by Sophie Lee
Rebekah had called her first thing Monday morning. 'Omigod, hon, we got you in to test for Beyond Sunset. This is huge. Danny Goldenberg is producing. We are so excited right now! They are going to love you!' Rough Beast Slouching was officially a thing of the past.
The Goldenberg film was a love story with a twist set against a backdrop of war. Alice had been asked to test for the female lead. The two male leads were brothers and both of them were in love with the same woman.
Alice sat in one of the fold-out chairs in the casting department. The atmosphere was abuzz. Actresses whispered to each other and went over the pages of their auditions. According to Rebekah, Gwyneth Paltrow had passed on Goldenberg's offer and the spot was now open for an unknown. Some lucky actress's career would be made by securing this role.
Danny Goldenberg's headquarters in Santa Monica were not what Alice had imagined. She had envisaged marble and stainless steel and pointy-edged furniture. To her surprise, his offices were housed in what looked like a converted barn. The walls were exposed brick and the russet shades matched the beams on the ceiling. Office doors were painted shiny red and work desks were visible to visitors. The overall effect was cheerfully studious. The 1980s-style décor was reminiscent of a groovy university library, not the epicentre of one of the biggest production companies on the planet. The casting session was taking place at the very top of the building, close to the ceiling; it took three flights of stairs to reach it. Once at the top, one could look down to the offices below. Alice felt as though she were in a rogue pigeon's nest.
She was intrigued by the one scene she had been given to prepare. Goldenberg would not release the full script to any of the unknowns testing for the part. He had rationed out only what was absolutely necessary. Alice wondered how he could be spending a rumoured $100 million on the budget without allocating any of this to a decent scriptwriter.
The audition scene took place on the eve of the Battle of Iwo Jima. The nurse, Betty-Sue, was declaring her undying love for one of the brothers. Alice was unsure which brother he was and whether the nurse favoured him over the other. It was impossible to contextualise it in the absence of the whole screenplay. The two-page scene ended with the line, 'If I ever see another sunset . . . or write another letter . . . I'll think of you.' Chances were, Betty-Sue would find herself performing both activities once or twice over the next sixty-odd years of her life. It wasn't as though she'd been able to pinpoint a very specific activity that would remind her of him. For example, she could have said, 'If I ever happen to be stung by a wasp when changing a patient's dressing, I'll think of you.' A far more specific memory trigger, she reckoned. At the end of the nurse's declaration regarding sunsets and letters, Alice/Betty-Sue was to cry. It said so in the big print. Hence, the onion.
Twelve minutes passed. There were still three ahead of her in the waiting room and Alice hunkered down for a long wait. A pungent scent wafted upwards as she shifted in her seat. The vegetable chunk was probably losing its potency. Alice hadn't factored in the possibility of lengthy delays and wished she'd brought a back-up onion and Stanley knife. Unfortunately, her Stanley knife had been confiscated by customs back at Sydney airport.
'. . . even tested Charlize Theron for it,' said one of the actresses to the other two.
'. . . bigger than Titanic . . .' whispered the actress next in line, who'd gone to the trouble of putting finger waves in her hair and applying red lipstick. Alice, chastened by her 'plaid' experience, had resisted the urge to dress according to the period and was in jeans and a T-shirt.
Alice regarded the three other actresses in the waiting room. They were equally young, thin and beautiful. It was a textbook Hollywood casting session. They were looking for an unknown actress to turn into a huge star. According to Rebekah, they wanted a girl who invoked Grace Kelly. Alice wondered whether she had any Kelly-like qualities. She doubted it. A rounder, freckly-faced Grace Kelly in Converse sneakers, maybe? She looked down at one scuffed toe and wondered whether she should have at least worn heels. Getting this role would be like winning the lottery. Whoever got the job would be instantaneously catapulted into a different sphere. The smell of the onion was beginning to make Alice feel nauseous.
She looked at her watch. 5.30 pm. She was ready for them. As soon as they called her name, she would thrust her fingers into the onion, thereby extracting the juice to casually rub into both eyes. By the time she was in the room and the cameras were rolling, the onion should be stimulating her tear ducts. Hopefully, she could time the tears for the letters and sunsets.
Under usual circumstances, Alice did not doubt her ability to cry on demand. She'd done so many times before. Once, on a telemovie set in Sydney, the director requested she cry in a close-up mere seconds before he called 'action'. Alice had managed to do what he asked that time, but in fairness, the scene involved a soliloquy of sorts which gave her time to work up to the requisite emotions.
In the case of this audition, her one scene was under two pages long, was out of context and quite possibly written by a baboon. She was to perform it cold and opposite a casting person with no props or costumes or other actors to ground her in a different reality. She was pretty sure she didn't have the emotional flexibility to pull it off. She tried to imagine sick orphaned kittens to get her to a sad place just in case.
At 6.05 pm Alice heard her name called and jumped up. Her imaginary kittens were trapped in the bottom of a bucket and being lowered into a well. The effect was more disturbing than sad and she wished she'd focused on something else. She bent down to pick up her fact sheet and satchel. It was at this moment, bent forward, that she scraped out the onion extract and furtively sunk her fingers into her eyeballs.
'Ow!' she cried, unprepared for the pain. As she stood up straight, the ragged onion segment rolled out of her hand and to the feet of a twenty-something brunette waiting beside her.
'You dropped something,' she said, pointing at the vegetable.
Alice stumbled as she retrieved the onion and muttered her thanks. She was relieved to note that the casting lady had had her back turned and was yelling something to her assistant. She turned to face Alice.
'Hey Alice, how are you, come and meet everyone,' she said, greeting her swiftly and leading her into the casting room.
'Thank you,' Alice replied, squinting. She walked in and dropped her satchel by the door.
The room appeared hazy through the onion fog. Three men sat in a room the size of Neville's closet. One of them seemed to be very young. Alice figured this must be the assistant who'd just copped an earful.
'Hey Alice,' chimed the three men in unison. Two of them resumed a conversation and the other younger one looked down at his notes.
'I'm Valerie,' said the casting lady, stepping forward to shake her hand. She looked Alice up and down. 'Well, we hear you're from Down Under . . .'
'Yes, but did you ever think that you're from Up Over?' Alice shot back, with a smile.
The room was silent.
'Huh?' said Valerie.
'Never mind,' muttered Alice. What on earth had she said that for? She busied herself with the two script pages. She felt furtive and untrustworthy with the onion in her possession. 'This is such a lovely scene,' she commented, amazed at her ability to be completely dishonest while momentarily vision-impaired.
'Isn't it great,' agreed Valerie, adjusting the camera. 'The whole love triangle at the centre of the story is so powerful. Could you just look to camera and hold up this piece of paper with your details on it? Thanks.'
'Sure,' obliged Alice, holding up the piece of paper. She blinked rapidly at the lens. She hoped that Danny Goldenberg and Co. wouldn't think she was making goo-goo eyes at the camera when they reviewed the tape.
Valerie did not suggest a rehearsal and stood by the camera ready to provide the brother's dialogue. The two men concluded their conversation and the room was silent.
'Okay Alice? Let's do this. In your own time of course . . . action.'
&nb
sp; Alice took a deep breath. She squeezed her eyes shut in an attempt to activate the onion juice and began her dialogue.
'Brad, wait. I don't want you to leave,' she said. Her eyes hurt and she kept them shut. It was an interesting way to begin the dialogue but left her feeling rudderless. When she opened her eyes they felt as dry as sandpaper. That's interesting, she mused. She couldn't remember this happening when cutting up onions for a bolognaise sauce. Alice was suddenly aware she was focusing too much energy on the onion. She needed to rein in her mind. She tried to think about prisoners of war and sunsets instead. She squinted at Valerie who was looking at her strangely.
'Brad, I need to tell you this before you go.' Focus, she urged. The kittens appeared. They were still being lowered into a well. There was an onion in the bucket with them. Alice shook her head rapidly from side to side in an effort to dispel the vision. This particular action didn't quite fit with the dialogue. She was worried her war nurse was coming across as a person afflicted with Parkinson's disease.
Valerie/Brad replied. 'I'm out of here. I'm, like, heading for a court martial as it is.'
Alice wrinkled her nose. She was sure they wouldn't have said 'like' in 1945. Hadn't it been invented by Valley girls in the '90s?
'Just hear me out,' she said. 'I'm sorry.' Alice was unsure what the character had to be sorry about. Perhaps Betty-Sue had done something with the other brother? She rubbed her eyes. There! They were stinging again. She caught her breath in an approximation of tearful breathing and felt some moisture brimming in her left eye. It clung stubbornly to the bottom rim and refused to spill out.
'I'll never forget your kindness,' she said. 'And whenever I write a letter or look at a sunset . . . I'll think of you.' Alice blinked and looked off to the left of camera.
'Cut. Thank you very much for coming in; we really appreciate it,' said Valerie stepping away from the camera and steering Alice to the door. Alice could feel the tear rolling down her cheek. She was aware of the very young man making a call on his cell phone as she left, ordering coffee for four. He had obviously been very moved by her performance. Valerie called for the next actress.
'That went well,' said Alice flatly, heading for the stairs. Her eyes were streaming now. 'That was just super.' She reached into her satchel for a tissue.
Alice drove down La Cienaga in search of a bookshop. Her eyes were still stinging like crazy and she felt nauseous. How could she have screwed up that audition so badly? She was going to need a new crime novel to take her mind off things. She still had a massive pile of scripts sitting only half-read in her room but couldn't bear the thought of them. Lithium was the only decent one so far, but she was pretty sure she didn't have an audition for it.
Alice spied a Borders bookshop and parked the car. Coffee and books were a combination made in heaven. She felt her shoulders relax as she headed from the carpark to the shop's entry. Her cell phone shrilled from the depths of her satchel. It was pretty late for Rebekah to still be at work, but that was LA. The relentless work ethic meant people were virtually always in the office, and they never ever took 'sickies'.
'Hey, Alice, where are you?'
'Hi, Rebekah. I'm just going to the gym,' Alice replied, walking into the bookshop.
'Good girl. So . . . how'd it go?'
'Um . . . good I hope, I had one shot at it, and it was a pretty short scene, but I hope it went okay,' Alice replied, admiring a display of colourful children's books. A picture of a very hungry caterpillar made her smile.
'Great. Well, I'm going to follow up just as soon as I can. I have three more appointments for you tomorrow, Alice. I've emailed them through to you, so after the gym you're going to need to go and learn lines for a bit.'
'What? Three auditions tomorrow? It's nearly eight!' Alice was aware she was shouting, and hurried back through the bookshop to the carpark. 'What's the deal, can you have the script pages in your hand or what? What do they expect here?'
'Of course you can have the script in your hand if you have to,' Rebekah answered, in a tone that suggested the very opposite. 'But if you do that, you're not giving yourself the best chance. It's totally up to you though. Either way is fine. I've emailed through all the pages you need and I've had Charlize attach the Yahoo maps as well. Alice, I gotta go, I have a date. Call you tomorrow,' she concluded, and hung up.
Alice ran back to the Daewoo and clambered inside. She'd need to stop at a 7-11 on the way home for a supply of energy drinks to get her through the line-learning session ahead.
Alice hurtled towards the Miracle Mile district. Three cans of Triple G rolled on the floor on the passenger side. Alice hoped they were not fizzing up. Were the drinks aerated? She'd never actually consumed the product but was reliably informed by the Korean fellow at the 7-11 that Triple G was a superior product to Red Bull. She knew it contained guarana, which gave you the added energy, but it also contained two additional ingredients that also started with 'g'. One of them may have been ginkgo biloba. But wasn't that something they put in shampoo?
Alice had also bought a large packet of Wow chips. They were Shauna's favourite. Maybe Shauna would run lines with her if she supplied her with the snack? The packet boldly claimed to contain zero fat. Wow, thought Alice, I can't believe these chips don't make you fat! Wow! I can't believe these chips will sit undigested in your stomach for a year because they are made entirely from chemicals!
She turned into her driveway and sped down to the back parking lot. She was disappointed to note that Shauna's car wasn't there. Where could she be at 8.30 on a Monday night? Alice grabbed the cans of drink and the Wow chips and bounded up the back steps two at a time. As she opened the door, she spied a large cat tearing out of her bedroom. Before she could stop herself, she'd pelted it with one of the cans. It hit the wall with such force that it popped open and sprayed its contents all over the floor. The cat halted, its curiosity overriding its instinct to flee. It slunk back to lap up the liquid. Apparently the drink was aerated.
Alice ran at the cat. 'Shoo, you bloody revolting creature!' She clapped her hands violently and the cat retreated to the darkness of the living room. She hurried down the hall to the office to print out her pages for the following day. Once inside the office, she switched on the light and logged on to retrieve her emails. She read Rebekah's email quickly. Great, she sighed, three auditions, all in really tricky locations. She began printing out the first audition, the first scene of which was six pages long. There appeared to be three scenes. Alice stood over the printer, scouring the pages to see how many lines of dialogue her character had per page. She was hopping from foot to foot in panic when she heard Shauna's keys clatter on the kitchen bench.
'Holy crap! What happened out here?' she yelled. 'I didn't know cats did fizzy pee pee!'
'Relax, it's energy drink,' called Alice, relieved to hear Shauna's voice. 'I'm about to clean it up, right after I've finished printing out these first twelve thousand pages of dialogue for my three auditions tomorrow.' She caught more pages as they spewed out of the printer.
'Oh my God, Alice, I am so hungry,' Shauna moaned, leaning on the office door to watch her. 'My agency said I'm looking too big in the hips so I'm starving. I hate myself right now. Are those Wow chips?'
'Your favourite,' said Alice, pleased her plan was coming together, 'and don't listen to those wankers at your agency; you're gorgeous the way you are.' The final page of the third audition rolled out of the printer and she began to put things in order. Her desperation grew as she looked at how much she had to learn overnight.
'Uh, Alice,' said Shauna. She had opened the packet and was nibbling the corner of a Wow chip as if it were part of a food ration that had to last a week, 'I also have a big audition tomorrow and was going to ask if you could help me . . . but I guess now you have all that work . . .'
'You have an audition? But, that's great . . .' She was pleased for Shauna. Who would want to endure the indignity of modelling swimsuits long term?
'They need a m
odel slash actor,' Shauna explained, sawing at the air when she said the word 'slash'. She grinned with excitement. 'I really want this job, Alice.' She helped herself to two more Wow chips.
No shit, thought Alice.
'But don't sweat it, you're way too busy.' She started licking round the edges of one of the remaining chips in her palm.
'Here's what we're going to do,' decided Alice. 'It's now twenty-one hundred hours. We will spend the next hour confined to our quarters and reconvene here in the barracks at twenty-two hundred hours to run lines. Got that soldier?'
'Yes, sir.' Shauna saluted and scurried off.
'Wait. You'll be needing this.' Alice tossed her a can of Triple G. 'Oh, and I'll attend to that mess a bit later,' she added, as she stepped over the spilt energy drink and into her room. She closed the door behind her and fiddled with the doorknob to check it was shut. The belts and necklaces jingled.
Alice sat on the end of the bed, exhaled loudly and looked down at her audition scenes. 'Right, let's get cracking,' she said, taking a small sip of Triple G. Her face screwed up at the taste but she persevered with another larger sip.
The first audition was at 10.30 am in Studio City. This was a made-for-television movie for the Hallmark Channel. There were three scenes in total and the first one fitted into the category of what Alice referred to as, 'This is My Special Place' scenes. A young man shows a young woman a special geographic spot – could be a waterhole or a corner of a field – and says this is the place he comes to think or feel or to remember his gran' daddy who passed. In this case, the boy with the sick mom shows his girlfriend the end of a pier. One of Alice's lines was, 'She must be real proud of you.'
Alice knew beggars couldn't be choosers but she really did not even want to try out for this job. For one thing, the character was barely out of her teens and Alice was pushing thirty. She knew her round face made her look a couple of years younger than she really was but this was taking things way too far. Second, she knew that decorative girlfriend parts such as this were not her strength. She didn't possess the calm beauty to carry her in such roles. She felt better suited to characters who actually had something to do, other than merely look serene and lovely and murmur words of encouragement to the male lead.