Venice: Though she does look like she’s about to bite her pet hamster in the neck. Ha-ha, ha-ha.
Silver Lake: Hehhehheeh. And what’s the point of putting up a fuss? Isn’t it better to simply let the spectacle unfold?
Venice: Just let the kid chomp. One last splash of adrenalin, that’s what you’re buying with the ticket.
BLINDED BY PAPARAZZI
A cherry role with a breakout actress. A choice opportunity, a major bump up from cable TV. Matty was going big-screen while he was still young enough to do loss of innocence. It made no difference that, within the first minute of the phone call, he understood the project was mostly about the actress. Spada, she was the breakout. The studio, the brain trust, hadn’t failed to notice how much face-space she’d been getting. These days, while you waited in checkout, Spada was the wallpaper.
Who was Matty to argue with the brain trust? Brava Spada, he agreed, trying out the accent.
Born to break out, the double helix of her introns and exons spiraling beautifully through first Libya and then Sicily, the woman also had learned how to work it. She had a practiced gaze, slantwise. The package added up to #7 on some laddy-mag’s list of World Babes, and—the news was all over the wallpaper—she’d just left her boyfriend. Spada had come into the Industry and left behind the Art, her b.f., one of those genius auteurs with a Citation for Excellence but hardly two quarters to rub together. Riding to the set on the back of a Vespa, she’d had enough of that. Maybe she’d had enough of those complicated Mediterranean types, too. Maybe Spada was ready for an All-American.
The thought crossed his mind, sure. To hook up with Spada fit the career chart neatly: first the cherry part and then the World Babe. It was about the work. If the studio had guessed right, if the multiplex was ready for cappuccino, then Matty would enjoy a significant bump up. This regardless of whether he and Spada started swapping orgasms. He’d like to get the girl, but as it was he’d got an epic.
Time travel. One movie, a dozen parts.
A typical sequence started with Spada the slave, Matty the master. He’s the master with a heart of gold, hardly more than a boy when he took over his father’s plantation. And his high-yaller house gal, her hand-me-down bodice a tad limp at the hem, she’s been giving young Beauregard his bath since he was a pup. The people on the soundtrack came up with something crafty here, too, they synced the music so Spada’s crooning keeps time with the droplets running down his hips and belly. Her lullaby itself a caress. But no sooner does Matty’s innocence appear thoroughly lost than boom, big twist.
No sooner do they kiss than they go straight into that wavy-seaweed effect—some tricks never grow old—and come out of it into whole different seduction. The lovebirds go from a hot night in old Dixie to a steamy passage from the Book of Kings, a visit from the Nubian Queen. This time Spada’s the one with the whip. She’s haughty with her young scribe. You might wonder just what part of Nubia this guy comes from, with his golden curls and sapphire eyes, but mostly you’re watching the queen, rising regally from the scented water of her bath while the potted plants in the foreground keep everything PG-13 (some tricks just never…).
Yet once the queen and scribe move into the bedchamber, between the onyx and the ivory, it’s not what you expect. She doesn’t ask to see his quill. Rather, twist again, she understands she’s fallen into a mystery. She scans the troubled gaze of her new b.f.
My secret heart, she declares, I see you feel as lost as I. Do you read the glyphs with such a gaze? And in all the chronicles, was there ever love so strange?
The boy sets his jackal earrings aclatter, shaking his head. He and his queen, he replies, appear to play across the millennia as moonlight sparkles on the surface of a pond.
The woman smiles but remains thoughtful. Then we must recall all that we can of the mystery from whence we came, she insists. We must delve beneath the golden inlay and leopard skin of this our present world. Only, first kiss me again….
And when they do, the seaweed billows back up. The soundtrack’s got something wild going here, as well, thumb piano and piccolo. A ticklish new earworm for every pivot in the narrative. Now Matty slips a coin under his tongue in one era so that he can spend it in the next, now Spada scratches a graffito on a wall of the Coliseum, just before she’s thrown to the lions, so that she’ll get a flashback centuries later, when she visits the ruin as a nun.
Totally cherry! Besides all the changes Matty gets to play, the variety of accents and body language—and besides the opportunity to spend one intense hour after another with so knowing and supple an eyeful—besides all that, he’s getting ten days in Rome. The brain trust figures they need to go on-location for the final sequence, the confrontation with the Emperor’s evil Babylonian mage. The villain’s got a ram’s horn as twisted as he is. Blow the right note and it blasts a hole in the universal continuum, his rivals simply disappear…
The studio got the right man for that part too, one of those Royal Shakespeare coots who can do the Wicked Sorcerer with a flick of the eyebrow.
And chops like that, one flick and you’re thanking the Academy, wasn’t that really what this project was about? Wasn’t it about the work? Matty would never have gotten this far if he’d left his career up to his curls and his dimples. Curls and dimples, any club girl out on Sunset had that much. He put in fresh hours with the voice coach, extra practice on timing. He enlisted the help of a couple of his old crew from USC, guys still in the business, happy to pitch in so long as Matty showed their screenplay to the right people. He did it, too; he kept it real.
But then early on in the filming—talk about real—the switcheroo from the movie came barreling into his life. Into his life and Spada’s too, the uncanny came walloping, knocking them far and deep across the timeline. And there were no mics, no blocks, no crew. Matty may have caught a faraway blare of the Arkestra, a crescendo of sax, but that was something from the movie, something the people doing the sound had sampled for the players to help them prepare for the next scene. But when Matty heard it this time, he went straight into the impossible. And all he and Spada had done was step out for the evening. Her suggestion; she’d felt it would be good for “the choreography.”
Were they going to dance? He might’ve asked, but before he got the chance, they were whisked away through fluttering kelp.
All they’d done was pose outside the restaurant. Part of the business, the buzz, and Spada wasted no time getting her smile in place, slantwise. It wasn’t for Matty’s sake alone, her bare shoulders, her lamé sack top, as if this were Bowie’s first date with Iman. But then in the middle of the laser flash, that yellow Morse code, the two stuttered away, dah-dit-dah, into old trolley-riding LA, the LA of bungalows and Bakelite. When the visuals stabilized, Matty was wearing a fedora.
And when he spots the woman at his side he needs to confirm, blinking, frowning, that this was his exotic lead, because he’d never seen Spada looking so mannish or so white. He needs to remind himself that women’s suits in those days tended towards the mannish, a lot of shoulder and no waist, though on second thought it strikes him as all the more bazook that Spada should be wearing a suit at all. Where’d her glam thing gone? And when did she get her skin bleached, a Dorothy Dandridge fade? Nonetheless this is Spada, as startled by the jump-cut as Matty himself. Doesn’t take a sorcerer to see that, her looks all at once overripe. She’s never been so easy to read, Spada, her face glowing beneath the tiger-pelt slashes of the shadows of the blinds. The rest of the set’s underlit, the potted plants like black silk, but before Matty can get a decent look his date or his victim or whoever bursts into speech. She gives voice to a wordless and fitful music, full of pain it seems, yet bristling with sarcasm. A woman with a past, turning her pocketful of secrets inside out. Doesn’t take a psychic to see that. Though Matty’s nowhere near sure of himself, even as he tips back his hat and murmurs in hard-boiled understanding. Really, understanding? Where’d he get this stuff? He couldn’t recall seeing any pick-ups tacked onto the script. Not that he doesn’t enjoy it when the woman seizes him in a trembling embrace. Not that he doesn’t enjoy the notion that he’s the last good man standing. Spada seizes him in a terror that might’ve left bruises, and her whimpering might be in Italian, and as they fall into a longing kiss the entire scene starts to tremble. They go to dissolve with no more than a hint of the rollicking seaweed.