“Yeah,” Alan said. Bob didn’t seem so much sad as exhausted by the topic.
“She was the lead in my personal project, but she was just a cameo in Nevercome. Her scene was crucial to me.”
Bob looked wearied by the topic, but he also looked like he had more that he needed to say. Alan debated letting it drop. His curiosity won.
“How come?” Alan asked.
“I had this concept. I worked on it for almost twenty years, can you believe that? Twenty years of work—I should have known how fragile it was. It’s foolish to count on anything that takes more than two months to develop and yet you have to keep pounding your head against walls for years to get anything done. You have to keep tap dancing because the floor is always shifting. It’s a shitty business to be in.”
“So what was the project?” Alan asked.
“Let me see if I can boil this down. You’ve seen movies that rely heavily on childhood flashbacks?”
“Of course,” Alan said.
“They always suffer from the same problems—it’s tough to make the old footage feel authentic, and it’s tough to cast look-alike child actors to play your leads.”
Alan nodded.
“It’s been done well a few times, but if you’ve got big names they usually come with unique looks. There’s only one George Clooney. They’re not making a whole lot of kids who look authentically like a small version of him. I got the idea to start from the other side. As soon as I had some money, I put together a research team. We started looking for parents who were likely to raise a movie star.”
Alan burst out with a startled laugh. Bob was clearly serious, but the concept was ludicrous.
“How?” Alan asked with an incredulous chuckle.
“Maybe not as hard as you think. Good-looking parents who already have one good-looking smart kid. The younger sibling has a chance of being attractive and outgoing. We filmed a ton of babies with their parents and played the odds. A bunch of that footage was shot for a movie called Summary of Hugh. It was one of my first films. A few years later we did a movie called Getaway River Drop.”
“I saw it. That movie was great.”
“Thank you. You remember the kids?”
“Those kids living in the cabins with their parents?”
“Yeah. That was the second piece of the puzzle. We used the same kids again. They were a couple of years older by that point,” Bob said.
“They weren’t a big part of the plot,” Alan said.
“No, not of that movie. I shot some extra footage that didn’t make it into the final cut though. I just snuck it into the schedule here and there. It’s tough to do with kid actors—the rules are strict on how much they can work—but we squeezed in enough to make it work. I had the footage from Hugh and Getaway and I squirreled it away, waiting to see which of the kids would go into acting.”
“I see—you started with a whole bunch of babies with Summary of Hugh and then put some of them into Getaway River Drop also?”
“Right, exactly. Some of the babies didn’t go into acting. A couple got too fat. We just let the process weed them down and cast whomever was left. That’s how I got the kids for Cry Under. It was a limited release indie about preteens who grow up in an abandoned amusement park. Really dark.”
“So you use the same kids over and over again in your movies. That’s pretty cool. Gives them a continuity I guess.”
“It’s more than that. Like I said, we used these films to shoot other scenes that weren’t meant for release. The whole point is, I’ve been filming this other movie that takes place over decades. I don’t have to try reproduce authentic settings and technology from fifteen years ago because I actually filmed the scenes fifteen years ago. And I don’t have to find look-alike actors, because I’ve been using the same actors the whole time.”
“Wow. What’s the other movie about?”
“It’s scrapped now, but it was going to be about actors who grow up in the industry and then become movie stars,” Bob said.
“That’s amazing.”
“Everything was going to plan. In fact, it was turning out better than my highest hopes. Hope was legitimately on her way to becoming one of the most popular actresses of her generation. Nigel’s career is just starting to take off, but I think he’s on his way also.”
“Hope?”
“When we first filmed her as a baby, her name was Hope Sanders. She changed her name to Ophelia Saunders about five years ago.”
Alan stood up from his rock. He braced his hands against his knees and hunched over. He turned to Bob with his mouth hanging open. “Ophelia Saunders? Ophelia Saunders was your female lead? She’s so famous.”
“She was,” Bob nodded. “She was.”
Alan felt a familiar mix of emotions at the mention of Ophelia’s name. He suspected that he shared the feeling with middle-aged men dating back to the invention of arousal. Ophelia had been gorgeous and magnetic. She had been the definition of sex, but she’d also been much closer to Joe’s age than his own. It was wrong to have such lust for a young woman who’d been born after he’d graduated from college. That was a fact. His libido disagreed.
Something else occurred to Alan. “Wait, and Nigel? You mean Nigel Devons? Are you kidding? I didn’t even realize they were ever in a movie together. Talk about Hollywood elite. You discovered both of those actors?” Alan said. He lowered himself slowly back down to the rock. He sat facing Bob. Bob looked off into the woods.
“Yeah. Like I said—it was working out better than my highest hopes. Neither of them had ever had a starring role in one of my movies, but they were both there. A few scenes here and a few scenes there—the footage is out there. I was going to start Gaucho next year. It was going to be Hope and Nigel’s first real movie together as leads, and I’ve got a third of the story already filmed. It’s all in that extra footage from Summary, and Getaway, and Cry Under, and the rest. They were basically going to play themselves in Gaucho—how they met and grew up. Some of the scenes from Gaucho were filmed at the same time as scenes from the other movies.”
“Really?” Alan asked.
“You remember that car crash in Getaway River Drop? It’s near the beginning.”
“Yeah, that guy just had sex with his aunt’s friend in the back of the the YMCA. He’s late for his daughter’s recital or something?”
“And he hurries through the stop sign and hits Gretchen’s minivan,” Bob said.
“Yes,” Alan said. “That’s when we first see the kids from the cabins, right?”
“Yes, pretty much. You can see them in the title sequence, too, but that’s the first time they’re legitimately characters,” Bob said. “Behind those cabins, we had a second crew filming the kids from a different angle. They were doing a simultaneous scene about being child actors. They were told to play and act natural. During their dialog, you can see Gretchen’s minivan go by, driven by a stunt woman, and then you hear the accident.”
“So you see that whole iconic scene from a totally different angle? Like a behind-the-scenes view?” Alan asked.
“Yeah, exactly. And Hope is credited with her old name in that one. Devons was uncredited—he didn’t even speak and he slipped through without getting a mention in the credits. Some movies we filmed the kids as if they were working as actors, and others we filmed simultaneous scenes that are supposedly real life.”