by Rachel Cline
11
In December, Nancy Travis turned down Trouble Doll in order to do Fluke, a talking-dog picture with Samuel Jackson and Matthew Modine. “Laura’s someone I’d really like to work with,” she told Simpson. “I adored Two Chevrolets.” (People loved to say how much they liked Laura’s first film because it was virtually impossible to see—Disney had objected to the seven-second use of the song “Someday My Prince Will Come” to imply a character’s sexual dysfunction and embargoed the film. If you had seen it, you had either been at Sundance in 1991 or knew someone who had a videotape.) In any case, this was bad news for Simpson’s cast-Bunny-first strategy. They needed an actress who was indie enough for Laura to respect, commercial enough for her name to mean something to foreign distributors, and plausible as a skanky stripper with big dreams. Travis was the end of their list.
So Simpson implemented his Plan B: attach a cluster of quirky characters for the smaller, cameo parts—the Reservoir Dogs strategy, he called it. It would be a lot easier to get someone with a recognizable name to commit to an oddball script for a few days of work than getting some would-be ingenue to stake three months of her life on it. He hired a location scout and started telling people they were going to go at the first of the year. He figured they could shoot exteriors and ready-made locations while they dressed the strip club, where almost a third of the story took place. He also told Laura they needed Ramona to punch up Bunny’s character, again.
Laura and Ramona had become friends at AFI almost ten years earlier. The two black-clad women had recognized each other instantly as necessary allies, unafraid to use the word cunt and able to keep up with their male classmates shot for shot at the bar, the pool table, and behind the camera. But after their fellowship year, when Laura optioned Ramona’s script, their friendship began to fray. Laura felt she had overpaid, Ramona felt Laura was getting more than her money’s worth. Then Laura vanished entirely to work on Two Chevrolets—for what turned out to be almost five years. When she reappeared, she was married to Greg, living in Hollywood, and acting like she was doing Ramona a big favor by renewing her long-lapsed option for five grand. Since then, things between them had been tense. It wasn’t easy for Ramona to get herself over to Laura’s house for rewrites just because some producer she’d never heard of thought he could sell the thing, but she went.
“Do you know Fat City?” Laura asked as the two women sat ignoring the plate of cookies that Laura had placed on the coffee table between them. “That’s the feeling I want.”
“Utter despair?” Ramona knew the movie, but she did not particularly admire it.
“Oh, come on, there’s plenty of hope in that movie,” said Laura, although Ramona’s disdain was already causing her to question the truth of this assertion. “Well, hope is the wrong word. But I’m thinking about Susan Tyrrell’s character. Bunny could be like a version of her before she hits the skids.”
“Bunny isn’t depraved, she’s tragic,” said Ramona, who was looking down at a torn cuticle she was in the process of stripping till it bled.
Laura knew enough not to continue with the Fat City analogy. It was just that analogies were the only way she knew to think about character. All she could do was try to come up with a better example while Ramona fidgeted. Most of her favorite pictures—Chinatown, Badlands, The Graduate—were too ironic, too detached. She wanted Trouble Doll to be more sincere, more like Cutter’s Way, if she remembered it right.
“I have an idea,” said Ramona, finally looking up at Laura. “Let’s give her a scene with a kid in it. Like, a little girl who might one day grow up to be Bunny, if she’s not careful.” Laura considered this. “A tough little girl, like Jodie Foster in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” Ramona continued.
Laura was nodding and had picked up a pad to write on. “So, where? At night, right? So there’s, like, an implied threat because the kid seems to be alone when Bunny finds her. What is she, eight? Nine?”
“How about in the supermarket?” said Ramona.
Laura loved this idea. It brought in a whole implied sociopolitical analysis. Of course, there was always the problem of turning around all the brand labels. But they could just shoot in tight. She started narrating for Ramona:
“We see Bunny in, let’s say, the canned goods aisle. And her eye is drawn to something on the floor: a child’s plastic barrette. The kind with those molded flowers on it. Blue or purple.”
Ramona picked up the thread: “And then she sees the kid, who’s farther down, staring at the soup cans. And Bunny goes up to her to give her back the barrette but the kid asks for her help. She wants to make tuna casserole. Bunny asks if she’s done it before and who’s going to eat it and tries to help her find the recipe on a soup can and, I don’t know, does she fail or succeed?”
“Neither,” said Laura. “The kid hears her older brother calling her name and runs off, scared.”
“And so then, later, we can get some mileage out of Bunny finding the barrette again in her coat pocket! This is great!” Laura saw a strange shift of expression on Ramona’s face. Greg had just walked into the room.
“I’m making coffee,” he said. “Do you guys want some?” Catching the black-haired woman’s eye, he’d felt a jolt of fear and excitement. Then he’d realized he hadn’t fucked her, just sat across from her several times at his SA meeting in Burbank. He had no idea what, if anything, he had shared about in her presence, but he assumed that she knew at least the general outline. He probably knew equally damning things about the anorexic-looking woman on the couch if he could remember any, but he couldn’t.
“None for me,” Ramona said.
“No, thanks, honey,” said Laura, turning to smile more intimately than was usual and to check on her husband’s face. She could tell that he and Ramona had met before but decided, ultimately, that Ramona wasn’t Greg’s type. Too Goth-looking, and basically just not “cute.” Laura felt she would know in her bones if she crossed paths with anyone who was a real threat and, in the absence of those crossings, the idea of the occasional also-or almost-ran in Greg’s life was part of what kept her harness tight. His predatory gleam was a reason to keep her own hips slim, her skin firm, her hair glossy and kempt.
“Now, where were we?” she said to Ramona. “Right. The barrette.”
12
Very early on the morning of January 17, David was standing in the kitchen when he heard the barking of dogs—it seemed to him later that he must have been troubled by the same things the dogs heard, because he’d woken up anxious and disoriented when the world outside was still silent.
When Annabeth opened her eyes the clock said it was four-thirty and she was alone in their bed, which was shaking like the little girl’s bed in The Exorcist—erratically, violently. She became aware of the window over her head, which usually did such a pleasant job of waking her up when the sun came up over the fence, and she understood that the window was now a guillotine. The shaking stopped, but strange electric sounds continued to shear the darkness, sometimes accompanied by blue flashes. She found that she couldn’t move; she couldn’t think of where it might be safe to move. The door frame, a mere three strides away from the foot of the bed, seemed impossibly distant. The transformers blew, the dogs barked, the car alarms keened, and she was immobile.
“David?” she finally croaked, her voice sounding more peremptory than terrified.
“I’m out here. Are you okay?”
“Where?”
“In the kitchen. There’s broken glass all over the place.”
“Come back to bed.”
It sounded like an invitation to sex. Her tone of voice had become utterly unpredictable.
“I’m barefoot,” said David.
Annabeth’s brain began to pace: the electricity was obviously out and would be for some time, and that triggered memories of the riots, not even two years ago. Nothing bad had befallen her then—she’d essentially watched it all on TV. She’d even gone out on a cleanup crew the following morni
ng but, in the weeks that followed, she had become almost pathologically afraid of black people and their anger. There was something about the rage she’d seen that night that she recognized. On the morning of the Northridge quake, she felt that their cute little bungalow on the groovy southern edge of Venice was now far too close to Oakwood for her comfort. Maybe they could go to Laura’s place—but then again, Laura’s house was more or less straight up Western Avenue from South Central. Would there be roadblocks like before? Maybe it would be a better bet to head for David’s parents’ place in Mandeville Canyon. Would there be fires? How much cash did they have? How much gas was in the car?
David appeared in the bedroom doorway with a quart of milk in his hand, which he’d been drinking out of when the shaking started. He’d had the good sense to shut the fridge and then thought better of opening it again to replace the milk when the earthquake seemed over. He didn’t realize he was still carrying the carton. In the shadows, he saw that Annabeth was curled up in a fetal position at the foot of the bed.
“I think I may have cut a tendon,” he told Annabeth. “I’m bleeding. Can you help me?”
She watched him sit down uncertainly beside her, cradling his foot and applying pressure with the corner of the sheet. It was still dark in the room, but the soft white sheet was highly absorbent and the bloom of blood frightened her. She put her feet into his nearby flip-flops and scuttled to the bathroom. She thought twice about opening the hot-water tap, though she couldn’t figure out why. Would it dispense snakes and spiders, like the girl’s mouth in the fairy tale? Her thinking was definitely distorted. Was there a gas line open that had poisoned her?
She returned to the bedside and cleaned and bandaged David’s foot by candlelight. His tendon was not torn. After she finished, they lay awake, waiting. She found that there was something oddly soothing about the idea that this was, at last, the Big One. Not so much because she had been living in fear of it—she hadn’t. They had no emergency kit of canned goods and bottled water on hand. It was more a sense of closure, of justice having been done. The Los Angeles in which she lived, with its fragrant night air, its hallucinatory jacaranda blossoms, its gleaming ocean, and its idiotic surplus of wealth, deserved a setback. They all knew that, didn’t they?
David was singing to himself softly, something about being sucked into a tar pit and eating cancer.
“What is that?”
“I used to think it was just about a relationship, but it’s really all this shit; the way we keep fucking up the world. Earthquake, atom bomb, cancer. ‘I’ve got a new complaint?’ Get in line. I mean, one day it’s just going to be flat earth outside.”
“I always think that—whenever anything goes wrong.” Did she? It sounded almost as though she was competing over who was more despairing, but she couldn’t let him keep talking that way; it was too creepy. “Why aren’t there helicopters?” she asked him. “If the police had it together, they’d be flying over to survey the damage and keep the looters under control.”
“I’ve been hearing helicopters—haven’t you?” Had she been asleep without realizing it?
“Maybe. But where are the searchlights?”
She told him about seeing Diane Keaton at the First AME Church the morning after the riots. The actress had been unloading shopping bags labeled “Matsuda” from her shiny new land yacht and Annabeth, in the back of a flatbed truck full of well-meaning West Siders, had found that funny. Later, after she’d spent the day shoveling ashes and collecting sodden drywall—and being looked at only with contempt by passing pedestrians—she decided the actress’s form of contribution was no more self-deluding than her own.
David had been at a friend’s place in Santa Barbara the night of the civil disturbance (as he called it), smoking pot with some high school friends. It was the last time he had ever, or would ever, smoke pot. “I had this image of my parents running into the fray, to offer free medical care and legal advice—because, you know, they’re exactly the sort of people who would do that—and then before I knew it, I was picturing them being torn limb from limb by a pack of enraged black kids.” Thinking of his mother, he knew how much she would be worrying about him right now. He wanted her to imagine him dead. He thought this, but he went on telling Annabeth the story he had begun: “We were sitting on the couch watching TV, and you could kind of see the mob behavior—except it was all shadowy, and who really knew what was going on? Then I looked over at my friend Philip, who is black. I realized I couldn’t tell him any of what I’d been thinking, and then I remembered how weird my mother used to be around him when he came over in high school and I tried to apologize for that and he pretended not to know what I was talking about.”
Annabeth nodded. She’d had no black friends in high school. She’d had no Jewish friends in high school. If David ever found out what a cultureless wasteland she’d grown up in, he’d probably reject her, completely. She hid her face in his armpit and he held her close, stroking her hair. They had been lovers for less than a year—there were a lot of stories they hadn’t yet told each other. At dawn, they made love in a listless but soothing way and fell back to sleep afterward. When they woke up again, at eleven, they were sweaty and tangled in each other’s arms and legs like drowned people.
The next morning, the front page of the Los Angeles Times reported twenty-five deaths and used “pancaked” to describe what had happened to an apartment building near the epicenter. Elsewhere, a construction worker had been rescued from underneath six feet of asphalt and a boy had been crushed by a building while his mother, in the next room, escaped unharmed. The Original Pantry restaurant, downtown, had continued serving all night, even in the dark. The mayor had imposed a curfew to discourage looting and had canceled the Martin Luther King Day parade.
Annabeth phoned Laura the following afternoon. She found her heart racing as she dialed. Did she really think Laura was dead? Her house was nowhere near Northridge, and it was unlikely that she’d been driving under some freeway overpass at four-thirty A.M. Yet she heard her own voice crack as she said, “It’s me, Annabeth” to Laura’s disinterested “Hello?”
Laura was, indeed, physically fine, as was Greg, but a eucalyptus bough had fallen on her car and their house had developed an alarming crack near the fireplace. She was waiting for a structural engineer to come assess the damage. Annabeth listened to the worst-case scenario that Laura had envisioned. Their house would be condemned but its true value was so much greater than what the insurance would pay that they’d be unable to afford a comparable new place to live—effectively homeless. They’d be strangled by legal bills and living in temporary housing and meanwhile she had a movie to produce. Annabeth felt out of her depth in the face of all this impending disaster, but she did her best to offer comfort. “Maybe it’s really just a crack,” she said.
“Not after the rains come in the spring,” said Laura.
Part 3
ACTION
13
The acceleration of the Trouble Doll shoot—“from standstill to juggernaut in three days,” Laura planned to say to interviewers—was the result of Steve Buscemi’s unexpected decision to play the part of Jude, the sleazy actor. Buscemi had read the script and agreed to the job in a matter of hours, a highly unusual circumstance and a long-awaited gift, because, with Mr. Pink’s funny blue-lipped face attached, the project became interesting to foreign investors. On the downside, Buscemi’s availability for shooting was extremely limited, and if he was going to be part of the project it had to go “like, now,” as Simpson put it to Laura. Unwilling to wait out additional offers, Simpson made a deal with Halo Pictures, an upstart company led by a former director of slasher films, two Israeli bankers, and three “power fetuses” with MBAs. Halo had prenegotiated low-budget contracts with the unions, which saved Trouble Doll a good three weeks of prep time—plus, they were willing to let Simpson keep his sole “producer” credit. Laura cast an unknown young actress named Flynn Allison to play the part of Bunny, counting on
her training at Yale more than her audition, and also on the soft transparency of her skin, which seemed likely to glow on film.
To Annabeth, it seemed that one night the sky had fallen and then, almost as soon as the rubble was cleared, her dream of working with Laura had suddenly come true. She’d been sitting on the back steps, stuck, intending to drive over to the Trader Joe’s on National Boulevard but dreading its tiny congested parking lot and the problem of picking out wines that wouldn’t make her look too cheap in David’s eyes. The sunshine had already begun to slant obliquely, and she knew her failure to perform the one task she’d set herself for the day was starting to look pathological. And then the phone rang and it was Laura, breathless and ecstatic.
“We’re going!” she said. It took Annabeth only a few heartbeats to understand who “we” were and the nature of “our” destination. She asked the next logical question: “When?” The whole phone call lasted no more than three minutes. There had been no doubt that Annabeth was available, or that the not-so-generous terms of the deal would be acceptable to her. In the course of the brief conversation, Annabeth heard herself reflecting Laura’s exhilarated tone breath for breath, but when she got off the phone she felt a strange dissonance. There is a difference between asking someone to dance and telling them to do so, and Laura had done the latter.
Within days, Annabeth had hired an assistant, a guy who’d done the job on only two other features but came highly recommended. His name was Peter Calderon and he looked like a Mexican skateboard punk: shadow plaid shirt, long sideburns, Vans sneakers. She liked him on sight. Peter had the patience of a saint, everyone said. She left it to him to set up the machines, both digital (Avid) and manual (Moviola upright) and to order and install the rewinds, synchronizers, splicers, bins, and endless pairs of white cotton gloves that made a cutting room functional.