‘There is always a first time,’ Solly said.
This was at one a.m. in the morning at the start of the third week’s shooting. Ben had told the girl he needed to reload the camera, and he was in the bathroom now, with the light out. We had sent Harry home at midnight. He had gone reluctantly, it seemed to me, but I didn’t suspect anything was developing between him and the girl. All I knew was that he had done his job very realistically during those first two weeks, and we were ready to phase him out since his services were not too strenuously required during the remaining eighteen weeks of shooting. In fact, as I explained to the girl, she was supposed to become more and more involved with the people making the film, and less and less involved with her leading man, until the very end of the picture when she got married.
‘Married?’ she said. ‘To who?’
‘To Harry. We have a nice little scene where you get married at the end. But that’s after you have sort of experienced all different kinds of sexual experience and gratification with the various men working on this film, which experience provides the bedrock of a good marital relationship later on.’
‘You mean, sort of, I learn different things from them, and this prepares me for being like a good wife to Harry later on, is that it?’
‘That’s it exactly,’ I said.
‘That’s beautiful,’ she said, and she began to weep.
Ben came out of the bathroom, camera in hand. ‘All loaded,’ he said, ‘and ready to shoot.’ He looked at the girl. ‘Is something wrong?’ he asked.
‘Everything’s fine,’ I said. ‘Solly, are you ready?’
‘Ready,’ Solly said, and began taking off his clothes.
We worked very hard during those next few weeks, both on camera and off. Now that we were really into the movie, so to speak, the hours got longer; we would start work at eight and sometimes not finish till three or four in the morning. You have to remember that we were all holding daytime jobs, and I mention this only to explain our dedication to the project. And besides, this was still costing each of us close to forty-two dollars a week because, since we were gentlemen, we agreed to continue paying Harry his twenty-five a week even though his services would not be required on the picture again till we came to the very end of it. We explained to the girl that the end might be some time away, since whereas she was doing an excellent job and we were all very pleased with her (including Ben, who had preferred a redhead for the part), we were nonetheless not getting exactly the kind of professional footage we wanted, and this might require shooting a great many scenes over again, maybe even three and four times. So this would probably take us past the twenty weeks we were hoping for.
The girl said this was okay with her, she was as interested in doing as artistic a job as the rest of us, but it would help if she understood a lot of the words in the script, like sometimes Solly’s descriptions were very artistic but a little difficult to understand. We asked her to point out a specific instance in the script, and she said, ‘Well, like this one.’
174 THE LOFT — INT — NIGHT
The Girl is clad in leather straps.
She does fellatio on The Cameraman.
‘I just don’t know what he means by “clad in leather straps,” the girl said.
‘We’ll show you the costume when we get to it,’ I said.
‘And also,’ she said, ‘it would help if I could see some of the scenes we already shot, so that I could know what I was doing right or doing wrong.’
‘That’s very bad for an actress,’ I said. ‘It only makes her self-conscious. Just take our word that you look beautiful and entirely convincing. I think I can say, in fact, that even in those scenes where Solly or I were handling the camera while Ben was working with you, even those scenes came out beautiful.’
‘Even the close-ups?’
‘The close-ups are particularly beautiful.’
‘Well, okay,’ she said. ‘But this scene we’re supposed to shoot tonight, the one where I’m supposed to be between you and Solly?’
‘Between The Director and The Writer, you mean.’
‘Yeah, you and Solly,’ she said. ‘I want you to know that I can’t even draw a straight line with my left hand. So I don’t know how I’m supposed to do this both together. I might get mixed up.’
‘Just do your best,’ I said. ‘Believe me, you’re everything we hoped for. You’re making our dreams come true.’
‘Well, thanks,’ she said, and lowered her eyes. ‘And I want you fellows to know something, too. And that it is that I think you really are trying hard here not to make a cheap or dirty picture. I think it’s marvellous the way you pay so much attention to detail and want to get things absolutely right. I really do hope we make lots of money on it, but that’s not the important thing. The important thing is that I got a chance to work with professional people who really care. That, to me, is very very important, and I just wanted to thank you.’
And that was when Harry the dope stepped in and ruined the entire thing.
He called me at Benjamin Brothers Apparel, and left a message that I was to return his call right away. When I got back off the road, it must have been three or four o’clock in the afternoon. I called him up, and he said he wanted to meet me for a drink before we began shooting that night. I thought for a minute that maybe Ben had forgotten to send him his twenty-five dollar cheque, and I asked Harry if that was the problem, but he said, ‘No, no, I got the cheque, it’s something else.’ So I agreed to meet him at a bar near the loft, though to tell the truth I wasn’t too anxious to talk to him. We were supposed to shoot a very delicate scene that night in which The Director and The Girl experiment with a great many interesting and artistic approaches to exploring personalities through sexual experience, and I wanted to prepare myself for it by taking a little nap before I reported for work.
Harry was already sitting at a table when I came in. I walked over, pulled out a chair and sat down. He stared at me for a long time, the dope.
‘I can guess what the problem is,’ I said. ‘You’re wondering when you’ll be back in the movie again. Well, I’m happy to tell you it’s going along splendidly, and it’ll seem like no time at all till we shoot that big wedding scene.’
I smiled at him. He was still staring at me.
‘That’s not what I want to talk about,’ he said.
‘What do you want to talk about?’
‘There is no film in the camera,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘There has never been any film in the camera.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ I said. ‘Who told you that?’
‘I found out for myself.’
‘How did you find out?’ I said. ‘And besides, it’s a lie.’
‘It’s not a lie,’ Harry said. ‘Do you remember going out for hamburgers last night at two in the morning? Do you remember that?’
‘I remember it.’
‘I sneaked into the loft.’
‘You didn’t sneak into the loft. We locked the door behind us.’
‘I went up the fire escape and in through the window. There was no film in that camera.’
‘That’s because we were finished for the night. Ben had already unloaded.’
‘You were not finished for the night. You came back to the loft at precisely three-ten a.m.’
‘At which time Ben probably reloaded the camera.’
‘There was no film any place in the loft. I looked all over the loft. There was no film. None. Now I’ understand why Ben always went into the bathroom to reload. You are not shooting a movie there,’ Harry said.