The picture’s biggest star was Aaron Jakes: he’d made a splash on the last season of some cable drama called One for the Money, and he was (of course) very good-looking, and (of course again) somewhat arrogant and not at all intimidated by Hannah or anyone else. The movie’s budget was $20 million; a tenth of that was going right into Aaron’s pocket.
At first, Hannah was generous in granting me access to everything; as long as I kept her supplied with grande lattes and charged smartphones, I got to sit in on phone calls, production meetings, and even the first read-through of the script. There were at least forty people present for that - the entire cast, the director and producer, the heads of every department, and me - and it went well until we reached page sixty-eight, when Aaron questioned his character’s motivation. Ned tried to explain it to him, but Aaron had obviously already decided he didn’t like the scene, and he refused to read any further until it was removed.
Even though it was only ten past eleven in the morning, Hannah called a lunch break and dismissed everyone except Aaron. I admit that I was more interested in seeing the outcome of this than eating, so I didn’t file off to the food tent with everyone else, but hung around just outside the door of the stage where we were holding the read-through. There was no sound of shouting or arguing from within, but after a few moments the door burst open, and Aaron Jakes - six-foot-tall, chiselled-features, built-like-a-brick-shithouse Aaron Jakes - came out crying. He didn’t see me, but turned and headed for his car.
After a few seconds, Hannah came out. “Everything okay?” I asked.
Her smile reminded me of the time my dad had taken me fishing and I’d caught a barracuda, and had dreamed for nights of its vicious teeth. “Fine. Where’d he go?”
I nodded after Aaron. “His car, I think. Is he ...?”
“It’s fine. He’ll be back by the time lunch is over.”
“How ...?” I started to ask, but Hannah was already thrusting her empty coffee Thermos at me. “Refill that, will you? Oh, and then get yourself some lunch.”
She was right, of course - Aaron returned after lunch, the rest of the read-through proceeded without incident, and the scene stayed.
Hannah Ward was always right.
~ * ~
Hannah started asking for my opinion.
The first time was during a meeting with the costume designer; when they’d reached an impasse over different designs for a dress the female lead had to wear in one scene, Hannah asked me to decide. A few days later, she brought Ned into her office, told him I would be reading the latest draft of the script, and that he was to take my notes seriously.
“Why on earth should I? She’s nothing but a bloody kid,” he said, as if I wasn’t even in the room.
“That’s exactly why - because she’s the perfect demographic for this film. And I respect her opinion.”
Ned shrugged and left the office. When he was gone, Hannah offered me the closest thing I’d ever seen to a genuinely warm smile from her. “You remind me a lot of myself when I was your age,” she said.
Some part of me sensed the manipulation behind those words, but the biggest part wanted to believe them. I wanted to believe that I was Hannah Ward’s spiritual heir - that I would study at the feet of Hollywood Hannah and take over when she retired. I felt bonded to her, and would have done almost anything for her at that point. I was Hollywood Hannah’s bitch, very happily so.
Which was proven a week later, when she asked for help with a suitcase.
~ * ~
“Can you stay late tonight and help me with something?”
It was a Friday afternoon, and shooting was ready to begin on Monday. We were in Hannah’s meticulously neat office; I’d just finished making notes of a few gifts she wanted to buy for the cast members to celebrate the start of shooting.
“Sure. Whatever you need.”
I said that confidently, but when I looked up, my gut clenched - because for a split second, before she caught herself, Hannah Ward looked anxious, and I’d never seen Hannah Ward look anxious about anything.
She took me out to dinner at a favourite small Hollywood eatery where everyone knew who she was and catered to her every whim, and then she asked me to drive her to an airfield in the Valley. The destination was strange enough, but the fact that she asked me to drive was the strangest thing - she never asked anyone to drive her. It was a matter of great pride to Hannah Ward that she never used a chauffeur or driver, but always drove herself. I knew better than to ask her why, though, and so we travelled in silence to the Van Nuys Airport.
When we arrived, she directed me to drive right on to an area of the tarmac where a private jet waited, the passenger stairs already in place and the hatch open. “Wait here,” she said as she climbed from her Hummer. She stepped out, then turned back and looked at me. “No matter what happens, don’t get out of the car. Even if someone tells you to - don’t”
“Okay, Hannah,” I said, trying not to sound as scared as I felt.
I watched, then, as she walked the short distance to the stairs, climbed up, and met a man at the top. He handed her a large suitcase, glanced once at the car (and me), then nodded to Hannah and went back into the plane. She lugged the suitcase down the steps and back to the car, tossing it into the rear before climbing up the passenger side. “Now, get us the fuck out of here before he changes his mind,” she said.
I didn’t waste any time. Once we were safely away from the airfield and on the 405 freeway, she exhaled and laughed. I glanced at her curiously.
“Know what’s in the suitcase?” she asked.
“Not a clue.”
She laughed again, a loud, triumphant bark, then said, “Most of the movie’s budget.”
I’d heard rumours for years that some of Hannah Ward’s movie money came from organized crime, but I hadn’t really believed them ... or at least, I certainly would never have pictured anything as low-rent as a midnight suitcase exchange. And I’d been the getaway driver.
I was getting an education, all right.
~ * ~
The first crew member disappeared a week into shooting.
He was the bottom-ranking grip, and staggered in late one morning as drunk as the proverbial skunk. The key grip tried to cover for him, until the idiot knocked over a heavy light stand during shooting, destroying an otherwise-good take and narrowly missing one of the actors.
Hannah walked the key grip off the stage, but she wasn’t very happy when she returned a few minutes later.
“Can I get you something?” I asked, both curious and hoping to mollify a brewing tempest.
“A way out of the union contract I signed, maybe.” And I’m not exaggerating when I say she snarled that.
It turned out the drunk was the key grip’s brother-in-law. The key grip wasn’t going to fire him, and suggested that the IATSE union would crawl straight up Hannah’s ass if she tried. Even Hannah didn’t want to mess with the unions.
Besides, she had something better in mind.
The brother-in-law didn’t turn up for work the next morning. That afternoon, a security guard doing a routine patrol found him dead in an empty sound stage. It looked like he’d climbed up into the catwalks for some reason, and then fallen to his death.
I accompanied Hannah to the empty stage when the police arrived. The first thing I noticed was the dead man - he looked like he was asleep, except that his legs twisted the wrong way and his eyes were open and milky. A tiny trickle of blood had leaked from the corner of his mouth and crusted over. I couldn’t understand why there wasn’t more. He didn’t look as realistic as the corpses in most horror movies.
But more interesting to watch was my boss and the cops - they greeted her with smiles and called her “Hannah”, and she grinned right back at them. She palled around with them like she was just one of the boys, making jokes about other producers, LA’s mayor, and the dead man. They told her they thought he’d been dead about sixteen hours, whi
ch would put the time of death last night at about nine p.m.
“Oh,” Hannah said, turning those Arctic Sea eyes on me, “we were next door watching dailies until ten last night, weren’t we?”
We weren’t. She knew and I knew that we’d knocked off by eight. But for some reason I smiled and nodded. I even improvised, “Yes, they were great last night.”
Hannah gave me a warning look, which I knew meant “don’t overdo it”, then returned to her police friends. “Well,” said the sergeant, “I’m sure toxicology will find this guy’s bloodstream reading more like ‘Mary’ than ‘Bloody’.”
And that was it. We said our goodbyes, returned to our stage, and got back to work. Hannah even gave the key grip the afternoon off, so he could “cope with this terrible tragedy”.
The next day, she presented me with the latest state-of-the-art tablet computer and a year’s worth of prepaid 4G access. She said it was so I could do an even better job of helping her work.
I knew what it was really for, of course.
I’d spent the night without sleep, running over the possibilities in my head. Maybe she really hadn’t killed him; maybe he’d crawled up on to that catwalk, looking for a quiet place to drink, and had fallen. But I could imagine it all: her telling him something important had been left up there and he had to get it; following him up, and he was drunk and never even saw her, or felt those big hands on his back until it was too late ...
But there was no proof. She was too smart for that. I knew the tired crew had been heading home after wrapping out the day, that no one had noticed her or the grip, that there were no clues except what they’d find in his toxicology report.
So I rationalized staying quiet. And tried not to hate myself.
~ * ~
It wasn’t long after that when Hannah Ward said to me, at the end of a particularly long and difficult day of shooting, “You’ll be lucky to survive this movie.”
She patted my shoulder, and I asked, “Are they all this bad?”
“Oh, most of them are much worse,” she said, winking at me before she walked away.
~ * ~
I was looking forward to the end of shooting on The Lowdown, because I figured it meant my internship would be over; but as we neared that fateful day, Hannah asked me if I’d like to stay on to see some of the post-production, and she even offered me a small salary. I seriously needed money - my credit card was close to its limit and for some reason my landlord still wanted rent every month - so I said yes.
Hannah’s next film was already set: it was called Yank!, and was a rather (ahem) liberal re-telling of Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The script was in its eighth draft (with its fifth new writer), and Hannah had just starting talking to directors and stars. She said Will Ferrell and Seth Rogen were both interested.
I was in her office early one morning, taking notes (on my new tablet computer, of course) from her about the Yank! script when she glanced down at an entertainment news blog and froze. I saw her eyes scan the screen for a few seconds, then she blurted out, “That fucking bastard!”
I waited; I’d never seen her this furious before. Her face darkened, her eyes narrowed. She suddenly spun her laptop around for me to see the screen. “Look at this!”
The blog claimed that Jeff Minsky over at Dragonstar Pictures was developing an updated version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court called Art and the Yank.
Hannah had plenty of history with Jeff Minsky - he’d been the development executive she’d once punched.
“He doesn’t really want to make this movie,” she said, peering at the screen again, “he’s just doing this to piss me off.”
“What a dick,” I muttered, although I was really thinking, Is this whole movie business run on idiotic pettiness?
Hannah held a finger up at me. “Stay right there - I want you to hear this.”
“Okay.”
She pulled out her cell phone, thumbed through her address book for a few seconds, then punched a number and raised the phone to her ear. She looked at me with gleeful anticipation when she said into the phone, “Jeff, it’s Hannah.”
I only heard her side of the conversation, but she made it pretty clear that he was denying that his project had been influenced by hers in any way, and that he had no intention of giving up Art and the Yank ... and Hannah made it equally clear that she didn’t believe a word he said.
When she ended the call she went blank for a few seconds, and somehow that frightened me more than the way blood had suffused her face earlier.
“So he won’t give it up, huh?”
She grinned then and said, “Doesn’t matter. It’s time to do something about Jeff Minsky.”
~ * ~
A week later, Hannah called me on a Sunday night and asked if I could meet her at her place in twenty minutes. I was relaxing in sweats, but of course I said I could.
I was five minutes late getting to her Brentwood estate, and was surprised to find her waiting for me in the driveway. “Hope you didn’t have anything planned for tonight - I’m afraid it’s going to go late.”
“Sure,” I said, and then hopped into her Hummer.
She drove us down the 405 to the 10 freeway headed east. It was already late - after ten p.m. - on Sunday night, and was one of the few times traffic in LA was sparse. We drove in silence for twenty minutes, then Hannah put on music - she liked classic jazz, which I didn’t know at all. It was something with a fast, frantic saxophone, and it didn’t do much to help me relax.
We kept going east, past downtown LA and through the towns of the San Gabriel Valley - Monterey Park, Rosemead, West Covina, Pomona. There were fewer cars on the road with each passing town, and Hannah picked up speed - soon we were doing 90 m.p.h., headed for ... where? If we kept going, we’d soon reach nothing but desert and Palm Springs. I tried to remember if she was working with a writer out here, or searching for a location ... but at eleven p.m. on a Sunday night?
We kept going. We passed Palm Springs, Indio ... and then left the 10 freeway and headed south, towards the Salton Sea. I’d never been out here before, and I mainly knew of the area only because of how the noxious, stagnant pond that passed for a “sea” was occasionally stirred up by storms that sent its rotten-egg stench 150 miles west to blanket LA. I guess it had once been planned as a major resort, but from what I could see as we sped through the desert night, it was little more than a collection of abandoned shacks and miles of wind-blown emptiness.
Hannah finally slowed down and turned off the main road. We bounced along a rutted dirt track for another mile or so, until she finally spotted an ancient rusted sign with a lot number painted on it. She parked there and killed the engine.
“We made good time getting out here - we’re early.”
I couldn’t hold my silence any longer. “Early for what, exactly?”
She didn’t look at me as she spoke, just stared straight off into the night. There were no lights visible around us - no one lived out here, and I could see why - but in the distance I caught the faint glimmer of starlight on water: the Salton Sea.
“You know, I started as an actress. I was pretty then - a pretty piece of meat. I got tired of it quickly. One day a studio head -doesn’t matter which one - called me into his office and told me he’d give me a leading role if I gave him a blow job. Instead I grabbed his crotch, squeezed, and told him I’d keep squeezing unless he let me produce the film instead of starring in it. He agreed, and I was done with acting for ever ... but there were still plenty of men who thought I was a pretty piece of meat and who needed their balls squeezed regularly, and it hasn’t changed much since.”
She turned and looked at me then, her eyes glinting from the soft lights of the dashboard ... but from what she carried inside her, too. “So how’s your grip?” she asked me.
Why were we here, in the desert by an abandoned sea, at one in the morning? So she could ask me this? No,
she could’ve done it in LA.
“Why did you pick me, Hannah?” I’d finally voiced the question that had circled around my thoughts like a carrion bird ever since I’d interviewed for the internship. What had she seen in me? Was it something I didn’t see in myself? Something I didn’t want to see?
Before she could answer, something distracted her, something she was looking at beyond me. “Ahh, good - our company has arrived.”
I spun in my seat and saw headlights approaching. The new arrival thumped to a halt next to us, and a man got out. He was big, tattooed, short dark hair, a leather jacket. He nodded to Hannah as she walked up to him.
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 18