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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Vertigo
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
From the CWA-longlisted author of Dear Daughter comes a wickedly funny behind-the-scenes whodunnit set on a true-crime film shoot 'A twisty story, a cinephile's delight, a knockout of a heroine. I loved it' LAURA LIPPMAN 'I am a sucker for a tough yet vulnerable heroine, and here Elizabeth Little gives the reader an excellent one, and sets her against a brilliantly toxic backdrop of glitz and entitlement' RUTH WARE 'An atmospheric thriller that sparkles with intelligence and irrepressible wit' STEPH CHA ____________ Some girl dies. Film editor Marissa has read better loglines for films, but still jumps at the chance to travel to a small island to work with the legendary - and legendarily demanding - director Tony Rees. Soon she discovers that on this set, nothing is as it seems. There are rumours of accidents, indiscretions and burgeoning scandals. In the midst of this chaos, Marissa is herself drawn into an amateur investigation of the real-life murder that is the movie's central subject. The only problem is, the killer may still be on the loose. And he might not be done. ____________ See what readers are saying about Pretty as a Picture 'Unique and original. I have been pulled in and unable to put this one down' 'Hilarious and witty, I thoroughly enjoyed this book which should delight the cinephiles and thriller lovers.' 'At times I wanted to stop reading because I just wanted the experience to go on for longer' More praise for Elizabeth Little 'Often unexpected, always entertaining' Kate Atkinson, New York Times bestselling author of Life After Life 'Needle-sharp writing that brings characters and atmosphere leaping off the page' Tana French, New York Times bestselling author of In the Woods 'What a devilish, delightful treat! Crackling with wit and shining with originality' Sara Shepard, New York Times bestselling author of Pretty Little Liars A CrimeReads Best Psychological Suspense of 2020A Los Angeles Times BestsellerA Wall Street Journal Mystery of the YearA Seattle Times Mystery of the Year
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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“Elizabeth Little is part of an exciting new generation of crime writers who have been bending this sturdy genre into new, unexpected shapes. Pretty as a Picture is a glorious buffet – a twisty story, a cinephile’s delight, a knockout of a heroine. I loved it”
Laura Lippman, author of Sunburn
“Funny, fast-paced, and a pleasure to read”
The Wall Street Journal
“A valentine to the intoxications of filmmaking and film-viewing”
The New York Times Book Review
“Elizabeth Little’s fantastic new book is part parable of the film industry, part feminist thriller, and part ode to the rise of the true crime podcast”
CrimeReads
“Elizabeth Little has an impeccable ear for dialogue and a sharp eye for detail, and she’s created a page-turner that is as well written as it is captivating. I enjoyed every scene and sentence of this glorious book”
Steph Cha, author of Your House Will Pay
“One of the year’s most anticipated thrillers”
Bustleii
“I am a sucker for a tough yet vulnerable heroine, and in Pretty as a Picture Elizabeth Little gives the reader an excellent one, and sets her against a brilliantly toxic backdrop of glitz and entitlement”
Ruth Ware, author of The Woman in Cabin 10
“Engaging and irresistible from the very first page, Pretty as a Picture is a smart and compelling thriller filled with surprises”
Alafair Burke, author of The Better Sister
“Pretty as a Picture is a remarkable thriller that succeeds on almost too many levels. It’s sharp and stylish, witty and fierce, not to mention extremely intelligent”
Ivy Pochoda, author of Wonder Valley
“Both a captivating thriller and a snarkily funny send-up of Hollywood pretensions, the book glories in movie references – film fans will be especially rewarded”
The Seattle Times
“A smart, cinematically steeped page-turner… Little scores with the achingly vulnerable Marissa, whose specific set of skills enables her to see the big picture before anyone else. Psychological thriller fans will be well satisfied”
Publishers Weekly
“Murder and mayhem plague a film set on a secluded island… Readers fascinated with the behind-the-scenes machinations of a movie set will be enthralled, plus there’s a frisson of romantic tension… A quirky and distinctive heroine headlines this fun and fast-paced thriller loaded with cinematic flourishes”
Kirkus Reviews
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For Annabel and Robyn
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Life in the movie business is like the … beginning of a new love affair: it’s full of surprises, and you’re constantly getting fucked.
— David Mamet
CONTENTS
PRETTY AS A PICTURE
PROLOGUE
They say a picture’s worth a thousand words.
That’s not what I’d say.
I’d say it depends on the picture. I’d say it depends on the size and the color and the subject and the print and the framing and the focus and the composition. I’d say it depends on what you were doing the hour before, the day before, the year before, the life before. I’d say it depends on whether you’re looking at it on a wall or scrolling past it on a screen or cutting it carefully out of a book, digging your knuckle into the gutter of the spine because the margins are so small and the blades are so long and it’s impossible to get a straight line, but you don’t want to dig up a guide and an X-Acto knife because you aren’t willing to wait, you have to have it, you have to have this picture, right now, and your kitchen scissors are close enough and good enough—yes, good enough—and Jesus Christ, Marissa, when will you get it through your thick head: Imperfection is a price happy people pay to cradle the weight of something they love.
That’s what I’d say.
But I understand some people prefer the cozy imprecision of “nice round numbers,” so I’m willing to pretend, for the moment, for 2the sake of argument, that a single picture is indeed worth one thousand point zero zero words exactly.
It would follow, then, that two pictures are worth two thousand words.
A hundred pictures, a hundred thousand words.
At that rate it wouldn’t take too many pictures before you’d have in front of you all the words there ever were in all the world and more besides, more words than anyone could thread together into anything resembling sense.
Think about that the next time you go to the movies.
If you want to trick the human eye into believing a series of pictures represents continuous motion—what first-semester film school students learn to call “persistence of vision”—you’re going to need to present your audience with about sixteen frames per second. More, if you’d like, but no fewer.
Sixteen. Not round, but still a number people like to hang on to. It’s often said that 16 FPS was the standard frame rate in the silent film era, but that’s wrong—there was no standard. Those cameras were hand-cranked, and directors varied the frame rate from scene to scene depending on the rhythm that suited their story. But once talkies came along, picture had to sync to sound, and since then, the frame rate used in movie production and projection has been 24 FPS, with a few exceptions I won’t let myself go into, because according to Amy no one wants to hear what anyone thinks about Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.
By this reckoning, at eighty‐five minutes, your average movie is made up of 122,400 frames. So if a picture’s worth a thousand words—well, that average movie must be worth 122,400,000 words.
One hundred twenty-two million. 3
In the wrong hands, that’s too much. Too much information, too much possibility. No one can find a signal in all that noise. You might as well eat a library. You might as well drink a dictionary. You might as well ask an actor how they’re feeling.
That’s why they come to me. The editor.
Give me enough time. Give me enough space. Give me a dark room and a roll of film, a Steenbeck, a Moviola, an Avid NLE, a director with a vision and an actor with some craft.
Give me an X-Acto knife and a guide.
Give me this, and I’ll do all the things with pictures I can never do with words. I’ll slice and stitch and lace and weave and cut and wipe and fade. I’ll crack open the body of the beast and slip my hands beneath its beating heart.
Give me a movie and I’ll find the meaning; I’ll find the truth; I’ll find the story.
Sometimes, if I’m very lucky, I’ll find all three.
ONE
Not that I manage to say any of that out loud.
Of course I don’t.
Sometimes I think everything wrong with my life can be located in the space between what I should have said and what actually came out of my mouth. No matter how hard I try, no matter how well I prepare, the right words are, for me, forever out of reach. Not because they catch in my throat. A cat hasn’t got my tongue. None of the usual phrases apply. It’s a more comprehensive kind of collapse. When faced with any real conversational pressure, my personality just goes offline, AWOL, and no matter how hard I try, it doesn’t respond. Catastrophic system failure.
Speak, I tell myself in those moments. Speak.
Like I’m Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, lying barefoot in the back of that truck, gritting my teeth and trying to force my insubordinate body to bend to my iron will.
Speak.
But I’m not Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. I didn’t train with Gordon Liu. I don’t know the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique, and I don’t have the body to pull off a yellow leather motorcycle suit. So I never get my toe to move. I never drive that truck to Vivica A. 6Fox’s house. I never get revenge and I never find my daughter. I just starve to death in a hospital parking lot.
And in real life, when asked to explain to a potential employer why I’m the best candidate for a job I desperately need, I don’t deliver a rousing monologue about the exhilarating, all-encompassing, soul-shifting, life-shaking power of cinema. Instead I just comb my fingers through my ponytail for the seventeenth time while mumbling something about my work ethic.
Then, to top it off, I shrug—I shrug—and I say:
“I just really like movies, I guess.”
My agent makes a sound so pained I’m genuinely worried I might have killed her.
I don’t know what else Nell expected, it’s been six years since I’ve had to look for work. Six years since Amy hit it just big enough that we could coast from feature to feature to feature without having to hustle for work we hated in the interim. It took some doing—the plumbing in the Mid-City two-bedroom we shared was more vague promise than functional reality, and six nights a week we ate rice and beans we bought in bulk—but eventually she was able to stop taking AD gigs; I was able to stop doing TV. We found a rhythm that worked for us, postproduction bleeding into preproduction and back again, and if I didn’t have time for a social life, I wasn’t particularly bothered: I got to live and work with my very best friend.
But last month I decided it was time to start thinking about getting my own place, and Amy and I put the new movie on hold so we could figure things out.
It didn’t take long to realize that blowing up my personal and professional lives all at once wasn’t exactly the smartest thing I could have done. For about three days it felt freeing. But then I ran out of new-release movies to see. 7
And so, this afternoon, I found myself pacing the inadequate length of my short-term rental in Burbank, restless, anxious, fingers fluttering at my sides. I had finally managed to work up the nerve to send a few emails to old colleagues, hoping I could pick up an episode or two of I truly didn’t even care what, but either they didn’t remember me or they were all out to lunch or Gmail was down for everyone but me.
By two p.m., my nerves—already frayed by the arrival of my credit card statement—drove me to a desperate act: I made a phone call. I left a message for my agent explaining that Amy and I were taking a break, that I needed a job, and, therefore, that I might actually be willing to take her advice for once.
I should have known something was fishy when she called me back right away.
“You have a meeting,” she said.
“Who with?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about that. Get here by six, I’ll take care of the rest.”
“Today? At rush hour?”
“You want a job or not?”
“Nell. Have they even seen my reel?”
“Don’t worry about that, either.”
“The more you say that the more I worry.”
She sniffed. “Worry, don’t worry, either way this is the only open assignment that isn’t scraping memory cards for Transformers7. So if you want it, be here at six.” She paused. “And maybe do something with your hair.”
She hung up without saying good-bye, and I wished, not for the first time, that I were an agent, too.
Imagine being able to end a conversation whenever you want.
When I arrived at Nell’s office—ten minutes early, despite a slow-down at Coldwater and Mulholland—I still didn’t have a clue what I was walking into. Nell hadn’t mentioned a script or a story or even a 8logline, so my best guess was that she’d arranged for a late-day meet-and-greet with a producer too green to know this was a below-the-line agency. As a strategy, it didn’t make much sense: Nell knew my personality wasn’t my strongest selling point. I figured she was planning to keep the meeting short.
Nell gave my ponytail a tug when she saw me. “You got this,” she said, all historical evidence to the contrary.
And that’s how I found myself sitting here, across the table from two agents, three lawyers, and an important studio executive, interviewing for a job I know absolutely nothing about.
I obviously forgot the important executive’s name immediately. I think it has a “y” in it, maybe? He’s wearing chunky statement glasses and a plain black T-shirt that probably cost more than my car payment. He’s the picture of bland, reflexive courtesy, steepling his fingers and leaning forward in his chair, nodding at every third word no matter what that word is.
After more than a decade in the film industry, I can confidently assert that this particular demeanor indicates one of the following:
measured enthusiasmcatatonic boredoma recent corporate-mandated webinar on best listening practicesI suppose it could be worse.
I blink his face back into focus. I think he’s finally saying something relevant.
“—coming in this late in the game is somewhat less than ideal, obviously, so what we need here is a quick study.”
My eyebrows go up. “And you called me?”
“Well,” he says, “we’ve been told there’s no one better at watching footage and knowing exactly what the director’s trying to say.” 9
“It helps that they usually give me a script.”
The executive beckons to one of the assistants stationed along the back wall. She pulls out a folder and hands it to him. He slides it across the table toward me.
Inside is a photo. Glossy, eight by ten.
“That’s not a script,” I point out.
“No,” he agrees. “It’s a still. And I want you to tell us what you see.”
I draw a breath, preparing to explain to the room at large why this is a terrible way to gauge an editor’s skills (for a start, my job is putting pictures together, not picking them apart), but then I catch a glimpse of the photo, and because at heart I’m just a dog who happens to be into a very particular type of squirrel, this is all it takes to send my thoughts racing off in a new direction.
It’s a medium close-up of a young woman asleep on a beach, and the first thing worth noting is that she’s being played by Liza May, Oscar-anointed ingenue and the reigning, relatable queen of the “Stars, They’re Just Like Us!” social media sphere. Last time I saw her, I think she was waxing her mustache on Facebook Live.
So this is a big-time job. For a big-time director. No wonder Nell was so responsive.
The second thing worth noting is that the woman is dead.
Her body occupies the left half of the frame, visible from the shoulders up, the straps of her neon orange swimsuit the only discordant shade in an otherwise tranquil palette. Her hair is silky, taupe and raw umber and dark blond, streaked by the sun. It falls in layers over her cheek; one strand teases at the corner of her mouth. Her eyebrows have been thinned out, which makes her look older than she is, but she’s barely wearing any foundation, which makes her look younger than she is. Her skin is smooth and very clear.
She’s lying on a weathered wooden beach chair with a white canvas cover. Her arm is stretched out over her head, her cheek 10pillowed against her right biceps, her profile radiant in the golden light of a late summer afternoon, that time of day when the angle of the sun and the particles in the atmosphere do what a reflector or bounce board can never quite match, what color grading can’t quite pull off.
“Well?” the executive asks. “What do you think?”
“I think magic hour’s a nice time to die.”
The executive adjusts his glasses. “How do you know she’s dead?”
“Well—” I draw out the word as long as I can, buying time to reverse engineer my own thinking. It’s been a while since I’ve had to deconstruct the gut certainties that make me good at my job.
I stare at the picture until my eyes start to water, searching for something, anything that might help me stand out. Eventually my finger lands on a faint line that slices vertically through the frame, just past the edge of Liza’s chair.
“The split diopter,” I say.
“Explain,” he says.
“It’s a half lens you stick on the end of the camera if you want to keep two different planes in focus at the same time—like bifocals, but for the movies. So we have Liza here, in the foreground, and then all these beachgoers, there, way far away in the background—but they’re both in focus, right? That wouldn’t be possible without a split diopter. I wish people used it more often, but I guess De Palma kind of beat it to death back in the seventies and eighties, and now it’s not—”
The executive holds up a hand. “Yes, I know what a diopter is, thank you.”
My mouth snaps shut.
“What I’m wondering is how that tells you she’s dead.”
I sneak a glance at the door. “You know, I’m not the best at putting this stuff into words. Maybe I could just show you my reel?” 11
Nell wraps her hand around my wrist and whispers in my ear.
“Robots, Marissa. In disguise.”
“I get it,” I say, and even I can tell my voice is tight and unfriendly. I edge my chair away from the table until I have enough room to jiggle my foot without accidentally kicking anyone. After a few seconds of this, I’m able to explain myself. “Since this is a studio movie, it’s a safe assumption the crowd’s being kept in focus because they’re an important part of the scene. Because we’re waiting for one of them to notice Liza—to find her. The prospect of discovery, that’s what’s driving the tension here. It wouldn’t be dramatic if she were just taking a nap.”
The executive props his elbow on the back of his chair and pushes his hair back from his forehead. “You’re certain of that?”
I consider the shot again. “I guess it’s possible the director just thinks it looks cool—”
Nell kicks my chair.
“—but either way, she’s definitely dead.”
The executive studies me over the rims of his glasses. “You’re the first person to bring that up. Everyone else said the white lips were the giveaway.”
“No, I wouldn’t trust this makeup department.”
“Why not?”
I point to Liza’s face. “In the summer, someone with her coloring would freckle. They gave Liza a spray tan, obviously, but the cosmetician adjusted the color, washed it out—probably because her blood would already be pooling in her lower extremities, so she’d be paler than normal. Livor mortis, right? But dying doesn’t make your freckles disappear. They should have painted some in.” I brush my fingertip along her cheekbones. “Right now she looks too much like a movie star, and you don’t want that, not when you’re doing true crime.” 12
The executive is frowning now, two small lines etched between his eyebrows, and it occurs to me that dragging their makeup department was not, perhaps, the best way to win this job.
Well, at least Nell won’t be able to say I didn’t try.
I open my mouth to thank them for their time—
“What makes you say it’s true crime?” the executive asks.
I glance back down at the photo. Why did I say that?
“Judging by the costume design, it’s a period piece—midnineties, probably? And I figure it’s based on a true story because—yeah, the color hasn’t been corrected or graded, I know, but the overall palette is so deliberate and carefully curated. Meanwhile, that swimsuit she’s wearing is just … unbelievably orange.” The answer comes to me the second before I say it. “So I’m thinking, probably, it’s the same suit the real girl was murdered in.”
“Hold on,” he says, “I never said she was murdered.”
“That just stands to reason. Why else would you make a movie about it?”
Now, I may not be a crackerjack conversationalist, but I’m something of a connoisseur of silences. You can, roughly, separate them into two groups: the kind of silence where everyone’s looking at each other and the kind of silence where everyone’s not looking at each other. Personally, I prefer the latter. If there’s going to be cruel laughter, I’d rather it be out of earshot.
The silence that just settled over this room, however, is an extremely undesirable third variety:
Everyone’s looking at something else. Namely, the speakerphone in the center of the table.
Which means they’re scared.
Then there’s a crackle of static, and a voice comes over the line, sealing my fate.
“She’ll do.”
13Note: Dead Ringer is produced for the ear and designed to be heard, not read. We strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that’s not on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and Suzy’s little brother and may contain errors because lollll, guys, this is not This American Life. Cut us some slack.
SUZY KOH: Hi, everyone, I’m Suzy Koh—
GRACE PORTILLO: And I’m Grace Portillo.
SUZY KOH:—and welcome to this week’s episode of Dead Ringer, the true crime podcast for people who hate true crime podcasts.
GRACE PORTILLO: Seriously?
SUZY KOH: What?
GRACE PORTILLO: I don’t know, that just seems, like, unnecessarily divisive.
SUZY KOH: Fine. It’s also the true crime podcast for people who love true crime podcasts.
GRACE PORTILLO: Okay—
SUZY KOH: And for people who only kinda like them. And for people who don’t even know what podcasts are— but that’s okay, Grandma, I still love you. [pause] Did I miss anyone? Or is that inclusive enough for you?
GRACE PORTILLO: Oh my God.
SUZY KOH: Right, so when we left off last week, Tony Rees’s big-deal dead-girl drama had just hit a snag, losing its highest-profile crew member to date—14
GRACE PORTILLO: Not that anyone on the production staff would admit what had happened.
SUZY KOH: The excuse the producer gave at the time was that Tony and his editor had parted ways—
GRACE PORTILLO: Right— “creative differences.” Which doesn’t even make sense! They weren’t even editing the movie yet!
SUZY KOH: Yeah, but we didn’t realize that then. We’d never been on a film set before.
GRACE PORTILLO: What was the crew’s excuse?
SUZY KOH: Probably something to do with not wanting to be fired?
GRACE PORTILLO: Oh. Yeah, I guess that makes sense.
SUZY KOH: So we begin today’s episode with the arrival of Marissa Dahl.
GRACE PORTILLO: Marissa, thanks so much for agreeing to speak with us.
MARISSA DAHL: And thank you for agreeing to stop leaving me voice mails if I came on.
SUZY KOH: Marissa’s a film and TV editor best known for her work with Amy Evans, the award-winning director of Mary Queen of the Universe and All My Pretty Ones.
GRACE PORTILLO: Best known until recently.
SUZY KOH: Well, right. You probably know her as the woman who cracked two of the biggest murder cases of the year.
TWO
Hollywood has just two speeds, “We’ll get back to you” and “We need this yesterday,” and as soon as the speakerphone clicks off, we skip straight past the slow torture of the former and into the unforgiving maw of the latter. The lawyers and agents are all talking rapidly, all at once, about all the things I pay them to think about for me.
“I assume our previous deal memo stands.”
“I’m happy to reopen the discussion of residuals.”
“I’m happy to reopen the discussion of her quote.”
“Her quote’s her quote, Steve.”
There’s an assistant—who can say whose—at my side, tapping on two phones simultaneously, peppering me with questions I barely manage to register, much less respond to.
“Burbank or LAX? Nonstop on American or a layover in Chicago on United? Aisle or window? Six o’clock or seven twenty?”
“There’s nothing tonight?” the executive asks.
I frown. “Tonight-tonight?”
The assistant chews her lip and flicks furiously at her screens. “No—last flight’s at nine forty-five. She won’t make it.”
“Excuse me, I’m sorry, but are you talking about me right now?” 16
The executive peers at my agent. “Nell, you sure we can’t send her coach?”
She shrugs. “If you think you can find a better candidate, go right on ahead.”
The executive sighs and nods to the assistant. “Book the six a.m. We’ll have our guy meet her there.”
What is happening? Where am I going? Why is everyone acting like we’re launching a military campaign? I glance around the room, but no one appears to be treating this as anything unusual. “Hello? Is anyone going to explain any of this to me?”
The executive spares me the briefest glance. “You’re going to set.”
I make a face like I’ve smelled something sour. “Why? Let the assistant editors handle the memory cards; I’ll get everything set up here for post.”
He waves a hand dismissively. “There are no assistant editors. Tony doesn’t trust them.”
One of the lawyers drops a pile of contracts on the table in front of me and tries to hand me a pen.
I swat the pen away. “I’m sorry, did you say … Tony?”
The executive freezes. He swallows, his Adam’s apple dipping behind the crew neck of his overpriced tee. Then he lifts his head and looks somewhere past my left shoulder.
“Oh, didn’t we mention that? Tony Rees—he’s the director on this picture.”
Live in LA long enough and you’re bound to lose your sense of wonder.
I didn’t grow up in a backwater—not by any reasonable standards—but even so, for a kid in Champaign-Urbana, seeing a celebrity was a big deal. I can still remember the envy and astonishment 17 that rippled through me when I heard that one of my classmates had seen Jennie Garth at the supermarket with her mother.
And Jennie Garth’s from Champaign-Urbana.
After nearly fifteen years here, though, celebrities are just part of the scenery, another thing to not notice on the drive home, and I don’t know what I hate more about my indifferent attitude, the cynicism or the way it sidles right up next to Hollywood cliché. But even so, very occasionally I’ll cross paths with someone so special that those endless, breathless dissections of a five-second glimpse of the back of Jennie Garth’s head make perfect sense again, and for a moment I’ll remember how obscenely lucky I am to be in this business.
Like when Dede Allen smiled in my general direction. Or Agnès Varda shook the hand of someone standing next to me. Once I was introduced to Thelma Schoonmaker, and it turned out she already knew my name.
Then there’s the time I fell into a fountain with Tony Rees.
I didn’t feel so lucky then. It was two years ago, and I was at the Venice Film Festival with Amy. She was accepting an award, and she’d insisted I come with her. We’re a team, she said. You deserve this, too. And I was too much of a coward to say no, so there I was, hiding out in the hotel courtyard, enjoying the symmetry of the colonnade, the palm trees that reminded me of LA, the sky. There was a bench in one corner, but I was walking the outline of the fountain: three sides of a rectangle, two sides of a triangle, three sides of a rectangle, two sides of a triangle.
It was a particularly good pattern. Sometimes, if I walk just the right way—at just the right speed, with just the right gait, in just the right direction—I can lull my worst thoughts into submission.
I was warm, I remember. And relaxed. Happy, maybe.
Then someone cleared his throat. 18
I recognized Tony immediately, but I know not everyone would. He’s an average, inconspicuous white man in most respects, mid-forties, neither tall nor short nor fat nor thin. His hair isn’t mousy or mahogany or sun-streaked or whiskey-colored. It’s just brown. He has no visible scars, moles, or birthmarks, and only one tattoo: his daughter’s name, on his forearm, in blue script.
Two things set him apart, though.
First, his eyes, which everyone says are strikingly green (“bottle-glass green” is the usual descriptor, though this seems uselessly expansive to me). They’re vivid enough you can guess their color even in the solemn, black-and-white portraiture glossy magazines are forever commissioning of him.
Second, he never speaks louder than a low, intimate murmur. Not ever. Not in interviews, not on commentary tracks, not at awards shows, not even—as anyone who has ever worked with him will tell you, in vaguely stunned tones—on set. No matter the situation, Tony talks to you like he’s inside you.
That’s how Amy once described it, anyway. I’d just say he’s kind of hard to hear.
How the most exacting director in Hollywood manages to make his movies without raising his voice is one of the great mysteries of show business.
We were separated that day by the reflecting pool, a comfortable enough distance that I didn’t mind looking directly at him. He was dressed in jeans and a chambray shirt, the cuffs rolled back, three buttons undone. His tan stopped at his neck, tracing a line where a T-shirt would normally lie; below that, settled into the hollow of his throat, was the silver disc of a St. Christopher medal.
He was watching me, tapping his chin absently with one long finger, his right elbow propped on his left fist, and I can still taste the bile that burst on the back of my tongue when I realized what was happening. This wasn’t the second lead on a network sitcom or the 19star of a new Verizon campaign. He wasn’t waiting for fro-yo or prodding figs at the farmers’ market or blocking the pasta aisle at Von’s. This was one of America’s most celebrated directors, a man whose work I admired deeply.
And he wanted to talk.
Or at least he looked like he wanted to talk. He wasn’t showing any of the usual signs of impatience: His feet weren’t shuffling; his gaze wasn’t skipping around. But he wasn’t saying anything, either.
Then, I felt it. A growing pressure behind my breastbone, a sensation I knew all too well. I sent up a last-second prayer: Please God, whatever I’m about to blurt out, let it be sophisticated. Clever. Astute. About one of his earlier, lesser-knownfilms. About a technical detail that would give me the chance to demonstrate my own expertise. About, at the very least, the weather.
But God apparently had other things on His plate.
“Did you want to talk to me or did I just happen to wander into your line of sight?” I asked.
His finger stilled. His mouth moved. And his next question was so patronizing it took me a moment to register what he was asking.
“Did you just ask if I’m here for the festival?”
He nodded.
Dammit, I thought, I knew I was too short to wear this jumpsuit. Amy had been very clear that I needed to make an effort, an impression, that I couldn’t just wear comfy pants and a tank top—“This is Italy, Mar”—so I’d gone shopping in Silver Lake before we left. I don’t know much about fashion, but the girl who sold me on the jumpsuit was wearing oversized sneakers and jeans up to her armpits, so I thought I could trust her.
Just how ridiculous did I look? Did I need to worry that he was going to call security? Did I need to show ID? Pull up my IMDb page?
Ultimately, I did the only thing I could think to do under the 20circumstances—I didn’t like doing it, but I didn’t see any other way to establish my credibility.
I dropped a name.
“I work with Amy Evans,” I said.
Sure enough, Tony’s shoulders drew back and his gaze glittered with new interest.
Might’ve just been the sun, though.
“I’m a fan,” he said, lightly.
I wasn’t sure what to say to this. Obviously he was a fan. He was the president of the jury that had just awarded Amy the Silver Lion.
“She’s very talented,” he went on.
I guess I couldn’t quite hide my disbelief, because he let out a low grunt of surprise.
“You don’t agree?” he asked.
“I’m just not sure why you’re telling me things I already know.” My eyes caught sight of a single gull crossing the sky. I had to wait for it to disappear from view before I could return my attention to Tony. “But I guess you can’t help being a director.”
One of his eyebrows lifted, and an image of Joaquin Phoenix in Roman regalia, his thumb just tipping toward the ground, flashed before my eyes. Tony Rees, I remembered then, could destroy a career with a single phone call—with a single look.
Could and would and had.
But that day, for reasons I still don’t understand, he chose instead to be amused.
His laughter was softer than his speech, softer even than the silky burble of the courtyard fountain, and I took a step closer, listening for the hard, tight tone that would mean he was laughing at me, not with me. When I didn’t hear it, I caught myself wishing—fiercely enough that my pulse skipped at the thought—that he would be called away on some urgent matter so I could count the conversation a marginal success. The laws of probability were not on my side. 21
“Who are you?”
“Amy’s editor.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Then you should have been more specific.”
“Oh?”
I explained it as delicately as I could. “Given the context, it stands to reason that the most useful and telling personal detail I could provide would be my area of expertise. You don’t want to know my life story or who my favorite bands are.”
“And if I do?”
“Then you’re out of luck, because I mostly listen to white noise.”
“Anton—”
We turned toward the sound. A few feet to Tony’s left, framed perfectly by the doorway, stood a bird-boned woman in a crisp white dress, her arms akimbo, honeyed hair billowing in a breeze that appeared to blow just for her.
Annemieke Janssen, the hugely popular star of several of Tony’s movies, and also his wife.
She’s extraordinarily beautiful. Delicate. Ethereal. I’m guessing when she gave birth to their daughter, the only sound she made was a single, exquisite gasp.
Tony’s lips pressed together. “Just a second,” he said.
I plucked at the waistline of my jumpsuit and tried not to stare as he made his way to Annemieke.
I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but even I could tell Tony wasn’t pleased—his expression hadn’t changed, but a muscle in his jaw was twitching. Annemieke, however, seemed unconcerned. She kept admiring the toe of her navy stiletto then looking back up at Tony from under her lashes. When she swept her bangs off her face, she used her pinky finger.
I peered down at my own hand, twisting it, palm out, extending my pinky. I lifted it halfway to my forehead before deciding I couldn’t 22pull it off. I would just look like I didn’t know how a normal human female pushed back her hair.
With each passing moment, I grew increasingly antsy, ever more certain I’d misunderstood him. He’d said, “Just a second,” but maybe “just a second” didn’t actually mean “wait a second” or “hold on a second” or “I know this sounds crazy, but would you please stay here while I get rid of my gorgeous wife, one of the great actresses of her generation, as I find myself oddly intrigued by your inability to apply eyeliner or track a conversation, and I’d like to know more.”
Maybe “just a second” was the new “good-bye,” but the New York Times Style section hadn’t gotten around to telling me.
Was I wrong? Was he watching me out of the corner of his eye, wondering what I was still doing there? Were they talking about the awkward girl in the ridiculous outfit? Were they laughing at me?
And if they were, did I care?
Part of the calculus of being me: weighing discomfort against opportunity.
I decided to risk it. A small measure of humiliation was nothing if it meant Tony Rees might remember me the next time he was hiring. In this business, I can’t afford pride. Not with my social skills.
So I waited. Soon, my feet led me back to the path around the fountain.
Three sides of a rectangle, two sides of a triangle, three sides of a rectangle, two sides of a triangle.
After two laps, my heartbeat slowed. My shoulders settled. And then—there—that twist of relief just behind my breastbone, like I’d unfolded a kink in a line, and my niggling sense of not-quite-rightness fell away. When I came back around to Tony’s side of the pool, I walked directly into a cloud of Annemieke’s perfume, and I was so relaxed I paused to catalog the notes: peach, violet, something that reminded me of Amy’s favorite Moroccan restaurant. In that moment, not even synthetic fragrance could bother me. 23
I was so lost in my thoughts when Tony tapped me on the shoulder that there was really only one way for it to go: I startled, tripped, and threw out my arms to catch myself. But the only purchase available was the slender metal chain around Tony’s neck.
And that’s how I literally dragged the director Film Comment called “the first great filmmaker of the twenty-first century” down with me.
Into a fountain.
This is a disaster.
That last part I do manage to say out loud.
Nell’s head whips around, and her face falls for a split second before she recovers. She levels a bland smile at the room. “Can I speak privately with my client, please?”
The suits and their assistants jump up, clearly happy to have an excuse to leave the room. As soon as they’re gone, Nell leans back in her chair and crosses her legs. She does me the favor of not pretending not to know why I’m concerned.
“You did say any job,” she points out.
“I meant any reasonable job.”
“Editing a two-time Best Director seems pretty reasonable to me.”
I pull my feet up on the chair and wrap my arms around my shins. “He’s going to hate me.”
She shrugs. “So?”
“Who am I replacing?”
Nell checks her notes. “Paul Collins.”
“Do we even know what happened to him?”
“Death, destruction, Scientology—who knows, who cares. It didn’t work out. And now they’re desperate. They’ve been interviewing every unemployed feature editor in town.” Her lips thin with annoyance. “I would’ve brought you in earlier if I’d known you were available. Could’ve saved me a hell of a lot of time, Marissa.” 24
“I don’t want to be somebody’s rebound girl,” I mutter.
“But wouldn’t he be your rebound guy?”
I glare at her over my knees. “Amy and I didn’t break up.”
She puts up her hands. “Of course not.”
“And don’t take everything I say and parrot it back to me in a cute, pointed tone. That’s annoying. This isn’t a script.”
Nell uncrosses her legs and reaches forward, tugging my hands into hers.
I’m feeling bad about my behavior, so I let her.
“Marissa, listen. This is the perfect job for you right now. Setting aside the fact that it’s a classy fucking gig, no one on earth will blame you if it goes badly. This is Tony Rees we’re talking about.”
“You’re saying it’s a good thing he’s impossible to work with?”
“It’s only, what, three months of your life?” She squeezes my fingers. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
“I honestly don’t even know where to begin with that.”
Her grip tightens. “And anyway, it’s too late to turn back now.”
I look up. “What do you mean?”
When she smiles, it’s even blander than before. “These people really don’t like it when you say no.”
25
GRACE PORTILLO: What’s your process, generally, when you take on a new movie?
MARISSA DAHL: Well, on a big feature like this, typically I’d spend a few weeks working with the script, meeting with the director and the script supervisor and the rest of the editorial department. Then my assistants and I would be on hand during production, compiling a rough assembly cut as we went, and we’d be ready to hit the ground running once we got to post.
GRACE PORTILLO: But you came into this job knowing absolutely nothing about Caitlyn Kelly?
MARISSA DAHL: I’d never heard of her.
SUZY KOH: And you didn’t think to google it?
MARISSA DAHL: With the information I had?
SUZY KOH: I’m just saying, if I were making a movie about a real-life murder, I’d kind of want to know a little bit about what happened.
MARISSA DAHL: Of course I tried. But I didn’t have any details. At that point, I didn’t even know her name. And looking up “dead girl movie” doesn’t exactly narrow it down.
THREE
You don’t even know what it’s about?”
“They wouldn’t give me a script. They made me sign a sixteen-page NDA before they’d tell me the title.”
“Which is?”
I take a beat. “‘Untitled Anton Rees Project.’”
Amy laughs, and satisfaction fizzes through me. I’d been thinking through the rhythm of that remark all morning. Sometimes when I try to tell a joke, it’s like I’m pedaling a bike with a broken chain—but I got it this time.
It’s nice to have one thing go according to plan.
I’ve been on the road for nearly three hours now. I was met in Philadelphia by my driver, a strikingly handsome black man with a shaved head and an impeccably tailored suit. His name’s Isaiah, and he has legs for arms. He’s the kind of guy Amy likes to call a brick shithouse, which I suppose must be accurate, because Manohla Dargis once wrote that Amy has a “gimlet eye for the vagaries of the human condition,” but now that I’m saying this I realize I don’t know for sure if it’s meant to be an insult or a compliment because yes, brick shithouses are almost certainly more expensive and impressive than wooden shithouses, but still: They’re shithouses. 27
He’s big is what I’m saying.
“Let’s roll,” he said when he saw me, and that was it for conversation, which was fine by me.
At first.
