On the jet to Palm Springs, Love asks what I think of the “script.” I deflect. I ask her when Milo finished writing it.
“This summer,” she answers. “He hit it out of the park, right?” I contain my rage. I will not let him win. Not when I’ve just gone to war for my relationship. “Love,” I say, pointing to the script. “You’re not even a little offended by this?”
“Joe,” she says, definitive, as if she’d been preparing for this. “If you’re going to tell me that you think you’re a puppy, then I’m going to tell you that you need a shrink. I am not Harmony any more than you are a puppy. Milo is not Oren. This is a story. A made-up story.”
“I know I’m not a puppy.”
“You are not a puppy.” She sighs. “And anyway, Milo started this script ages ago. He’s been rewriting it for a while. You know, Jake Gyllenhaal was going to play Oren, up until the very last second. That’s how good the script is.”
I do not remind Love that he finished it after meeting me and I do not call bullshit on Jake Gyllenhaal. We land and I try to focus on the positive. Our fight is behind us, and I’ve been wanting to go to Palm Springs. The desolate road from the airport snakes through a desert where the houses are giant UFOs from the sixties, spread apart, like dice rolled onto a craps table.
“We’re shooting here and living here?” I ask.
“Yep,” she says. “How gorgeous is this house?”
“Striking,” I say, and I mean it in a bad way. The house is midcentury, ice cold, plastic and pink and orange and white, like a ceramic bowl of sherbet left in the middle of the desert during an atomic meltdown, empty as Forty’s mind. We park and she knows I am disappointed and she pushes me.
“Sorry,” I say. “I just thought we were going to Palm Springs.”
“We are,” she says, her voice fresh with indignant attitude that only comes from being cast as a lead and studying a screenplay in a jet. “Milo is amazing, getting us this house, right?”
I am sick of hearing that Milo is amazing. He isn’t. And this house sucks. We’re several miles from the hotels and the stores and the stuff I read about in Less Than Zero, the stuff I wanted to see. My head started pounding the second we walked into this cold house and we’re only three hours into the day. I get the chills. It’s so hot outside and it’s so cold inside. There is no ocean, no relief, no shabby chic sectional, no sand on the floor of the kitchen, no crunch, no texture, no depth.
But we had to shoot here because Milo is desperate to get footage of some something he calls “Indoor Coachella.” Coachella is a festival fashion show where people dress up like hippies and pretend that Passion Pit is as good as the Rolling Stones. So the idea of taking that mess and shoving it inside a casino is loathsome to me.
Barry Stein nixes it right away. He says Coachella is too big of an insurance risk and Milo pleads with him. “I just need a night there,” he says. “I’ll go in guerilla style, Barry. I just want those jagged lights, the feel of it. We need that flashback. And it’s not Coachella for real.”
“Yeah,” Barry says. “It’s more of a shit show. No is no.”
Milo sulkily moves on, and we “shoot” all day, every day. Milo karate chops the air at the end of every take, as if he never saw a Ben Stiller movie, as if he doesn’t know that chopping the air is an asshole thing to do. I wish Ben Stiller were here. I wish anyone with a brain would come and take over.
While we shoot, I have to sit in video village, another misnomer; video village is not a village. It’s just a bunch of folding chairs shoved together in front of the monitors. I have no purpose. When we move locations and relocate the village, I’m not even allowed to move my chair because I’m not union.
It’s day four and “Harmony” and “Oren” are fighting because Harmony’s puppy ate Oren’s boots and then making up because they hate fighting and Love kisses Milo again and again. I hate set. There’s too much clapping, and bullshit with nicknames. They call the second to last shot “The Abby” and the last shot “The Martini” and the level of self-importance is unbearable. When my scripts get the green light, I won’t spend all my days on set. And when Milo begs to visit, I’ll say yes and then I’ll “forget” to give his name to security.
“Cut!” Milo yells after they finish kissing for the thirtieth time. He grabs Love’s hands. “That felt good. Did that feel good?”
“That felt great!” she says. She bounces and I die.
It’s the little things that make you want to kill someone, the way Milo drinks Diet Dr Pepper and ties his Jewfro in a bun and lifts his shirt to show off his stomach and wipes his glasses down even though they’re not dirty. Yes, Milo got glasses, and seafoam green Topsiders, and a navy blue Polo-style shirt with a popped collar, and didn’t I already kill this guy when he was schilling Home Soda and fucking Guinevere Beck?
Milo calls action again and kisses Love. My muscles tighten. All I can do is eat and wait, eat and watch—and this is day four of twenty-eight days—and they’re improvising the dialogue—bite me—because he just wants to mount her.
I want to be anywhere but here and I ask Forty about nearby restaurants. He slaps my back. “This is a shoot, Old Sport. We don’t go anywhere until we get this baby in the can.”
I lower my voice. “Well, what about those other movies?”
He whispers, “Bad news is fast. Good news takes a while. Hurry up and wait. It’s your job, you’re the boyfriend.”
And that’s what people call me. Can Love’s boyfriend bring her a Diet Coke? Can Love’s boyfriend find Love’s charger?
It’s bad and it gets worse on day seven when the hairstylist asks if Love’s boyfriend can grab the pickles. Milo laughs. “‘Love’s boyfriend’ is kind of awkward,” he says. “Let’s just call him Loverboy!”
The director gets what the director wants so now my name is Loverboy. Forty says I have to lighten up. Love thinks it’s cute. Milo shows us a picture of the Restoration Hardware table, home of The Big Sex Scene on page twenty-seven. “The table represents real love,” he says. “What Oren and Harmony have, the way they forget it around new people, plastic people, but then they get on this table and man, there’s nothing like it.”
“I love it,” Love says.
He avoids my eyes and licks his lips as he leafs through his script. Milo is definitely trying to take her away and I will kill that table. Instead, I go to craft service—why can’t they just call it the food?—for the fourth time in two hours. I dunk a slice of cornbread into the chili and I hear someone: Is Loverboy at crafty again?