by Dan Bevacqua
“That’s not the point,” Molly said. “The point is, she stopped talking to me afterward. I mean, I’m glad she did, but it was like, ‘You weren’t in The Matrix? Okay, by-ee.’ Not another word. Like I didn’t exist.”
“You’re in the pop imagination now,” Abigail said. “You’re haunting their vapid nightmares.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m serious,” Abigail said. “You’re floating around out there. You’re not a person. Or you sort of are. Half of you is in limbo, or wherever. You know when somebody dies? It’s like that. No one knows what to say. There’s no frame of reference. It’s this unspoken thing, and then all of the sudden it appears. That’s what it’s like to be a famous person. Expect awkwardness. Expect the weirdest, strangest shit.”
“You’re high,” Molly said.
“That’s true. That’s what I am,” Abigail said. “And you’re an actress.”
Molly was there to talk preproduction. In a month’s time, Abigail was set to direct their third movie together. Their first, Starcatcher, had whiz-banged through a single Canadian film festival and was never heard from again. The second fared much better. Titled Trust, the film was set in New York City. Reviewers had called it a “dark independent comedy.” In it, Molly played a struggling actress named Elle. She becomes the unknowing mistress of a married man. It is only after the man’s death that Elle learns about his wife and family. She attends his funeral, and later the post-funeral luncheon at the family home. The wife, as it turns out, had known about the affair all along. “You’re not a woman,” she lectures Elle. “You’re a girl. Go over there. Eat some cold cuts. Then leave.”
Back in ’98, handing the script over to Molly, Abigail had said, “Most of this shit happened to me.”
Abigail was wild, a strange talker of nonsense with the unique ability to always hit upon, after awhile, the absolute truth. She was the person in Hollywood whom Molly most owed her career to. She was also a drug addict.
Raising the money for Starcatcher had felt like begging for change. Neither Molly nor Abigail were in any position to secure so much as a meeting, so for a year they “fundraised,” which actually meant having dinners with the parents of their rich friends. In the end, they managed to raise Starcatcher’s minuscule budget. But then, like a girl abducted, Abigail vanished. She called Molly two weeks before the start of the shoot to say she was in rehab.
“For what?” Molly had asked.
“For all the coke I do,” Abigail told her. “Duh.”
Clean, Abigail kept Starcatcher under budget, and would later manage to sell the film rights to a Danish production company. They recouped all of their investors’ money on Starcatcher (an eighty-minute movie about a heroin-addicted librarian), and the impossibility of this fact—that they’d somehow managed to break even with an unwieldy, poorly reviewed, mostly silent art film—caught the attention of real producers, who then wondered how much money they could make if Abigail wrote and directed something audiences would actually want to see.
Abigail lived a few blocks southwest of Chinatown. She parked her BMW in her private driveway, and the first thing the women did was take the elevator up five floors to the roof of her apartment.
Trust had made Abigail something close to a millionaire. Two purchased, yet unproduced screenplays had officially put her in the upper tax bracket. She’d left LA to become one of those San Francisco people, Molly thought, one of those people who never seem to do anything but who have a ton of money. When Bay Area people came down to LA, Molly never quite knew who she was talking to. She couldn’t tell if Mr. Ponytail was a hippie or a dot-com billionaire. She didn’t know if the nerd in the Polo worked for a think tank or Pixar. Molly had come to enjoy the transparency of Los Angeles. There at least people lied to you up front about what they claimed to do.
Four white hemp couches formed a loose square in the middle of the roof, and in the center was a black marble coffee table. Abigail said the floor was quadruple-reinforced bamboo. She went to the coffee table, pulled a joint from a porcelain jewelry box, and lit it. She pointed at the bay.
“Look.”
Molly stared out across at the water.
“Alcatraz,” Abigail said.
There it sat: the working lighthouse, the fenced-in buildings, the little white boats speeding by.
“I’ve never been,” Molly said.
“There’s a tour, but tours are for tourists.”
Abigail coughed and coughed and coughed. When she was done, she said, “People up here take their weed very, very seriously. Everybody does now, I know. But honestly I’d never thought of it as a real drug until I moved north. And then I was like, ‘Yeah, okay, I get it.’ It’s all about cross-breeding and mutations. The whole twenty-first century is. Nothing will ever be left alone anymore. Everything has to change constantly. Otherwise it’s forgotten about and tossed aside.”
One way or another, and because she was a writer, Abigail was always talking about herself. The two unproduced screenplays, both dramas, had combusted in development hell. Abigail had signed a two-picture deal with Hydrogen, a production company founded by Emily Roth and her brother, Leonard. The Roth siblings were notorious for their taste, charm, and pathological need for total control. Abigail had refused Hydrogen’s rewrite suggestions on the grounds of artistic principle. “No one lives at the end of anything,” she’d said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “Why should they in a movie? Why should the couple—who clearly don’t belong together—get together? Why should I pervert my vision?”
“Your vision?” Leonard Roth had screamed at Abigail in their final meeting. “Your fucking vision?” Everywhere she went, Molly heard about the incident. For a few days it was all anyone could talk about. It started to feel as if she’d been in the room. “Here’s your perverted vision: it’s dead. You’re dead. Fired. You want to know how badly I can pervert someone’s ‘vision’? I’m gonna turn your movie into a cartoon and make a hundred million dollars off it. And, just because I can, I’m gonna ruin you.”
It wasn’t an overt destruction campaign. Leonard let Abigail’s downfall come about slowly—like the afterthought it was to him. At first, the Hollywood rumor mill only described her as difficult, temperamental, an auteur. Three months after that she was effectively blacklisted. Finally, no one spoke of her at all. She claimed to prefer it that way.
“I feel free up here,” Abigail said to Molly. She closed one eye, and pointed at the island. “The prison’s a nice little reminder.”
It occurred to Molly, and not for the first time, that she might hate her friend. Ever since Trust, Molly had felt indebted to Abigail, but Abigail’s career implosion had reflected poorly upon her. In meetings for the two studio roles she’d been up for, executives had asked her if, like her friend, she possessed an aversion to traditional publicity.
Leonard Roth hadn’t been so direct. On the fourteenth of September, three days after his sister died while on board United Airlines Flight 175, Molly read for a part in a Hydrogen production called The Human Variable. Molly’s agent, Irene Neidecker, had assumed the audition would be canceled. Molly was surprised to get a call that morning. Feeling the old fear, she drove to the Universal lot, and read to a room of distracted execs. Although he himself had insisted preproduction on The Human Variable continue as planned, Roth sat expressionless throughout her reading. When she was finished, the executives turned to him. Leonard’s face was the worn-out color of a dry-erase board.
“I don’t know,” Roth said. “I don’t know about you. I don’t know about anything.”
“I’m sorry,” was all she could think to say.
Staring past her friend at Alcatraz, Molly watched the last of the cool morning air evaporate. Inside her purse, her cell phone rang.
“How many of those do you have?” Abigail asked.
“Phones?” Molly asked. “Three.”
Digging through her purse, Molly kept her eyes on her friend. Abigail mumbled through the s
moke curling around her face.
“They must be a-ringin’ all the time,” she said. “Just a-ringin’, and a-ringin’.”
* * *
Alone in the guest bedroom, she listened to her voicemail. “Hi, Molly,” her assistant Diane said. “So… seventeen messages. I’ve emailed you a brief recap of each and the required contact info. Leonard Roth called eight times. Also Jared. He didn’t seem to have your new number. I gave it to him, which I’m assuming is fine. Hope your trip is going well. I’ll check in later.”
Her agent, Irene, had told her from the start, “You show up to these things. You be yourself. End of story. I am the fame-whore-engine. I’m extra bad all year so I’ll get coal for Christmas. But if you’re one of those sluts who doesn’t believe in compromise, who doesn’t believe in lying, or smiling when you would rather die than smile, then don’t get on the train.” Irene was the sister of Cleo Neidecker, a casting agent who’d fallen into Hollywood-love with Molly, getting her into room after room, audition after audition. Because of these two women, Molly had started to happen. She’d landed the romantic comedy Make It So, her first big role. Based on that, she’d been given a part in the smaller, but more prestigious Initiation. Through her publicist, she managed to secure a three-page photo spread in Vanity Fair titled “Girl from the Future: Why in Six Months Everybody Will Know Who Molly Bit Is.” By the time shooting on Make It So was supposed to begin, she was exhausted. What hadn’t happened to her in the last year? The clearly drugged wife of a Sony executive had inquired if her tits were real. An Italian photographer had shouted, “Look more dirtier!” at her. She’d recorded and sent in eighteen audition tapes. She’d gone to a fundraiser for Children’s Leukemia Research and spoken to the parents of children who had died from the disease. She’d held some of their hands, but could not divorce herself from the fact that her sympathy—which was real—was also false. Standing in a backless ballgown, Molly understood she wasn’t there for these people. She was there for her. She was there to be seen.
On the eve of their second wedding anniversary, Jared had said to her, “You have a negative outlook on life.”
“What? Why?”
“Can’t you just enjoy it? It’s a good thing,” he said. “You’re raising money. You’re meeting people. You’re doing great.”
“I’m not raising anything,” Molly said. “What money did I give? All my money’s tied up in this house. And I know it’s a good thing. I know I’m meeting people. I’m not saying I’m not doing great. I’m just saying… it’s weird.”
“You think everything’s weird.”
“Everything is weird,” she said.
They were in their house, her house, which was in Coldwater Canyon. The realtor had called it modest, but there were five extra rooms that Molly had no idea what to do with. Irene had suggested a screening room. “For when, you know, you wanna go to the movies.” Molly didn’t know who you called for something like that, and wrote it down on her “Questions for Diane” list.
“You think I don’t appreciate this?” she asked him.
They were unpacking books in the large back room that overlooked the unfilled pool.
“I’m not saying that,” he said.
“What are you saying, then?”
“I’m saying,” Jared said, “you could get someone to unpack these books for you. If I were you, I’d enjoy what was happening to me a little more.”
“The thing is, it’s not happening to you.”
As soon as she’d said it, she regretted it. Jared had been supportive. He’d listened. He’d sidled up to her at premieres. He’d stepped aside when the photogs asked. He’d gone over her lines, feigned a good attitude at his own abysmal career, attended the meetings she’d set up for him which had come to nothing. At events, he’d made chit-chat with the wives, the girlfriends, the other husbands. He’d done everything she’d asked him to do, and if what he felt toward her wasn’t exactly resentment, it was then maybe something much worse: the refusal to acknowledge it.
“That’s true,” Jared said. “It isn’t happening to me. You’re right.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?” he asked, and walked into the next room, like always. “What do you have to be sorry about?”
Unpacking her overnight bag in Abigail’s guestroom, Molly felt terrible. She’d forgotten to give Jared her new phone number. He’d called her old number, hoping to say hello, or to let her know how the play rehearsals in New York were going, and had reached Diane instead. Jared’s month had been harrowing, terrible, the sort of month he would speak of—or not—for the rest of his life. He’d arrived in New York on the ninth of September in order to begin rehearsals for an off-Broadway play called Mr. Tomlin’s Angry Daughter. The first rehearsal had gone well… but then Tuesday. That Tuesday. The Tuesday.
“Where are you?” she’d asked him that afternoon.
“In a bar,” he’d said. He was drunk. The world was out of the ordinary.
“I was freaking out. I couldn’t get a hold of you.”
“You were?” he’d said. “You were freaking out? You were?”
For a week and a half, rehearsals had been canceled. Instead, he’d gone to Ground Zero. He rode down in a school bus every morning. They gave him a mask, a bottle of water, and a red flag attached to an iron rod. He moved cement into dump trucks. He called out hello. Most of the steel he touched was still warm. Jared was a hero. What was she?
“I’m an asshole,” she said into his voicemail. “I’m sorry. I forgot about my new number. It just happened. Things have been crazy. Call me.”
Then she took a breath and tried Leonard Roth.
As expected, she got one of his assistants, Langdon, who Molly had never seen in person. He sounded nineteen.
“Hydrogen Productions.”
“Hi, Langdon. It’s Mol—”
“Oh, Molly. Thank God. Where are you?”
Roth’s assistants always sounded as if they were being hung upside down over a cauldron of bubbling tar.
“He was slamming doors all morning when he couldn’t get you on the phone. He screamed at the head of Warner Brothers. And he fired two people. This old guy started crying.”
“Jesus.”
“Where are you?”
“San Francisco.”
“Fun,” Langdon said. “But not fun. God, San Francisco?” Hydrogen’s main office was in New York. “Okay. Let me figure this whole thing out.”
Molly heard Langdon typing, and mumbling, “Cock sucking motherfucker” under his breath.
“Langdon?” Molly said. “Hello? Hello?”
“Still here, Molly,” Langdon said. “Sorry. Sorry. It’s just… It’s just—”
“What’s going on?”
“I don’t know!” Langdon shouted. “All of the sudden this morning it was, ‘Where’s Molly Bit? If I don’t get Molly Bit on the phone pretty soon, I’m going to start cutting people’s heads off!’ ”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know!” Langdon shouted again. “He saw a screening of Make It So last night, came in here this morning, starting screaming about not being able to find you, and now he’s gone. Can I call you right, right, right-right back? Is this your new number? I mean, like yours?”
Hydrogen had put up a small stake in Make It So, a few million dollars, some scant points on the gross as their return. It wasn’t their kind of movie. They weren’t exactly art house, but they weren’t rom-com, either. They were movies like Trust, which they’d picked up at Sundance, reedited, and marketed the hell out of. Make It So promised to deliver what movies like it had always promised to deliver: the feel goods, the fairy tale, the unmitigated horseshit of a happy ending. “I know you want to make art, honey,” Irene had said to her after the contract was signed. “But first you have to make money.”
The script was like Nora Ephron minus the talent and nuance. On the page, Molly’s character was your standard advertising executive type-
A blank. At first, this fact frightened her. The woman’s name was Christine, and Molly hunted through the script for clues to her life. What had Christine’s childhood been like? Sweetly happy. What about past boyfriends? Affable. What were her flaws? A case of mild yet charming neurosis.
Finally, Molly found a line that, with some imagination, was mildly interesting.
CHRISTINE
When I was a kid, I went to clown camp.
Like a big red nose, the line honked at Molly, taunted, and dared her. Molly played the character as if she was a warm-up performer at a Poconos resort in the 1950s, or a slightly deranged kindergarten teacher—anything other than an ad exec. Christine liked to toy with objects. She would turn a watercooler cup into a tiny house, wield a butter knife like a sword, knot her boyfriend’s tie into a noose, and then laugh hysterically about it. After what should have been a scene’s end, Molly would mumble miniature asides. (“Benefits to living alone: less concern over personal hygiene.”) On set, she felt great about it. The crew loved it. The other actors loved it. The director, who’d cast her for this very reason—for her particular take on Christine—loved it.
But maybe everyone had been wrong.
She’d seen Leonard Roth on the Make It So set a few times, knew him of course from when Hydrogen had purchased Trust. They were “hello” people. They said “hi.” In the role for The Human Variable, he’d cast Helen Wheeler, a more established actress. At first, Molly wanted to go to his Malibu home and throw a brick through his front window, but after a few weeks she’d stopped taking it personally. Business was business. Until they met again, Leonard Roth was finished with her.
So why the phone call? She reached the worst conclusion. Maybe Hydrogen had more money invested in Make It So than Molly first realized. Leonard had intended to broaden Hydrogen’s product base with the movie, and now he was calling Molly to let her know she’d ruined his first foray into major market suburban mall cinema with her goofy ad-libs, and that her career was officially over.
