by Lisa Ferrari
When I get her down again, two of her alien cannibal thugs drag me off of her until she can stand. We then resume our fight to the death.
I’m genuinely exhausted by the time I get my kill shot, my revenge: she makes one final, desperate attempt to stab me in the back with her tail, the same way she killed my husband. So I grab it and break it off. Slimy black alien blood goes all over me. I stab her with it. Right in the chest.
Her clawed hands go limp. She doesn’t move.
I collapse to the floor, kneeling beside her dead body. I’m exhausted, I have a terrible headache, I’m pretty sure I have at least a couple of cracked ribs because it hurts to breathe, there is actual blood dripping from a genuine cut on my eyebrow, and I think I’m concussed.
There’s a camera in my face but I ignore it. I simply stare at the dead alien queen before me. Her blood is all over me, greenish-black muck that it is.
Two words go through my mind: It’s over. It’s over. It’s over.
The camera pulls slowly back.
When I look up at it, I lose it in an overhead light. The light hurts to look at, so I close my eyes and put my head back. Silent, lifeless tears escape each of my eyes.
It’s over. It’s over. It’s over.
I just want to go home.
“CUT!!!” AARON CALLS.
Everyone applauds.
Aaron runs over to me and hauls me to my feet and hugs me tightly. Because of my injured ribs, it hurts; a lot.
Calista gets up, cussing like a truck driver and saying how hard I hit her. Once the effects guys have removed her big alien head that will probably give me nightmares for the rest of my life, she hugs me. The costumers and FX people help her out of the alien get-up. She’s soaking wet with sweat from being inside that thing all day.
Aaron is rushes all about. He continuously repeats that it was fucking awesome.
I’m glad it was fucking awesome.
It wasn’t fucking awesome for me.
WE SPEND THE next week shooting in exterior locations, showing me making my way out of the lair and onto the surface, where I am eventually picked up to be taken home. There’s not much dialogue, so it’s fairly easy. I spend most of the time sitting in my chair, wondering what would have happened if they had taken my advice and wrote the script so it had a happy ending in which Kellan lives, I kill the Queen, and we escape this shithole together so we can live happily ever after.
But, that’s not the story Aaron and Rami wanted to tell.
At last the day comes when the we complete principal photography. The production wraps. It’s a monumental achievement.
The following day we are at the airport and are, in fact, flying home. I’m excited to see Kellan. I try to be social with everyone while we’re in the van on the way to the airport and while we’re in the First Class Lounge and while we’re in the air.
But all I can think about is seeing Kellan.
IT FEELS LIKE an eternity but at last I see him at the airport, waiting for me in the arrivals terminal. He’s holding a huge bouquet of flowers. He’s wearing faded blue jeans and a white tee shirt and a black leather vest, which must be new because I’ve never seen him in a vest. But it looks really good. He looks like he should be on a stylized cover of a romance novel. He has a five o’clock shadow and his hair is slicked back. Even so, it looks longer. He also looks thinner, smaller, as though he’s lost weight. It’s probably my imagination.
He’s also surrounded, and I do mean surrounded, by paparazzi.
But I truly don’t care.
I hurry down the escalator, very nearly knocking people over as I go. I run to him and launch myself at him.
Kellan catches me in midair and wraps his powerful arms around me and holds me tight. I hide my face in his neck and weep for joy as a thousand flashbulbs go off all around us like lightning.
WE ALL TAKE two days off and then it’s back to work. There’s a bunch of ADR to do. Plus pickups if there will be any, and I assume there will be. Sheila and Aaron and Rami are all great at explaining how ADR stands for automatic dialogue replacement, which is when an actor goes into a recording studio booth and says their lines while watching their on-screen performance so the in-studio dialogue can be used when the on-set dialogue isn’t clear. Pick-ups involve shooting small scenes or reshooting scenes as required.
Kellan and I also go to three separate effects labs to have our bodies and faces scanned so the digital artists can do their thing.
Word gets out that principal photography has wrapped on the Billion-Dollar Movie and media outlets and TV shows begin calling to book interviews. Paparazzi accosts us everywhere we go. It’s fine when I’m with Kellan, but when I’m alone I tend to get intimidated. So I simply try to smile and answer their questions (fully half of which involve my buzz-cut Mohawk punk rock hair). I usually stop walking and speak with them for a few minutes before excusing myself. It seems more dignified than walking hurriedly while they chase me, which I’ve seen a lot of celebrity folk do and it often comes off as though they don’t want to talk, either because they don’t want to be bothered or they’re hiding something or they’re snobbish or they’re uncomfortable. I insist that my hair was simply because I wanted to cut it. I don’t say anything about knifing it off unexpectedly while the cameras were rolling.
I get text messages constantly from Denise and Beth and Nancy and other people, telling me they saw me on TV or on the internet, and how they cried when they saw Kellan and me reunite at the airport. Mostly people back home are complimentary. Almost everyone mentions my hair. I try to be gracious, even when I’m criticized. Every two to three weeks I get overwhelmed and distance myself from social media and communications in general. I don’t check my email or read any comments about any of my social media posts.
WE GO TO Calista’s one night for dinner. Which is great. It’s nice being with people who live the same type of life and therefore understand the challenges.
But mostly, Kellan and I catch up after not seeing one another for almost a month.
And by catch up, I mean make love.
And sleep.
And make love some more.
And sleep some more.
We eat, train, lie by the pool, soak in the Jacuzzi. And I fellate him. And then I fellate him some more. And after that, that’s right, I fellate him some more. I wake up in the middle of the night and do it. I do it while we’re watching TV on the sofa in the evenings. I do it on the 10 freeway on our way to Santa Monica. I can’t get enough of his penis. I begin to think I’m suffering from some new psycho-sexual food-related depravation-related anxiety in which I’ve begun to sate my anxiety by substituting my new husband’s penis for the food I would normally be inhaling.
Kellan loves my short hair. Sheila texted him the day I did it, so he wouldn’t be too shocked. He says he loves me and that I’m beautiful and I always will be, no matter what my hair looks like.
Kellan resumed working with his online training clients while I was still on location. I try to get back to work writing, but my mind is all over the place. None of my WIPs interest me. I’m not feeling the pull to write. Kellan suggests I compile a diary about what the production has encompassed. He says it will sell half a million copies when the movie comes out. I take his advice and begin working on it, mostly by sifting through all my photographs and writing captions for them, along with short, anecdotal pieces about stuff that was happening behind the scenes. We have more than 20 terabytes worth of data, so it takes awhile. But it gives me something to do every day, for which I’m grateful.
Kellan also notes one morning during post-fasted-cardio-and-in-the-shower-standing-up-lovemaking breakfast that he was kind of shocked when he saw me at the airport because I was so thin. I say that I felt the same way about him. He says he didn’t train much at all and was barely eating during the month he was here and I was still there, a third of the way around the world. I did the same thing. My appetite waned. Plus, we were working so mu
ch that I wasn’t thinking about food. Combined with being severely lovelorn, I lost weight.
Kellan says that now that we’re home and are once more together, we can get back to normal life, can get back on a regular training and nutrition schedule, can get our weight back up, and, most of all, we can get back to enjoying being newlyweds… husband and wife.
ONE DAY WE get a text from Aaron to meet him at a post-production facility in Beverly Hills. When we get there, he’s acting weird. The three of us go into an editing suite. I’m guessing he wants to show us some dailies or a rough cut of the movie or a few scenes.
I’m not wrong.
He proceeds to explain his longstanding love for cinema verité, which is a French term for ultra-realistic filmmaking. He says, awkwardly and with much infuriating clearing of his throat and a great deal of stammering, that, when we were in Hawaii, our limousine, the hotel, and our honeymoon suite, as well as the Jeep we rented and the perimeter of the waterfall, were all bugged with hidden video cameras. He got the idea after we decided to get married on camera for real. So he went and personally set up nearly 50 cameras. He then went and retrieved them once we’d left. He knew the footage would be private and deeply, deeply personal, so no one has seen it. Other than Sheila and Rami, no one knows it even exists. He explains that he has not looked at any of it. He has only compiled all the footage onto one hard drive, which he pulls out of his pocket and hands to me. He pulls out a second drive, which is brand new and completely empty, and hands that one to me as well. He says to sit down and watch the footage and anything we don’t want in the movie, we can remove from the drive. We can keep it for ourselves on the backup drive or delete it completely. And of course we can copy any or all of it as well.
Aaron quickly excuses himself and hauls ass out of the small, dimly-lit editing suite.
Kellan and I are aghast. At first. But the more we talk about it, the more we decide we aren’t angry. We realize Aaron’s heart was in the right place. Assuming we can trust that there are no copies of any of this footage, which he said repeatedly there are not.
We attach the drive to the editing computer and open the one and only folder titled KC.
Inside the folder are 49 MP4 files.
We open the first one. It shows us getting into the limousine, tossing the bouquet from the sunroof, and then promptly having sex.
I’m torn between being shocked by what I’m seeing and evaluating it. We look good. Kellan agrees.
When he flips me onto my back, we move out of frame but we’re still audible.
The second file shows a video inside the limo but from a different angle, one from the front of the long passenger compartment. It shows us having sex in all its glory.
We make our way through the other files.
They show us in the hotel, us in the elevator, with Kellan carrying me, and going into our room. There is a file for each room of the honeymoon suite showing us having sex in each of the rooms, in multiple positions, as well as our non-sexual moments in which we’re sleeping or eating or just sitting and talking. The dialogue is clearly audible. I forget that I’m watching video taken of me without my knowledge. I get drawn into the scene, watching it and remembering it at the same time. It reminds me of lots of little moments I’d forgotten.
We finish the rest of the files which show us driving in the Jeep and swimming at the waterfall and having sex behind the boulder. That shot is up close, so Aaron must’ve assumed we’d have sex there because he put a camera behind the big rock.
I ask Kellan if he was in on this.
He assures me that he was not.
He concurs that he’s glad the footage exists, but that there is definitely some stuff that is off limits. So we set to work cutting footage out of the files. We remove all the full frontal shots of both of us. We remove all the shots where you can see Kellan’s penis or my vagina. We decide to keep my breasts in the film. We spend several minutes discussing this, as Kellan is leaning more toward removing shots of my boobs. But these are scenes in which a newlywed husband and wife are making love, and that’s not something to be ashamed of. We compromise by allowing Aaron to have only shots of me topless which are long shots, filmed from far away so there’s really nothing to see due to the distance.
By the time we’re finished, we’ve copied the entire drive onto the backup Aaron gave us and deleted the off-limits stuff from his drive. We deleted several spectacular ejaculations as well as all but one orgasm. The one and only orgasm scene we let Aaron have is a tasteful sideways medium-length shot of Kellan and me in bed. I’m in his lap, riding him. Our arms are wrapped around one another. We’re kissing and saying ‘I love you’ over and over again before we both climax together. I can almost feel Kellan’s hot semen inside me as I watch it. But there’s no way to know for certain by watching the video if we’re actually performing a sex act or are merely simulating it. So we’ll let Aaron decide if he wants to use it. If he does, everyone will assume it was simulated, especially the folks at the MPAA (aka the Motion Picture Association of America, the agency which assigns ratings to movies), so, hopefully, our film won’t get an NC-17 rating. But it might get an ‘R’ or ‘Restricted’ rating. I have no idea what that would do to potential ticket sales and subsequent profits. If it’s PG-13, like Jurassic Park and Avatar and Titanic, parents will take their kids to see it. But if it’s rated R, like Aliens and Event Horizon and The Thing, will it do as well? Or will it do better? Everyone freaked out when Showgirls was given an NC-17 rating but the movie was so dumb (titillating, yes, but dumb), that surely the rare and feared NC-17 must have actually boosted ticket sales.
We invite Aaron back into the room to discuss the footage. He asks about a dozen times if we’re angry with him for what he did.
We explain that we were at first but that we came to understand his actions and that we’re actually now pleased that we have a record of our intimate honeymoon moments.
I hand him the drive with the modified content, confident that he’ll have plenty to work with. I ask why there were only 49 MP4 files when he said there were 50 cameras. He explains that one of the cameras suffered a glitch and shut off after 37 seconds, recording nothing of interest. I ask where that camera had been placed. Aaron says in the bathroom of our hotel suite, in case we made love in the shower (which we did; more than once). It’s just as well, having a scene in which Kellan and I are naked or being intimate is one thing. Having a scene in which I’m taking a giant, noisy poop is something else, something which strikes me as being the more embarrassing scenario.
Kellan and I head home with our new hard drive.
We’re in the door two seconds when Kellan has it connected to his laptop and we’re watching ourselves have sex on the home theater system. He looks amazing. He says repeatedly that I look amazing.
Within five minutes, we’re tearing each other’s clothes off for real.
TIME PASSES. As it tends to do.
We see Aaron and Rami and Sheila less and less, though they do keep us updated on the status of our film.
We also get a release date: July 1st, as summer is the hottest time of year for movies because kids are out of school and people have plenty of free time, and there are no major cultural or sporting events to distract people, such as the Superbowl or the Oscars or Christmas shopping. Plus, the first of July is a Wednesday, which they like because the super-excited fans will go see it opening day, as well as Thursday and Friday, which will give the movie momentum going into the holiday weekend. I’m not certain how I feel about a movie detracting from the great 4th of July traditions of barbecues and pool parties and fireworks which always accompany America’s Independence Day. But Sheila says that’s why they chose Wednesday the first, to give people the ability to schedule seeing The Biggest Movie of All Time around their celebration.
Everyone refers to Forever Love as an “event movie”, a term I’ve never heard. Heather explains to me that it refers to a movie everyone
is looking forward to, either because it’s a long-anticipated sequel or because it’s super-duper expensive or because it has big-name stars and big-time, cutting-edge special effects. In short, the release is in and of itself an event. She says Jaws was considered the first event movie.
Heather explains that ours is also a “tentpole” movie, one upon which the studios are basing a great deal of expectations for the success of their financial future. It also means there will be a massive tie-in campaign, promoting toys and games and fast-food partnerships to help sell the movie.
Immediately the press junket begins.
Within a few days, the banners appear. They must put them up at night because one day I’m driving east on Sunset Blvd. and everything looks as it usually does, with the skyscrapers bearing huge, massive, tall banners for various movies and TV shows. But the next day, they’re covered with banners for our movie. There is a huge, ridiculously huge, poster of me in my costume. I’m dirty and look kinda crazy with my knife, but kinda hot because I’m showing some leg and cleavage. There are also buildings with posters showing Kellan, Calista (in full alien queen garb), and Garth. There’s no title or anything. Just a date: “July 1”. I guess everyone knows what it means.
Wow. I pull over and snap pics of each of them on my phone.
Wow.
Over the next several days, I continue to see adds. I see a teaser on TV and on multiple websites. It’s just a teaser, but it’s really good, especially the music, which is grand and epic but also soulful and at times sorrowful. I love it. It sort of reminds me of Game of Thrones. I should be so lucky to be in such company.
Jeremee calls and texts constantly. Constantly. Kellan and I fly all around the country doing interviews, sometimes separately, but often together. At first, these are utterly, utterly terrifying. But pretty soon I start to see through the television artifice: they’re mere mortals asking me questions. Sure, there are a lot of lights and cameras and women with foam triangles dabbing me with concealer and a guy shoving a microphone wire up the back of my shirt and into my ear, but I begin to grow more and more accustomed to it. I begin to relax a bit more and sometimes I am able to enjoy it.