by Cate Andrews
The teasing continued until they were pulling up to a row of rickety, rust-coloured buildings on the edge of Erizo. Joe parked up underneath a dusty, old street light that kept flickering on and off like a scene from a horror movie. Cutting the engine, he indicated to the building on the end.
‘That’s our hotel over there.’
Polly followed his gaze and her face fell. On the flight over, she’d been having fantasies of a five-star Moroccan Palace.
‘Appearances can be deceiving, sweetheart,’ he murmured, watching her carefully.
Polly jumped. ‘Am I that easy to read?’
He shrugged and opened his door. ‘You’re not the first crewmember to arrive. I guess I’m getting used to the reaction. Don’t write it off just yet though. This place is like an aging actress with a high IQ; the sharp interior far outweighs the crumbling exterior.’ Grabbing her case, he led her up the dusty stone steps and through an archway flanked by two carved wooden doors.
Stepping inside, Polly gave a gasp of surprise. The walls and the ceilings were draped in a sumptuous cream fabric that conjured up visions of lavish Bedouin tents. This unexpected lightness lent an exotic charm to the glorious dark wood reception desk and the brightly coloured mosaic floor. In the centre of the room stood a large marble fountain. Soft candlelight from the dozens of tiny lanterns suspended from the rafters reflected in the steady trickles of water below like miniature diamonds.
This really is a desert oasis, she marveled, as the pungent aroma of delicious-smelling spices drifted past on the late evening breeze.
‘I take it all back, this place is amazing,’ she whispered to Joe as a hotel porter emerged from the gloom to take her bag and lead her over to the reception desk.
For some reason her reaction filled him with relief. ‘Make sure you come and find me once you’re done,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ll introduce the gang.’
‘I will. And thanks again for coming to pick me up.’
‘My pleasure, I think. Despite the digs about my age I rather enjoyed the 80s film revival. If you can keep the insults in check, I might even let you borrow my Top Gun CD sometime.’
Polly laughed. ‘How can I resist such a treat? Fine, from now on no more insults.’
‘Good,’ smiled Joe. ‘Me and my fragile ego will be very relieved to hear it.’
Flustered by the unfamiliar currency, which gifted her porter a tip as large as her suitcase, Polly splashed water across her face and beetled back downstairs, hoping she didn’t reek too much of dried yoghurt and gravy.
Lowly lit and dominated by a vast wide-screen, fixed on MTV Morocco, the bar was heaving with endless groups of hot, sweaty, self-confident bodies. Brash Brit and American accents and the fug of cigarette smoke hung thickly above each table, and Kenny Loggins was turned up so loudly, he might have been Footloosing right out of the stereo.
I wonder if that’s Joe’s CD, thought Polly idly, peering through the gloom for a glimpse of the 1st AD. Intrigued by the splashes and squeals that kept puncturing the conversations around her, she glanced through a set of open patio doors as a bikini-clad babe dived headfirst into a gleaming blue swimming pool. A huge cheer erupted as a pink top floated to the surface, sans babe.
‘Hey Polly over here!’
Heads swiveled as Joe jumped up from a table in the corner and made his way over to her.
‘Couldn’t resist another crack at my age, could you?’ he teased, kissing her lightly on the cheek, ‘or am I in for that evening of blackmail after all?’
‘I’m still deciding,’ she laughed, ‘what’s my silence worth?’
‘The first two rounds at least.’ Joe grasped her arm and led her over to the counter. He must be at least six feet, she marveled, as he leant over to attract the barman’s attention. Six whole feet of gorgeousness.
‘Casablanca ok?’ he asked her over his shoulder.
Polly nodded, hoping it wasn’t too alcoholic. Her lack of sleep was liable to fast track the effects of booze, especially after her over-indulgence last night. Picking up her drink, she followed him back to his table.
‘This is Polly,’ he announced, plonking four beers down. ‘Pull up a chair, sweetheart,’ he added, patting the spare seat next to him. Straight away a young man with short wiry black hair lent over to shake her hand.
‘Hi, I’m Danny.’
Polly took his hand, shyly. His soft, coffee-coloured eyes were perilously hypnotic, and, when he grinned at her, she couldn’t help smiling back. Seeing this, the table’s occupants roared with knowing laughter.
‘Don’t be fooled by his Irish rogue routine,’ Joe warned her, slapping Danny’s hand away. ‘Give him half a chance and he’ll have you naked and performing his version of Riverdance, within the hour.’
‘And could you blame me for trying?’ exclaimed Danny, leaning over to plant soft wet kisses on her cheeks, ‘look at her, she’s gorgeous! Ignore them all, darling, I’ll be suing for libel, first thing Monday.’
‘At least let her have a beer before you launch your charm offensive,’ said Joe lightly. ‘This is Rashid, our Crowd Assistant, and Khalil our Location Manager,’ he added, gesturing to the two men they were sat with.
‘Welcome to Morocco,’ they replied in perfect, accented English, thumping her on the back and offering up expensive-looking cigarettes like they were peppermints. Polly declined with another smile and took a sip of her beer. Within seconds, the conversation had shifted to some new-fangled film camera that she had never heard of. Unable to contribute anything, other than a few timely grunts of agreement, she glanced around for Rachel. Instead she encountered fierce scowls from every other woman in the bar. She quickly turned back to the table.
‘So, err, how far is the production office to the hotel?’ she asked suddenly.
All four men turned to look at her.
‘Fifteen minutes, I reckon,’ said Joe. ‘We’ve hired a studio on the outskirts of town. Part of the movie will be shot on location but we still have a few scenes to thrash out on the sound stages there.’
‘Great. Glad to hear it.’ Once again, Polly’s conversational skills slithered to a halt. Catching sight of another granite-faced blond shooting her daggers, she automatically inched closer to Joe.
Hearing the soft scrape of the chair, he smiled down at her. He liked Polly, he decided. In fact, he liked her a lot. Despite Janie’s assurances, he had been expecting another of Stephen’s identikit runners to come stomping out of the arrivals terminal tonight, complete with a camera-truck load of complaints about travelling economy. Instead, this cheeky girl with the faint whiff of school dinner halls about her had walked out and completely smashed his presumptions. He just hoped to god she was tough enough to handle his brother.
‘I took a call from Michael Wilson whilst you were out,’ he heard Danny murmur, as he lent over to him.
‘Oh?’
‘Walt’s demanded a Global representative at the production meeting on Monday. He’s flying him in a week early. He’s scheduled to arrive tomorrow night.’
‘Christ, does Vincent know?’ groaned Joe. ‘He’ll go bananas at them muscling in on his territory again.’
Danny cocked an imaginary gun at his temple. ‘Ba-ba-boom! He does now. I had that pleasure myself, right after he learnt his hotel room was a whole foot smaller than Stephen’s.’
Joe frowned. Both men detested Vincent, as did most people on set. He was demanding, obnoxious and everyone went to extraordinary lengths to avoid him.
‘Ok thanks, i’ll tell Stephen when he lands. We better get everything in tiptop shape for this meeting on Monday, those two will be looking for any old excuse to kick off. Can you make sure Rachel prints off enough storyboard sets, script changes and schedules, and can you ask the Studio’s health and safety rep to come along as well? This isn’t going to be an easy shoot and I want to make sure every potential man-standing-on-a-rake screw-up is covered.’
‘Sure, i’ll get onto it first thing. Oh, and one more thing�
��Maisie’s been confirmed as lead.’
Danny turned back to his beer then so missed Joe’s look of horror. As one of the unlucky few who knew about his brother’s traitorous affair, Joe was constantly being called upon to provide alibis. Now, with Michael flying in for the duration of the shoot as well, it was shaping up to be a very tricky few months ahead.
Chapter Seven
The next morning, Michael Wilson, sat cooling his heels in one of the fancy First Class lounges at LAX. At the same time, he was casting his eye over a script that his old Global Studios development team had slipped him during a brief sushi sojourn yesterday.
Devouring the first page in ten seconds flat, he reached out to snag a fistful of grapes from a nearby fruit bowl, his gaze never once leaving the thick wad of paper in front of him. The more he read, the faster he chewed, and, before long, the grapes in his mouth resembled nothing more substantial than the pulpy residue at the bottom of a fine bottle of claret.
All of a sudden, he burst forth from his black leather armchair and began prowling around the monochrome lounge like a restless tiger, obscuring the view of the mega inch television screen in front of him and trampling many a pampered toe in the process. His mind was a chocolate hazelnut swirl of characters and plotlines. He was so excited, he barely registered the disgruntled mutterings from the male contingent, the women being only too happy to be flattened by this golden Adonis.
The script was ingenious! It was inspired!
He was suddenly anxious to see if a second reading was just as good, and as he sat back down there was a joint sigh of relief from the lounge’s Fox News enthusiasts. A naturally gifted skim-reader, it took him all of forty-five minutes. He wasn’t disappointed, far from it in fact, and whilst Love Letters from Romania was a movie of epic proportions, a genre most likely to have him reaching for his paper shredder these days, the story was simply too exquisite to abandon.
A sweeping love-fest, set in Eastern Europe amidst the demise of Communism, it had a dialogue that fizzed with wit and a heart that exploded in violence. It was a Romanian Dr Zhivago crossed with Kill Bill, decided Michael, reaching out to pinch another grape. One where the lead character laid waste to the bars of Bucharest and shot up the bad commies in a Tarantino-esque fashion as he sought out his long lost Romany muse.
Eager to share his discovery, he punched Maisie’s number into his cell then groaned as it went straight to voicemail. His leather armchair squeaked in protest as he slumped back into it, deflated, and he eyed his neighbour’s whisky glass. It was only 11:00am. Still a good half hour off the acceptable lunchtime drinking period, but surely the long journey ahead of him was a good excuse to scrap alcohol etiquette today? Clutching his script, he strode over to the bar.
‘Double scotch please ladies,’ he said, smiling at the two hostesses who gaped at him in wonder.
‘Certainly Sir,’ they gushed, as two pairs of tanned, lightly scented hands collided reaching for the same bottle.
Michael turned away to try Maisie again so was oblivious to the furious squabbling that had erupted behind him. In a lounge of wall-to-wall beauty, his was by far the most alluring. Not vain enough to be an actor or model (no ‘me-me’ attitude, nor entourage of preening stylists), but much too sober to be a rock star, the hostesses had taken it upon themselves to plonk him in the most coveted and accessible of potential boyfriends boxes; an international jet-setting playboy. These girls weren’t going to surrender their chance to serve this wealthy sexpot without a fight
Still fiddling with his phone, Michael accepted his drink from a triumphant-looking brunette but deflected her complementary flirtations easily. Her face fell and she slammed the bottle back on the shelf.
Michael barely noticed. As always his thoughts were with Maisie, though he hadn’t actually spoken to the love of his life since yesterday afternoon, not since she had flown to London to start press for her latest movie, Wild Devils. His handsome face creased into a scowl. He knew movie junkets were tiresome and time consuming, but surely she could have taken a five-minute break from those simpering journos to return his calls and messages?
Unable to track down Maisie’s hopeless assistant, Bitsey, either, he ordered another drink and returned to his seat. His flight would be boarding shortly and he wanted to dissect the last few pages of that fabulous script once again before take off.
Growing up as Walt Wilson’s son in the heart of Hollywood had not been easy on Michael. A front row spectator to all its cutthroat voracity, he had quickly learnt to associate the gently swaying palm trees with untold misery and shattered dreams.
Walt, a flashy Italian-American, whose own looks rivaled those of his movie’s protagonists, had spent most of Michael’s childhood establishing his powerhouse studio, leaving his beautiful young Swedish wife to raise their son alone, assisted only by a succession of sexy tennis instructors and an ever-increasing dependence on cocktail hour. Alas, as his empire grew, so had his son’s loneliness and resentment, and by the age of eighteen, Michael’s hatred for the movie industry, or what he saw as the root cause of so much parental disharmony and neglect, threatened to bubble over like the water in one of his ancestor’s pasta pots. Overnight, he swapped his platinum credit cards for board shorts and his Vanquish for a surfboard, and set his sights on escaping Hollywood’s grubby clutches forever.
Michael spent the next four years living in beachside motels, ignoring his father’s messages and taking direction from the turn of the tide, until he awoke one day to find his beloved surfboard stolen and a family of cockroaches scurrying across his toes. Batting the critters across the room with a well-worn Haiviana flip flop, he came to the depressing conclusion that life as a surfer bum was not all it was cracked up to be.
Jumping on the first plane out of Sydney, he set a course for home weighed down by four cartons of duty-free cigarettes and a ten-ton weight of disillusionment. With his Stephen King imprisoned in the overhead locker by a set of bongos and a didgeridoo, Michael had wearily sized up the in-flight entertainment on offer; an intensive tête-à-tête with his overweight, hyper-active neighbour, or a marathon chug through the entire movie collection; six rom-coms, three actions, two epics, one foreign.
Deciding on the lesser of two evils, he immersed himself in celluloid, only for something miraculous to happen. Amidst the mirth (most of the rom-coms), and the tears of anguish (epics, one of the rom-coms – some actresses really should stick to the serious stuff), Michael, unwittingly, went and unleashed the dormant film-zealot deep inside. He was entranced. Captivated. Like a young, handsome and very buff Captain Columbus discovering America for the first time, and as the plane prepared for landing, he caught a glimpse of the Hollywood sign and at long last bowed to his inevitable destiny.
Delighted at his son’s dramatic change of heart, Walt immediately offered him the plum job of Development Executive, working closely with an exciting new UK Production Company that he had just cemented a first look deal with. Determined to show his Pa that he wasn’t just another Hollywood nepotistic freeloader, Michael threw himself into the role. He spent the next few years slogging his guts out for GBA, but in private becoming more and more disheartened with the type of scripts he was tasked with sourcing.
Fixated with big budget, overly emotive epics, Stephen and Vincent’s ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ attitude tended to spurn the more quirky fare that Michael was really interested in making. Stephen also refused, point-blank, to cast anyone other than his girlfriend, Maisie, in his films, with the exception of the dim-witted, Bunny Hopkins, in this year’s smash, Warrior Tigress, and, as much as he adored his girlfriend, he could sense the public were already beginning to tire of the same old pouts and gratuitous cleavage shots.
Most frustrating of all was his father’s ability to turn a brooding blind eye to GBA’s appalling behavior, just as long as they kept on raking in the big bucks. Walt loved nothing more than sexy cocktail waitresses, his son and big, fat dollar signs stacking up in his offs
hore bank accounts. Michael, however, found Stephen and Vincent’s conduct to all those around them sickening. They thought nothing of blackballing crew who displeased them, or actresses who refused to sleep with them, and with the amount of bribery and back-handers going on during award season, it was a miracle that they had never pocketed more.
Eventually, Michael plucked up the courage to request a transfer to the Global Studios Art-house Division but his father rubbished him out of the door. Angry and frustrated, Michael had rebounded by forming his own production company, yet aware that such a move might knock Walt’s great big Italian ego, he made sure to schedule a ‘tell-all’ lunch with him, before the Hollywood tittle-tattle busybodies got a whiff.
Alas, on the day his nerves got the better of him and he bottled it by the first course. Something about Walt always brought out the neglected schoolboy in him, anxious to please for a smidgeon of approval. In the end, after picking miserably at his salad nicoise, or rather two iceberg lettuce leaves and a single shrivelled black olive, served with a $60 price tag, he was bullied into accepting a promotion to GBA’s Executive Producer, before his father’s attention was diverted by a passing waitress’ derriere.
It was the worst possible outcome. Now, until he found the balls to fess up, Michael would have to shelve his new company and be forced to spend even more time in the company of his two least favourite filmmakers.
Chapter Eight
Polly blinked back the tears and gazed out at a sea of adoring faces. In the front row she spotted her parents, clapping like mad and bursting with pride. All those tense confrontations over her decision to study Media Studies A-level instead of French or Physics or indeed anything other than learning how to twiddle volume nobs, as her dad liked to put it, forgotten in this one glorious, glorious moment. Even Joe was there with tears of joy streaming down his face. He had swapped his combats for a smart black tux but she could still spot the tips of his black and white converse poking out from the bottom of his trouser legs.