“The director,” Greer said. “Wes Stark. Flip calls him Willie Stark, but I’m not sure why.” Tess thought about explaining All the King’s Men to Greer but knew she would be depressed if Greer’s only point of reference was Broderick Crawford. Or even worse, Sean Penn.
“But I thought the woman, the one who’s been running the crew, calling out some of the orders-”
“First AD. Assistant director, Nicole. She’s really good, and Stark’s smart enough to cede a lot of power to her. Smart or lazy – he doesn’t like to leave the video village if he can help it. At any rate, she’s pulling his bacon out of the fire on this ep.”
Something in the phrase, the bit about pulling Stark’s bacon, didn’t ring true to Tess. She didn’t doubt its veracity, having no basis to judge his performance. But she didn’t believe it was Greer’s unique opinion. Someone must have told her that, or Greer had overheard that scrap of phrase and decided to appropriate it.
“You need to watch from the village,” Greer said. “Where the director is.”
“Oh, I’m fine here,” Tess said.
“You may be fine, but Johnny’s not. You’re in his eye line, and he freaks out when there are strangers watching him.”
Tess decided not to point out that someone who freaked out when strangers were watching was a bad fit for the acting profession.
Greer led her to an encampment of director’s chairs, some of which did have names on their backs. Here was Flip, along with the tiniest adult woman that Tess had ever seen, her chair fitted with a wooden footrest higher than the others, so her legs didn’t swing free. The back of her chair identified her as Charlotte MacKenzie. So that was the bean counter who had cut her fee and reduced Lloyd to an intern. Ben wasn’t in his chair. He was several feet away, standing next to a cart piled high with food. Flip glanced up, caught Tess’s eye, greeted her with a curt, professional nod. Ah, she had segued into the category of “help,” alongside Greer. She no longer qualified for the thick charm Flip had piled on when trying to hire her. As long as his checks cleared, she didn’t give a damn.
“Here you go,” Greer said. “If you want to watch, you can take Ben’s chair and I’ll get you a headset.”
“Oh, I-” But Greer was off, catching a man by the sleeve and bringing Tess back what looked like a small battery pack with headphones.
“Just remember to give it back to me, okay? Don’t walk off with it, whatever you do.”
“I wouldn’t-”
“Do you want sides?”
“You mean like french fries?”
Greer gave an exaggerated sigh and thrust some pages into Tess’s hand – not a script, proper, but just a few pages, including the scene in question – then rushed away again, returning to her natural orbit at Flip’s elbow. She considered Tess a waste of time, and Greer clearly didn’t value people unless she felt they could do something for her. She wanted to be around those with power, and Flip was the power source here.
“Rolling… action… fuck.” The camera, a two-headed behemoth set on a wheeled cart, had snagged on its track. Workers rushed to it, not even waiting for instruction, already aware of what they had to do to fix the problem.
Ben wandered over to Tess, having snagged a handful of miniature candy bars, but waved Tess back into his seat when she tried to surrender it to him.
“Exciting, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” Tess said.
“I was being sarcastic. The most exciting thing on a movie set is craft services. The food,” he added helpfully, brandishing a Snickers. “Movie sets are lousy with free food.”
“Isn’t that hard on the actors?”
“Harder on those of us who have no incentive to maintain our boyish figures.” More sarcasm, she figured, as Ben still had the bean-pole skinniness of an adolescent who had grown six inches in the past year. Tess’s greyhound had more body fat. “Although some actors aren’t as disciplined, and it gets to be a problem.”
“Really?”
“Let’s just say that our Mann of Steel is at risk of becoming Man of Flab.” He flapped a candy wrapper at the two actors on the set, Selene and Johnny Tampa. Oh, how the mighty had fallen. He was a shadow of his former heartthrob self. Well, not a shadow. Something considerably more substantial than a shadow.
“He doesn’t look so bad,” Tess said, out of loyalty to her teenage crush.
“He split two pairs of pants yesterday and we lost almost an hour finding a third. Okay, they’re getting ready to film again, so you know to be-”
“Quiet on the set. Sound speed. Rolling. Action.”
Ben cocked an eyebrow at Tess and held a finger to his lips. He joined Flip and Lottie at the monitors, but she didn’t feel entitled to jockey for the best view. Besides, she sensed that Greer might tackle her if she tried to get too close to Flip. She stayed in Ben’s chair, catching only a glimpse of the actors through the equipment and personnel circling around the set, but able to hear every word they said over the headset. It was a short scene, nonsensical without the context of the larger story. Mann seemed to be trying to pass himself off as a sailor, but Betsy Patterson, who had dated a sailor or two in her time, kept catching him in lies and misstatements. “Are you wellborn?” she asked at last, and the scene ended, apparently on a hilarious close-up of Johnny Tampa, considering the question. All in all, it was no more than two minutes, but they filmed it again and again from different angles, while the director, the stoop-shouldered man, kept pulling Tampa aside to chat. No one had anything to say to Selene, and Tess had to admit that she was convincing as Betsy Patterson, perhaps even more captivating than the real-life coquette, managing the trick of being innocent and knowing at the same time. But Johnny seemed tentative, off in a way that even a civilian could discern.
“Someone put Nair in Johnny’s face cream yesterday,” Ben whispered to Tess during one of the breaks. “He smelled it before he put it on, but it freaked him out. He could have ended up losing his eyebrows if he had used it.”
“Where was this?”
“In his banger. Trailer. We have a bank of trailers on the parking lot, which the actors and day players use as dressing rooms.”
Tess made a mental note that the trailers were something else she would have to be concerned about. Meanwhile, she was able to piece together much of what was happening on her own – two cameras, for example, took simultaneous “A” and “B” shots, which reduced the amount of time spent on coverage. The director never told either actor how to say a line but spoke more generally about the emotion he was looking for, the tone. They were on the ninth take, and even Tess could tell that they were finally getting what they wanted from Tampa when three bars of an Iguanas’ song trumped the tender scene. Para donde vas? Her cell phone. Oops.
“Whose fucking cell phone was that?” Lottie leapt from her chair – a not inconsiderable feat for her, given the distance to the ground. Her voice was soft but vicious. “I was serious about the fine, I will fucking fine you, I will have your fucking head, what kind of idiot doesn’t turn his phone off-” When she realized that the culprit was Tess, she softened her approach, but only slightly. “Oh, you must be the… security detail. Monaghan. Well, I guess no one told you, but there are signs posted all over the fucking place. You can read, can’t you? Greer-”
She motioned to the young woman and leaned toward her, giving her what Tess could only suspect was a whispery scolding.
“I’m sorry,” Tess said. “It was all my fault. Greer did tell me.” She thought that might win her a look of gratitude from Greer, but the young woman had a panicky, stay-away-from-me expression. Flip looked sheepish, knowing he had arranged for Greer to bring her here, while Ben’s usual smirk was in place. Tampa was clearly frustrated, having been interrupted just as he was beginning to calm down. Only Selene seemed oblivious to everything going on around her, playing with her hair even as a woman kept poking at the elaborate upsweep with a long comb.