What Movies Made Me Do

by Susan Braudy

  “Good thing you’re human,” he was saying. “I can’t stand those modern women who never flinch.”

  “I had a nightmare.” Fear flooded my chest and I sat up, hugging my knees and rocking in my nightgown. I held my breath, clutching the phone. “I dreamed I was dead. I felt like a vegetable that didn’t exist.”

  “Nightmares make you appreciate life in daylight.” He sounded like he was speaking from experience.

  “I’m talking like a refugee from an Ingmar Bergman movie.”

  “Yeah, his characters are always dreaming their own funerals.”

  “Never meant much to me before,” I said, perking up.

  “Whistle something,” he commanded.

  “No.”

  “Come on, it’ll distract you.”

  Then over the instrument I heard the beginning of a song from The King and I, “Whistle a Happy Tune.” He whistled with vibrato: “whenever I feel afraid …” It was silly, and a little California, but I smiled in the dark and pursed my lips. As I joined in for the second verse, Rocky leapt up, cocked his ears, and left. I felt better, whistling: “… convinces me that I’m not afraid.”

  I turned on the light, squinting at the framed photograph of Jack Hanscomb standing behind me at a studio party.

  “You under the covers?”

  My whole body flushed. He played seduction games like other people did crossword puzzles. “I’m in bed. Where are you?”

  “What are you wearing?”

  “My nightgown.”

  “I wish I was there right now,” his voice teased me, “but I bet it’s cold.”

  “Why are you calling? More problems on the set?”

  “Is it all buttoned up?”

  “No, the buttons got lost in the washing machine years ago.” I tried to sound annoyed. “What are you wearing?”

  “I’m lying in the sun and I’m so hot I can’t stand it.”

  “Don’t talk funny,” I snapped. Sometimes he sounds like a cheap vamp. I forget that when I spin fantasies.

  “No kidding,” he said slowly. “I’d like to see you in the sun.”

  “Yeah, sitting on the beach watching you get tan.”

  “You still sound sad.” The bullshit was gone. Thirty seconds of silence went by.

  “I hear you’re knocking them dead at the studio,” he said.

  “It’s not about my job.”

  “What else do you want?”

  “I don’t know. I’m scared I’m off the track.”

  “Well,” he sighed, “I always meant to have some loving people in my corner. I just don’t know where the time has gone.”

  “You got it made,” I said, putting on my glasses so I could really see the photograph of him. He was wearing horn-rims, laughing, and flicking a milk mustache off his upper lip. He gave off light. It was the big gala the studio threw when they hired me five years ago.

  “How awake are you?” He sounded more anxious.

  I was stretching and pointing my toes. “You do a great wake-up call.”

  “Good, because we got bad problems with our picture.”

  I punched a pillow. It was a goddamn business call after all. This birthday was the worst.

  “You see dailies?” he asked.

  “I see a weekly reel.”

  “You didn’t happen to notice I’m not in the movie anymore?”

  “Well, she has been shooting around you.”

  He snorted. “I ask her not to wear red on the set, it’s bad luck for me. She wears nothing but. Your girlfriend Anita’s flipped out.”

  My pulse pounded. Jack Hanscomb was the star; he got his way, or else. But nobody could tell Anita what to do. “She’s trying too hard to be the boss,” I said.

  “She’s stoned every day.” He sounded stern.

  “She has a steel psyche.”

  “She never gets crazy?”

  “Nope,” I lied. “What else’s going on?”

  “It’s been six weeks of hell,” he said shortly. “She tell you she’s rewriting the script?”

  I groaned. She hadn’t said a word. “Sure, sure, I’ll talk to her.”

  “Too late, kiddo, you got two hundred and fifty people sitting around doing nothing.”

  “What?”

  “I’m telling you, Anita’s gone off the set, and I’m not hanging around here anymore.”

  “How long has she been away?”

  “Forty hours.”

  I gasped. No wonder I couldn’t reach her. Our production manager never bothered to tell me; he was probably covering up. His first lady director, Anita, had him dazzled. If I found out nobody was working, it was my job to move in and try to save as much money as I could. But Anita was a professional. Unless she was playing some weird power game, she’d drag herself to the set if she was bleeding to death.

  “Anita’s hurt?” I’d never forgive myself if something happened to her.

  “For all I know, she’s lying in a dune with her neck broken.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  I jerked the telephone cord and the whole instrument clattered to the floor. Rocky came bounding back into the bedroom, his dinner bowl between his teeth. He was mixed up, poor dog. All this chatter, he thought it was time for his morning kibble.

  “Listen, Jack, this is serious. Where did Anita go?”

  “She’s wandering in the desert, fasting and praying.”

  I couldn’t think straight. I was hearing his side of the story. She was so slick, she could be hiding out to manipulate him. I held the phone away from my ear. He was ranting. “I’m acting the hell out of Jesus, but none of it will ever hit the screen. Your director won’t shoot my face—she shoots my hands, my shadow, my feet, the back of my head. My face is the money, that’s what I read in the trades. Six days ago, she does me a favor and shoots two minutes of close-ups for the crucifixion scene, and I swear she didn’t ever bother to light me.”

  But I heard fear and vulnerability in his voice. “Jack, listen, she respects you. She’s a good director.”

  “I know when a director is losing it. She wants to be the star of her picture, but I’m the only reason this movie got green-lighted, and she’s making a goddamn fool out of me. I got twenty-eight days until I’m off the clock. If you want a movie in the can, Carol Young, you replace her fast.”

  “I’ll get her back.” My mind churned up a picture of Anita lying in the sand unable to move her left hip. Twenty-five years ago she’d injured it permanently jumping off a dorm roof at midnight with an illegal male visitor.

  “You’re supposed to be holding my hand.” He sounded mournful. I knew what was bothering him. This was his first serious role and he couldn’t vamp his way through.

  I sighed. “You’re a soulful rabbi. The way you dropped thirty pounds for the part, you look more miserable than an El Greco, and more than half Jewish, and your charisma—”

  He was sputtering. “My last picture for Stanley, he had roses in my bathroom every morning and—”

  The line strummed and he was gone. “Hello, hello,” my voice vibrated across oceans and land masses. I pressed the phone to my ear in shock. I missed hearing his voice. I hated to admit it. But I couldn’t moon over him. I was going to kill Anita for this one—I crossed my fingers—if she was okay. She always hated my idea of casting Jack as Jesus, but nobody else at the studio was interested in the picture without him. And he is half Jewish.

  Last Christmas after I signed him, I poured champagne in her glass and we sucked candy canes and watched his first movie. She said, “He feels too light for Jesus, but he defers to me. He wants a serious role bad. He likes my work.”

  “Shush,” I said. We sat in my cold screening room under our winter coats and I strained forward while the leading lady unbuttoned his shirt.

  “Cool it,” Anita ordered me. “There’s no sex in my shooting script.” I buried myself under my coat while the actress said, “You’re so smooth except where they wounded you.”

  “What
an insipid line,” I spoke aloud into the buzzing phone.

  An operator ordered me in broken English to hang up. I asked her to call our production manager, Paul Riley. I had to force him to tell me how bad this mess was and hide it from Michael Finley in Los Angeles. He’s been wanting to fire me ever since I actually launched the movie. No New York executive ever pulled a movie off. They discarded studio executives like Kleenex for losing control of their productions.

  The operator rang me back. The local lines were down in Israel.

  I lay in the dark, rigid, wondering if Barry still hated me. I felt my skin sink into the cool pillows as my brain kept thinking and thinking and trying not to think.

  Two

  Exterior establishing shot: dazzling midtown Manhattan. Camera dollies up sunstruck green glass skyscraper. Sound track trumpets blast “I Love New York” over chiming elevator. Then we face two imposing double glass doors to reception area.

  I usually enter my office warily. My blood starts pounding when I hear the hum of air vents and ringing telephones. This morning I waved at our receptionist, who was sticking her headphones into her wild gray hair. Her three kids sat lined up in chairs. I rubbed the tall girl’s head. She picked at a scab on her knee while her eyes followed me.

  “What are you kids doing here?”

  “Martin Luther King Day, no school,” Ivy answered. I kept patting Mary’s head. I identified with her slumping shoulders, eleven years old, and she’d shot up to five feet six in the last year. “Pretty picture,” I said before she closed her coloring book. She popped her hand over her mouth.

  “You kids better beat it to the playroom in five seconds,” Ivy ordered. She frowned at me. “They want to stick around for the parade, big crowds, they’re closing off our street. Take your lunch inside.”

  “Any messages from Israel?” I asked, begging silently for good news. I had to make sure Anita was found before the studio in California discovered next Christmas’s release was disappearing on location.

  “Nope.” Ivy threw a lever on her switchboard. “But your boss called from the coast.”

  She announced my name to somebody calling the switchboard and handed me a typed invitation to our next screening party—for Hitchcock’s Rope. I lure New York directors and producers into my office with rare old movies. “We still doing this?” Ivy asked.

  I shot her a jittery look. Maybe everybody figured I was getting the ax. “Sure, and you better show up,” I said in a peppy voice.

  I watch over the productivity of thirty people. No matter what my mood, I keep up their morale. I opened my fat briefcase and leaned into a doorway to hand a fast-talking screenwriter the first half of his draft with my notes. “I’m inspired,” he shouted. “I got ten more clean pages.” I waved at script readers just out of film school. I was proud of the way I’d set up their offices like little living rooms, with cheerful movie posters, couches, ragtag ivy and rubber-tree plants, and white bookshelves for screenplays.

  I twisted my arm out of my heavy coat and heard my secretary Rosemary’s sweet-child voice promising I’d call somebody back. She had the telephone pressed to her ear under her mop of red hair, and one foot in a clunky wooden clog up on the green desk blotter. “I got you into that play,” she whispered to me. “I browbeat the producer.” At my look she drawled, “Excuse me,” and dragged her foot off the desk.

  In fact, her casual decorum relaxes me. She reminded me of somebody’s kid who had just finished a basketball game at the high school gym. Today she was blowing bubbles with pink gum and wearing a loose white blouse over white dungarees.

  I had been watching this tall, plump twenty-one-year-old from Minnesota for a year from my favorite spot inside the plush curving arm of my couch. She’s the only person I see for eight hours straight while I skim scripts and pass on projects, check contracts, dictate memos, hold meetings, and talk up the business on my nine telephone lines.

  I know most of Rosemary’s gestures. When she’s in a bad mood, she hisses if she hits the wrong typewriter key. She hums hymns when things are going right.

  “Get rid of the gum,” I said.

  She spit the pink stuff into the palm of one hand. “Yes, ma’am.” She pulled her chapstick out and rubbed it across her thin mouth. It was her only makeup. She guarded her immaculate desk from everybody. She chased cosmological answers and read crank self-help books at lunchtime while she ate fruit yogurt off a plastic spoon. She made me read them too; we had formal discussions of religious awakening and spiritual therapies. Thank God I majored in philosophy. It was only a matter of months, I figured, before she claimed her heritage and became a born-again Christian.

  “Bran muffin and milk on your couch,” she said.

  “Run today?”

  “Six miles.” She laughed her squeaky chuckle. “How’s your back?”

  “Your stretching exercise did the trick,” I said, reaching for the mail from the Hollywood office.

  “Vicky’s here, better put on your bulletproof vest.”

  I clutched the envelopes. “Where is she?”

  “In the visiting executive office.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “Tough.”

  “Hey, no California coconut scares me,” I said.

  I was terrified of Vicky Corona, the young woman who had just been hired as a production executive in the California office. I knew she’d love to steal my Jesus project. She had the inside track; she was the protégée of our new chairman, my boss’s only superior in the movie division. We were the only two female creative vice-presidents, and I needed her as an ally, or else she’d become a deadly enemy. We were both trying to do the same vaguely intellectual movies about something that would appeal to a mass audience—we were already going after the same people and projects. Somebody told me she wears tight sweaters and flirts, and her office decor was a photograph of herself as a kid throwing a baseball back into Yankee Stadium. Her father was a New York Post sports-writer, and she was his favorite. I knew she had already shouted back at our boss and gone over his head to buy a script on a lady sky diver who wanted to be a femme fatale.

  “What’s she look like?” I pulled my scarf through my coat sleeve. Rosemary tossed me a wooden hanger.

  “She wears sexy lip gloss and she asked millions of questions about Anita and your film.”

  “Damn.”

  “I told her it was rolling,” Rosemary said virtuously, “with a New York Times piece on you for having made it all happen, and I said it was below budget and ahead of schedule.”

  “Good work.”

  I piled six screenplays on her desk. They were heavy; I’d walked to work. “File these turkeys and type up my comments for the coast.”

  My mind was whirling. I had to fight for power or knuckle under to my west coast colleagues. But I refused to send the best scripts and ideas to Hollywood. My title was vice-president production, east coast, and even though movie titles are filled with words like “worldwide,” I intended to deal with movies myself on this side of the country. But the politics of a studio are as murky as those of any banana republic. I was forty years old and I didn’t have much time left. It was do or die with my film on Jesus.

  Rosemary recited the rest of my morning appointments by memory and swiveled her chair around to the typewriter, her back to me. “I placed three overseas calls to Anita’s production man.” Then she asked in a small voice, “You ever tell anybody about me?”

  I was shocked. “Tell what?”

  “You know,” she prompted.

  “Why?”

  “I dunno, something Vicky said.”

  “No, I never told anybody.”

  I stood there watching her fingers bounce over the typewriter keys. Then I walked across her little cubicle through the doorway to my office. It was a large corner of the fifty-first floor with two walls of windows and a video screen over the third wall. Rosemary had opened the blinds; the winter sun made stripes of light on the corduroy couch and blue Tibeta
n carpet. I pulled out my horsehair exercise mat, sat, and touched my forehead to my knees. Yoga relaxes my brain. Through the windows I saw huge glass walls blazing like mirrors. I was thrilled every morning when I saw these chunky towers filled with windows of people wheeling and dealing. I had been watching them for five years in rainstorms and changes of sky. They were my moon and mountains.

  I never discussed Rosemary’s secret. Sometimes I forget it. Eleven months ago, I was in a dark mood over Anita’s firing her production designer when I passed a young girl in front of the Plaza Hotel freezing her fanny off in skimpy red satin shorts and a fake white fur jacket. She was tall and her red hair blew wild. I saw her placing one foot in front of the other like she was walking a narrow ledge. Her plump cheeks were covered with old-fashioned circles of rouge; her ankles shook. I have the same problem with high heels. When you’re a tall adolescent, nobody teaches you to walk in them.

  I almost reached out to steady her elbow as she wobbled into the crowded Jockey Club bar. I peered through the window while a plump man in an expensive navy suit pulled out his wallet and stumbled against her like he’d been drinking, clutching her breasts. Her eyes jumped with fright, she pushed him back, and bills fell out of his wallet. He staggered off. She looked around fast, picked up his money, and teetered out the door after him.

  I followed her, a few feet away. When she tapped him on the back, he turned, scowling, and she handed him his money. Awfully generous, I thought.

  She didn’t seem to know what she was doing. I wondered where she came from. Prostitutes fascinate me, because they take more risks than I could ever imagine. My New York life is as alien to my family as a call girl’s life feels to me. My mother’s sister once looked at me furtively, tittered, and then described a scene in a Beckett play about a man paying a prostitute. She suspected I’d had sex since my divorce. One man your whole life; if I broke her rule, I had a dangerous life with no rules at all.

  I took one last look at the girl pushing her way boldly inside another bar crowded with businessmen. I bet she didn’t know how fast she was going to get booted out of there in her red satin getup.