17th

Isabella.jpg

Halley Parry

The camera sits several meters from the end of a low, wide table. The floor is a pale hardwood. The terrace is visible to the right of the screen; a balcony leads to the sky outside. Large terra cotta pots sit on the railing of the terrace and vines with open blue flowers strangle the columns. We are shooting in a mansion in LA, though it is easy to imagine we are at an Italian villa in the twelfth century.

Twelve people sit around the table which is set not for an elaborate banquet but a simple supper. The tablecloth, made of elegant silk, is a subtle gray, its pattern a tangle of white flowers. The pattern and the color mimic Isabella’s dress which is darker gray like a stormy sky and littered with golden flowers. Like a bouquet of roses thrown into thick fog. Nutshells litter the table before the man in front, Isabella’s brother, sitting across from her. The wall behind the set is plastered with wallpaper, a magnification of Isabella’s dress and dizzying.

The shot is static, framed so you can see the face of almost everyone sitting around the table. It is disorienting, this angle, each actor lined up so that they are in stark profile. They don’t seem aware that they are sitting in a group, there are separate little orbs around them. No one speaks in this scene, just Lorenzo and Isabella. One woman’s face is obscured, she sits at the far end facing the terrace. She is too beautiful, the director said, so beautiful that she will upstage the lead if her face isn’t hidden.

The left side of the table: in the foreground, Isabella’s brother sits with one muscular leg extended in front of the table, pointing his toes towards her chair. A dog is curled up beneath the green velvet of his chair, which is tipped at an alarming angle to accommodate the dog. But that’s how it has to be. Beside him is a man in a yellow gold shirt with a red tunic layered on top. He nervously inspects his wine glass, which is full of a brown liquid. For this shoot, they are using prune juice though I hear that some directors let the actors drink real wine to get in the mood. There is a falcon perched on his chair; it is making the dogs nervous. To his left is a smug looking man with straight red hair, and next to him is the beautiful woman with the obscured face.

On the other side of the table farthest from the camera and closest to the wall, a man is downing the contents of his cup. He is a heavy drinker and will die first in the movie from the poisoned wine. Next to him is a busty, prude woman in a green dress with her hands clasped across her belly. She looks straight ahead, as though she is about to make a joke but decides better of it. A man peels a pear with a small knife, a beautiful woman with dark hair raises a nut to her lips, and the man next to her dabs his mouth with a napkin. An old woman with a sheer scarf covering her head wraps her hands around her belly, in either physical or emotional pain.

Everyone is in profile except for Lorenzo, who turns away from the old woman toward Isabella, toward the camera, toward us. He hands Isabella an ornately decorated blue plate with a blood orange, sliced in half. She is lifting one half but does not meet his gaze. Behind her stands the servant, one knee cocked in yellow tights, though his red hair makes him look like part of the family. There is an air of suspicion among this group of actors, but I don’t yet know why. Perhaps they are just good actors, they are suspicious that something has been poisoned and they are right. A bowl of grapes and a plate of plums and peaches is partially hidden by the hulking figure of Isabella’s brother.

This is how the scene begins. The director for this film, a period piece, has eyes like ice and is known for his controversial tactics to infuse his scenes with a hidden air of reality. Once, he locked an actress in a room until she began to panic before releasing her into a scene.

I take note of these details, positioning for the beginning of the scene, in my mind like a list. This is a simple shot, the guests eat somberly and Lorenzo tries to convince Isabella to take a blood orange from his plate. It is my job to make sure that, from take to take, nothing has changed in case they will need to be edited together.

My official title is script supervisor, but I think of myself more like a painter. Every drop of paint has a place and cannot be changed. I have a meticulous eye for detail, but the real reason I am so good at this job is that my memory is photographic. I see each take like a new snapshot and I compare them with my eyes closed.

Take 1

Lorenzo	Isabella
My tunic is the exact color of salmon. It is crushed velvet and features a long seam down the front. The wardrobe assistant asked me to raise my hands over my head which was honestly humiliating. She held it open so as not to disturb my hair, which has been greased into a crust that cascades from my head. I am beheaded at the end of this movie, though the brother has ordered the waiter to poison the wine in a failed attempt to kill me, and most of the people at the dinner will die. Isabella will become ill but survive. The waiter stands behind me looking suspicious, his hands are clenched and up by his chest, gripping the white towel draped over his arm. I don’t like to be touched and I feel as though he is about to reach out and touch me, which has made me set my jaw tightly and the director comments that he loves the intensity on my face, to keep it. The director fusses over Isabella but seems oblivious that there are more of us sitting around the table.	In each scene, I take a bite of a blood orange. An actual bite. Because they are there, yes, but also because it’s important to the director that I appear to be truly eating -- an effect I can only manage, apparently, by the actual act of chewing and swallowing. Not mimicry. Acting is just about doing what you are told. I have already eaten seven segments of orange today. I came to set hungry, in part so I could manage to eat as many oranges as we needed to get the shot, and also because my dress is half-a-breath too small. It holds my organs together in a desperate hug. At the audition, I lied about my size in the hope that I would get the part if I were just a bit thinner. It’s possible that I was right. I say my line, “I would not grieve thy hand by unwelcome pressing.” I eat the orange and gaze at Lorenzo, puncturing each individual cell of orange with my teeth. The take is no good because the dog barks at the moment of most intense eye contact and I jump.
The Brother	The Falcon
We all sit around a dinner table. It is night, but lights have been erected outside to make it appear that the sun is shining on the other side of the terrace, in the sky. It looks blue. I am sitting across from the lead, across from Isabella. Her real name is Coco but she insists that we call her Isabella for the duration of the shoot. She’s a bit of a snob, takes this all very seriously. To get into character, she isn’t using anything that wasn’t around in medieval times. I saw her taking a piss in a chamber pot upstairs and I watched, I couldn’t help myself. There was something so feral about it. In the dinner scene I pretend to kick the dog. I stretch out my leg and hold it, taut and strong. The dog barks when I nudge it with my foot and we have to start over. Their handler is outside smoking behind the dressing rooms, a row of white trailers.	You whisper to me when you take the hood off of my eyes. You whisper encouraging words because you are kind, kind despite the fact that I am kept in the dark. That I was kept in the dark for the long journey here. I hate the taste of metal. The air is still here which makes it difficult for me to concentrate on my task, which is to perch. I am not interested in any of the food on the table though this whole room has an air of warm rot. A flea crawls across the back of the dog. A roach makes a nest beside us in the wall.

I pace back and forth behind the camera, unseen. The camera-woman is idle. She has sunglasses on and I believe that she is asleep. The lens she is using gives such an odd effect to the scene, I can’t describe it. The brutish one, the man playing the murder-happy brother, is texting on his phone and smiling. Isabella stares at him, aghast, and clears her throat until he looks up. The dogs look at her too and cock their heads.

“Excuse me,” she says, “excuse me. I don’t know what it is but that machine is terribly inappropriate.”

Lorenzo rolls his eyes.

The director doesn’t pace nor does he sit. He squats low to the ground, thin knees up to his chin, and brings out a new, freshly sliced orange during each take. He is looking to get something right that I can’t quite see, something that was not present in the first take, and they won’t stop repeating the same motions until he is satisfied. The sliced orange gets passed to Isabella by Lorenzo, she takes it and her brother watches, glowering, as their hands graze.

Take 2

Lorenzo	Isabella
I stare at her, I stay in character while we wait out a siren. When I saw her headshot I thought she was beautiful -- Elsa swept it off of the table in a rage. But now I see that she is not. She refuses to look at me, I don’t know why. I smell smoke. Someone’s house is on fire. I had a book as a child, about the daughters of a firefighter. They were proud of their father, and proud that they knew to crawl and check the doorknob to see if it were hot. My wife is at home breastfeeding our child. He is long and thin like me. I tried her breast milk once, just to see. Can the man behind me tell what I am thinking? He is smiling like he knows. In the next scene I will make him take a sip of my wine and he will die a sudden, painful death. Lorenzo values his life above all else. I value the life of my child.	We are waiting for a siren to pass by on the road outside. Everyone sits very still in their seats. I eat the orange how I normally would, as it was already halfway into my mouth when the siren sounds began inching into our ears. When my mother ate, she said she was making the food “go to church” -- a little joke leftover from her childhood that I never fully understood. Unless, of course, we are to worship in the mouth. This had been my first audition. I am nervous but the method acting technique is working, and they even let me sleep here, in the villa, in the room with the oranges. I wake at sunrise and bathe with water from the fountain in the cul-de-sac before the crew arrives.
The Brother	The Falcon
A siren has stalled somewhere on the street outside. I played a firefighter in a soft porno once, worst experience of my life. The sound of the sirens were stuck in my head like a song for weeks. The director is being an annoying prick, just like I was warned. The second dog is under my chair and I have to balance tipped forward so the shot doesn’t change. I am strong but my leg is starting to shake. When I showed Marco my costume he laughed and told me I look like a rat in the Nutcracker. Worse still, I have to crack nuts for the entire dinner scene, over and over, until my hands begin to blister.	A sound so loud pierces my ears that I must lower my head. I know this will upset my keeper, but I can’t bear it. The smoke, whatever is burning, is moving farther away and there is no danger. I raise my head slowly, I hear water, too, water with a chemical smell. Another distinct chemical smell is drawing closer, too, but not from the water. It’s from the woman with her hand on the dog. Something about her has changed. The flea now climbs up her skirt.

I walk purposefully around the table to fix a bunch of grapes that have begun to fall out of the bowl. I take my time to look closely at the beautiful woman hidden at this far end of the table. It’s true, she’s gorgeous.

If I don’t look closely, I cannot tell which hands belong to which body. Suddenly it appears that the busty woman is peeling the pear, though this is impossible because I see her hands on her stomach. I circle the table, adjusting velvet robes and tunics. The actors engage in idle chatter between takes, nothing worth noting. When I come to Isabella, to adjust the black and silver ribbon that has sheathed her braid, she is smiling primly at the man who plays Lorenzo while he talks about his garden. A garden is something she can tolerate, apparently.

“Rolling,” says a voice and her smile falls as I hurry out of the shot.

Take 3

Lorenzo	Isabella
They made a perfect replica of my head for the beheading scene. The process was excruciating, like sitting for a portrait. They covered my face in clay for the mold and I sat in darkness for over three hours while the clay hardened. Elsa was there, pregnant. I could hear her but couldn’t see her. She sang to me and I placed my hand on her swollen stomach. When the mold dried they peeled it from my face slowly. I came back two weeks later to sit while they painted my doubled, unadorned face. We shot the beheading scene last week and I feel more and more like a ghost, out of time. They let me take the head home, and Elsa hollowed it out and has been playing pranks. I dread going home to find a naked woman with my face, painting her toes on the hardwood floor with the baby by an open window. “Why are you mad?” she said. Why, does she even have to ask. I cover the mirrors in our house.	I stood against the wall with what seemed like an endless amount of women my exact height with red hair. Not one woman was as pale as I am. The line we were to deliver for the audition was, “Why it is so kind of you to travel all this way.” Isabella says this to the old woman when she arrives at the banquet, the first scene. I said the line over and over in my head until I wasn’t sure if I knew it anymore. Repetition makes things fade into the background. We waited there for hours, the line dwindling as women went behind the curtain one at a time and delivered the line. After two hours of waiting, the ground began to shake. It was a small earthquake at first, but it intensified in an instant. There was nowhere to take cover, no desks to duck under. Paintings rattled on the walls and everyone around me began frantically reciting the line in some sort of shared delusion. They gripped the walls and thanked the old woman for traveling so far, why, why, why bounced around the room in a strange echo.
The Brother	The Falcon
In this scene, I know that the butler or whatever has poisoned the wine, because I asked him to. I tell my face to be smug, distracted, and I focus on the nut in front of me. A silver bowl of salt has spilled on the table in front of me. I caught the director arranging the crystals before everyone else arrived. I thought he was making lines of coke, but I was wrong. It’s only salt.	You give me a command that I don’t know so I remain still. Every person around me is tense, like they are being hunted.

Someone brings coffee from down the street. The falcon’s handler takes off his glove and leaves to get one of the mice he is keeping in his truck. Only the falcon and the dogs seem to have no understanding of the difference between camera rolling and camera off. Everyone else relaxes when the director calls, “Cut!” This relaxation is imperceptible, visible mostly when their eyes dart back and forth whereas before they had been looking straight ahead.

Now it is my job to make it appear that the sun is setting in a subtle, yet realistic manner. The choreography of the lights is precise and scientific, changing from pink to gray and ultimately a velvety blue to mimic the night sky. The sun sets, and then people begin collapsing from the poison. The death scene will take place over the course of the sunset but because we have constructed this celestial habit out of lights and blue screens, we can time it to the scene and won’t have to worry about timing anything to the rhythms of nature. In this false night, we are gods.

No matter how sternly I ask, the trainer cannot control the dogs. The skinny dog, whose name is Tutu, has her head in Isabella’s lap. Isabella looks uncomfortable, it’s possible that she doesn’t like dogs. The director likes the way this changes the shot, and will use footage with the dog’s head in her lap. The trainer blows an invisible whistle and Tutu’s eyes swing toward the camera.

The falcon, at least, has been very still. It pecks occasionally at its own back, until a soft, downy feather becomes caught in its toes. Isabella is looking ill; anytime she does not have a line I see her hands shaking in her lap. She is so pale and yet has somehow lost color, the make-up girls run over and rub rouge into her cheeks between takes until she looks manic. Everyone is ready to mimic a seizure, vomiting, the mouths of death.

Take 4

Lorenzo	Isabella
Something is different with the orange when the director hands it back to me, it glistens. I squeeze it a bit and blood-colored juice seeps from its center. I am supposed to be paranoid in this scene, worried that Isabella’s brother is trying to kill me, which he is, but what I feel is bored. The longer I stare at Isabella the more I despise her, and we have yet to shoot the sex scene. One of the dogs, chewing on a small piece of something, confuses my toe for more of its treat and bites down hard.	By now, the dog has his head in my lap. They are not very well trained. I look very hard at the dog to imagine it is my hunting dog. Between each take, their handler gives them a little piece of meat to chew on. There is a small crust of slobber on my dress, growing larger. “Even when you bend over to take the orange,” the director says, “you must keep your back completely straight.” I raise my shoulders.“Straighter.” I picture my spine like a thick steel rod. “Straighter.” And even though I can’t make my back any straighter he seems satisfied.
The Brother	The Falcon
Later, I will see if she wants to take a smoke break in that funny room where she sleeps with the oranges. I wonder how she imagines an old fashioned lady would have sex, like maybe she’d flash her ankle.	I hear small birds flying by outside but I can’t see them. There is something between us and the sky that looks like the sky, but is solid. As time passes, I do what you say and I do not remember why. For food. When my wing was injured I tried to fly but you would not let me. I am both trapped and cared for.

Take 5

Lorenzo	Isabella
When I hand her the orange, she drops it and runs to the balcony. She has been deteriorating slowly over the course of this shoot, the last four weeks. They say she will only drink water from a natural source, but the PA’s are just taking bottled water and pouring it in large ceramic bowls. The bowls are props, but she thinks they’re real.	When I pick up the orange for the final take, I am overwhelmed by a sudden wave of nausea. I stand, and the dog Tutu follows me onto the balcony. I lean over. A thick ribbon of vomit off of the balcony turns to rain before it hits the ground. Though I feel better, I am now even more convinced that there is something wrong with everything we have been putting in our mouths.
The Brother	The Falcon
I saw Isabella eating moldy bread on our lunch break. She isn’t using a refrigerator and makes her own food over a fire in the back. Where she got the bread, I don’t know.	I hear a mouse, scared, growing closer.

The falcon’s handler clicks his tongue and the bird shoots towards him. He sets the mouse free. We all watch as the bird stalks the mouse, which is scurrying frantically towards the balcony. The falcon watches it run until the last minute before it swoops. The death of the mouse is over-dramatic, prolonged, and unrealistic.

Twenty-three takes later, the director is satisfied. What he was missing was a dribble of blood orange down Isabella’s dress, which is now ruined. There is a close up shot of the juice running down silk. After they are done, everyone stands for the first time in hours. But Isabella stays seated, looking straight ahead, scratching idly at a spot on her leg. She is still sitting there when I leave as true dawn rises over the hills. I imagine she will sit there forever.