CHAPTER 103 - Paint It Black (2)

Thursday was their big day.

It was the filming of the Novaks and the first of the production’s truly time-constrained sessions.

Set design had already transformed the empty apartment into something that was troubled and messy and strictly 1980s. The living room consisted of a television on a dinette chair, and a sofa with springs that sang. The fridge was full of photos that did not include Josie.

The kitchen had several scales.

None of which had anything to do with baking.

Linda had Eppie in the chair at seven with a folder of Polaroids from the corridor day propped against the mirror. The Josie in the photographs had a bruise mark across one cheek and a crust of blood in one nostril—the end result of the Novak family scene.

Linda matched Eppie’s prior shot shade for shade, down to the eyeliner. A part of it went on a shade lighter, because Josie was less tired in the morning, and her day wasn’t yet so despairing.

Tanya Novak was played by a lanky twenty-year-old from Staten Island called Dana Whitlock. At makeup, she bowed her head in advance of what was about to happen.

“If I mess up, please forgive me,” she begged the singer of the world-famous Bully Boy Shanty. “I have never struck anyone. I have a cat.”

“Hit me like you would a kitty butt,” said Eppie, invitingly. “Trust me, I’ll match your swing.”

Dana laughed awkwardly, which was natural. If she struck Eppie for real, too hard, that was the end of the day’s shoot, and someone would never be hired again.

The stunt coordinator walked them through it in the kitchen with the camera’s eye taped out on the floor in a long triangle. Dana would swing on the side of the lens. Her hand would pass two inches clear of Eppie’s cheek. Eppie would turn her head with the hand, not after it, and the sound department would put the SLAP in later, an act involving a leather glove and a beautiful cut of someone’s future pork belly dinner.

“On one, you wind up. On two, you swing. Three, she’s already gone.” He mimed the act while speaking. “Then back out of frame.”

They walked it at half speed, then at full. Dana cringed on every swing. Eppie did not. On the third pass, her head went round with the hand as though real enough to make even the coordinator flinch. [Act Natural] was, alas, a little too natural.

“Not your first time?” he said, a little uncomfortably.

“Theatre,” Eppie said, defusing the suspicions. “I was going to play Lavinia, you know…”

After midday, Petey Novak, played by Owen Marsh, who was five, arrived holding his mother’s hand and a plastic T-rex, trailed by a studio teacher with a tote, a stopwatch, and a mandate.

The lady introduced the rules before herself, meaning that within ten minutes, every adult in the room kept their distance.

But not so Eppie.

She knew that her rapport with Owen was absolutely necessary, but had no idea of the consequences involved in using [All the World’s a Stage] on a child, so she chose the high road.

After introducing herself, she asked for a hug, received it without question, and asked Owen about dinosaurs. Once they were sufficiently warmed up, she asked if he knew Deer-ri-me.

He did. Every daycare centre in America did, according to Davis.

So while everyone else worked, she took Owen’s hand and sang about fawns and sun and music through the hills, her [Vocality] filling the apartment with sweetness. When she finished, Owen’s mother grew starry-eyed, and Owen buried himself neck-deep, hugging her by the waist, asking for more.

So she sang Whatever Will Be, and even the teacher teared up while Owen clapped.

After the commotion, the gaffer pushed a hard, flat morning light through the kitchen window, then notified Ferroni that they were ready.

The scene itself was simple. Tanya comes out of the bathroom with an empty lipstick tube. She finds Josie at the table, her lips inexpertly made up. She hits her. She leaves, and her bedroom door slams. And then Petey, who has seen all of it from the floor in front of the television, comforts his sister.

Nobody had written what Petey would say. Bebe said to leave it.

Ferroni called action. Dana came out of the bathroom as Tanya, bleached blonde, bitchy, and sour-faced like a cat with indigestion.

She had the tube in her fist and her whole body pitched forward as if to press the empty tube into Eppie’s eye socket.

“You think I don’t know where it went?” she spat in a voice gone low and flat. Owen, sitting on the floor, stopped playing with his T-rex.

On two, she swung. On three, Eppie was already gone.

The boom operator, standing on an apple box by the fridge, did not so much as breathe. The slap had no sound. The slam of the door had all of Tanya’s careless cruelty.

On camera A, there was just Josie at the table with her hand against her face, and a brother on the floor.

Eppie’s enormous eyes fought the reflex to cry. She was defiant; she was vulnerable.

Then Owen got up. Ferroni had asked for a hand on the shoulder. Owen did none of that. He came and stood beside her chair and looked very hard at the side of her face, his adorable face puffed up, then he reached up and touched the red mark with one finger.

“Are you okay?” the boy asked, his eyes as blue as her own.

The script had no lines, so Josie said, “I am okay,” because that was what a big sister said to a younger brother who was too young to understand.

Owen nodded, then climbed into her lap with the T-rex, and Ferroni, behind the monitor, did not yell cut.

They held it until Owen got bored, which wasn’t long for a five-year-old, and then he said, loudly, to the whole kitchen, “I am thirsty.”

This was not in the script either. Ferroni did not yell cut.

Josie lifted her brother off her lap and stood him on the floor. She wiped her nose with the back of her wrist, and there was blood on it. She looked at her blood-smeared hands. The Steadicam rolled over her shoulder.

“I’ll get it,” she said. “Stay here. Watch your cartoons.”

She got the milk.

“Cut,” said Ferroni, exhaling, finally breathing.

They looked to Owen’s teacher.

She nodded.

They did it twice more for coverage. The first was unmatched, largely because Owen could no longer channel the genuine concern once the initial shock passed. The close-up of the blood smear was masterful.

Eppie watched it back later over Ferroni’s shoulder.

Petey’s scene was essential, for he was the reason Josie would betray Marcel’s trust.

Eppie was not on Friday’s call sheet.

She came anyway, at six, with two trays of coffee, cookies and doughnuts from the bodega that was “left for the crew”. Ferroni looked at the coffee, then at her, and took one. Neither of them mentioned Eric.

She found Kel in a casual ’80s-themed jacket and feigned a squeal. Kel looked up, expecting a fan, only to see his nemesis.

Then his face blew up.

“I got a gun,” he told her, delighted, happy as a retriever with a shot mallard. “Check it out. Sig P229! Bro, it’s so cool…”

“You do not have a gun,” said the armourer from the briefing table. “You have a prop. DO NOT PASS IT TO MISS FONTAINE.”

“Yessir!” Kel yelled back, saluting.

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Eppie swallowed her laughter.

The armourer was ex-Army, a quiet, heavy man with a steel case and a clipboard, and he gathered everybody in the Novak apartment at seven and told them the word of God.

Every weapon was his until he handed it to you, and it was his again the moment Ferroni called cut.

Kel told Eppie that when he held the Sig the way he held props in his music videos, the armourer immediately took it back. “Do that again,” the armourer said before handing it over a second time. “And you can ask me later why they got a new actor for Tull.”

Kel became a choir boy with a gun, after that.

At the same table, Eppie next greeted her Theatre Chair with a big hug. David Cooper wore Hollis’s long camel coat, holding a paper cup of tea and listening to the armourer the way he listened to everything.

When his turn came, he took the pistol with his forefinger laid straight along the frame, well clear of the trigger, turned it on its side, looked into it, and handed it back grip first, the muzzle towards the floor.

The armourer whistled. “Where’d you learn that, sir?”

“Marines,” said Cooper, announcing the weather. “That’s how a Bronx kid gets into acting college, at least in the ’70s.” The gun passed hands again. Under supervision, Cooper tested his muscle memory again, and he looked incredibly natural and cool. Too cool. “Golly, this takes me back.”

The armourer gave his fellow vet a look of approval.

Kel, across the table, stared as if Cooper had pulled a rabbit out of his coat.

Eppie had not known either, and her eyes grew enormous and worshipful, just like Petey’s.

The massacre of the Novak family would last about three minutes on screen, consisting of about sixteen seconds of bodies. It took the whole of Friday.

Eppie had by now absorbed knowledge like a sponge, and knew her way around the gaffers, electrics and grips, the camera crew and the day players. What was still new to her was the action side of movie magic, which was happening today.

The effects man had spent Thursday night inside the Novaks’ walls. Under the wallpaper by the television, in a ragged line at the height of a man’s chest, he had buried a row of little charges wired back to a board that looked like a church organ’s controls. When the guns went off in the doorway, the wall would open a beat later, in order, left to right.

Dale Morrow was the man playing Walt Novak. Eppie watched him get harnessed with a bag of blood over his heart and a wire running down his trouser leg to the same board. Walt was standing in the kitchen doing the crossword when he was hit by gunfire.

Like Eppie, Cooper stood in the doorway in the long camel coat, filling himself with knowledge while the effects man ran his wires past his shoes, asking questions without intruding on the work.

Ferroni had some time free, so he walked her through the process.

Before the first take, the gaffer surveyed the room with a small lamp that he flashed off and on, off and on, and watched how it hit the walls. The guns would light the apartment for a fraction of a second each time they fired, and he wanted to record where the light fell.

Everybody received earplugs. The sound mixer turned all his levels down and sat with his arms crossed.

“Alright everyone, places!” Ferroni walked back behind the camera.

“Rolling,” said the first AD. “Effects ready.”

Ferroni yelled action.

In the doorway, Cooper fired the way he was trained, four times, without hurry, his free hand resting on the frame. Between shots, his eyes did not follow the gun but went ahead of it, to where the next person would be.

Cooper played Hollis with the theatricality of Pyrrhus stalking through Troy, looking for Priam—only his prey was a crook and a family who knew next to nothing.

Against Mr Novak, he fired four times. The wallpaper by the television burst open in a neat left-to-right stitch, like someone ripping a seam.

The noise was not like the films. It was flatter and much, much louder, a physical shove against the chest, and on the monitor the doorway went white four times.

Dale Morrow jerked back against the counter, a dark flower bloomed under his shirt, then he slid down out of frame.

Between takes, the armourer took the weapons from them all, checking everything before handing them back without a word.

Then it was over, and eleven people began putting the wall back together.

The script supervisor walked through the smoke with a Polaroid camera, photographing where the blood had landed so that when they reset and shot it again from the other side, it would land in the same place. The effects lead sat on the floor with a tube of plaster and a pocketful of new charges and began rebuilding the stitch, one thumbnail at a time.

They did it from the doorway. They did it from the kitchen. They did it on Walt, on Lorraine, on Tanya, on the television, and on Cooper’s psychotic face. They did it four times, and the apartment was restored each time.

This, Eppie decided, was movie magic.

At three o’clock, they shot the aftermath, and Eppie saw Kel in action.

For his part, Tull comes in behind Hollis with his pistol down, and steps over what is on the floor, and goes to the kitchen doorway, and then sees the dead boy.

After negotiations with the teacher, Owen agreed to lie on a rubber mat behind the kitchen table, on his side, with his back to the camera and his T-rex under his cheek. The blood was painted on the mat around him, in a shape the art department had drawn in chalk first.

Nobody was to fire anything while he was in the room.

“You’re a sleeping Brontosaurus,” the studio teacher told him. Owen lay down and closed his eyes and pretended to be just that.

On Kel’s first take, he came through the door low and fast, swept the room with his gun, found the boy, set his jaw, and moved on. It was cool. It was MTV cool.

For the next take, Cooper walked Kel into the kitchen and talked to him for a minute too low for anyone to hear. Eppie could see only Kel’s face while he listened, and she chose not to leverage her [Perfect Pitch].

Kel came in behind Hollis’s back, and he didn’t sweep the room. He stepped over Walt’s leg carefully, like stepping over refuse. He reached the kitchen doorway. Then he saw the boy Hollis had executed.

This time, his pistol’s aim went down an inch, as if the gun got heavier. He looked at the small shape on the mat—and then a genius thing happened. Kel looked at Cooper, as if seeing him for the first time, as if realising that old rhetorical adage.

Are we the bad guys?

Cooper’s manic glee broke for a split-second. There was something between them, the thing that a mentor shared with a mentee, a rookie with a jaded veteran. Kel’s take was passable, but paled compared to Cooper, Eppie, and Aubert. His eyes went to the boy a beat too early; his breath was audible on the boom, but Eppie was impressed. Impressed enough to give Kel a hand, because they didn’t have the budget for more takes.

Two minutes of [All the World’s a Stage] was all it took.

“Cut,” said Ferroni.

Before anybody else could praise Kel, Owen sat up behind the table and said, “Can I stop being dead now?”

Everyone laughed, including Kel, who could not believe that he had just done the best acting of his life. The armourer came and took Kel’s gun, then Kel found a seat just to digest his newfound feelings.

Eppie was glad that all Owen had to do was pretend to sleep. She couldn’t itemise her [Causality], but she was confident Owen had cost her next to nothing.

The studio teacher lifted Owen off the mat and carried him out without letting him turn round. Behind them, a man from the art department knelt with a roll of white tape and began to mark the edge of the dark shape on the floor, for a future scene.

By Monday, the Novaks had been gone from their apartment for a week.

That was the story the art department told, and they had told it over the weekend without anyone to watch. A strip of yellow tape languished across the door, sagging in the middle where somebody had already ducked under it. Drawers were pulled out and upturned. Her home was now a stale crime scene.

And on the floor behind the kitchen table, there was a stain.

The scenic painter had spent Saturday making it. He had lifted the rubber mat and followed the white tape from Friday, and he had inked the grain of the boards with rags and a brush and a kettle, sanding back and going again, until he had the shape of a boy lying on his side.

The afternoon was Eppie’s.

Her character had returned to the apartment.

Earlier, they shot the scene of the snitch—Mrs Szabo—the old landlady who knew Josie was a Novak, and had just now seen her return, a scene that was the connective tissue to the film’s finale.

Now, they were filming Josie’s discovery of the stain.

Inside the Novaks’ apartment, the afternoon was dying through the kitchen window, and the gaffer had helped it along with a cold lamp outside the glass, turned low, so that the light had the stylistic flavour of French noir.

Padding had been placed to drown out sound.

Ferroni didn’t want realism; he wanted the girl alone with a stain.

He called action.

Josie was in her third costume, wearing a loose band-tee, a denim mini-skirt she picked up, and a polyester ’80s windbreaker in washed-out teal and purple. Her hair was styled longer, to indicate the passage of time, and her bruises were gone.

With the timidity of a cat, she ducked under the police tape. She made straight for the kitchen, where Petey had been.

And she saw where her brother last slept before the morgue took him.

Eppie knelt, because Josie would do just that. She placed one hand flat on the boards beside the stain, careful to avoid the pigment. Then she felt not only the call of [Act Natural] and [Vocality], but something deeper, more authentic, and guttural.

The sound that came out of her tiny body was thin and high and wet, catching the back of the throat while clawing at the chest, like a cat choking on something it could not bring up.

She fed [Causality] into [The Facial Landscape]. Somewhere inside her, she channelled the anguish of a girl on a rooftop who had seriously believed that kissing the pavement was better than dealing with the locker rooms.

Out in the corridor, the sound mixer lifted one side of his headphones off his ear, just to make sure he was hearing the real thing.

Delaney walked on soundless socks, moving the Steadicam forward and around her to catch her face. On his viewfinder, Josie bent over the stain until her forehead almost touched the floor.

A string of tears ran to the end of her nose and fell. Where they landed, the painter’s dye, which had been drying since Saturday, darkened again in small round spots over the vague shape of a boy who had sat in Josie’s lap a week ago.

She knelt there for the whole of the take, and past it.

“Cut,” said Ferroni, and then made his choice. “That’s a oner.”

Nobody on the crew protested.

When the room had emptied, the scenic painter knelt where Eppie knelt and took Polaroids for the records.

Afterwards, Eppie watched it back over Ferroni’s shoulder on a tiny monitor.

She watched a girl in a dead family’s kitchen, kneeling beside a mark the size of a boy, with one hand on the floor. She watched the girl bow down over it and growl like a wounded animal.

She watched the girl’s face close, set, and turn into something terrible and fatal.

She saw Josie stand back up. Another structural metaphor, this one courtesy of [Script Analysis].

A fourteen-year-old girl knelt beside the place her brother had been and learned, in one perfect take, how to hate.

And in feeding her hate.

She would lose her paradise.

And therein lay Bebe’s great elevation: transforming an urban thriller into Shakespearean cinema.