“Well, yes, I am finished filming for the day,” I said to Lucky. Which was why I was now fully covered in layers of warm winter clothing, with my face clean of Alicia’s makeup. “But as I was leaving the set, Ted asked me if I’d meet him at his mother’s store later to try on some outfits for a party scene that we’re supposed to film later on.”
To my relief, he hadn’t wanted me to do the fitting at that moment, since he had a meeting to go to right after the shoot; so I hadn’t had to cancel my plans to confer with Lucky and Max over dinner at the funeral home.
“How is the filming going?” Max asked me.
I waggled my hand. “So-so.”
I started giving them a judiciously edited account of the day’s events while I served myself some steamed Chinese broccoli. Then I succumbed to temptation and put a dumpling stuffed with succulent shredded duck on my plate.
After our eventful lunch on Doyers, which had concluded with Ted assuring a departing Lopez that we certainly would not attempt to film on location again without a permit, most of us had returned to the loft on Hester Street to shoot part of a different scene there, so the day wouldn’t be completely wasted.
The loft, which was chilly and pretty bare-bones, had belonged to Benny Yee, and it served as Ted’s production base. This was where I had auditioned for my role. Ted used some of the space to store all his film equipment. Another part of the loft was set aside for the actors to get into costume and makeup. The rest of the space was a film set decorated to look like a small apartment; this was where the movie’s protagonist lived, and a number of scenes took place here.
As we were setting up for the afternoon shoot there, I’d learned that Ted had an additional problem, besides losing Benny as an investor. It turned out that Benny had not left his widow as well-fixed as everyone assumed, and Grace Yee needed to sell this loft in order to solve the financial problems created by Benny’s recent business setbacks. These fiscal woes, she had explained privately to Ted, were why she couldn’t honor Benny’s memory by sinking more money into the movie which had been his last investment in life. Even for Benny’s nephew, Grace just couldn’t spare the cash—as her sons kept telling her.
She was sympathetic to Ted’s situation and didn’t plan to kick him out of the loft, but she was going to have to put the place on the market soon. She was just waiting to be advised of an auspicious date for that.
“Astrology is very important to Chinese people,” Ted explained in a quick aside to me, when telling us about the possibility of losing the loft as our production base and primary set. “She wouldn’t want to launch the sale on an unlucky day.”
Fortune and luck, both good and bad, kept playing a big role in everyone’s fate here, including mine.
Due to the economy, the loft might sit on the market for a long time. After all, although it was in a good location, it would probably need remodeling and updating to be useful to anyone besides an indie filmmaker or a tong underlord. (I was curious about what Benny had used the place for before loaning it to Ted, but I assumed I was better off not knowing.)
“Or this loft might sell within days to a buyer who wants us out of here by the closing date.” Ted concluded with a shrug, “There’s no way of knowing.”
“What’ll happen to the movie if we lose this space?” Bill asked anxiously. “I really need this film to succeed, Ted. My parents . . . you know.”
I resisted the urge to give Bill a reality check. Even if the film got finished, which wasn’t a given, success was nowhere in this low-budget movie’s future. Not with Ted’s clumsy script and plodding direction.
“Don’t worry, we’ll find another space,” said the ever-optimistic Ted. “Our fortunes are improving all the time. I’ve got a meeting later today with our new backer.”
“We have a new backer?” I asked eagerly.
“Well, I hope he’s our new backer,” said Ted. “Fingers crossed.”
Indeed.
Dressing, undressing, and sitting around waiting to work were uncomfortable in the frigid loft. So was touching each other, due to how cold our hands were. We wound up working on a love scene between Brian and Alicia today, during which my shirt kept getting hiked up (but stayed on); and every time Bill touched my bare skin, it was hard not to shriek.
Cynthia wasn’t needed for this scene, since Mei wasn’t in it, so she had gone home after lunch. Archie was with us on set, though, since Jianyu came to Brian in a vision while Alicia was trying to seduce him.
None of us had our lines down well for the scene, since we hadn’t expected to shoot it today, so progress was slow and we had to do a lot of retakes. Which meant that I spent much of the afternoon repeatedly flinging myself at Bill, who responded with comedic uncertainty to Alicia’s aggressive sexuality. The first few takes were a little uncomfortable between us, since we were scant acquaintances who’d never done more than shake hands before, and now I was in his arms and kissing him. But after we’d done this several times in a row while Ted asked me to tilt my head differently, the production assistant called out the lines we kept forgetting, and Archie was practicing moves nearby with his sword while waiting for his cue . . . the awkwardness faded, and Bill and I got pretty comfortable with each other.
Kissing a fellow actor in performance isn’t like kissing someone in life. Your character may well have complex feelings about embracing the other person, but you’re just doing your job. So unless your relationship with the other actor is making the situation complicated (which wasn’t the case here), once you get over the initial embarrassment of intimately touching each other, doing a love scene isn’t that much different than doing a close-contact fight scene or a dance routine together.
It’s all physical acting, and in each instance, you have to rehearse together, develop trust and a comfort zone with each other, learn your mutual moves well enough to make the scene look spontaneous and natural, hit your marks, say your lines, and make sure your face can be seen when the director wants it seen. And whether you’re on camera or on stage, the whole time you’re touching and kissing each other while exchanging seductive dialogue and pretending to be turned on, lots of people are right there in the room watching you. When filming a love scene, the director may be within a foot of your embracing bodies, and the camera and microphone may be perilously close to hitting you in the head.
So although Bill was the first man who had touched me this way since Lopez had left my bedroom Christmas morning, there was no similarity whatsoever between the two experiences, and one didn’t remind me of the other.
Anyhow, as I now told Max and Lucky, we’d gotten a very late start on filming today because of the Doyers Street mess, and we hadn’t really learned our lines for the scene we wound up working on. (I didn’t tell my two companions that the scene involved a lot of kissing and fondling.) So we didn’t get much done today and would have to return to the same scene tomorrow.
“And at some point,” I concluded, “we’ll also have to go back to Doyers to film the scene we should have filmed today.”
Max reached for a second helping of noodles as he said, “It was most thoughtful of Detective Lopez to offer to help expedite the necessary paperwork for the filming to proceed more smoothly.”
“Thoughtful, my elbow,” said Lucky. “He owed it to her.”
I froze for a moment, feeling awkward as I realized he must know what all his colleagues who’d been busted at Bella Stella knew—that I’d had sex with Lopez (twice) after the arrests at Fenster’s, and then he’d never called me.