Scar Flowers (5 page)

Monday, May 22, 4:30 a.m. Day 1 of shooting.

The alarm clock bleated from the shelf above his
bed. Simon groaned and slapped at the snooze button, dislodging a half-empty bottle of tequila that narrowly missed his head. He groped across the blankets for it. Cap still screwed on, at least.

He lay where he had passed out, in his trailer on the studio lot, looking up at a bulkhead while his head buzzed and rang like a band saw. No, not his head. It was the second and third alarm clocks
that he had stationed at the other end of the trailer. Off the set, he could never be bothered with schedules and watches, but here he had to care. He sat up, the pressure in his head sloshing like an overfull glass. He stared down at his legs. Still dressed; too bad he would have to remove his clothes to take a shower. Once shooting started, everything but the film felt like wasted time. The stars had their day trailers, but he preferred to save the drive to the hotel and back. Shedding clothes as he went, he squeezed into to the iron-lung-sized bathroom that smelled of vinyl and soap.

Get used to it
. This trailer would be home for the next fifteen weeks, sixty-two days of which were shooting days.

Shooting kept him going until he collapsed. Plunge in, draw it back, flow back into it. There was no choice once the momentum built—with decisions to make, disasters to avert, and dailies flooding in: ride the juggernaut, steer it, or it will crush you.

He skipped his every-third-day ritual of shaving and his usual cup of coffee. The first was a shooting tradition, and the second was necessity. If he swallowed anything but water on shooting mornings, it would come back up half an hour later. The tequila last night had been another tradition. The only way to calm his nerves—or at least go unconscious before morning. He could write the script and raise the money, but the pressure of directing never hit until the night before, robbing him of sleep.

He shouldered a new black backpack and trudged across the lot, rubbing his forehead to ease the pounding. His tongue felt like
new-laid asphalt. Dawn broke as he approached the set of the hero Blake’s childhood home, an enormous house with bay win-dows and a sun porch. Adrenaline spiked through his veins. His set. He had daydreamed this house, drawn it on cocktail napkins, seen the blueprints, and here it was.

The porch stairs creaked
as the screen door slammed behind him. Inside, the set was a mixture of real and sham. Tiny accuracies abounded: antique glass doorknobs and yellowed wall-paper, so that when he lifted a picture from the wall it exposed a square of brighter pattern underneath. But closet doors opened onto blank walls, and the ceilings and walls were breakaway. Dolly tracks for the camera snaked across the floor.

In the dining room, he took out his sketchpad and reclined in the window seat as the sunrise warmed his back. Streaks of light began their incremental slide down the rose-patterned wallpaper on the opposite side of the room. Just like the first day of school: waxed floorboards, a backpack full of new sketchpads and note
-books. The sigh of air moving in an empty room, the whisper of anticipation in his ears.

A surge of vertigo, cold as saltwater,
washed through him. Today he began directing a Hollywood feature. He knew the odds; for every thousand budding directors in film school, maybe two would work on their own projects. He also knew that he would have withered and died if he had had to go back home to Skagway a failure. To clerk in a shop selling Gold Rush mugs and Soapy Smith T-shirts to cruise ship tourists.

Here. The first flashback sequence would be shot here. Version one would be from the hero’s point of view: his parents presiding over Sunday dinner while everything—from the roast chicken to the dining room chairs to his parents themselves, bloomed into flame—as his mother said grace and his father passed the potatoes. Version two would be shot first: the hero, haloed by the blaze, sitting at an empty table.

Simon took a swig of bottled water. His storyboard sketch of a man seated in a burning room turned to a mush of lines under his pencil. The paper clung to his spread fingers and crumpled in his palm as he ripped it free of the pad. He stood and paced.

Yes, do the first take in a wide shot, then shoot coverage against Walls A and B to save time on the lighting setups and set changes. Basic economy, no reason to change that habit, even with the huge below-the-line budget granted for this film. In a few days, crew would replace the windows of this room with sheets of clear rock candy, so when the stunt man was blown through them in the dream sequence, he would not be hurt. Simon had changed the script so that the house would be destroyed in an explosion, and
he planned to not film one second more than necessary. Then Fran and Paul could not make him reshoot any flashback scenes—nor could they rework his film during editing.

Paul the associate producer had turned out to be Nadia’s friend from the film festival party. Off on the wrong foot with that relationship. But only one thing mattered now.

After six months of preproduction, it was day one of filming.

Not just filming—
shooting
.

Shooting had
its own rhythm. The hot wash of it, the raw sting of emotion and whirl of ideas rising, after months of planning. Preparation, negotiations, contracts, rights. The schedule and call sheets started the flow, the suck and pulse that drew out everything he had. The living stuff of the story would materialize as actors, prop masters, lighting technicians. If he could create the right environment, when he invoked Julia, she would appear. Not just to him but to generations. Truth and beauty in one swoop.

The crew would arrive soon. The first-unit assistant director and lighting team, the director of photography. Simon had hired two core crew members from his indie days, Brian the DP and Gunnar, his AD.

5:00 a.m. Stomach felt sick. He stifled a yawn. A car door slammed outside: Gunnar, at last. Baby-faced, stoop-shouldered Gunnar, unfolding himself from the front seat, with his clipboard already under his arm.

Simon ran his hand along the wall. His house. In the whirl
-wind of shooting, its secrets and those of its temporary family would be scattered, blown out like candy glass in sweet, sharp shards.

In ten seconds, the door would open, and Gunnar would poke his head in.

The AD climbed the stairs to the sun porch: one, two, three, four, and slammed the screen door. Three more strides across the porch and the front door was next.

In eight, seven, six, five seconds, it would begin. Shooting. In four, three, two seconds.

Action.

Tuesday, May 23, 11:30 a.m. Day 2 of shooting.

“Simon’s busy. Whatever it is can wait until tomorrow’s production meeting.”
Gunnar loomed over Leah from his perch on the stairs of Simon’s trailer.

“He wants to meet with me about the Julia–Blake confron
-tation scene.” She craned her neck but could not see into the window behind him.

“It’s not on the schedule. He’s meeting with Fran now. He’ll contact you.”

Gunnar’s emphasis on
you
did not escape her, nor did his air of disapproval.

“Of course. Thank you.” She waited for him to finish descending the stairs, but he had evidently decided to see her off the premises first. She had to retreat.

She had accomplished nothing. Paul, who had called constantly since L.A., would demand that she quit tomorrow. She had told him she only needed three days.

She
had
to see Simon. She had thought—foolishly, she saw now, though the same sort of thing had worked with others—that he might come to her room after she fed him the olive. But no. She waited for him, like everyone else. The epicenter, the scenes being shot, happened in bursts under molten lights, amid pauses for makeup, wardrobe, and prop adjustments followed by barked orders for lockdown and quiet on the set.

Armed with airbrushes, the special effects crew painted the surface of a pit of oatmeal with a hydraulic platform in it to look like an Oriental rug: Eight hours of work to prepare for a single dream-sequence shot of a character being sucked down into a carpet. The thump and ring of hammers, the baked odor of hot plastic from the lights
rose above the whine of band saws and the sharp scent of cut lumber. In the midst stood Simon, unshaven and shaded by a Kansas City Monarchs baseball cap, flanked by supplicants who held contracts, cups of water, fabric swatches, cell phones. As they made their requests, he replied to the unsuccessful with a refusal and to the lucky with a nod.

She had never encountered such elusive quarry. Though she had taken a risk with Angel and the others, it had been on her territory. When Leah had returned home to
Seattle after the film festival, Angel had not objected when she told him that she was going back to L.A. to work on a movie. He called her hotel room every night at the appointed hour and did not ask many questions. But Faith had not called once.

Her heart fluttered. Had something happened to Faith?
I’ll check on her tonight.

The crew sensed
that she did not belong. On her way back from her encounter with Gunnar, she was herded into a crowd scene as an extra. “You’re dressed too nice to be crew,” the second-unit AD joked when he realized his mistake. Like most everyone except the actors, he wore shorts and a tank top. She had brought her usual weekday clothes. Blouses, tailored skirts, hand-bags, and matching shoes. Usual for her; in Seattle, she was used to being the only one who dressed as an adult.

“Hold on, hon,” Karen Boyd’s makeup artist, Celia, told Leah as she got in line at lunch. “Lighting crew go first, so they can start setting up the next shot faster.”

Leah stepped aside as men with walkie-talkies crowded to the steam table trays.

“You ever worked on a film before? What a pretty skirt.” Celia smiled and fanned herself with
handful of costume sketches.

Leah smoothed her linen pencil skirt and sleeveless silk top. At least Celia, with her hoop earrings and brightly patterned head wraps, had a sense of style.

“Cele,” cut in a wardrobe girl with a muslin mockup of a shirt folded over her shoulder. “Which has better costumes,
Gone with the Wind
or
Magnificent Ambersons
?”

“
GWTW
, child!”

“How ’
bout you?” the wardrobe girl asked Leah.

“I haven’t seen
Ambersons
, and I fell asleep during Charlotte’s tea party.”

Celia threw her head back and laughed. “It’s Scarlett, not
Charlotte!”

“. . .
not even talking heads—it was all Kilroys and nostril shots,” the man behind them said as Celia and the wardrobe girl left with their trays. Leah wrote “Magnificent Ambersons” in her script. It must not have been by one of Simon’s favorite directors, whom she had taken notes on in preparation for this trip: Jacques Tourneur, John Cassavetes, Stanley Kubrick.

A pair of interns passed her on their way to the lunch line: “What’s up with the Karen and Simon action? Have you seen how she looks at him?”

“That’s not the only thing she craves—Little Miss Macrobiotic sent her assistant to the store at two in the morning to get her a pint of fudge ripple.”

Gossip. Leah had been the target of whispers in school,
a mixture of childish nonsense and full-grown hate in the form of slashed tires on her bicycle, rocks thrown at her back, “HORE” written on her book bag in indelible ink.
Her name’s not Leah, it’s Lay-ya . . . Lay-ya Slutterson, skank of the school.
A few years of this and she also saw the jealousy of the girls, the suppressed fear of the boys who shouted requests for blow jobs without knowing what oral sex was, let alone how to spell
whore
.

She never learned the reason for the slur campaign
. Perhaps it was being the first one to smoke or the way she looked boys in the eye instead of blushing at the ground.

Leah returned to her hotel room that night with bags of new
clothes—cotton sun dresses, T-shirts, track suits. Someone had shoved a revised copy of the schedule under her door, and it showed that the Julia–Blake fight rehearsal, her first one with Simon, had been moved to the day after tomorrow. Her breath seized in her throat, and she sat down.

Was it possible that she would not get a chance to talk to Simon before then? And if so
, then . . . what? Give up and go home to Seattle?

Maybe she had finally gone too far
. Delilah had warned her to never take too much at a time. To respect her subject’s limits even when he did not respect himself.

Unnatural, that’s what she was. Maybe that was what her schoolmates had sensed when they started the whispers about her:
Leah traded blow jobs for cigarettes, Leah took off her clothes and masturbated behind the playground fence for anyone who asked, Leah had sex with the whole football team after the homecoming game.

Hadn’t she since learned that if people gave her a legendary reputation, legend was hers to grasp? Hadn’t she learned that archetypes manifested because they were real?