XI Jack
XI
Jack
“I watched How to Steal a Million last night,” I announce to CJ as I stride up alongside her after arriving early to the lot one evening the following week. She’s standing in front of a set as art PAs mill about.
“Oh yeah?” She doesn’t turn to look at me, but I can see her eyes flash with excitement. Two days prior, she’d rattled off a list of movies I needed to watch to rectify my “honestly shameful” knowledge gap around Audrey Hepburn. I’d tapped the assignment into a note I keep on my phone titled “CJ” that’s mostly littered with questions I want to ask her.
Around us, crew members are prepping Gatsby’s living room for an overnight shoot. What was once an immaculate, practically gleaming apartment is now covered in detritus left over from one of Gatsby’s parties. Signs warn that it’s a hot set, meaning: The trash is intentional. CJ and Brianna monitor the progress. We’re now nearly two weeks into filming, and staying on schedule is paramount.
“You know, when I was a kid,” CJ starts. She still has eyes on the set, but she shifts closer to me. “I thought that Audrey played the same character in every movie. Like an Audrey Hepburn Cinematic Universe.”
“A-H-C-U. Sounds close to ‘achoo,’ but we can work with it,” I say, going for a joke.
CJ tries to mask a grin, but I don’t hide mine. Her eyes move across the space, and I follow them to find Timmy heading toward us. Missing from the top of his head is his Knicks hat, which is clutched tightly in his hands. I’ve never seen him without it before. He has a strained, anxious look on his face.
“Give me a second,” she tells me as she steps away to meet him.
I watch the pair exchange words in my peripheral vision. Or, rather, I watch as Timmy tells CJ what’s plaguing him, and she nods thoughtfully, jumping in with a reaction here and there. After a few minutes, she grabs her walkie.
Almost immediately, a PA materializes at my side, ushering me to my trailer, and I follow begrudgingly. I want to stay and witness CJ at work. My brain tingles pleasantly at the prospect of watching her solve a particularly vexing puzzle, and I realize that were we ever in any kind of danger, I’d risk being too turned on watching her swing into action to be much help at all.
When I reemerge, summoned at last, we aren’t at Gatsby’s house: We are at a replica of Bemelmans, the famed Carlyle Hotel bar in New York. An earlier scene between Daisy and Jordan—one that wasn’t in the book or any of the other film versions—was set there, but I’m not sure what we’re doing back again. Because the crew had already started breaking it down, they’d taken the last few hours to rebuild it, which means the shot list had to be thrown out and rewritten, which means we are in for an even later night than planned.
In scenarios like this, an actor can go one of two ways: Ask a slew of questions and slow things down further, or zip it and roll with it. It’s door number two for me. Whatever the explanation, I know CJ worked painstakingly to duplicate the bar, and this, if anything, is another chance to showcase it.
“Sorry about the last-minute change,” Timmy mumbles when Boone and I take our places alongside extras filling out the milieu. There’s no time for rehearsal; we will have to wing it. “Are we ready to rock?”
I look over at CJ, sitting behind the monitor next to Timmy. Her face is fixed with concentration. She’s told me over coffee how much she hates these last-minute changes, when attention to detail gets discarded, but I’d never know it by observing her. She appears calm, poised, and ready to get to work. Nothing on her face suggests exhaustion, even though it’s now 11p.m. and she is staring down the barrel of a twelve-hour shift.
“Rolling,” I hear.
“The first time I saw her, we were only seventeen years old,” Boone says, a rueful Gatsby. “She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life.” He looks away from me, down at the bar.
I open my mouth, but Timmy jumps in before I can get my line out.
“Cut! They should be drinking something. It doesn’t make sense that they’d be at a bar and not drinking.” He turns to CJ. “Can we have glasses and prop liquor?”
“The ones we used for the other bar scene are in storage now.”
“We can use whatever we have around. Brianna, grab the closest glasses and bring them over.”
“Timmy, let us get the right ones,” CJ says calmly.
“You really think anyone cares about what glasses they drink from?”
“Respectfully, they do. Otherwise I wouldn’t have a job.”
Everyone on the crew is watching, waiting to see if this will morph into a full-blown argument or remain a skirmish. There isn’t a trace of anger—or any emotion—in CJ’s voice. She’s confident and assured. Neither loud nor quiet, neither timid nor condescending. The same way she managed those fans the first night we met.
I’ve never seen anyone up close with so much conviction in my entire life. I am both turned on and ready to follow her into war.
“We need to get filming. We don’t have time to get the other glasses,” Timmy insists.
“If Brianna takes the golf cart, she’ll be back with the glasses in twenty minutes. The more time we spend talking about it, the longer it’ll delay her.”
“We don’t have twenty minutes.”
“If we’ve been waiting this long, another twenty minutes isn’t going to make or break anything. Would you rather wait twenty minutes to get the glasses we sourced for the bar or look at your film, know that this detail is off, and know that it will be discussed and dissected online?”
Timmy sighs and returns the Knicks cap to his head. “Brianna, go get the glasses.” And with that, she’s off.
I’ve seen countless crew members and producers capitulate to the director and many productions that were all the worse for it. I search CJ’s face for evidence that she knows what a big deal it is that she stood her ground and came out victorious. I make out the tiniest trace of a smile but only because I’m beginning to learn exactly what to look for.