The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (19 page)

George

THE YEAR I GOT THE SCRIPT FOR
ISABELLA
, I WAS JUST SO TIRED
of making bad movies. The company was doing well; the old bad days of not paying our electric bill were behind us. But in those days we’d made movies I was proud of. Now we kept the lights on and I made enough money to rent an apartment by the beach and send something to my daughter, Kat, every now and then, but we did it mostly by making shitty movies for women. The movies were all the same; they had that indie lighting, kind of crappy the way people like now, and a controversial-seeming premise, like a daughter finding out her dad is a cross-dresser. At the end the point of all of them was to make women feel like the world was an okay place and even if you were a little bit fucked up, you would eventually find happiness in it. I got it. I knew life was hard for women. I’d made it harder for plenty of them myself. I understood why they’d want something to calm them down without making them feel too dumb. But I was tired of feeling like a therapist, and every time I saw a movie that was actually good, I got terrified that I’d never make a movie like that again.

I felt that way when I saw
Woods
. I’d liked
Marianne
—loved it, even—but I thought it was a little green. Stark would linger on one of her actors’ faces for a beat too long or show some fingernail clippings on top of a dresser for no reason—it was like she hadn’t quite learned how to communicate with an audience. But in
Woods
she knew exactly what she wanted to say. The nurses crowding Beth at the beginning, one entering as soon as the other left, the kids in the schoolyard, the guests at her wedding, her family swarming to pick up a fork she’d dropped—nearly every scene stuffed with the sad fumbling of human love, the way well-meaning people hurt as often as they help. Those few scenes where Beth was alone and her whole body relaxed, like she was free. And the final scene, when Beth made it to a clearing in the woods full of green-gold light, a place clearly more beautiful and comforting than anything her family had been able to offer her, a place that would welcome her away from life. I stood up and clapped at the end, even though I think standing ovations are stupid—it just felt so good to see a movie that didn’t try to make me feel good.

After that I watched
Marianne
again, and then I tracked down Stark’s other work—a couple of music videos, a weird, beautiful short called
Daniel
. It wasn’t all as flawless as
Woods
, but it all had that quality—as if an alien had come down and filmed humans and shown us what we were like so much more honestly than any other human could. I talked about her to everybody I knew, which was easy, because
Woods
was blowing up—people were talking about Oscars. After a little while, I stopped talking about her, because I was worried somebody else was going snap her up, give her a big budget to make their movie, and I wanted to get her first. I felt like
I’d discovered her, which was how I’d felt my whole life about anything I loved, even though it was rarely true.

Isabella
wasn’t an obvious fit for Stark. She’d never done anything period, and the script was sort of schlocky and commercial in a way none of her own screenplays were. But it was the most serious property we had—it was the only one I could imagine being an Oscar contender. And it had a woman at the center who was strong but in some ways isolated, which I convinced myself was a connection to her previous films. Still, I didn’t think she’d call back. I figured people were probably beating down her door. And her agent was someone I didn’t know, a young guy with a confident-sounding voice even on voice mail. There were more and more people like that in the industry—ten years ago when I walked into a party, it would be full of my friends, but now I was in my fifties, and half the time I was the old, weird guy by the vegetable platter, pretending to text people. When I got ready to go out at night, I knew I didn’t look bad, just nondescript—gray hair, a little bit of a gut but not a lot, something gone out of my face in the last ten years or so. People I met now tended not to remember me. I was worried her agent would tell her not to call; I definitely wasn’t expecting her to show up at my apartment.

It was a Saturday afternoon in October. I was rereading the script for
Stuffed
(a bereaved woman finds love with a taxidermist) and watching
Babylon 5
. At first I thought the girl outside my window wearing a backpack and a flannel shirt was one of the beach drifters who sometimes went door-to-door looking for food or money. Then I recognized her face from
Conversation
. I hadn’t had a visitor, expected or unexpected, in months, and I had no idea what to say. I went with, “It’s so great to meet you.”

“Yeah,” she said, and I wasn’t sure if she was saying that it was great to meet me, too, or agreeing that yes, she was great. Her voice wasn’t rude, just flat, without feeling.

“This is an unexpected surprise,” I said, and I felt gross—my Hollywood politeness sounded so fake in front of her.

“Well, I needed to get out of town for a while,” she said, “and you called, so.”

From her films, and from the few pictures I’d seen in
Conversation
and newspapers, I’d expected someone cool and tall, elegant and forbidding. But Sophie was short, and her voice was casual and familiar. I knew she was around thirty, but she sounded like a smart twelve-year-old. I thought of Kat at twelve, bringing her books into my office to talk to me about molybdenum or stag beetles. It would be two years before she learned to hate me.

“Can I get you anything?” I asked. “If I’d known you were coming, I would’ve . . .”

I gestured awkwardly around my little living room. My apartment wasn’t messy, but it was embarrassingly empty—I’d moved there two months ago, after Taylor kicked me out of the place in Silver Lake I thought was ours. I’d gotten rid of most of my stuff when I moved in with her, not that I’d really had much since divorcing Nadia thirteen years before that, and since I’d been on my own again, I hadn’t really bothered to accumulate anything. A coffee table, an IKEA couch, a bed, a few photos of Kat, and some driftwood I’d picked up on the beach were pretty much all I had.

“Can I use the bathroom?” Sophie asked.

I showed her the tiny room—its window onto the beach was my favorite thing about the apartment, because I could watch the waves while I showered. She left her backpack in the living room—I almost
wanted to go through it, just to see what I was dealing with. Her showing up at my place had thrown me. I had a pitch planned, but it was for the phone, and all my comparisons between
Isabella
and Sophie’s previous movies sounded dumb and pretentious when I imagined making them to her face. I guessed it was a good sign that she was here, but I didn’t know her—maybe she always showed up at people’s houses to catch them off guard.

“Who’s the girl?” she asked, coming back from the bathroom.

I had a photo of Kat, eight years old, in a picture frame painted with fish that she’d made in her third-grade class. At the time she’d said that fish things were for the bathroom, in that funny-serious way she had, like she was a judge delivering a verdict, and I’d kept it there in every house I’d lived in since the divorce so she’d feel at home when she visited. For the last ten years, though, since she’d become an adult and could make her own decisions, I’d mostly seen her for lunches in nice restaurants, and the only fatherly satisfaction I got out of those meetings was that I always knew what she’d order (Niçoise salad) and what she’d leave on her plate (we could never get her to eat capers, no matter what we did). I was surprised that Sophie asked, but I liked talking about my daughter. I missed the days when she was little and people would ask me about her all the time.

“It’s my daughter, Kat,” I said. “A long time ago.”

Sophie sat down, not on the couch but cross-legged on the floor.

“It’s a good name,” she said.

I thought so, too. I always planned to call her that when she was born, and I couldn’t help using it still, even though I was pretty sure it annoyed her.

“She goes by Ekaterina now,” I said. “It’s Russian. Her mom picked it out.”

“You’re not together anymore?” Sophie asked. Her tone was nonjudgmental, the way you might ask if I liked seafood, but I didn’t like talking about Nadia the way I liked talking about Kat. I was aware again that I had a stranger in my house, and I wasn’t sure what she wanted.

“Let’s talk about
Isabella
,” I said. “You must have questions.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, scratching her leg. “When do we start shooting?”

I was surprised, and a little disappointed. I realized that I’d been looking forward to being able to convince her.

“So you’re interested?” I asked. “That’s great news. I know you must get a lot of offers.”

She shrugged. “Yeah, but I need to do something different now.”

“Different how?” I asked.

She shrugged again. “I like
Isabella
because somebody else wrote it, so I can’t fuck with it too much. When I have too much freedom, I make mistakes.”

“But
Woods
is wonderful,” I said. “Your original work is some of the best I’ve seen.”

“Yeah,” she said, not humble but not flattered either. She stared out my window at the clouds rolling in over the ocean. I was annoyed with her then—I’d been hoping for a smart discussion with someone I respected, not a surly girl sitting on my floor. I wondered if I’d made a mistake.

“Maybe you’d like to talk a little bit about your vision for the movie,” I said. “Do you have any specific inspirations? Other films, visual art—”

“Actually,” she said, “I haven’t eaten. Could we get food?”

I didn’t have dinner plans—I was just going to eat Pop-Tarts and
have my own sci-fi marathon like I did pretty much every night. But it made me even more frustrated that there was nothing I could say she was interrupting. I still tried to cultivate an air of importance, even though it was clear I’d never be the big studio honcho I’d dreamed of becoming. I screened my calls; I tried not to let people schedule meetings with me any less than a week out. I didn’t like that she thought she could come in and take over my day.

“Listen,” I said. “It’s been great to meet you, but I’m pretty busy tonight. Why don’t we set up a time while you’re in town, and you can come into the office, and we can really talk seriously about the movie.”

Then she put her face in her hands. I thought she was crying, and I was terrified. I’ve never known what to do when someone cries. But when she lifted her face she was just breathing hard, her nostrils flaring.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just don’t have anywhere else to go.”

I
TOOK HER
to the taco stand near the boardwalk. We got chicken soft tacos—she wanted hers plain, no salsa or even onions—and sat on the beach. The sun was going down behind the clouds, and the light was all muffled—it could just as easily have been early morning. The beach was mostly empty; it was just us, a few joggers, and a guy walking a brown dog he’d let off the leash. The dog ran up to us and stuck its nose in Sophie’s face. She didn’t flinch, just petted it calmly between its eyes until its owner whistled and it ran to meet him.

“My ex-wife used to say if you could read a dog’s thoughts, they’d be smells,” I said, to break the silence.

Sophie didn’t answer. She bit into her taco.

“I know I shouldn’t have barged in on you,” she said after a
minute, still chewing. “Things just got really bad really fast, and I’m not that good at having friends.”

“What got bad?” I asked.

I was still annoyed with her, but I didn’t want to turn her away now. It had been so long since anybody had asked me for help.

“Did you know
Woods
was sort of based on my husband’s mom?”

I nodded. I’d seen something about that in a write-up of a screening in Chicago, but I hadn’t paid much attention. I’ve never thought the backstory of a movie was very important—I don’t watch making-of documentaries either. It was strange to think of Sophie as someone’s wife—only now did I notice the ring on her finger, below a bitten-down nail.

“Well, at first he was really into it,” she went on. “He said it would be a relief to have his mom’s story out in the world, not just in his head anymore. Then he saw the movie.”

“Once it was real, it didn’t seem like such a good idea anymore?” I asked.

I’d seen this before with biopics—the family’s so flattered that someone wants to tell their famous grandpa’s story, and then they realize the screenwriter put in the coke and the cheating and they freak out. Like they didn’t get what made the story interesting in the first place.

Sophie shook her head. “No, I fucked up. I knew that Jacob wanted it to be a happy story, like about his mom finding peace. And I let him think I’d make that. I thought I could make it. But then I got into it, and I realized there was a much better way to make it that would be really beautiful and interesting. And I knew I could either make it happy or I could make it good.”

I remembered the second-to-last scene in the movie now. Beth leaves the house, weak and fragile, and looks across the lake to the beach where her family is playing, and just for a second her face flashes total contempt. You had to be really ballsy to show an audience that, to let us see someone who, on her last day on earth, hates the people who took care of her. And if those people were your husband and his family, you had to be a little cruel.

“I’m glad you made it good,” I said.

Sophie shrugged. “I knew I shouldn’t do it. But once I see the best way to do something, it’s hard to do it any other way.”

I admired her then; I was almost jealous. I’d hurt plenty of people in my life, but never because of my artistic integrity. I’d been all too willing to compromise that just to get a steady paycheck, a decent office. When I was really young, I thought Hollywood was going to be full of geniuses—ambitious, crazy people like you see in movies about movies. But mostly it was full of people like me, people who thought they had big ideas but really just wanted to make money and be famous and ultimately couldn’t even quite manage that.