Final cut, p.1
Final Cut, page 1
Final Cut
A HOLLYWOOD MYSTERY
Marjorie McCown
For Ann Collette, Extraordinary literary agent and cherished friend. Your wisdom and perseverance shone a constant guiding light. This book is yours as much as mine.
“A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.”
—Orson Welles, Director/Actor/Writer/Producer
“Crewing and being on film sets is kind of like being in a carnival, with carnie folk.”
—Ben Mendelsohn, Actor
JUNE 21
8:10 PM
Joey felt frustrated that she was late getting back to the shoot. By this time, nearly an hour after wrap, most of the movie crew had packed up and gone home after what had been a long, discouraging day. As key costumer, Joey usually started the morning on set, then ended her day at one of the specialty shops that made clothing for the film, or one of a dozen other tasks that went with her job. But tonight was different.
She’d made the long drive back to the shooting location in Malibu because she wanted to talk to Courtney in person, and even though she wasn’t looking forward to the conversation, she wished she’d made it back before wrap. The second AD hadn’t answered her texts, and now Joey worried she’d missed the chance to do timely damage control, to smooth over the tension between them after their flare-up on set earlier that day. The hectic pace of the movie had everybody on edge, but their confrontation could threaten the costume department’s entire working relationship with the assistant directors. If she couldn’t talk to the second AD without starting a fight, it was game over.
Determined not to let that happen, Joey stopped by the wardrobe truck then headed straight to the AD trailer as soon as she got back to location. She’d seen firsthand the problems that came from bad blood between departments.
On one of her first films, the costume supervisor had gotten into a feud with the transportation captain. After that, the wardrobe trailers were permanently parked in base camp Siberia, as far from the actors’ trailers as possible. The time it took to travel those extra yards added up fast when you had to cover them many times each day. Then drivers suddenly became unavailable to do runs of any kind for the costume department, no matter the urgency. That might not sound like a big deal, but transpo can be a lifesaver when you’re up against an impossible deadline by making an important pickup or drop-off when everybody in your department is too slammed with work to do it, which can happen several times a week on a busy film.
Getting on the wrong side of the AD department was even worse. Assistant directors are like air traffic controllers on a movie. Without them, everybody crashes into everybody else, literally and figuratively. Alienate the ADs and you’re just asking for trouble.
The costume department already had enough problems on this movie between the lack of prep time, late casting, and a director with an ego as big as his box office grosses. Making an enemy of the second AD wasn’t an option. The thought sent a shiver through Joey, and she picked up her pace.
When she didn’t find Courtney in the AD trailer, she continued her circuit of the movie’s base camp, asking everyone she passed if they’d seen the second AD.
“She was by the cafe set last I saw her, but that was a while ago,” one of the grips said.
Joey headed for the Paradise Cove Cafe up by the beach. All the actors’ trailers, nearest the set, were dark and locked up for the night. She tried the back door of the cafe, but that too was secured, so she peered through the windows. A single work light remained on, but there was no sign of anyone inside, the cafe apparently deserted now that the day’s filming was done. The sun was low in the sky, dipping toward the ocean.
The longest day of the year, and that’s exactly what it felt like to Joey.
She’d run out of places to look. Anxiety tugged at her. Her relationship with Courtney was complicated, like it is whenever your ex is dating somebody new. And she needed to be honest with herself about the way her personal feelings may have clouded their interactions.
With daylight dying over the water, she stepped onto the beach, hoping to feel a scrap of the serenity she always found in the natural rhythm of the breaking waves, like a favorite refrain, a golden oldie that just gets better with time.
At the water’s edge, she noticed a pile of clothing, buffeted by the incoming tide scudding across the sand. Her first thought was that one of the extras had abandoned their costume, but that didn’t make any sense. As the sun dropped out of the sky, she took a few steps closer to investigate, at the same time as a larger wave swept aside what she’d taken for coils of kelp swirling around that bundle of fabric.
Horror sliced through Joey like a scalpel; she stumbled and fell to her knees. Courtney Lisle lay motionless in the shallow water at the shoreline as the cold blue Pacific surf washed over her body.
FOURTEEN HOURS EARLIER
Chapter One
The first day of principal photography on a film is always a milestone in production, like opening night in the theater. After working mostly independently of each other for three months or more, all the different departments merge to become one big machine. No matter how many movies you’ve done, every new job is a blank slate. Each time, you ask yourself: Do I have what it takes to climb that mountain again, to create a new world out of whole cloth?
Put up or shut up time.
Joey slept poorly the night before, which was par for the course; but she couldn’t shake the feeling of dread that dropped on her like a net as soon as she opened her eyes that morning. She’d had a bad feeling about this job from the start; she’d nearly passed on the movie for a number of reasons, both personal and professional. But the carrot of working so close to home was finally too tempting to resist.
The costume department had been prepping for months, but the schedule was rushed for a project so large and complex. Lots of special effects, stunts, and complicated costumes; lots of money and reputations on the line. Still, she felt her department was as ready as they could be, and her standards for readiness were high; so she tried to chalk up her misgivings to first day of shooting jitters. Later, she’d wonder if they’d been a premonition.
Just before sunrise, she pulled her car into the crew parking lot, about a mile south of base camp in Malibu. A shuttle van idled, waiting to ferry people to the set. It was empty save for the driver, whose head rested against his seat back. The teamsters were responsible for the setup of vehicles and equipment, so that all was ready for the shooting company when they got to work. They were the first in and last out every day, and most of them were expert at grabbing a few winks when they had the chance.
Joey gathered her purse and work satchel, then locked her car and pinned her keys to her waistband. She had keys to the costume offices and storage space for the movie as well as her personal keys, and this was the only sure way to keep them at hand throughout the day without losing them.
She trotted over to the van and pulled the side door open, startling the driver out of his catnap. A grizzled veteran in his late forties, he sat up with a frown until he saw who was climbing into his back seat.
“Joey Jessop! Girl, how you doin’?” A wolfish grin lit his face. “You are lookin’ fine as ever, Sweet Cheeks.”
Pete O’Neill was a relentless lech, and even though he was basically harmless, he could be tiresome, especially first thing in the morning.
“Pete, what a nice surprise,” she said, trying to hide her true feelings. “I didn’t see your name on the crew list.”
“We ran three weeks over on the last job down in Louisiana; made it back in the nick of time to get on this one. Didn’t want to miss out on a big show in LA, for a change.”
“No kidding,” she said. “This is the first job I’ve booked in the past four years that’s shooting here. I’m thrilled to be sleeping in my own bed for the next six months.”
“You coming off location, too?”
“I’ve been back here prepping this one for a while, but before that I was out of town shooting a Western.”
“How’d that go?” He wiggled his eyebrows. “You meet a lot of hunky cowboys?”
She managed to keep from rolling her eyes. “It was an education.”
“Never done a Western before, huh?” He gave her a knowing look. “Whole different animal.”
“That’s one way of putting it.” Joey had been on dozens of location shoots, but the Western was a real eye-opener. From the wild temperature swings in the desert—25 degrees at night to over 100 in the afternoon—to the dust storm that took out their generators one day, or the flash flood that nearly trapped them in a box canyon on another, the experience had given her a fresh appreciation for the comfort of shooting on a studio back lot.
She stifled a yawn. “At least it was fast. Six-week shoot.”
“Yeah?” His expression was skeptical. “Who was directing?”
“Clint Eastwood.” She smiled as she pictured the director on set, watching the shot in progress on a handheld monitor. Despite the difficult conditions, Joey enjoyed working with him.
Pete nodded appreciatively. “That man’s a class act, old school Hollywood.”
“Yes, he is,” she said. “A real filmmaker. We could use more like him in the business these days.”
“You got that right.” Pete checked his watch. “I don’t think I’ll be getting any more customers for a while, crew call’s not for another hour. If you want, I’ll run you up to base camp now.”
“That’d be great.” She slid the door clos
He dropped the van into gear. They turned north onto the Pacific Coast Highway as a pale watercolor wash of daylight began to spread across the ocean, sketching in the horizon line to the west. Joey took a deep breath, bracing herself for the nonstop activity the next sixteen hours would bring.
“Have you read the script for this one yet?” Pete glanced at her in the rearview mirror.
“Didn’t have much choice,” she said lightly.
“That bad?”
“Not my cup of tea. I’m not a big fan of comic book movies.”
“’Bout all they make around here anymore,” he said, “if you want to earn a decent living.”
“Don’t I know it.”
The screenplay was 125 pages of special effects–driven gobbledygook, but Joey had no doubt it would play well with the movie’s crucial fourteen- to twenty-year-old target audience.
“I heard this one’s about some new superhero.” Pete caught her eye in the mirror again.
“It’s actually the Legion of Phenomenals, based on some underground comics that have a big cult following. Nothing new, but they haven’t been used in any movies so far.”
“Why not just call it that, instead of UMPP?” He was asking about the working title for the movie. “Sounds like a noise you’d make if you got punched in the stomach.”
She couldn’t help smiling. “It’s code for Untitled Marcus Pray Project. You know how paranoid the producers are. They’re trying to keep the fanboys in the dark.”
“Like that’s going to stop them. The director’ll probably be posting pictures on Instagram from the set, and the studio won’t say boo to him.” Pete leaned back to talk to her over his shoulder. “Marcus Pray’s no Eastwood, even if he is a big dog in the business right now. I’m taking care of his trailer, and I got a mile-long list of special stuff that’s gotta be on board for him and his friends.” Pete gave the word a suggestive emphasis.
Marcus Pray was a powerful Hollywood hyphenate, a producer-director with a string of action-adventure blockbusters to his credit. This movie was sure to be another lucrative notch on his belt. Joey hadn’t worked with him before, and some of the stories she’d heard made her think twice before she signed onto this job.
Pete winked at her in the mirror. “I hear Pray’s got a lot of pretty little friends. Can you believe, they made me sign a special NDA, about how to work and act around that guy, like I haven’t been doing this for twenty-five years? The second AD was real nasty about it too. She may be good-looking, but she’s a bitch on wheels.”
Joey was relieved to get to base camp and put a period on the conversation. She wasn’t interested in dwelling on personalities or gossip; she wanted to concentrate on the work. Whatever the movie’s shortcomings might be, she was excited to see it start coming to life on film.
As key costumer, she straddled the two worlds between the shooting crew on set and the prep crew back at the costume house who worked ahead of the shooting schedule to get the rest of the movie ready for camera.
On a big movie there can be hundreds of speaking roles and thousands of extras. There’s never enough prep time to complete all those costumes before the first day of shooting. Some important speaking roles might not even be cast before principal photography begins. One film Joey shuddered to remember went on location two weeks before shooting was scheduled to start, with no one in the cast except the leading man.
The film was modern, so Joey struck an agreement with the best men’s clothing store in town to open for her any time with a phone call. She also had vendors on standby in New York and LA to messenger clothing to their location in Tennessee at a moment’s notice.
The deals for the supporting roles were signed just in time to fly the actors in on the weekend before cameras were set to roll. Then it was up to the costume department to gather, fit, and alter their clothing in slightly more than forty-eight hours. Even with Joey’s careful preparations, they barely pulled it off and avoided breaking the cardinal rule of film: No matter what: Never Hold Camera.
If anyone asked, Joey would say the thing she liked best about her position was that the definition of a key costumer was so vague, the job could be customized for each project, limited only by the talents and skills of the person hired for the gig.
But she also loved being part of a team, working with talented people toward a common goal. Every day on every movie was different, so the work was never boring. Even when that variety meant big and sometimes unexpected challenges, solving them made the job that much more satisfying. She felt lucky to feel that way about her profession.
Base camp was just beginning to stir as she threaded her way through the hodgepodge of vehicles wedged into the parking lot of their first shooting location, Paradise Cove Cafe, a funky little restaurant with tables set up for diners right on the sand. The mechanical drone from generators and diesel engines all but drowned the gentler rumble of waves breaking on the beach only a few yards away.
Joey climbed the portable steps to the tailgate of the principal wardrobe truck, a converted fifty-three-foot semitrailer that served as the costume department’s headquarters on location. Fixed double-tiered hanging racks for clothing lined both sides of the interior. A stackable washer/dryer sat up front beside a slightly elevated platform, aka the poop deck, a flex space fitted out with countertops and cupboards. That tiny piece of real estate had more uses than square feet: daily clerical work, impromptu fittings, costume alteration and repair, sometimes all of the above could be cycling through the poop deck at any given time.
A movie of this size required two wardrobe trailers, one for principal clothing, the second for background. Both trailers accompanied the shooting crew to every location, including the soundstages on the studio lot. In addition to clothing, the trucks were stocked with supplies and equipment such as safety pins, wardrobe tags, zippered clothing bags, laundry detergent, clothing steamers, sewing machines, digital printers for continuity photos the costumers would take on set, and a host of other items the crew might need at their fingertips during the workday.
“Awesome! You’re early!” Zephyr Tomomatsu, the set costumer for both leading actresses, pounced as soon as Joey came in the sliding glass door at the back of the trailer. A waterspout of shocking red hair somehow harmonized with the vintage men’s clothing she always wore. At twenty-eight, she was six years younger than Joey, though her irrepressible puppy dog energy often made that gap feel even bigger. But they’d worked together before, and Joey knew how capable she was. In fact, she’d recommended Zephyr for this job, a step up from her usual position of general set costumer.
But the look on her face dashed Joey’s hopes for a little quiet time before the morning rush hit.
“Brooke’s having a meltdown in her trailer. She doesn’t want to wear the bikini. I tried to tell her she looks incredible, but she won’t listen to me.” Zephyr fixed her almond-shaped eyes on Joey. “Can you please, please talk to her?”
Brooke Austin Reynolds was a twenty-one-year-old actress who’d gained attention in a small but well-received independent movie before she was cast in this big-budget studio extravaganza. A beautiful young woman, she nevertheless wrestled with a raft of insecurities, mostly centering on her appearance. No matter how gorgeous or thin she looked to the rest of the world, the reflection she saw in the mirror always came up short and fat.
Zephyr leaned into her pitch. “You’re the closest thing we have to an assistant designer, and Brooke respects your opinion. She told me she thinks you’re smart and have great taste.”
Joey shook her head in frustration. It was a tricky problem to address because logic didn’t apply. There was no talking Brooke into seeing herself in a different light. Joey had learned that lesson years ago when she first came across the same situation with another lovely actress. Since then, she’d seen it too many times to have any illusions about a quick fix.
“Maybe we should wait for Dahlia. This should be her call.”
Dahlia Raines was the costume designer, and though Joey was her right hand in most respects, coaxing actors to wear costumes already agreed to in the fittings was more properly part of the designer’s job description.
