THE BLACK ALBUM: A Hollywood Horror Story (18 page)

“He owes me back rent I guess I
ain’t never gonna see.”

Loveless nodded sympathetically,
swiping his ATM card as fast as he could while Charlotte stood there with a
smile frozen on her lovely face.

“How’s that pretty little thing
of his? She pop yet?”

“No. But she’s due soon,”
Charlotte said, disturbed by Della’s crude reference to child birth.

“That Jerry’s a sly one. I’ll give
‘em that. Better watch out for him. He takes you in with his poor innocent me
routine. But you better believe that dirty dog will bite the hand that feeds
him without the slightest hesitation.” Della bagged their groceries slowly.

“We’ll try to remember that,” the
filmmaker said, trying not to sound impatient.

As Loveless and Charlotte exited,
Della’s last words followed them out the door, “Snow storm coming. Gonna be a
bad one. In four, maybe five days.” The woman seemed certain even though the
skies were crystal clear and there was no mention of even one drop of
precipitation in any of the weather reports for the area.

While shooting a night scene
where a dejected and desperate Grace tries to take her own life rather than let
the demon Jeremy possess her body, the weather turned unexpectedly cold. The
wind whipped at the cast and crew harshly. Jerry was rigging the harness vest
Charlotte was wearing under her clothing. A thin but extremely strong cable
running down from a pulley on a thick branch of the tree overhead, and
attaching to the vest would support Charlotte’s weight as she tried to hang
herself. The cable, painted black, was invisible against the night. The actress
would slip the noose that ran down from the tree, around her neck, giving the illusion
that she was really hanging herself. In the script, the noose breaks giving
Grace a second chance at life and redemption.

“All set,” Jerry gave Loveless
the thumbs up.

“Last looks,” Collin said, the
movie clapboard tucked under his arm. The make-up artist moved in and touched
up Charlotte’s make-up.

Loveless gave the actress some
last minute direction. “The frayed rope will snap almost immediately, so you
just have to sell being strangled for a moment.”

“Got it,” Charlotte nodded.

Action was called and the scene
got under way. Charlotte - now in character as Grace - stood on a chair under
the tree. She trembled. Tears rolled down her eyes as she put the noose around
her neck. Charlotte said, “Fight the Devil,” closed her eyes as if in solemn
prayer and stepped off the chair. A buckle on the vest unsnapped and the vest
slid up on the actress under her clothes. Charlotte immediately started
thrashing and clawing at the rope around her neck with both hands as she swung
back and forth. It was Loveless who realized something was wrong and launched
forward. He grabbed Charlotte, locking both hands around her hips and lifted
her, taking the weight off her neck. “CUT HER DOWN! CUT HER DOWN!”

Jerry whipped out a folding knife
and sawed the rope in two. Next, he unclipped the carabiner that attached the
cable to the vest. The filmmaker lowered Charlotte to the ground and pulled the
rope from around her neck. He smoothed the hair out of her face, scared as hell
that she was not alright. “Charlotte, Charlotte!”

Charlotte finally caught her
breath after gasping for several seconds, “I’m okay, J.D.”

“Good thing the other buckles on
the vest held,” Loveless said, still trying to figure out what had gone wrong.
He looked at Jerry. “What happened?”

“There’s no way that buckle
should have come loose like that. These are the vests professional mountain
climbers wear. Those buckles don’t just come loose. And even so, the noose
wasn’t even tied to the tree. I just threw it over the branch,” Jerry defended
himself as he shined a flashlight up at the tree branch that the rope was slung
over. Another branch was right next to it.

“Look,” Collin pointed to the
branch, “The wind must have blown the rope into the crotch of those two
branches, where it got snagged.”

“A freak friggin’ accident,”
Jerry said, a ghostly expression haunting his face.

“Way too many freak accidents
happening on this shoot,” Matty the cinematographer pronounced grimly.

“Amen to that, bruddah,” Collin
said.

“Good thing the other buckles
held,” Loveless repeated looking at Charlotte with a shimmer of tears in his
eyes.

“Otherwise I would have hanged
for real.” Charlotte finished the sentence.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,
Charlotte. If I thought for even the slightest moment that there was any
danger, I would have never taken the chance with you.”

Charlotte reached up and put her
hand on the filmmaker’s cheek, “I know. I know.” In true
the show must go on
bluster, the actress continued, “Is the shot ruined?”

Loveless thought for a moment.
“No, that’ll be the ‘master.’ The rest we’ll just cheat with tight shots: the
rope getting taunt and breaking, the chair turning over, your feet dangling in
the air, you laying into frame in. I’m not taking any more chances with you.”

Charlotte heard and felt the
choked emotion in Loveless’ voice and smiled faintly. She looked the filmmaker
right in the eyes. “It’s okay, J.D. I’m alright.”

Loveless, Charlotte and Lizzy
were having breakfast at the diner when the filmmaker received a call on his
cell. The filmmaker looked at the caller ID. His face lit up. “I gotta take
this.” Loveless left the noisy din of the eatery and went outside. He looked up
at the sky. Storm clouds in the far distance had begun to form.

“Hey. How’s it going?” the
filmmaker said into the phone.

Through the diner window,
Charlotte and Lizzy watched as Loveless nodded excitedly at everything that he
was hearing on the phone. A moment later, he pocketed it and came back into the
diner. He smiled as he plopped down into the booth next to Lizzy, across from
Charlotte.

“That distributor I was
originally trying to get to put the money up for the movie is back from South
Africa. He finally read the script, watched the trailer I sent over. Him and
his wife want to see what we have so far. Before we show it to anyone else. They
want a first look.”

“We just have a rough assemblage
with only some of Jerry’s scoring and a bunch of temp music. About six scenes
are still missing,” Charlotte said concerned.

“Six minor scenes. We’ve shot all
the major sequences. Plus, I’ve been giving the editor notes. He’s been making
the changes. We’re closer to a rough cut than a rough assemblage. We have the
bulk of the movie, with cards standing in for what we don’t have yet (in
filmmaking a card states what scene would go at a certain point of the film.
For example: missing love scene). They’re distributors. They understand this.
Plus, I think what we’ve got so far is damn good.”

“When do they want to see it?

“Today.”

“Today? We have a shoot tonight.”

“And we’ll be back in time. Come
with me. You and Lizzy. We’ll swing by my place and pick up a hard-drive of the
rough cut. The editor’s there now. The crew can start setting things up at the
location, while we’re on our way back. They know what to do.”

Charlotte glanced from Loveless
to Lizzy and shrugged. “Okay.”

Lizzy looked up at her mom, “Can
we go shopping while we’re in LA?”

Charlotte ended up dropping Lizzy
off at her sister’s apartment in Santa Monica for a few hours. Charlotte’s
sister Rita loved to shop and a visit from her favorite niece gave her just the
right excuse. They were talking about boutiques that sold designer boots when
the filmmaker and actress left.

The distributor and his wife -
who was also his partner in the company - met Loveless and Charlotte at a
screening room in Burbank. Bob was tall, in his mid-fifties and looked every
bit his age. His wife Shatari - a Hindu Indian woman - was petite and nearly
twenty years younger. From the second they walked in, Charlotte, an astute
saleswomen, knew the distributor and his wife were very interested in “The
Black Album.” They were already on the hook.

Bob confirmed it. “J.D., I’ve
gotta admit, this sounds good. The trailer’s solid. Script’s excellent. If you
shot what was in the script and have decent production value and performances,
we should definitely have something we could sell.”

“Wait ‘til you see the locations
we’ve been shooting at in Arrowhead. They’ll blow you away,” Loveless said with
equal enthusiasm.

“Tell me you shot with the Red
Camera, J.D.”

“I shot with the Red Camera,
Bob.”

“Perfect! I’m thinking SyFy
Channel, strong foreign sales. Hell, maybe even a limited theatrical here in
the States. I know the guys over at Anchor Bay. Plus it’s got horror franchise
written all over it, like “The Ring.” There can be a “Black Album II, III IV.”
Bob looked from Loveless to Charlotte. “And this, of course, is your lovely
ingenue Grace.”

“Charlotte,” the actress
corrected as she stepped forward and shook Bob’s hand firmly. “This is my wife
Shatari. I met her while filming a movie in Bombay seven years ago.”

“That sounds so exotic and
romantic,” Charlotte said as she took Shatari’s hand warmly. “Wow. You have the
most beautiful hair. I wish I had hair like that.” Charlotte knew from her
years in sales, you always butter up the wife.

“Thank you,” Shatari responded,
blushing merrily at the flattery. The Indian woman did have a luxurious
straight jet black mane that stretched all the way down to the small of her
back. Charlotte's compliment melted away any remaining first meeting ice. The
actress definitely knew how to prime the pump.

“Great- Bob, Shatari,” Loveless
said happily as he handed his hard-drive to the tech guy Bob had standing by.
The tech hooked up the hard-drive and started up the editing system. Bob,
Shatari, Loveless, and Charlotte sat down on the folding chairs provided for
them in the little screening room. Seconds later, the lights went out and the
big screen lit up.

Out the corner of his eye,
Loveless watched the expressions of the husband and wife distributors. They reacted
in all the right places, nudging each other, nodding, whispering, smiling.
Hell, they were just as excited as the filmmaker and his actress. When the
movie came to the scene where Grace unearths the album from the grave, Bob
whispered to Loveless, “Good production value on that cemetery. Looks real.”

“Was real, Bob.”

For a second Bob and his wife
shared an uneasy glance. When the movie reached the crucial point where Grace
played the record backwards and the unholy lyrics began to issue forth with an otherworldly
echo effect, Shatari’s nose began to bleed.

“Oh,” the Hindu woman said in
mild surprise as she cupped the blood that was running out of her nose. Seconds
later, it began to gush out.

“Shatari? Shatari, are you
alright?” Bob was alarmed.

The woman was nodding as she got
up and rushed out the room to a nearby restroom. Bob excused himself and went
off after her. The tech pressed pause on the movie. Loveless, Charlotte and the
tech sat there uncomfortably. They heard sounds of muffled arguing. Two minutes
later, Bob came back into the room.

“Her nose just won’t stop
bleeding. She’s losing a lot of blood. I’m going to take her to the emergency
room.”

“Jesus! Has anything like this
ever happened before?” Loveless asked as he stood up.

“Never.” Bob seemed weirded out.

“Is there anything we can do?”
Charlotte asked with true concern.

“No. No. We’re just gonna have to
postpone seeing the rest of the movie.”

Shatari came back into the room.
She had a white towel to her nose. The towel was a sopping crimson. In her eyes
was a look, a look of accusation when she looked at Loveless and Charlotte. She
said something in Hindi that no one else in the room understood. The Hindu
culture was very old. As old as any. They had a history with magic, the
supernatural.

“Don’t worry. We can come back.
You can look at the movie later.” Loveless smiled.

Shatari’s eyes flashed. In them
was loathing and hatred. The Hindu woman tried to bury these feelings, but she
couldn’t. While Loveless had missed this, the actress hadn’t. Charlotte saw the
emotions. There would be no deal with these distributors. The woman was spooked
and her husband was going to do whatever his trophy wife said.

On the drive back up the
mountain, with Lizzy passed out in the back seat amidst a number of shopping
bags, courtesy of Auntie Rita, Loveless called the distributor, “Hi, Bob. I’m
just calling to see if Shatari’s alright.”

“Her nose finally stopped
bleeding. Doctors don’t have a fucken clue what caused it.” Bob’s voice had a
haunted ring to it that fell over his words like a shadow. “But we just got
home a few minutes ago and I don’t understand it at all.” The man stopped.

“What?”

“Our cat’s dead. Dead. I mean
mangled, on our bed. And clumps of Shatari’s hair have started falling out.”