“Charlotte,” I whisper at two in the morning. “Wake up. I need to tell you something.”
She opens her eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I say. “I have something amazing to tell you. Something incredible happened to me this afternoon.”
She sits up and rubs her face.
“I was with you earlier,” she says.
“Yeah, it was before that. I got offered a job as a production designer.”
“Turn on the light.”
I flip it on and she squints.
“Are you talking in your sleep?” she asks me.
“No,” I say, plopping down next to her. “I got offered a job by someone Morgan knows from film school—Rebecca, remember, who was with her when they picked up the couch?”
“Okay.”
“It’s for a film she wrote with her boyfriend. I just finished reading the screenplay.”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to take the job. It’s the most beautiful story. There’s no way you could ever call it stupid. Will you read it?”
“Right now?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Please. I know it’s two in the morning.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?”
“I was afraid that it was going to be a bad movie. I mean, me? A production designer? I thought it would be a joke. I didn’t want to act excited about something that was probably going to be terrible.”
She swings herself out of bed. “Make me coffee.”
“Seriously? You’ll read it now?”
“My best friend has just been offered a really important job for a project she thinks is beautiful. Of course I’m going to read it now.”
So she takes a seat in the orange chair and I make coffee for us both and she reads. She drinks her coffee, she turns the pages. At one point, she gets up to use the bathroom but then she comes straight back. I force myself not to look over her shoulder or ask her what she thinks. Instead, I start gathering my ideas for the sets. We’ll need to have George’s house and Juniper’s apartment; the market; a park. It’s a lot to get together in four weeks, but I’ll only have to work on decorating one location at a time.
A lot of the scenes are in the market, so I make a list of all the markets I can think of, from small produce stores to larger groceries that still have a small-town feel. Most of the work for this part will simply be to find a place that will say yes to letting us film there. George’s and Juniper’s places will be more complex because they need to reflect who they are.
This is what I love about production design. The writers imagine the story, tell us where people are and what they do and say. The actors embody the characters, give them faces and voices. The directors and producers transform an idea into something real. But the art department, we do the rest. When you see their rooms and you discover that they love a certain band, or that they collect seashells or hang their clothes with equal space between each perfectly ironed shirt or have stacks of papers on their desks or a week’s worth of dirty dishes in the sink and bras strewn over brass doorknobs—all of that is us.
The art department creates the world. When you walk into someone’s house and you see all of their things—the neatness or the clutter, the objects they have on display—that’s when you begin to really know someone. Maybe there’s a guy you think is your friend but then you go to his house and discover his walls are covered in taxidermy animals and trophies and you never even knew that he hunted. Maybe it’s creepy, maybe the mounted heads look deranged, not preserved exactly right. Or maybe they’re perfect and you can tell he’s proud, that he’s really good at something. Either way, it makes him more interesting. All of that is important and a lot of the time it isn’t in the script; it’s something the art department gets to imagine.
Rebecca and Theo have described Juniper’s apartment as small and humble and containing many plants, and it will be my job to decide everything else. Is she neat or messy? Are the plants perfectly lined up on windowsills or are they cluttering every surface with dirt everywhere? Does she have art on her walls? The answer is yes. She has art on her walls, maybe something scientific.
I see her apartment in blues and greens, mostly; she’s a little melancholy.
George is melancholy, too, but while Juniper’s apartment needs to reflect who she is, he’s living in a house he didn’t decorate, a place that’s been preserved for a long time. He’s heartbroken over the death of his parents. In one scene he cooks an egg and eats it and washes the dishes right after, which seems like a ritual. Like the way he was taught to do things by his mother. He’ll keep everything neat, exactly as it was before they died. I’ll need to create a set that looks dated but cared for. He needs to seem like a guest there.
Coral. The color scheme will be corals and pinks and maybe some yellows, like the house is trying to comfort him.
When he eats his sad, single egg, he’ll eat it off a dainty plate with scalloped edges and a floral pattern.
I make long, curving lists. I sketch out a couple of the vignettes for both of the houses. I work on the scenes I remember because Charlotte has my copy of the screenplay and I don’t want to take her out of the story. Then I grab my laptop and browse for images to show Rebecca and Theo so they can get a feel for what I want to create. I find a few pieces of furniture on design blogs that I want to track down for the set, so I look them up and take note of where they came from, and I find the most gorgeous coral-y wallpaper to go in the kitchen of George’s house, and the address of a nursery in West Hollywood that carries all kinds of exotic plants.
And then I hear a sigh and I look up and it’s Charlotte. She’s closing the screenplay. She doesn’t say anything at first, and I can feel myself stop breathing as I wait, and then she says, “You’re right. It’s so moving. I love the characters. The pacing is perfect.”
“Will you do it with me?” I ask her. “They said I can hire one assistant. I need someone to help me stay sane.”
We’re basically finished with our current project at the studio, and since Charlotte’s leaving for school soon, it’s also her last project there. Still, there’s a good chance she’d like to spend her last few weeks at home laying low, getting ready for school and spending time with her family. So I am prepared to beg.
But she doesn’t make me.
“Sure,” she says. “You’d make me do tons of work anyway. I might as well get paid for it.”
“So I should go for it,” I say. “Right?”
I just want to hear her say yes.
“Yes.”
Chapter Eight
The next day at noon, I meet Theo and Rebecca at their house just a couple blocks from the café where we had our first meeting. Their backyard is like a tiny jungle. A white iron table set with sparkling water, lemonade, and three glasses sits flanked by tropical plants.
Before sitting down, I take a look at the details. Vines curl up the fence and in one spot Theo and Rebecca have hung objects from the branches: several hand-carved masks, a few small mosaics assembled from bright pieces of pottery.
“These must be from where you’re from,” I say to Theo, and he nods. “South Africa?”
“Yes. Cape Town.”
“You must have spent a lot of time outdoors. And you still do, obviously.”
He cocks his head. “How is it obvious? I mean, you’re right, but . . .”
“Most people don’t decorate their outdoor spaces this way,” I say. “They have outdoor furniture and a few decorative things, sure, but they don’t, for example, have pillows that look like they were sewn by hand on the chairs, or framed photographs of their family members hanging on the exterior walls of their houses.”
Theo and Rebecca have both of these things. They also have a collection of enamel pots and mugs that contain carefully tended succulents.
>
I pick up one of the mugs to show them.
“Some of these would be great for Juniper’s place,” I say, and Rebecca pauses on her way to the table, a cutting board heaped with fruit and cheese in her hands, and says, “So you read it?”
“I read it.”
“And?” Theo asks.
“I loved it,” I say. “It’s beautiful. And I would be honored to be the production designer. And I don’t care how little it pays.”
This morning, I thought about playing it cool but then I changed my mind; it isn’t my strength.
They beam at me and we take our seats at the table.
“I have a lot of ideas,” I say, taking out my laptop, opening the screen and showing them the images I’ve collected. I reference all the places in the script that lead me to the decisions I’ve made about the characters, and Theo and Rebecca are asking questions, and saying Yes, blues and greens! And Theo’s saying Coral? Like orang-y pink? That’s brilliant! And Rebecca’s saying to him Didn’t I tell you? And to me, Your aesthetic is exactly what we want. These ideas are perfect. And somewhere along the way, this thing happens between us.
It becomes our film instead of only theirs.
We go over the budget and it’s almost nonexistent. There’s enough money to pay a small amount for the locations, but barely anything left over.
“We can save money for decor if we can use locations for free,” I say. “I have somewhere in mind for Juniper’s apartment.”
“Yeah?”
“My brother’s place. He’s out of town now so it wouldn’t be a problem. It has great light and it’s small and a lot of what’s in there already would work for Juniper. It would give us a good foundation, at least.”
“Excellent,” Theo says, and I tell him I will send pictures later today, and they say that pictures would be great at some point, but that they trust my vision so there is no rush.
“Where are we with casting?” I ask them in between bites of sliced peaches.
“We got Benjamin James,” Theo says.
“For George?”
He nods.
“I can’t believe you guys didn’t tell me about that yesterday!”
Rebecca smiles. “We thought we could use it today if you were a tough negotiator.”
“Right,” I say. “Well, it would have worked. Who else?”
“Lindsey Miller,” Rebecca says. “She’s playing the woman who has the seizure.”
“Lindsey Miller? That’s huge.”
Theo says, “Yes, we’ve been tremendously fortunate.”
“She’s a friend of ours,” Rebecca explains. “Her agent is a real hard-ass but she was able to talk him into letting her do it as long as we can shoot all her scenes in two days.”
“Are those dates set?”
They nod, so I get out my phone and start calendaring. The days are late in the production schedule, which means that our grocery store scenes will be the last ones we film, which is probably for the best considering that the store might be the most difficult location to secure. We brainstorm some markets to approach.
“So who is playing Juniper?” I ask.
Theo sighs and Rebecca rubs her forehead.
“Don’t worry,” she tells me. “We’re going to find someone.”
But it’s clear that she’s worried, and with only four weeks until production begins, I can understand why.
“We had Sarah Williams,” Theo says. “She’s the reason we pushed the entire shooting schedule up. But after the Oscar nod she was in such high demand. She had to back out.”
“That sucks,” I say. “But it makes sense.”
And it does. Sarah Williams is the new “it” girl—too new to the scene to be hated by anyone, just established enough to grace the covers of all the high-end magazines. But even though having her as our female lead would have been incredible, a different idea is coming to me.
“Have you been auditioning other people?”
Rebecca laughs and Theo holds up a hand.
“In my defense—” he begins.
“Over one hundred other people,” Rebecca says.
“Please. In my defense. This is the most important role of the entire film. If we don’t have a strong Juniper, our film will be worthless.”
“She’s based on his sister,” Rebecca explains. “No one is good enough.”
“Sarah Williams was good enough,” Theo mutters. “Anyway, we’re getting a new group of girls next week. Our casting agent friend has been recording auditions for us.”
“What scene are you having them read from?”
“Forty-two,” Rebecca says. “When she—”
“Talks about the florist. Tells George that story. I love that part.”
They stare at me.
“I don’t have it all memorized or anything,” I say. “But I made a lot of notes on that scene. It’s the first time we’re in the break room, and there are a bunch of things that I want to get in the shot. Like wine crates for them to sit on, hooks for the aprons to hang from, a board that shows the shift schedule for the week . . . That sort of thing.”
“We originally wrote it to play out as a flashback,” Rebecca says. “So you would see the flower stand and everything happening as Juniper tells the story. It’s one of the things we had to cut considering the budget. But as long as we have great performances, we think the actors will be able to carry the scene.”
They want to hear about more of my ideas, but I steer them back to Juniper as soon as I can.
“We have an A-list cast,” I say. “Does that mean you need a star for her part?”
“We’ve talked a lot about that,” Rebecca says. “At first we thought yes, but we changed our minds.”
“It was out of desperation, really,” Theo adds. “No star who wanted to do it was right for the part. But we have enough name recognition with Benjamin and Lindsey.”
“So you’d consider an unknown?”
“As long as she was the right unknown,” Theo says. “Then yes.”
~
Even after I’ve left, I don’t want to stop planning. I’ve never felt so awake.
As soon as I get back to the apartment I set myself up on Toby’s patio with my sunglasses and my laptop and scour the Internet for art to go on Juniper’s walls. I want lush, lived-in sets for this film. Nothing too spare or too modern.
A couple hours later I find what I’m looking for on the site of a vintage store in Minneapolis. Eight botanical prints from a book published in 1901. The prints are yellowed in a way that makes them look valuable and rare, and the plant drawings are so pretty—all delicate blossoms and leaves and root structures. They are so clearly right for Juniper that I only hesitate for a moment when I see the price. Yes, they are a third of the budget we have allocated for Juniper’s entire apartment, but I am sure that I’ll be able to beg and borrow for almost everything else, so I get out my credit card.
~
Ava appears in the doorway of the Marmont bar, scanning the room for us, clearly relieved when she sees me wave.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” she says as she steps down into the bright, sunken seating area where we’ve claimed a table. “I had no idea what door to go through! And I kept thinking I was somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be and that someone was going to know and throw me out. What is this place?”
She drops her purse on the red worn carpet and pulls out a velvet upholstered, high-back chair. Her hair is up today, bobby-pinned and messy, and she’s dressed in the same shorts and belt as last time, today with a white shirt loosely buttoned and rolled up at the sleeves.
“It’s a hotel,” I say.
“A ridiculously overpriced hotel,” Charlotte adds. “For celebrities and people desperate to see celebrities.” She catches sight of something in the courtyard. “And for wo
men who make me terrified of growing old.”
We follow her gaze to where two elderly ladies are rising from their table, wobbly on their matchstick legs and high heels, their breasts huge and fake, the skin on their overly made-up faces pulled tight by many surgeries. Their lips are so swollen they must hurt. I look away.
“The Marmont is more than that,” I say. “It has a lot of history. Clyde Jones used to hang out here, so I thought it would be the perfect place to meet up with his granddaughter.”
“He did?”
“All the stars at that time did. And sure, lots of people come here just to be seen, but people do serious work here, too. Like Annie Leibovitz? She’s taken some of her most famous portraits here. People have written novels here. Sofia Coppola filmed an entire movie here. And there have been a lot of tragedies, too.”
Charlotte says, “Emi loves tragedy.”
“That’s because all the best stories are tragic.”
“Tragedies like what?” Ava asks.
“So many of them. Have you heard of John Belushi?”
She shakes her head no.
“He was a comedian, part of the original cast of Saturday Night Live. He died here in 1982. He was only thirty-three, and that night he was partying with all these other celebrities—Robin Williams and Robert De Niro and lots of other people—and then he OD’d. They found him in his room. Bungalow Three.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Yeah, so sad,” I say. “Are you hungry?”
She nods and I hand her a menu. Almost immediately, her brow furrows, and I know that it must be because everything costs way more than it should. You can’t even get a cup of soup for a decent price. So when the waiter comes I jump in and order a bunch of things.
“Does this sound okay?” I ask them. “I thought I’d order stuff to share.”
Ava nods but she looks worried.