Manuel Munoz - What You See in the Dark

At ten, another woman came in and sat quietly in a chair. She, too, wore a robe, but already the Actress knew she had no clothing on underneath — no bathing suit, no moleskin coverings, no bikini. The other woman sat without saying a word, her time being paid for, though it seemed today her services might not be required. Even though she had a robe on, anyone could see she was endowed with a magnificent pair of breasts, hips curved for a Las Vegas floor show, yet she sat in the chair reading a Marguerite Duras novel in French without once glancing up to meet the eyes of the crew, who stole quick glances and grinned at each other.

Not fifteen minutes later, another woman appeared, this one tall and thin, accompanied by more people from wardrobe, a scattering of props on hand while the Director guided the talk about the lighting. The Actress observed them as they positioned the tall actress at the frame of the bathroom door, silhouetting her, discussing the width of her shoulders, the shape of the wig, the appearance of the knife in her hand. For the rest of the morning, the Actress and the Las Vegas starlet sat in their identical chairs, the nuances of the lighting details becoming so particular and technical that they hardly made sense anymore. For the rest of the morning, it was the tall, thin woman who received the direction, who was guided in how to raise the knife menacingly, who was urged to slow down her entrance through the door, even though she was nothing but a shadow.

Finally, when they were ready to shoot again, the Director called for the Actress, and it occurred to her that even the pivotal scene of turning to face her surprising demise was not yet in the cards. It was merely the entrance of the silhouette. “Can we run the water a little bit, just to warm it up?” she asked, and one of the crew answered politely that it was hardly going to get much warmer. Still, they ran the water some, the Director asking her to keep her right arm close to her body as she rinsed, to conceal the shape of her breast from the camera as best she could.

By this time her hair had dried, and the Actress wondered to herself about just how wet her hair had been in the previous shot. She stood with her face under the tepid water for as long as she could before raising her arms, involuntarily, to run her fingers through her hair.

“Cut right there,” the Director said. And though everyone could hear him, the Actress felt he whispered what he said next. “I could see the shape of your breast. Keep your right arm down and use the left if you must, but keep the right one down, elbow in.”

“Hair?” asked the stylist. “Do you need it dry again?”

“No, just go as is. As if you’ve been under the nozzle for several moments,” he said to the Actress, and the camera rolled again.

This time, the Actress monitored her right arm, the feeling like a constriction. Suddenly the bathroom set seemed oppressively contained, the physicality of the scene becoming like a series of dance steps to be practiced, rehearsed, and replicated with supreme precision. She rinsed her hair, her body contained, but her face registering what it was supposed to.

“Cut. Stop there. Your entrance,” he said, before the Actress realized he was speaking to the tall, thin woman. “Open the door, but pause before you enter. Don’t rush through.”

The water was still running and the Actress stood as far away from the stream as she could. It was getting cold.

“Again,” the Director said, motioning them all to start. She stood back in the shower stream, her eyes closed serenely against the water, realizing she wasn’t playing the part at the moment, but no matter. She just wanted to hear the sound of the curtain being pulled, but the seconds dragged on. Even before the Director called out for a cut, she knew something had gone wrong.

Something about the lighting was displeasing the Director, and the wardrobe mistress motioned to the Actress to get out of the shower. The water was turned off, the set becoming quiet as the Director conferred with the men around him, until finally he said, a little dejectedly, “Early lunch. One hour.”

Half a day and hardly anything burned onto film just yet. Over a sandwich and a cup of coffee, the Actress studied the script again, turning to the pages that described the shower scene, but then she pushed the whole thing aside. For all its audacity, this was a technical exercise, and all she had in her head about this woman’s vulnerability, her moment of surprise, and her terror was now revealing itself to be almost irrelevant. When the scream came, it needn’t be done with an eye to its believability, but to its function, how she looked when she did it, if her face was in focus, how she carried her scream over the sound of the water falling in the echo of the shower. On the one hand, yes, it was a moment that she knew was different from other movie deaths. It was real carnage, not an actor going down in an elegant ballet, clutching his stomach, his face grimaced in perfect pain. In her teenage days back in the Valley, sneaking into movies midway through a screening, she’d seen gangsters fall majestically in a rain of bullets, women screaming bug-eyed at a movie monster and raising their hands like museum statues. But for this scene, something else was at work, and even the Director’s explanations and his revelations on the storyboards hadn’t been enough for her to realize what he was doing until she had come into the middle of the action. It was now a measure of camera angles, how water appeared on the screen, the height of the shot, the overheads, the sound — her body as a prop — and she finished her coffee and sandwich and reported back to the set a little early, readying herself to be used as needed.

All afternoon, they worked with slow precision. The Las Vegas girl stood in the shower completely nude, and a different shower curtain, a little more opaque, was hung up to conceal her nipples. Lens condensation corrupted a couple of the shots when the shower ran too long, and they had to start over. The back wall of the shower jammed in place and the grips finally muscled it out, their dirty fingerprints wiped away from the edges to maintain the illusion of a bathroom so pristine it gleamed. The warm water ran out and they had to wait awhile to let the tanks reheat. The Las Vegas girl took to sitting topless so much that even the crew stopped noticing.

The next day, it was the same thing. A new girl, equally curvy and coached to be more demure when off camera, came in as a replacement. More camera setups, failed takes, mole-skin applications, arms over breasts with the back almost to the camera but not quite. Sometimes it was the new girl in the tub, doing exactly as she was told while a camera shot from overhead, keeping her head down as much as she could so there was never a possibility of noticing she was a stand-in. She dried off and quickly robed, paper cup of coffee in hand, watching the proceedings. The screaming was easily done, only a couple of takes because the editing would take care of the rest, and all the thinking the Actress had done about the moment of this young woman’s death was really for naught. What was more important was how the woman walked into the bathroom, what she was doing right before, the casual way she went about making a grand decision in her life, her effort to change course, and how the certainty of that decision was going to be silently clear to the audience: this was a changed woman, and she was doing the right thing. She was good enough to be forgiven.

It took seven days to shoot the scene, almost as long as it had taken to shoot the preceding drama, and with the holidays so near at hand, the pressure to finish fell heavy on the set. Who knew it was going to be so demanding? But it wasn’t the time involved — it was the physicality and trusting that the Director could see what he needed to see. It was the appearance of nakedness without being naked, hard as it was to tilt her body away from the camera when, right out of the corner of her eye, she could always see a voluptuous pair of Las Vegas breasts at the ready.