Greer was turning out to be one of those people who simply didn’t answer questions not to her liking. “I suppose you want a tour of the set,” she said. “Flip said I should take you around, if that’s what you want.”
Tess didn’t really care about a tour, but Greer sounded grudging, as if she resented being given this task, and her attitude made Tess perverse.
“Love to.”
The former store had been more or less stripped down to its concrete floors, with a labyrinth of plywood now taking up half of the space. Vast and high ceilinged, the building held the morning’s chill and then some.
“I’ll take you to the sets we’re not using, first.” Greer headed toward the maze, and Tess had one brief paranoid fear that Greer was planning to lose her in it, that Tess would end up wandering for days among artificial rooms.
“This is the Mann rowhouse,” Greer said, stopping in front of a living room that played to every stereotype of how blue-collar workers lived, replete with shag carpeting, velvet paintings, and a plaid La-Z-Boy. “We’re not using it in the current episode, because that’s set almost entirely in the nineteenth century.”
“It looks a little wide,” Tess murmured. “But then, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Film isn’t very good at conveying narrow spaces like eleven-foot rowhouses.”
“What do you mean?” Greer appeared to be offended by the mere suggestion that a film could fail to emulate real life.
“My boyfriend and I went to New York this summer, and we toured this amazing museum in a former tenement, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the kind of place you saw in The Godfather, Part II, or Once Upon a Time in America.” Tess didn’t bother to add that she had been motivated to visit the museum because of memories of books like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or the All-of-a-Kind Family series. Film was the only language spoken here, the only cultural reference that anyone seemed to get. “And the thing is, the real tenements were so tiny, so claustrophobic and dark. Even in the best films, the tenement sets are too big, too filled with light. I’m guessing it’s going to be the same for this rowhouse.”
“We have a very good DP,” Greer said, still haughty.
“DP?”
“Director of photography.”
“Oh.” Tess decided not to suggest that Francis Ford Coppola and Sergio Leone might have had good directors of photography as well. DPs. She was a quick study. She would learn to talk the talk, if that’s what it took.
The next set was a run-down meeting room. “The union hall.” Tess stepped into the room, marveling at the level of detail – the newspaper splayed across the Formica-topped table, the mismatched chairs, the faded memos tacked to the bulletin board, the coffee cups. There was even a fake coffee stain on one table. Tess couldn’t help but approve of such conscientiousness.
She was taken aback, however, by the view through the “window” – an extremely realistic photographic backdrop of the waterfront, with cranes rising in the distance, the blue smear of the harbor just beyond.
“So the things we see through the windows in a movie or television show – they’re not real?”
Greer looked amused, superior – Tess’s intent. People tend to reveal more to those they consider ignorant.
“Of course not. Think about the lighting and continuity issues created by a real window.”
“But it looks so real. I mean, on film. Here, it looks like a photograph, but on a screen, you can’t tell.”
“The camera has no depth perception,” Greer said. “And, of course, sometimes they cut in a shot of the real view – say a character had to look out the window and see something in particular. You edit that shot in, and it heightens the illusion. But look up and you can see the lights hanging from the ceiling, which allows us to light the view for day or night.”
It was an intriguing insight, but Tess wasn’t sure she liked this behind-the-scenes view of things. While movies weren’t as magical to her as they had been, back in her late teens and twenties, she still wanted to be able to suspend belief, not think about all the ways she was being fooled. She didn’t share these thoughts with Greer, however. Instead, she continued to inspect the set with pretended awe, as she assumed most people did.
“You said they were filming today?”
“They are, but it’s way off in another corner of the set, where we’ve created Betsy’s world.” We, we, we. To hear Greer tell it, she was part of everything that happened on Mann of Steel. “I’ll take you there.”
Tess had not necessarily wanted to watch filming, but she figured she should. Observing Selene at work might give her a sense of what her charge would be like at rest. Restless, she supposed.
They wound their way through the maze, stepping over endless rivers of coiled cords and cables, until they finally found themselves in a thriving hive of activity, where young men and women – and they were overwhelmingly young, Tess noticed – rushed around with ferocious certainty. She was shocked at how many people there were working – twenty, thirty, maybe even forty. It was hard to keep track, given how they kept moving. Maybe Mann of Steel could be a good little economic engine for Baltimore, assuming these technical folks were locals, not imports.
“Last looks,” someone called out, and Tess watched as makeup and hair people swarmed Selene and a puffy middle-aged man – oh dear, it was Johnny Tampa, seriously gone to seed. “Last looks” turned out to be a flurry of pampering – makeup was tweaked, hair smoothed and coaxed into position. One woman produced a camera and shot Polaroids of both actors, instructing them to hold up their hands.
“Continuity, again,” Greer said, as if sensing what Tess was about to ask. “We have to keep careful records, so if there are reshoots, or other scenes in this time frame, everything matches up. If Selene’s wearing a ring, we can’t have it disappear later.”
A round-shouldered man lumbered over to Selene and Johnny, mumbled something inaudible to them. Selene, stroking her much-amplified mane of hair, nodded absently while Johnny Tampa looked confused, not unlike an animal that had just been poleaxed. The round-shouldered man shuffled away. Whoever he was, his posture made him quite the saddest sack that Tess had ever seen.
“The director,” Greer said. “Wes Stark. Flip calls him Willie Stark, but I’m not sure why.” Tess thought about explaining All the King’s Men to Greer but knew she would be depressed if Greer’s only point of reference was Broderick Crawford. Or even worse, Sean Penn.
“But I thought the woman, the one who’s been running the crew, calling out some of the orders-”
“First AD. Assistant director, Nicole. She’s really good, and Stark’s smart enough to cede a lot of power to her. Smart or lazy – he doesn’t like to leave the video village if he can help it. At any rate, she’s pulling his bacon out of the fire on this ep.”
Something in the phrase, the bit about pulling Stark’s bacon, didn’t ring true to Tess. She didn’t doubt its veracity, having no basis to judge his performance. But she didn’t believe it was Greer’s unique opinion. Someone must have told her that, or Greer had overheard that scrap of phrase and decided to appropriate it.
“You need to watch from the village,” Greer said. “Where the director is.”
“Oh, I’m fine here,” Tess said.
“You may be fine, but Johnny’s not. You’re in his eye line, and he freaks out when there are strangers watching him.”
Tess decided not to point out that someone who freaked out when strangers were watching was a bad fit for the acting profession.
Greer led her to an encampment of director’s chairs, some of which did have names on their backs. Here was Flip, along with the tiniest adult woman that Tess had ever seen, her chair fitted with a wooden footrest higher than the others, so her legs didn’t swing free. The back of her chair identified her as Charlotte MacKenzie. So that was the bean counter who had cut her fee and reduced Lloyd to an intern. Ben wasn’t in his chair. He was several feet away, standing next to a cart piled high with food. Flip glanced up, caught Tess’s eye, greeted her with a curt, professional nod. Ah, she had segued into the category of “help,” alongside Greer. She no longer qualified for the thick charm Flip had piled on when trying to hire her. As long as his checks cleared, she didn’t give a damn.