I'm Glad About You (37 page)

What that meant, though, was anyone’s guess. Who was she supposed to play nice with? Lars? She had, and she did, and that situation only got more complicated. Impossibly, he was even more obsessed with every detail of her; every vowel she uttered came under excruciating and never-ending scrutiny. If the line was as simple as, “What do you want, Ben?” there were still thousands of ways to modulate it. He would put her through take after take focusing on a lift of an eyebrow. And then there were the ever-increasing demands on her time off the set. Lars wanted to have sex all the time and it was exhausting, frankly, especially on nights when she had a 4 a.m. call. Also, especially, since his potency waned even as his demands increased.

It was too much. He was tired, and she was tired, and she had to get up at least two hours before he did, to sit in a makeup trailer while they made her glorious twenty-eight-year-old face even more photogenic. What was he trying to prove? He wasn’t enjoying the sex anymore; that was perfectly clear.
She
certainly wasn’t enjoying it, although that didn’t seem to matter to Lars one little bit. The vigor and ingenuity of their previous lovemaking laughed at them from the corners of hotel rooms, a mocking and prurient ghost.
It was never anything at all
, she thought, while Lars pumped away at her. Most of the time, he had his eyes closed. Why couldn’t he even look at her? She was the living visitation of movie magic, a sex goddess in the flesh, made incarnate by his own hand. It didn’t matter. His eyes remained shut, his face slack, while he concentrated on whatever it was inside him that might entice him to come. Most nights she truly wanted to shove him off her. But the pressure was on, and she had to play nice.

The movie itself was good
.
An action movie, with eight hot-blooded American boys on a mission in the jungle, with a swell girl who might have been a lesbian but also looked like Ava Gardner? The peculiarity of if it crossed over into something original, weird, even magical. Alison had never actually understood what Lars was doing with his pathological control of her look, but once they were shooting, the fierce intelligence behind the peculiar filmic elements began to reveal itself. It was
Day of the Locust
meets
The Misfits
, with a few grenades tossed in. A couple of times, Alison actually was the one who got to toss the grenades. David, the DP who had worked on three other films with Lars, knew instinctively that Alison’s more classical features required a shift in the way the film itself was shot, and so he hypersaturated the colors. While the gun battles were shot like hallucinations, the love scenes drifted into haunting movie moments redolent of the heyday of the film greats. Alison actually did know how to tip her head back and look at her hero with tragic yearning.

“The young Bergman,” the second camera op muttered. Stu the grip nodded, equally impressed. They were a gang of seasoned pros who had worked with pretty much every star and starlet under the sun, and many of these young stars treated the crew like servants. But Alison’s good Midwestern manners never failed her, and the grips, the PAs, the wardrobe assistants, and the lady who helped her with her coffee at the craft service table were all treated with good-natured respect and gratitude. The crew loved her.

And as days rolled into weeks the camera recorded the possibility that Alison was in fact The Real Deal. Pretty soon, they all said, she was going to be able to do whatever she wanted. She didn’t know what that meant, but so many people said it to her so many times, it was hard to pretend that it might not actually be true. Even strangers, especially strangers, gushed and warned her gleefully of the coming tsunami of global attention. Reporters who showed up on the set hovered, watched, flirted with her. Men in suits whose names she could never remember came and watched with a reptilian bonhomie. The sequence of writers who showed up on the set invariably ended up writing extra scenes for her.

Gordon, the head of the studio, meanwhile, joined in the obsession with every detail of Alison’s hair, her makeup, her dialogue, and her close-ups. Her clothes especially were cause for brutal interference. The day Lars decided that Alison should be wearing a narrow pink silk sheath—all the better to seduce a drug lord at his birthday party—Gordon weighed in passionately. He liked the color, she could wear the pink, it was a terrific color and it looked good on her. But shouldn’t the dress be more “special”? This was often the language of their parlance: Gordon was “underwhelmed” by the dress. It needed to be “more special.” When you pressed him as to what he might mean by “more special” it turned out that what he usually meant was “sequins.”

This news was delivered to all of them during a costume fitting in the wardrobe trailer. Alison thought Lars’s head was going to explode. “
Sequins
? Is he fucking insane? Where the fuck did they find
sequins
in the middle of the fucking
jungle
?”

“Well, for that matter, where did they find a pink silk sheath?” observed Molly, the imperturbable costume designer.

“She
had
it. She brought it with her from the States, it’s been in her backpack for six years.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t say
oh
like that’s impossible, it’s not
likely
, but it’s
possible
that she would squirrel away a piece of her previous life as a
debutante
but it is
not
possible that she would carry around a pink
sequin dress
for six years, that’s in
sane
.”

Alison kept her mouth shut and sat there. They were surrounded by hundreds of dresses and scarves and steam irons. Lars preferred issuing orders and having them intuitively understood by someone who had decent and reliable taste, like Molly, who had worked on three films with him; this being summoned to the wardrobe trailer did not suit him.

“I can email them a rendering in half an hour,” Molly explained, the soul of patient cooperation.

“He doesn’t really want to see a rendering, he wants to see her in the dress.” This from weirdo Norbert, the producer-slash-factotum who always insisted they implement any demand the studio put forward, bar none.

“But we don’t have a dress, we will have to build the dress, and this is supposed to shoot tomorrow,” Molly explained. “If he really wants her in a sequined dress—”

“He definitely wants the sequins, it’s really important to him. The dress really needs to be more special.”

“Well, we can do that but—”

“We are not
PUTTING her
in a
sequined dress
!” It was the first time Alison had ever seen Lars’s cool Icelandic prince act start to crack. What was the big deal? The whole idea that she had any dress at all stuffed into a backpack for six years was preposterous. The whole sequence in fact was ridiculous, and had actually just been added to the script last week, apparently as a total excuse to put the hot young female lead into a slinky dress and watch her play Mata Hari for a couple of minutes while the boys ran around and placed detonators on the periphery of the drug lord’s compound.

Lars finally threw in the towel. The compromise—if you could call it that—was
gold
sequins. But it came at a cost. Lars never threatened to walk off the picture, as that was not his style. But, Ryan told her in a whispered phone call, the entire
town
was talking about the degree of interference that the studio was inflicting on him. It was un
heard
of.

Rumors of studio intervention were flourishing everywhere. The band of brats (so titled with a saucy sisterly flair by Alison) tossed the unverifiable information about carelessly as they sat to the side and waited for the DP to finish lighting.

“I heard they’re going to reshoot all the bar sequences,” Evan observed.

“I heard we were going to reshoot all the action sequences,” Robbie countered.

“Gordon hates all the sets, he says it looks cheap.”

“He wants to rebuild all the sets?”

“He wants to send us to
Mexico
,” Robbie insisted. “That’s what my agent says.”

“Cut it
out
.” Lars had fought valiantly for a location in Mexico, but the studio bean counters had put their collective foot down. There was a drug war going on in Mexico—not a pretend one, a
real
one, where
real
drug cartels were shooting
real
bullets at each other and anyone else who happened to be in the vicinity. Under these circumstances, the insurance company had decisively declined to offer any kind of coverage to this particular production. So Mexico was out, and Colombia too, and the farther south they went in their search for an authentic Latino jungle the more the complications flowered and decayed. Finally, the only answer was building a Mexican rain forest in the desert hills just outside downtown Los Angeles. Which cost a small fortune. Now Gordon didn’t like the sets and he was going to send them into the middle of the Mexican jungle and put all their lives at risk after all? Well, anything was possible. Alison was learning: Any amount of insanity, not to mention dough, was tossed about these movies like confetti.

Although Lars never blew his cool (other than during the War of the Sequins) the disagreements with the studio became increasingly intense, making their presence felt on the set with a weary regularity. The editor had put together some rough cuts of scenes which Gordon asked to see well before the DGA rules allowed him to get a look at it. Rightly, Lars refused to let him look at the footage. But some exec managed to sneak a flash drive out of the editing bay and he took it straight to Gordon’s office, so Gordon did in fact see footage he had no right to see, and he wasn’t happy. In spite of everyone’s delight at the dailies, he expressed his unhappiness with the direction of the scenes, the look of the sets—that rumor turned out to be true as well—and demanded substantial reshoots. After hours of wrangling with executives, Lars refused to reshoot a single frame, at which point Gordon threatened to pull him off the movie. Phone calls were made to and from the DGA, and agents and execs screamed at each other regularly, and one day the lunch break extended into two hours while it was determined whether or not Lars would return to the set, which if he didn’t would put the entire movie in jeopardy as well as cost the studio millions. Then, suddenly, it all got settled somehow and everyone went back to work.

Several weeks later they did spend half a day reshooting scenes that really were fine, and then a week after that there were more reshoots. Lars had won the battle and lost the war.

It was the third time Lars reshot one of Alison’s scenes that her nerves began to fray. Protected by the early buzz, she had managed to stay out of all the wrangling by simply being agreeable, doing a good job, and never showing up late for anything. Actresses who showed up late were regularly dismissed as the lowest form of life by everyone on the set. But when Lars came to the set one day and explained that they were going to have to reshoot for a third time the scene where she was talking to her mother on the telephone, and looking at herself in the mirror, she made a mistake. She asked him why.

“We just need some more colors,” Lars told her, abrupt.

“What kind of ‘colors’?”

“It would be great if you could be putting lipstick on. Looking at yourself and putting lipstick on.”

“While I’m talking on the telephone?”

“Yeah, while you’re talking on the telephone.”

“Do you still want me to start in the kitchen, and then walk over to the mirror?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, but this isn’t—”

“Isn’t what?” Lars was testy. Which was entirely unfair; the boys talked back to him all the time, and he never got testy with them. She should be allowed to ask a
question.

She had the phone in her hand. She held it up for him. “You can’t actually—okay. Look.” She marched over to the kitchenette part of the ratty apartment set and held the phone to her ear. “Okay, I’m on the phone,” she announced. “I’m talking talking talking to my mother in the States. I walk over to the mirror to look at myself, I’m not sure why, but I do it, and now I reach for a lipstick which you need two hands to open, so in spite of the fact that I’m on the phone I reach for the lipstick and do what, hold it on my shoulder, while I open the lipstick? It’s a
cell
phone. You can’t hold a cell phone with your shoulder, to your ear.”

“Set the phone on the dresser.”

“Like, while she’s talking?”

“I would really like you to put lipstick on.”

“But—”

“
Just do it, Alison.
”

“This is the third time we’ve shot this stupid phone call,” she said, and there was no question, she was tired and edgy. “What is the fucking deal?”

Lars turned and stormed off the set.

The fucking deal, as it turned out, was that Gordon had decided that he wanted to see Alison putting on lipstick while she chatted on the phone. The first time this request had come down the chain of command to Lars, all the intermediaries had interpreted Gordon’s request with too much complexity: He wanted to see a more sexualized version of the character. Alison was playing her too soft. She should be more cunning. These instructions had been delivered with so much determination that Lars had shrugged and agreed finally to the first request for a reshoot. But the first reshoot was unsatisfactory. She was playing it more cunning, yes, but where was the lipstick? Why wasn’t she putting on lipstick? When this question made its way down the chain of command to Lars, it was a bad day. He couldn’t believe that the head of a studio would be thinking about an actress putting on lipstick. He also was in no mood to cooperate. Gordon had recently fired the fifth writer the studio had hired to do petty rewrites and they were now scrambling for some other WGA hack who would cost an arm and a leg while delivering nothing but shit dialogue. And then the bean counters would call and scream at him about going over budget. The studio was out of control; his producer Norbert was a useless, incompetent toady; and the budget was soaring, not because he couldn’t control it but rather because Norbert couldn’t control Gordon and Gordon couldn’t control himself, and kept insisting on more of everything: more costumes, more extras, more writers, more sets. Doing a second reshoot of Alison in front of a mirror was insane. He would do it, but it was insane. He put a different costume on her, hoping that Norbert and Gordon would feel like the studio had been placated, and left it at that. When Gordon came back a third time with the demand that he see her putting on the lipstick, Lars hit the roof. But, as one underling pointed out, that was
always
what Gordon had been asking for. Gordon had a right to be angry. It was the simplest of requests, to see Alison putting on lipstick while she talked on the phone! He was the head of the studio. What was the big deal?