Chapter Ten
“Mr Fitzroy? Ready for your screen test now, studio
two.”
Laurie
regarded the wall-mounted speaker from which he'd been summoned.
Douglas Brett might have been keen to get hold of him, but now he
was here, he was clearly just one of some two dozen hopefuls, and
being treated as such.
That was
fine. Everything was dreamlike around him. He expected to wake up
in bed with Sasha any minute. They'd spent the weekend in Brighton,
rather self-consciously enjoying themselves. Laurie had put the
Merc's top down and driven them around the coast, up into the sunny
hills, and Sasha had shown him an old Roma trick of filling the
scratch in the paintwork with wax crayon. Everything was fine.
Earlier that morning Laurie had cancelled his second rehearsal with
Sir Ralf, and had heard in the admin lady's voice this time the
crackle of his bridges being burned.
So be
it. He stood up and gave the other young men awaiting their call a
sympathetic grin. He wanted to tell them not to give up, that if
they'd got this far they were obviously good. It was just hard luck
for them today.
Studio
two was a windowless cube. Laurie had done TV work before,
interviews and masterclass videos for RADA, and he knew not to
expect the thrill that touched him whenever he entered theatre
space. So much of that was to do with smell—dust and velvet, the
indefinable glimmer left in the air by thousands of enraptured
minds. He didn't spare a glance at the lights, the cabling or the
acoustic panels on the walls. A state-of-the-art digital movie
camera was set up on its tripod facing a blank screen. That was
Laurie's target, the person he'd come here to meet. He shrugged out
of his jacket, slung it onto a chair and took up
position.
There
were people in the cube. At first they took as little notice of
Laurie as he had of them. A sound engineer was checking the
camera's mic. In the background, two women were conferring over a
clipboard. One of them looked up at him. She was lean and tanned,
her fair hair swept back in a ponytail. Laurie stood motionless
beneath her examination, respectful but indifferent. She wasn't the
point. “Green screen or blue?” she asked eventually, addressing the
question to someone unseen behind Laurie's back. Laurie heard in
her accent the sound of a far Pacific shore, and suddenly felt the
distance he was about to try and leap. He repressed a shiver and
stood still.
“Oh, thank God,” the voice behind him declared, its cadence
much nearer to home. Laurie guessed that Ivory Gate had flown its
own producers in but were using British studio staff. “Something to
do at last.”
“Not my fault if the last three didn't even warrant a matte.
Green or blue?”
“Doug said to use blue for the tests. Keep costs
down.”
The
blonde woman snorted in a manner which suggested that costs were
the least of Doug's problems. “Have you seen the colour of this
one's eyes? You can explain to Doug why they've vanished in the
cut. And it's not like we have to key out the reds from his skin.
Get the green. And hurry up—we're running late already.”
Laurie
glanced over his shoulder. A technician was rolling a lurid green
backcloth down to ground level. “Under his feet, Libby?”
“No, that'll do for a head shot. Okay.” The woman strode
forward, hand outstretched. “I'm Libby Palermo, Douglas Brett's
production manager.”
“Laurie Fitzroy. I understood Mr Brett would be
here.”
“Hell, no. He can't be in studio for every screen test. You'll
get to meet him later on if things go well today.” She gave Laurie
a sarcastic onceover. “Is that good enough for you?”
Laurie
returned her look. He sensed that a less blue-eyed, pale-skinned
young hopeful would already be out on his ear by now, and nodded in
acknowledgement, smiling. “For now.”
“Oh, I'm so very relieved. Here's your script. Location is a
mountain top in Kathmandu. Your character is Devlin Steele, a young
British vampire who—”
“Yes.” Laurie didn't mean to cut her off, but he'd done his
homework for this role. He'd had a few stiff drinks and sat through
the first Blood Moon trilogy on DVD while Sasha was out. He'd even read a few
celebrity gossip columns. “The guy who's going to replace Valentine
Frost, right?”
Libby
blanched beneath her tan. “Hush! No-one knows how BM Four will end.
Not even the actors. It's a closely guarded secret.”
“The showbiz columnists seem pretty sure.”
“Cheap speculation. You'd do better not to join them in it,
especially around here.”
She was serious, though Laurie couldn't for the life of him
tell why. He'd wept with laughter throughout most of first
two Blood Moon films, and a six-year-old could have worked out where the plot
was going. Still, he hadn't yet gained his objective. He didn't
want to tread on any toes. “All right. Sorry.”
“Devlin and Valentine Frost confront each other on the
mountain. Since you're so well informed, you'll already know that
Devlin is a nightmare prophecy who's haunted the Frost family for
years. In this scene he tells Valentine that he holds the secret to
the Frosts’ immortality.” She handed Laurie the script, whose ten
pages Laurie glanced through absently. “So. We're looking for an
actor who can play a villain with charm and make our
Blood Moon audiences love
him whether they want to or not. I hear from Douglas that you're
something of an expert in that area.”
Yes, and it almost killed me. Laurie
was startled at the thought: he hadn’t realised. Still, trotting
out BM’s kindergarten baddie would be easy, not like wrestling with
Bertram for possession of his own soul. He handed back the script
to Libby. “Okay.”
“Decided against it?” She folded her arms and gave Laurie a
look of relief and grudging respect. “I thought you might. To be
honest, I was shocked to see you here. Doug has a thing about you,
but I know you’re a serious stage actor, and...”
“I’m sorry?”
“I gather you’re not gonna read for us.”
“Read? Oh, you only want audio?”
“No, we want you to play the scene.” She tapped the rolled-up
script against her palm. “From this. Laurie, have you never done a
cold read for camera before?”
“No. Plenty for theatre parts. But Devlin only has twelve lines
here—I don’t need the sheets.”
Now he’d
annoyed her. He wasn’t sure how. Had he been arrogant? But his scan
of the script had more than sufficed for him to learn it. He could
soak up whole dialogue sets in only a little more time than this.
She was shrugging, retreating back to her chair. “Whatever. Mikey,
Sal—cue him in and roll.”
Laurie
took a bewildered step back. The screen behind him rustled as he
bumped it with his elbow. Before he’d steadied himself, a cameraman
appeared from nowhere, and a girl interposed a digital clapperboard
between Laurie and the lens. “BM Four audition for Devlin Steele,
Laurence Fitzroy. Take one.”
Libby
nodded curtly from the shadows. “Action.”
Laurie
reached for composure. He’d been thrown in at the deep end of much
bigger pools than this, and the sharks had been live, five hundred
expectant faces waiting to see him swim or drown. Okay. He was
Devlin Steele, a wicked, charming vampire up a mountain in
Kathmandu. A fit of giggles was lurking dangerously under his
lungs. “Frost! You were a fool to meet me here. But your kind don’t
feel the cold, do they?”
He
paused. Did Libby want him to do Valentine’s lines as well? He
could, effortlessly. The sultry caramel tones of the Frost actor
were available to him, latest addition to the limitless archive of
accents and idiolects he had absorbed over the years. But after a
second a dull, bored English voice chimed in from somewhere behind
the camera. “Your kind’s my kind, Devlin. Or don’t you know that
yet?”
“Know it? I was sucking blood in the backstreets of
Revolutionary France while you were still a mortal child in
diapers.” Laurie held back a question about Revolutionary diapers
and gave the poor prompt boy a look he wouldn’t soon forget: this
was clearly the big reveal. “Did you never wonder who was lurking
by your cradle? Whose shadow passed your bedroom window by the
light of the full moon—the blood moon, Valentine?”
“Cut! Cut, cut, cut.”
The cameraman straightened up. The prompt boy wandered
indifferently back to the coffee machine, and Libby leapt out of
her chair and stalked over to Laurie. “Over the top.
Way over the top. Have
you ever worked against green screen? Do you know what it’s
for?”
Laurie didn’t care. He was back in the kitchen with Sasha,
reading the one review he shouldn’t have. Overwrought. Hothouse. For an instant
his nerve failed him and he wanted to bolt for the door. “No,” he
said distractedly. “It's for cartoons, that kind of thing, isn't
it?”
“It's for...” Libby sounded a little winded. She took a deep
breath and tried again. “It's for high-tech computer-generated
backgrounds.”
“I think that's what I meant.”
“No. When, for example, we can't transport you into deep
space—much as we might like to—we film you against a green screen
or a blue. Then our chroma-key computers strip out the green from
the footage, and we can replace it with any CG backdrop we
like.”
Laurie
tried to listen. He was being taught something about his new world,
a world he planned to storm and conquer before he left this room.
“Why green for me rather than blue?”
“Green's more expensive, but it's better and more sensitive.
And, if an actor has...” She paused, as if right now it was killing
her to say any good of him. “If he has particularly blue eyes, it
can be tough not to key them out on a blue-screen matte. And all
this is done using HD cameras that can pick out every open pore and
pimple you might have—if
you'd ever had any—so try again, this time as if
Valentine was right there in front of you, not in the back row of
the New York Opera House. Understood?”
“Yes. I think so.”
“You think so? Any questions?”
“Er... Why Kathmandu?”