“I said, do you see what I mean?” Woody smashed the heel of his hand into Rinaldo’s face again. He’d probably broken his nose, but he didn’t care. “You want to know something? I went to visit Angela Strappafelci in Regina Coeli Prison in Rome. That’s the woman who put the bomb in the station. I pretended I was a journalist and got to go right into her cell, and I almost killed her. I was that close.” He held up finger and thumb for everyone to see. “And that’s how close I am to smacking you again. Angela’s out on furlough now. She put a bomb in the station and killed eighty-six people. And now she’s out walking around. But I’m going to promise you something: If anything happens to this dog, I’ll send you to a place where there are no furloughs. Is that clear? Do you understand?” He released his hold. “Now get the fuck out of here.”
Woody was shaking. The waiters took him into the restaurant and brought him a glass of wine and some antipasti. They treated him as if he were the one who had been smacked around. And they were right to do so. That’s the way he felt. As if he were the one who’d been threatened and slapped and humiliated and needed looking after.
What bothered him most was the realization that this particular kind of evil was everywhere. Not just in the big things, but in the little things too. It was everywhere. You couldn’t escape it, not even in Piazza Tasso.
The waiters put two tables together, and Woody was joined by other patrons. He was the center of attention. The waiters brought more wine, three kinds of pasta. A bowl of scraps for Biscotti. And after a glass of wine Woody thought, Well, I didn’t do too badly, did I?
Audition
The thing Miranda had been hoping for morning, noon, and night came to pass. She’d been called for an audition. She wasn’t sure if it was her creative visualization that had brought it about, or the prayers she had said at the Catholic church by the entrance to the Glendale Freeway—where she sometimes stopped on her way home, even though she wasn’t Catholic—or her agent (who wanted to take the credit), or the fact that she’d been sending Esther Klein a humorous card every single day.
What she learned from her agent, when he called with the news, was that Esther didn’t have the financing in place yet but that Michael Gardiner was going to direct and that Giovanni Cipriani had been attached as the male lead, and that Esther was looking for a fresh new face to play Margot.
Miranda continued stopping to pray at the Catholic church. She spent two hundred dollars on a Montblanc fountain pen like Margot’s. She rented Esther’s latest film—How Happy I Am— and Michael’s—Last Rites—and Alessandro Martone’s Love in Venice, starring Giovanni Cipriani, or Zanni. She practiced her creative visualization exercises every afternoon. She reread her dog-eared copy of Michael Shurtleff’s Audition: Everything an Actor Needs to Know to Get the Part. She bought a translation of Natalia Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues—Margot’s favorite book. She went to the public library and checked out Luigi Barzini’s The Italians and a book on bookbinding—Hand Bookbinding: A Manual of Instruction. She read through chapter 2 of Hand Bookbinding and, using her new fountain pen, made a list of the tools and supplies she’d need. She didn’t want to play Margot; she wanted to be Margot.
She had to do the audition cold, but she didn’t mind. She thought it would be to her advantage, in fact. She’d read the book so many times that in a sense she already was Margot. She knew Margot’s “arc.” She could jump into her story at any point.
The audition was held in an office in downtown L.A., near the Grand Central Market, a not-very-impressive office, an old-fashioned office surrounded by dentists and lawyers, with opaque glass windows in every door. The office itself made her a little uneasy. Everything said temporary, low-budget. There were no magazines in the office, just a few chairs and a desk with a secretary behind it. The secretary took her information and handed her a side to look at. Another actress was waiting. She was good-looking, but she wasn’t Margot. Her breasts were too big, for one thing, and she was wearing one of the cheap flowered Lycra dresses that were in all the shop windows. Miranda was wearing jeans and a man’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, which is what Margot had worn when she was working at the Certosa and when she was doing the final restoration work on the Aretino volume. She could hear voices in the next room. Then the voices stopped and the door opened. Miranda got a glimpse of Esther Klein. Esther registered her presence. An actress came out of the office. Esther said good-bye, said she’d let her know. The secretary nodded at the actress in Capri pants and called her name. Miranda didn’t think she’d ever heard it before, which was a good sign.
The chairs were uncomfortable, but Miranda didn’t mind that either. But when she started to read her side, she didn’t recognize the characters, didn’t recognize the scene. She thought, There’s been a mistake, but there was Margot’s name in capital letters: MARGOT. Her head was swimming when Esther came out of the office and told Ms. Capri Pants that they’d let her know. The secretary nodded at her and called her name: Miranda Clark.
There were just two people in the little office. Esther Klein, at a desk, and Michael Gardiner. The room was too small. The venetian blinds were sagging. The rubber tree plant was about to expire. She had two seconds to make a good impression. Her instinct took over; she gave good handshakes and introduced herself without stumbling. She told herself that they were more afraid of her than she was of them. She didn’t really believe this, but in fact, instead of the usual agony that most actors (including herself) experience at this moment, Miranda was experiencing feelings of anger and contempt. These feelings were stronger than agony, stronger than fear. She opened herself to her feelings instead of fighting them.
“Miranda,” Esther said. “Interesting name. Your parents must have been Shakespeareans.”
“Actually I picked the name myself.”
“Then you must be a Shakespearean.”
“Not exactly. I picked the name after I got arrested for shoplifting at a department store in Fort Madison. I got off because the officer forgot to Mirandize me. I didn’t read The Tempest till I was in college.”
“I see. You’ve been sending me a card every day. They’re very funny—but effective.”
“I’ve been praying every day too,” Miranda said, consciously opening herself up, letting them get to know her.
“That’s even funnier.” Esther was looking at her résumé. “Always the bridesmaid,” she said. “Never the bride.”
“My agent thinks it’s about time,” Miranda said. “I do too. But you remember I was Alice in Heavenly Days.”
Esther nodded. “You’ve done a lot of commercials,” she said.
“Well, then,” Michael Gardiner said, looking at his watch. “Let’s get started.”
“Any time.”
“We’re not looking for a finished performance,” Gardiner added. “We just want to see what you can bring to this role. Are you ready?”
Miranda nodded.
“The stage is yours,” Michael Gardiner said. “I’ll be reading with you.”
The scene was set in the little piazza outside the convent where Margot had discovered the Aretino. Miranda had located it on her map and had no trouble conjuring up a latteria, a pizzicheria, a bar, an arch, the big doors of the convent. She’s sitting at a table in the piazza when a man (SANDRO) emerges from the sewer. This made no sense at all to Miranda, but, she reminded herself, Every scene is a love scene.
But who was there to love? Oaf meets wimpy girl? And of course there’s humor in every scene too. Maybe that was the way to go: Bozo the Clown meets Margot the Prude. Acting is discovery, but what Margot was discovering in this scene was that she didn’t want to be there, and that’s what Miranda was discovering too. She tried to play the opposite to her lines to bring out subtext, but she couldn’t find a subtext, so she did the only thing she could do: she made a strong choice and ran with it. She drew on her own anger in the present moment. She let it fill the wimpy character on the page. She was a powder keg, a ticking tim
e bomb. There was power there. Strength. The poor girl—the wimpy Margot on the page—just hadn’t figured out how to tap into it yet.
Michael, looking reasonably pleased, suggested an adjustment, and Miranda knew he wanted to see if she could take direction.
“Let me hear you play the situation, not the emotion,” he said. “Try it with a different objective. Your conscious objective is to get this man to go away, but your unconscious objective is to get him to take your clothes off. This will give you a point of contradiction to work with; it will give you more to do.”
But Miranda balked. She was too mad. “I don’t need another objective to interpret Margot,” she said. “I am Margot. I read The Sixteen Pleasures at Smith, and I’ve read it a dozen times since. Excuse me. I know this is crazy. I wasn’t going to say anything. But I can’t help it. How could you do this? How could you do this to Margot? You’ve turned her into a wimp. She doesn’t speak Italian. So what is she doing there? She doesn’t drink wine; she doesn’t like Italian food. It doesn’t compute. And her lover? Why is he such a jerk? He’s supposed to be suave and sophisticated. I mean, Giovanni Cipriani, that’s great. He’s perfect for Sandro. But why is he such an oaf in this scene? Has Giovanni actually looked at this script? And why is Sandro coming up out of the sewer? It doesn’t make any sense.”
Miranda was pretty shaken up after the reading. Stuck in traffic on the Glendale Freeway, she asked herself, What would Margot do? But she couldn’t answer the question. She wished she were back in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, living in her parents’ house; she wished she were back at Smith, living in Lawrence House, or in Norwalk, Connecticut, where she’d spent a summer at the White Barn Theatre. She wished she were anywhere but where she was. Hollywood was a sham, completely out of touch. People in Hollywood wouldn’t recognize a good story if it bit them in the ass.
She was so depressed she couldn’t think. It was after six o’clock when she turned off the freeway. She thought of stopping at Corpus Christi to pray and maybe light a candle but decided against it. When she got home she poured herself a glass of white wine and sat in the kitchen with the lights off. She finished the wine and poured herself another glass and unpacked the boxes of bookbinding tools and supplies she’d bought at McManus and Morgan on Seventh Avenue: paper, tape, thread, binding boards, mull (strips of cloth), paste, a carpenter’s square, a steel ruler, two bone folders, a folding needle, a right-angle card, a squared card, a sewing frame, a press and a tub, paste brushes, an awl, beeswax, fine sandpaper, a paring knife. She spread everything out on the dining room table and read through the instructions for her first project, which was to make a blank book with a single signature:
• Cut and fold signature paper.
• Cut cover paper.
• Collate.
• Mark up and sew.
• Fold up cover.
• Make and attach label.
• Press.
But before she got started, she had to set up her new sewing frame. The instructions on page 38 of the manual were very clear. She cut three tapes and attached them to the keys and then fed them through the slot in the sewing frame and attached the other ends to the crossbar. She tightened the crossbar to take up the slack in the tapes. And she thought, This is what Margot would do.
But then in the morning her agent called. She had the part. “You took them by surprise,” he said. “You brought a lot of spunk to the part. And that’s exactly what they were looking for. Spunk. You really spunked the hell out of it.”
Second Reconnaissance
Esther didn’t believe in hiring talented people and giving them free rein. A lot of talented people didn’t know what things cost. Esther knew what things cost because she was the one who wrote the checks—for the film, for the camera package, for the sound and lighting equipment, for the dolly, for the insurance, for the automated dialogue replacement, for the Foley, for the permits, for music and effects, for craft services. A producer wrote thirty-eight checks and she was in business.
She had only three months to set up the film, but everything was falling into place. The principal actors had been attached; she had an acceptable domestic distribution deal with Three Oaks films that guaranteed her three hundred theaters and a prints-and-advertising commitment of 150 percent of the final budget, and a foreign deal with Leviathan with a livable distribution fee and capped expenses. Her line producer, Barbara Cohen, who’d worked on the last two films she and Harry had done together, had already organized the insurance and the completion bond and had prepared a preliminary budget. She’d hired an American cinematographer, Stu Knowles, and an Italian assistant director, Franco Bevilacqua, who was bringing his own department heads on board. Both Knowles and Bevilacqua had worked with Michael before. Knowles was fast and dependable and knew how to work with available light and still get a consistent look. Bevilacqua was an optimistic realist, or a realistic optimist, who knew how to merge characters, reduce extras, cut down scenes, merge locations. He also knew everyone in Florence, including the mayor.
In mid-November she and Michael flew first-class to Rome for her second recce, Michael’s first. Michael, who was asleep in the window seat beside her, his long legs covered with a light airline blanket, was tired all the time, and he had to get up to pee every hour. She hadn’t known about the cancer when she’d attached him, and now it was too late, and she was starting to worry that he wouldn’t make it through production. But he was tractable, so different from Harry. He didn’t have the drive that Harry had, but he knew how to put together a coherent story out of bits and pieces, knew where to put the camera and how to move it around, knew how to take command of a set, knew how to bring the best out of an inexperienced actress like Miranda, and how to keep a strong actor like Zanni in front of the camera for more than two takes. The weak link was not Michael but Miranda Clark. She was beautiful, however, and she had spunk, and it was easy to imagine audiences falling in love with her. Besides, when it came right down to it, they really hadn’t had much choice, and she was a step above the other young actresses they’d auditioned.
Paola Bottazzi, the locations manager, and Franco met them in the lobby of the hotel, and they took a taxi straight to the convent in Piazza San Pier Maggiore, which they were planning to use for a production office, for storing equipment, for wardrobe and makeup, and for most of the interior shots. Margot had made the initial contact, and Paola Bottazzi had done the follow-up. The convent, which had been closed for ten years, had been taken over by the city government, which was planning to turn it into a school, but which hadn’t managed to do so yet, though some playground equipment had been installed in the cloister. The convent would represent an enormous savings—bathrooms, a kitchen, changing rooms, green rooms, sets, production office, wardrobe—and Esther wanted to reassure herself that it was going to work. If it did, they wouldn’t have to go to Eastern Europe.
Margot was waiting for them in the piazza, and they were soon joined by a government official who had the keys. He opened a small door that was cut out of one of the big doors. Esther was reluctant to enter. It gave her the creeps. One of her girlhood friends had become a nun and had disappeared. But she followed the others into the dark interior, staying close to Margot.
“You were tempted, weren’t you?” she asked Margot.
“Tempted?”
“To join.”
“For about an hour,” Margot said.
“Do you think you could have stuck it out? It gives me the willies.”
“Probably not. A religious vocation wasn’t what I thought it was. There was always something I couldn’t understand. It was a good place for a woman, but . . . a mystery. A place I couldn’t get to.”
“These three rooms,” the government official said, “were the hospice for pilgrims. They’re the only rooms that have been converted to classrooms.”
“Production office,” Esther said. “Right by the front door.” In her imagination the room was already full: desks, telephone
s, computers, fax machine, coffee machine, production assistants and interns. Herself in the middle of it all. Everything was perfect. They could even house the PAs and some of the Italian crew members in the dormitory rooms on the second floor and save another bundle. Esther was relieved to see Michael shake off his tiredness, as if every room were presenting the solution to a problem that had been weighing him down. It was like having one of the big studio soundstages at their disposal. They had seventy pages scripted for interior shots, most of which could be done in the main chapel, which was big enough for two or three sets and which would be easy to light because the ceiling was high enough for the overheads.
In the piazza everyone shook hands with everyone else. Franco and Paola and the government official would take care of the paperwork. Esther could hardly contain herself. She was starting to think this could be big, bigger than she’d thought, and she wanted to take everyone out to dinner, to Enoteca Pinchiorri, which she’d read about in one of her guidebooks.
“Too expensive,” Margot said. “Besides, you need a reservation six weeks in advance.”
“You know people,” Esther said. “Get on the horn, tell them it would be a damn shame if the producer and the director of a great film can’t get a table at Enoteca Pinchiorri. Tell them who you are. Tell them you wrote the book.”
“It’s pronounced Pinkiori,” Margot said. “The ch is pronounced like a k.”
“What about you, Mike?” Esther said when they were in a cab on the way back to the hotel. “You think Beryl will join a convent after you’ve popped off? I wouldn’t be surprised. Do Episcopalians have convents?”
“You’ll have to ask Beryl,” Michael said.
The doors of Enoteca Pinchiorri were almost as big as the convent doors and were flanked by potted plants the size of trees. There was no menu posted out in front.
Franco had come for them at the hotel in a taxi. Margot was waiting at the restaurant, along with her friend, Woody. Esther wished that Woody hadn’t come because four would have been nicer. Besides, she pegged him right away as a sourpuss, couldn’t see him opening up. He sat up straight in the Queen Anne chair, as if he were bracing himself for an attack. And he wasn’t dressed appropriately. White shirt, nice jacket, and an okay tie, but jeans. Everyone wore jeans in Italy, but not at the Enoteca Pinchiorri. She knew that he’d worked on a screenplay with Margot and was afraid that this might spell trouble. Unfortunately, at some point she’d have to sit down with Margot and explain the facts of life, explain that she was going to use her own screenplay, not Margot’s. Dealing with writers was like dealing with parents of small children. Esther’s sister was a schoolteacher in Phoenix. Parents were always complaining, her sister said, because they thought you weren’t treating their little darlings properly. Writers were like that with their books. They couldn’t grasp certain fundamental concepts: Film is essentially different from narrative. It’s a visual medium. It works through images, not through words. Not that dialogue isn’t important. Writers thought that story was the heart and soul of everything, including movies, but it isn’t. Images are the heart and soul of movies. Moving images. Story is incidental. That’s what writers couldn’t understand.
The Italian Lover Page 8