Trey said, “Children. Play in a time-efficient manner, please. We have a movie here that’s already two days behind schedule, and every day costs me about twenty-one thousand dollars.” She got up and went to the chalkboard at the front of the room, which was actually a three-walled set built to impersonate a high school classroom for reasons I preferred not to speculate about. Tatiana and I were crammed into desks in the front row while Rodd Hull sat on the edge of the teacher’s desk in front of the chalkboard. Trey, wearing a golden dog-collar today, along with a pale yellow silk business suit that would have turned heads at a Braille convention, had been leaning against a wall until the squabbling prompted her into motion. Three of her hard guys, one of whom was Eduardo, bristled at the world in the corners. All of them bulged in the obvious places. Eduardo was obviously thrilled at being taken for a walk. He was wearing black leather gloves as though to conceal the tiny biceps in his fingers.
Trey picked up a piece of chalk and said, “Here are your basics.” She drew three horizontal lines on the board, each about two feet long, stacking one above the other, but staggering them so that the second line began below the one-quarter point in the top line, and the third line began a quarter of a way into the second. Next to the top line, Trey wrote, “First Wish.” She wrote “Second Wish” next to the second line and, apparently getting impatient with the process, put the number “3” next to the bottom line. “This is our time line,” she said.
It looked like this:
“Each of these lines is one of the movies,” she said. “The staggered lines represent start dates. You can get plot details and arches-”
“Arcs,” Rodd Hull said.
“I’m paying for them,” Trey said, “and I’ll call them whatever I want.” She waited to see whether Rodd would respond, but he found something that needed to be viewed through his viewfinder, and he viewed it.
Trey drew a dot roughly in the middle of the top line. “This is about where we’ll be tomorrow morning, roughly nine weeks into the process. We’ve used all the time until now getting the scripts right, doing the schedules and the budgets, developing the graphics for the titles and the ads, because we’re going to start advertising this movie long before we finish shooting it. We’ve hired Todd-sorry, Rodd-and Tatiana, and all the other talented people who will actually make the films. We’ve cast all the secondary parts, even the crowd scenes. And we’ve shot a bunch of second-unit stuff-cars in motion, the outsides of buildings, some scenes that don’t have our star in them. And finally, we’ve done some doubles work, by which I mean using a double for Thistle, wearing Thistle’s wardrobe-mostly shot from the back, walking on sidewalks, going through doors, getting onto elevators, and so forth.” She lowered the hand with the chalk in it and looked over at Rodd. “What have I forgotten?”
“Nothing whatsoever,” Rodd said. “Absolutely nothing. Brilliant, just brilliant.”
“We also designed and built the sets,” Tatiana said without a glance at Rodd. “We identified and locked the locations. We leased the equipment we’re shooting with. We hired the publicist and the still man.”
“Thank you, Tatiana,” Trey said. Then, to me, she said, “And all of that hasn’t given us one second of what we’re all here to do, which is to get a single frame of film on Thistle Downing. And here’s where it gets hairy.”
She put the chalk on the dot in the top line and drew a vertical straight down so it intersected the other two horizontals. Then she measured off about another eight inches, made another dot on the top line, and drew another vertical line straight down.
Now it looked like this:
“This is it,” she said. “This little bit of space between those two vertical lines. This is the twelve-day period when we live or die. This period, which begins
“Why stack it like that?” I asked.
“Because,” Rodd Hull said, “Miss Downing is a piece of work the likes of which you have never had to experience, if life has been kind of you. Remember that cute little kid? Well, forget about her. What’s going to walk in here tomorrow morning is the kind of thing that makes Catholic priests think about exorcism. Which is not to say,” he added hurriedly, with a nervous glance at Trey, “that she isn’t beautiful. Made up just right, shot carefully, lighted perfectly, with lots of soft-focus in the close-ups-the
“What about that sore on her lip?” Trey demanded.
“The good news is that Doc says it’s not herpes. The bad news is that it’s going away at its own rate, which is slower than we’d like. So for the first couple of days, she’s Claudette Colbert.”
Trey said, “Who?”
“Movie star from the thirties and forties. She was pathologically convinced that the left side of her face was her good side. People called her right profile ‘the dark side of the moon.’ ”
“It’s not that bad,” Tatiana said. “Poor little chickie, she’s taking in like exactly zero vitamins. I’m not surprised she’s got a couple of sores here and there.”
“A little sunlight wouldn’t hurt, either,” said Rodd Hull. “She probably hasn’t seen her shadow in years.”
“Well, just stop piling on,” Tatiana said. “She’s not, like, dead, you know. You think she won’t pick up on this attitude? Anyway, there’s more talent scattered on the floor after she gets her hair cut than you’ve demonstrated in your entire career.”
“Well, of course, she’s our little
I was well into developing a strong dislike for Rodd Hull.
“Good idea,” Trey said. “Tatiana. Tonight send a couple of gnomes to three or four flower shops. Tell them to buy the oldest flowers in the place, the stuff that’s going to get tossed. They should try to get a deal. I want those flowers stripped of petals, and I want those petals in buckets-no, in big gift boxes-at 8:30 tomorrow morning. Eduardo,” she said. “Make a note for me to find out about the profitability of flower shops, maybe a change of pace for dope dealers. We can build a chain. What should we call it, Mr. Bender?”
“Todd, I mean Rodd, here, already named it,” I said. “Petals at Her Feet.”
12
“It’s about what you’d figure,” Tatiana said. She was folding a restaurant napkin into a tight, tiny square. “Take an eighteen-year-old girl, give her no education because she worked six days a week from the time she was seven until she was fifteen. Make her as sensitive as a fern, and throw in an absolute beast of a mother who’s trying to rip her off and a brother who hates her because she’s famous. Then give her an almost unlimited amount of money and no one to say no to her. Dig up a crowd of parasites, some of whom are her relatives, to sue her for big chunks of the money. Add unimaginable amounts of cocaine, methedrine, ice, and, for all I know, heroin, and a bunch of bloodsucking motherfuckers who pretend to be her friends so she’ll keep buying dope for them. Let her trust them and believe they care about her, so they’ll be able to break her heart when the money runs out. Close the doors on all that and leave it to cook for five years. Then let her stagger out into the sunlight, broke, friendless, strung out, and unable to tell up from down. Uninsurable in an industry that won’t cut a fart without taking out a policy. Bingo: You’ve got Thistle Downing.”
“This year’s model,” I said.
“That fucker Rodd,” she said. She tore the napkin in half. “Goddamn television directors. What have they got? The best technical crews and the best journeyman actors in the world. Pretty good writing, as good as they could appreciate, anyway. And it’s all about
