Pretty as a Picture

by Elizabeth Little

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Anjali says. “I just wanted to introduce you to our line producer, Valentina.”

  Valentina grimaces around the silver Juul clamped between her lips. “Charmed.”

  She hefts a bulging messenger bag up onto the work table. She digs around inside for a few seconds before pulling out a badge on a royal blue lanyard. She tosses it in my direction; it bounces off my stomach and falls to the floor.

  I pick it up gingerly, afraid of what I’m going to find. They didn’t ask me for a headshot, so that means—yep, that they’ve used the only photo IMDb has of me. It’s a Getty shot from an awards show a few years back. Just a third-rate critics circle, but it was my first nomination, so Amy dropped a dress in my lap and sent me to get my hair and makeup done. Afterward, my mother said I looked sophisticated; Amy said I looked hot; I said I looked like a kindergarten pageant queen.

  I hold up the lanyard. “Do I really have to wear this?”

  Valentina shrugs. “Depends. Do you want to be detained by security?”

  I scowl down at the badge holder. I’ve never been on a set that required ID. Most productions I’ve worked on were content to outsource perimeter security to twentysomething PAs who may or may not have even known how to work a radio. It’s a different story for a feature with big-name actors, I guess—but this is a shoot on a sparsely populated island. What are they so worried about?

  Tony’s words from before come back to me.

  In fact, some are in this hotel with us right now.

  That can’t really be what this is about, can it? If it is, someone should really tell them a premium-cotton lanyard isn’t going to provide much protection against a murderer.

  Another object collides with my stomach; this one I manage to keep from falling.

  “Your phone,” Valentina says, with relish.

  I pick up the gray flip phone between my finger and thumb. “What’s wrong with my iPhone?”

  “No smartphones. Nondisclosure agreement, page nine.” She extends her hand, palm up. “Hand it over, please.”

  I shrink back. “You want me to give you my phone?”

  “You know,” Anjali says, “these days some people actually pay to have their phones taken away from them. Think of it as a media fast! It’ll be good for you. God knows I wish I could stop looking at the news.”

  “How will people reach me?”

  “You can always call your voicemail and check your messages.”

  I turn the flip phone over, examining the casing. “Can you even still do that?”

  “No clue. I get to keep my phone.”

  I reach into my pocket and pull out my iPhone. Anjali snatches it out of my fingers, replacing it a second later with a set of keys. “These are for the front door to the theater and the padlock downstairs,” she says. “Don’t lose them. Anyone important enough to have a set of their own is too important to have time to let you in.”

  I curl my fingers around the metal until the edges of the keys press into my palm. “Okay, wait—wait. I have just a couple questions—”

  Anjali nods sympathetically. “Of course you do. And don’t worry, we’ll set you up with Scripty first thing in the morning. She’ll walk you through everything. Tony doesn’t want you on set until noon, so you’ll have plenty of time to catch up. Speaking of—” She looks at Valentina. “Has Brandon printed the call sheet?”

  Valentina reaches for her Juul. “He is working on it now,” she says.

  “Yeah, well, it was supposed to be done an hour ago, so will you tell him to get a fucking move on?”

  Valentina’s left shoulder lifts an inch or two in the most desultory of shrugs. “I can only say the same thing so many ways.”

  “Then maybe you should say something new. You’re Russian. Be creative.”

  Valentina takes a long, lazy drag, holds it, then releases the vapor from the corner of her mouth in a slow, steady stream.

  “Tak tochno.”

  Anjali snaps her fingers. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. I have no idea what that means, but it scared the shit out of me.”

  Valentina gives me a look like she’s breaking the fourth wall.

  Then she clamps her Juul between her lips, tosses her bag over her shoulder, and slinks out of the room.

  Anjali gazes after her, shaking her head. “If she ever cracks, it’s gonna be magnificent.” She claps her hands and turns back to me. “We good here?”

  Good? Are we good? No. We’re not good. We’re so far from good I don’t even know what good is anymore.

  “Like I said, I have some questions.”

  “And like I said: Scripty will handle that. Is there anything you need from me?”

  Her smile is lethal, sweet and unforgiving—a fact I only register several seconds after barreling on ahead and saying, “So why did Tony fire Paul?”

  That smile goes a little unsteady around the edges. “It’s not my place to say.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re the producer, right? It’s your responsibility to ensure that the movie gets made. Which means it’s your responsibility to ensure that your new editor doesn’t get fired immediately. So it seems logical that you would want to tell me what Paul did wrong so I can make sure not to do the same thing.”

  The smile has disappeared completely now. “You should really ask Tony.”

  “I tried. But he just responded with a slightly demented lecture about”—I wave an inarticulate hand—“process.”

  She sighs, and for a moment she looks less than perfect—I can see faint circles under her eyes and a slight crease down the middle of her forehead. “Look, he wouldn’t have hired you if he thought you were going to make the same mistakes.”

  “He can’t know that. He barely knows me.”

  She laughs. “Since when did that stop anyone from making a snap judgment? You don’t know anything about me, but you obviously have a theory or two.”

  I think back to the moment I met her. “Well—I was worried you might be an actress.”

  When she doesn’t respond, I force myself to look at her face, and what I see there isn’t understanding or impatience or even annoyance. Her eyebrows have drawn together, and the line of her mouth has gone very straight. It’s an expression I’ve really grown to hate.

  It’s an expression that means she doesn’t think I’m funny.

  I’ll be lucky if I last a day.

  ANJALI BHATTACHARYA: I didn’t think she’d last a day.

  SUZY KOH: Why would you say that?

  ANJALI BHATTACHARYA: You’ve met her.

  SUZY KOH: Yeah, but our listeners haven’t. So could you, you know—elaborate a little?

  ANJALI BHATTACHARYA: I don’t suppose I can deflect by questioning the validity of your metrics?

  GRACE PORTILLO: Please don’t be a jerk just because it’s easier to be funny.

  ANJALI BHATTACHARYA: Yikes. Out of the mouths of babes. Okay, then, honesty for honesty: When I met Marissa, I thought she was a little weird, but that didn’t concern me. Most editors are.

  SUZY KOH: But . . . ?

  ANJALI BHATTACHARYA: But I didn’t get the sense she’d be able to stand up to Tony—and since I know you gremlins are going to ask for specifics, no, I can’t tell you exactly why I thought that. It was just a hunch. [pause] I mean, just goes to show, right?

  ELEVEN

  After Anjali leaves, I sit down at the editing bay, raise the chair, and pull the keyboard within reach. My eye catches on a yellow paper doll that’s been taped to the corner of the center screen. It’s an old trick: Some editors use a scale doll to remind them of the size of a theatrically projected film. It’s cute, but not something I’ve ever bothered with. No piece of paper has ever been able to help me imagine my way into the f
eeling—or even into a decent memory of the feeling—of being physically dwarfed by a beautiful picture.

  And these days most people stream their movies anyway.

  I tap the doll—or what’s left of it.

  Someone’s torn its head off.

  I decide to start at the beginning, with the film’s first scene: Liza, on the beach, dead but not yet discovered. The shot that started it all.

  I find the file, adjust the volume, start playback.

  In the background, the extras are already in motion, applying sunscreen and adjusting umbrellas and shaking out towels. Two children are hard at work burying their father’s feet in the sand. A red-and-white beach ball has been abandoned in the water. It floats in and out of frame.

  Liza, however, is just lying there. And Tony’s letting the camera roll.

  I jump forward. Five minutes, ten minutes—twenty minutes. Finally, at twenty-five minutes, Liza moves. It’s not much, just a wiggle of her hips, and even though the editor in me cringes, I can’t blame her. She must be incredibly uncomfortable. There’s no way her arm hasn’t fallen asleep.

  Her chest shudders, a reaction familiar to anyone who’s ever fought their natural breath, then stills.

  Tony’s voice, barely louder than a whisper, comes from off-screen: “Liza, we’re still rolling.”

  Her nose twitches, but she doesn’t respond. She’s getting anxious now, I can tell; you can see her body working to hold itself in place. Her stillness is labored. And she’s forgotten about her eyeballs—they’re moving beneath their lids. She probably doesn’t even realize she does that when she’s concentrating on something.

  “Stop thinking,” Tony says, very calmly. “Dead girls don’t think.”

  Behind me, unmistakably, someone giggles.

  I pause playback.

  “Gary?” I ask. “Is that you?”

  Silence. Then—

  “Uh—yeah, sorry about that, I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I’m just wrapping up here.”

  Another pause.

  “He’s just such a pompous dick, you know?”

  I spin my chair around. Gary’s eyes are half closed and his hands raised in front of his chest. He looks like he’s preparing to absorb a full-body blow.

  “You’re not gonna tell him I said that, are you?”

  I blink. “I think maybe you can go now, Gary.”

  He nods. “Yes, ma’am.”

  I shake my head and turn back to the computer.

  Following a hunch, I click through to the directory and sort the files by date. The footage I’m watching shoots straight to the top. So I was right, this isn’t just the first scene in the script—it’s also the first scene they shot. With most directors I wouldn’t read too much into the production schedule. There are any number of reasons why they would start with this scene. Permits. Weather. The logistics of Liza’s fake tan. But everyone knows Tony does nothing less than exactly what he wants.

  What was he hoping to accomplish by picking this scene?

  I restart the footage and scroll forward. The answer will be in here somewhere.

  An hour and forty-six minutes in, it happens: Liza finally forgets her face is supposed to look good for the camera. Her lips part and her jaw softens and her eyes settle low in their sockets, and she releases a tension in her forehead I hadn’t even realized she’d been holding. Her eyebrows aren’t nearly as arched and symmetrical as she would have us believe.

  This, I’m certain, is what Tony was waiting for.

  For her to stop fighting.

  For her to give in.

  Sure enough, two seconds later, three background figures break away and head toward camera. Teenage boys, their swim trunks slightly different but complementary shades of blue. Tony has them miked even though they’re talking about nothing at all.

  Because of the split lens, the closer they get, the harder it is to see them, but then they cross into the foreground and come into such sudden, sharp focus I stiffen at the shock.

  It’s perfect timing: We’re able to see them at the exact moment they should be able to see Liza.

  My fingers curl around the mouse.

  Any second now—

  But they pass directly in front of the camera without stopping. They exit the frame. The screen goes black.

  I push back from the desk and rub briskly at my arms.

  He really did that. He really had her lie there in silence for nearly two hours, her eyes closed, sending the same signal to every part of her body: Dead, dead, be dead, I am dead, this is dead, one day this will be me, dead. The most important thing Tony wanted Liza to establish as part of her performance was what it would really feel like, in her body, to be dead.

  A feeling I’ve spent thousands of dollars trying to forget, and here she is, conjuring it up by choice.

  Something hot and sharp burns the back of my throat: a memory, but not the kind I’m expecting. A real one, from grad school. Second year, Amy and I took a class from this guy John Hale, an apparently well-respected critic with two acknowledged areas of expertise, Italian neorealism and hitting on his students. Unfortunately, only one of those was listed in his faculty bio.

  The guy was fixated on Stromboli and Umberto D—so fixated, in fact, that he didn’t deign to discuss anything made after 1951 until the very last lecture, at which point he glossed over the last seventy years of Italian cinema in three hours with the same sniffing disdain you’d expect from a society doyenne who’d just been served dinner from the right.

  Over the course of that last three-hour class, Hale’s commentary grew sharper and stiffer and terser until, finally, he hit some kind of limit two minutes into a clip from Suspiria. He paused playback, flipped on the lights, and turned to the class.

  “This is garbage, of course. Real art deals with real emotion, with real life. None of this”—I can still picture the disdainful flick of his fingers at the screen—“is real.”

  There followed a lengthy, pained silence, and for once it wasn’t my fault. At least half the guys in there had only signed up because Tarantino’s an Argento fan. That’s when Amy leaned back and stretched one arm along the back of the seat to her right, breathing out a luxurious sigh that had me edging toward the aisle.

  Hale’s shoulders rose and fell. “What is it now, Amy?”

  “It’s just bullshit, that’s all.”

  He propped his elbow on the lectern and rested his chin in his hand. “I presume you’re going to tell me that, thanks to the unparalleled expressive power of allegory, Suspiria helped you access some heretofore unknown corner of your heart—to learn something ‘profound’ about the human condition that you couldn’t possibly have otherwise comprehended.”

  “No, of course not—but it helped you learn something, right?”

  His eyebrows—white, wild, so low they sometimes tangled with his eyelashes; the only piece of his face my memory seems to have grasped on to—lifted a scant inch. He and Amy had been arguing all semester. Looking back, I wonder if he knew then that he was walking into a trap.

  That he kept on walking tells me nothing. Men always do when Amy’s involved.

  “Oh?” he said.

  Amy twisted her hand in a slow, counterclockwise circle. “Men make horror films about fantastic creatures and outlandish villains and beautiful victims. Women make horror films about what happens when the wrong guy gets into your car. You ever wonder why that is?”

  Another flick of his fingers. “That’s a grotesque mischaracterization.”

  I silently agreed with him. Sometimes women also make horror films about what happens when the wrong guy gets into your house.

  “The answer, John, is that for you, fear is a fantasy.” She paused and looked out at our classmates. “You can only conceptualize fear as an exception, when for women, it’s the rule.”

 
Hale rolled his eyes. “Oh, Amy. Did a war break out when I wasn’t looking? Because last time I checked we were sitting in a very comfortable classroom at a school that your parents, presumably, are spending forty thousand dollars a year for you to attend. Come on. When’s the last time you were really scared?”

  Amy tilted her head to the side. Only pretending, I could tell, to think about this.

  An inappropriate moment, perhaps, to picture Admiral Ackbar, but I just couldn’t help myself.

  “I’m fairly certain,” she said, “it was two weeks ago—when you backed me up against a wall and asked if you were smelling my perfume or my pussy.”

  Hale ended class early that day, and I’d like to think he was ashamed of himself, but honestly he probably just couldn’t bear to cover Cannibal Holocaust. Last I heard he was still teaching. Occasionally we’ll run into someone who was in class with us that day, and they always try to bring up what happened, but Amy’s embarrassed by it now.

  “Never underestimate the intellectual arrogance a single women’s studies course can give a girl,” she always says.

  (“But seriously,” she always adds, “fuck that guy.”)

  I drift back over to the wall of reference stills. Tony may be a slave to verisimilitude, but he can’t resist tszujing the visuals: a little shimmer here, a little shine there, shapewear on everyone. Were the photos displayed in a more artful manner, it wouldn’t be hard to mistake them for a series of curated vacation shots, the kind a tour company takes so you can populate your Instagram feed without having to pack a selfie stick. No regular human would look at these stills and confuse them for anything other than a carefully art-directed version of the real thing. And they haven’t even been through post.

  My hand kneads a knot of tension in my lower back. Normally I love Tony’s aesthetic. In his movies, everything has its place and everything is in its place, and getting to live in a world like that for two hours is about as close as I can get to inner peace. But this is a story about a real person, a real murder. Shouldn’t that demand a more rigorous commitment to realism? And still, Tony couldn’t help himself. He just had to make it beautiful. Special. Exceptional.