“Does he know that this is bothering you?” Jake asked.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I keep up my happy voice when I’m talking to him; and Greg is sometimes annoyingly oblivious when he’s being offensive to someone.”
“That is true,” Jake agreed. He had been on the receiving end of that particular Greg Oldfellow personality flaw on multiple occasions. “How much longer will they be filming? They’ve been at it for a few months now.”
“At least another month of principal photography,” she said. “And ... well ... they’re getting ready to start filming the...” She trailed off to an incomprehensible mutter.
“The what?”
“The sex scenes,” she said.
“I see,” Jake said slowly. “And when they do that, they’re going to be like ... naked, right?”
“Well, their genitals will be covered since they’re not doing hardcore, but yeah. Pretty much naked. Bare asses, bare tits. The scenes are going to be a hard R rating. I read the script. They’re going to be putting their mouths together. Her boobs are going to be squished all over his chest. His hands are going to be feeling those tits up and squeezing her ass. At one point, he’s supposed to suck on her nipple while she bounces on top of him.”
“No shit?” Jake said, remembering for a brief moment what it had felt like to have Mindy Snow’s nipple in his mouth while she bounced on top of him. “They actually write out how the scene is going to go?”
“Of course,” she said. “Did you think they just threw them naked into bed and told them to improvise?”
“I guess I never really thought much about how a sex scene is filmed,” he said. “I’m assuming this is kind of bothersome to you?”
She frowned. “I didn’t think it would be at first,” she said. “I mean, I was never thrilled about the thought of my husband getting naked and rubbing against Mindy Snow, but I know it’s just acting and that they’re not really doing what they seem to be doing on the screen. He’s done scenes like that before—in So Others May Live and even The Northern Jungle—although those scenes were not quite as graphic. That never bothered me. Truth be told, it always got me a little hot to watch those scenes and I would always ... you know ... get aggressive with him after we would watch it. I thought I’d feel the same about these scenes with Mindy Snow too. And I did at first, but after all the listening to him talk about how wonderful and professional Mindy is and about this fucking chemistry they share ... it’s nagging at me now. I’m getting stressed out thinking about what they’ll be doing and how much that chemistry is going to come into play.”
“I can see where you’re coming from,” Jake said. “Kind of anyway. This is really a bizarre thing to have to deal with.”
“It is,” she agreed. “Something that normal married couples don’t have to go through.” She shrugged. “The life we choose, right?”
“The life we choose,” he agreed.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s pick up the pace or we’ll be late for breakfast.”
“All right,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
They started running again, settling in on an eight-minute mile pace. It was easy to do as it was mostly downhill from this point.
In Chicago, it was another hot and muggy summer day. All of the daytime exterior scenes for Us and Them had already been filmed, so the cast and crew were now spending their days on a rented soundstage just east of the Loop filming the inside scenes that did not take place in the police station or Frank Haverty’s home. For the past three days now, the soundstage had been built up into the set of The Star Lounge, which was the fictional cop bar where the fictional Haverty and his fictional fellow patrol officers liked to hang out and drink after work. The production team and the actors methodically worked their way through each scene that took place in the bar, starting with the scene where Haverty gets drunk before going home and having the argument with his wife and culminating with the scene in which Lyndsay joins Haverty there after an emotional shift that involved watching a young pregnant woman die right in front of them after being shot by her psycho boyfriend. A slew of extras and supporting cast members were floated in and out of the set for each particular scene so that the bar always had different people in it.
At four o’clock in the afternoon they were almost done with the last bar scene. It was the one where Haverty and Lyndsay got drunk together after the pregnant woman call. It was this scene that would lead to the first of the sex scenes between the two of them and where the chemistry between the two actors was particularly important.
Greg and Mindy sat at a small cocktail table on the set, the primary camera looking at them in profile with the bar and the extras sitting at it in the background. Secondary cameras pointed at each of their faces. A boom microphone was over their heads, just out of the eye of the primary camera. Greg was dressed in blue jeans and a long t-shirt, green in color, that hung over his belt. He had Sergeant Mackle’s empty pistol holstered to the belt and covered by the shirt. Before him was a glass of ice water with a touch of brown food coloring in it that was supposed to be a scotch on the rocks. Mindy was wearing black slacks and a button-up white blouse. Her hair was now down (an earlier part of the scene involved her unpinning that hair after the emotional day) and she had a glass of plain water in a martini glass with an olive on a stick in it. The script supervisor had already made careful notes on the clothing they wore, their hair styles, and the level of liquid in each of their glasses so there would be no inconsistencies when the various takes of the scene were edited together, and so their clothing would be correct when it was stripped off for the first sex scene later.
“All right, people,” said Georgie Fletcher from the director’s chair just adjacent to the cameras. “Let’s try this last one again. I’d really like to wrap up these bar scenes so we can get a little rest before tonight’s fun, okay?”
Greg and Mindy nodded at him but did not speak. They were on the seventh take of the final three minutes of the last bar scene. It was a section where both Haverty and Lyndsay had to spew out a fairly lengthy bit of dark and meaningful dialogue. Greg had screwed up the first two takes by flubbing his lines. Mindy had screwed up two more. One of the extras over at the bar had screwed up another by tripping and knocking over a stool. Fletch himself had put the kibosh on what everyone else had deemed a good take just because he hadn’t thought it good enough.
“Greg, Mindy, you two dialed in?” Fletch asked.
“Tight as a nun,” Mindy assured him.
Greg simply gave him a thumbs up.
“Okay,” he said. “All you in the back, let’s do it just like before, without any tripping or dropping if you please.”
A chorus of agreement noises and thumbs up came back at him.
“Okay, let’s do it then,” Fletch said.
The camera assistant stepped forward with a digital clapperboard and held it up where all three cameras could read it. The readout denoted the name of the film, the scene number, and the take number. The operator read this information aloud and then clapped the top down so the beginning of the take would be marked for later editing (assuming this take was even used). He then backed quickly away, out of the camera eye.
“Action,” said Fletch.
At the bar, the extras began to sip from their near-beers or their colored water drinks. A female carrying a tray of drinks walked slowly through. A bartender began to mix things up while talking softly with two extras before him. Greg, who was no longer Greg, but Frank Haverty after three stiff drinks, slowly took a sip from his drink and then looked up at Mindy, who was no longer Mindy, but Lyndsay Brown, left-leaning, cop-hating reporter who had just spent a month getting educated in the real world.