by Rachel Cline
There was not a whole lot for Annabeth herself to do until footage started coming in, so she spent an inordinate amount of time making matching script notebooks for herself and Laura—three-ring binders that contained copies of the script as well as of the storyboards Laura had sketched for the few sequences that would require special equipment. The scripts were marked up with Annabeth’s own notes regarding complete entrances and exits, careful matches for insert shots, and anticipatory solutions to other editorial bugaboos. She’d gone to three different stationery stores to find the kind of old-fashioned, blue canvas binders that could be written on directly with marker so that she could print the words “Trouble Doll” on the spines in her ultra-legible editor’s handwriting. The finished product seemed impressive to Annabeth, a helpful tool in a handsome package. Simpson walked into the cutting room for the first time as she was admiring her work.
“Arts and crafts?” said the skinny strawberry-blond man in the too small suit.
“Uh, I guess so,” said Annabeth, belatedly realizing, from his close physical resemblance to Tintin, that this man was, in fact, the producer. They had made her deal on the phone. “Hi, I’m Annabeth,” she said, standing up to shake hands with him. He took her hand and led her to sit beside him on the nubby beige couch.
“Arthur Simpson,” he said. “Nice to meet you finally.”
“You, too,” said Annabeth, studying his face, which seemed familiar, almost a version of her brother Jeff’s.
“All set in here? Have everything you need?”
“I think so,” said Annabeth. “They’re delivering the Avid tomorrow—it’s going to go over there.”
“Great,” said Simpson. “I hope you don’t mind if I come in here to use the phone from time to time. It’s really the only room with a door that shuts, isn’t it?”
“Be my guest,” said Annabeth, not at all comfortable with the thought of trying to cut the movie while the executive producer sat on the couch behind her making deals…but what could she say?
Simpson stood up again, “Well, just making the rounds. Only forty-eight hours left! I’m pretty excited, how about you?”
The way he looked at her then made Annabeth feel as though she had to make up for some past behavior—although she’d been nothing but effervescent in every phone conversation they’d had about her deal, and had done nothing at all wrong in the preceding minute or so.
“Oh, totally!” she said. “I haven’t slept since Laura called me.”
Simpson waved and stepped out of the cutting room. Annabeth sat down on the couch and tried to imagine the guy she’d just met pointing a gun at a woman. It seemed terribly unlikely.
The first morning of principal photography was an exterior at Trip and Bunny’s run-down bungalow in Burbank. The only problem with the location was that it was across the street from a park that began to fill up with toddlers and their caretakers by midafternoon, so they had to get the exterior shots in before the real shrieking started. Annabeth arrived at six and placed Laura’s notebook front and center on the table in the production trailer, along with a bunch of tulips in a mayonnaise jar and a picture postcard of a desert highway. As she sat there waiting for Laura to arrive, the craft-service kid came in and set up coffee and doughnuts on the same table, which kind of spoiled Annabeth’s presentation, but it didn’t seem right to interfere. When Laura came in—late, at six-twenty—Annabeth stood up and hovered while Laura, barely out of the trailer’s stepwell, dispensed herself a cup of coffee.
“Hey,” she said to Annabeth and then yelled out the trailer door to the first AD, “Is first team here yet?”
Annabeth couldn’t hear the answer but picked up the notebook. “Here,” she said, afraid that Laura would leave before she got a chance to present her gift.
“What?” Laura asked, turning abruptly to look at Annabeth.
“I made you this.”
Laura looked at the notebook without apparent comprehension, but stepped forward into the trailer.
“It’s a script.”
“I have a script,” said Laura, patting her shoulder bag.
“No, I know.” Annabeth nodded. “I just marked this one up with some cutting notes.”
Tim, the AD, stuck his head inside the trailer door. “Ten minutes,” he said to Laura. “We’re going to get the car pulling up and then turn around for Bunny slamming the door.”
Laura nodded. “Great,” she said, “I just want to walk it with Deke first.” She threw her jacket onto the bench beside Annabeth, then reshouldered her bag in preparation for her talk with the cinematographer.
“Sorry, I guess I should have waited to do this,” said Annabeth, realizing that she had lost her audience.
“To do what?” said Laura, patting herself down for her glasses.
“Nothing,” said Annabeth. Laura nodded and stepped out of the trailer, opening the door wide, as though making an entrance for the benefit of anyone who happened to be outside watching. No one was until a grip with a massive white silk flag under his arm stepped out onto the liftgate of a truck parked across the street.
“Hey, cutie-pie,” called Laura. Annabeth had never heard Laura speak that way to anyone, though she sounded perfectly natural. Then the trailer door shut and Annabeth was alone with Laura’s script and a large vat of coffee. She decided to put the binder somewhere out of harm’s way and, after some hesitation, wedged it spine outward between the cushions in the couch/daybed toward the rear of the trailer. She left the flowers where they were.
The next time Annabeth was in the production trailer, five days later, the script was exactly where she’d left it. Pink pages and blue pages had since been issued by the production office, but the copy she’d bound and marked up for Laura was still entirely white—untouched.
14
Earthquake damage on the 10 freeway forced Annabeth to explore new ways of driving across town. Neighborhoods she hadn’t seen since she’d been a frequently lost L.A. newcomer came back into focus. An earlier, more authentic version of the city seemed to live on in the dingy pastel stucco, the borders of dusty Kaffir lilies and glossy, poisonous oleander. The mint-green Seaway Motel always caught her eye. It was so far from the ocean that Annabeth wondered whether its name referred to some inland body of water, now lost, like the Salton Sea. She could imagine how the Aloha Grocery, with its hand-lettered signs about homemade tofu, would have looked standing alone on its block, a destination instead of an oversight. The haggard House of Teriyaki Donut, the ingenious swimming-pool-blue painting of the airplane that was also a marlin at Centinela Travel, even the malevolent-sounding Shining Path preschool, set back in its shady yard: these sights made her nostalgic for a time and place that was wholly imaginary. Making her way east on Exposition Boulevard, she felt she should have been able to find an intersection with Flashback Drive, or Montage Way, but had to settle for Bundy, which took her exactly where she needed to go.
The Trouble Doll production offices and cutting rooms were at Big Time, a postproduction facility where Annabeth had worked many times before. It didn’t look like anything from the street—if not for the sign, it would have been invisible. The large, single-story building, originally some kind of factory, contained three anonymous corridors lined with offices and editing suites. There were also a few independent producers’ offices, an editing-equipment repair shop, and a screening room. Across the parking lot was a strangely ambitious split-level restaurant called Eureka, where the diners were dwarfed by an immense copper vat of microbrewed beer.
All Annabeth had to do at first was immerse herself in the raw footage as it came in. She watched the previous day’s work first on the Moviola, her face pressed up against the tiny screen, her foot on the pedal that advanced the film. Getting her hands on the actual film every day was a ritual that kept her in touch with the privilege of her position. Thirty-five-millimeter film, even work print, even when backlit only by the Moviola’s dim viewer, was an oil painting in comparison to the video she
looked at while cutting on the Avid. Other than getting the dailies ready, her job during principal photography was to assemble the scenes as they came in, using the takes Laura had liked best on the set, and to put them in roughly the sequence in which they appeared in the script. This was the normal order of events on any feature film. By making this first assembly, the editor got acquainted with the strengths and weaknesses of the actors, the cameraman, the sound engineers, and so on. Then, when the shoot was over and the director came back to begin his or her first cut, the editor was expected to act as a well-informed set of hands. Only after the director’s cut was complete would she get to dig in herself. But as Annabeth sat in her cutting room during the early days of Trouble Doll, she found herself straying from the plan. She would set out to assemble a sequence but find herself stopping to finesse some nuance, fine-cutting into dialogue and gesture before there was a scaffold of story on which to build. It was almost as though she wanted to get there first, but not to “win,” just to prove Laura had done right by hiring her, that she was not only competent but talented.
During the second week of shooting, Laura dropped by the cutting room for an impromptu visit during an especially long lighting setup at a nearby location. Annabeth had just spent four hours working obsessively on a prickly insert shot that was supposed to reveal that one of Bunny’s tips was a fifty-dollar bill. The master shot of Bunny into which the insert was supposed to fit never stopped moving, but the insert—of the rolled-up bill in an actor’s hand—was static, and this destroyed the illusion of continuity. This was particularly irritating because it was one of the things she had made a note about in the script she’d marked up for Laura, and Laura had obviously never looked at that note. In any case, after trying to cut the insert numerous times, in numerous ways, that morning, Annabeth had engineered a solution that dispensed with the shot entirely. She had patched in a piece of added dialogue—“I gave her a fifty, let’s see what I get”—which worked because you couldn’t see the actor’s face; the camera was over his shoulder, on Bunny. When Annabeth heard the cutting room door open and saw Laura, she felt a stab of excitement and anticipation: her friend would “get” the cleverness of this solution and praise her for it.
“Here, see what you think,” she said, cueing up the footage as she stepped away from her chair at the Avid. Laura sat down and triggered the machine. Annabeth’s work of art lasted about fifteen seconds. When it was over, Laura played it again. Then she shrugged.
“Can’t you show me some of the assembly?” she said.
“Oh.” Annabeth suddenly felt as guilty as she had previously been exalted. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Let me set something up.” And she began searching her hard drive for the pathetic beginnings of the assembly, reaching across Laura to tap the keys.
Laura got out of the chair, surrendering it to Annabeth. “That was a very weird little piece of film,” she said to Annabeth’s back. “Why did you show it to me?”
“I—I was just, I guess I was kind of proud of myself for writing a line of dialogue,” said Annabeth.
“Yeah, leave that to the experts next time, huh?” It was a glib enough remark, not delivered with any particular venom, but it took Annabeth’s breath away.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her shame half-drowning her voice.
“It’s no big thing,” said Laura. “Look, if you’ve got performance anxiety, I sympathize, but it’s time to get over it. Take a beta-blocker. I’d just like to see an assembly, okay?”
Annabeth nodded gratefully. Laura was right to be irritated. “I’ll finish the first sequence today,” said Annabeth. “You can see the all the club stuff and all the Trip’s apartment stuff tomorrow after dailies, I promise.”
“Perfect,” Laura said, with only the faintest tinge of sarcasm.
At dailies that night, Annabeth found that the seating arrangement in the screening room had changed. On arriving, she had gone to the booth to remind the projectionist that the second reel contained a short end and to wait for it, and when she returned to her accustomed row, she saw that Simpson was occupying her usual seat while on Laura’s other side, Simpson’s daffy assistant, Lorelei, sat with notepad at the ready. There was no place for Annabeth at all. She thought she’d overheard Simpson mentioning Mia Goldman’s name on the phone earlier in the week, but she’d dismissed it as paranoia. But that had been before Laura’s visit to the cutting room. She was getting fired. The thing was to apologize. But how? Standing in the aisle at dailies she could hardly yell “I’m sorry” to Laura in front of everyone. Laura beckoned to Annabeth. This was it. But surely Laura was classier than to do it here, now?
“What are you doing?”
“Uh, I don’t know where to sit.”
Laura looked around and realized what had happened. “Move over,” she said to Lorelei, with no more delicacy that she might have said, “You dropped this,” and then nodded sideways at Annabeth, meaning Sit down, and said, “Let’s get going.”
The next night, as promised, Annabeth showed Laura what she had of the first assembly. Because the first location was Bunny’s boyfriend’s place, and then they’d redressed the same interior as Jude’s apartment, the first complete sequence was the story’s climax or culmination: the point at which Bunny realizes that she has burned all her bridges. Inside Trip’s apartment, she learns that he has spent all the money she had saved to pay back her boss. Then she goes to see Jude, the actor who has been telling her he’ll get her a meeting with a casting agent, and he essentially rapes her. After promising him that she will come back, that she is just going to score some meth, she goes back to Trip’s, where she sees Sasha getting out of his car. He appears to be carrying a gun.
The sequence offered considerable drama—there was weeping, screaming, and attempted vehicular homicide. What bothered Annabeth about it, though, was Bunny. The actress was fine, but her story was a tale of such relentlessly wrong choices that every time her lips stopped moving, Annabeth found herself wondering whether anyone could be that stupid. This frustration was what gave the story “edge,” according to Laura. (Annabeth had never understood what movie people meant by “edge.” Speed? Anger? Irony?) Laura had also once said it was a film about longing, but longing required stillness and repose. Annabeth needed Bunny to stop moving and close her eyes, but she never seemed to.
Yet when Laura saw the assembled footage that night, she had no problem with Bunny or anything else. “That was fantastic!” she said.
Driving home after reviewing the sequence with Laura, Annabeth felt the accumulated tensions of the preceding two weeks overtake her. It was after midnight. As she crossed Ocean Park Boulevard, she gazed out toward the ocean but it was only an absence, a place where the city’s lights stopped.
She knew David wasn’t working that night, but for some reason she wasn’t ready to see him, so she sat in her parked car listening to the radio call-in show LoveLine. The intimacy of hearing people’s real voices and true stories in the middle of the night was soothing, for some reason. At least it was until one of the callers sounded like someone she knew, though she couldn’t quite place who or where from. He called himself Paul, and he was talking about his compulsive need to have sex with a different stranger every day, in spite of being married to a woman he described as “brilliant, sexy, and up for anything, if you will.” Annabeth didn’t know any Pauls, but her sense that the voice belonged to someone she knew persisted, which made her uneasy about listening.
Dr. Drew, the show’s “sensitive” interviewer, the one who always gave sound medical advice and made sure the real desperadoes got patched into the suicide hotline, told Paul that he was hurting himself and his wife with his behavior and that he should seek professional help. Paul thanked Dr. Drew politely and said he’d been in therapy since he was twelve. Dr. Drew’s smart-ass sidekick laughed at that. “Nice one, Paul!” he said. “What’s your complaint anyway? Sounds to me like you’re getting more ass than Wilt Chamberlain.” Annabeth hated the si
dekick, but it was his crassness that finally enabled her to turn off the radio. In the silence that followed, her car’s engine ticked, and she tried to close her eyes but she couldn’t keep them shut. The night was too full of noises, and the pictures in her head were all bad.
15
In matching canvas chairs, Laura and Simpson waited in the courtyard of the 1920s apartment complex where they were supposed to be shooting a party scene. The illusion of dappled, rosy light emanating from strings of Chinese paper lanterns was taking an eternity to perfect. Amid dozens of extras, and a crew whose numbers were swelled by supplemental grips, electricians, and set decorators, both director and producer were doing their best to ignore the gathering sensation that their ship had run aground.
“This next bit’s just a single and an over, right?” said Simpson, looking at his watch.
“Well…” said Laura, not yet ready to give up the empathetic effect she had hoped to achieve by following Bunny into the scene with a hand-held camera. Simpson was aware of this plan and was not at the point of asking directly for its sacrifice, but he wanted Laura to know it was on the table if they didn’t start shooting soon.
“Hey, how was the assembly last night?”
“Fine. Except my editor’s a passive-aggressive little cunt.”
“Annabeth?” Simpson’s voice cracked with an incipient laugh. Laura’s head turned rapidly to check this.
“I’m serious. She decided she had to ‘fix’ the bit in the club from last week—before I’d even seen it cut together.”
“Oh, stop. She worships the ground you walk on.”