CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 1
Can You Forget That You’re Wearing a Mic?
“What should we toast to?” Emma says to Fred as she leans across an intimate table at Shutters on the Beach that’s nestled into the tall palm fronds that surround the greenhouse section of its restaurant, Coast.
It’s midday, brunch things on the crisp white tablecloth, a bottle of Dom Pérignon sweating in a silver bucket, the sun dappled through the cream sailcloth providing some shade above.
“To you,” Fred says, raising his fluted Champagne glass, the bubbles sliding up the inside of it, and clinking it against Emma’s as his periwinkle eyes twinkle with mischief. “To us.”
“To Rome,” Emma says. Her chestnut mane tumbles in beachy waves to her bare, thin shoulders. She looks young, innocent, and happy . “To the Giuseppes for bringing us together.”
“In death?”
“In life.”
Fred raises his glass and starts to take a drink—
“That’s not what happens in the book,” I say to my younger sister, Harper, under my breath. “And this dialogue is cringe.”
“And CUT!” Simone Banerjee pulls her headphones from her ears and glares at me across Video Village. She’s wearing a pair of dark blue coveralls with her name embroidered over her left breast where her heart should be. “Did someone explain to The Writer that there’s no talking while we’re rolling?”
Shawna Kassel, Simone’s early-twenty-something assistant, shuffles nervously from foot to foot. She’s wearing an expression I associate with new mothers trying to keep their toddlers from having a tantrum in public. “I did tell her, Simone. I’ll tell her again.”
“Excuse me,” I say, putting up my hand. “Are you talking about me?”
“Is The Writer talking again ?”
“No, Simone. I’m taking care of it. Reset, everyone! We go in five.”
There’s a collective sigh from the cast and crew as Shawna beetles her way toward the table where Harper and I are sitting.
It’s the last day of filming on When in Rome , the movie, and when they asked us if we wanted to be extras, I jumped at the chance. Who wouldn’t want to be an extra in a movie based on a novel you wrote? The whole experience has been exciting and surreal, terrible dialogue notwithstanding, and the first day I walked on set and saw the world I’d created in my imagination made real, I cried .
I know, right? That’s not like me.
But anyway, I watched as many of the shoots as I could over the last forty-nine days, and now here Harper and I are, dressed as ladies-who-lunch in enough makeup that it feels like a Halloween mask.
“You’re in trou-ble ,” Harper says. They’ve swept her dark hair back into a low chignon and given her features more definition. She looks older than thirty-three, and more severe than usual.
“I don’t ca-re ,” I sing back, but that’s probably not true. No one likes being called out on a film set. Especially not one where Simone is in charge.
I shift my focus to her as she picks up her clipboard and writes something down. Probably a demerit point for me that I’ll hear about later.
She’s hated me since high school—LA is a very small town—and I knew there’d be problems between us when I learned she was going to direct When in Rome .
“Um, Eleanor?”
I look up into Shawna’s scared face. She’s got unruly strawberry blond hair and pale green eyes. I met her on day one of filming, and I swear she’s aged ten years in that time. Working for Simone will do that to you.
“What’s up, Shawna?”
“Sorry, but it’s about the talking. You can’t talk during a scene.”
“I muttered under my breath.”
“But you’re mic’d up? Remember, before you came on set, they put a microphone on you?”
“I remember.” The mic pack is resting against the small of my back, and the wire to it that’s hidden in my bra is itching under my costume in the worst way. But I’d agreed to speak a line in this scene and so it had to be done.
Besides, maybe I didn’t care if everyone heard what I thought of the dialogue in this scene. Because it’s dreadful.
People always tell me that my books would “make a great movie.” And I always answer, “Or a terrible one.” It was my stupid joke and now I’m paying for it.
Don’t put things into the universe that you don’t want coming back.
Anyway, filming’s almost over, and I don’t have script approval, 2 so it’s too late to do anything about it. But for the record, the original dialogue was much better than the lines Emma and Fred were delivering at the beginning of this chapter. 3
“Well,” Shawna says, “anything you say on mic goes into our headsets. So we can hear everything.”
“We could all hear it, headsets or no,” Emma says with a laugh. She’s holding an empty Champagne glass in her left hand. Normally, the Champagne in a scene is colored water, but knowing Emma, she’s figured out a way to sneak real Champagne on set.
It’s the sort of thing we would’ve planned together until recently. Now she goes to Fred first, which is as it should be, but I already miss the intimacy we had.
Emma is that Emma, by the way. Emma Wood, who commands $5 million a picture.
We grew up next to each other in Venice Beach, and Emma’s the reason I got a publishing deal. And, more relevant to this particular story, she’s playing me in the movie. I mean, not actually me, but Cecilia Crane, my alter ego. 4
“I spoke the truth,” I say to Emma as I pull a face she’s more than familiar with. “Sue me.”
“I like to avoid litigation wherever possible,” Emma says sweetly as she rises and walks to my table with grace. “But I’m sure David will be very happy to hear your thoughts about the script.”
She means David Liu, the screenwriter of this shit show.
I mean the movie I’m very happy is being made.
“Surprisingly, he’s proven unreceptive to my notes.” 5 , 6
“You don’t say?” She smiles at me again as she reaches down and grabs my hand, pressing a folded piece of paper into it like we used to do in school, passing notes in the hallway with our special handshake.
She taps my palm three times in rapid succession, our code for keep this to yourself , and I slip the paper under my place setting. I give Emma a questioning look, but she’s already turned away and gone back to her seat.
“Anyway, the thing is,” Shawna says, doing that thing again where she hops from foot to foot, “we need to wrap in time for the party? And Simone would like to bring this in on time and on budget?”
That’s been Simone’s refrain since day one of filming: “We’re bringing this plane in on time and on budget.” And while it’s annoying to hear over and over, I don’t blame her for this.
She’s a female director. She only gets one shot.
So maybe I should cut her some slack? The sisterhood and all that.
Ha ha. No.
And okay, before you judge me, I was prepared to flip the page and start over, but Simone started calling me “The Writer” on day one and that was that.
“She won’t do it again,” Harper says to Shawna. “I promise.”
“I can speak for myself.”
“I know. That’s the problem.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be on my side?”
“You’d think a girl whose book is being made into a major Hollywood film would be happy .”
She’s right. Because Harper’s the one who always calls me on my shit.
And I was happy. I am .
When my film agent, Rich, called a few days after we’d returned from Italy to tell me the When in Rome film was finally happening, I’d been over the moon. After the book was optioned 7 ten years ago, it had lingered in development 8 for years, and I’d given up hope of it ever seeing the screen.
But all of the publicity surrounding my almost-murder in Italy had revived interest in the project. They already had a script and they wanted to rush it into production.
I’d whooped in delight and spun Harper around the kitchen, and then Emma had called, brimming with excitement. They’d offered her the part of Cecilia Crane! We were going to have so much fun ! 9
It seemed like a dream, especially when it was confirmed that Connor was going to be played by Fred Winter.
The Fred Winter! One-time Oscar-winner, big-time movie star.
Emma’s had a crush on Fred since high school, when he burst onto the scene in a schlocky surf movie that showed off his, well, assets . Ever since she disclosed that in an interview at the beginning of her career, people have been fan-casting them in movies.
And then there was the location. I’d been worried we were going back to Italy, which seemed like a bad idea with one of the people who tried to kill me still on the loose. But they’d decided to film in California. I could visit the set as often as I wanted, and Instagram about it to Harper’s content.
It all seemed too good to be true. 10
“I’ll keep quiet,” I say to Harper, and I feel bad for embarrassing her. This was supposed to be an amusing day for us, being extras in one of the last scenes, which calls for Emma and me to share a moment of eye contact, like she is looking at her future self—and, of course, she is! 11 “I didn’t mean to ruin the day.”
“One minute to slate!”
“It’s fine,” Harper says. “They always do several takes. Simone will get over it.”
“Right,” I say, but somehow I doubt it. 12
I try to make eye contact with Simone to calm the waters, but she’s deep in her clipboard. Plus, trying to speak to her would involve everyone hearing what I had to say, which I’m sure neither of us would appreciate.
She’s probably heard this entire conversation, anyway. Of course she has. I never turned my mic off. Amateur mistake.
Oh, well. Maybe I’ll find time to talk to her at the wrap party. Though I don’t know what the wrap party’s going to change. But I can always hope for the best.
Hope for the best and expect the worst, my mother used to say. And then she got hit by a drunk driver and died way too young, so I guess she knew what she was talking about.
Sorry about that. That got dark for a minute.
We are at the beginning of a murder mystery, though.
You should know it’s going to get dark.
“Places!”
I snap away from my memories and glance over at Emma’s table. A makeup artist is touching her up while the continuity girl refills her glass to the level it was at the beginning of the scene.
Emma seems so serene and calm, and then Fred 13 reaches across the table and touches her hand briefly. An intimate gesture that makes her beam.
They began dating right after they met in pre-production. They kept their relationship under wraps for the first month, but then it burst out of them after they filmed a particularly dramatic scene, and the cat, as they say, was out of the bag. 14
And I’m happy for her. I am.
I mean—Fred Winter!
Everyone says they’re perfect for each other, and I think so, too. I’ve even been taking credit for their match because, hello, if I never wrote the book, they never would’ve met.
So that’s all of us.
Am I forgetting anything?
Oh! Emma’s note.
I slip it out from under the place setting and unfold it in my lap.
“Quiet on set!”
I glance down at the note. Instead of Emma’s handwriting, it’s written in letters cut out of some publication like a newspaper or a book.
SomEonE Is GoiNg To Die At The WedDinG.
Ah, hell .
“And...action!”
2 My film agent assures me that no book writer gets script approval, but I should’ve asked for it anyway. Don’t ask, don’t get.
3 The mystery was better, too, though I knew it would be changed to fit into a movie format.
4 Quick primer: Cecilia Crane is the protagonist of When in Rome . She meets a private investigator named Connor Smith on vacation in Italy and ends up working with him to solve a series of robberies and, eventually, a murder while they conduct a whirlwind romance. The book was loosely based on my own trip to Rome ten years ago where I met the real Connor Smith and we solved some major crimes.
5 “Notes” is the Hollywood term for, well, notes on screenplays. In Hollywood, everyone has an opinion on your writing, and the screenwriter is expected to incorporate all of them.
6 Not my notes, though. David didn’t even acknowledge the multiple emails I sent him.
7 Hollywood doesn’t buy the rights to your book until they’re making the project. Instead, they “option” it, paying the writer a fraction of the eventual purchase price to hold on to the possibility of making it.
8 Hollywood speak for “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
9 For the record, Emma speaks in exclamation marks, not me.
10 Which, of course, it was! Okay, yes, I do use exclamation marks sometimes. Sparingly.
11 Did you notice how my best friend who’s my exact same age is playing me ten years younger?
12 News flash: Simone does not get over it.
13 Imagine Captain America with a smirk. Dark blond hair, steely blue eyes, a strong jaw, and a hint of something underneath.
14 This is an unfortunate expression to use for reasons that will become clear later.