Matt Rhoden

Excerpt from the short story, "Director's Cut"

You should start in the movie theater, with me, in the front row, looking around for Shelly Bing. I was up on one knee, twisted around in the springy seat, with one hand on the rough chair back, the other shading my eyes from the projector's pinpoint of light. Where was she? I had to see her. I knew if I could make Shelly Bing cry, I would have done something magnificent.

Maybe she'd ducked her head down, to squint at her leather notepad. No doubt she'd brought it, hoping to jot down fresh metaphors for skewering the new Howard Hillman picture.

I glanced down at my wife, Annabelle, in the seat next to me. This was her first time seeing her own performance, in the context of the entire picture. When the screen flashed, I could see her tongue touching her upper lip, the way it did when she was immersed in a film. The pulsing of the violins went from staccato to legato, so I knew that the scene had cut from Rogelio's hands braiding strips of pie dough, to a wide shot of the pastry kitchen. I knew that if I turned around I would see Annabelle's character, Janette, her fingertips dusted with baking powder, stroking Rogelio's unshaven cheek. "Please don't turn away from me, Rogelio," came her voice from the speakers.

"What good love is?" answered Rogelio. I'd carefully developed the Rogelio character so that his broken English would sound not comical, but achingly endearing. "The only way you could ever love me is if I had been born a steel magnate, or a ranch cattler, like your husband."

"Down in front," someone whispered. I started to drop back into my seat before I realized it was Lester chastising me. Lester Ogilvy was sitting behind me, resting his head on his fist. "Asshole," he said, furrowing his bushy, gray eyebrows. "Some of us are trying to watch the movie." One side of his mouth was cocked in a half-smile. I knew why.

I thought back to the day Lester had signed me on to direct Boat Adrift.

"You never done a love story, Hillman. It's different. Don't over-think it." He'd reached across his desk and put his hand in the candy dish. "You gotta hear sniffles in the audience. You want 'em reaching for the hankies, you know? Crying means word of mouth. Word of mouth--do I have to spell it out? You can quit worrying about the critics."

"I don't worry about them."

"I know." Lester popped a mint in his mouth. "They could all fall into San Andreas, and you wouldn't worry a bit. Do this picture right, and the critics can say what they want, and screw them."

And here we were at the screening: myself, and Lester, and our two stars--and a couple dozen critics. That's why Lester was smiling: because when it was critics back there, reaching for the hankies....

I sunk back into my chair and turned back to the screen, where Rogelio was chopping brisket, absently, even sloppily, with none of the loving care he'd displayed in the earlier scenes. Janette kissed the back of his neck and untied the knot of his apron. "There is hope, Rogelio. You keep insisting that I don't love you--"

Rogelio ripped off the apron and threw it across the kitchen. "I ask you again: What good love is?"

They embraced in a white explosion of cooking flour. The music ballooned to a crescendo as the tracking shot moved past the tangled lovers, then out the window. Then the shot angled up to the moon, which cast enough light in the theater that I could see José Marquez, the actor who'd played Rogelio. He was resting his head back on the seat, nodding, as if satisfied. The studio had made a fine choice in José, actually; he looked fantastic on camera. But he didn't now. In the weeks since the shoot, he'd let his sideburns grow until they looked like a couple of shoeshine brushes.

Annabelle squeezed my hand. "I still think we should have kept the title." She was talking about the change from Same Boat to Boat Adrift.

"I told you, that was Lester's doing." I pulled her hand up and kissed it. "With you as Janette, we could have called it anything. We could have called it Ishtar," I kidded.

She whispered in my ear. "Thank you, Howard. For..." She couldn't get the words out. A tear slid down her cheek.

"Crying!" I whispered. "You too?"

"My career," was all she could say.

"Your acting," I said. "That's what this is all about."

Annabelle put her hand on my thigh, and I felt her nails sink into me as she whispered in my ear. "Wait 'til we get home." I felt her moist tears against my whiskers when her cheek touched mine. "I'll shine your Oscar!" her hot breath hissed.

"Oscar," I said. "I don't have one yet."

Her fingers worked their way up closer to my crotch. "You will," she whispered. "Just wait."

My chair back squeaked as I shifted. Sure enough, a tall, stiff statue had formed, and I pulled at my suit jacket for coverage, just in case anyone else on the front row decided to look over at us. I was excited alright, and the feeling wasn't just sexual.

Boat Adrift was our first project together since Bones For Delia, the Civil War period piece I'd cast her in three years earlier. In Bones for Delia, Annabelle's character was, at once, a capable nurse with charming bedside manners, and a schizoid personality who poisoned her lovers, both Union and Confederate, and buried them in the basement with her family's silver. The returns from Bones were feeble beyond expectation, but Shelly Bing's praise of Annabelle appeared on the front page of New Weekly: "That the young star could go from pining Southern Belle to seething black widow in a matter of seconds, and do it all in such a muddled film, is testament to what a tremendous talent we are witnessing." Muddled. They shouldn't let these people write about what they can't understand. But they had, and Shelly Bing had said what she'd said. And then the other critics had piled on, echoing Shelly Bing's sentiments with slight variations until Annabelle was soaring, and I was buried under all that denigration--until I couldn't walk into Nueves without people whispering: There goes the director who can't snuff the talent of his pretty wife, no matter how inept he's become. Actually, it didn't bother me, what people said. I didn't care what the reviews said, either. At least, not at first.

There was a stretch after Bones for Delia where I didn't choose my scripts. When Lester Ogilvy offered me Mostly Ghostly, I'd said, "I don't do films based on children's board games."

"You do this one." He'd dropped the script on his desk. "Grant Peebles and Lisa Redwine have already signed on, and we're guaranteed a tie-in with Queen Cow restaurants."

I closed my eyes and envisioned "Mostly Ghostly," in spooky lettering, wrapped around a twisty-straw milkshake cup. Then I pictured myself, trying to coax emotions out of that mannequin, Grant Peebles, while worrying that the Queen Deluxe in his hand was going to drip grease on his ghost costume. I shivered and looked at Lester. "Out of the question."

"As always," Lester said, sliding the script across his desk, "the choice of cinematographer is up to you."

"I can't."

He was up out of his chair. "These tie-in deals pull in dough like slot machines." He came around his desk, a polished oak structure so large that he'd thrown on a silk necktie and tied it by the time he got around to my side. "You need a hit."

When I first met Lester, he was in an office a quarter this size, stuck producing The New Starsky and Hutch, with unknown actors, for some fledgling cable network. That was 1991. He'd been trying to move into features, and he'd given me a shoestring budget to direct Xavier Jorgen's supposedly unfilmable beatnik screed, Flaming Out in Frisco. Unfilmable, they all said. I was just a few years out of school, and couldn't resist the challenge. I decided to make it a comedy, and I hired the funniest actors available to embody the segments of society that Jorgen railed against. According the reviews, Flameout "cut to the quick," and was "one of those rare gems that make people think." It got repeat business. It moved up to number one by its third week. People today are buying the DVD. That film made a ton, and it put Lester and me on the map.

But that was 1991. There had been some good, and not so good years after that. In 1999, a year after Bones for Delia, I needed a hit, just as Lester said.

I remember sighing as I lifted the Mostly Ghostly script from Lester's desk. "Who was your first choice?" I asked. I stood and flipped through its ninety pages, looking for extraneous camera directions.

"We're gonna get you back on track," Lester said, patting my shoulder. He straightened his silk necktie and led me to his waiting room. I'd helped build this plush waiting room with Flameout, but memories aren't that long in Hollywood, and no one wants them to be. He said, "We're gonna show Valkyrie Entertainment and Shelly Bing and all those fuckers that you still got what it takes to be a mover in this town."

I closed the script. "Yes," I said, "a mover. Loading trucks, bending at the knees...."

"That's what I like--the humor. Use it in the picture; it's supposed to be a comedy."

It wasn't. Not a funny one, anyway, but it did turn a tidy profit, which led to Lester giving me Electrowoman and Dynagirl, a script whose source property I was not familiar with. When Electrowoman lost money on a grand scale, I had none of the moneymaker's clout, and I no longer had my critical respectability to keep me warm at night.

And Annabelle was, to use a phrase I detest, a hot ticket. She'd had two hits since Bones--Diamond Mine and then Moscow Calling--and when Valkyrie got the rights to Same Boat, they'd offered Annabelle the part of Janette Tremelling. They wanted to cast José Marquez as the Mexican lover, but José was in a rehabilitation center, binging, supposedly, on prescription muscle relaxants, and wasn't planning on another film until spring. But Lester had a relationship with José, and I had a relationship with Lester, and I was married to Annabelle.

There was a deal happening all around me. I wanted in. Same Boat would be my chance. So a year ago--early in the development of Same Boat, I asked her what she thought of me directing. She said she'd talk to Valkyrie and get back to me.

The next day, we were in the breakfast nook. Annabelle was across from me, nibbling on a piece of bacon, reading brad-bound sheaf of papers.

"Well," I said, "what did Valkyrie say?"

Annabelle didn't even look up when she told me they didn't think I was right, because I'd never done a pure love story.

"But they haven't picked a director yet," I said. "Right?"

She shook her head and kept reading. I walked into the den and dialed Lester's cell phone. He began acting as if he didn't even have a say in the matter. "I don't know, Hillman. This is Valkyrie we're talking about, I can't just--"

"You could for this one." I was pacing across the den. Annabelle had ordered new carpet, and it was so thick that each step required what seemed like a full second for the pile to collapse. "We work well as a team, Lester, and they know that."

He laughed and said, "1991 was a long time ago."

"Not for you."

"I took a bath on this last piece of shit I did. Business Casual. You heard about it?"

"Lester--"

"Romantic comedies," he said. "It's like betting on sumo wrestling. They all look alike, but you don't know which one is gonna--"

"But about Same Boat," I said. "You may want to reconsider me when I tell you--"

"One more flop and I'm--"

"Bill Vanderberger," I interrupted, "wants me on the picture."

I could hear honking and truck brakes and soft-rock, possibly the Eagles, coming over his cell phone. He was likely on the Santa Monica, where he'd be stuck for an hour. Which was the only reason he was spending so much time talking to me. I just wanted him to okay the deal, and then I wanted to hang up. "Did you say Vanderberger?"

"He wants me to direct Same Boat," I said. I kept staring out the window, avoiding Annabelle's gaze. "He wants me to direct." I could hear my own breathing in the phone. "He told Annabelle."

"Well that's something," said Lester.

"Yes."

"I mean most of these novelists, who gives a fuck, but Vanderberger--"

"Apparently, he's a fan of mine." I couldn't put off looking at her. When I turned, she was standing in the kitchen, holding a bottle of juice. I remember how stunning she looked, even when she was dressed down, in those ratty warm-up pants, with her unwashed hair tied back--even when she was angry, which she clearly was at this moment. There was extra color in her cheeks.

"I mean," Lester was saying, "that guy's fans would buy Mein Kampf in hardback if he said it was a good beach read."

"He's been known to write a blurb or two."

"I mean there's a guy that can get some asses in seats!"

"Lovely," I said. "So can we get it done?"

Lester sighed and said, "Like I say, it's not that simple." But then he admitted that he felt partly responsible for Electrowoman. "And you did a hell of a job on the Mostly Ghostly thing," he said. And finally, he told me he would get me on board, if he could jack off everyone else involved.

As I switched off the phone, I heard Annabelle thump the juice bottle on the tabletop. "I can not believe," she said retaking her seat, "that you just stood there and lied to Lester."

"Well, I can't either," I said, racking the phone. "But it's done now, isn't it?"

"What happens when they meet to hash out the contract?"

"But you've got connections with Vanderberger," I said. "Can't you smooth it over?"

She closed her eyes and shook her head. "Maybe you can afford to burn bridges," she said, "but I can't."

"There won't be any problems," I said, coming into the breakfast nook. "All we have to do is be brilliant." Standing over the table, I could see the cover of the booklet she'd been reading. It was the treatment for Same Boat. "May I see it?"

She looked up at me, then down at the treatment. "Actually," she said, "that may be a good idea." She palmed the cover and pushed it across the table. "Have a look, Howard."

I picked it up and began leafing through it. As I nodded, and scanned the pages, I watched Annabelle. She grabbed a strip of bacon, picked off the crispiest section and laid it across her tongue. "So," I said, closing the treatment, "what's the problem?"

"Howard," she said, chewing. "Honestly. Would you be happy doing a story like that?"

Suddenly, I understood. I set the treatment down. "So it's you," I said, "not Valkyrie that thinks I can't do a love story."

"I don't think you'd be happy directing it," she said. "And, frankly--"

"What about our relationship?" I tried to shove the treatment back at her, but it flipped open and skidded into the coffee urn.

She sighed and reached out. I thought she was going to pick up the treatment to take another look, but instead she grabbed a piece of cold toast and began buttering it. "I don't know, Howard."

"Don't know what, Annabelle?" She bit off some of the toast and began chewing. When I said, "Well?" she spoke to me with her mouth full: "You start out with the best intentions--"

"Yes?"

"But you don't fulfill your vision," she said. "It just never makes it up on the screen."

"What does that mean?" I said.

She waited until she'd swallowed. "I know what your problem is, Howard." She pushed herself back from the table and stood. "It isn't bad scripts, and it isn't low budgets."

"My problem?"

"The fact is," she said, "you can't consummate."

I felt like I'd been gut-shot. I pulled out a chair and fell into it. "Don't ever let Shelly Bing hear you say that."

"What would she do?"

"'The director that can't consummate.' She'll take that phrase and scramble it up with nineteen other metaphors, and stick it on the front page of New Weekly. And that reputation will hang on me like the smell of rotten fish."

She brushed her hands. "Don't be melodramatic. It's not like you."

"Can't consummate," I said. "How would you know?"

She shrugged, as if to remind me: she'd graduated at the top of her USC program. But then she said, "It's fine to talk about the immortality of the perfect heroine of realization when you're buzzed on champagne--"

"Perfectly realized heroine," I corrected her. "Work with me, Annabelle. I know how to use your talents. Someday, you'll see."

She pushed in her chair. "Someday, someday."

I picked up a knife from the table and stared at the shiny blade. "What's happened to you, Annabelle?"

"Nothing," she said. "I'm doing what I've always done--reading, learning, growing. You should do the same, Howard."

I angled the knife to see my own mutated reflection, which bent my chin and magnified the white patch in my whiskerage. "Choose wisely," I said.

She said, "You mean choose you to direct Same Boat."

Did I? I laid the knife on the placemat. I pulled the treatment across the table and opened it to the first page. "Just don't let Simon Kelso direct it. He'll make you as flat as a crepe suzette. He'll make you--" I couldn't finish. I tossed the treatment next to the butter dish. A tear swelled in my eye. It practically squirted out. I remember feeling its diminishing warmth as it dripped down my cheek. Someone like Annabelle, who could cry on command, could never understand how a tear of frustration could come so unexpectedly. I didn't understand it myself.

She was fiddling with her ponytail. The shirt exposed her tan and lean stomach, and through my watery vision, I stared at the soft, almost invisible golden hairs below her navel. "I'm going out."

"Annabelle," I said. "If it's not on the screen, how do you know what my vision is?"

"Three years of living with you," she said, as she grabbed her gym bag. "I know you, Howard Hillman." She reached down and dusted some crumbs off the treatment. She slid it across the table. "Direct it if you want."

"Really?"

She slung the gym bag over her shoulder. "But for God's sake, stop sniveling. What do you think Shelly Bing would say if she saw that?" She left, slamming the door behind her.

Annabelle was telling me what I could and couldn't do. She had that right. Valkyrie had brought her the project. She would have credit as a producer.

What had changed her?

Reading, learning, growing, she'd said. Reading what? While she was at the gym, I ran up the stairs, to our library and searched through her film journals until I found the clue I was looking for. It took a while, but I found it: a copy of Film in Depth, with dog-eared essay from Scotty Gottschalk. It was called "Half Life: Declining Vitality in the films of Howard Hillman."

I didn't blame that shitworm, Scotty Gottschalk. He was just doing his job: reading reviews from people like Shelly Bing and regurgitating the ideas in a high-flown style for the academic set. I noticed the phrase, "muddled archetype." It had taken a while, but Shelly Bing's ideas had finally gotten in the hands of someone that Annabelle would take seriously. She read Film In Depth cover to cover every month. I yanked the page from the magazine and ripped it repeatedly, then dropped the shreds in the wastebasket. I lit a match and watched the shreds burn and smolder.

The critics didn't matter anymore, I figured. Because Annabelle, despite her misgivings, had said yes. I breathed in the smoke. Valkyrie had no choice but to give the go-ahead to our tidy package: Annabelle Street and José Marquez starring, Lester Ogilvy producing--along with Annabelle--and me directing.

When we'd started shooting, Shelly Bing took another body shot in her column: "Just curious. But why has Valkyrie given Howard Hillman a project as ambitious as Bill Vanderberger's Same Boat? Anyone remember what Hillman did with Electrowoman and Dynagirl? Anyone? Me neither. My guess is Hillman's headed upstream without a you-know-what. The jury's still out, but this reporter believes that Vanderberger's fans will be singing that same old song: 'Not nearly as good as the book.'"

Of course, I was the one who'd invited Shelly Bing to the Boat Adrift screening. But had she even made it? Surely, she wouldn't miss a chance to roast another muddled Hillman flick. I took one more look, and realized where she was: right there behind Lester Ogilvy's head of white hair. No wonder I'd missed her before: Shelly had a new hairdo--a brownish-red Afro the size and shape of a medicine ball. I'd been wondering whom that fuzzy red sphere belonged to. A flash from the screen lit the room as Shelly Bing touched a Kleenex to her freckled nose.

I smiled as I turned back to the screen, where Annabelle's character, Janette, sat in a rowboat, reading Rogelio's suicide note. Here was the rowboat scene, finally. Annabelle, next to me, smiled and shook her head, as if to say, I don't know how you did it--how you, of all people--could put together such a touching story. Especially, she was probably thinking, after the argument we'd had shooting this very scene.

I'd wanted no interference for the rowboat scene. I'd sent the entire crew on a long lunch. "You're frightened," I'd told Annabelle, while I adjusted the camera lens. "You can't believe this note that you're reading, and you're in fear."

"Fear?" Annabelle fiddled with her bootlace, and the skiff rocked from side to side.

I said, "It's a suicide note--"

"Yes, but the book--"

"Fuck the book," I told her. "How many times must I remind you?"

Annabelle's hair was arranged in a bun, and she touched at some blonde strands that had fallen loose. "I just don't think my character would be fearful, when she was the one who realized that it was destiny that Rogelio would die by his own hand in this very lake."

"Again," I said, "that's the book."

"Then what about the meat-grinding scene? A whole day shooting me and José making sausage together. You said, yourself, it was Janette's way of saying goodbye because she knew his suicide was imminent."

I pushed the camera forward, bumping the wheels across the dock. "That's true, I did."

"Well?"

"Film school has ruined you, Annabelle." I looked in the eyepiece and zoomed in on her neck. "Please. Just do it my way."

"Shelly Bing was right," she said. The boat swayed as she leaned over to retrieve the ink-smeared paper. "You really have lost it." But she did it my way. When I rolled the film, she looked down at the letter and closed her eyes. Her lip quivered and then, just as I'd asked, she opened her mouth and let forth a powerful scream. "That's the take," I said as I marked it. "Marvelous. I could really sense the fear, Annabelle."

She rolled her eyes.

What a contrast to José's behavior during the drowning sequence--the other scene I'd shot unassisted. "You're angry!" I'd told him. "Angry, José! Circumstances have led you to this! You didn't want to take your own life in this lake...you're fighting back now, José. I want you to look like you're fighting." I raised the pan bar and angled on José's bare shoulders as he floated in the water. "The water is sucking you down, but you're coming back up for air, José. Angrily."

"Okay, Mr. Hillman, amigo, you're the boss." He took a deep breath and went under. José had the imagination of a postal clerk, but he could take orders. I zoomed in on the spot where he'd just submerged himself. I had just found the focus when he vaulted out of the water like a maniac, the cords in his neck stretched tight, his eyes as wide as golf balls.

We shot for hours, with José shivering and splashing around in that cold, dirty lake, while I worked on getting the close shots of his excellent facial expressions, and then pulled back for some wider shots--José with his hands in the air, desperately clutching at hope before slipping into the murky drink.

"Amigo," he said while dogpaddling between takes. "Mr. Hillman, amigo, it's very cold."

"Yes, José, I can tell. Your teeth are chattering." Then I said, "Only a few more takes." I never told him, "just one more take," always "a few more takes." I didn't want to give him any illusions. Illusions make us happy. I didn't want him happy; I wanted him angry.

Now, at last, an audience was witnessing the rowboat scene, watching Janette clutching the tear-stained paper to her breast--thereby bringing home the full effect of her parting words about destiny, just prior to Rogelio's suicide. Of course, I was listening to the sniffles from the rows behind me--audible sniffles, some of them Shelly Bing's.

The angle tightened on Annabelle, as Rogelio's voiceover read the letter: "Though life have torn us apart, Janette, we will be together. Together, in the same boat. A boat forever adrift. A part of you, with me, Janette. And also, with you, a part of me." The shot cut to Janette's hand as she cast the note into the breeze. And as the inky paper sank away in the glinting, sunlit water, there was a thump.

The scene shook with the sudden lurching of the boat before the shot revealed a man's hairy knuckles clutching the oarlock on the rim of the skiff. The soft music died, leaving the splashing sound of disturbed water as José Marquez's wet, black hair emerged from the lake. I sat stone-faced as I watched José's look of crazed anger fill the screen in extreme close-up before the angle pulled back, then panned up his arm to reveal a backlit view of the wet strand of pond moss hanging from the gleaming blade of his meat cleaver.

The scene cut back to Annabelle as her mouth fell open in a look of sheer terror. She let out a blood-curdling scream that was cut short by Rogelio's swinging blade slicing through the white flesh of her neck. An explosion of crimson blood showered from her throat before the frame froze and the credits began rolling over the open mouth and closed eyes of Annabelle Street's severed head.

I tried to sit still, but gave in to my impulses. I shifted in my seat and peered around the theater. I saw what I'd never seen from an audience of film-industry critics: complete and total shock. I dropped back into my seat. It was hard to hear over the blasting musical score, but I could catch a few reactions. "What the hell--? Who the--" Like good reporters, they wanted to know what the hell they'd just watched and who the fuck would do such a thing. No one asked how. But then, there wasn't much to it: there's no limit to what you can do with a couple of body doubles at the Guild minimum, and nineteen hours in the editing lab.

A fellow with wire-framed glasses and a knit scarf, had taken a stance in front of me. It was Scotty Gottschalk. I recognized him from his picture in Film in Depth. He was the other critic I'd invited personally. After that article about my declining vitality, how could I not? The genius was addressing me directly: "Mr. Hillman, you totally sabotaged the expectations built in the arc of the storyline! Not only is it poor film-making, it's unfair!"

I shook my head. I said, "Don't take it so personally, Scotty."

"I take it personally." This was Lester, behind me. He squeezed my shoulders. "A media screening is no time for a joke." When I didn't respond, Lester let go of my shoulders. I could hear him grabbing his overcoat.

I could sense the angry gaze of Annabelle in the chair next to me. She blinked her big, brown eyes and waited for me to say something. I settled back in my seat as if I were drowsily viewing Masterpiece Theater. Annabelle said, "I'm going outside."

I sat there watching Annabelle's severed head, and listening to the repeated minor-key stings of the synthesizer. No one else did. Those people couldn't get out of that theater fast enough. At the end, I was alone. No one saw my last little surprise: As the copyright blurb came up, the eyelids on Annabelle's disembodied head twitched and popped open one last time.

I walked out of the theater and stood, hands in my pockets, as if I were waiting for my mother to come pick me up. People were crowding under the awning, staying out of the drizzle. When Lester's limo drove up, he strode toward it with his wife. Lester Ogilvy, with his striking white hair, carried himself with a regal bearing. Annabelle once said that Lester looked like a professor of Russian literature until he spoke.

When the concierge opened the limo, Lester turned to me: "What about Bill Vanderberger? What's he gonna say, Hillman? After what you did to his book. What about his fans?"

"He signed a contract," I said. "It's my movie."

"Which won't be released until you've lopped off that crap at the end." Lester laid his arm on the limo door. "Your director's cut, or whatever the hell that was, is never going to be seen. Not on cable, not on video, not on DVD. If they come up with some new format that fits into the chip in your head--"

"Lester," I said. "You signed a contract, too." He looked like someone had let the air out. His jaw dropped and he looked down at his alligator loafers. I said, "Remember, Lester?"

Continued....

"The water is very cold, Mr. Hillman, amigo!"