The Five Acts of Diego Leon

by Alex Espinoza

  Diego took it and read the title. It was in Spanish. La novia de sangre, it read. He was confused. “What’s this?”

  “A script.” Bill chuckled.

  “But it’s in Spanish. I thought I’d do English-language movies. Like I have been.”

  Bill said the talkies made selling films to foreign audiences who didn’t speak English a little trickier. They had to now worry about words, about actual dialogues. Many studios had taken to filming two versions of films they hoped to pitch to international audiences or immigrants residing in the United States. In this case, they would be filming two versions of the film, one called The Bride of Blood for American audiences with an English-speaking director and actors; the other would have a Spanish-speaking director and actors.

  “And the English version?” Diego asked him. “Why can’t I do that one?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “Not quite yet. We have to work up to that. Be patient.”

  “But—”

  “Trust me,” he said. “I know what I’m doing. Do you accept the part or not? I need to know in the next twenty-four hours.”

  Diego took the script. “I’ll tell you tomorrow then.”

  “Very well.” Bill gathered his things and rose. “I’m sorry. I have to go. Please order whatever you like and put it on my account.”

  “You’re not staying?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t,” he said. “I’ll make it up to you. I promise. All of it. I know we haven’t spent much time together, but things have been stressful. Order anything you like on me.” Bill grabbed his coat and hat and left.

  Diego was angry so he ordered the most expensive thing on the menu: filet mignon in red wine sauce, and a bottle of merlot. After his meal, he read the script. The movie was about a blood-sucking female vampire terrorizing a remote town high in the Hungarian mountains. Diego knew he had little choice in the matter, and realized he didn’t want to wait until tomorrow to decide. He asked the waiter to bring him a telephone.

  He dialed Bill’s number. Lawrence answered. “Please tell Bill I said I’ll take the part,” he said.

  “Very well,” Lawrence responded.

  He hung up then finished the wine and ordered another bottle and a crème brûlée for dessert.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he had been as nervous as he was before this screen test. It would be in Spanish. The last few years had required him to speak more and more English so that, by the time the script for La novia de sangre came his way, Diego felt unsure about his ability to deliver the lines, to pronounce the words properly, to carry the language. He felt like an outsider, a stranger, as he flipped through the sheets, breaking down the scene he was to perform for the test. That morning, he found it hard to focus. He forgot his lines. His hands trembled, and he felt his heartbeat quicken. Nevertheless, when time came for him to leave for the studio, he put his jacket and hat on, took a deep breath, and marched toward the trolley stop, focusing, rehearsing his lines over and over.

  At the test, he met his costar. Alicia Prado came from a line of impressive stock. Her father was a nationally recognized stage actor who toured throughout Argentina, Latin America, and Europe. Now an acting coach with his own theater troupe in Buenos Aires, where Alicia first got her start, he had been singlehandedly responsible for producing some of the country’s most regarded actors and actresses, such as Olga Bermundes and Fernando Alaniz. Alicia had gone on to star in a number of successful films back in Argentina. She was in Hollywood now, she said, hoping to “make it big.”

  Alicia was young and radiant, with bobbed hair and an animated way about her. “I’ve heard so much about you,” Alicia said when he walked up and introduced himself. She sat in front of a large mirror with lights running along its edges and was adjusting her outfit, a long blue and yellow dress.

  “It’s a pleasure,” he said.

  She smiled and rose. “My, but you are so tall.” Her English, despite a strong accent, was understandable, her voice beautiful and melodious, and she immediately put him at ease with her affection, her kind face and jovial attitude. “I’ll need lifts to reach you,” she said, chuckling.

  “They do that to some actors or actresses,” he responded. “You know? Lifts.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind if I have to,” she said. “I’m just so excited to be here on the Frontier lot working on a movie. You know, the director is such a veteran of the film scene in Latin America. I do hope it’s a fun experience.”

  “Have you worked with him?”

  “No,” she said. “But plenty of my friends have.”

  They watched the film crew get the lights and microphones in position. They darted around, back and forth, moving cameras into position, adjusting lenses, marking the slates with chalk. Alicia nodded to the director, who sat off to one side, flipping through the script, muttering to himself.

  Alicia turned to him and asked, her tone serious, heavy, “Tell me, are you nervous? Are you scared?”

  “No,” he said, feigning confidence. Bill once told him that a leading man would never show his insecurities.

  “Where did you study? What school?”

  “None,” he told her. “I have no formal training.”

  “Well,” she said. “That’s quite all right. I’m not a snob.”

  She said everything she learned about acting she got from her father. He trained her to perform from the time she was old enough to stand. And, when she officially joined his theater troupe at the age of ten, she had already accumulated an impressive amount of experience playing in the most prestigious and impressive theater houses in Argentina. It’s been a lot of hard work, Alicia explained, and from the theater there eventually came offers from the film studios that were starting to emerge around Buenos Aires and throughout the rest of the country. They stood behind the cameras watching the crew prepare the set. He was in a version of one of the costumes his character was required to wear—a basic suit and tie—and the director had instructed the makeup people and stylists to do what they could to make Diego appear a few years older. But not too old, he had stressed. So they combed his hair to the side, put him in a different set of clothes, and gave him sideburns. They called him forward then, and Alicia stayed behind. He stood on the set, which was the interior of a courtyard where he and Mary, his character’s young wife in the film, would meet and talk. The courtyard consisted of flower beds, a stone bench, and a gurgling fountain.

  “We’ll do some very basic poses, okay, son?” said the director. Then he asked him to stand by the fountain. “Here.” He pointed to the small X on the floor, and Diego was annoyed; he knew where his mark was.

  Carolina had sent him a few letters over the years. She had gotten his address from his grandparents and wrote him from time to time, filling Diego in on all that was going on in Morelia and her life. And, though he had rarely written her over the years, her correspondence had remained consistent. She had written at least once a month. He had told her, early on, about the rift between himself and his grandparents, his breakup with Paloma, his intention of someday returning but not until he had acquired at least a semblance of success. “So that years from now, my children could have real proof that I had lived,” he wrote once.

  She mentioned his grandparents in passing, a few lines scattered here and there throughout her letters: Doroteo was no longer working; they sold the house and business and moved out of the city. Where to, she never said. He also learned that Javier had returned back to Morelia after having traveled throughout the country, organizing rallies and protests, first against the church, then the government. For a time he lived in remote villages in the states of Oaxaca and Chiapas, helping the local indigenous people to build schools and clinics. “He’s well,” she had written. “Passionate as ever about his politics. Idealistic.” In her last letter, she told him that Javier had gotten serious with a girl named Lucía Martínez, someone he had met in a class at the university. This class, taught by a professor named Juan Aragón, a man known to be
a staunch Communist with radical ideals, a man who had made a name for himself by criticizing the corrupt government and political powers in Mexico, had apparently taken a liking to Javier and was grooming him to be his young protégé. But then Aragón died mysteriously. Some suspected it was murder. Javier had dropped out of school and taken up the man’s cause.

  It was well past nine in the morning now. He had overslept and needed to be at the studio by ten-thirty for the last round of costume fittings before the company was to begin production of the film when there came a knock on the door.

  “Yes?”

  “You got a call,” one of the other tenants shouted through the door.

  “Thank you.” He stepped out of his room, his shirt unbuttoned, shoes unlaced, as he went to the phone at the end of the hall. “Yes?” he said. “This is Diego.”

  “Hello,” a young man’s voice said. “Brother, it’s so wonderful to hear your voice again.”

  “Who is this?” he asked.

  There was a pause and then he spoke, “It’s Javier,” he said. “Javier. From Morelia. Brother, it’s so good to be talking with you. So, so good.”

  “Javier?” He was stunned. Diego felt hot blood rush up to his face. “Javier?” He held the wall. “How did you get this number?”

  “I called the studio. Pretended to be your brother,” he said.

  “You’re calling me from Morelia? Why? What’s happened?”

  “Everything’s fine. I’m in San Bernardino, actually.” Javier sounded enthusiastic. He took many breaths and talked rapidly. “I should be in Los Angeles next month.”

  “What?” he asked. “Why?”

  Javier said he was traveling through the United States with a group of his associates, visiting with union leaders and leftists throughout the country. Now that the left was in power in Mexico, Javier explained, there was very little to rally against, since the elites and their sympathizers had been ousted, so they set their sights on the United States. They would be stopping in Los Angeles then San Francisco, Chicago, and eventually New York—to shore up support for trade unions, workers’ rights, to raise money for “the cause,” as Javier put it.

  “We’ll be staying for a few weeks,” he said now. “We’re meeting with some directors, producers, and actors. We’ve gotten much support from Hollywood folks. I’d like to see you while we’re there. There’s a lot I need to tell you about. Can we? Will you be terribly busy?”

  “I’m to begin filming a movie,” he said, glancing at his watch. “I’m very late. I can’t talk at the moment.”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “I understand. I want to see you when I arrive, brother. I must run, but I’ll messenger you when we’re there.”

  “Very well. I’d like to see you, too.”

  “Good,” he said, then hung up.

  He had no time to dwell on it. He finished dressing, combed his hair, and ran down the stairs and into the street to catch the next trolley to the studio.

  A few days later, both The Bride of Blood and La novia de sangre began production with little attention in the media, only a few articles here and there in the trade journals about the happenings around Studio 18 on the Frontier lot as “the oldest movie company in Hollywood films the same movie in two languages.” The articles told of the two separate crews. “While the English crew films in the morning, the Spanish cast and crew,” one article wrote, “are at home, taking their much-needed siestas during the day. At around four o’clock, Dalton Perry and his crew bid a fond ‘Adiós’ to the studio. Then, an hour later, Señor Salazar and his troupe of bleary-eyed and sleepy Latin stars stumble in to film during the long hours of the night while the entire Frontier studios, and Hollywood, sleeps after a hard day of filming.” Diego still couldn’t believe his film was now being talked about in the magazines he had once so religiously read.

  They were shadows, he thought on the first night of shooting. The studios shut down, lay silent, unmoving. The offices emptied out, and the clerks and secretaries and typists, the switchboard operators and messengers, the accountants and payroll staff, the makeup and wardrobe people, the set designers and architects, the directors and their assistants, Mr. Levitt and Mr. Cage, everyone, everyone just left. The scouts and reporters, the grips and lighting technicians, the carpenters and truck drivers, and the extras and talent agents, they all rose, straightened their backs, dropped their hammers or microphones, their blunted swords or wooden pistols, their pens or staple guns, and they marched en masse out of the iron gates of Frontier Pictures, “Where Stars Are Born,” to families and dinner and a drink, to a hot bath or shower, to rest and regroup. They left it behind for the night, and they breathed and were grateful. With the offices and soundstages emptied, with the hallways and waiting lobbies and trailers hushed, with everything still, all activity stopped, when the great empires of the world—China, Egypt, England, Ancient Rome—ceased moving, ceased being, a new group took over, claimed the spaces, claimed the libraries and chambers and cathedrals of wise men and refined women, the battlefields of warriors and soldiers, the hallways and classrooms of learned men, the prairies of farmers, the oil fields of barons and tycoons, the countries of kings and dictators. They claimed this all, armed with feather dusters and cleaning solvents, metal carts with wheels they toted back and forth across the great canyons of the studio, their uniforms simple and forgettable. They washed the steps where a notorious gangster had been shot that morning, dusted the crib where a newborn had slept, straightened the office of an executive who had just launched the careers of some of the biggest film actors in history, polished the furniture in the waiting room where hundreds of extras had milled about, hoping and praying that today they would get their big chance, the break they were looking for, hoping for.

  And the film crew of the first all-Spanish production ever to be shot on the Frontier Pictures lot joined that secret society, that underground citizenry who slept during the day and claimed the night for their own. Diego watched them with great interest—those silent, unseen Americans—watched with greater interest as he himself joined that segment of the population. For the next six to seven months, Studio 18 on the Frontier Pictures lot would be in operation twenty-two hours a day. The hours from five in the morning until four in the afternoon would belong to Perry and his all-English crew, and the hours from five in the evening until four in the morning were Salazar’s and his group’s.

  Production began, then, simply, uneventfully, without much excitement, as the Spanish crew took the lead, shooting first. And it was a strange feeling to be sleeping during the day and passing through the gates of the Frontier Pictures lot at night, while the large domed soundstages lay empty and abandoned and dark. They had the entire place to themselves, and he and Alicia took time off between takes to drive around in the studio trams to visit the soundstages, to drop in on the sets of the other films under production at the same time as theirs. They scaled the Great Wall of China, marveled at fake icebergs, and danced around the mirrored walls on the set of The Lady Sings.

  It was fun, and they played and drove through the lots and back roads, over sand dunes and a castle’s moat, across the American prairie and around the Chilean Atacama Desert. Over the next few weeks, he found himself spending his free time with Alicia. Her spunk, her zest, made him laugh and remember what it was like to have fun again. She was so different from Fiona, and he loved how impressed she was with him, marveling at how well he spoke English. On the weekends and on days when they weren’t filming, he took her around town, showing her the sights—the Egyptian Theatre, the Brown Derby, Sardi’s—and they traveled all over the southland. The studio’s media hounds leaked information to reporters, and their pictures appeared in all the publicity rags with captions that said things like “Frontier’s Latin Heartthrob Seen with Leading Señorita,” or “As Hopping as Two Mexican Jumping Beans.”

  A little over two weeks into shooting, Dalton Perry ran into some trouble on the English set. The article in the gossip section
of Snapshots was vague, vague in the way such stories—carefully controlled by the publicity machine that was Frontier Pictures and its alliances with publications such as Reel News, Screen Test, and Snapshots itself—always were. It seemed that Jerome Hunt, who had taken the role of Peter in the English-language version, had been involved in an unfortunate and embarrassing scandal. The article mentioned an arrest, an “unidentified female entertainer,” and a bottle of prescription drugs. Jerome’s doctor, the article went on to say, was recommending the actor be pulled immediately from all current and upcoming projects to rest, for he was suffering from “mental fatigue and was not in the right frame of mind to make sound decisions.”

  Diego had read enough of these reports to know that the phrase “female entertainer” was a thinly veiled word for a prostitute, and that the prescription drugs were likely not at all given to Hunt by his physician but acquired illegally. This scandal would surely spell the end of Jerome Hunt’s career. The actor had been a problem for the studio for years. Frontier had been looking for a reason to get rid of Jerome Hunt, whose antics and bad behavior had irked studio executives for some time, and this proved to be the perfect opportunity. He was immediately pulled from filming The Bride of Blood, and production on the English-language version came to a loud and grinding halt. With no one to play Peter, there weren’t many choices left for Perry to rectify the situation. Diego wondered what solution would be presented, what the English-speaking crew would have to do to solve the problem. He wasn’t surprised to find Perry there at the set when Diego walked in. He had made it a habit to arrive a few minutes early and sit in his small trailer to rehearse his lines while smoking cigarettes. The English company had vacated and his fellow Spanish actors and actresses had yet to arrive. Perry was anguished, Diego could tell, for he was pacing back and forth and talking with Salazar.