Ed McBain - The Last Brief

‘You mean this is like a sort of strip tease, is that it?’ she asked.

‘Yes, sort of. But tasteful. We don’t want to get into any sex scenes right off, you see.’

‘Thank God,’ she said. ‘I really don’t think I’m up to anything like that tonight. Are you, Harry?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m definitely not.’

‘Okay then,’ I said, ‘what you do is come into the loft, and ask if this is where we’re casting this movie, and we’ll answer you but nobody will see us, the camera will just be on you. And we’ll introduce you to Harry and then ask if you would mind taking off your clothes, and you should take them off slowly and shyly, and that’ll be the scene. Later on, we may ask you to kiss Harry or something mild like that, neither of you will have to do anything you don’t really feel like doing tonight. We’ll just play it slow and easy, we want to do a sensitive job here, and your personal feelings are very much in our minds.’

‘Well, okay,’ the girl said.

‘Is something wrong?’ I said.

‘Well, before I take off my clothes, I want you to know the contract is binding, no matter what. I’m getting fifty dollars a week, and fifteen percent of the profits, and that’s that.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘That’s our agreement.’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘In which case, I want you to know I’m not a natural blonde.’

‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘Quiet on the set, please.’

I won’t bore you with all the details of that first night’s shooting, or even of the progress we made during the next two weeks. I will say that Solly had been absolutely right about the girl. She had looked spectacular when she was wearing clothes, but she looked positively fantastically unbelievable when she took them off. Also, when she got over her shyness and embarrassment, she really did a good job with the sex scenes she performed on camera with Harry. I guess this was because Solly had written such a good script, spare and neat and what I guess you could call lean. He very much had in mind the feelings of the actors, and wanted each of the sex scenes to appear spontaneous, instead of like some of these scenes you see in cheap porn flicks, where you just know the actors are being told what to do each and every minute. Solly’s script made it all seem very natural and very beautiful and also, I might say in compliment, very artistic; I always give credit where credit is due. For example, in the scenes we shot that first week, where the girl gets the part and then starts to become acquainted with the leading man — who was Harry the dope — Solly didn’t do what a lot of script writers do, he didn’t clutter up the page with a lot of unnecessary directions. A sample of his writing from one of the early scenes will explain to you what I mean.

34 THE LOFT — INT — NIGHT

The Girl is becoming acquainted with the leading Man.

They do sexual intercourse together.

During all of these scenes, Ben, Solly, and I were sort of what you might call off-stage actors, or, since this was a movie we were making, I guess you would have called us off- camera actors. That is to say, we were in the script even during those first two weeks of shooting, but all you did was hear our voices. And though you never actually saw any of us, you knew there was a director there, and a cameraman, and a writer, which was the beauty part of the script, the play-within-a-play aspect. It wasn’t until after those two weeks of shooting that any of us would appear on camera as real live actors, which was what the script called for because, you see, there was supposed to be intensely personal human relationships developed between the girl and the people making the movie — the movie itself was supposed to become an artistic microcosm of life itself, if you know what I mean. In other words, the girl was supposed to perform with her leading man only during the early parts of the movie, and then become gradually involved with the people working with her, and do on camera with them what she had earlier been doing with him, but more. I know that sounds complicated, but it was in Solly’s script, and when we explained it to the girl, she said, ‘I don’t understand. Does this mean I have to do this with Solly in front of the camera?’

‘Not Solly himself,’ I said. ‘The writer of the movie.’

‘Solly is the writer of the movie,’ she said.

‘In real life, he’s the writer of the movie,’ I said. ‘But in the movie, he’s only pretending to be the writer of the movie.’

‘And we’re supposed to do it here? In the loft?’

‘Yes. The loft is where we’re shooting the movie, and what happens is that during the coffee break, The Girl gets involved with The Writer, and this leads to a beautiful sex experience for both of them.’

‘But Solly is bald,’ she said.

‘My dear,’ I said, ‘you’d be surprised how many bald men go to see pornographic movies. There are at least millions and millions of them.’

‘If we could afford an actor to play the part,’ Solly said, ‘we’d hire him in a minute. But that would only cut into our profits.’

‘I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Solly,’ the girl said. ‘It’s just I have never balled a bald man in my life.’

‘There is always a first time,’ Solly said.

This was at one a.m. in the morning at the start of the third week’s shooting. Ben had told the girl he needed to reload the camera, and he was in the bathroom now, with the light out. We had sent Harry home at midnight. He had gone reluctantly, it seemed to me, but I didn’t suspect anything was developing between him and the girl. All I knew was that he had done his job very realistically during those first two weeks, and we were ready to phase him out since his services were not too strenuously required during the remaining eighteen weeks of shooting. In fact, as I explained to the girl, she was supposed to become more and more involved with the people making the film, and less and less involved with her leading man, until the very end of the picture when she got married.

‘Married?’ she said. ‘To who?’

‘To Harry. We have a nice little scene where you get married at the end. But that’s after you have sort of experienced all different kinds of sexual experience and gratification with the various men working on this film, which experience provides the bedrock of a good marital relationship later on.’

‘You mean, sort of, I learn different things from them, and this prepares me for being like a good wife to Harry later on, is that it?’

‘That’s it exactly,’ I said.

‘That’s beautiful,’ she said, and she began to weep.

Ben came out of the bathroom, camera in hand. ‘All loaded,’ he said, ‘and ready to shoot.’ He looked at the girl. ‘Is something wrong?’ he asked.

‘Everything’s fine,’ I said. ‘Solly, are you ready?’

‘Ready,’ Solly said, and began taking off his clothes.

We worked very hard during those next few weeks, both on camera and off. Now that we were really into the movie, so to speak, the hours got longer; we would start work at eight and sometimes not finish till three or four in the morning. You have to remember that we were all holding daytime jobs, and I mention this only to explain our dedication to the project. And besides, this was still costing each of us close to forty-two dollars a week because, since we were gentlemen, we agreed to continue paying Harry his twenty-five a week even though his services would not be required on the picture again till we came to the very end of it. We explained to the girl that the end might be some time away, since whereas she was doing an excellent job and we were all very pleased with her (including Ben, who had preferred a redhead for the part), we were nonetheless not getting exactly the kind of professional footage we wanted, and this might require shooting a great many scenes over again, maybe even three and four times. So this would probably take us past the twenty weeks we were hoping for.