Chapter 6 INT. CONFERENCE ROOM
Chapter 6
INT. CONFERENCE ROOM
Esme McCullough—Zoya’s assistant—read the description that brought the first episode of the third season of Waverley to an end: “CLOSING MONTAGE: AN ANGUISHED GEORDIE LEANING AGAINST THE WALL OF THE TOLBOOTH PRISON, AN ANGRY MOB POURS THROUGH THE STREETS OF EDINBURGH, A DETERMINED EFFIE ALONE IN HER CELL, MORE SHOTS OF THE MOB, A FRIGHTENED JEANIE HUDDLES IN HER COTTAGE, AND THE FEET OF THE HANGED MAN SWINGING. OUT.”
The room was silent. Maggie had no problem imagining it, and if everyone here did their jobs, it was going to be awesome.
Someone whooped, and the cast and crew broke into applause.
“Great work,” Zoya shouted over the clapping. “I don’t know about you all, but I’m pumped.”
Maggie might be pumped, but the nausea was doing a good job masking it.
Next to her, the stunt coordinator sat up. Ryan Baris , according to the paper tent in front of him—the guy who’d worked with Cole and Tasha several times. He folded his arms onto the table in a mirror of Maggie’s posture and said, under his breath, “You feeling all right?”
Great. Her face must be broadcasting her trepidation for everyone’s amusement. “I don’t think I realized how big this is.” Maggie had known that there would be fifty people at the table read, and even more on set once they started filming, but the sheer size of Waverley was only beginning to hit her.
“It’s like being back in Afghanistan.”
“I didn’t realize you’d served.” Since she’d never spoken with him before today, she couldn’t’ve known, but she still felt vaguely guilty.
Ryan snorted. “Why would you?”
She shrugged in apology. “I guess it’s obvious I’m a little overwhelmed.”
“Yup.”
Someone had mentioned that Ryan had gotten his start as Cole’s stand-in, and Maggie was having trouble believing it. The men had a superficial resemblance, sure, insofar as they were both tall and fit with dirty-blond hair. But they had completely different energies. Cole was a teddy bear, all soft warmth and self-deprecating smiles. Ryan had an edge that felt genuinely intimidating.
But maybe it was a front, because the look Ryan shot her was kind. “Just keep faking it, and one of these days, you’ll realize you know what you’re doing.”
“Did that work for you?”
“Yup. Just be aware, once you get a taste for this”—he gestured at the room—“it’s addictive.”
The jury was still out as far as she was concerned.
“Can you tell me something? Why are we shooting wildly out of order?” They wouldn’t finish with all the stuff for the first episode until four months from now.
“When we’re in Edinburgh in a few weeks, we have to get all of the location stuff. Then we move to the Highlands for all the pretty vista shit, and we wrap up with the interiors in the studio in Glasgow. I don’t know how they do it.” He pointed to the actors. “It would mess with my head.”
There, way down the ring of conference tables, was Tasha Russell, whom Maggie hadn’t seen since the disastrous dinner at Troncos. The actress rolled her neck before giving Cole, on her right, a small smile. Tasha had been absolutely focused during the read-through, alert and determined, like a bird of prey. But Cole was in a full-on serious mode that Maggie had never seen from him before. While most of the actors had been giving a half-strength version of their performances, feeling out the beats and logistics of the script as much as anything else, Cole had been giving it his all.
It had been exhilarating to watch. For all his worries about this part, and the moments of vulnerability that he’d shared with her, he was nailing this role.
The former-director part of Maggie was happy for him. The now-intimacy-coordinator-who-might-be-credited-with-supporting-him was delighted. But under both of those roles, Maggie was also a person. A person who’d come to care about him a totally normal amount for a couple of days of acquaintance. He was a charming, sweet guy—of course she wanted him to be amazing in this role.
That was all the tenderness in her gut was. Nothing else.
“I gotta check in with the sword guys,” Ryan said, “but holler if you need anything.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.”
Maggie flipped through her script and added a note. Check with David re: camera angles.
During the table read, she’d followed along on a clean copy of the latest version of the script. This sat next to her annotated, working, and slightly-out-of-date copy, but that one was already thick with highlighting, sticky tabs, and notes. If she’d added anything else to it, it would’ve been unusable.
Zoya, who’d been accepting congratulations, stood, and the room fell silent. “Thanks, everyone. That was great work all around. Actors, you’re free to go. Any meetings that you have with wardrobe will be delayed for a bit until I can finish conferring with Alexa. Same with Ryan on stunts and Maggie for intimacy.”
Alexa Pratt was a legend who needed no introduction. An older white woman with a stylish gray bob and chunky red-framed glasses, Alexa was currently deliberating with several assistants, who were sitting in the outer ring of chairs around the table. Ryan and Maggie were not famous. Zoya pointed to them, and they gave obligatory waves, but no one paid attention. The conference room had melted back into a mix of overlapping conversations and laughter.
Cole caught Maggie’s eye, and for a second, a smile passed over his face—just a flicker of the man underneath the movie star—and Maggie’s breath lodged in her throat. She nearly choked when he began walking through the crowd, which parted around him as he made his way over to her.
“Did you get it?” he asked her.
“Get what?”
“The Wordle. I saw you working on it when you came in.”
Cole James—the movie star—wanted to know if she’d solved today’s Wordle.
Life, it comes at you fast.
“Yup, in four. SAVVY. ” It had been a tricky one. “How many five-letter words have double V s?”
“Bevvy,” he offered.
“And divvy. Damn, there are more than I thought.”
“Well, regardless, good work.” Then, because she was only barely holding it together as it was, he leaned closer. “You okay? You were a little green. Saw Ryan checking in on you.”
At some point, when sensation returned to her body, Maggie was going to be mortified that everyone apparently could sense how out of her depth she felt. But with Cole smiling down on her, everything seemed okay with the world.
“Cole? You ready?” It was Tasha, trying to reclaim her best friend.
Which was fine. It was where his attention ought to be. Maggie wasn’t miffed at all. Nope.
“I’m fine.” Maggie considered adding some white lie, like Must have been bad fish pie , but she didn’t want to lie to him. Not even about something trivial.
“Good.” Then he returned to Tasha.
They left the room with the rest of the cast trailing behind, as if the actors were a royal court taking the lead of their king and queen.
The doors closed behind them while Zoya jotted notes on her tablet. When she finished, she paused, read over what she’d written, and gave a satisfied nod. Her eyes popped up and skimmed over the room, her expression bright and lively. “What’d you think?”
The crew began talking at once.
“That last action sequence is going to be a bear—”
“They’re still not ready for the sword choreography—”
“I have concerns about the location shooting—”
“We really have to start thinking about music—”
“Okay.” Zoya projected her voice over the din. “Let’s start with David, and then we’ll go to Kevin.”
David Keith, a Black British man who was always impeccably put together, was the director of photography and would be shooting the show. “I only have a few notes. Shirley tells me that the production is still waffling on two locations for exterior shots. The National Trust is being difficult about Gladstone’s Land, so Tom is scouting a backup plan. Alas, it’s in Glasgow, so it’d completely cock up the schedule.”
“Fuck, I don’t like to hear that. Let me send you the most up-to-date version. I wanted to have things finalized by the end of next week.”
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
“Understood.”
They were going to spread the nine table reads out over the weeks of rehearsal before they moved to Scotland. Zoya was planning to direct the first, fourth, and ninth episodes, but the directors for the rest were listening from the edges. This really was like shooting several movies at the same time.
Zoya chatted with the directors, with Alexa about wardrobe, then with Ryan for stunts.
“And Maggie, how are things coming on your end?”
“Well,” Maggie said carefully, “we’re not as far with the choreography as we’d like, but since that’s a much larger conversation, I don’t want to bog down this check-in.”
“I have time now. We good, everyone else?” Zoya asked. The room muttered assent. “Great. I’ll see you all back here Wednesday for the episode-two read-through.”
As the crew left, Zoya patted the spot next to her at the table. Maggie moved over and arranged her drawings between her two copies of the script.
“What’s going on?” Zoya asked.
“Tasha Russell is being . . .”
“Tasha?”
“Yeah. She’s made it clear she thinks this is unnecessary, even as she’s also ... look, I’m reading between the lines here, but I think she’s got some issues with nudity. Can I ask if anything came up during negotiations?”
Zoya shot a look at Esme to confirm before saying “No. We went into the nudity waiver discussion with her agent thinking there would be some pushback, but basically, she was really committed to the part. She signed the show’s standard rider.”
“It’s just that she hasn’t done nudity since Cosa Nostra . That’s a long time for an actress not to take her clothes off on screen, especially someone who takes the kinds of parts she does.”
Quite frankly, most action movies were pretty male-gaze-y. For Tasha to have maintained such a vise-tight grip on her image was impressive.
“Hmm.” Zoya wasn’t agreeing or disagreeing. Just digesting.
“You’re well connected. Did something ... happen on that set?”
Zoya smiled faintly at the flattery, seeing it as the ploy it was but accepting the offering anyhow. “What do you know about Vincent Minna?”
“That he’s won a lot of Oscars.”
“I shouldn’t say anything, really. He’s technically a producer for Waverley , though it’s really Elmer Meyers at Silverlight who’s shepherding the show. But as long as you understand that this isn’t confirmed and it has to stay buried, there are certainly ... rumors about his relationships with the actresses he discovers. And he discovered Tasha. He produced that movie. I mean, I can’t say for sure that they had an affair or whatever, but there’s a lot of smoke for there to be no fire.”
Maggie considered this. Tasha’s mom had been one of the biggest stars of her era, and her daughter seemed more like a finely honed knife than a woman. It was hard to imagine Vincent Minna steamrolling someone that well connected and fierce.
But then Maggie recalled Rhiannon, who was also strong and self-possessed with a good agent who was supposed to be advocating for her, and Rhiannon hadn’t even realized that she could object if she didn’t want to bare her entire breasts on screen.
No, this industry sucked for anyone without power. And at the beginning of her career, Tasha had had very little power, especially compared to Vincent Minna.
“That would make sense,” Maggie said. “It’d be more disappointing than surprising. But even if we’re right, it could also be that I’m just not a good fit for Tasha. It could be personal. Maybe she doesn’t like me—”
“I really doubt it’s personal.”
“I wouldn’t be offended or anything.” Maggie was a grown-up. She didn’t expect everyone to like her. “But it’s a hard industry for young women.”
“It’s a hard industry for everyone. How’s Cole doing?”
Maggie took a second to make sure her I’m-an-expert-not-a-woman-with-a-crush mask was on tight before answering. “He’s sweet. Every rehearsal, he’s very professional, very conscientious of Rhiannon and of me. He clearly wants to do a good job, and he’s talented. In the meetings I’ve had with him and Tasha, I can see the relationship between them, the mutual concern. But I worry if she and I don’t have a breakthrough soon, we’re not going to get to a point where I can help. And ... this is my job.”
At its core, Maggie was here to put the humiliation of her firing behind her and to build a new career. If she couldn’t get Tasha to come around, Maggie wasn’t exactly making a strong case that she’d be a good intimacy coordinator.
It had taken way longer—way, way longer—for her to feel like a bad teacher. Even at the end of that job, she hadn’t thought she was objectively not good at it. The problem was that the field was hostile and toxic. But she couldn’t start over yet again . She was way too old for that.
“Also, Tasha truly seems to need support.” While it would be professionally embarrassing for Maggie if she couldn’t make this work, there was an angle of this that was much larger than her piddling professional anxiety. “The entire goal of me being here is to address this dynamic—to make the intimacy easier to film and not traumatic—and I’m feeling like ... a spleen. That’s a vestigial organ, right?”
Zoya had listened to Maggie’s monologue with a focused expression that gave nothing away, but at this, she laughed. “You’re not a spleen.”
“Fine, but I am feeling stuck. I dunno, how do you get through to someone like this?”
Maggie’s high school students had been all open enthusiasm. Sometimes a kid who didn’t care ended up in one of her classes, but in her experience as a director, it was lack of talent or discipline that had been the major issues.
She had no capacity to understand the inner workings of movie stars, and Bernard hadn’t covered this subject in his lessons.
“I’d just jump into the choreography,” Zoya said. “Tasha is absolutely not a touchy-feely person. Cole, Rhiannon, Owen, Leanne: they’re going to want to work through the emotions with you. Tasha has emotions—at least, I think she does—but she doesn’t want to share them. She hates to come across as vulnerable in any way. Maybe even invite David to your next meeting. Frame it as a craft question. Where is the camera going to be? How are we going to light the scene? It helps that we aren’t filming this until we’re in the Highlands. The on-location scenes at Midlothian, plus Cole and Rhiannon’s stuff, comes sooner, so you have a longer time to figure out what’s going on with Tasha. But no one expects you to solve the riddle of Tasha Russell, I promise. Just do your best.”
That made sense.
“Is there anything else?” Zoya asked.
“Yeah. I’m sorry. I feel like the squeaky wheel. But for the Madge-and-Geordie love scene, Rhiannon and Cole found the script as is to be ... underdeveloped.”
Zoya’s eyes sparkled. She was listed as the lead writer on that episode. “Is that so?”
“Yeah. So here’s what we’ve worked out.” Maggie pushed her sketches across the table. “I apologize in advance for the quality of my art.” Maggie had bought colored pencils and had painstakingly redrawn the pictures. They weren’t better, but they were in color.
After a few beats, Zoya asked carefully, “Are they snow people?”
Esme, who was young and bright and had a mass of brown curly hair, was trying very hard not to laugh. “No, it’s Stay Puft Marshmallow Man porn. It’s only missing the jaunty hat.”
Maggie whined. “Bernard insists storyboarding is necessary.”
“I think he’s, like, a classically trained artist.”
Maggie had seen his portfolio. She believed it. “Okay, what about this?” She offered her shorthand notes instead. They were broken down shot by shot and move by move, the way she used to write down dance choreography. It listed which hand went where and what it did, from the beginning of the sequence to the end.
Cole’s words to Rhiannon kept echoing in her head: Your feelings are important too . Maggie had planned to follow Bernard’s instructions to the letter, but just as Rhiannon had, Maggie clearly had to find her own way.
“What does RL mean?” Zoya asked.
“Right leg.”
“Oh, of course.”
Zoya skimmed through the notes, then went back to the beginning and reread more slowly, consulting with the script. “This looks great. I’m really comfortable with the blocking here.”
“You can see that we changed the wardrobe to give Rhiannon a bit more coverage.”
“Yup. That’s the kind of thing that we tend to work out in the moment when we’re filming, or even in the editing room.”
That had been exactly what Bernard had predicted Zoya would say. “Directors all trust themselves to handle these things while shooting,” he’d speculated when he and Maggie had talked last night. “But that’s not good for an actor who can’t advocate for themselves, or might be lying there with no clothes on—with a disinterested crew standing around, watching—while they have a discussion about boundaries. I mean, maybe some established star can work in those conditions, but that’s not going to be the best option for a twenty-year-old kid who needs this job to pay their rent or get their SAG card.”
But when it came to how someone’s lack of power might affect their ability to speak truth to someone with power, Maggie was the pot calling the kettle black.
This was it, the heart of the job. Was Maggie able to tell Zoya she was wrong? And would Zoya accept that criticism with grace, or would she bristle?
Maggie was about to find out.
“Look, I know that I’m new at this,” Maggie said. “And I don’t want to speak out of turn. But I think it would be better to have this level of detail”—she tapped her choreography notes—“in the script. Not in a way that’s set in stone, because there needs to be some ability for the actors, the intimacy coordinator, and the director to improvise and reject and make changes. But ... if we don’t have a clear, beat-by-beat, shot-by-shot starting point, it leaves the process open for problems.”
Zoya was quiet for a long time. A long, inscrutable time.
Then, in a completely neutral tone, she said, “Like whatever went down at Cosa Nostra ?”
“Yes. Exactly. I don’t mean to be unfun or whatever, but I don’t know how an actor could know what they’re signing on to, how they could weigh a nudity waiver, if the script basically says They make passionate love . That could look so many different ways. Like is it a fade-to-black Hallmark Christmas movie or Fifty Shades of Grey ? You’re not telling them.”
Oops. That was probably too much.
After a beat, Zoya’s lips twitched. “I love it when I’m right.”
“Excuse me?” Maggie asked.
Zoya looked at Esme. “Did I call it or what?”
“You totally called it,” Esme agreed.
“Did I bet someone about this?” Zoya asked her. “Do I have some money to collect?”
“No, no one will bet you anymore because you always, always win.”
“I have no idea what’s going on here,” Maggie put in.
Zoya gave Maggie a smug smile. “I left the set of Hear Her that morning, and I texted Esme and told her we had to find room in the budget for you. Esme was skeptical, and the production company was skeptical—basically there was skepticism everywhere—but much like Cassandra when Agamemnon met his fate, I have been vindicated. I was right.” She punched the air with a fist. “You’re great at this. A natural. And the show is going to be stronger because you’re here.”
“Wasn’t Cassandra’s vindication . . . murder?”
“You’re missing the key part: I was right.”
Maggie’s mind was still picking through every sentence of Zoya’s speech as if it were a table at a flea market. “They didn’t want to hire me?”
“That’s not the point! The point is that I was right.” Zoya looked at her assistant and sniffed. “Someone really ought to be giving me five bucks.”
Maggie had no idea what Zoya was making as the showrunner, director, and writer of Waverley , but it was presumably a lot more than five bucks.
Zoya pushed the sketches and notes across the table to Maggie. “I can see your point. Next time, we’ll bring you in sooner, when we’re still writing, and you can write out the choreography for all the intimacy and nudity for us. It’s good for the actors, but it’s also good for production and design too. I’m impressed you were willing to stand your ground with me like that. Very plucky.”
“Zoya admires pluck,” Esme said. “It’s why she keeps me around.”
“I ... really appreciate you saying so. After the stuff with Tasha, I needed that vote of confidence.”
Maggie had to do this job well. She just had to. Zoya might want the vindication, but Maggie needed it. Maybe Zoya could call Maggie’s parents and mention that she was good at this and also that it was a legitimate and important job.
“You got this. I know it. And as we’ve established, I’m never wrong.”
Maggie let the compliment light up the rest of her afternoon.