by Susan Braudy
She whammed the crutch into the fire and looked at me in disbelief.
“The studio wants to relieve you of your post of captain of this—” I deliberately looked around the room at the steaming pot in the fireplace, the littered table, and two white chickens with red combs pecking at her cameraman’s bare feet.
“This piece of modern art,” she said sharply.
I focused on the pink peeling spot on her nose. I felt exhausted by a mix of power and guilt, like I was swatting a butterfly with a huge hammer. “Michael is tired of your arty meshugas, and he wants to bring in a new director next week.”
“What’s Michael’s problem,” she snapped, “besides his brain, his personality, his self-image, the size of his dick, and his world view?”
“You.”
“Fuck all,” she said expressionlessly.
I summoned my energy. “You won’t talk to him, you’re a million dollars over budget, eight days behind schedule, you’re making war on the hottest leading man in the business, you wait for fog and full moons, budgeting items like fifty thousand dollars of dry ice, losing crew members, you closed your set, you won’t show Michael dailies, you’re writing new women into the Bible, and he’s tired of me lying to him about it, and you’re driving me crazy.”
“This always happens,” she said haughtily.
“Except for one big factor,” I said in my best imitation of Michael’s menacing voice.
“Yeah?”
“Jack isn’t happy.”
“Then let him start popping happy pills,” she snapped back, but she whistled between her teeth. I saw she had a liquid shine in her eyes, she was fighting tears. “He wants to be the director,” she said in a soft wail.
“Then you better start calling him Mr. Director-Sir. You ask for his help in your rewrites?”
She snorted rudely.
I looked her in the eye. “He’s studied directing with the greats. He could direct this movie.”
“What’s he been up to?” She was measuring me with wounded eyes.
“He’s been on the telephone.”
“To you?”
“Yeah, and then Michael when that didn’t work.”
Anita kept looking at me like she’d been smacked.
“Michael will do anything he says. You know what that makes him?” I continued.
“Not the director,” she said softly.
“If he can get the director fired, what does that make him?”
“A horse’s ass.”
“It makes him the star,” I insisted. “There’s a fine line between bravery and self-destruction and you crossed it—”
We were pointing our fingers into each other’s shoulders.
“I stand behind my work.”
“You’re a good director, but you need nine million dollars to set up a camera.”
“I’m an artist.”
“If you don’t cooperate, you’re no artist, you’re unemployed. When Michael gets the word out on how difficult you’ve been, you’ll be dead in Hollywood. You’ll be making chalk pictures on sidewalks.”
“Bullshit.” She sagged against the kitchen table. “What can I do?”
“We go a long way back,” I began, “and I never lie—”
“Cut the melodrama.”
“What would Cecil B. De Mille do?” I teased.
“What about Hermann Hesse?” These were her two college heroes.
“You like De Mille better,” I said.
“Big deal.”
“He got his movies made,” I said sharply. “Things could be a lot worse.”
“I got trouble,” she said in a small voice. “You got it made—all the free lunch you can eat and you sit around dreaming up ten-million-dollar movies to develop.”
I groaned, noting she was changing the subject. “You’d hate the politics and all the time I waste in meetings smiling at stupid hustlers trying to sell me junk.”
She said sadly, “I hate directing. I compromise and compromise and at night I can’t sleep thinking about all the failure.”
“It’s not all failure.”
“It’s never as good as I expect.” She squeezed her eyes shut against tears. “A movie is two hundred people making sixty mistakes a minute.”
“Anita,” I said, resisting an impulse to pat her head, “all you wanted was to be an American artist, and you’re thirty-nine years old with many good movies behind you that help millions of people understand things a little better.”
She just gnawed on a piece of her hair. I was feeling real pity for her. I remembered that cold winter night at the end of first semester freshman year when she ran out on the dorm roof in her nightgown to throw a snowball at her boyfriend, yelling at him that a movie director was the best thing in the world. He’d just proposed for the third time. I was dumbstruck a year later when she anointed me producer on the short about the burlesque house. It was the first of her movies showing contemporary women really talking and fighting and living that would become part of her trademark. I never figured I was good enough. I remember a flash of envy the year after graduation when her proud father agreed to put up $300,000 so she could shoot her first television feature about two girlfriends on vacation trapped at an erupting Hawaiian volcano. It had been my idea but I declined to produce it after my husband’s abashed whisper how he’d miss me. Now I watched her chewing her hair and felt a pang—all my years as a working film critic and an executive seemed the cowardly path. She was making the movie. “I’d take your job—”
“Great, and I’ll take yours,” she interrupted. “You just snap your fingers and us slaves get to work.” She shook her head. “But I couldn’t do what you do, package movies, fight New York for fifteen years. You got something like an aura, these powerful men get crushes on you and give you what you want. You just got this combination of brains, wild hair, and straight clothes.”
I pursed my lips. I knew she wished she was tall. I said brightly, “I got a plan.”
“What director does Michael want to bring in?” she interrupted.
“Sam Falco.”
“He’ll make it a Dracula movie,” she hissed.
“He’ll spend two weeks shooting tight close-ups.”
She clapped her palms to her eyes.
“You either start shooting Jack Hanscomb’s eyes and nose and mouth with lots of light or pack it in and let Sam come and finish and—get sole directing credit.” I gulped, my throat dry.
“What else does my star want?”
I wanted a drink of water. “He wants script approval. He wants to be in on rewriting sessions.”
“That’s it?” She stubbed her cigarette out.
“Look,” I sputtered, “if Jack Hanscomb wanted to make a movie wearing a bridal gown, Michael would have only one question.”
We mimicked him together. “What’s the start date?”
I kept talking. “Jack’s also pissed because he signed on for a straightforward human Christ story and you’re shooting it arty.”
“I have to do what I think is right.” She sniffed back tears. “I see it in black and white until he’s born, high contrasts, blinding whites and silvers, dense blacks. After all, it’s a time of miracles.”
“I’m sure it will be a beautiful movie, just stop it,” I begged.
“Stop what?”
“Stop stalling me and let’s figure out how to keep Sam away.” I wanted to hug her or something, underneath it all she seemed so fragile.
“Jack won’t come out of his cottage because of his back,” she said.
“Let’s go find him and get us out of this mess.”
She balled up her fists. “I’m a professional. I’m prepared to be raped graciously.”
I touched her wrist lightly. “Or to rape, depending on which cards you happen to be holding.”
She smiled with effort. “Let’s go.”
Her capitulation was quick. But I had to try and trust it. We didn’t have choices and she knew it. I started gettin
g up.
“You promise me to shoot him and wrap the film in the next three weeks,” I said, “or I’m out of a job too.”
“I follow your lead for a week,” she said morosely. “If it works, I’m in; otherwise—”
I gave her a hand, and she pulled it to stand up. “You better cooperate. Promise me on our twenty-year friendship.”
“Okay, okay.” She blew her nose and hobbled away. I sprinted after her.
“You better agree to anything he wants.”
“Take an hour,” she told Allen, who was pulling his red beard and glowering at me. “I’m going to pay a visit to my star and then take another look at that Bresson film about the lonely country priest.”
“One-hour break.” Allen waved to the crew in the corner and to Jim behind the video camera, still tracking me and Anita as we headed for the door.
“What am I going to give his majesty?” she asked.
“Whatever it takes.”
“Okay.” She took off her sunglasses to look up at me. “You got someplace to sleep?”
“Nope.”
“You want a farmhouse or a palacio?”
“I want the best bathroom.”
“Local pipes are all bad,” she said, grabbing a light meter off Jim’s neck and reading it near my face. “Better wrap it up, Jim,” she said. She closed her eyes. “I’ll put you in town near the café. You like people around.”
“I want to see dailies.”
“Don’t bully me.”
“Don’t do dope on the job.” We both smiled a little; she did dope all the time.
Jim knelt, still shooting us. I tried to ignore him.
“Tomorrow afternoon”—she raised her tiny palm in the gesture of an oath—“I’ll do better than the dailies. I’ll show you a six-hour rough cut.”
She pulled Allen Rosenbaum’s beard. His face lit up. “Hey, get me torches for the crucifixion run-through before magic hour,” she ordered. “I want the dolly track right behind Jesus, so we can shoot his exact point of view. We’ll cover the track with sand to keep it out of the shot. And roll me a j.”
“Me too,” Jim said from behind the camera.
“You only shooting him from behind?” I asked, exasperated.
“It’s an amazing shot,” she said. “Most point-of-view shots are to one side of the actor to avoid shooting the dolly tracks.”
“Please, profiles too,” I said.
She squinted angrily.
“You doing any day shooting at all?” I asked.
“No, only sundown on.”
I sighed. “Better start day shooting.” Directors are fixated on what they call “magic hour,” when the setting sun’s rays bathe the world in gorgeous clarity for about twenty minutes.
She absently offered me the joint.
“No, it makes me paranoid.”
“Get you through a helluva tough meeting,” she said, holding her breath. “You always had a crush on Jack.” She watched me closely.
My chest was contracting. I had seen Jack in the flesh only once in the past six years, to shake his hand at my studio inaugural party. I had recruited him for this movie, but I only spoke to him on the phone. I met with his agents, by his choice. I was scared spineless of him.
“Don’t be a nincompoop,” I said indignantly. “I’m not interested in dangerous unavailable men.”
“Then why not pull for me like you’re pulling for him?” She looked weepy again.
“I am on your side, I swear it. I been working on your movies for twenty years.”
“Get a grip on yourself.” She looked mollified, and wiped her nose on her hand as we tramped down behind the stone farmhouse and into a wheat meadow of thigh-high stems. “He’s in hiding.”
The meadow had a cool breeze that made waves in the wheat. I was startled to see an ancient plaster cottage with a big thatched grass roof shimmering in the bright sunlight. In front of it was a modern gray-planked California sun deck with baroque lawn chairs and a sunken turquoise swimming pool. Somebody was playing a meandering Stravinsky waltz inside on the piano. I tapped my finger to the beat of each eerie scampering measure.
“That’s his place,” she said. “He never lets me inside.”
The music was lilting, the notes clashed and vibrated like they were flying in on meadow breezes from outer space. I saw a girl kicking away from one end of the pool. Her naked buttocks glistened.
“He lives in a suburban medieval house?” I asked.
“He hates it, but his place leaked, so he moved in and screwed up our shooting schedule for six days.”
Closer to his house the girl waved at Anita, and the dissonant chords intensified like a siren song. The breeze tickled the fine hairs on my arms. I was happy as though I’d invented the electric-blue sky and the golden meadow and the distant purple mountains.
But he began singing over the waltz in an anguished baritone.
He sounded isolated. I bet Anita wasn’t the only thing torturing him. His sister had recently talked too freely to a reporter. Until his girlfriend left him a month earlier, she said, he believed he had a charmed life.
His voice was making me giddy. It made everything in that meadow special. Then he broke off the waltz and without pausing began to play fierce, sorrowful music, like a lament. “He sounds pent-up or something.”
“He loves desecrating a piano.”
“Weird, weird,” I said to nobody in particular. “I wish you’d get him to express himself like that on film. Is he very unhappy?” I was still savoring the sounds of his voice, the mournful piano, the bright pool and deck in front of the cottage, and the wind bending the wheat. “It’s like seeing the Grand Canyon,” I said stupidly.
“You can take the girl out of Philadelphia,” Anita muttered.
“At least I’m not jaded,” I said.
“You’re naïve.”
“Okay.”
We were walking up to the sun deck. “Who lived here before?”
“My fag production designer.”
I stared at her.
“He left last Sunday.”
I stamped my foot on the sun deck. This was a disaster. “Dammit, nobody told me.”
“No, Carol.” She turned, curling her finger, beckoning me to the screen door. “I paid him off to go underground for a month until I finished shooting. It’s too late to get somebody else to come here.”
“You didn’t want Michael and me to know how things were falling apart.”
She grinned brazenly at me. “It almost worked.”
I smoothed my hair with both hands. I wished I had combed it.
“Anybody else deserted?” I asked while she stood blocking the open screen door.
“Nope.”
“Come on,” I said, dreading what she’d say.
“Well, it sounds worse than it is—the engineer, the wardrobe mistress, and Carlos, the second-unit man, left two days ago. A local kid found them a villa on the beach near the Red Sea. I agreed to pay them half their wages if they don’t show their faces until I get the movie in the can.”
“What, that much of the crew is gone?” I almost exploded. This production was a nightmare.
“It cost me.” She grimaced again.
“But now Jack needs some tender loving care,” I said, trying to calm myself. “Let’s nail him down.” I put my hand over my mouth. “No pun intended,” we said in unison, and she linked her arm in mine.
“Just watch out,” she whispered, rapping the door, “he’s nutty.”
The piano stopped. I heard birdsong and slow splashing from the swimming pool. He started chording slowly up the scale, singing, “Show me the way to go home, I’m tired and I want to go to bed.”
Anita was watching me. I realized with shock I was singing along with him. I rubbed my nose. “Does he still want to make our movie?”
“Yeah, yeah.” She peeked through the screen door. “He wants to look serious. Every ambitious Hollywood hustler wants to be an artist.”
> “I never met an unmotivated star,” I said. “But you know they’re spoiled and pistol-whipped by fans and critics until they’re out of their minds.”
She pounded the door until it rattled. “This one’s insane,” she muttered. “Remind me to tell you about the lucky charms in his pocket and how he cries if he has to walk under ladders.”
“Knock and it shall be opened to you,” he said in that famous crackling voice.
“He thinks he was born to play Jesus Christ,” she whispered.
“Give me a couple minutes alone with him.”
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” She tried to sound jaunty.
Inside, the room was dark. The minute I saw him I closed my eyes. Red spots whirled inside my eyelids. “Shalom,” he drawled. His black hair parted in the middle and hung to his shoulders. He looked like I wanted Jesus Christ to look: tortured, Semitic, and full of hyped-up charisma, his blue eyes flashing, his mouth sullen. I forgot how broad he was in the shoulders. I forgot the power he had over me. I loved the fact that genes and God and the random molecules of the universe had conspired to produce a beauty like him, and then more prosaic forces like commerce sent him to Los Angeles to be touched up, photographed, and reproduced into lots of people’s dreams.
A white ceiling fan turned over his head like a weird halo. I felt tipsy, like an older Alice in Wonderland stepping through a movie screen. “How do you feel?” I asked.
He squinted at me like an old rabbi. “You look like the kind of woman rich men marry,” he said finally.
“You look dark and desperate, like a speed freak from 1969.” He had lost more than thirty pounds. I would have to check rushes to make sure they were hiding his weight changes with lights and makeup. Otherwise he’d shrink and balloon up from scene to scene.
“What brings you to the temple?” He set his lips in a patient, false smile.
“You invited me here,” I said boldly. I was remembering kissing his relaxed lower lip six years ago. He had laughed and uncurled my arms from around his neck. “You got a steamy side, Carol,” he’d said. “It comes rushing out of you through windows that you keep slamming shut,” and he tugged me to his starched hotel sheets.
