Chapter Eight: On Again, Off Again
Night work commenced, and they were right on schedule, but there was a heavy workload. It was not typical to begin with night work, but the director wanted to get the difficult location shooting out of the way while everyone was still fresh, and avoid a timetable where they ended up in Hollywood on the weekend.
While they were scouting locations, Nicholas had sensibly dissuaded Travis from a rain sequence in the alley, by suggesting that, in the interests of makeup and wardrobe, perhaps the alley scene should be presented in the movie after the rain had already fallen.
Officer Fleet, who anticipated conflagrations at every moment, looked on with a frown, as they used the water truck to wet down the pavement. Tommy lit the pools of water with a shimmer of hallucinogenic colors. Passing headlamps and the neon signs of Hollywood Boulevard flickered in the background. There were moody shadows of the streetlights, and fire escapes. Jack and Travis rode the camera crane, side by side, and as it rose into the air, the cameraman whispered to the humble director, “Now you can look down at all your subjects.”
The cast of streetwalkers lined the alleyway, leaning up against the grimy brick walls, and under antique lampposts, which had been brought in from a prop house for the scene. The performers were provocatively dressed, with attire suggesting the fantasy that they would each portray when it came time to film the sex: Traci in a schoolgirl uniform, Ginger vamped up like a femme fatale, Jasmine in a carnival outfit with feathers and tiger skin. Tiffany wore a skimpy nightdress, since the sequence was meant to suggest her nocturnal reverie.
The contract player was on her best behavior, even given the nighttime hours, especially because Nicholas was present on the set. This meant that everything that happened and everything that either of them said to the other would be reported back to Duncan. The conversation between them consequently consisted of nothing but smiles.
Take after take, Tiffany conducted herself like a perfect star. She asked many questions of the director, insisted on constant make-up touch-ups from Maria so that she would look her best on camera, and only delayed the proceedings when she had to stop for a cigarette break, or a Starbucks, or to play back her messages, or to check on Coochie (the dog), or if she had to pee.
They maintained a steady pace, because there were so many shots to accomplish and everyone was conscious of how short the night hours would be. Tommy kept eyeing the sky, and checking his watch, and asking Howard how much was left to do, since he had challenges understanding the format of the printed schedule. They had production assistants with walkie-talkies to escort the girls from the set back to the hotel room, so they always knew where the performers were. Homeless denizens of the boulevard and tourists with a dozen questions hovered near the fringes of the production, and once in a while, one of the two policemen was compelled to leave the craft service table of potato chips and licorice sticks to establish the presence of law enforcement and shoo off the onlookers. Tiffany wore a long winter coat over her night dress when she was not on camera. Nobody in the cast dared to wander off.
At midnight, Howard had planned to hand out ice creams to everyone to keep up morale. But an unseasonable chill set in during the middle of the night, and nobody wanted ice cream. It seemed like another one of Howard’s missteps, but, in a rare stroke of inventive genius, born of necessity and peckishness, he put all the chocolate ice cream bars into a bowl in the microwave, and soon emerged onto the brisk street with mugs of steaming hot chocolate that were greatly appreciated. He walked around with a tray, beaming pinkly from his cheeks to his pate, since nobody could believe he had managed to do something competent. There were odd bravos from the crew. At two o’ clock, refreshed by the supply of hot beverages, they dismantled the crane, and rolled it out of the way, and now it was all hand-held camerawork through the alleyways, as each actress in her turn, led Jack to the different corners and doorways to provide the introduction for the sex scenes that they would shoot on stage, over the next three days.
At around 5.a.m, Tommy pointed off to the eastern horizon, where the black night was peeling away, and the first streak of dawn was breaking over the Los Angeles skyline. “Boss,” he murmured to Travis, “You’re turning blue.”
They were prepared for this moment. They always knew that, come first light, they would be able to simulate the night by shutting down the exposure on the lens. It was an old movie trick known as day for night, mostly seen in black-and-white Westerns where the cowboys rode the range under long shadows against silver hills.
“What do you think, Jack?” the director asked the cinematographer.
He did not take his eye off the viewfinder. “As long as I stay off the sky, I’m all right for a while.”
There was a covered section in front of the doorway to a tenement.
“All right,” Travis said, “Let’s move Tiffany and Ginger under the awning, and we can shoot out a little bit of dialog with them, where it’s more sheltered.”
“You got twenty minutes,” Tommy said, staring up through his fingertips.
“There are two more scenes on the schedule,” Howard reminded them, checking his clipboard.
Tiffany chose the crucial moment to ask if she could be excused for a quick five minutes to pee, and everyone waved at the sky, explaining the problems with light, so she valiantly agreed to hold it in until after the sun rose and her dialog scene with Ginger. Under pressure, Tiffany scurried off the set, right after her close-up, leaving Ginger to recite her own lines into thin air. Howard agreed to read Tiffany’s lines off-camera to give Ginger the cues, but, understandably, the actress could not keep a straight face when Howard was obliged to pronounce, “I want to be the hottest bitch on the street,” and they were obliged to do another take.
After twenty minutes, Jack looked up, and shrugged, “It’s no use, Travis. We can’t cheat any more. You can tell that it’s day.”
Travis Lazar grinned because his plan had worked. “Have a close look at the schedule, Jack. It’s supposed to be a day scene. This is when she wakes up from the dream, and comes out into the morning. We came all the way around.”
He had beaten the sun.
It was easier to beat the sun than what the producer had to confront next with Tiffany.
The company moved from location work to the interior work at Sound Stage B. The cast and crew were so awed with the impressive sets that a few of them tried to renegotiate their rates, based on the argument that if the production could afford to spend so much money on set dressing, there was surely another fifty dollars in the budget for salary. The veteran producer did not even blink, and left it to Howard to explain that not only were the rates carved in granite, but that there might be deductions made for tardiness on the part of certain employees, which put an end to the debate.
There was a steady stream of visitors to the Dreamscape set, who could mostly be found hanging around the craft service table in the green room, upon which was spread a continuous cold buffet of meats, cheeses, salads, fruit, vegetables with guacamole and hummus dips, and potato chips. There were representatives of the press, guests and employees of AXE, potential financiers invited by the director, and the significant others of crew and cast members, who found excuses to be there.
The Duchess came by at Travis’ personal invitation to watch his back, and to offer moral support. “I can’t believe what you did,” she complained to him, as she caught him coming out of the makeup room on the second morning, although there was a gleam in her dark eyes.
“What did I do?” Travis asked, as they continued down the hallway.
“The way you were grabbing Ginger’s ass.”
“I was working,” Travis insisted, “That girl needs a lot of attention. I was just handling her.”
“That’s exactly what it looked like,” she retorted, “You think because it’s porno, you can’t get sued for sexual harassment?”
“Okay,” he surrendered, “I won’t do it again.”
They walked into the production office, in mutual understanding that either of them might need a private word on some matter of intrigue before Travis had to direct the next scene. Howard was helping Traci in filling out her confidential paperwork, by offering her a variety of pens, and suggestions for her answers. Howard was quite enjoying the task, inspired by the fact that the actress was dressed in her schoolgirl uniform, ready for camera, but the production manager was seized with a spasm when he saw the lady producer. “Uh-oh, bad news.”
“Relax,” said Travis, getting his director’s notes from the desk,
“She’s just visiting.”
“Traci,” said the Duchess, “Will you excuse us a minute?”
“No, prob. Done. On the set.” The actress left the room in an instant, and shut the door behind her.
“He’s correct.” The Duchess gave Howard a piercing look because it was her conviction that he never got anything right. “Sorry. But we do have a problem.”
“I knew it,” Howard said smugly.
She delivered her bulletin bluntly. “New York Pictures is shutting down production until the winter season.”
“This is coming from…?” asked Travis.
“Sylvia Bern. There’s no way around it.”
“Now what are we going to do?” Howard glanced at the grid on white board.
“I’m out of work too,” she said, “I might take a low-budget infomercial for a garden tool.”
“Just as well we have AXE,” the director said confidently, as he went out of the office to the set, but Howard kept staring at the board under a cloud of gloom and indigestion.
Nicholas was sage enough to refrain from making artistic suggestions during the period of principal photography, and spent most of his time in the green room or in makeup, improving his relationships with the performers. He found a kindred spirit in Jasmine, who shared his interests in pyramids, solstices and oriental astrology, although Nicholas had so many eclectic pursuits it was not hard for him to find something in common with anyone. They sat beside each other on the burgundy couch under the warmth of the makeup lights. The slender actress wore her costume for the movie, which consisted mostly of colored feathers and stripes, and was not abashed by being topless. Nicholas trifled with his goatee and his tortoise-shell shirt buttons. The subjects drifted from mysticism to music, then politics, and new age philosophy, and finally, by the third morning of shooting, on the subject of fine art, they came upon the idea of Jasmine visiting Nicholas’ house, where he would sketch a portrait of her in the nude.
“It’s an idea I have for a coffee table book,” he explained, “It’s going to be charcoal and pencil drawings of different porn stars, and some black and white photographs. Nothing pornographic.”
“I think that is so creative,” Jasmine was impressed, “I would love to be part of a project like that.”
“There’s no money at this point.” Nicholas made sure she understood there would not be any remuneration. “Ars gratia artis.” He provided his own Latin translation in the event that Jasmine was not versed in classical quotations. “It’s just art for art’s sake.”
“Let me ask you a question,” Colt interrupted, “If it’s got naked porn stars in the book, what’s to stop a guy from jerking off to it?”
“Nothing,” Nicholas said, “He has the freedom of choice.”
“Then, how can you say it’s not pornographic?” Colt was wearing a flamboyant business suit for his role as a customer of one of the streetwalkers, and posed his question to Nicholas as if he had delivered a key piece of legal evidence as the attorney in a courtroom drama.
“If a pyromaniac strokes it to a fire, does that make the flames obscene?” Nicholas stumped him.
“Guys are so weird,” commented Traci, who was in the makeup chair for a touch-up, “I had a guy once who wanted to buy my toilet paper.”
“Gross,” said Maria.
“Anything can be sexualized,” Nicholas remarked, turning on the sofa towards the makeup artist. “There are no absolutes.”
“Do you mind?” Jasmine lightly touched her hand on Nicholas’ thigh. “We were trying to have a serious conversation here. About art for art’s sake. Now it’s all deteriorated to spanking the baboon.”
The sophistication of the discussion was further undermined when Ginger tottered into the room in precariously high heels, a short skirt and clinging blouse, visibly upset. She snagged her suitcase full of clothes on the doorjamb in her agitation, struggled with it, gave up and fell onto the sofa. “I think Travis is mad at me about something….”
“What’s wrong?” asked Maria, who counted reporting gossip to the director among her explicit job requirements.
“I don’t know what I did to piss him off.” Ginger was on the verge of tears. “He didn’t grab my ass this morning.”
The final sex scene on the schedule on most of their productions was the lesbian scene. It was the easiest sex scene to shoot, for physiological reasons, and they could hurry through it rapidly if they were heading into overtime, or, if they were early, or needed running time, they could milk it. By the time, they reached it on the roster, on most movies, all the production problems had already happened.
But, on Dreamboat, it was different.
On the last night of filming, with a buffer of a good two hours left before they ran into overtime, as if he were a heavyweight returning to his corner after a damaging round, Howard staggered into the production office. Travis looked up from examining his checkbook, to see Howard’s dramatic entrance followed by Tiffany, who swept in theatrically dressed in her flimsy nightgown.
“Tiffany does not want to do the girl-girl scene with Jasmine.”
Howard collapsed into the love seat.
“I don’t do black, Travis,” Tiffany snapped, “You already know that. Duncan knows that too.”
“First of all, Tiffany,” the producer began, getting to his feet, “Jasmine is a very light skinned girl, and secondly, you didn’t just find out about this. It was in the script.”
“In the script, it doesn’t say she’s black.”
He could not stomach her shallow racism. “You knew she was in the movie, and that you had a girl-girl scene with her.”
“How was I supposed to know that the famous Jasmine Lanoire was going to be all coffee and crinkle? The first time I met her was on this set, and I never knew that she was the one I was doing the scene with. Nobody explained it to me.”
“I went through everything step by step….” Howard protested quietly.
“Well, I never heard that I have to do a scene with a cocoa puff.”
Tiffany folded her arms across her chest. “I would have refused. I’ve done everything else that you asked me, and been on my best, which means that now I am wrapped. Me and Coochie are going home.”
“You’re not wrapped until I say you’re wrapped,” stated Travis.
“You can’t force me to have sex,” she retorted.
“No, but I can make you stay for dialog.”
“There’s no more dialog.”
“If you don’t do the scene, as written,” Travis said, “Then I have to do a rewrite. The whole movie is about your dream sequence. I can make you dream anything. You’re going to have to stay and watch Jasmine have sex with….”
“With who?” asked Howard, since all the other performers had already completed work.
“Is Ginger still here?” inquired Travis, “See if she’ll do the scene.”
“I’d better stop her.” Howard exerted himself off the sofa, and left the office, with all the haste he could muster.
“You’re going to make me stay on camera for the entire scene?” Tiffany demanded.
“That’s how I want to direct it.”
She advanced until her face was close to his. “You are a scum slurping, wart speckled amphibian.”
The cold-blooded producer followed a course of pre-emptive action rather than engage in a fight he was going to lose. “And you’re fired.”
“You can’t fire me.” The star felt she was invincible. “I’m under contract to AXE.”
“I’m firing you off my movie.”
She had already concluded all her work on the movie, so her termination was purely symbolic, but it was effective and demeaning. Tiffany stormed out, and charged down the hallway, still wearing her nightgown, with Coochie nipping at her heels, in the role of angry mascot, just as Howard and Ginger were coming along it from the other direction. Like a flight attendant strutting through an airport, Ginger was trailing her suitcase full of clothing, which she had been about to load into the trunk of her car when Howard halted her in the parking lot and offered her another scene. Neither woman gave way in the hallway. Nobody broke stride. Tiffany glared at her replacement, from a distance. She turned her head to continue her smoldering gaze, as the two full-bosomed women brushed past each other, like great ocean frigates passing in the night.
“She needs to go back into make-up,” Howard said, stopping in the office to tell Travis.
Ginger’s face was wiped clean. “I didn’t know you needed me anymore. I took a shower.”
“That’s okay, sweetheart.” Travis came around the desk to hug her and squeeze her derriere, in keeping with his directorial responsibilities. “You’re okay to work with Jasmine?”
Ginger quivered. “If you need.”
Maria came into the production office. “I heard I have to put Ginger back together again?”
“Sorry, Maria,” said the director, “We had a Tiff.”
“Ginger’s easy, as long as she doesn’t get to feel neglected,” Maria advised, “But now Jasmine’s upset.”
“Nicholas is talking to her,” Howard reported, “He’ll smooth her out. She’s been waiting three days to do her scene.”
“It’s not that.” Maria shook her head. “She was crying. I have to re-do her mascara, and her lashes look like spider webs.”
Maria completed her repairs in record time, putting Ginger back together again more handily than all the King’s horses and all the King’s men, and mopping up Jasmine. On the final scene, Jasmine and Ginger performed like acrobats, especially given the last minute switch of partners in the duo, but, although the production wrapped safely on time, on budget, and on schedule, Travis had an uneasy feeling that his problems navigating Dreamboat were still ahead of him.
Tiffany got her story in first, which not only gave her an insurmountable advantage, but was also, an amazing tale.
The following afternoon, Duncan glowered at Travis and Nicholas across his desk. “She says you fired her because she refused to have intercourse with you.”
The producer was not intimidated by the volatile studio boss.
“You know, there were six other whores on the set if I wanted to have intercourse with someone, but, if it’s quite okay with everybody, I prefer to go home and bang my wife.”
“I paid you a fortune to deliver me two scenes with Tiffany West, and I only got one. She’s the star of the movie, and she’s hardly in it.”
“Duncan,” Travis leaned forward with his chin out in more ways than one, in an appeal to the mogul’s famous sense of integrity, “If she refused to do the scene, what was I supposed to do? Were we supposed to hold her down and rape her? Because if that’s what you wanted, you have the wrong producer for that.”
Duncan let the producer’s words sink in; Nicholas sat slumped in his chair with his head down, and his fingers loosely clasped. Then the studio boss said, “I don’t have problems like this with Alec Zig. I am taking you off this movie, and letting him finish up the post-production.”
“You’re turning my picture over to Alec Zig?” Travis had plans to ride the wave of publicity that the blockbuster release would generate. “This movie is going to be nominated in Las Vegas….”
“And I’m putting his name on the movie too,” Duncan added, “It will sell more pieces. It cost too much to make and now we are going to have to scrape to recoup the budget….”
“You can’t do that….” argued Travis.
“Read your contract,” Duncan responded bizarrely, because they all knew that the deal was done on a handshake and nobody had signed anything, “I own the picture.”
“In all my years making movies, I have never heard of the studio siding with a piece of ass over the producer.”
“That’s it,” concluded the mogul, “Get out. You’re fired.”
“You can’t fire him, sir,” Nicholas said quietly.
“Why can’t I fire him?”
“Because he doesn’t work for you,” Nicholas reminded Duncan, “He’s an independent contractor.”
Duncan glared at him for this correction. “You work for me?”
“Yes, sir.” Nicholas swallowed.
“Good, then you’re fired.”
The former Head of Production and Creative Affairs turned pale.
The producer rallied to the defense of the executive. “You can’t fire him….”
“Why can’t I fire him?”
“Because he didn’t do anything.”
“Exactly.” Duncan had his own internal logic. “Pasquale, you have one hour to clean out your desk. Lazar, I want you off the premises in thirty seconds or security will escort you to the door.”
The President of AXE himself came into the lobby, arms crossed in front of the display cases and the waterfall, to witness Travis depart.
Stepping out into the parking lot, Travis turned back with his hands half-raised, as the door swung behind him, and said deferentially, “Okay. I’m off.”
He took a stride towards the Mercedes in the guest parking spot, had another notion in hindsight, and catching the door before it swung closed, he turned back to offer one last comment to Duncan. Flanked by a security guard, Duncan was still standing in the lobby like a watchdog, as Travis came back into the building, and as soon as their eyes locked, before the producer could utter a word–with a fist raised–the mogul thundered at him, “Off again!”