CHAPTER 103 - Paint It Black

“What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,

That he should weep for her?”

William Shakespeare,

Hamlet

The fish was served in Kuromon’s sushi bar at quarter past twelve, laid out on a black lacquer board so long that the staff bringing it to the table had to take an end each.

When Kuromon-san sliced into the fish, and it did not wake up and start singing Bully Boy, Trent Davis crossed himself. The damn song, much like for the rest of America, parts of Asia and for some reason, Finland, had been stuck in his head for days.

He watched his guests try not to look impressed. There were a great many culinary quirks in Culver City, but Kuromon-san remained both exclusive and singular.

Hal Weingart and Joanne Keane had both come up out of California to sit in dark rooms for a week looking at other people’s unfinished pictures before Toronto… and Davis had managed to snag them both with the promise of a meal they wouldn’t regret and fifteen minutes of their otherwise busy schedule.

That, and his peers had their performance review soon. Rumours had it that, for 2009, budgets were looking less swell.

“This seems to be a dangerous day to begin a meeting,” Weingart said. “That’s a great-looking tuna. And… that’s a big knife.”

The table laughed.

“It’s lunch,” said Trent, casually. “The meeting’s after.”

Kuromon-san performed the cutting with ease and precision, using the enormous sushi knife like a surgeon with a scalpel. He made them one of each cut, from a different part of the fish.

Akami first, lean along the spine, deep crimson and firm, the choice of a purist.

Chūtoro next, chewy and rich, pink fading into rose.

Ōtoro chased the leaner cuts, the fat melting like savoury butter.

Keane ate her first piece with her eyes closed. Weingart ate his and laid his chopsticks across his plate with great care. Both had no words for the experience.

Kuromon-san wasn’t done yet. There was a reason he was one of the best-paid private chefs in the city.

What followed was uni in a collar of nori, saffron-gold and smelling faintly of the tide.

Then stacks of Hokkaido scallops sliced thin, with a single flake of salt.

Then horse mackerel, its silver skin scored, a pinch of ginger and scallion to tantalise the tongue.

The meal took an hour.

“Alright.” Keane smiled, satisfied and a little tipsy from the sake. “Give it up. What’s all this for?”

“Are we not friends?” Davis grinned.

“Friends?” Weingart cocked his head. “You didn’t even give us the time of day when we reported a loss back in 06.”

“Is this because the market’s good right now?” Keane said. “Despite the lack of our arachnid headliner?”

“Then you wouldn’t mind looking at something for fifteen minutes,” Davis continued, sipping his sake. “Would you?”

His colleagues relaxed. Davis found their insecurity amusing, but couldn’t find it in his heart to mock them. Sony BMG revenue was one-quarter of Pictures, but its publishing margins were eye-wateringly high, and risks absurdly low. This made Davis one of the company’s tentpoles, while Keane and Weingart sat on revolving chairs.

“Whose picture?” asked Keane.

“Jack Ferroni’s.”

The look that passed between them was not difficult to read.

“The Vasseur script?” Keane said. “The… pedo script?”

“That’s gone, clean gone, unless someone’s outright looking for it,” Davis promised. “Shall we?”

The two executives followed Davis to the viewing room on the same level, the one usually reserved for reviewing MTV productions.

“Here’s what they have so far,” said Trent, then gestured to the back of the room. “Be as critical as you like.”

They sat.

The projector rolled.

Lights flickered against black, and then a stairwell appeared. There was no music added yet.

They saw a girl, arrestingly striking, walking up the last flight with a carton of milk held against her hip. The shot was singular, continuous, and as it passed the height of her face, they saw the bruise, and something in their chests tightened.

The corridor she traversed was ancient, its paint scuffed to the same hue as an abandoned hospital. The bulbs were out; there was the sound of a dying radio somewhere, and the static of an eighties analogue TV running a baseball game. The girl approached the retreating lens. She looked uncannily youthful, but also old at the same time, a paradoxical story told by her tired eyes and the youth still exuding from her body language.

Past the top of the stairs, a door stood open.

Something evil was inside; that much was obvious to the viewers.

She tried not to look. She tried so hard… and succeeded. There was a man in the doorway, barring her way.

“Hey.” The voice almost reverberated in their head.

The girl stopped. She still didn’t look. She stopped the way a guileless child stops for a grown-up who has spoken.

“You live up here?”

The girl’s fringe dropped aesthetically; she shifted the weight of her arm on the carton because the milk was cold and slippery. She smiled but did not smile, and it was disarming and disturbing at the same time.

“Go on, then.” The voice in their head gave permission.

She went on. She did not look back, and she did not look in, and Trent heard Weingart’s breath leave him slowly through his nose as she passed the open door with the milk, and the doorway fell away behind her.

Then came the door scene.

With Aubert fiddling at the lock, indecisive.

And the girl looking into the peephole, pleading.

Please…

Please…

Barely withheld tears smeared her poorly applied liner.

The door opened. The girl entered, her face blooming like a sunflower.

Welcome… welcome home.

Fade to black.

Nobody moved for a few seconds while the room lit back up.

Weingart looked at his sweat-soaked palm, then at Trent. He looked a little embarrassed.

“Play it again,” said Keane. “I… er… forgot to check the details.”

Trent nodded at the darkness. Play it again.

They returned to Kuromon’s after the second viewing.

The chef had made green tea desserts.

“Who is she?” Weingart asked.

“Do you watch Johnny Kimball?” Trent replied with a question.

Keane frowned, then her face changed. “That’s the Grammy kid. That’s Director Curon’s kid.”

“Bully Boy, right? She’s a singer,” said Weingart. “How is this possible?”

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“She’s a songwriter, actually; her major was theatre.” Trent paused. “The film comes with its own marketing, that I can assure you. Her MySpace and YouTube numbers are… industry-leading.”

Davis refrained from telling them whether the singing fish was going to make or break the self-marketing. All he knew was that Bully Boy would haunt every garage in America for years to come. Umbrella would be considered retro RnB before the horrors of 2008’s Bully Boy were erased from the nation’s collective conscience.

“They wrap mid to late September,” Trent said. “After that—”

Weingart and Keane ate their desserts.

“Are they selling ownership?” Weingart said.

“Unlikely,” Davis said. “Film’s fully funded and paid for. Our girl pulled strings.”

The execs whistled.

“Is she rich?” Keane let out a nervous laugh.

“A little. In fact, I did a little math—” Davis leaned in conspiratorially. “If I include every asset she’s contributed to, and take into account future Bully Boy licensing…”

“Yes?” Weingart matched Davis’s lean.

“She makes up six points of our profit. Profit. You know how much it cost us to make her shanty? Four hours in a booth, one marketing manager, and one Johnny Kimball. It’s slated to hit YouTube #2 this week. It won’t crack #10 on the Hot 100, but my god, the sales, and the licensing…”

And the fish…

Weingart and Keane’s eyes grew large. The same ratio, put into Sony Pictures, would make the A-list of A-listers. In their business, profitability, against every other metric, was king.

“She’s our Maneki Neko,” Davis boasted, immensely pleased with himself. “To think Curon picked her off the street…”

He smiled. His smug jaws read what can ya do when money falls out of the sky, eh?

Weingart and Keane did their best to keep their cool.

“Anyway… enough about us.” Davis slapped his knees, as if the deal was already sealed. “Let’s talk about percentages.”

On the first morning of principal photography, Ferroni met Rémy Aubert in his fictional apartment home. Aubert had been sleeping in it the last few days to get a feel for his divergent character, his habits, and his rigidity.

The Pro’s director sat on an apple box with the script on his knees and scrolled the film in his head. He had twenty-two shooting days, represented by pages on the script. The film would be shot by cost-effectiveness, not chronology, and by the scheduling of the actors and actresses.

Lucky for him, there were no big names attached other than Aubert, who was a staple of French cinema and was fully committed to the bit. Likewise, Eppie was “Not in Education, Employment or Training”, or so her father said, and Cooper’s schedule was flexible. Comparatively, the day players were all booked through the agency.

Inside the apartment, the gaffer had killed the bulb above the sink and put a single lamp outside the apartment’s one window, gelled to the colour of five in the morning, so that dawn came in sideways. Delaney had asked Ferroni for a mood and then made it happen. Such was the pleasure of working with a small crew he’d personally known for a half-decade.

At seven, Ferroni looked up and asked whether Rémy would like a rehearsal.

“Non,” said Aubert, from the chair, smiling. “Let’s make cinéma.”

The plaque went up in front of the lens.

“And action!”

Marcel was asleep, sitting upright in a chair with a Beretta 92FS across his thighs, chosen by the armourer for its visual spectacle.

Aubert did not close his eyes, because he was the Pro. He was Marcel.

A film actor asleep in a chair shuts his eyes and lets his head fall. Aubert sat with his eyes open like a distrusting guard dog’s, his head up and his back not touching the chair. He was tense; he was a man who had never relaxed a day in his life, and it took a full minute for the picture on Ferroni’s knees to become a picture of a man falling asleep.

The sleep was communicated through Aubert’s hands. A macro shot showed the thumb beside the guard relax involuntarily. His other hand, palm-down, curled and uncurled a quarter of an inch, soft as breath, to simulate deep sleep.

Below them, the building’s pipes knocked.

It was not a cue. The sound mixer had decided to incorporate what God had given the location by decree.

On the monitor, Marcel’s eyes changed, or rather, the micro-language of his whole body changed. It was as though Marcel had stopped breathing.

Finally, his eyes drooped. He was asleep.

“Cut,” Ferroni said, very quietly, as if he might wake Marcel, then took notes.

They went four times.

Ferroni watched every one of them, and then decided the hand was the subtle touch he wanted for this rigidly routined, isolated man with stunted emotions but an enormous heart.

He sent in a grip on socked feet who nudged a black flag an inch to the left so that the shadow of the window bar fell across Aubert’s knuckles.

The lighting was now almost chiaroscuro in nature, a Georges de La Tour with a gun in hand.

Perfection.

Then they shot the milk scenes.

Marcel owned a refrigerator that was barely alive. An electrician had spent an hour rewiring it so that its light came on half a second late, the same way the apartment itself was falling apart.

Aubert took out the carton. He opened it. And because Marcel could not read, he had no habit of looking for the date. He smelled it instead, the way a dog checks water for freshness, then he poured it into a glass and drank it in four swallows.

The crew took notes.

Bebe had been very exact.

Marcel had a compulsion for routine.

The milk filled to the same volume every time.

He drank it in four gulps. Every time.

The focus puller had chalked the counter where the glass should land, but Aubert put it down on the same square inch every time without moving his gaze from the middle distance.

There was nothing better to communicate that he was a man of unflinching repetition.

Then Marcel rinsed the glass, thrice. The final rinse was not wasted. The water in the glass went across the room into a vibrant pot plant. He stared at the pot plant like a father to a child, and looked utterly content.

They recorded four setups from four angles with tiny variations, always the same beats.

After lunch, Eppie came on set.

While she did her make-up and costumes, the crew had turned the room around for the afternoon: the bedsheet was struck, the window lamp dimmed until the light across the mattress looked like a different morning.

Bebe’s pages for Josie’s first morning at Marcel’s were short. A girl wakes on a mattress in a stranger’s room. The stranger is awake in his chair because he has not slept. The girl gets up and finds something to do, because being idle meant being hit.

The scene was Josie moving around Marcel the way a small animal moved around a pit bull holding a Beretta.

Ferroni called action and watched Euphemia Fontaine wake up.

Josie had slept in her loose T-shirt, and her morning hair was somehow catching the light beyond the stylist’s actual intent. Her whole body seemed to ache, and her eyes, half vacant, still struggled with yesterday’s massacre.

There was no breakfast, so she borrowed the singular glass, then poured and drank some of Marcel’s milk. Then she dried it on her sleeve and set it on the folded towel, right side up, like a good girl.

Marcel got out of his chair. He crossed the room. He turned the glass over. A man putting a thing back where it lived.

Josie flinched, near-expecting to be hit.

Marcel went back to his chair after fixing the glass’s displacement.

A macro captured the upturned glass in close-up, its curvature catching Josie intact both in frame and within itself.

“Cut,” said Ferroni. “Beautiful. Check the gate.” And when the camera had been looked at and pronounced clean, “We have it.”

The take was good. It was excellent. With more days, he would have covered it properly, but these were the scenes between the action sets, and a director who cannot cover a scene has to be right the first time.

Then Aubert raised a finger from the arm of the chair.

Ferroni looked at his watch.

The Frenchman said, “One more.”

On the second take, Marcel kept his hand on the glass. He waited, patiently, without looking at Eppie, until Josie saw how and where the glass lived. Then he went back and fixed the chair’s displacement.

The flinching read differently now. There was acknowledgement from Josie.

The act was… unintentionally fatherly in a way that neither character explicitly noticed.

And Ferroni, watching the monitor, understood why Aubert was a French cinema tour-de-force.

After lunch downstairs, with the location walled off and the locals out and about doing their natural business, it was time to shoot Héctor’s bodega, which was the real bodega two doors down, with a real Héctor’s worth of lottery tickets and plantains and votive candles.

The gaffer kept the shop’s signature fluorescents, then hid one warm lamp behind the cereal boxes so that Néstor Quiñones, their Héctor, would not go green on camera.

Ferroni watched the take from behind the counter, wedged between the fascinated owner and a chest freezer.

Previously, Eppie had practised taking the milk out of the fridge a dozen ways and settled on a particular cadence of action. With the camera rolling, Ferroni watched Josie stand on tippy-toes to retrieve the first milk—then return to the fridge for the second.

Héctor looked at the two cartons. He looked at the girl.

“Two today?” The man illustrated the banality of Josie’s normal life in two words.

“Sí,” said Josie, as local as the banana bread out front.

Beside Ferroni, the enormous and bearded owner of the bodega, who had not read the script and did not know who anybody was, gripped the director’s shoulder and squealed like a schoolgirl.