Reel Murder (6 page)

I nodded. “How will I find Maisie?”

“She’s the continuity girl, so she always sits next to Hank during the shooting. But it would be better to catch her now, at lunchtime. Once she gets on the set, you won’t be able to talk to her.” Sandra shielded her eyes from the bright sunshine and then pointed to a model-thin girl at a neighboring table. “Look, there she is. She’s the one with the red hair and that cute Boho top. She always has extra copies of the script and I know she’ll be glad to give you one. You’ll have to see some of that dialogue to believe it.”

“It’s that bad?” I said mildly.

Sandra rolled her eyes and gave a little shudder. “I can’t even describe it to you; I know I couldn’t do it justice.” She reached over and gave my arm a friendly squeeze and the half-dozen thin gold bracelets she was wearing clanked together. “You’ve gotta help us with this, Maggie. I’m counting on you.”

“I’ll get a copy and read it tonight,” I promised.

I caught up with Maisie, the continuity girl, and introduced myself just as they started to clear the tables. She was pretty, with a sprinkling of freckles across her nose, and like most of the female cast and crew, she was wearing tight designer jeans. “A script? Sure, no problem.” She pointed to a trailer that was being used as the production office. “Tell them I said it’s okay. Anything else you need, just let me know.” She snared a bottle of Crystal Geyser from the lunch table and grabbed a clipboard off the table. “I thought you were media, but somebody said you’re also a psychologist, right?”

“Guilty as charged. I used to have a practice back in Manhattan before I moved down to Florida. Now I have a radio show on WYME.” Word travels fast on a movie set, I decided. Maybe Lola had been bragging to Hank? I doubted Adriana would bother talking about me; her whole focus was always on herself.

“We’re shooting a big scene in a few minutes,” she said. “It’s the finale scene when Adriana finally meets up with the killer. Would you like to watch? I can sneak in another folding chair next to mine. You have to promise not to make a sound, though.”

“Thanks, I’d love to. And I’ll be quiet as a mouse; shrinks are really good at that.”

She pulled a headset over her glossy auburn hair, mumbled some words into it, and looked serious. “Are you saying Jesse is ready to go on the pond scene?” She glanced at her watch and her eyebrows shot up. “Right now?” A short pause and then, “Okay, I’ll be there in three minutes. Set up an extra chair next to mine. We have company.”

“Jesse is the AD, the assistant director,” she explained, yanking off the headset and looping it around her neck. “I’m afraid we’ve got to hustle. Hank goes nuts if anyone is late when we start shooting.”

“Why are you shooting a big finale scene now?” I asked breathlessly. She was making tracks past the picnic area and I was scrambling to keep up with her, my kitten heels sinking into the spongy soil. “I thought the movie was just starting?”

“Oh, we always shoot scenes out of sequence.” She tossed a grin over her shoulder. “You get used to it after a while. It makes it tough on these New York method actors who have to spend hours gearing themselves up emotionally for a scene. You know, they have to ‘find their motivation,’ whatever that is. So pretentious! Those kind of people drive Hank crazy,” she confided. “Hank thinks that all you need to do is know your lines and not trip over the furniture.”

“That’s what Laurence Olivier used to say,” I told her.

“Yeah?” She looked doubtful and I wondered if she’d even heard of the great British actor. “Well, here we are.” She scurried onto a roped-off area at the edge of a small beach. The sun was glinting off the still waters of Branscom Pond and Adriana was standing at the edge of the shoreline, looking impatient. She was fanning herself with a huge straw sun hat while a makeup girl flitted around her, touching up her lipstick.

Adriana was inspecting her work in a small hand mirror and shaking her head in dismay. “You know I hate this color lipstick,” she whined. “What is it? Old-lady red?” She grabbed the tube and looked at the bottom. “Even my grandmother wouldn’t wear this color. It’s going to add ten years to my face. Why can’t I have something bronze instead? We need to get Marlene back doing my makeup.”

Her voice was shrill, the undertone deadly. I could tell this was an old argument and the makeup girl calmly took the tube away from Adriana and returned to her work.

Maisie slid into a canvas-backed chair next to Hank and patted an empty chair beside her. She immediately picked up her copy of the script and I noticed it was full of handwritten notations. “Have a seat, Maggie. This should be a good scene. Adriana confronts the killer and he takes a shot at her.” She leaned over and smiled. “Don’t worry; he’s a lousy shot and he misses.”

“You certainly made a lot of notes,” I said, pointing to her script.

Maisie nodded. “Some of these are wardrobe details and hair and makeup descriptions. Everything has to look exactly the same from shot to shot. You know, continuous. The actors and the props have to be identical to where we left off shooting. So if Adriana was wearing a white scarf during the last frame of the last bit of footage, she has to be wearing the same scarf in this scene.” She paused and held up her index finger. “And it has to be tied the same way. Plus her hair has to look exactly the same. You’d be surprised how easy it is to miss little things like that.”

“I can see that.” Mom had already told me all about continuity, but I could see that Maisie was proud of her job and seemed to enjoy talking about it.

We both watched while Hank conferred with the deeply tanned lighting director who’d argued with Adriana earlier, and then there were several sound checks. When Hank was finally satisfied, he waved to the AD. I heard a soft click as a camera slid up next to me, sidling into position.

“That’s Jeff Walker,” Maisie said, pointing to a fortyish actor standing a few yards down the beach. “He’s plays the killer. We’re going to open with a tight close-up on Adriana, and then Jeff is going to walk right into the frame for their dialogue.”

“Stand by, quiet everyone,” Jesse, the AD, yelled through a bullhorn. He glanced at the group of extras who were watching the filming from behind the rope. It was surprising how many people were on the set. Maybe fifty or sixty, I guessed, including all the techies and the wardrobe mistress, plus the hair and makeup artists. And I knew there were a couple of dozen administrative types, toiling away back in the production office.

Funny, but I didn’t see Mom anywhere. I knew she wasn’t in this scene, so I figured she must be checking out her wardrobe or catching up with old friends. There was a low buzz of conversation that suddenly wound down, and now the only sound was the humming of cicadas, signaling another hot day in south Florida.

“Looks like we’re ready to go,” Maisie said to me.

“Stand by to cue Jeff,” Hank said.

“Uh-oh,” she suddenly muttered under her breath. “Wait a minute. We’ve got a tiny problemo.” She leaned over and whispered something to Hank Watson.

He nodded, his lips twitching with annoyance. “Adriana, we need to have you tuck your hair behind your left ear, not your right. That’s the way it was where we left off after the restaurant scene.” He glanced down at a notation in blue Magic Marker written in Maisie’s script. “You were driving to the pond and your hair was tucked behind your left ear.”

“Oh honestly,” Adriana grumbled. She sighed dramatically and flipped her hair behind her left ear as directed. “Can’t these people get anything right?” A young girl in jeans rushed up to Adriana and whipped a hairbrush out of her back pocket. She made a tiny adjustment to the actress’s hair and then scampered out of the shot.

“Good work,” Hank said in a low voice to Maisie. “Glad you caught that.”

“And I’m sweating like a pig,” Adriana continued in a loud voice. “What is it, a hundred and fifty degrees out here?”

Like magic, two techies dragged a long cable across the sand and a gigantic fan materialized, as powerful as a wind machine, sending a cooling breeze over Adriana. The techies glanced back at Hank Watson, ready to cut the fan the moment they began filming.

“Quiet on the set, everyone.” The AD admonished an extra who had picked that moment to tear open a bag of potato chips. “No noise, no talking, no cell phones.” Once again, a hush fell over the crowd; they seemed to be caught up in the excitement of the moment.

“Pond scene, take one!” I nearly jumped as a production assistant moved into the shot and snapped the clapboard just a few feet away from us.

I watched Jeff Walker and decided he was handsome in a square-jawed Hollywood sort of way. I’d seen him in some B movies, all forgettable, all straight-to-video. I knew he was getting himself psyched up for the scene. He’d closed his eyes, and he was shaking his hands at his sides and blowing out small puffs of air, as if he was trying to throw off some muscle tension. I’d seen Lola do exactly the same thing before her scenes.

“A-n-n-nd . . . action!” Hank Watson shouted.

“I didn’t think you’d show up,” Adriana said, moving slowly toward Jeff, who’d begun walking down the beach at the same moment. A cameraman was tracking her, gliding along beside her with his camera mounted on a little miniature railway track.

A myriad of emotions crossed her face—anger, uncertainty, and a touch of malevolence. “In fact, I was convinced that you’d had second thoughts and that—”

“Cut, cut!” Hank shouted, leaping out of his chair. “Adriana, you’re moving
way
too slowly. Jeff hit the mark and you didn’t. You’re gonna have to speed it up, so you both hit the mark at the exact same time.” His expression was tight and his tone brittle.

For the first time, I noticed someone had scratched a giant X on the sand. Apparently that was the mark Hank was talking about, and Adriana was at least six feet away from it.

“Why shouldn’t Jeff be the one to speed it up?” Adriana retorted, her expression stony. She put her hands on her hips, her body language challenging. “Do you know how tough it is to walk with my damn high heels sinking into the sand at every step? I almost fell on my ass.”

Maisie snickered next to me, and quickly covered it with a fake cough.

“Look, Adriana, if Jeff walks too fast, it ruins the scene,” Hank said with heavy patience. “You just have to walk faster, just pick up the pace a little. Let’s try it again, okay? From the top.”

Hank sat back down and whispered to Maisie, “If she moved any slower, you could harvest her organs. I think she’s doing it deliberately.”

“This is par for the course,” Maisie said quietly. “Typical Adriana behavior.”

“I know. I must have been out of my mind to hire her,” Hank muttered, running his hand through his silvering hair. He saw me watching him and managed a grin. “Oops; you didn’t hear that, Maggie. Dealing with actresses is giving me gray hairs. You’d think after all these years, I’d be used to it.” I knew he was putting a good spin on things because I was there; he didn’t want me to go back to WYME and talk about trouble on the set.

“Don’t worry; I didn’t hear it.” I smiled to reassure him.

During the next take, both Adriana and Jeff hit the mark at the same time.

“Thank God,” Maisie whispered under her breath. I noticed she was following the dialogue, running her index finger under each line. I glanced down and saw some stage directions coming up at the bottom of the page:
Jeff pulls out a gun
. Maisie had hilighted that line in blue and underlined it several times.

Adriana was mouthing some lines about money, and I gathered that her character had been blackmailing Jeff. She jabbed him in the chest to emphasize a point and then her eyes widened with fear when he pulled out a gun he’d tucked into the waistband of his pants.

“No!” she screamed. “Jeff, don’t do it!! We can work this out.” She took a step backward, lifting her hands in front of her, palms up, her expression pleading.

It looked like Jeff was wielding a Beretta from where I sat, but of course, I knew it was only a harmless prop gun, designed to look lethal. He wouldn’t be shooting real bullets. In fact, a prop gun wouldn’t even take a real bullet. Instead, a harmless wad would be expelled from the gun followed by a sharp retort, just like the sound of a real gunshot.

Mom has acted in a lot of thrillers and she told me that if the prop gun didn’t sound right, they would simply add a gunshot to the audio track after the filming was completed. The magic of Hollywood.

Jeff was mouthing some cliché dialogue like, “Can it, Adriana. I’ve had enough of your silly games and I’m never going to pay you another penny.” He gave a maniacal laugh, pointed the gun at Adriana, and fired at point-blank range. The noise was surprisingly realistic and I flinched. I thought I smelled a faint scent of powder in the air, but maybe that was just my overactive imagination at work.

Adriana reacted perfectly; she clutched her chest, her eyes rolled back convincingly in her head, and she collapsed on the sand.
Interesting.
She was a much better actress than I’d thought. She’d managed to fall like a rag doll and her legs were splayed out at odd angles. Adriana is so vain I would have expected her to fall in a more graceful pose, but maybe I’d misjudged her. She played the scene convincingly, like a pro.

“A-n-n-nd . . . cut!” Hank yelled. “Nice work, guys.” He turned to Maisie. “Let’s get rolling on the party scene. Jesse needs to get about twenty extras in dressy clothes. Or maybe fifteen, if we shoot around them. I think the best way is to—”

“Hank,” Maisie said urgently, clutching his arm. “What’s going on down there?” She pointed to the water’s edge where Adriana was lying still motionless. Jeff had started to walk away, but turned back, puzzled, when he realized Adriana wasn’t making any move to get up.

“Hey, Adriana,” Hank called. “Quit playing possum. Didn’t you hear me yell ‘cut’?” He started to laugh but the sound caught in his throat.