Amie Barrodale - You Are Having a Good Time

“Of course. But if you’re going to play her, these are questions you need to consider. You’re going to want to read between the lines. Because I love you in Bob’s films. I loved you in Sentinel , but I got the impression you were trading on charisma. I want the tricks and I want more. I need you to do the work. We want you to read from the party scene.”

She realized he expected an answer. “You want me to play the part?”

“ I want you to, yes. David, the studio head, wants me to go with a name actress, but I’ve told him that’s all wrong for this picture. Kate is fragile, and she’s confused, and a movie star isn’t going to be able to inhabit that. It’s one of those elusive qualities, fragility, isn’t it? Quite a bit like intelligence. You can’t hire an actor with a thirty-two IQ and tell him to play a scientist — there’s a stupidity in his eyes, and no matter what kind of genius he is, that stupidity is going to be there. Fragility is much the same. If I hire some Hollywood movie star, I’m not going to get that true open gaze, the one you so naturally possess. I’m having difficulty explaining it to them in a way they can understand. They keep sending me videotapes of movie stars making puppy eyes.”

He laughed. She wasn’t sure what he meant when he said that she wasn’t a movie star.

“Libby, you understand it because you’re a genius at what you do. But these are idiots I’m dealing with. These are people who try to get reservations at a restaurant because they read about it in a magazine. That’s what I’m talking about. I tell them I don’t care if Jane Lake is signed on. You can’t have Jane Lake playing Kate. Obviously not. We already have a doe-eyed star, for Judith, with Cynthia Wu. For Kate we need someone who’s mousy, someone who’s vulnerable, a person who’s been through a lot in her life, and it shows in her body and on her face.”

Mousy? She showed wear on her face? Everyone said she looked younger than she was.

Libby poured the rest of the wine into a glass. When she put the bottle back on the marble counter, the sound it made was distinctive, and Victor stopped mid-sentence. He couldn’t possibly know what Libby was doing. But she was sure he did. They were both quiet. Libby brought the glass and went and lay down on the couch in her study.

Victor shifted gears.

“We need you to come into the studios to do a shoot. I need to show them Libby and then show them Jane Lake, and they’ll see it. But if we’re going to win this, Libby, and I think we will, I need you to make my lines work. I know Bob is loose with his dialogue, and he doesn’t mind some improvisation. I don’t do that. An actress of Jane Lake’s caliber doesn’t do that. I need you rock solid. I need you to know my lines. If you have to say them a thousand times, do it. Do your homework. Don’t walk in. One thing I hate, and I’m going to tell you right from the start, is seeing an actor over by the crafts table at four a.m. with a page from my script. And Libby? Don’t get in the way of the scene. Don’t get in my way.”

“What do you mean?”

“This movie is a small movie. It’s a realistic movie. It’s about family life, and it’s about middle-class life. It’s set in the home, and it’s about the received ideas that govern one woman’s inner life in her home. She tells herself she loves her husband and he loves her, but she knows the truth, and when she observes herself thinking about the truth, she suppresses the thought. In this scene, she recognizes that. So don’t let Libby get in the way of Kate.”

“Well, wouldn’t that be good? I mean, given what you told me about the vulnerability I bring to the part, if I were to put myself into it?”

“Uh-huh. No, that’s not right. I’m going to interrupt you now and put Terry on the phone, and he’s going to explain what we need to go forward.”

The phone line was quiet for a full minute. Then Terry picked up a phone line.

“Libby? Terry. Yes, I’m handling all the callbacks for Kate. I don’t know if Vic’s talked to you. Yes? Good. Well, let me tell you, Vic wants us to do all of the audition tape in a studio that isn’t so echo-y, so we’re flying all of you in. We need you out here Wednesday afternoon, two p.m. to two-thirty.”

When they had made arrangements, Victor said, “Work on the lines, Libby. I want you for the part.”

“Were you listening in?” Libby asked.

“I have a feeling about us, and my feelings are never wrong, so if it doesn’t work on this picture, don’t worry about it. You’re a really good actor, and I’m sure I’ll use you soon. Oh, and, Libby? Is it all right if I call you again sometime?”

He hung up the phone.

* * *

She made coffee and took her script to the attic. She read her lines out loud, dispassionately, all morning. Her throat started to get scratchy. She wrote her lines out in longhand, filling a spiral notebook. Then she sat and thought about Kate, and what she would have been feeling in the moment. At first she tried to remember bad relationships, being lied to, but then when she read her lines with those things in mind, she got distracted. She thought about the key emotion of the scene — she decided it was fear expressing itself as aggression, that it was fight or flight — and she tried to remember a time when she felt like fighting. She couldn’t get it, so she took her puppy for a walk. The damned dog was half poodle, and even though it came from a breeder, it was starting to act like a puppy-mill dog. It always wanted to go into her space — to walk right in front of her legs. Before she realized it, she was kicking the dog! When she got home, she read the scene again, and it worked, simply like that — thinking about her puppy, she got as angry as an ordinary woman would get if she was beaten. Angry at her damned stupid puppy, she recited the one line over and over—“Why don’t you do it again?”

* * *

A day after the retest, Victor called and said, “You blew Jane Lake out of the water.”

“I got the part!”

“Well, close. It’s all there, but you showed a little too much. Take a week. Try it again. Rephrase it. Make it simple and concrete so we can deal with it.”

“I have another test?”

“A formality, to wrap things up. I’m sending a cameraman to you. You’ll do it by video, and he’ll mail it to us.”

Three weeks became a month and a half. She tried to reassure herself. Her mother worried for her, and she reassured her.

“He said I all but have the part, so I believe I do. According to Victor, I blew Jane Lake out of the water. Those were his exact words. The last retest is a formality. He’s a perfectionist, but he’s not a sadist. I mean, he wouldn’t say that and then take it back. I hear he sometimes takes thirty, forty takes, to get it right when an actor walks across the dance floor. It drives people crazy. He had one actress who supposedly broke into his apartment, but then I heard he didn’t keep it locked and they were sleeping together at the time.”

“Libby, we have another word for that in Houston.”

“What?”

“We call them assholes.”

When Victor finally called, the conversation was relaxed. He told her she’d misread some of his lines and he’d changed them to reflect her reading. He apologized for being finicky about his exact lines. He said, “It’s the sort of thing a TV director would make you do.” Libby said, “Well, I didn’t see it that way, but I’m happy to go back to my initial reading,” and Victor laughed. He read to her from Jung’s Red Book . He asked Libby where she was sitting, and she said she was lying on the ground. He said, “Somehow I knew that.” He told Libby she should watch Star Wars , and she told him to watch La Jetée . He said, “How did you know I’ve always refused to watch Chris Marker? I’ve seen every other trashy movie ever made.”