It was too much. He was tired, and she was tired, and she had to get up at least two hours before he did, to sit in a makeup trailer while they made her glorious twenty-eight-year-old face even more photogenic. What was he trying to prove? He wasn’t enjoying the sex anymore; that was perfectly clear. She certainly wasn’t enjoying it, although that didn’t seem to matter to Lars one little bit. The vigor and ingenuity of their previous lovemaking laughed at them from the corners of hotel rooms, a mocking and prurient ghost. It was never anything at all, she thought, while Lars pumped away at her. Most of the time, he had his eyes closed. Why couldn’t he even look at her? She was the living visitation of movie magic, a sex goddess in the flesh, made incarnate by his own hand. It didn’t matter. His eyes remained shut, his face slack, while he concentrated on whatever it was inside him that might entice him to come. Most nights she truly wanted to shove him off her. But the pressure was on, and she had to play nice.
The movie itself was good. An action movie, with eight hot-blooded American boys on a mission in the jungle, with a swell girl who might have been a lesbian but also looked like Ava Gardner? The peculiarity of if it crossed over into something original, weird, even magical. Alison had never actually understood what Lars was doing with his pathological control of her look, but once they were shooting, the fierce intelligence behind the peculiar filmic elements began to reveal itself. It was Day of the Locust meets The Misfits, with a few grenades tossed in. A couple of times, Alison actually was the one who got to toss the grenades. David, the DP who had worked on three other films with Lars, knew instinctively that Alison’s more classical features required a shift in the way the film itself was shot, and so he hypersaturated the colors. While the gun battles were shot like hallucinations, the love scenes drifted into haunting movie moments redolent of the heyday of the film greats. Alison actually did know how to tip her head back and look at her hero with tragic yearning.
“The young Bergman,” the second camera op muttered. Stu the grip nodded, equally impressed. They were a gang of seasoned pros who had worked with pretty much every star and starlet under the sun, and many of these young stars treated the crew like servants. But Alison’s good Midwestern manners never failed her, and the grips, the PAs, the wardrobe assistants, and the lady who helped her with her coffee at the craft service table were all treated with good-natured respect and gratitude. The crew loved her.
And as days rolled into weeks the camera recorded the possibility that Alison was in fact The Real Deal. Pretty soon, they all said, she was going to be able to do whatever she wanted. She didn’t know what that meant, but so many people said it to her so many times, it was hard to pretend that it might not actually be true. Even strangers, especially strangers, gushed and warned her gleefully of the coming tsunami of global attention. Reporters who showed up on the set hovered, watched, flirted with her. Men in suits whose names she could never remember came and watched with a reptilian bonhomie. The sequence of writers who showed up on the set invariably ended up writing extra scenes for her.
Gordon, the head of the studio, meanwhile, joined in the obsession with every detail of Alison’s hair, her makeup, her dialogue, and her close-ups. Her clothes especially were cause for brutal interference. The day Lars decided that Alison should be wearing a narrow pink silk sheath—all the better to seduce a drug lord at his birthday party—Gordon weighed in passionately. He liked the color, she could wear the pink, it was a terrific color and it looked good on her. But shouldn’t the dress be more “special”? This was often the language of their parlance: Gordon was “underwhelmed” by the dress. It needed to be “more special.” When you pressed him as to what he might mean by “more special” it turned out that what he usually meant was “sequins.”
This news was delivered to all of them during a costume fitting in the wardrobe trailer. Alison thought Lars’s head was going to explode. “Sequins? Is he fucking insane? Where the fuck did they find sequins in the middle of the fucking jungle?”
“Well, for that matter, where did they find a pink silk sheath?” observed Molly, the imperturbable costume designer.
“She had it. She brought it with her from the States, it’s been in her backpack for six years.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t say oh like that’s impossible, it’s not likely, but it’s possible that she would squirrel away a piece of her previous life as a debutante but it is not possible that she would carry around a pink sequin dress for six years, that’s insane.”
Alison kept her mouth shut and sat there. They were surrounded by hundreds of dresses and scarves and steam irons. Lars preferred issuing orders and having them intuitively understood by someone who had decent and reliable taste, like Molly, who had worked on three films with him; this being summoned to the wardrobe trailer did not suit him.
“I can email them a rendering in half an hour,” Molly explained, the soul of patient cooperation.
“He doesn’t really want to see a rendering, he wants to see her in the dress.” This from weirdo Norbert, the producer-slash-factotum who always insisted they implement any demand the studio put forward, bar none.
“But we don’t have a dress, we will have to build the dress, and this is supposed to shoot tomorrow,” Molly explained. “If he really wants her in a sequined dress—”
“He definitely wants the sequins, it’s really important to him. The dress really needs to be more special.”