Thomas Hoover: Life blood

I remembered when I'd first pitched it to David Roth of Applecore. His response had been; "Definitely art-house. Probably never get past the Angelika. A wide release is gonna be three screens where they serve iced cappuccino."

I was dead set to prove him wrong.

"So," I wound up, "I've shot the entire film, but now, thinking it over, I've decided there's one last thing I need to do. As I go through the story, at every step of the adoption process I want to cut to an interview, just talking heads, tight shot, of somebody who actually went through it. Nonfiction. The real-life happy ending. And that's where you come in."

What I wasn't telling her was, I was increasingly concerned the picture might be slightly hollow without this punch of real life.

"Well," Carly declared with a grin, "my ending couldn't be happier."

"Okay, want to get started?" I looked around at Arlene, makeup, who always seemed to have more on her face than in her bag. I kidded her about that a lot. But she was actually the one who had found Carly, bumping into her at a gym in the Village.

"Hey, let's go for it." Arlene grinned.

I turned back to Carly. "So how's about we prep a little while you're getting the 'natural' look?"

In the back of my mind I knew what I wanted for the interview. Something like the feeling I remembered from The Thin Blue Line, where people engaged in Hamlet-like monologues that told us more about them than they themselves knew, that let us really know their secrets and their fears. The interviewer was never seen or heard.

Arlene ensconced Carly at the dining room table, a weathered country French, where she'd already unfolded and plugged in a mirror with lights.

"Having Kevin has been wonderful," Carly began. "He's changed my life. Sure, being a single 'supermom' makes for a lot of bad-hair days, but no matter how much I complain, it's worth every burp."

I thought momentarily about having her hold him during the interview, but instantly decided it would be too distracting. Kevin and his wonderful eyes would commandeer the camera. A kid this cute in a scene was nothing less than grand larceny.

He came toddling in now, dragging a stuffed brown bear. Then he banged its head and tried to say its name. "Benny." His funny, awkward walk reminded me a little of Lou Crenshaw after a couple of drinks. God, he was fantastic.

"Come here, sweetie." I picked him up, inhaling his fresh baby scent, and wanted to hold him forever-while he slammed the bear against my face. This child, I thought, is too good to be true.

He was wearing a small bracelet around his left ankle, a tiny little chain, with a small silver medallion attached. It looked like the face of a cat. Funny. Carly didn't have a cat, wasn't a cat person, so why the little bracelet? And the back had a bunch of lines and dots, like a jumbled-up Morse code.

Ask her about that, I thought. But later.

Now Carly was caught up in the sound of her own voice and on a roll. While Arlene continued with the makeup, moving to her eyes, she bubbled on.

"Like I told you on the phone, I tried and tried to adopt, through a whole bunch of lawyers, but it was a nightmare. One guy even helped me put ads in newspapers all around the country, but nothing worked. I kept getting scammed by women who wanted thousands of dollars up front, then backed out at the last minute." She was getting up, looking intense. "Let me have a minute. I want to make coffee for everybody."

I followed her into the kitchen, which was the "country" type with a faux granite counter and lots of copper-bottomed pans hanging from the ceiling.

She was right about the pain of adoption, which was why her story was such a burst of sunshine. As part of the start-up research for my picture, I'd actually gone to meet an adoption attorney out in Brooklyn, a sleazy-looking guy named Frank Brasco. I'd been pretending to be a client, to find out firsthand how tough it really was. What I heard was chilling.

"I don't want to get your hopes up," he'd declared for cheery openers. "Finding a healthy, Caucasian, American baby is virtually out of the question, so naturally we focus on foreign-borns. All the same, it can take years, and there's incredible paperwork. Passports for the kid, an extended visa for you while you go there and then wait around to process everything in triplicate. Bribes, corruption, you can't imagine." He sighed and adjusted his toupee, as though the very thought made him weary. "And that's just the foreign end. Here you have the INS, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. They give bean-counting paper-pushers a bad name." He examined me closely. "Not Jewish, I take it. 'Cause if that's what you're looking for, you may have to wait for the Messiah."

Now, almost a year and a lot of experience later, I knew full well how right he was. Which was what made Carly's story so fantastic.

"So how did you manage to get Kevin? You said it only took a few months?"

"Well, to go back to the beginning, I didn't start out wanting to adopt. But when the guy I was planning to marry got cold feet-after four and a half years, the louse-and there was nobody else on the horizon, I decided to just have a baby on my own. You know, find some smart, good-looking hunk, seduce him, and get things going the old-fashioned way, or if that didn't work, then I figured I'd just go to a sperm bank. Who needs an actual man, right?"

She took out a white and green bag of coffee beans, labeled Balducci's on the side. I was still holding Kevin, who threw Benny onto the floor, then began to sniffle and point.

But Carly seemed not to notice as she shook the coffee beans into the grinder. "Well, getting a baby the fun way turned out to be moot, because it seems I have some kind of uterine condition-which meant I couldn't get pregnant, or even do an in vitro. Bottom line, if I wanted a baby, I had to adopt."

She pressed the button on the coffee grinder, sending a blast of whirring through the kitchen. In seconds it was over and she was tapping the batch into her Braun. "So that's when I started on the attorney thing, got worked over good trying to adopt as a single mom, and finally heard about Children of Light."

"The adoption organization? What do you know about them?"

"Tell you the main thing," she said, "they're the place that can make it happen." She reached over and poked Kevin's tummy. "Right, big guy?"

Sure looked that way. What a cutie.

By now the spacious living room had been turned into a mini film set, with two 35-mm Panaflex cameras set up, windows blanked out, lights and filters in place, and a video camera and monitor. Having tested the boom mike and the tape recorder, Tony and Sherry were ready.

Carly announced to everybody that coffee was available, and I handed Kevin over to Marcy. Then together we marched into the living room.

"Okay," I told her, "we're going to be filming, but ignore that fact. Just look into the back of the camera and talk to it as though it were me."

"Hey." She grinned. "You're dealing with a pro. This is my thing."

I looked around at the cameras and the grips. "Okay, guys. Roll sound." There was a retort as the clap stick used for synching whacked out the start of the shoot. "Scene one, take one, Carly Grove interview."

She proceeded to hit the ground running, recounting in great detail her story of many disappointments. She finally got to the point where she was trying to adopt the baby of a woman in a Memphis jail, and then even that fell through.

"Which was when my main lawyer, Chuck, just gave up and recommended I hock the family silver, take a Valium, and try this place called Children of Light. Where you go when all else fails. So I gave them a call."

"And what happened?" It sounded too good to be true. "Did they seem… in any way unusual?"