And the part, which had been only two lines when she went in to read for it, turned out to be quite a juicy little nugget of a role. The thing just kept growing. Within a day, there were two extra scenes sent to her Gmail, and by the end of the week there were three more. Each came with a brief notification attached, that all scenes were subject to change, and her new agent, Ryan Jones, warned her numerous times that it was great that the part was growing, but it could shrink just as easily. But it didn’t shrink. The witness was given her own name—Elizabeth Garrity—and a backstory: She was dating one of the friends of the killer, who had some sort of “he’s my buddy” pact with the guy that was more important to him than anything in the world. There was even a great scene added in which she accused her nasty boyfriend, in front of witnesses, of being in love with the killer. Then he tried to slug her and strangle her, and the cops in the room had to jump him and drag him off. That bit necessitated a fight choreographer who for a couple of shots had the other actor throw her across the desk, but the director thought it was too much and declared firmly that he wasn’t going to use any of it.
The whole experience was a complete blast, on top of which they actually paid her. She had done a couple of scenes in an independent movie while living in Seattle, so she was already a member of SAG, which meant they had to pay her SAG minimums, eight hundred dollars for every day she was required to be on set. Because the new scenes got added so late, they got shoved into the schedule wherever they fit, which meant that Alison was required to be on the set on four separate days. Which broke down to four times seven hundred, twenty-eight hundred dollars for the whole gig, a figure she never would have gotten if they could have scheduled her scenes more tightly. Ryan wanted them to pay her even more—he tried briefly for the top-of-show rate, which was what anyone with a major guest part should have gotten. But everyone knew this was a huge break for Alison already and they weren’t going to go the extra mile for an actress who was such a total nobody. Ryan settled for the $2,800.
Besides which, there definitely was some confusion around the way that audition had been booked. As it turned out, Ryan hadn’t submitted Alison for the two-liner. His assistant, somebody named Darren, was the one who put the call in without running it by his boss, which was why the suspicious casting agent had never heard about Alison from Ryan—because Ryan had never heard of Alison either. Alison didn’t even know about this angle of the shenanigans until Ryan called her the next day to congratulate her on booking the gig and to ask her who the hell she was. She told him what she knew, as she had been told by Lisa, about the whole hip-pocketing plan, and Ryan informed her that this was all news to him but that he’d love to meet the girl who had managed to convince a writer to build a whole subplot around her in one audition. Once in his reasonably swank offices, Alison had apologized, but she also was shrewd enough to continue to stick to the point, which was that she had actually booked a pretty big job with very little assistance on anyone else’s part. The agent, who was in truth impressed, was the one who actually explained to her the whole story—how she had wowed the writer so much that he went ahead and reconceived the entire episode, which never happened, and would not have happened if the script hadn’t in fact come in eight pages short to begin with. But that specific detail was neither here nor there. Alison had done what everyone told these young actresses they had to do: Grab an opportunity and make it your own. Ryan Jones signed her on the spot.
As Alison found out later, the reason her episode came in eight pages too short to begin with was that in the middle of November the show was hitting a wall; all the scripts were coming in late, and the executive producer, who was an egomaniac and a prick, had spent too much time rethinking every choice anyone made in any of the episodes that had already been shot and so they were days behind schedule and inches away from shutting down production for a week, which would have cost a complete fucking fortune that the network was not willing to spend for a show that was on the bubble. So while the egomaniacal prick of an executive producer was off putting out fires with the network, the episode’s writer was left to solve his own problems. When this young actress showed up and actually gave an emotionally charged reading of two fairly mediocre lines of his dialogue, he felt artistically vindicated and knew that this was his chance to spread his wings.
“Everything was for Billy,” Alison told the camera bitterly. “It was always, ‘he’s my buddy.’ You mess with that at your own peril.”
“This is it, this is the big scene,” the real Alison informed the room.
“Did you feel threatened by that?” asked the ADA.