Crashed

were not shaking, as far as I could see. “It’s there that terrifies me.” Her eyes went to Ellie, who was standing with her back against the wall as though she wished she could melt through it and out of the room, maybe out of the day altogether. “How about it, double? Wanna go to work today?”

“Ohhh,” Ellie said, blinking fast. “I’m not-I mean, I’m not that kind of double, just, just for rear shots and exteriors, and …”

“I’m kidding,” Thistle said. “Sort of. How about I give you some of the money they’re going to pay me? Maybe pay me.”

Ellie’s head was going back and forth at surprising speed. “I couldn’t … Ms. Annunziato would never-”

“No,” Thistle said. “She wouldn’t.” Then she lowered her head and seemed to study the hands folded in her lap. Both makeup girls stepped back, and Thistle looked very much alone. She said, “Oh, my God.”

“Hold on,” I said. “I’ll be back.”

I managed not to slam the door behind me, but just barely. The hall was full of people, most of them carrying stuff: lights and equipment, but also odds and ends of furniture. I followed them down the hall and out of the building. The first thing I passed was a jumbo trailer full of mirrors and chairs. The six guys who had barged down the hallway were sitting there, stripped to the waist, smoking and talking as they got makeup sponged on their chests and shoulders. Beyond the trailer, some twenty feet away, was a sort of oversize quonset hut with an airplane door standing open. Inside, it was dark except for a brilliantly illuminated corner at the far end. That was where everyone was going, and I tagged along.

Another three-walled room, this one a bedroom that was obviously supposed to be in some sort of penthouse; large color photographs of a nighttime big-city skyline filled the windows. A king-sized bed with a peach-colored spread on it had been positioned in front of the windows, and above the bed someone had hung a big mirror, about the same size as the bed, facing directly down. Rodd was standing next to a woman who was busily aiming a camera at the mirror. He said, “Are we horizontal?”

“We’re in tight,” the woman said. “It’ll fill the screen exactly.”

“That’s an artsy touch,” I said. “The mirror, I mean.”

Rodd glanced at me and then ignored me, but the woman said, “It’s just coverage. It gives us a different view to cut to when we need an edit. And it’s a little disorienting, so we’ll be able to cut between setups that don’t really match.” She stuck out a hand. “I’m Lauren Wister.”

“Junior Bender,” I said.

“You’re working with Trey, right?”

“I guess.”

She gave me a very quick look. “The idea here is to have four cameras going the whole time. Two of them- this one on the mirror, and the master shot that takes in the entire bed-will be stationary, meaning that the cameras don’t move. The other two, the Steadi-Cams my assistant and I are holding, will move all over the place. The whole idea is to try to get as much as possible in one take. We’re not sure how long Thistle will last.”

“One take of what?”

“Her and the-the guys,” Lauren said. She had the grace to look embarrassed.

“Exactly how does this concern you?” Rodd said, a bit waspishly.

“I seem to be Thistle’s sounding board. I can guarantee you I’m the person she’ll talk to about this scene. I don’t know whether you’re even going to get her out here, once she knows what she’ll have to do, but if anyone can explain it to her, it’s probably me.”

Rodd gave me a long look and then sighed. “In this scene,” he said, “Anna-that’s Thistle’s character-tests the limits of her newfound sexuality. It’s really the pivotal sequence in the first film. It’s also probably the hardest-if Thistle can get through this, everything else should be relatively easy. You see, Anna begins as a totally repressed person, just completely closed off, living in a shell, too shy even to say hello to people. One evening, on her way home to the apartment she lives in alone, she encounters a homeless person who confronts her. She tries to sidestep, like she always does, but no go. He just won’t let her walk past him without acknowledging his existence. She’s a very nice person beneath all the anxiety, and she finds the courage to talk to him. She even gives him some money. We’ve already shot those scenes with the camera behind Thistle’s character, using that mousy girl, what’s-her-name-”

“Ellie,” I said. “Ellie Wynn.”

“Yes, using Ellie. We’ve shot the reverses-those are the shots where you’re looking over Thistle’s shoulder, so you don’t see her face-on a number of scenes, using Ellie. Anything to minimize the length of time Thistle has to work. We’ll shoot the other setups, the ones where the audience actually sees Thistle, later. Three of her twelve days, in fact. So she-Anna, I mean, Thistle’s character-helps the homeless person, and he reveals that he’s actually a kind of, uh, spirit, and he gives her three wishes and tells her to use them well, and then he goes all sort of twinkly and disappears before her eyes, in the one and only visual effect in the film. Anna’s first wish is for the courage to act on her impulses.” Rodd was more focused than I’d previously seen him, walking his own way through the story as he told it. “Her first trial of her new power was to go out with one guy, someone in her office that she’d never had the nerve to talk to, and that worked out fine, I mean, he’s calling her all the time now. But in this sequence of scenes, culminating in the one we’re about to shoot, she takes a giant step. She goes to a bar, and all these men cluster around her, and she decides to take them all home. The bar is over there,” he said, thumbing over his shoulder at a dark set diagonally across the stage.

“She’s supposed to have sex with these guys?”

“A couple of them. Some of it can be simulated, but not all of it. She’s going to have to do some of it, before the day is through. If there are shots she just can’t do, we can shoot some inserts later with a body double and cut them in-”

“A body double,” I said.

“Some girl with the same build as Thistle, someone who’s done, uh, this kind of movie before. Those will be close-ups of the real thing. The audience for a movie like this expects a few genuine money shots.”

I said, “Jesus Christ.”

“Actually,” Rodd said, “I pretty much agree.”

“Call it any fancy name you want,” I said, “but what it is, it’s a gang-bang.”

“Now that we’re actually on the verge of filming it,” Rodd said, “it would probably be disingenuous to call it anything else. But not in front of Thistle, please.”

“You have some good credits,” I said. “Why are you here?”

“Darling.” Rodd put an open hand beneath his face, palm up, as though presenting it to an audience. “I’m fifty-eight years old. In Hollywood, that’s too old to qualify for an obituary. Do you remember those signs they used to have at amusement parks for the kids’ rides? If you were too tall to walk under it, you weren’t allowed on? Well at the networks now they have a picture of a teenager over the door and a sign that says, if you’re older than this, don’t knock. Last job I actually went out for, the network executive wore braces.”

“If it’s any comfort,” Lauren, the cinematographer, said, “he’ll probably be a soda jerk on Sunset in six weeks. Most of those guys don’t keep their job long enough to get the chair warm.”

“Over there,” I said, pointing across the stage. “You said that was the bar set, right?”

“Right.” This was Lauren again.

“Wouldn’t it be better to start with the bar scene? I mean, at least give Thistle a chance to, to talk to these guys before she has to-you know.”

“Yes,” Rodd said. “It would be better. It would, in fact, be the way I had it sequenced in the first place. That’s why the bar’s built and ready to go. But it is exactly not what Ms. Annunziato wants to do. She wants Thistle to cross the great divide, as she herself put it, before one more penny of the Annunziato millions is spent on this film. First the press conference, then this scene. With those out of the way, she figures she’ll have no way of losing her movie. If Thistle can do this, she’ll be able to do anything.”

“For what it’s worth,” Lauren said, “we’re going to talk her through all of it. We’ll clear the set except for the essential people, the minimum crew to get the sequence. Most of them are women. We’ll shoot the action silent and dub it later, so she can call off any activity that she absolutely can’t do, and we’ll find a way to film around it. Inserts, as Rodd said. But she’s going to have to do some of it, or Trey will shut the movie down.”

“I don’t know,” I said.