Hello Hollywood

by Suzanne Corso

  SIX

  Finally, on May 11, shooting started, and Marvin and I drove out to Gallery Studios.

  The studio was an anomaly for Hollywood. It didn’t offer visitor tours, didn’t have some huge sign outside that screamed, I’m here, I’m here, and if you were driving past it, you probably wouldn’t have any idea what it was.

  Tucked away in Laurel Canyon, amid the towering, ancient rust-colored rocks, the property covered more than three hundred acres. Yes, that was small potatoes compared to the two thousand acres that made up Skywalker Ranch, Lucas’s place north of San Francisco. But to a girl from Brooklyn, where your neighbors practically lived inside your bathroom, it was an incomparable paradise of space.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Marvin leaned forward over the steering wheel, his eyes sweeping across the vast expanse beyond the curving driveway. “I mean, really. What the hell kind of money buys this?”

  “A lot more than we’ve got.”

  He sat back. “In some ways, Sam, this kind of wealth is almost obscene when most of the world is going hungry.”

  I knew what he was saying. It was the sort of wealth Alec and I once had, before Wall Street went belly up, and we blew through it faster than he earned it. But back then, world hunger and the planet’s dwindling resources barely registered on my radar. I tithed to my church, gave to various charities, helped people I knew who were down on their luck. But when confronted with huge, practically insurmountable inequities and suffering, I felt helpless. What could one person do to alleviate it? After I received the insurance money, I donated half a million of it to a Feed the Hungry organization and would do so again at the end of this year. Even so, it didn’t seem to put much of a dent in the magnitude of hunger and poverty globally.

  Priti had described the vast and terrible poverty in India. I had seen it in Africa, in the Caribbean, in South America. When you went hungry, not much else mattered. When you had to eat mud cakes to stay alive, as Haitians had after the earthquake in 2010, everything else fell away.

  I knew that Gallery had established a foundation that donated enormous amounts of money to victims of natural disasters, money that helped them to relocate, to put their lives back together. Yes, it was a lucrative tax write-off for them, but I also think Gallery did it because the people in charge had social consciences.

  Gallery’s enormous profits enabled them to tackle subjects in documentaries that addressed problems that we, as a human collective, as a planet, were facing in the coming century. Two of these films—one on climate change and one on alternative fuels—had won Golden Globes. And earned practically nothing at the box office.

  As Kurt Vonnegut used to say, So it goes.

  Marvin parked in the tree-shaded lot at the side of the main building. I recognized Liza’s Mercedes and Paul’s BMW, but not any of the other cars. As we headed toward the front steps, an electric cart came around the corner of the building, King at the wheel.

  “Hey, Sam, Marvin, hop on board,” he called, and drew to a stop beside us. “We’re shooting in studio four. George emailed you the breakdown of scenes we’re shooting today, right?”

  “Yeah, he did,” I said. “The kitchen scene with Grandma Ruth, making potato pancakes and blintzes. And the mother, Joan, stumbles in, hungover.”

  “Wait till you see Sarandon. Her ability to transform herself is astounding. And Camilla as Joan is incredible. And then there’s Jenean, who is simply remarkable.”

  He was so uncharacteristically chatty that Marvin’s brows shot up. WTF ? Who wound him up? “A great cast, a great studio, and a fantastic director. What else can any novelist ask for?” Marvin said.

  “A good producer,” King said, with a slight smile that indicated he knew Paul and I were no longer seeing each other.

  “Ah, right,” Marvin agreed.

  King drove the cart along a hard-packed path that curved and twisted through trees and beds of flowers, past a swimming hole. Thick branches hung over it, and ropes had been slung over several of the branches, an invitation to leap and swing and drop into the glistening water.

  “We should write in a scene that can be shot there,” I said.

  King laughed. “Jenean said exactly the same thing.”

  The woods thinned, and the path took us up a shallow hill, where a large Victorian house stood like something out of a fairy tale. Tremendous trees formed a semicircle around it, as if embracing it. Half a dozen electric carts were parked in a small, shaded gravel lot on the right. The only vehicle was a large van with GALLERY STUDIOS written across the sides in vibrant blue letters.

  “Wait till you see the set, Sam,” King said. “Our art director did a fantastic job of duplicating the apartment in Brooklyn.”

  Way back when Paul first optioned the book, I had written up descriptions of the interior of the apartment, as shabby as it was; of a local café where my friend Janice and I used to hang out; and of other places in Brooklyn. I suspected those notes had gone to the art director.

  We followed King into the house. A lot of people mulled around in the living room, helping themselves to a spread of food on a large wooden table. The crew. They all looked to be in their twenties, wore jeans, had iPhones sticking out of their shirt pockets. They had an easy, casual air about them that I had never mastered—not in my twenties, not now.

  “Hey, guys,” King called out. “I’d like you to meet the author of Brooklyn Story, Samantha DeMarco, who also wrote the screenplay, and her assistant, Marvin Castelli.

  A chorus of hellos and welcome rang out. A petite blonde came over and introduced herself as Renée Tennerin, the art director. “I loved your book, your notes were fantastic, and I hope you’ll give me pointers on how my staff and I can improve the set.” Then she looked at Marvin. “And you’re Samantha’s buddy from The Suite Life, right?”

  Marvin looked embarrassed. “Uh, yeah.”

  She winked and leaned close to us and whispered, “There’s some buzz about optioning the second book and the third one, when it’s out. Is the new one nearly finished?”

  Hardly. I had written exactly two paragraphs. “It’s a long way from finished. Since I moved out here, I’ve been busy with my production company.”

  “Oh, right.” She rocked back on her heels. “I heard you just optioned a rather intriguing fantasy screenplay.”

  “I have to thank Marvin and my other employee for that. They both have a great sense of story,” I said.

  She and Marvin started chatting, and because I was suddenly famished, I slipped away toward the banquet of food. I picked up a plate and moved through the line, helping myself to a bit of everything—crepes, omelets, shrimp in some delectable rice concoction, baked plantains, vegetarian wraps, and on and on. It was like grazing my way through a shopping trip at Whole Foods, but a whole lot better.

  Just as I was about to dish some paella onto my plate, the hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up. I raised my eyes, and there, on the other side of the table, was John, his plate heaped with as much food as my plate held. He glanced at me, at my plate, back at me, and laughed.

  “You’re too petite to be able to eat all that.”

  “Ha. I have a monstrous appetite.” In more ways than one.

  “Want to eat outside? The weather is perfect, and they aren’t shooting right this second.”

  “Are there tables outside?” Did it matter? I would eat on the sand with this man, sit on concrete in the blazing sun with him.

  “We’ll make one,” he said with a quick laugh, and added a helping of salad to his plate.

  Minutes later, we were sitting on the ground, our backs up against the trunk of this huge tree. “This studio always has the most incredible food,” John remarked. “Honestly, just look at the variety.”

  He held his plate out, like an offering, like some ancient ritual to a mythological deity. For a moment or two, I c
ouldn’t wrench my eyes away from his hand. It was large, larger than any hand had a right to be, and beautifully formed, the fingers symmetrical, the nails perfectly cut, the skin smooth and beautiful. It was easy to imagine that hand on my body, igniting a hunger I hadn’t felt for a long time.

  “Paella is one of my favorites,” I said, looking down at my paper plate, picking up my fork and scooping up a bite of it. “Even if it isn’t Italian.”

  “I love Cuban food. I love Cuban coffee. I love Cuban everything. I’ve begun to think I had a life in Cuba in the pre-Fidel days, you know, when Che was doing his revolution thing.”

  He talked fast, as if he felt the urge to say whatever he had to say before something came along and changed the dynamics.

  “A past life as one of Che’s main guys?” I asked.

  “Yeah, something like that. Or maybe Che himself ? Now, that would make an interesting script.”

  Priti had talked a lot about reincarnation, and at one point a few years back I considered going to a past-life therapist for a regression. Stuff had interfered, though, and that regression remained on my bucket list. “Do you speak Spanish?” I asked.

  “I do. Took a year of it in college, then quit because it . . . I don’t know, this sounds weird, but it all came back to me. I didn’t need the class to speak the language.”

  His eyes. I knew those eyes. Recognized them. Knew that somewhere in the past, those eyes had pierced mine. But I couldn’t find the specific memory. Maybe I was delusional.

  But what about that reference to Frank’s Pizzeria? Had that been delusional?

  I picked away at the food on my plate. The cool breeze blew around us, through us, and I pulled my lightweight jacket more tightly around my body and zipped it up. “Parli italiano?” I asked. Do you speak Italian?

  He rocked his hand from side to side. “Un po’.” A little. “Very un po’,” he added with a laugh.

  As we sat there in our slice of warm sunlight, I kept stealing glances at this man, struggling to find a memory of him. I knew it was there, buried somewhere in the past, but I couldn’t find it. The problem was that I had cut myself off from so much of my Brooklyn past that chunks of my memories were probably gone forever. It struck me as ironic that I was mulling this over when, inside that studio, my past was being filmed.

  “What?” he finally asked, and met my eyes.

  “I can’t shake this feeling that we’ve met before.”

  “In this life?”

  I laughed. “Yeah, in this life. It’ll come to me.”

  “Maybe I’ve got a doppelganger.”

  “The other day you mentioned Frank’s Pizzeria. It’s in my old Brooklyn neighborhood. I used to go there in high school. How do you know about Frank’s?”

  “Must’ve read it in one of your books.”

  “It wasn’t in either of my books.”

  “Then I must’ve been there at some point when I lived in Manhattan.” He finished off the last bite of food on his plate, set it on the ground, changed the subject. “Isn’t that swimming hole something? I told Brian and George there should be a scene added at that swimming hole.”

  “I thought the same thing when I saw it.”

  Marvin hurried over to us. “Hey, shooting starts in five minutes. You two going to watch?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” John said, and picked up our paper plates and tossed them in a nearby trash can.

  • • •

  The studio looked so much like the kitchen of my childhood that I felt almost suffocated by the past. The air even smelled the way that kitchen had smelled so long ago—of potato pancakes and blintzes. Susan Sarandon was the spitting image of Grandma Ruth—silver hair, wrinkles and all. And Jenean had somehow transformed herself into my much younger self. Watching them was like time traveling.

  “That no-good Italian ran out on your mother,” Sarandon said, her voice so Brooklyn and Jewish I was astounded. “What could she do? I tell you, my Samelah, you marry a Jew, you hear me?”

  Jenean rolled her eyes. Her hands moved as she spoke. “Oh, so a Jewish guy will never leave me. Right, Grandma?”

  “Right. They stay with the family. Look, now you have no father. He punished you, too, see?”

  “Yeah, well, I’d rather have been abandoned by him than learn firsthand who the hell he really was.”

  Vito. I suddenly felt really uneasy watching this scene, reliving those moments in the Brooklyn kitchen, knowing what I knew now about Vito. Why hadn’t he just stayed out of my life?

  “Watch your mouth,” Sarandon snapped. “Don’t get like your mother, always swearing and cursing through the house. Consider yourself lucky to have prospects.” Sarandon flipped one of the pancakes and glanced at Jenean. “So, bubelah, any boy got your heart yet?”

  “I’m waiting for the right one, Grandma.”

  “Good. You don’t want to do what your mother did. Don’t be in such a hurry that you give milk without making them buy the cow first. Oy! Your mother, she never listened to me, and look where that got her!”

  Sarandon wiped her brow with the back of her hand, then blew strands of hair off her forehead. “Did you write today?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Machayeh. I’m proud of you. Write yourself out of this story and into a better one.”

  On the other side of the room, I saw Paul lean in close to Carl Davidson, the director, and whisper to him. Liza, who stood nearby, glanced at them, then at me, and winked as if to say, Don’t worry about them. It’s your story. Davidson nodded and gestured at someone I couldn’t see. A moment later, Camilla Baptiste stumbled into the kitchen, lighting a cigarette stuck in the corner of her mouth, her hair disheveled, her clothes wrinkled, her feet bare. She looked so much like my mother that goose bumps erupted on my arms.

  “No one ran my bath,” Camilla whined through a haze of smoke.

  A black hole opened in the pit of my stomach. Maybe it hadn’t been such a great idea to be on set. Camilla was such an exact duplicate of my mother that all these negative feelings I’d had in my childhood now rushed back and nearly overpowered me. Yet the scene was too rushed. In real life, there had been a lag, my mother hadn’t appeared that quickly. In real life, on that morning, her eyes had opened so slowly it was as if they had been glued shut and she had to pry them apart. In real life, she had lit that cigarette before she had even gotten out of bed. And in real life, she’d been coughing up blood by the time she had stumbled into the kitchen.

  I waved my arms, the signal King and Prince had told me to make if I disagreed with how a scene was being filmed, and Davidson called, “Cut!” Then he marched across the studio, his long, thin arms swinging at his sides like pendulums. “What is it, Sam?”

  “It’s too fast,” I said. “We need to see Joan in the bedroom as she wakes up. She’s hungover. Or still drunk. She lights the cigarette before she even gets out of bed.” That scene hadn’t been in the book, but it had been in the script, and Davidson—or someone else—had deleted it. “We need to see her haggard face, her coughing fit as she sits at the side of the bed. She looks like hell, hair disheveled, the lines in her face are really visible.”

  “That’s not enough action,” Davidson said, his wiry body twitching, pacing, restless.

  “I love it,” Sarandon said.

  Davidson rolled his eyes. If he’d been a smoker, he would have lit a cigarette just then and puffed furiously. “Susan, no disrespect intended, you’re Grandma Ruth, not Joan.”

  “No disrespect intended, Carl,” she replied. “But you’re a director, not an actor. This is the kind of scene where an actor climbs into the character’s skin. It’s a scene that helps define that character.”

  “It’s also how it happened,” I said.

  Davidson’s shoulders twitched. He was Mr. Creative, and the rest of us were simply the pawns he moved around
as he saw fit. “Look, I don’t think—”

  “We need that bedroom scene.” John spoke up. “It tells us everything we need to know about Joan Bonti.”

  And that was that. The scene was rewritten and shot again. I felt Paul’s eyes on me, burning through me. What’re you doing, Sam? Don’t interfere. Can’t you see what I’ve done for you? those eyes seemed to be screaming. See the stars I’ve recruited for your movie, Sam?

  I ignored him and watched as the scene unfolded the way I had originally written it, the way I had lived it. Who were we if we weren’t true to our stories?

  In this retake, we saw Camilla transformed into the woman my mother had been on that day. And when she stumbled out into the kitchen, she moved toward the stove with all the gracelessness of the drunk she had been. “Who’s gonna run my bath?”

  Run it yourself, I felt like screaming.

  “Bubelah, run your mother’s bath,” Sarandon said, sliding the potato pancakes onto a plate. “She’s feelnish git.”

  Jenean took Camilla’s hand. “C’mon, Ma. I’ll run your bath.” Jenean waved away the cigarette smoke, then did something I had never done: she jerked the cigarette out of Camilla’s mouth, hurried over to the sink, and ran water over it.

  I started to say something, but decided that I loved what she’d just done. It showed a streak of rebellion, a rebellion that would also be apparent in one of the scenes they’d added to the script as a flashback. In that scene, my mother had brought home some new guy, and because I hated it when she did that, I peed on the carpet in her bedroom. Like a dog. I kept doing it until one of her men caught me in the act.

  I knew I wanted to be on set when they shot that scene. I knew Jenean would capture the horror of that moment for me, when the man caught me peeing on my mother’s carpet. I knew she would capture the essence of my revenge. But right now, the longer I watched, the shittier I felt. It was like a mathematical axiom. It was as if all those negative feelings from the past were making me ill.

  I turned toward the door, then moved through it, out into the main area where lunch had been set up. I went over to a huge metal bin filled with ice, helped myself to a bottle of water, and headed for the exit, suddenly so overwhelmed with tumultuous, unresolved emotions about my childhood that I felt like puking.