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The director of photography, a stoner from Big Bear Mountain with bags under his eyes, sometimes failed to press Record. The sound guys occasionally forgot to mention the roaring helicopters disturbing the live recordings, and the script supervisor usually failed to notice when actors wore different outfits within the same scene, but my father was Zen and coated each disaster with a warm balm and a smile. He never got upset. The gods were finally on his side, he said. Things would fall into place because the film had a higher purpose, a life of its own. No matter what, this was it. He just knew it and led the way like a minister preaching about predestination and unquestionable success. His Italian-style superstitions were amplified by his equally Italian-style film quirks: As long as nobody wore purple and everyone kept a red plastic corno in their pocket, we’d be fine.
His dogmatic approach made us feel safe and our faith paid off. Variety ran an article about the film. The headline read: “Ancient Downtown Hotel Glory Revived by Independent Italo-American Production.” Something had clicked. We were gaining visibility. At night my father practiced his American slang in front of 90210 reruns so he could communicate better with his actors.
He talked back to Dylan McKay. “What’s up, man? Ma-an? You’re not cool. You’re not cooool. What’s up, dude? Dood? Dud?”
The importance of dude.
He wanted to be affable and laid-back and changed his wardrobe to project this. He paid for my mother to keep up her Meg Ryan cut and platinum blond hair, started going to the gym at five a.m. before work, and wore white sneakers and ball caps.
“That’s how they do it here. Have you ever seen Spielberg? He wears sweatpants for God’s sake. Sweatpants and fleece jackets and caps. I don’t know a director in Rome who would even get close to a fleece jacket. I threw my Church shoes out. I don’t want actors thinking I’m some kind of European snob. I want to be amiable and affable, dude.”
The Hollywood crowd he’d met through Max over the summer read the news in Variety and began to stop by the set to take a look at the film. Johnny Depp liked the premise so much, he came down for a cameo as the bellboy in an elevator scene. My father and Max took a Polaroid with him inside the elevator. They were right. Courting his agent and creating “the necessary compost,” as my father called it, was paying off.
The Hotel Alexandria had been magnificent and elegant during the silent-movie era, a witness to tap-dancing, smoky smiles, cupid lips, and brushed-out ringlets. Rudolph Valentino kept a suite there. Charlie Chaplin did improvisation sessions in the art deco lobby while Tom Mix rode in on his horse. It had been a wild place with luxurious rugs, marble columns, gold-leaf ceilings, and a mezzanine ballroom with a stained-glass skylight. Now it was a run-down dump. Only sinister tenants and ghosts lived here and this suddenly attracted film directors.
The Italian horror cult director Dario Argento flew in from Rome. The Weinstein brothers at Miramax, who loved everything Italian and produced and distributed independent and foreign films, called to congratulate Ettore personally, baffled that it had taken an outsider’s eye to discover and revalue one of the city’s most precious lost treasures. They offered to take a look at the film once it was complete with a view toward distribution. My father and Max were thrilled. Members of the Huston family began to drop by during lunch breaks. Someone had spread the word about my mother’s Italian cooking and Mario Sorrenti, the rising-star fashion photographer who had shot Kate Moss in the Obsession campaign, picked the Alexandria as the location for his next shoot. The words whispered at home were “See? Visto? We made it!”
I had never seen my parents so happy and confident. It made me tentatively happy. Encouraged by the general enthusiasm around her cooking, my mother started giving demonstrations in the hotel ballroom. The Tiffany stained-glass skylight had remained intact, refracting a hazy light. The room appeared even bigger thanks to the large golden mirrors that stood stoically inside the arched nooks, rotting around the edges. The hair-and-makeup junkies who normally fed on the edible balls that floated in their Orbitz soft drinks—“You, like, can drink and eat at the same time. It’s amazing,” they said—were particularly happy about Serena’s culinary crash courses. My mother looked at their purple bottles, horrified.
“That is not food.”
She set up her workstation on a steel countertop, wrapped an apron around her hips, and pulled on her reading glasses. The frames pushed her hair down next to her eyes like blinders, but she kept going.
She put a pot of water on the stove, peeled garlic cloves for the soffritto, then cleared her throat.
“Don’t fry the garlic! Don’t burn the garlic, just let the oil take on some of its flavor.”
Crew members stood by, looking at her with folded arms and tilted heads.
They loved Serena’s bluntness and even started cussing in Italian to prove their solidarity to the family. “Che cazzo!” or “Madonna mia!” they invoked every time something failed to work, which was often. As long as they were eating or cooking, they didn’t complain about late payments and disorganization. Unions were never contemplated. “SAG” was not uttered once.