by Rachel Cline
“As long she can walk in my footsteps—”
“Relax,” he said, as he watched the cinematographer give a promising nod to the first AD. “Do you want me to talk to her?”
Laura shook her head and followed the slight shift in Simpson’s focus toward the camera. The stand-ins were walking away, so she stood up. “But have you ever heard of that before? She even wrote new dialogue!”
“You never hear about anything an editor does that works, Laura. You know that.”
She nodded at Simpson, but she was already forgetting about Annabeth as she walked back to the set, into the light, visualizing for the fiftieth time the material she was about to shoot. This was the scene that would take the curse off Bunny, that would make her an actor in her own life instead of a victim of circumstance. The traveling shot of Bunny making her way into the party—the lights and shadows on her face, the sense of motion and direction—would show the audience who she really was, how cunning and subtle. “Looks great,” she told Deke, smiling. And when Flynn came out of makeup, the actress was so beautiful Laura wanted to kiss her.
Annabeth was careful to assemble the scene in the Chinese-lantern-bedecked courtyard according to Laura’s notes. It was a lot of material and very little dialogue, but she could tell that Laura had a very specific idea about how the scene worked, and she did her best to reproduce it. It started with a shot of Bunny wandering into the crush of hipsters, reading the crowd and adjusting her appearance as she goes. Soon she decides that her be-jeweled heels are too dressy, and she takes them off, proceeding barefoot toward the bar. Waiting for a drink, she begins to surreptitiously rub off her sparkly eye shadow, which is what she’s doing when she spots Jude (Buscemi, doing a kind of Al-Pacino-in-Scarface number in white pants and a Hawaiian shirt). Subtly adjusting her décolletage before lifting her drink and crossing to him, she gets jostled by a dreadlocked guy but ignores him. She then sidles up to Buscemi and taps him, which is when the audience finally gets what it wants: a close-up of Bunny looking bewildered, smeared, and absolutely radiant.
But the volley of dialogue that came next—which had been filmed very late in the evening after long hours lighting and shooting the traveling shots—wasn’t nearly as well executed. It seemed to veer from superficial flirtation into utter melodrama no matter how Annabeth put it together. The problem was not either actor’s performance or even the move away from the subjective camera style at the top of the scene; it was the dialogue itself, which seemed to undercut Bunny’s intelligence. She’d gotten herself this far—invited to the party—and she’d made contact with the guy who’d invited her. She should have stood pat and waited for his next move. Instead she turned into a dope, lowering her eyelids, confessing her dreams. “All I want is a chance” was the line that made Annabeth cringe. It wasn’t even specific enough to be a real wish, just an open invitation to abuse—it was almost as though she was going to burst into song. The audience should feel that Bunny’s sad end is inevitable, but not that she deserves it.
And so Annabeth had gotten bogged down in the details again, and that was when Laura, again, showed up unexpectedly. She opened the cutting room door without knocking, took one look at the Avid, and practically bounded up to Annabeth’s side. “Oh boy, scene seventeen! Show me, show me!” she said, pulling up a nearby chair.
“It looks gorgeous,” Annabeth said. She stopped herself from commenting on the dialogue, chastened after her experience with the insert shot in the strip club. Instead, she just ran the scene for Laura and stopped it after the fateful line.
“What’s the problem?” said Laura.
“Well, it’s like she’s basically stripped off her clothes, hopped onto the sacrificial altar, and handed him the blade to cut out her heart with. It makes her a total victim,” said Annabeth.
Laura nodded, as if to say “So?” Then raised her eyebrows and said, “Let’s see the end.”
Annabeth ran the tail of the scene for Laura, who snickered appreciatively at Buscemi’s improvised alternative to “That’s right”: “Hey, I’m hip,” he’d said.
“So, you think it’s too soon in the story for her to be so…available?”
“Uh-huh,” said Annabeth cautiously.
“Well, what if you bring up that bit with the Rastafarian spilling his drink? You know, step on her line with that business. Make it less of a walk-walk-walk, talk-talk-talk.”
It was an excellent suggestion and a total mystery to Annabeth why she hadn’t thought of it herself. She made a few quick edits and they watched the result.
“Yeah, like that!” said Laura. “I still have some cutting room chops.”
“Thank God one of us does,” said Annabeth.
Laura gave her an Oh, please look and said, affectlessly, “Teamwork, n’est-çe pas?”
Annabeth nodded.
“I’m going to get fired, I know it,” she told David when he came in, at about four the next morning.
“Really?” he said, which was the wrong answer. He was supposed to reassure her. He could see on her face, even in the dark, that he had already fucked up. “Look, I don’t know enough about the movie business to second-guess you. Whatever you tell me, I believe. So tell me what happened.”
“I just keep getting myself into these things with Laura where she thinks I’m not on her side.”
“How could she think that?”
Annabeth was silent, replaying the afternoon’s conversation in her head. Why couldn’t he just take her word for it and comfort her? Why did she have to explain? “Never mind,” she said finally.
“It’s only her second movie, right? I bet she’s worried about what she’s doing wrong. She probably thinks you’re catching all her little mistakes and feels defensive.” This was an excellent point, he thought, but Annabeth wasn’t having it.
“She was working in cutting rooms while I was still an English major, David! I told you. Jerry Greenberg?”
She had told him. But what could he say now? “Do you even actually like her?”
“What?”
“You say she’s your friend, but you never say anything nice about her. I mean, maybe you aren’t on her side, really.” It gave him a strange satisfaction to say this, although he knew it would enrage her.
Annabeth was speechless. After a few moments of stunned silence, she turned away, curling up into a ball. He felt his heart shrink.
Rolling onto his back, he felt a stab of pain in his injured foot—the wound was still open, and becoming infected. Tomorrow morning he would scrape away the dead tissue, flush it with hydrogen peroxide, and paint it with Betadine. “You’ll get blood poisoning,” his mother used to tell him when he picked his scabs as a boy. She sounded so certain, he had almost looked forward to the experience.
16
After the riots, jeeplike vehicles had started to proliferate on the streets of L.A., but after the earthquake—with the freeway out of commission for the foreseeable future and many canyon roads cratered and treacherous—the trend escalated geometrically. Every other car was a tank. Laura was not someone who usually entertained apocalyptic visions, but she sometimes found herself coveting an übervehicle too. That wish crystallized early one morning at the intersection of Beverly and La Cienega while she was waiting for the light to change. She realized she was being gazed down upon by the driver of a Range Rover and, moreover, that the onlooker was Jon Golden, her liar. Despite her lighthearted tone when discussing him with Annabeth, they had not parted on good terms—largely because Laura had made the mistake of sleeping with him, of falling in love with him, in fact. Now he seemed to be looking skeptically at her car, which was when she realized she was driving Greg’s rusted Pontiac Firebird (the Karmann Ghia was in the shop, waiting for a part). Jon Golden was judging her on the basis of her husband’s stinking heap of a car!
She couldn’t roll down the window and yell, “It’s not mine”—let alone “I’m directing a movie!”—because any attempt to explain would imply that the car really was hers, that she
had something to compensate for. All she could do was pretend to ignore him, which she did, with all her might. As the light changed, Golden smiled and flickered his fingers, approximating a wave. The crew of Trouble Doll was turning around from days to nights—and her call time wasn’t until four that afternoon. She was on her way to the cutting room to spend some quality time with her movie.
When Annabeth arrived at eight, she heard the muffled sounds of someone running her footage. She assumed it was Peter and gave him some time. She had often come in early or stayed late to study Janusz’s work when she was assisting. Still, after dawdling over her coffee and looking at a few recent issues of Variety, she ran out of patience and tapped on the door. “Peter?” she said.
“Go away!” yelled Laura.
Annabeth immediately understood what had happened—faced with all those empty hours before call time, Laura couldn’t stay away. That didn’t make her curt dismissal any less wounding. But if the person in the next room had been any of the previous directors Annabeth had worked for—even the Idiot—she probably would have thought his gruffness justified. At any rate she would have found herself something useful to do while waiting to be called back in.
When Peter arrived at eight-fifteen, Annabeth asked him what he thought. How long did she have to wait before she could knock on the door again? “Forever,” he told her. But he also pointed out that it sounded as though Laura was just running the assembly over and over. It was likely that no harm was being done.
“But I’m losing time!” said Annabeth. “I was going to cut the fucking fight scene this weekend. If I have to do that while we’re doing dailies and everything, I’ll never get through it.”
“You don’t have to prescreen the dailies, you know,” said Peter. “I mean, I could just let you know if there was anything you really needed to look at beforehand.”
Although this was true, it was not an acceptable answer. She wanted Peter to be on her side. She wanted to get into the Avid room now.
At three that afternoon, Laura finally emerged and called for Annabeth. “Hey,” she said casually, as though the door had been open all along.
“Welcome back to daylight,” said Annabeth, trying not to sound resentful. Then she noticed that the neck of Laura’s T-shirt was stretched out almost to her shoulder. She had been compulsively picking at the skin on her back, where no one could see it if she bled. For a moment, Annabeth felt sympathy.
“You know how, sometimes, you just can’t see what you’re doing anymore?” Laura asked. Annabeth nodded. “Would you come take a look?”
As she explained it to Annabeth, the top of the scene she’d been working on was fine, but she’d been thwarted by a bit of bad audio—an airplane had flown over and begun to drown out the line “C’mon, tell me where you hid the gun.” Unfortunately, it sounded like “where you hid them” in the only other good-looking take, and in the only other usable piece of audio the actor had altered the line for emphasis, saying, “Tell me where you hid the fucking gun.” Laura had tried to edit out “fucking,” but she couldn’t get it to match.
Annabeth believed that the problem Laura was really having was that she had reached a point in the script where the story foundered. Bunny wouldn’t have hidden Sasha’s gun. Bunny wouldn’t have touched Sasha’s gun. But there was no point in arguing that.
Laura waited anxiously for Annabeth to finish reviewing the scene. But when the editor was done she didn’t bother to say, “The first part is great” or “I love how you finessed the business with the light,” as she might have done with Peter. She just went with what she thought.
“Why don’t you just play it on her?” she asked, meaning stay with Bunny during Sasha’s line. Annabeth figured Laura had already tried this solution and found it wanting—it was Film Editing 101—but it was the only suggestion she had.
“Don’t have it,” said Laura.
Annabeth knew that they did. She wanted to throw the synchronizer at Laura’s head—for lying, for wasting her time, for refusing to see what was right in front of her, which was that Annabeth was the editor and she was out of line.
Laura giggled and shrugged in the ridiculous way Annabeth had sometimes seen her do with Simpson. It seemed to mean, I abdicate all responsibility—you deal with it. And then she got up from Annabeth’s chair and left the room. And that was that.
17
Over the Presidents’ Day weekend, Laura had to rewrite the scene of Bunny’s audition, which was shooting the following week. To accomplish this, she decided she needed to be alone in the woods and had borrowed a friend’s house near Lone Pine, where there would be snow on the ground and total silence in the air. To Annabeth’s surprise, Laura invited her along on this trip. “You can get some air,” she said. “You must be dying to get away from that cell at Big Time by now.”
Annabeth wanted anything but that. There were only a few weeks left of shooting and therefore only a few weeks left during which she could work uninterrupted, but the invitation was too surprising, and too flattering, to turn down. When she saw the new Jeep Cherokee that Laura had just leased, however, she felt betrayed. She had pictured the two of them laughing and chattering in the tiny front seats of the Karmann Ghia, maybe even singing. But the new car seemed impersonal, outsized, and Laura had not even bothered to stock its state-of-the-art sound system with music. She had assumed that Annabeth would bring along cassettes of the songs they’d discussed for various sequences. So, almost the whole way there, they listened to KCRW, which Annabeth had all but stopped doing out of a perverse loyalty to David’s show. She didn’t want to know that Chris Douridas had recently made all the same amazing slush-pile discoveries that David had.
The borrowed house was huge, a genuine ranch on almost five acres of sheltered meadowland lined with mesquite and cottonwood. It was fully equipped with kitchen appliances, music, videos, even board games and puzzles, and it smelled like wood smoke and clay or, at any rate, like piñon incense. Annabeth was dying to determine who the owners might be, to look in their scrapbooks and see what they kept in their closets and their basement, but by four o’clock that afternoon, when the smell of marijuana smoke began to drift out of Laura’s bedroom, she had pretty much exhausted the mysteries of the place. The owners were movie people, wealthy enough to have been photographed with Bill Clinton but otherwise unremarkable. Still restless, she set out for a walk. When she got past the half-mile-long driveway and out onto the road, Mount Whitney was looming darkly and the sky overhead looked cloudy and dramatic. She took deep breaths and tried to enjoy being outside—she always had as a child. But she felt exposed and unsafe on the side of the road; the traffic was infrequent but there was not much in the way of a shoulder, and the cars that did pass seemed much too close. The mountains are beautiful, she told herself, focus on the mountains.
When she had walked a mile or so along what turned out to be Highway 395, she caught sight of a green sign:
MANZANAR
8
INDEPENDENCE
18
It seemed to her like some beatnik poem. The word Manzanar itself was so exotic, like one of the destinations in the Crosby-Hope “Road to” pictures. Manzanita was the Mexican name for chamomile, she thought. The diminutive ita meant little—a little daisy? So was Manzanar the parent word? She pictured a town under the shadow of a giant daisy and smiled.
When she got back to the house, Laura was lying on the couch watching a tape of Cutter’s Way. Her writing session had not gone well.
“Oh my God,” said Annabeth, “I didn’t know this was on video.” She sat down on the floor in front of Laura, leaning her back against the base of the couch.
“I think it’s a bootleg,” said Laura, adjusting the throw covering her feet. “This is my favorite scene.”
In the movie Jeff Bridges, sleek and youthful, had just come “home” to the ramshackle house he shares with his friends Cutter (a disabled Vietnam vet, played by John Heard) and Maureen (Lisa Eichhorn). His ch
aracter, Bone, finds Maureen alone in the living room, drinking vodka by the fifth and weeping. “You look beautiful,” he tells her. “Considering,” she replies. As the scene continues, it becomes clear that there is a history of mutual attraction between the two old friends, and also some bitterness. At one point, Maureen reaches out in Bone’s direction and he makes as if to take her hand, thinking she’s coming on to him. “No,” she says, reaching more directly for what she wants, “the bottle.” Both women sighed at the beautiful bitterness of her performance.
“I wish I could make something even half that real,” said Laura, which was where Annabeth was supposed to rush to the fore with reassurance, but she missed her cue. “I said, I wish I could make something even half that real…” she repeated, now making fun of herself but still demanding her fealty.
“You have?” answered Annabeth, and then, “I mean, you are!” which made them both laugh.
“So, where’d you go, before?” asked Laura.
Annabeth described her walk and, feeling expansive, began to extemporize about the evocative mileage sign: Dorothy Lamour, the giant daisy…and just a little farther on, independence. “Isn’t that kind of great?” she asked.
“Great?” Laura sounded irritated. “Manzanar was a fucking concentration camp for Japanese-Americans. Are you some kind of moron?”
“No, I mean, I knew that,” Annabeth lied. “I just meant the words…the juxtaposition on the sign…” Annabeth felt slapped in the face, but also as though she’d asked for it. No one ever seemed to tell her anything she “should have” known: that children couldn’t sign their parents’ checks, that it was rude to stare, that girls didn’t wear Y-front long johns, and on and on. She always had to find out for herself, and invariably someone found her mistake not just ignorant but offensive. It was probably why she’d made a career out of something no one in her high school graduating class was ever likely to know more about than she did.