Backdrop

by C. G. Cooper

  Cooper stared and gave a slow nod.

  Barnes cleared her throat. “Damn, I think I got an idea for more dialogue. So you leave speaking to the professionals, huh?”

  Andy looked at her and smiled sheepishly. “I don’t know how to play this game. I only know how to live.”

  “You know,” said Cooper, “I always considered myself a quick study. I mean, I thought I knew people. I’m eighty-five and thought by now I must have had it all figured out. When I first saw you, I thought, ‘What a stick up his ass that boy’s got.’ But you got it pulled out, son. You got it pulled out.”

  When the night was over, Andy paid for the meal—Coles was going to have to pay the bill so why not? — and drove back to Burbank in a thoughtful state of mind.

  He could do this.

  Chapter Five

  “What is your assessment of Ashburn?” Coles’s voice was harsh and tinny over the phone. It sounded like he had Andy on speaker.

  “I don’t like her.”

  “I didn’t ask you for an emotional weather report.”

  It was five a.m., PST, and Andy’s body couldn’t sleep anymore. Heading west through the time zones always hit him that way. Not that he minded; he could survive without sleep, and he loved being up before the rest of the world. He walked out onto the third-floor balcony. The tree cover was the color of weathered pine boards. A single match would burn them all down in a matter of hours.

  “I don’t like her, but I can work with her.”

  “I didn’t ask that either.”

  “Listen, so far she’s legit. But it’s early. You went to all the trouble of setting this up, so I’ll give it to you straight: My gut tells me she’s no terrorist spy.”

  Coles grunted and Andy suppressed a smile that he knew his boss would have heard over the phone line.

  “What did she have to say about me?” Andy asked.

  The man laughed in his ear.

  “I knew it,” said Andy. “You’ve been in touch with her.”

  “Andrews, did you really think I was gonna send you in as a lone wolf?”

  “It’s the kind of thing that appeals to you.”

  “Not a chance. Not with something this important. She checks out with me too. But I want you to keep an eye on her and her boyfriend.”

  “The prince.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Hear any chatter?”

  “Only that several factions within his own country want him dead. Nothing too serious.”

  “What else is new? Anything else?”

  “Yes, just one more thing: Serena Ashburn thinks you’re an ass. But Cooper gave you the pass, so she says she’ll work with you.”

  Andy blinked. “Hold on. Jack Cooper’s in on this?”

  “No. But she trusts his opinion.”

  “Are you still holding back on me, sir?”

  “She did say you found a couple of good ones,” Coles continued, unabated. “Diamonds in the rough. Especially one young actor—Something Dell. But when she tried to give him a callback he turned her down. Going to see a recruiter, I think were his exact words. Your doing, Ashburn said.”

  “Huh. Glad to hear it. He say which branch of the service?”

  “You know damn well which branch.”

  “I’ll see if Ashburn can track him down for me. I’ll check up on him.”

  “You are supposed to be recruiting Hollywood moles and uprooting terrorists, not coaching kids to join the Marines.”

  “Sometimes you just get lucky, I guess.”

  “Just keep your eyes open and your mouth shut.”

  The call disconnected before he could get another word in.

  Two more days of auditions for fake Marines, and then he’d have to move onto the set and start talking to the director and the producers, as well as the Saudi prince who might be the key to finding the center of this whole thing. And finding out whether it was a “thing” at all.

  He wasn’t sure about Hollywood. He still wasn’t sure about Coles.

  Ashburn looked up when Andy walked into the room. “You’re late.”

  “You said eight o’clock.”

  “We’ve been here an hour already.”

  “Punctuality’s a virtue. Good for you.”

  Her nostrils flared.

  “Besides, if you were more efficient about this process you wouldn’t be here all night and day.” Egging her on was becoming his favorite Hollywood pastime.

  “Yes, please, tell me how to do my job,” she said. “Which I’ve been doing for the last fifteen years, by the way.”

  “Children,” said Barnes, “Go to your corners or I’ll turn this car around and none of us are going to Disneyland. Andy, do me a favor and go pick someone. There’ll be plenty of time for the two of you to hate on each other later.”

  Andy headed back into the corridor.

  He barked, “Who skipped putting on cologne this morning?”

  One kid raised his hand.

  “Outstanding. You’re first.” He put his arm around the kid’s shoulder. Come with me and don’t let them scare you. Let me scare you. I’m the Marine you gotta convince you’re good enough to play the part. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir!” Chest puffed, voice projected.

  “With that kind of attitude, you might just go far in this world.”

  He was going to say “Hollywood,” but substituted “this world” at the last minute. He owed that much honesty to the kid.

  Chapter Six

  The studio was closer to Burbank than to Hollywood. He’d passed it on the way back and forth to the casting studio all the previous days and hadn’t looked twice at it. From the view of the avenue, the building resembled some kind of private school or a monastery. Quiet, unassuming, cloistered. He turned off on a side street.

  Ashburn had been very specific about which gate to use and had instructed him to show up before 7 a.m. He checked his watch. 6:39 and 23 seconds.

  MH Pictures had a high outer wall made of cement painted to look like adobe, topped with clay tile. There was no razor wire on top, and if he’d been ambitious (and lucky enough to find a parking spot), he could have boosted himself over the wall and into the lot without incident. It seemed like there was lousy security here. He expected the place would be crawling with tourists later. Any one of them would be able to get on or off the lot with the flimsiest excuse. It seemed the gates and checkpoints were there more to control the flow of tourists than to actually keep anyone out.

  He pulled up to the small side gate. A guardhouse kept watch over the closed security gate—enameled steel fashioned to look like black wrought iron with decorative spikes. A guard came out and checked his driver’s license and registration, made him fill out a waiver on a clipboard and squinted into the back seat. It was more like being let into a drive-in movie theater than a secure installation.

  “Want me to pop the trunk?”

  “Nah,” said the guard, a lethargic, sixty-year-old man with a paunch. “You look pretty solid to me.”

  He gave Andy a slick brochure with a map of the lot in the center. Folded within was a temporary parking hanger to dangle off his rear-view mirror and a temporary ID badge with his name and picture on it—a headshot that had obviously been pulled from his Marine days, courtesy of Coles. Less than five minutes after he’d pulled up to the gate, he was through. The guard seemed far more interested in making sure that Andy didn’t park in a reserved parking space than whether Andy was who he said he was.

  He made his way to the employee cafeteria. The door was marked “Employees Only” and that was it. If he hadn’t been trailing the scent of frying bacon, he would have missed it altogether.

  The place wasn’t fancy—more like a hospital cafeteria than anything you’d expect to find on a movie studio backlot. So much for the vaunted Hollywood catering. Just another tinsel town illusion.

  Serena Ashburn was waiting for him. He offered to buy her breakfast. She refused, said they didn’t have time, handed h
im a cup of coffee, devoid of steam, and dragged him back outside to a golf cart.

  She said nothing as she drove like a maniac down the narrow back alleys, turning sharply enough that Andy had to grab the side of the seat and pray that the lid of his coffee cup didn’t pop off. Driving at twenty miles an hour on asphalt had never felt so dangerous.

  “Hey there, Ashburn. Want to tell me what’s... ” He suppressed an inappropriate comment; Ashburn was exactly the kind of person to take unnecessary offense. “... the rush? Or do you always drive like this?”

  She shot him a look that said, Jam it in your gunny sack, Mister. He decided to let it go.

  They blew through stop signs and swerved around a garbage truck, drove across empty parking lots and raced through a faked-up street; a bunch of building facades attached to narrow buildings that you maybe could have stretched out inside, and maybe you couldn’t. Narrow cul-de-sacs, errant props and hunched workers flew by.

  Finally, they arrived at a more substantial building. The front was made up to look like a bank. They parked in an alleyway beside it.

  DO NOT ENTER WHEN RED LIGHTS ARE ON – CLOSED SET – NO SMOKING. STAGE 19.

  The red light next to the door was unlit.

  Inside, a maze of small half-rooms, some of them nothing more than green cloth stretched across steel frames with bright lights hanging from more steel framework overhead, and smaller lights scattered around the set. Other rooms were more complex. Ashburn strode through the sets with fire in her eyes, heading toward a group of people on the far side of the building on a balcony.

  “Thompson!”

  The conference turned toward her. One of them was Barnes. With her were two men: an enormous, shaggy-haired brute in a plaid shirt that spread out across his gut like a tablecloth; and a much smaller man, shaggy-haired but gray, dressed in a gray V-neck t-shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots. The sheepdog and the bichon frise, thought Andy.

  The big man, who had to be Dale Thompson, the director, answered her in a tone of pretentious dignity. “Ah, if it isn’t our delightful casting director. Yes, Miss Ashburn? What is your desire?”

  “You can stop abusing my actors, for one thing. Hollings has a sprained ankle this morning.”

  “Oh, I’m afraid glass ankles are not my province, Miss Ashburn. I did not abuse the poor boy. He had an accident on Saturday.”

  “An accident due to your not having the set locked down!”

  They came to the foot of the rickety stairs leading up to the balcony. Andy followed her up. Ashburn’s attitude toward everyone was her attitude toward life in general: run to the end of your chain and bark.

  “An unfortunate affair, my dear. Nothing to worry about.”

  She stopped mid-stairs. “An unfortunate affair? He tripped on a Dominos box, Thompson! You can’t tell me that that was part of the Afghanistan set.”

  “Someone in the art department must have thought it was a nice local touch.”

  “A local touch,” she said indignantly. “Domino’s Pizza.”

  “Actually,” said Andy, “they opened the first KFC in Kabul back in 2008. And they just recently reopened a Pizza Hut.”

  She gave him a look that singed his eyebrows. “You a stockholder?”

  “You forgetting I was in Afghanistan? But more importantly, did anyone check the box for a bomb?”

  Thompson raised an eyebrow.

  “I’m just thinking,” continued Andy, “if you have something on set that none of the actors, let alone the director, can fully account for, that sounds an awful lot like a security breach to me. A pizza box isn’t exactly the ideal place to conceal a bomb, but you’d be surprised what kind of ingenuity terrorists possess. And in any case, if nothing else, someone ought to be reprimanded for eating an unauthorized pizza on your set.”

  The director cleared his throat. “This must be our new consultant from the Marines, then, yes?”

  Andy stepped past Ashburn on the stairs and continued the rest of the way, hand extended. “Major Bartholomew Andrews, U.S. Marine Corps, sir. Pleasure to meet you. Big fan of your work.”

  “Mmm,” said the director, extending a hand. Andy clasped it, felt Thompson’s grip tighten. “On the grounds of good taste, I’m inclined to forgive your unlettered meddling in the affairs of, as you might call it, show bizzzz?” He said it like it was a bad taste in his mouth. “It might do you naught but well to leave the affairs of the set to yours truly, lest you look like a damn fool.”

  The bichon frise stood watching, a look of suspenseful excitement on his face. All he needed was a bucket of popcorn to munch on while he watched the show.

  “With me,” said the sheepdog, “is Benjamin King, our director of photography. And this is Marjorie Barnes, the writer of this burdensome obligation with which I have been saddled. She is attempting to make a silk purse of a sow’s ear for us. I have every faith in her capabilities and blame this catastrophe in which we find ourselves immersed up to our proverbial clavicles entirely on the producers. You may have seen them on the way in. Squat, little fellows? Muscular haunches? Skittering through rubbish heaps and squeaking?”

  “Heya, Andy,” said Barnes. Despite what Thompson had just said in her favor, there was a strain of reticence in her voice that he’d not heard before. “Welcome to a real-life Hollywood set. What do you think?”

  “One big security breach waiting to happen. It wouldn’t bother me half so bad if the whole place didn’t remind me of Turkey.”

  Benjamin King, the bichon frise, wheezed a laugh. With it came a breathy gust of alcohol and cigarette smoke.

  “Yeah, but what do you think about the set?”

  “Not bad. Someone’s got a good eye for detail. Change the Dominos box to a KFC bucket and you’ve really got something.”

  Thompson’s face lit up with a grin. Andy was led down off the balcony and toward one of the sets, with Thompson pointing at different lights and explaining the technical details down to a level that had to be some kind of attempt to keep Ashburn from talking. She trailed behind them, snapping her heels on the black cement floor. Ire radiated off her like a heat lamp.

  Finally Andy interrupted him. “Where is everybody?”

  A few people were working with electrical cords, adjusting lamps, cleaning the sets, or just standing around—nothing like the army that Andy would have expected.

  “In makeup, Major Andrews,” Thompson said, seeming to mock him with his title.

  “Please, call me Andy.”

  Thompson chuckled. “Very well, very well, if you like, Andy, the actors are still in makeup. They won’t emerge from their cocoons until ten at the earliest, the prettiest little butterflies you’ve ever seen, with all the inherent flutterings and adversity to being corralled as those vile creatures possess. We have nothing but interior shots this morning, so I let them sleep in a bit. Gives them the delusion that they’ve earned it. But you’re here to see the stunt coordinator, no? Gregory Kelly. Goes by the boorish truncation of Greg. He’s somewhere around here…”

  From the top of the building came the flash of movement. A man was standing atop a platform on some scaffolding that stretched to the roof, so close to the edge that his heels were hanging over. His hands were raised, palms out, as if he were saying, Let’s just talk about this a minute here.

  A gun went off.

  The man on the ledge was hit. His body flew backward through the air, then went arcing downward.

  Just as he dropped out of sight, the airbag puffed up like a donut on all sides, the sounds went POOF, and Thompson shouted something unintelligible through a bullhorn.

  A team advanced on the airbag and eventually fished the gunshot man out of it.

  “Looks like something out of a kung fu movie,” someone said. “Aren’t we supposed to be going for realism here?”

  There was a rustle like someone sliding off nylon, a curse, metal jingling, and the sound of a fan starting up. The wires whirred as they were pulled back upward, dangling without the w
eight of a stuntman to hold them taut.

  “Psshhh, realism,” said the gunshot man. “Your average John and Mary Moviegoer won’t care. It’ll look great. Let’s move the pad in closer.”

  “Come on,” said the first speaker, coming into view. He was a tall, scrawny fellow, like a young Jimmy Stewart. “It’s only thirty feet. You can take the drop easy.”