And how did Cass’s proud colleagues respond to this twisted diatribe? They smiled for the cameras and clapped. Cass stood in their midst, in the middle of a dumb flock of free-range fryers, and watched as they celebrated the man who had just butchered their self-respect. But then she realized that it made perfect sense; they had sold their souls when they signed up for the show. Let Micah say what he wanted. They cared about the money and nothing else.
The cameras kept rolling, and Micah kept talking, “And now, dear beautiful people of Hollywood, tonight nine of you will move one step closer to your ten-million-dollar movie deal!”
More applause from the flock.
“One of you, however, will prove to the world that you are nothing but an actor, and you will be fired.”
Cue the henhouse despair.
“And here is your challenge: Tonight you will attend a masquerade ball right here in the Plaza Hotel grand ballroom. It will be the party of the year, and you have the honor of being the only invited guests. Unfortunately, your perfect night will be crashed by ten imposters who will be disguised in costumes and masks just like you. Your job, my friends, is to separate the beautiful people from the impudent wannabes. You are allowed to ask any person you meet no more than three questions. When you are asked a question yourself, you can tell the truth, tell a lie, or tell anything in between. At the end of the night, the person who has identified the most imposters will choose who gets fired.”
“Oh shit,” said Cass, a little too loudly. She had expected a simple loser-gets-fired kind of arrangement. Now her exit strategy had suddenly become that much more difficult.
“Yes, Cassandra, did you have something to add?” said Micah.
“No…no…sorry…yes! I have a question. Are we allowed to fire ourselves?”
“Why would you want to do that, Cassandra? Is ten million dollars too low for you?” asked Micah.
The birdbrains laughed.
Yes, as a matter of fact, $10 million is too low, thought Cass, as she paced her cramped trailer later that afternoon. Only $10 million to commit suicide on StarBash? No, thank you. StarBash might have had zero Hollywood cred, but it had more than enough power to ruin her career. And when you added Brandi Bonacore, who would gladly plant a dagger in Cass’s back if given half a chance, things looked even worse. No, just like Freddie, her agent, had warned, this lousy job had no upside. Of course, he only knew half the story, the half that didn’t include the struggle with Lenora Danmore, but he had been right.
Cass had two choices: get off the show now, no matter how bad it looked, and possibly take a hit to her career; or, take a risk, possibly catastrophic, and try to go out in style by sticking around until she won one of the challenges. Cass had good business sense. Her career proved it. The fact that she knew how to make painful decisions also proved it. And she made one of those decisions that afternoon in the trailer. She was gone. Even if the exit she had in mind looked less than dignified, she was gone.
***
Brandi Bonacore liked being back on a big-time production, even if it had to be reality TV. She’d been out of action for too long. Three years to be exact. And during that time, she’d done exactly two fake courtroom shows and one fake dating show. That had been it. And she’d had to use a different name to even get those jobs. They paid two hundred dollars each. She had tried self-submitting video auditions for a while after her agent bailed and had even gotten some good-looking callbacks, but then somebody would whisper into somebody else’s ear and the deal would die.
Brandi liked StarBash. Considering that she had been a little one-woman Hollywood basher in her own right, it only made sense. The show reminded her of the story of the king with no clothes, only in this case the king was full of shit, and StarBash showed it to the world every week. The other actors tried to have it both ways; when the cameras rolled, they played along, and when the cameras stopped, they trashed the show. Brandi didn’t care. She’d already crossed the line and didn’t plan on going back. And when one of the other actors got burned on the show, she didn’t feel the least bit sorry. The way she looked at it, if you’re a plastic person with a plastic personality, maybe it’s not such a good idea to go near the fire.
In some ways, though, the whole StarBash thing didn’t add up. Yeah, everyone in Hollywood had gotten the memo: if you cared about your career you stayed away. But the screwy thing was that because of the show’s popularity, if a down-and-out actor dared to cross the line and did well on the show, then that suddenly popular rogue actor zoomed straight to the top, and the jobs came flooding in. And then, assuming a brain bigger than a walnut, the actor confessed his sins, fell back in line, and stayed as far away from StarBash as possible. The rules had a nasty bite, as Brandi knew better than anyone, but if you threw in enough money and power, things had a funny way of suddenly turning a little fuzzy.
All this meant that Brandi had a shot at erasing the damage from the last three years of her life. StarBash had the power to make it all disappear. And she figured what the hell. Somebody had to win. It also meant that she had a shot at getting even with the person who had ruined those years. And since StarBash had such off-the-charts ratings—fifty million people a week—with a little luck, she could pay back Cass Moreaux ten times in a single day. Maybe this would be that day.
She’d heard the other actors talking strategy for the masquerade ball, and it mostly involved weeding out the imposters with technical stuff: What is blocking? What is a POV shot? What does the second AD do? To Brandi all this sounded too simple. She knew this show, and these imposters weren’t going to be just some dummies grabbed off the street. They’d be carefully picked and coached enough to make things interesting. So Brandi decided to take a different path. She’d ask innocent-sounding questions that didn’t seem to have right or wrong answers—unless you knew how things really worked, like she did.
***
By the time the event had finally wound down, Cass had carried out a plan that had been effective—and painfully clumsy. She had no doubt about either of those two points. And she had no regrets. Now the time had come to take her lumps, and that’s what she planned to do. She’d follow the plan, take the calculated hit, and go home. She was ready.
The cameras rolled, and Micah, dressed in a tuxedo and bow tie, stepped onto the ballroom stage to reveal the winner to the unmasked actors, who had grouped in front of the stage. “Let it never be said that StarBash doesn’t know how to throw a big-time Hollywood party!” he exclaimed.
Cass, still wearing a red wig and costume, clapped and screamed with the other Kool-Aid drinkers. She figured what the hell, she might as well go out with a bang.
“And that’s what you are,” continued Micah, “big-time! When fifty-three million people know your name, there is just no other way to put it. In fact, according to the Official Advertisers Scale of Celebrity, fifty-three million means that you are more famous than Jack the Ripper! Congratulations! By the way, Ronald McDonald is at fifty-four million, in case you want to shoot for something bigger.”
The actors looked confused but clapped anyway.
“Yes, my friends,” continued Micah. “Today you are famous. But the real question is, how famous will you be tomorrow? I’m sorry to say that for one of you, the answer is not very. That’s right, the time has come to send one of you home. You have been challenged to weed out the imposters who crashed your exclusive Hollywood party. Now let’s see how some of you decided to tackle the problem.”
A film clip of the masquerade ball began playing on a screen that hung over the stage. As it played, two handheld Steadicams roved among the actors to catch their reactions to the film. A third stationary tripod camera in the very back captured the wide-angle master shot that included all the action and all the players. Cass resisted the urge to hide from all three of them. She squeamishly watched the film.
“What’s a gaffer?” asked the first masked partygoer to another masked partygoer. The clip th
en showed this same question being asked forty or fifty times by a wide assortment of partygoers. It ended with a serious-sounding masked man offering his opinion: “The gaffer is the person responsible for catching gaffes. This person sits next to the director and yells, ‘Gaffe!’ whenever they catch one. They also bring the director coffee and medication.”
The clip ended, the actors chuckled, and Cass breathed. So far so good, she thought.
“Who was that masked man?” asked Micah.
One of the actors raised his hand.
“Roddy Markem! Way to throw down the oil slick! Roddy is wearing number twelve. How many of you incorrectly listed him as an imposter?”
Most the actors raised their hands.
“That’s right, seven of you did,” said Micah. “We’ll call you the techno-sleuths because you asked technical questions about gaffers and grips and best boys. Unfortunately, this strategy didn’t work very well. The techno-sleuths on average nabbed only four imposters.”
The actors sighed for the cameras.
“But don’t feel bad,” continued Micah. “Someone else did even worse. In fact, this special person didn’t catch a single imposter.”
All heads instantly snapped toward Cass. A crack army couldn’t have been in more unison. The two Steadicams, one on each side, zoomed in on her face. Here goes nothing, she thought.
“My goodness, Cassandra, why are all your friends staring at you?” asked Micah.
“Just show the clip, Micah,” said Cass.
He laughed and said, “Very good, Cassandra; you read my mind. Let’s show the world your very original strategy.”
The clip showed Cass with a red wig, freckles, mask, and prairie dress. She was supposed to be Anne of Green Gables. She wandered around the ballroom and asked every person she met her one big question, “If I pay you one hundred thousand dollars, will you fire me from this [bleep] show?” After showing three or four of these encounters, a carefully edited version of the same clip cut away the wandering and just showed her asking the question in a pathetic-sounding rapid succession. Then, since that had been so much fun, another edited version cut out everything else except the bleeped-out cuss word, which Cass repeated over and over and over again. And then it ended, and everyone laughed their asses off.
This is going worse than I had planned, thought Cass. She looked at Micah and knew at once that he had both barrels loaded. She braced herself.
“Anne of Green Gables! Such language!” he exclaimed. “It’s a good thing Marilla isn’t here, or you’d be eating soap for a week!”
More laughter. And he wasn’t done.
“Now, Anne, a hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money. I hope you didn’t steal Marilla’s brooch to pay for it! You do remember what happened last time, don’t you?”
One of the cameras panned the laughing mob while the other crowded up to Cass’s face. If she tensed up she’d look like a stick of dynamite with a red wig, so she smiled and tried to roll with the punches. How convincing this was she didn’t know. The ruckus eventually died down, and Micah continued.
“I have to tell you, Cassandra, we’ve had actors try to get off the show before but never quite like that. That was…interesting. How many takers did you get?”
“Everyone. All nine actors,” said Cass.
“Well, I’m no mathematician,” said Micah, “but that sounds to me like you might be going home.”
Cass smiled for the cameras and said, “Yes, Micah. I believe that’s what it means.”
“Well, OK then,” continued Micah. “I guess we better find out who gets the check and the big kiss goodbye.” He turned his attention back to the whole group and continued, “OK, my friends. You heard it straight from our resident A-lister. She wants out and will pay one hundred thousand dollars to whoever gives her the boot. That means tonight one of you will collect a cool two hundred grand, including a hundred thousand dollars from StarBash for the charity of your choice and a hundred thousand dollars from Cassandra Moreaux that goes straight into your pocket. Are you ready to find out which one of you is the big winner?”
The actors clapped and hollered and pounded on the stage.
“Roddy Markem!” exclaimed Micah.
Roddy yelled, threw his fists into the air, and pushed his way toward the stage.
Then Micah continued: “You are not the winner, Roddy, but you did get second place. Congratulations.”
Roddy’s puffed-up chest sprang a leak, and he disappeared back into the crowd.
“The winner of this week’s contest,” continued Micah, “and the winner of the biggest cash prize ever awarded for a single challenge is…”
A handful of actors still in the running crowded up to the stage. They stood rigidly straight, with clinched fists and red faces.
“…Brandi Bonacore!”
Brandi pumped her fists repeatedly and launched into some sort of gyrating honky-tonk dance. The other actors also celebrated. It really represented the perfect outcome. Not everybody won, but everybody got another week on StarBash—except for Cass, the only person who didn’t want it. So she joined the celebration, too. If she had had any doubt about the plan, it now vanished because nobody on earth wanted to see her get fired more than Brandi Bonacore. Even with the prime-time flogging Cass had just taken, she could honestly say that it couldn’t have worked out any better.
Micah invited Brandi up to the stage. They had her in a Spanish Dulcinea costume that didn’t work; she looked like two hundred pounds of Italian sausage squeezed into a hundred-pound casing. She had a round, streetwise face with jowls. Her black curly hair looked OK. Up until a few years ago, she’d made a good living playing the thirtysomething big-mouthed mistress in a few different mob movies or the sassy sidekick in several romantic comedies. Then she opened her mouth once too often and hit the skids.
“Now, Brandi,” said Micah, “you threw down a pretty strange strategy tonight. You asked about politics, favorite movies, and, most strange of all, where people shop for groceries. What was that all about?”
“Let’s just say it wasn’t all that hard to weed out the imposters,” said Brandi.
“And…?” coaxed Micah.
“And that’s all I got to say.”
“Uh…OK…well, you do have to say a bit more than that,” said Micah. “You have to tell us about your charity, and then you have to fire someone. Can you do that?”
“Yep.”
“Great. Why don’t you start by telling us about your charity?”
“My charity is the National Rifle Association.”
The actors gasped.
Brandi continued: “The National Rifle Association’s mission is to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, especially with reference to the inalienable right of the individual American citizen to acquire, possess, collect, exhibit, transport, carry, and enjoy the right to use arms.”
“Uh…OK…let’s give our audience some more details about your charity. Roll the video,” said Micah.
The promo video played, but the actors didn’t watch. They stared at Brandi. She returned their stare with an added measure of defiance. And this woman wonders why she can’t find work, thought Cass. The end of the video was met with complete silence. Then Micah spoke solemnly.
“Brandi, do you have a college degree?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry to hear that because I have to be honest with you. If you don’t win StarBash, I don’t think you’re ever going to work in Hollywood again, and I wanted to hear that you had something to fall back on.”
“That’s OK, Micah. I haven’t sold out yet, and I’m not gonna start now. I’m OK with it,” said Brandi.
“You’re a special person, Brandi, and I’m proud to know you,” said Micah.
And then Brandi gave him a hug. Two low IQs became one and maybe added up to a moron, thought Cass.
“All right, it’s time to fire somebody,” continued Mi
cah. “Sometimes our contestants find this part of the show to be difficult. But something tells me tonight might be a little different. Are you ready, Brandi?”
“You betcha.”
And, just as Cass had expected, Brandi pointed at her and said, “Do you have my check, Cass?”
Did she ever. Cass held up the check and pushed to the apron of the stage. The monkey show had ended, and it made her want to scream with happiness. She handed the check to Brandi.
Brandi held up the check and smiled for the cameras. And then the smile faded into a frowning scowl. She looked down at Cass, who still stood just a few feet away. She said, “Cass Moreaux, this is what I think of your money.” She dramatically tore the check into little pieces. The actors gasped loudly. Brandi continued: “And this is what I think of you.” She bent down and blew the little pieces of paper into Cass’s face and wig. The camera caught everything, including Cass’s stunned expression. Brandi continued: “You ruined my life, Cass, and now the whole world is going to watch you pay for it, week after week. You’re not going anywhere.” Brandi stood up, pointed at Roddy, and said, “Sorry, Roddy, nothing personal, but you’re a little too clever. You’re fired.”
What does a person do at this point? There just isn’t an easy way to rehearse for the time when you will be insulted in front of fifty million people. So Cass stood there and took it. She didn’t respond physically or verbally in any way. Of course she wanted to make Brandi pay for taking such a cheap shot, but Cass instinctively knew that she’d end up stooping just as low as Brandi. She had no choice but to submit to the camera’s chokehold and to let Brandi glower at her. She also had to listen to Micah launch into a final round of jokes, all of them at her expense. Eventually the filming ended, but nobody moved. The cast and crew stood and stared at her, as if such a special occasion required her to say or do some particular thing. They must have been disappointed when Cass made only one quiet, simple statement to Brandi and then left.
Death of a Movie Star Page 5