metal spire of the North Christian Church (designed by Eliel’s son, Eero Saarinen) was almost two hundred feet high and stood in the frame between Casey and Jin. Haley’s performance in the car as she poured out her grief was spectacular and human.

  I stayed up too late on my last day of working, having drinks at a bar downtown they’d kept open for us privately—John Cho was too recognizable from Star Trek and fans were getting rowdy. We partied with Casey’s mom in the film, Michelle Forbes—“Miksha”—and shared some war stories about being women in show business. I’d miss my flight out of Columbus, thinking it was at one o’clock instead of eleven o’clock, and would receive an email with the news that my mentor in college, Joe Stockdale, had passed that very day. A line I’d said to Jin the first day of work, how his father “meant everything to me,” expressed itself again, there in the airport lounge. The Perimenopausal Puppet Troupe came back to life, speeding their emotions to my awareness—and all that pathos.

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  The move to Marcia’s was emotional. Upheavals happened to the building as well as to the family. Tony had been diagnosed with diverticulitis and was in the hospital while I was shooting Columbus. I came back to a garbage bag of food on the kitchen floor, and saw mice scurrying out. He’d been in too much pain to take it downstairs after he emptied the fridge. His old room was packed to the gills with large boxes, along with my clothes, which hung on a wardrobe rack, and the plants I’d placed on the bookshelves. We bit our nails for two months, hoping Marcia wouldn’t mind my things stuffed in Tony’s old room. She did, though, and I had to move everything upstairs to collect dust there.

  I got Lost in Space and the offer to play Dr. Smith on Netflix while I was moving some things from the country, from the house I’d struggled to keep. I was obsessed with the show as a kid and would wake up before six and watch the static of the TV as it turned to the color bars and the show began. The Robinson family, stranded on their own alien planet, and Dr. Smith, an alien family member. I’d be moving to Vancouver in six weeks for what would be eight months, and get paid to pay homage to a character and show that I loved.

  A few days before Christmas, the last ceiling patch was spackled and sanded. My nose had stopped dripping like a faucet and steroids had gotten rid of an earache that had me truly unbalanced. I brought Marcia upstairs to show her my projector screen. We both loved TCM and an old movie was on, and she loved the renovations. I ran out to dinner with Rob and, afterward, would finally have a quiet night in. I started a bath when I got home and as I waited, Gracie sat with me and we took in the new view with a sense of peace, at last. Until I saw water gushing from under the crack of the bathroom door.

  I grabbed blankets and towels and even took off my clothes to throw on the floor. I called Rob, as I put on warm-ups, shaking, my voice small and afraid of getting into trouble. He talked me down and asked if Marcia had called. “Not yet,” I said, and then she did. It would all be okay in the end, Rob assured me, and wished me luck.

  “Hi, Marcia.” I sounded like a child in trouble.

  “What is happening? Outside my bedroom is dripping!”

  “I’m so sorry, Marcia. The bathtub overflowed.” I said it calmly and then, “I’ll be right down.”

  I met her in her living room and she asked if I was an idiot and I assured her I wasn’t. I was used to my old bathtub, which never overflowed and was louder than the one in the bathroom upstairs and had a thing in it that prevented overflowing. “That chandelier costs a fortune!” she wailed. “What about all the African art?!”

  I helped her move an expensive antique table away from the wall. I moved the Chinese porcelain bowl that held her mail and photographs, which were now wet, as she shouted, “My theater tickets are in there, and ruined!” I moved a large African art mask as she told me it was worth a fortune and irreplaceable. “And it’s Christmas!” she shouted. When she asked me again if I was an idiot I said that I was as I looked at the wall in front of us—how it was sweating as it produced tears that dripped.

  I ran upstairs to get more towels, as gentle drips were falling from the flooded ceiling onto Marcia’s carpet. “Marcia, I will be here in the summer to oversee repairs to whatever damage is done.”

  “I don’t know if you will even be living here next summer!” she said as she walked into her bathroom for more towels.

  I went to bed wondering about my move. Had I made a choice in hopes of a fantasy? Would the reality of it be a nightmare? Was I living in the right place? My friends had been concerned, and it was kind of a crazy thing to do. I’m surprised I fell asleep and slept through the night. The next day I called my dad to tell him the whole story, and we laughed hard about it. I called him on Christmas to tell him how Marcia had offered me a hot toddy for my cold the night before, as well as Eukanuba, and how I said, “I don’t think dog food will help me with this, but maybe you mean echinacea?” We laughed hard about that one, too. It sounded like Marcia was the perfect landlady for me.

  20

  Master of Storms

  I met Woody Allen for Shadows and Fog and Bullets over Broadway back in the nineties. Juliet Taylor has been his casting director for years and he’s never liked the process of meeting actors for roles, so it’s up to her to choose a handful of people she thinks are right for whatever part in whatever film he’s working on that year. She and I had been in Kraków, Poland, together as judges at a film festival, so that’s how I landed in the right timing for Irrational Man. It’s really like that game in Vegas with that wheel that spins and the ball lands in the right place—I don’t even know the name of that thing.

  It was time to reinvent and get creative. I’d met Camille Paglia when we were on The Joy Behar Show, and she gave me her book Glittering Images. A year later, her publicist proposed we make something together; we were emailing trying to figure out what that could be. Something surreal and absurd or meta—a walk-and-talk film at first, where Camille talks about art and culture and architecture and then we have dinner at a restaurant and talk some more (like My Dinner with Andre).

  We’d reference Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona, which Camille knew inside out (it inspired the title of her famous book Sexual Personae), and maybe Anna Kendrick would play a younger actress I’m haunted by. We’d set a scene onstage where I’d perform from the Greek tragedy Medea, with Anna in the wings as my understudy. Camille would be sitting in the audience as a critic—critiquing both Anna and me as we took turns playing the part. The idea of doing an experimental film kept me entertained enough not to obsess about never working as an actor again. I thought about teaching acting classes at NYU and visited the acting department, assisting a class, which was fun.

  My friend Jenn Ruff was an editor and teacher there and collaborating with me on the Camille project, and I took her to Poland as my guest at the festival. We’d take boat rides around Kraków with Juliet and fellow jurors and watch films during the day and hobnob with journalists and filmmakers at night. There’s so much history, dating back to the Stone Age, and then all these baroque-style basilicas and cathedrals—so gothic. The sights had us looking up and down, wherever we walked, which slowed us down. The nuns from all the churches around
the neighborhood had an easier time of it and I even saw a few of them walking briskly, looking at their iPhones.

  I met Benedict Cumberbatch at the hotel, before he ran through a crowd of screaming fan-girls to his limo, and before he was honored for his work in independent cinema that night. I had trouble identifying his work in independent film but gushed about his work as Sherlock Holmes and racked my brain briefly to remember an actress I’d worked with twenty years earlier, a friend of his he’d mentioned. He was wearing a beautiful silver-gray suit that was perfectly tailored and dashed quickly out, leaving me bewildered and a little embarrassed and feeling on the spot.

  Juliet brought me in to meet Woody the week we got back. Everyone knows you meet Woody with one foot out the door, and that meeting him could last just a few minutes—and that the amount of time was no indication of whether or not you’d get cast. I knew the part I was up for was a teacher, so I dressed appropriately and made my way to his office and screening room uptown. It’s in a doorman building with a small lobby and I got there right on time so I could breeze through the casting office and into the screening room, where he was standing and waiting to the left. Juliet was next to him and introduced us.

  I smiled, because I’m a fan, and shook his hand. Juliet’s luggage got lost on the way home from Poland, so we made small talk about that and about Kraków—about the salt mines he wouldn’t be able to visit because of his claustrophobia. He said something like “Juliet wanted us to meet because I am doing a film in Rhode Island and there’s a part you could be right for.” He said he wanted to meet me to make sure I wasn’t crazy. I laughed and assured him that I wasn’t. He went on to say that the movie was starring Joaquin Phoenix. I gushed over Joaquin, calling him soulful and poetic, to which Woody simply said, “Uh-oh.” Since my foot was out the door, it was easy to get out and make my way with the rest of my day.

  I got feedback later on that the meeting went well, that Woody was engaged in the four minutes we spent talking. I’d wait to see if I fit his vision.

  I got a call the next day while I was in the dog run with Gracie, and my manager asked casually if I was going to be home from noon to two o’clock because that was when the “sides” (as the pages in a script are called) would be delivered. We laughed and I actually started crying because that ball on that wheel had landed in that thing in Vegas. “Roulette” is what it’s called. I then dropped Gracie back at the apartment and walked to Trader Joe’s for some groceries, and when I returned my sides were hand-delivered to me.

  There was a cover letter describing the character of Rita: a science teacher, a flirt, in an unhappy marriage, and loose. I didn’t receive a letter that flattered me in any way as an actress but maybe that was some kind of tactic. The title of the movie was WASP, and I smiled when I read the side pages where Rita referred to herself as “the original lapsed Catholic.” How did he know that I was a lapsed Catholic?

  The pages were terrific and he’d captured my voice so distinctly that I wondered if he’d written the pages the night before specifically for my cadence. I began to study the lines, to find clues to the character.

  The writing was so witty and natural, but that’s all I could glean when I put my detective hat on. What the tone was, I had no idea. Nor did I know what happened in the plot or if it was a darker film (like Interiors) or lighter (like Bananas). I got one clue wrong off the bat, though. It wasn’t a Woody Allen film about white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. “WASP” was an acronym for “Woody Allen Summer Project.” It’s hard to see the forest for the trees but I’d be in the thick of Woody’s island soon and game for it all.

  I broke my wrist a few weeks later and it would have to be a part of Rita. There’s something that’s said in acting class when a mistake happens: “Use it.” There are no addendums to that saying, like “even if it’s your right hand that’s needed for everything.” So I rolled with the punches and held back tears at my costume fitting as I crept my newly splinted wrist through shirtsleeves and groaned at myself in Suzy Benzinger’s wardrobe mirror about how puffy those pain pills (and the ice cream I’d eaten to go with them) had made me. Suzy could sense my downward spiral and said something about Woody’s saying I had nice skin, which I didn’t believe for a second.

  I left two weeks later for camera tests and production and to find a place to live in Providence or Newport where we were shooting. I took my truck, a Nissan Frontier my dad had given me from his dealership, and Gracie spent five weeks with Rob. I met Emma Stone in the hair and makeup trailer and she was open, funny, warm, and bright—genuinely supportive and even respectful. Having starred in Magic in the Moonlight, she understood my nervousness, and if you’re around the right people that energy can be close to fun—and it was with her.

  Camera tests were held in a huge soundstage, and offices, like accounting and production, were off to the sides. Our wardrobes were on racks with partition sheets in a dingy room. I passed Joaquin barreling out the double doors, so we hugged our introduction and admitted to our sweating armpits and nerves and laughed as we got called impatiently to go our separate ways—him to change again and me to the camera test.

  The room was huge and dark and the art department had put together a makeshift set with a lamp on a table pushed up against the wall, about fifty feet from camera. There was a line drawn on the floor for camera, to measure distance for the focus puller. They were working quietly, and Emma walked comfortably to and away from camera. In less than ten minutes, she was off and running to another change.

  Danielle Rigby, Woody’s first AD from Australia, greeted me warmly and invited me in as I waited for a new lighting setup. She brought me over to Woody, who was on his iPhone standing close to the wall, away from camera. He asked about my wrist, which was still puffy and stiff but would be fine for shooting. I would just have to wear my splint between takes. He said I could wear the splint if I needed to, but I assured him I’d be alright. We spoke quietly, as if talking would interfere with the world he was shaping—we spoke in church whispers.

  His daughter Manzie, who was twelve at the time, came over and introduced herself. She was spirited and lovely and brought me to meet Woody’s sister, Letty, where they were sitting in director chairs at the video monitor. I put my bag on the back of a chair and Danielle called me over to meet Darius Khondji, the DP, and his camera crew. Woody came over to have a look at me, alternately folding his arms and clasping his hands, as I stood in front of camera.

  It really did feel like church in there, and the crew worked swiftly and in hushed tones. I made small talk and said something stupid like “Wow, we’re shooting in film,” and Woody said something like “Well, this is a movie,” at which I laughed, alone. I turned around and walked to the mark in the back of the room feeling like there was toilet paper on the bottom of my shoe, or that my skirt was tucked into my panty hose.

  Helen Robin, Woody’s longtime producer, had no time to be a realtor while overseeing production, and actors were given a fee to find their own living accommodations. Emma Stone got a house outside of Newport proper, Joaquin would live in Providence around the college campus, and I found a nice 1800s hovel with no air conditioning or bathtub, on the bottom floor of a house just a ten-minute walk from the main part of town, close to the wharf and restaurants.

  I met up with Joaquin to go over our scenes and he kept quiet about the reveal of his character, Abe. It turned out Abe was a psychopath, but my character was in love with him, so why tell me about it? He had more on his plate to deal with, like carrying the whole movie. Joaquin had gained like thirty pounds for the part and we laughed about that, and about how Woody told him not to grow any facial hair or do anything weird when they talked on the phone about working together. Here’s something else that’s funny about Woody: his strong aversion to blue jeans. He asked Suzy what the students would be wearing and she said blue jeans. “No one wears blue jeans,” he said.

  “Students wear blue
jeans,” she responded.

  “No, they don’t,” and that went on until everyone was in khakis.

  My first day of work was on the first day of shooting and I was in the first scene up in the morning as well as the last scene of the day. It was a three-and-a-half-page scene, which is a standard, if long, scene in any movie. I drove the scene with information from the third part of the film, which I knew nothing about. It took place in a bar and there were about a hundred extras there. On Woody’s sets, they call the actors in at the last minute so there’s not too much distraction before we start shooting. I recognized Virginia, his script coordinator, who I’d worked with years ago. She used to be a nun, if you can believe that. I naively thought this was a sign that God was on my side that day, but this would be a day resembling more of a baptism by fire.

  I was milling about briefly before sitting at the bar with Emma for our scene together. When I sat down, Darius leaned over and asked, whispering, if I could sit facing out, since that was where the light would hit my face in the way he liked. “Sure, of course,” I said. Emma would be walking in and I’d notice her and motion for her to sit with me.

  After the first take Woody came over and said, “Are you going to sit like that? Because it looks like you’re waiting for the camera to land on you.” Hilarious. There isn’t much he can say that isn’t funny, even if the joke’s on you and it’s not a joke. I was good-natured and apologized, saying I’d forgotten how to act, that I didn’t know how to do this anymore. I wasn’t going to say, “Darius told me to sit here and he’s your DP,” mostly because it didn’t occur to me. I felt stupid and knew there was a chance I’d be fired and replaced but went with the flow, man.