John Domini: Movieola!

Which is about as far as we’ve got, except, no question, we’re staying with our root arc, staying right where we started on the romance, though I guess we’ll figure out what it comes down to in the end after the pre-screenings, I guess that’s up to the usual strangers in the dark, good news bad news. Though we do have a panel here showing the girl has a plan to change his face, the boyfriend’s, a plan to cut and paste, because for her it’s not about anyone’s face anymore, is it, not after all this time in the bowels of the mountain slashing through the scum of the earth—I ask you, what do lips and eyes and like that amount to, after you’ve been there and back, except some indistinct planes of light and shadow, a hand of Tarot that spells out a tale of love for a few staring moments and then gets swept off the table, destroyed, so that the cards can be reshuffled and then laid out again, in who knows what new confabulation? Everything’s a secret and anything’s possible. Plus finally we do have this one part here of in-the-meantime, this one bit of back in the world, with the guy, the boyfriend, the blade who could cut either way. We’ve got him doing what he can to fill the empty squares on the calendar, mixing up the Nestle’s with rum, whatever, montage, laying out her camisole again and decorating it with the stray hairs he’s found and kept safe, and studying his favorite Polaroid of her, that time he caught her just at climax, and standing before the mirror trying to mold his mouth to match her own ecstatic shape, somewhere between grin and yowl, trying to get it right by putting his fingers to the glass…

She’s heard all about it, visualization. Heard the talk and seen the email—if you want something to happen, you’ve first got to visualize —and yet she never expected anything like today. Never expected Industrial Light & Magic in a mall off one of the boulevards. Of course there are people in the industry who swear it’s magic anyway, visualization; an image in the mind’s eye, they’ll tell you, is halfway to elephant dollars at the b.o. Even a picture of a picture can make all the difference, you frame your pitch with the right shot and you walk out of there with a quarter million in startup. And she’s experimented, sure. At Starbucks for instance, during that comforting moment when your Venti’s on the way, she’s given the technique a whirl, she’s kited off into a sky full of money shots. But never anything like today.

Not that she hasn’t set herself apart already. She’s hardly been in town a year, Nola, but she’s worked out her niche: the girl who talks the high end. Let the others talk demographics, the 18 to 25, let them talk distribution groupings and ROI. Nola would talk narrative, not story but narrative . Never mere closeups, but moments of recognition. A niche that fit, the art end, and she had the look for it, less LA pastel and more NYC black. Her hair boldface parentheses around angular hard-plastic glasses. A look like she’s working toward a doctorate at the Sorbonne.

Her boyfriend loved it. The strategy, that is, that’s what he loved, all that politicking stuff. He’d rather talk about the most powerful table position at a dinner party than the kind of “positions” most boyfriends liked to talk about—because what he really preferred, Nola was starting to think (talk about a picture within a picture), was boys. She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t going to snicker at his name, Gaylord. She had to admit he made a lip-smacking presentation himself, aristo-blond, a former double major in English and Theater who could sound warm and sensitive even when he was telling her to deal cutthroat, and so she figured she had no choice but to overlook those cum stains on the futon. If in fact they were cum stains, and if she was picking up other telltales. After all, her lickable G-lord was going for his SAG card, and that could make anyone crazy. Plus he gave her all the props for the angle she was working, the high end. The very thought sent him into falsetto Little Richard, “Sww-eeet Mag-no-lia,” or down deep in the throat, “Lady Swee,” in the style of some bebop player. She appreciated that, the validation, such as it was, and she had to admire the guy’s range of voices. She only wished he’d come up with a nickname that wasn’t out of a minstrel show.

Still, she’d never expected this. Never expected such bop out of Lady Swee. And her magic in the mall felt all the more bizarre after a morning when, at last, shit was getting real.

That morning, no sooner had Nola settled into her cubicle than she’d been knocked for a loop again. Look what popped up on her screen! Time to duck into the ladies’ and murmur sw-w-eeet! At last the career had gotten real, right off the flow chart. The studio had decided it was time for an art project, a trip to the high end. They were ready to go with costumes and names and the whole Titanic , and for that kind of thing, who was their guy?

Madame Bovary, c’est moi . Or Madame Quality, anyway. She had her first honest-to-God shot at a property of her own.

So it’s that very same day, the same dawn-of-a-star early lunch, when our Lady starts to visualize. Never anything like it. She’s doing a Starbucks over at the Barnes & Noble, she’s thinking maybe a novel, maybe one of those based-on-a-true-story, meantime sitting over a whole stack of books—candy-colored packages, Christmas under the tree—and no sooner does she get a picture in her head than it takes over. One moment she dips her tongue into the cream piled on top of her Venti, savoring, pondering, and the next a kind of extended opaque linguine has boiled up and out of those pages and started ribboning away in a flexing half-circle all around her, up in dancing pale In-sta-Gro sprouts that multiply and fatten, up under her as well, hoisting Nola and her rickety ’Bucks table along with the rest of whatever this is, this sprouting linguine that unfolds out into the gasoline breezes over the mall and boulevard, all of it happening fast, lifting and widening with such balance and smoothness you’d think it was aware of insurance guidelines, and yet fast nevertheless, so that the store’s second-shift manager barely has time to reach the Lady Swee, or reach where she used to be, her former reading nook, and it’s only a matter of seconds really before this unfolding skyward and ribboning outward, these shafts of dream-matter or whatever, they start coming together as segments of colors and figures, yes you can see the forms taking shape across their gathering off-gray stalks as they start to link and overlap and assert themselves beyond the bookstore rooftop, beyond the fat windows and flimsy girders, until these eruptive rippling pieces of a picture reach their apogee and cohere into the grand retro shape of an oyster-shell drive-in screen, a massive open fan in place of the storefront, and playing across its semicircular sort-of canvas is the very movie our Lady had been trying to visualize.

She can sit where she is and watch it, the scene she’d had in mind (though in her happiness, as she’d tongued up her drink’s white froth, she’d also thought of the better times with her G-guy…). She’s got an excellent seat, actually, because the miracle moviehouse that’s taken over an entire corner of this roadside turnout includes some kind of luxury box, a perch well up one slope of the fan. Up where you can feel the breeze off the Pacific. She hadn’t realized she’d chosen a place so squarely in the LA flatlands, and till now she hadn’t noticed that she was sharing her unobstructed view with the stunned afternoon manager of the bookstore.

This is a woman who, compared to Sweet Magnolia, has a little more color in her clothes but a lot less in her face. She’s blanching, and can you blame her? The last thing a mid-level employee expects when she comes into work is to find herself clinging, at early lunchtime, to a café table and chair that seem perched on— what would you call this? Nola sees the hatch-shell of a drive-in theater, but maybe the manager sees the upper arc of a half-buried Ferris Wheel. What would you call it, or call the FX trickery by which, across this vast half-moon, there’s playing a movie? It’s all the manager can manage just to glance over at the heads and shoulders on the screen; to look down at the parking lot makes her tremble where she stands, just as looking up must stagger the rubberneckers below, taking cover behind their open car doors. Farther off, out on the freeway, you can see one fender-bender at least, while other drivers have pulled undented to the shoulder and are coming out of their machines to try and get a handle on this weirdness, looming up immensely in a fragment of a minute.