“Jeremy, stop!” she said, laughing.
Allegra ordered the octopus appetizer and burrata. He asked for the flat-iron steak, rare, and a Cobb.
“So. You gonna read my script?”
“Of course I’m going to read it. But you know what has to happen first, Lego? I know it sounds crazy… but for me to read it, you actually have to give it to me. It needs to be physically or electronically in my possession.”
“Oh fuck you.”
“What’s it about again?”
“Oh my God, you know what it’s about, Jeremy. The Children of God.”
“Movies about cults are a tough sell, Lego. Cult movies don’t even become cult movies. It’s autobiographical?”
“Parts.”
“You do not want to be the new Brit Marling.”
“I love Brit Marling, so fuck off.”
“Wasn’t River Phoenix in Children of God?”
“Yup.”
“Didn’t River get molested by those people when he was, like, four?”
“So he said.”
“Wish I could hot-tub-time-machine back and interview him. I’d molest the fuck out of him.”
“He might not be up for it.”
“So, Lego — did you get laid in that cult? As a child? I mean, did you have hot child cult sex? Were you a love child of God?”
“Not till I was six.”
“I’m serious, though. Wasn’t it, like, policy with those people? Wasn’t, like, kid-fucking written into their bylaws?”
“There was a lot of weird shit going down.”
“And what about Joaquin?”
“What about him?”
“Is that how he got his scar? From getting slapped in the mouth by cult dicks?”
“Jesus,” she said, both exasperated and annoyed.
“Allegra! I just don’t think you fully appreciate that the Phoenixes were the Barrymores of child-love sex cults!”
“The script is really good, Jeremy. And Dusty did say she would get it to Joaquin.”
“Honey, I can get it to Joaquin. But it’s kind of been there, done that for him, no? I mean, he kind of covered that in The Master.”
“That movie is so different from what I’m… I just didn’t — I didn’t ‘get’ The Master. I mean, Joaquin was amazing, always. I admired it but I just didn’t get it.”
“Does Dusty want to be in it?”
“She hasn’t read it yet. I’ve kind of been holding off.”
“Clever strategy!” he said, sarcastically.
“Did you know Rose McGowan was in it too?”
“Children of God?”
“Uh huh. She’s kind of talked about it publicly. Her dad was one of the heads of it? In Italy? They were really close. And I think she still kind of lives in Rome? We had a long conversation a few months ago, at a thing at the Hammer. I think she’d be into it.”
“Rose is kind of amazing.”
“Love her, love Rose. Love her Instagram. She’s fuckin’ fearless.”
“I really don’t think you need to cast actors based on their having actually been raised in the cult, Lego.”
“I know,” she said. “It would be interesting, though. Kind of meta.”
“Can you please not use that word? I hate that fucking word. No one uses it anymore and the people who do are pigs who should die. But you want to know what’s interesting? I’ll tell you what’s ‘interesting’—”
He looked toward one of the couches at a man with a taut pink smiley face, frozen in a perpetual startle.
“Emilio Estevez’s facework. Now, that’s interesting.”
He left the booth to go say hello.
—
A man on his knees, with his head inside an oven—
— the camera double for the Ted, as in Hughes.
Standing beside him is Larissa, Dusty’s stand-in.
Dead quiet as the D.P. lights the set. The enforced, always eerie pre-shot stillness lends the tableau vivant a slapstick formality: I Love Lucy meets Buñuel. The pants belonging to the man with the hidden torso are down, bunched up above the knees.
The ass, in boxers.
When Dusty arrives on the stage she goes straight to video village, where Bennett is watching his monitor. She clocks the kitchen burlesque and giggles. The director smiles in his soft-spoken way but stays focused on the TV. “Let’s try it with the pants up,” he says into the headset. Then, “Grieg, can you go close on Sylvia? Can I see what that looks like?”
Larissa’s face fills the screen, eyes turned downward in repose of humility — saucy, mournful, implacable — the tempered genuflection of a lesser god, in obeisance to her off-camera elders: Kali, Durga, Shiva. Dusty is again entranced. That hooded, impossibly ineffable gaze stirs in her a mystically erotic, unbearable melancholy worthy of ten thousand lamentations. The effortless smile, the acquiescent miracle of a stop-motion rose rising up from the cracked soil of their industry, blooms in an anthropomorphic prayer that drives its beholder to despondent little ecstasies.
The A.D. shouts, “First Team!”
On Dusty’s way in, they cross paths. Larissa dares to say, “Nothin’ says lovin’ like hubby in the oven.”
(The first words she’s ever spoken to her star.)
The actress ripostes, “Preheat to three-fifty — the new foreplay.”
Larissa laughs, touching her shoulder in a sisterhood of traveling innuendo. A charge between them as the double’s eyes lock in and widen before she caroms off.
It’s been a while since Dusty got hit on.
As she stands on her mark, a full-bearded Liam Neeson arrives to take the place of the Ted stand-in.
“Hi, babe,” he says, winking.
“Oh my God!” says Dusty. His skin has a bluish sheen and his nostrils are stuffed with snot crusts. “Someone’s ready for their close-up.”
“My face isn’t, but my ass is.”
“People are definitely interested in your derrière, Liam.”
“It’s huge on Instagram. Literally.”
Dusty chortles.
The First shouts, “Last looks!”
When makeup harpies descend, Liam asks if they’ve brought the Easy-Off. His team re-applies goop under his nose and touches up the spidery nostril webs of broken blood vessels.
The First says, “Okay, let’s try one.”
Dusty stands outside the closed kitchen door as Liam gets on his knees and ducks his head in. Bennett calls action. Dusty takes a breath, shouts “Ted?” then enters. Screams. Runs to him. Clumsily fishes out the body and cradles it in her arms. Liam is dead weight.
“Ted!” she bellows, shocky and distraught. “Ted! Ted! Someone help me! Someone help me—”
Thirty endless seconds of messy, camera-rolling anguish pass.
“And… cut!”
“Was I brilliant?” says Liam to Dusty.
“You were incredible.”
“Self-cleaning too.”
“Going again,” says the First.
—
The cast and crew gathered for lunch under a tent, two stages down.
Usually the stars ate in their trailers but sometimes they went socialist, joining workers and day players at the long tables. Last week, when Larissa was scarfing fish tacos with the camera operator, Liam came with his tray and sat down, out of the blue. She had a hunch she might soon be sharing a meal with Dusty but understood the need for caution. The unspoken protocol was Don’t join them, let them join you. The making of a film created an instant family, held together by the glue of a fanatically casual blue-jeans decorum and cordiality; it was easy to get caught up and forget one’s place. The best bet was to be cheery and obsequious when not invisible. Larissa had a plan, though, and was willing to take a calculated risk.