by John Fusco
Maybe Lantana was better, Avi mused. At least there was a security gate that could keep investors like Bobby Gronkowski out.
“Four weeks, my friend, I’ll show you a cut,” Avi said.
“Cool, bruh,” said Gronkowski—who went by the faux ’hood name L’il G—working his stubby fingers in the wrapper of some kind of coffee cake. He claimed to carry a small heater in his waistband; Avi wondered if he was packing it now.
“’Cause that’s music money, homes,” L’il G said. “And I got to turn it right back into my payroll. You still gonna use my soundtrack, bruh?”
“At the end when the credits roll.”
“And my name?”
“In the credits.”
“At the beginning or at the end?”
“At the end. That’s what people remember, walking out of the cinema, hearing your soundtrack and seeing your name.”
“You’re not blowing smoke up my ass, are you?”
Avi turned his eyes on L’il G, said nothing. He reached inside his jacket and removed a checkbook case made of Tumi leather. L’il G fidgeted with his coffee cake as he watched Avi write a check. “What are you doing?”
“Giving you your money back.”
“Why?”
“There are other recording artists looking to place a song in a hit movie. Trust me.”
L’il G reached across the table and gestured for the producer to not be so rash. “Hey, man, I was just sayin’.”
“In four weeks, I will show you a cut,” Avi repeated.
L’il G tugged gently at the soul patch under his lip, thinking this through. Finally, he nodded and resumed his work on the coffee cake. Then he noted that someone else was standing there now, waiting for a moment with Avi. Alexis Cain gave the large man a repulsive look as he closed the meeting and navigated his bulk past her. Avi liked the way men were now darting their eyes between him and the girl’s tramp stamp as she stooped to kiss him on the cheek.
“How are you, darling?” Avi said.
“All right, I guess,” she said. “Whatever.”
She sat and reached into her messenger bag, removed something small. Avi admired her blue fingernails as she slid the object across to him.
“That’s his rough cut.”
Avi gazed down at the flash drive then lifted his handsome eyes to the girl. “You are fantastic,” he said.
Alexis looked down at the remains of the coffee cake the fat man left behind. “Ew,” she said, folding her freckled arms. “You getting me a meeting with Gersh?”
Avi smiled at her mercenary approach. He leaned back, poked at his iPhone, and sent a text. Then he set the phone down firmly as if to say “done.”
A barista boy, cleaning the next table over, felt Avi gently take his elbow. “Would you please clean that fucking coffee cake off the table?”
Alexis smiled at Avi. She liked older, distinguished men in Fred Segal blazers. She liked watching him hold the little flash drive like it contained the trading secrets of Wall Street. She felt like a Bond girl. With a meeting at the Gersh Agency she believed she just might become one.
10
TORRANCE, WAREHOUSE DISTRICT
Troy and his small guerrilla crew hit the ground running. The first scene they would shoot was a waist-high single on Louie Mo, in the role of Cho the ex-con, walking across a barren lot, hands jammed deep in the pockets of a blue windbreaker he’d picked out of Troy’s closet.
Creeping backward with his old-school Arri 435, Troy’s baggy shorts bulged at the pockets with lenses, motors, and compressed air. As he picked up the “John Ford shot” hand-held and backlit, T-Rich caught the long shot in HD wide-angle from the second floor of an abandoned warehouse.
This would be part of the film’s opening title sequence, Cho returning to the neighborhood where he once lived to find that things had changed. The voiceover that Louie would record later was along the noirish lines of, “After twenty years in the slammer, I was a free man, no longer in the cage. Not the prison in Mexico, nor the cage that put me there.”
Louie would struggle with the word “slammer,” so they switched to “jail” and finally to “the pen” with good results. Louie savored the opportunity to simply stroll across a lot, no running or jumping. No going up in a harness and getting stuck up there until lunch. Today, all he had to do was walk like James Dean, shoulders hunched against a slight breeze. He felt young again, empowered. So much so he tried not to smile in the shot.
“Nice, Louie,” Troy said, after shooting more than four hours of the walking scene from various angles, tons of coverage. The sun was getting close to magic hour, and he wanted to close out the first day with some vintage Louie Mo. He rubbed his hands together, smiled at Dutch. She was sitting on the hood of the Chevy, dangling her feet and smoking a cigarette.
“What do you think? Ready to light it up?”
Dutch stubbed her cigarette, slid off the hood. “Box ninety?” she asked.
“Box ninety right into the lot. Hit your mark, Louie will roll over the hood. Come down and go right into the blow-for-blow with Matty. T-Rich will sit up front with you and shoot the reverse. Give me some twitchy cam, T.”
“Like 24?”
“Fuck 24. I want French Connection.”
“We’re losing our light, dude.”
“No worries,” Troy told him. He’d just overcrank the camera and shoot at 8fps instead of 24fps, draw more light on the film.
“Want some smoke?” Malone champed from the sidelines, scooping some Pyrolite in a flour sifter.
“Not yet.”
Matty Ng, a beefy young Thai, smiled from under his black hoody, his hands bound in filthy fighter’s wraps. Troy had scouted him at a Muay Thai gym downtown and offered him a nice little purse to play one of the young MMA thugs trying to make their name by beating Cho. “You get to be in a fight scene with Louie Mo,” Troy offered as a perk, but Matty had no idea who Louie Mo was; he just liked the idea of fighting in a movie, showing his girlfriend the check he got for it. Louie walked up to him now, and with just a nod, cued him to practice their fist exchange at slow speed. Troy watched, clearing his throat excitedly. This was pro stuff and Louie seemed in his element. But when Matty finished up the practice routine by faking with a knee, Louie shoved him backward. “No playing around on movie!”
The set went quiet. Matty recovered, took a cocky step toward the aging Chinese stuntman. “Yo, dude, easy.”
“Safety first!” Louie yelled back.
“Okay, bro, got it.”
“No joke!” Louie pressed a finger. “Time is money!”
Troy felt he better step in or Louie could go on with his union rules until after dark. “Let’s roll, Louie.”
On “action,” Dutch sped down Western Avenue with the roaring, “controlled uncontrollability” of a precision driver. Wearing a skull cap as a double for a bad guy, she hit her E-brake and executed a deep, long skid, carving a turn at a perfect ninety degrees as Louie ran into frame, hit metal with his knee, and pitched himself into a roll over the hood. Coming down on the other side, he was face-to-face with Matty Ng, mugging for the camera in his hoody and hand wraps. They fired their exchange at full speed, but when Matty lost track and tried to improvise with an elbow, Louie stepped on his front foot, entered, and knocked him out. Cold.
“Cut!” Troy yelled, hurrying over.
“Louie!” Dutch said, jumping out from behind the wheel.
“I thought maybe he block,” Louie said kneeling over the Thai kid and checking his chin. “Hey. You. Okay?”
Matty stirred and rolled over, touching his eye socket. “Fuck you, man,” he said. “That’s not in the script.”
“Elbow not in the script either,” Louie countered.
Louie looked up at Troy. “You get the punch?”
“Yeah.”
Louie winked. Troy smiled. T-Rich held up his HD camera to say he got a zoom angle on it too.
“Hong Kong fighting not for sissy,” Louie said to Matty as he helped him up.
• • •
Back at Dog House, Troy sat at his MacBook, earbuds in, writing into the night like he hadn’t done in a year. The day had fueled him, fired his passion again, and he was on a third-act rampage. Louie was right, he decided: The surviving bad guys would trap the beleaguered Cho in an old building, planning to blow it sky high. (Troy made a margin note: Check with Malone about rigging demolition charges.)
In the final minutes of the movie, Louie Mo would time his most spectacular stunt of all time and jump, with no wires, from the building to the dinosaurian neck of a construction crane just as a bitch-load of controlled explosives blew out the top floor of the condemned structure, a fire trap they scouted in a bankrupt city north of Chinatown, toward Pasadena. (Check with the city and fire department.) Louie would then ride the steel cable downward and finish off his opponents in a smash-mouth sequence (NOTE: tight, claustrophobic, real-world shit) intercut with flashbacks from the illegal cage fight that ruined his life. The movie would end with Louie walking alone across the desert outside Las Vegas, toward an uncertain future, like a gunfighter who’d outlived his era.
Troy was so immersed in the scene that he forgot he said he’d meet his housemates for beers in Venice. Nor did he hear Zoe come in, her heels clicking, Prius keys landing on the countertop. “Hey, writer boy,” she said. “Working on my scene?”
Troy turned, yanking at his earbuds. “Hey, Zee.”
Zoe crossed the kitchen, went into the bathroom—and screamed. Louie Mo was sitting on the toilet thumbing idly through PC Gamer magazine. He covered himself and said, “Hello, I’m sorry,” in Cantonese.
Troy sprung up, wheeled to meet her. “There’s a Japanese guy on the bowl,” she said, grabbing her keys in escape mode.
“That’s Louie Mo,” Troy said. “He’s my new stunt coordinator.”
“Jesus,” Zoe said, calming herself. When Louie came out, she was somewhat polite and apologetic. So was Louie, and she noticed his limp.
“Troy, can I talk with you?” she said, cocking her head slightly toward the dark hall.
In the bedroom, Troy latched the door, turned to face her. She was staring at his unmade bed, script pages scattered about.
“Everything okay?” Troy said.
Zoe pushed him over, awkwardly, onto the bed. With one quick zip of her tiny mocha-colored dress, she was naked, peeling it off over her strappy high-heeled sandals. Her body, lethally posed, nearly sent him into the kind of asthma attack he used to have in high school. “I want my character to kill the redhead,” she said, pulling a pin from her hair and letting it fall.
“Say again?”
“My character, Troy. She kills fucking Alexis with a nine-millimeter.”
Troy stared at her for a beat. “Alexis plays a zombie. She’s undead. She’s supposed to kill you at the end.”
“Whatever that bitch did to get that role, I can do better.”
“Jesus.”
• • •
Louie Mo was trying to get upstairs to the little bedroom that faced the ocean. He had been going up and down those stairs quite easily, but tonight, after a long day of shooting, it was an effort. Less than halfway up, he felt himself sweating from the pain. The moderate gag he had done was nothing compared to his lifetime of daredevil achievements; most of the shoot was of him walking across the empty lot like a sullen antihero. But the shoulder roll across the hood of the Chevy did a number on his hip. The knee was fine, never an issue, really. In fact, he had done some of the wilder jumps that Ringo Chou couldn’t do in the late ’80s because his much-younger ACLs were starting to give. The hip was another matter; his pelvis felt torqued, the nerve canal raw all the way to his heel.
On the sixth step he took an oxy—that made two in an hour—then kept climbing. Sweating. He used to run the steps of mountain temples; how could these rickety beach house steps feel insurmountable? Oh, to be young again and riding those bedsprings like naughty Troy down there, having a time with the dark beauty who walked in on him in the bathroom. That was another thing: He’d been on that seat for forty-five minutes and hadn’t moved his bowels because his organs felt jammed up. He’d felt like maybe he was getting somewhere when the pretty girl had entered and screamed.
Onward, he climbed. Up to his Malibu room with a view of the sea. The bed caught him cleanly, took the pain off his joints. A quarter moon hung over the gentle surge of water. He wished he could just relax and enjoy the first-class shelter from the storm this kid Troy was offering him. But it all felt so perishable, and too little too late.
The moon made him remember a girl . . .
• • •
It was 1993 and he was standing on the set of City on Flame, a giant tungsten moon hanging a fake glow over Victoria Harbor. He was already notorious among stuntmen, had already outlived the Shaw Brothers’ ’70s and the buddy-cop ’80s. He had earned the scars and a reputation as high-flying Louie Mo, the guy you brought in when some arrogant A-lister wet his drawers two hundred feet up on a skyscraper, deciding that doing his own stunts wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Louie stood on the docks, restless energy jittering in his legs, taking a hit off a cigarette, cracking a joke with the crew. Depression, like his two ex-wives, had been dogging him a little. Wine sometimes made it darker. His forbidden affair with Rebecca Lo, the Cantonese pop singer, sitting inside her movie star trailer at this very moment, made it deeper. But pulling off a big stunt—especially one where the movie star chickened out—filled some kind of dark hole inside, made him feel valued. There was no feeling like running seconds out ahead of explosions, knowing how many things could go wrong with pyrotechnics. If he tripped and Sammy the Fire Man sparked it off at the wrong time, he’d be torched in a ball of flame and shrapnel. That was one of the triggers to unleashing the Creature in his bloodstream: knowing how many things could go wrong.
On that night, lingering by the sheltered waters of the harbor—every now and then glancing toward the lights in Miss Lo’s trailer—he was getting himself mentally prepped for the “Burning Boat” scene. As he paced and smoked, a set PA brought him a bulky cell phone. Call for Louie Mo. Louie took the call, hoping it wasn’t a lawyer tracking alimony. And then wishing it had been.
“Leave the set, my friend,” Uncle Seven said in Cantonese. “These assholes are not playing fair, we’re shutting down the movie. Whoever doesn’t walk off the set tonight has made me lose face.”
Uncle Seven, then a “Red Pole” member of the Heaven and Earth Society, never even gave Louie a chance to speak, just hung up. Louie saw all the eyes on him, could sense the tension over in the video village. He saw Jimmy Tang, the high-paid action star, getting his leather jacket on and heading toward his town car. He realized then that Jimmy Tang wasn’t quite worming out of a dangerous stunt; he, too, had taken a call from Uncle Seven and wasn’t going to cross him. He was leaving the set like a good boy.
Louie sidled up near Clifford Kwan, the director, got the story. They were already over budget, had no money to pay the Heaven and Earth Society—better known on the street as the 14K Triads—who were demanding a tax for filming on the harbor.
“Go home, Louie,” Kwan said.
The irony of the dilemma wasn’t lost on Louie. “We make movies about gangsters with gangsters,” he once told Clifford. “For gangsters.”
“Yeah,” Clifford commiserated back then, “but it’s been going on for four hundred years, man.”
Clifford was right; the underworld operation known as the Triads had its roots in the late 1600s, when five Shaolin monk renegades teamed with Ming Dynasty loyalists to form the White Lotus Society. Their patriotic intentions back then were to overthrow the Qing Dynasty, but as the secret so
ciety of boxers evolved, they began to be viewed as a legitimate way of aiding immigrants from China as they tried to settle in new lands. Over time they became extortionists and launderers and traffickers, “like any other mafia,” Clifford said. The booming Hong Kong movie industry of the ’80s and ’90s attracted them like wolves to goat herds.
At first, it was simple: You paid “lucky money” to get location permits or to protect crews filming in certain areas. If a production didn’t pay, equipment was tampered with, film reels stolen, actors intimidated. Police protection was impossible to secure; the society ran too deep. By the late ’80s the Triads became so embedded in the industry that some Dragon Heads like Uncle Seven began to catch the moviemaking bug, and started to produce their own films. If a star like Jimmy Tang didn’t sign on to star in some low-budget gangster flick—movies about gangsters made by gangsters—he’d rue the day he said no. The same with Louie Mo and the Hong Kong stunt riggers. If Uncle Seven was producing a new movie, no matter how dreadful, that’s what a stunt crew committed to, even if it meant passing on a high-end production that paid more. And the stunts were unregulated, highly dangerous. Resist the extortion and a man-on-fire death scene could become real, insurance paid out to the producers.
Now the extortion was spreading beyond the sets and the crews. Louie reminded Clifford of a recent incident just a few blocks away. Four reporters for Affairs magazine, a Hong Kong glossy, were attacked in their offices, brutally beaten, and hospitalized. Turned out that the magazine had published a critical review of a certain film and the starring actress. The Triads were running the business at every level. Not only did actors and crew have to commit to a Triad-produced movie, critics had to like it. In Hollywood, certain critics might be barred from future screenings if they turned up their noses at a film; in Hong Kong they got their noses broken or earlobes cut, offices ransacked. It was getting ugly.
“Are you?” Louie finally said. “Are you going home?”
