“Well, we can do that but—”
“We are not PUTTING her in a sequined dress!” It was the first time Alison had ever seen Lars’s cool Icelandic prince act start to crack. What was the big deal? The whole idea that she had any dress at all stuffed into a backpack for six years was preposterous. The whole sequence in fact was ridiculous, and had actually just been added to the script last week, apparently as a total excuse to put the hot young female lead into a slinky dress and watch her play Mata Hari for a couple of minutes while the boys ran around and placed detonators on the periphery of the drug lord’s compound.
Lars finally threw in the towel. The compromise—if you could call it that—was gold sequins. But it came at a cost. Lars never threatened to walk off the picture, as that was not his style. But, Ryan told her in a whispered phone call, the entire town was talking about the degree of interference that the studio was inflicting on him. It was unheard of.
Rumors of studio intervention were flourishing everywhere. The band of brats (so titled with a saucy sisterly flair by Alison) tossed the unverifiable information about carelessly as they sat to the side and waited for the DP to finish lighting.
“I heard they’re going to reshoot all the bar sequences,” Evan observed.
“I heard we were going to reshoot all the action sequences,” Robbie countered.
“Gordon hates all the sets, he says it looks cheap.”
“He wants to rebuild all the sets?”
“He wants to send us to Mexico,” Robbie insisted. “That’s what my agent says.”
“Cut it out.” Lars had fought valiantly for a location in Mexico, but the studio bean counters had put their collective foot down. There was a drug war going on in Mexico—not a pretend one, a real one, where real drug cartels were shooting real bullets at each other and anyone else who happened to be in the vicinity. Under these circumstances, the insurance company had decisively declined to offer any kind of coverage to this particular production. So Mexico was out, and Colombia too, and the farther south they went in their search for an authentic Latino jungle the more the complications flowered and decayed. Finally, the only answer was building a Mexican rain forest in the desert hills just outside downtown Los Angeles. Which cost a small fortune. Now Gordon didn’t like the sets and he was going to send them into the middle of the Mexican jungle and put all their lives at risk after all? Well, anything was possible. Alison was learning: Any amount of insanity, not to mention dough, was tossed about these movies like confetti.
Although Lars never blew his cool (other than during the War of the Sequins) the disagreements with the studio became increasingly intense, making their presence felt on the set with a weary regularity. The editor had put together some rough cuts of scenes which Gordon asked to see well before the DGA rules allowed him to get a look at it. Rightly, Lars refused to let him look at the footage. But some exec managed to sneak a flash drive out of the editing bay and he took it straight to Gordon’s office, so Gordon did in fact see footage he had no right to see, and he wasn’t happy. In spite of everyone’s delight at the dailies, he expressed his unhappiness with the direction of the scenes, the look of the sets—that rumor turned out to be true as well—and demanded substantial reshoots. After hours of wrangling with executives, Lars refused to reshoot a single frame, at which point Gordon threatened to pull him off the movie. Phone calls were made to and from the DGA, and agents and execs screamed at each other regularly, and one day the lunch break extended into two hours while it was determined whether or not Lars would return to the set, which if he didn’t would put the entire movie in jeopardy as well as cost the studio millions. Then, suddenly, it all got settled somehow and everyone went back to work.
Several weeks later they did spend half a day reshooting scenes that really were fine, and then a week after that there were more reshoots. Lars had won the battle and lost the war.
It was the third time Lars reshot one of Alison’s scenes that her nerves began to fray. Protected by the early buzz, she had managed to stay out of all the wrangling by simply being agreeable, doing a good job, and never showing up late for anything. Actresses who showed up late were regularly dismissed as the lowest form of life by everyone on the set. But when Lars came to the set one day and explained that they were going to have to reshoot for a third time the scene where she was talking to her mother on the telephone, and looking at herself in the mirror, she made a mistake. She asked him why.
“We just need some more colors,” Lars told her, abrupt.
“What kind of ‘colors’?”
“It would be great if you could be putting lipstick on. Looking at yourself and putting lipstick on.”
“While I’m talking on the telephone?”