Uncommon Type

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Uncommon Type Page 6

by Tom Hanks


  Irene had perfected her ability to keep her laughter to herself when one of her clients said something really stupid or naïve—in Rory’s case, his thinking his first ever trip to Europe was going to be free.

  “Oh, punkin’,” she told him. “You’ll be working your ass off.”

  The junket began in Los Angeles: three days jammed with interviews, photo shoots, video conferences, Q and A sessions, forums with fan bases, and as many talk show appearances as possible, each needing an hour of preinterviews with the segment producers. Irene saw to it that Rory was well dressed, well groomed, and well versed in what the fuck not to do. And there was the trip to the Comic-Con convention in San Diego. Willa Sax needed a team of bodyguards to keep the fans at bay; many of them were costumed as Cassandra, the former Secret Service agent with computer chips implanted in her brain, formula-enhanced, superstrong sinews, able to communicate subconsciously with the Seven, the extraterrestrials who live among us, aliens who may be good guys, may be bad guys, and who et cetera et cetera et cetera you get the idea. Many Comic-Coners were costumed as the Seven. No one was dressed as Caleb Jackson, pro surfer/software whiz, because no one had seen the movie yet. The fans seemed thrilled at the screening of a twenty-minute teaser of the movie, making it a trending topic for most of the day on both Twitter and Poppit!

  Two days later in Chicago, the teaser was screened on the campus of Northwestern University, the alma mater of Willa Sax herself. Her old dorm was renamed in her honor. Irene steered Rory through two days of interviews, a parade, a charity volleyball match, the dropping of the puck at a Blackhawks hockey game, and a screening of the movie to benefit literacy in Africa that was held at the same theater where the gangster John Dillinger had been gunned down.

  Four days of junket were held in New York City, starting with a press conference staged in the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria, attended by 152 media outlets. Rory did not get a question until Willa had talked for thirty minutes, mostly of the challenges of shooting with the new FLIT-cam digital process and the new SPFX system called DIGI-MAX. She was a producer on the film, after all, having optioned the rights to the Cassandra Rampart graphic novel in 2007 for a mere ten thousand dollars.

  She laughed off questions about her husband’s investment genius and his supposed bedroom prowess. “Guys!” Willa protested. “Bobby is a banker!” Bobby was her husband, and he was worth $1.2 billion. Willa told the press that he really was a regular dude who had to be told to take out the trash.

  That led to Rory being asked, “How does it feel for a guy like you to kiss the most beautiful woman in the world?”

  “It’s a kiss for the ages,” he said. Irene smiled, knowing she’d done her work well. The crammed room remained silent, save the clicking of camera shutters. When the press conference ended, Willa was whisked away as more questions were shouted at her. Irene escorted Rory into a smaller ballroom set up with multiple round tables, each crowded with journalists and their microphones. Rory spent twenty minutes at each table, one after another, with no break, answering versions of the same three questions.

  What is it like working with Willa Sax?

  What is it like kissing Willa Sax?

  Is that really your ass in the hurricane scene?

  Irene took him to the Media Center on the eighth floor, to sit through a total of fifty-seven television interviews, lasting no more than six minutes each, all held in the same room, Rory seated in the same chair with a one-sheet of the movie behind him. In the poster, Willa was staring off into space, a look of ferocious concentration on her beautiful face, her torso clad in a tight sweater, a rip exposing her shoulder and the top sphere of her left breast. Behind her was a mosaic of images from the movie—an explosion, dark figures running in a tunnel, a massive, cresting wave, and Rory wearing a headset and looking at a computer, serious as all hell. WILLA SAX IS BACK AS CASSANDRA RAMPART was printed in big letters. Rory’s name was in the cluttered billing block at the bottom of the poster, in typeface the same size as that of the film’s editor. Irene kept him plied with green tea, protein bars, and small bowls of blueberries.

  The movie was promoted on CBS This Morning the entire week. Every morning at 7:40 and 8:10, Rory reported the national weather in front of a green-screen map. Willa Sax was a guest host with Kelly Ripa on Live with Kelly. The two women did Pilates on the air.

  The premiere of the film was supposed to take place on one of the piers on the Hudson—special facilities had been constructed with seating for five thousand people, but a predicted thunderstorm put the kibosh on that. Instead, cinema screens all over the city were booked for simultaneous digital projections of the movie. Rory and Irene were delivered to every one of them by SUV—a total of twenty-nine personal appearances. Willa Sax attended only the special screening held at the Museum of Natural History to raise money for its Programs for Young Scientists.

  At the end of the nine days of the domestic press junket, Rory was exhausted, talked out, dizzy; he had seen little more than cars and rooms and cameras. Worst of all, the questions had been the same for four-hundred-plus interviews.

  What is it like working with Willa Sax?

  What is it like kissing Willa Sax?

  Is that really your butt in the hurricane scene?

  Rory now felt that working with Willa Sax was like eating a peanut butter sandwich on a motorcycle, kissing Willa Sax was like Christmas in July, and the butt in the hurricane was that of a talking horse named Britches.

  “Welcome to the big leagues, punkin’,” Irene told him. “Tomorrow, Rome.”

  Willa Sax flew to Italy on a chartered plane, along with her team, her posse, and her handlers. The studio plane took the other five producers, all the executives, and the marketing heads. With no seats available for either Rory or Irene, they flew business class on TraxJet Airways, changing planes in Frankfurt.

  Three days of press were held in Rome, each as busy as those in the U.S. On the last night the teaser was shown outside at the Circo Máximo—where the chariot races were held in ancient times. To Rory it looked like just a big field. Scenes from the movie were projected onto a huge temporary screen, but not until after a local soccer team was presented with the trophy they had won in some championship. The crowd was estimated at 21,000. When Rory appeared onstage to wave to the Romans, nothing happened. When Willa appeared to do the same, fistfights broke out as a tide of fans in soccer jerseys rushed the barricades to get to her. The Italian carabinieri got into a melee with the thugs as Willa was hustled into an armored car and whisked away to the airport. The next morning, Rory and Irene took a commercial flight—Air Flugplatz—to Berlin, where another three days of press were on tap.

  In Berlin, Rory’s body clock was so jet-lagged that he found himself flush with energy at 3:00 a.m., so he went out for a run. Leaving the hotel, he was ignored by the dozens of fervent German Cassandra Rampart fans who’d lingered all night and would continue to do so all morning, hoping for a glimpse of her. He jogged along the dark paths of the Tiergarten, stopping to do push-ups on the steps of a monument to the Russian Army, complete with actual tanks, that crushed Berlin in 1945. At noon the next day he was so tired he felt like a sleepwalker. He talked like one, too, telling the entire staff of Bild, the national newspaper, that as both a fan of the movies and the latest costar of Willa Sex (he actually said “Sex” instead of “Sax”), he felt that “Sandra Caspart was the most complimental and sophisticationed of any and all films, for Willa Sex is heroin for our times, and a woman of the four ages.” Then came the questions.

  What is it like working with Willa Sex?

  What is it like kissing Willa Sex?

  Is that really your butt in the hurricane scene?

  “Try not to call her Willa Sex,” Irene told him in the car back to the hotel.

  “When did I do that?” Rory asked.

  “Just now. To Germany’s largest daily newspaper.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m no longer sure what the words are that
come out of my mouth.”

  The German screening of the teaser took place later that night, projected onto the Brandenburg Gate to six thousand fans. When she appeared at the balcony of the hotel to wave to them, Willa Sax was disappointed there were no fistfights.

  “I guess I’m no Willa Sex tonight,” she said at the gala dinner afterward, held in the same museum that displays Nefertiti’s bust.

  By the time Rory and Irene had flown to London (CompuAir into Gatwick), the international press junket had turned Rory into blabbering toast.

  DAY 2

  7:30—Grooming in room

  8:00—Transfer by Car to Gare de l’Est

  8:10–9:00—Red Carpet Interviews prior to Boarding CASSANDRA EXPRESS

  9:05–13:00—Train ride to Aix-en-Provence. En route 15-minute interviews in special Media Car. (Outlet list available on request)

  13:00–14:00—Red Carpet interviews upon arrival at Ancient Roman Theater

  14:30–16:00—Ancient Roman Theater. Re-creation of Hurricane Scene for Press. (Note: This is broadcast live on RAI-Due TV.)

  16:30—Reboard CASSANDRA EXPRESS. Live appearance on “Midi & Madi” TV broadcast from Observation Car.

  17:15–21:45—Return to Paris via CASSANDRA EXPRESS. En route 15-minute interviews for non-French media in special Media Car. (Outlet list available on request)

  22:00 Transfer by car to Cocktail Reception/Dinner at Hotel Meurice, hosted by Facebook France.

  After dinner you are free to stay or return to hotel.

  Irene will be provided the ADVANCE SCHEDULE FOR ASIA before arrival in Singapore/Tokyo.

  Getting the job was a fluke, a scratch-off lottery win. Rory had given up on Los Angeles after a six-month stint as a model-actor-bartender with all of two credits on his SAG-AFTRA card. He’d booked a yogurt commercial, playing touch football on a beach. For three cloudy days in San Diego he ran around shirtless—Rory looked damn fine without a shirt—with a group of racially mixed “pals,” then they all snacked on yogurt. They were coached on how to dip the spoons into the minipacks and place the yogurt in their mouths. There was a trick to it.

  Nine weeks later he was cast in a one-episode role on the rebranded Kojak series for CBS. Rory played a tattooed-shaved-head meth dealer who was pretending to be a handicapped Iraq War veteran, so obviously he had to die. Rory met his end in high style—shirtless (of course), dragged off the roof of an office building by his fraudulently gained motorized wheelchair, New Kojak jumping to safety just in time.

  With little else going on but car payments and gym workouts, Rory grew bored with Southern California, and took his yogurt-Kojak money to Utah for the ski season. When New Kojak finally aired, one of the several other producers on Cassandra happened to be watching and texted Willa Sax: Think I saw CR’s next bit o’ honey. A few days later, Rory got a call from his agency to get back to town because something huge was on deck, in the brew, cooking in the hopper.

  The first time Rory met Willa Sax—who was crazy beautiful, beyond-real-life beautiful—was over cups of green tea in her offices in the Capitol Records Building on Vine Street in Hollywood. The home she shared with her venture capitalist husband was somewhere in the hills nearby. She could not have been a nicer person, chatting with Rory about art and raising horses. Rory knew very little about either. Willa changed the subject to Fiji. She had been to the islands to do research for the movie. She told Rory about the beauty of the night sky and the clarity of the water and the happy faces of the locals, especially during the traditional kava ceremonies that were held to welcome visitors. She had learned to surf there. The movie would shoot in Fiji for at least two weeks.

  The meeting lasted a little over an hour, but before Rory was in his car and at a standstill in the afternoon traffic of the Hollywood freeway, his phone exploded with texts: WSaX Loved you!$$$$. Two weeks later he was officially cast as Caleb with a crazy payday of nearly half a million dollars, to be spread over three films, which could or could not be part of the Cassandra Rampart universe. The next time he saw Willa was at the studio for camera tests. A production assistant took Rory to her trailer. When he climbed up the steps wearing his torso-clinging Caleb Jackson surfing outfit, she sized up her no-name yet gorgeous costar and said, “Well, ain’t you hot shit!”

  The start date of the movie was delayed for a few months as the script was rewritten, then pushed to after the new year so Willa could enjoy the holidays with her husband; they spent Christmas in a castle in Scotland. Rory’s first day playing Caleb Jackson was in late March on a soundstage in Budapest. Willa had been shooting for three weeks and had her own makeup trailer, so the two did not see each other until they were on the set. The scene called for them to make out in a shower, but the water was not hot enough to hiss out any real steam, so the Hungarian SPFX crew rigged the stall with a smoke machine. When Willa came to the stage in her bathrobe, her three security guards circled her chair. She asked Rory if the hotel was working out for him, then told him that now that she was married she never kissed on screen with an open mouth.

  Over seven months, Rory shot only a few days a week—in Budapest, Mallorca, back in Budapest, in a stretch of desert in Morocco, then in Rio de Janeiro for a scene that called for Willa and Rory to run through the crowded streets of Carnival, a scene that took four days to prep and sixteen minutes to shoot. Rory himself shot a week in Shreveport, Louisiana, while Willa took time off with her husband in the Seychelles. They met up again for a day of additional running-through-Carnival scenes, but this time in New Orleans. Because some of the film financing came out of Germany, tax laws forced them to shoot one scene in Düsseldorf. They ran out of a building and jumped into a taxi—the extent of the Düsseldorf filming. After ten days of reshoots in Budapest, they had only the surfing scenes yet to do. They never did go to Fiji. Instead, Rory and Willa grabbed shots against a green screen at the exterior water tank in Malta, pretending to surf on SPFX gimbals as stagehands doused them with very cold water from dump tanks.

  DAY 3

  7:30—Grooming in room

  8:00–9:00—Hotel Restaurant. Breakfast with contest winners. (Note: Eleanor Flintstone will join for coffee at 8:50.)

  9:05–12:55—Principal TV interviews (12 minutes each)

  13:00–13:20—Lunch in room. Room service menu to be provided.

  13:20—Touch-Ups

  13:25–16:25—Principal TV Interviews continue

  BREAK

  16:30–16:55—TV Interview “Le Showcase” (hosted by Rene Ladoux, a French icon of film criticism)

  17:00–17:30—TV Interview with Petit Shoopi (Petit Shoopi is a puppet who will ask you to sing along with her. Song TBD.)

  17:35–18:25—Join Eleanor Flintstone in Ballroom for TV Interview with Claire Brule for FTV 1 (this is France’s most widely watched Women’s Show)

  18:30–19:00—Photo Shoot with Eleanor Flintstone for Le Figaro

  19:05–19:55—Photo Shoot for Orphaned Pets Organization. (Note: There will be cats, dogs, birds, and reptiles.)

  20:00—Transfer to Motorcade

  20:30—Arrival at Jardins des Tuileries

  20:30–21:00—Work Red Carpet Press Line, Interviews, Photo Call

  21:05–22:00—Concert by popular French rapper (TBD)

  22:05–22:30—Live Remarks to crowd (Note: you will introduce Eleanor Flintstone. See Irene for suggested remarks.)

  22:35–22:45—Fireworks

  22:50–23:00—French Paratroopers re-create Cassandra-Caleb drop into volcano caldera

  23:05—French Air Force Flyby

  23:10–23:30—Unveiling of CR3: DAH Holographic Billboard (Note: Crowd will be provided with holographic glasses upon arrival.)

  23:35–24:15—Performance by popular French Pop Star (TBD). Eleanor Flintstone to proceed to Airport. Stage is cleared.

  24:20 (Approx)—Screening begins.

  You are free to stay for screening or return to hotel.

  NOTE: TOMORROW WILL BE TRAVEL DAY TO SINGAPORE<
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  French telephones do not ring. They go bleat-bleat, bleat-bleat, bleat-bleat. At 6:22 a.m., the sound is like having a barn animal in your hotel room. Rory had to stop that sound.

  “Yeah?” The receiver felt like a toy up to his ear.

  “Change of plans, punkin’.” Irene was on the phone. “You get to stay in bed.”

  “Say what?” Rory was still a bit woozy, having taken advantage of the Hotel Meurice’s bar until just four hours ago.

  “The schedule for today is in flux,” Irene said. “Go back to sleep.”

  “Watch this.” Rory put the phone back in its cradle, rolled over, and was out like a glass-jawed boxer.

  He woke up three hours later and stumbled into the sitting area of his hotel suite—good enough for Nazi officers in the day and just fine and dandy for Mrs. Thorpe’s only boy. The schedule for his Day 3 in Paris was on the desk beside the room service menu and a media packet on CASSANDRA RAMPART 3: DESTINY AT HAND. At 9:46, Rory was supposed to be giving TV interviews of twelve minutes each, but neither Irene nor anyone else had come to fetch him. Tomorrow he’d be flying business class on IndoAirWays to Singapore, so he ordered up a few café au laits and a bakery basket from room service.

  He had spent very little time in any of the hotel rooms save for exhausted sleep and grooming, always by two women, one for makeup and one for hair, both ushered into the suite by Irene while Rory showered. Alone, in his underwear and sipping coffee and hot milk, Rory checked out the place.

  The hotel had been recently renovated in Hipster-Millennial, which would have been a blow to those Nazi occupiers of long ago. A black screen was the TV. The remote for it was long, thin, heavy, and incomprehensible to any American. The lamps were all touch-controlled, but only if you knew where to touch them. Four bottles of Orangina drink were arranged neatly on the square coffee table, ironically next to four porcelain replicas of oranges. The sound system was a retro turntable with a collection of LPs by the Elvis of France, Johnny Hallyday, one record going all the way back to the 1950s. There were no books on the shelves, but there were three old typewriters—one keyboard was Russian, one French, and one English.

 

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