Love, Camera, Action

Chapter 6

CHAPTER SIX

“It’s big, isn’t it? Bigger than you’d think. Heavy and thick,” Cali said.

Paolo took in the long wooden pepper grinder in his hand, considered its size, its weight, its girth. Cali’s lips quirked up in a little smile, and she snuck a glimpse at Jory, who, to her delight, was ever so slightly shaking his head, as though she were acting like a badly behaved teenager. Which she was.

She had survived—so far. This was her second week on The Demon , and this morning they were shooting the real-life meeting between Paolo and Thalia’s characters, Rafe and Anna. Having so far only connected in the dream world, Anna’s corporeal form was ramping up her possession of Rafe by way of an in-person meeting at the chichi restaurant where Rafe worked his day job. Paolo looked devastatingly ethereal in crisp server blacks while he waited on his literal dream woman, Thalia/Anna, and her blond “Best Friend” as she was named in the script. The restaurant was all chrome and glass minimalism, accentuating Thalia’s dangerous dark beauty and knockout curves caressed by a fuchsia cashmere sweater. Extras sat at the other tables, bored but quiet while the crew made final adjustments.

Cali, meanwhile, was deep into her option-three battle plan, which was, in essence, to chill everyone the fuck out. Stage one of the third option involved smoothing out her rocky start with a series of methodically placed bricks of efficiency. Every night, no matter how little sleep she got, she came up with a watertight plan that made the crew breathe easy and appeased Jory’s regimented nature. If there were issues, she was quick to find solutions. Shot taking too long? Cut time from the following scene. Problems with clunky dialogue? Have a quick consultation with the writer, to come up with better lines. Framing not quite right? Show deference to Jory without giving up too much control, resulting in a begrudging grunt of respect.

It helped that Howard was back in LA, dealing with some issue in the writer’s room. The entire cast and crew had collectively dropped their shoulders, able to do their work without worrying how it would be judged and torn apart.

Then she’d begun stage two: Jory needed to play.

Cali’s smile grew as she remembered the exchange she’d had last week with Jory outside the edit bays. Watching his icy facade melt away under boyish embarrassment as the sex sounds wove around them? Hilarious. And she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to ruthlessly tease him. He’d been a mess . He’d actually begun to stammer, and when the realization of what she was doing dawned across his face, his mortification was priceless.

He was all brisk efficiency and cool consideration, but there was no joy in anything he did. And maybe if he had more fun, he’d let go of the reins so she could do her job without interference. She had to show him that, despite the arduous schedule and warring egos, shooting a TV series—and about a demon no less—could be a hilarious riot. When you thought about it, what they did every day was kind of ridiculous. They had long discussions over whether a cape looked evil enough, or if the amount of water the rain machine sprayed on Rafe’s window was foreboding or maudlin, or what size the hellfire portal should be in the ice-cream parlor. Somewhere along the line Jory had lost his sense of play. Assuming he’d had it in the first place.

She started her campaign with the crew. She’d rejected Thalia’s view that all the men were enemy combatants. Antagonism would only raise tensions, and it wasn’t really her style. Instead, she gave out prizes for the most creative T-shirt. She had the crew whoop when the actors got a shot in the first take. She started a betting pool on when they would finish each day. The strategy was working on the crew, and on Jory as well.

He still moved around like a professional robot, but wry smiles or huffs of surprise occasionally eked out, and she was able to sneak in her ideas more freely. She watched closely for those tiny chinks in his armor, collecting them like shiny pieces of glass.

And he watched her. She didn’t know if it was to make sure she was following the rules or because she was an incomprehensible entity he couldn’t figure out, but she knew he was watching, even if he didn’t. Which made her the teensiest bit reckless. How far could she push him while still staying in the realm of professional behavior? In the restaurant scene, this particular brand of play she was experimenting with was on the cheeky side. And his little scandalized headshake was a good indication she was on the right path.

Cali focused on Paolo, his pepper grinder in hand. “Have you ever been a waiter, Paolo?”

Paolo let out a “pfft,” as though he would never stoop to such levels. At the table, blond, blue-eyed, and buxom Best Friend giggled, clearly smitten. He rewarded her with a dazzling smile.

“Okay, well … it’s a busy job that requires you to appear in control. Servers are always on the edge of chaos, even as they try to keep everything smooth and easy, to make sure their customers feel attended to. At the same time, those customers want something that’s a waste of the server’s precious time—more water, a cleaner fork, to know how much paprika is in the special. These lovely women here”—Cali gestured to Thalia and Best Friend—“want freshly ground pepper. Do you think they need pepper? No. Have they tasted their food to see if they need pepper? No. They just want some pepper ground onto their food because they think it looks fancy. So the best way to look fancy is efficiency of movement.”

She grabbed the pepper grinder from Paolo and brandished it like a pro. Mainly because she had been a pro. When she couldn’t find a gig on a set, she’d served at restaurants that ran the gamut from high-class to grungy, in order to pay for her expensive filmmaking habit.

Cali caressed the pepper grinder ever so subtly, showing it off to Thalia and Best Friend. “First you offer it as though it were a gift. The gift of your pepper grinder.”

Cali stole another glance at Jory, who was rubbing the back of his neck. She wrapped her fingers around the wood with the slightest suggestion. “A firm grip on the base with one hand and a quick twist at the head with the other, and the pepper comes shooting out.”

Jory coughed.

Zing. Another chink in the armor. “Efficient, controlled, effective. And if you do it like that, it will be even more awkward when you grind your pepper into the mimosa of the woman who has been invading your dreams.”

Cali slapped the grinder back into Paolo’s hands, and Thalia shot Cali a smirk.

“What?” Paolo asked Thalia.

Thalia shook her head à la “If you don’t get it, I’m not going to tell you.”

Paolo shrugged her off. Cali was beginning to wonder if his defensiveness was a cover for being deeply shy. If she could take a guess, Paolo had big respect for Thalia and was slain every time she mocked him.

Best Friend pursed her perfectly full, red lips. “I like pepper.”

“Oh, I like pepper too,” Cali said. “That’s just what the server is thinking.”

“Really?” Best Friend’s eyebrows shot up as though she was surprised servers had thoughts at all.

“Yes.” Cali turned back to Paolo. “Keep your eyes on Thalia’s—remember, this is the first time you’ve seen her in real life—and angle the grinder down so it crosses your chest. Holding it like that, um … highlights your biceps.”

Pleased with the setup, Cali walked off to Video Village. She sat in her chair while she waited for the scene to start. Empty spaces of time could wind her up more than anything, allowing her internal chatter to seep through the silent cracks. On the surface, she knew most people saw her as a calm but energetic person who was always in control. Internally she was thrashing around in a fast river of anxiety, desperately fighting to keep from being swept away. She’d learned being calm meant her mother might not descend into despair and/or fury quite as fast if, say, the dinner spilled on the floor, or the package didn’t arrive, or the date was canceled. And that outward calm helped her on set. But Cali’s boundless internal energy would always spill out, no matter how much she tried to squelch it. She did her best to monitor her breathing while her leg began its inevitable bounce.

Jory drifted from set to his chair beside her. Talk about efficiency of movement. No action was wasted, every motion purposeful: his strong fingers adjusting the focus of the camera; his shoulders straining through his T-shirt as he aimed a light; his smile like an aphrodisiac to the office staff, whom he left tittering in his wake. He was all languid confidence and easy sexuality. So chill, she sometimes wondered if he was even breathing, not trying to breathe like she was.

She pulled her attention back to the monitor, put on her Jory blinders as the set readied, and called, “Action.”

Paolo sailed into the scene like he’d been serving all his life. She’d had a hunch he would respond well to physical direction, and it was paying off. Any coaching that involved him having to use his head didn’t make a stick of difference to his performance, but give him something to do , and he was all ease and fluidity, as though he were born to act.

He masterfully wielded the pepper grinder to land at just the angle Cali had shown him, with a subtle cheekiness that caused Joanne, who was onset Makeup, to let out a little guffaw. Huh. Paolo could be funny. Who knew? Even Thalia registered surprise before she segued into an expression of wry amusement more in keeping with her character.

What the actors didn’t realize was that Cali had angled the grinder that way to place a visual barrier between Paolo and Thalia in obvious symbolic innuendo—a wall to be climbed, a boundary to be crossed, while signaling the mounting sexual tension between the characters. Cali loved those simple embellishments that added psychological weight to a scene, even if those cues were only subconscious. Plus, the pose really did show off Paolo’s biceps.

Jory sat forward, squinting at the screen. Cali stopped her breath entirely. This was it. Jory was about to rave over her quiet ingenuity. He raised his long finger to the monitor in slow motion, and she followed that finger along his muscled forearm, across his sculpted shoulder, and up to his eyes—those intensely focused eyes that now pinned her to her director’s chair. “Your little phallic symbol is making the bad guy look like a bobblehead.”

Cali’s gaze shot to the monitor where “the bad guy” stood in the doorway, watching the scene. Tragically, only his head was visible. Cali’s pepper grinder–cum–phallic symbol blocked the rest of his body, making him look like, yes, a live bobblehead.

Cali’s shoulders slumped. “Damn it.”

“Paolo has to move the pepper grinder.” Jory sat back.

“I’m trying to use that pepper grinder as a—”

“I know what you’re trying to do with the pepper grinder.” He answered her in a tone she could only describe as chastising. “Your thinly veiled attempt at sex symbolism needs to go.”

Cali’s mind raced for an alternative. “What if we changed the angle of the camera?”

“You’d rather change the camera’s angle than the pepper grinder’s?”

“When you put it like that, it sounds frivolous,” Cali whined. Ugh, she hated whining. She straightened in her chair and cleared her throat.

“This is not the symbol you want to die on. Pick another one.”

He leafed through his script, already moving on. No discussion. No collaboration. Decision made, edict delivered. Cali realized, as much as Jory had begun to loosen up over the past week, he had also delivered equal doses of condescension that fed the doubt percolating under the skin, turning her mood as black as unexposed film in the light. “You won’t discuss the possibilities?”

“I’ve already run through the possibilities, and it won’t work.”

Cali got off her chair and walked closer to the camera, taking in its sight lines. “What if you moved the camera to the left?”

He burrowed into his chair, appearing more and more like a jaded king issuing orders from his throne. “Then we lose the light from the overhead counter, thrusting—” Jory raised an eyebrow in obvious sarcastic homage to her innuendoes, “Paolo into darkness.”

“What about to the right?”

“Then I lose Thalia.”

“What about from below?”

Jory squeezed his eyes shut. “The only option is to raise the camera higher, but then we’ll have to change where the actors sit and their lights, which will take another half an hour.”

He really had thought through all the possibilities. She should have known. While obsessing over his manly form, she’d clocked his nearly constant, infinitesimal changes to each frame, his busy mind calculating every element coming into play for the shot. He also never factored her ideas into those calculations.

“I would like to bring some psychological depth to the scene.” Cali lowered her voice, aware of the crew around them, yet unable to control her petulance oozing out. “Or didn’t you study film theory at AFI?”

Jory scoffed. “You want to talk film theory?”

“It’s a simple concept.”

“Yep. Phallic symbols are pretty simple. Where did you go to school?”

Cali blushed. And of course, he noticed. He slid out of his chair, keeping his volume low while his body vibrated with intensity. “Ah! The school of experience. Not much film theory taught there, from my understanding. If by chance you had read any theory lately, you’d know no one cares about that stuff anymore. Symbolism is dead.”

Cali knew the crew was listening, that they couldn’t keep the intensity of the argument from them, but her temper was edging out her good sense, fueled by his patronizing tone. “ I learned on the ground that people want meaning.”

“No, they don’t. They don’t give a crap about what they put in their eye holes.”

Cali stepped closer in an attempt to keep quiet, and a current shot down her spine at his nearness. His body tensed and a flush ignited over his skin. “I think they watch because something calls to them, to whatever they yearn for inside, some kind of connection.”

“It’s a pepper grinder!” he exclaimed.

“It’s a phallic symbol!” she answered.

On set, Paolo piped up, “Is this grinder supposed to be my cock or something?”

Thalia blasted out a surprised laugh. “ Ding, ding, ding! You got it!”

Paolo gave her a smug look. “This is nothing compared to what I got, baby.”

“If you’re bigger than that pepper grinder, I don’t want you anywhere near me.”

Any hope of keeping the argument between them vanished, and even though Cali knew she shouldn’t involve the cast and crew, Jory’s inflexibility infuriated her. She marched over to set and motioned between Thalia and Paolo. “This needs spark. Some unknowable something that moves between them that the audience can pick up—a signal that these two are already half in love.”

Jory crossed his arms. Cali could feel the whole crew still as they watched their creative heads square off. “The audience will see him look at her and her look at him, and fill in the blanks themselves. It’s called ‘projection.’ Nothing needs to spark.”

“We”—Cali motioned to everyone, her arm gestures getting bigger as her frustration mounted—“need to differentiate one look from another, to signal they recognize each other as ‘The One’ rather than just another person they’re passing in anonymity.”

“ ‘The One’ ”—Jory made sarcastic air quotes—“can’t be represented by a phallic symbol. And people don’t fall in love with a look. Love is deeper than that. It’s not gazing across a table; it’s years of commitment.”

“You don’t believe in love at first sight?”

He snorted. “Do you?”

“I don’t believe in ‘The One’ at all.” She mimicked his air quotes. “It’s the audience who believe in ‘The One,’ and watching the initial connection gives them a thrill. But no, love at first sight isn’t a thing. If love is a thing at all.”

“It is too a thing.” Suddenly Joanne from Makeup stepped from the shadows onto the set, pushing her fire-engine-red hair off her brow, demanding to be heard. “I knew the second I laid eyes on my Joey. Bam! I almost fainted.” She let out a big laugh, lost in the memory. “Joey didn’t know right off, but that’s men for you.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” From the other side, Dan waved his arms. “When I saw Kelly, my heart stopped. Literally. I went to the doctor to make sure I hadn’t messed up my ticker.”

Cali’s excitement rose. Her personal opinion that romantic love was hogwash, a concept designed to make prey of vulnerable women, was unpopular. She’d watched how it had destroyed her mother and sister time and time again. And how it rocked Cali’s world by default: she’d been out of school for weeks because her mother couldn’t get out of bed after her breakup with Patsy’s father, and she’d had to hide grocery money so her mother wouldn’t give it to Rick. But the crew was making her point, so who cared? “And what was it like?” she asked.

“It was like … um. It’s hard to explain.” Dan squinted at Joanne for help.

“Yeah, it’s like … well …” Joanne screwed her face up, stumped.

“It’s like your whole world was washed in gray and then suddenly explodes into color.” Paolo’s voice had entered the fray, steeped in painful, bittersweet understanding.

Jory blanched.

Paolo went on, “It’s as though you weren’t breathing before, and now that you are, every breath scrapes across the pain of loneliness you feel without them. But you relish that pain since it means you exist only because they do.”

The room fell silent. Paolo started, as though surfacing from a trance, and blushed just as Dan stepped in to save him. “Yeah, it’s like that.”

Joanne smiled gently at Paolo. “It’s exactly like that.”

The unexpected tenderness from them both allowed a sad smile to surface. And then Paolo wiped it away as he tipped his head down.

Thalia snarled. “That’s just a myth the patriarchy cooked up to ensnare young girls into thinking they’re unworthy unless they find love. It’s a complete fabrication.”

Cali privately agreed with Thalia but kept quiet so her point carried.

“It is not a myth.” All eyes swung to Jory. “But it’s also not something you can capture with a glance or a sigh or a phallic symbol or whatever the fuck. Because it is something deeper. It is something better, something more solid and ephemeral than anything else in the world. Love is the world, and it envelops everyone in this beautiful blanket that not even death can deny. We should be striving for that , but instead we have to bow to whatever clich é people will swallow.” Jory let out a growl of frustration. “And none of this matters when a fucking pepper grinder is blocking the entrance of the next actor. We’ve wasted enough time. Dan, set the scene up again. Paolo, move the grinder.”

Jory stormed away and the set fell into silence.

Cali wasn’t sure if she should be embarrassed for herself that Jory had usurped her authority in front of the crew or embarrassed for him because he’d thrown a hissy fit.

She held her hand up to Dan to signal she needed five, and followed in Jory’s wake.

She found him a few sets over, bathed in darkness and quiet, standing among wood-paneled walls and lush armchairs. It was the Demon Overlord set, imposing and luxurious. It spoke of privilege, history, danger.

She approached gingerly so as not to startle him. “You’re right about the pepper grinder. I shouldn’t have dug in on it. We’ll take it out.”

Jory scrubbed his face, as though trying to scrape a memory away, and nodded without meeting her gaze. She sensed him retreating from her with every movement, and even though she was still riddled with doubt over her abilities, and anger at his stubbornness, she felt desperate to pull him back, to stay here with her. “We could do something different. Something you want to try?”

“I want something greater,” he implored. “Something that isn’t run of the mill.”

Cali felt compelled to get to the source of the pain she saw in him and stepped closer. “We could figure it out together. Something better than a stupid pepper grinder.”

“It wasn’t stupid.” He searched her face as though looking for the answer to an impossible question. He stilled and Cali got the strangest feeling he was about to kiss her.

He stepped back. “It’s fine. I’m being a brat. Let’s just get through the scene.”

Cali stiffened. She didn’t know when his good opinion had become so important to her, but she couldn’t be dismissed again. “I don’t want to just get through the scene. You may not think what we’re trying to say has value, but no one ever cried their eyes out over a perfectly lit and framed shot.” Jory went slack-jawed. She pushed. “It’s the imperfection, the messiness of emotion that brings people to their knees.”

“Are you saying that what I do isn’t important?” His shock disappeared, replaced by fiery anger.

“No. I’m saying what I do is important. My job is to bring everything together, to marry the perfectly constructed shot and the heart of the scene. Form and spirit combined.”

Ice smoothed out his features, forged by a fury Cali didn’t comprehend. “And I’m telling you: No. One. Cares.”

He walked off, leaving Cali alone.

“I care,” she whispered.

The room sucked up the sound as if she hadn’t even spoken.