CHAPTER 104 - Let’s Go Home

“Revenge, at first though sweet,

Bitter ere long back on itself recoils.”

John Milton

Paradise Lost Book IX

Wednesday.

Ferroni had rented the back room of a Lower East Side social club for Josie’s first meeting with Vinnie Lorenzo, the urban Godfather making use of Marcel’s savant abilities. He had scouted it while wandering about the neighbourhood in the weeks prior to filming, arriving ultimately at a long, narrow room with fresco ceilings, card tables, an ancient jukebox, and photographs on every wall. Gina, their art department, had then gone over it and removed anything that might infringe copyright or continuity.

Joe Mancuso, the actor who showed up for Vinnie, was a veteran from the ’80s glory days of Alonso Palumbo and Ralphio de Falco’s golden age of mafioso cinema. He was well into his sixties now, and he shook everyone’s hand, even the second AC, then made himself at home. He talked with Aubert like an old chum, despite having never met the guy; then he saw Eppie.

“Is this our Bully Girl?” he spoke with a natural Sicilian accent, which was rare these days. “Bellissima! How enchanting!”

Eppie thanked the man even as he launched into tales of the starlets he had worked with, and how she dwarfed them all.

The scene they were filming was Marcel bringing his ‘daughter’ in.

He gave her no warning. He simply came down the three steps into the back room with Josie behind him and stood her in front of Lorenzo the way a child stands a kitten in front of a parent, asking for permission.

On screen, Lorenzo puts down his cup and looks at her for a long, awkward moment.

Josie looks unnaturally pretty in her denim mini, as was the fashion, and she wears make-up that ages her up.

Every audience can tell what the mafioso is thinking.

“How… old are you, sweetheart?” he says at last.

“She’s fourteen,” Marcel confesses.

“Sixteen,” interjects Josie, who has learned in one week that being older gets her more.

Lorenzo looks from Marcel to the girl, reads their body language, then he understands. It was a subtle thing, one that only a veteran actor could pull off while keeping the character’s panache. “She lies so naturally. You could use some of that.”

Marcel says he wants to see the ledger.

Lorenzo gestures to an aide in a three-piece suit, a day player, who then retrieves the book prop. He opens the book for Marcel.

Lorenzo reads the lines out slowly, twice, his finger travelling under the figures, like he is reading to a toddler. Deposits. Dates. A total that makes Josie sit up. At the head of the column, in a looping continental hand, is a surname. Josie sees the florid letters but cannot read the word.

Marcel nods in the right places.

“Enough?” Marcel asks.

“Enough for what?” Lorenzo’s voice grows suspicious once more. “The girl?”

“For… for school.” Marcel speaks the word with reverence, and Lorenzo’s whole face softens. Next to him, Josie’s own expression grows flustered. In Bebe’s script, Josie simply wants to stay with Marcel.

School…school does not exist in Josie’s forecast.

“I imagine half a million is enough… for any school in the country,” Lorenzo says drily. “At least the ones that will take her.”

He looks at Josie then; only Josie is neither happy nor smiling. She looks betrayed, like an abandoned cat.

“Good.” Marcel perks up, and this is the moment the audience realises they have never seen Marcel approach the proximity of a smile, even with the plant—only he did it now, for a brief, unmistakable second.

“Cut,” said Ferroni. “Again. Eppie, react to the numbers before Joe says it. You can read the entries. He can’t. Joe, good job keeping our girl on her toes!”

Joe laughed.

Eppie said, “Yeah,” and performed as directed. When the scene ended with her eyes warm and brimming, the crew shared her feelings.

Truly, there was nothing more devastating on camera than an emotionally vulnerable Eppie.

Eppie watched the rest of Joe’s scenes with Aubert.

They would return later, closer to the last days of filming for Josie’s final meeting with Lorenzo, because the art department needed time to create a set that visually communicated Hollis’s theatrical violence.

They moved back to Rivington for the afternoon and shot the three scenes that were the reason Bebe Blau had been hired.

In the first, Josie begs Marcel to stop being a killer.

They have money. They are reasonably happy and fulfilled, or at least, she is, and she doesn’t want to see her faux-father figure hurt.

Eppie performed the role so naturally that Ferroni called it a “oner”, and only did a second for coverage because he wanted close-ups, over-the-shoulder, and edited cross-cuts between Eppie and Aubert.

The second scene was Josie teaching Marcel to write, after their encounter with Lorenzo.

Josie finds a pencil. She stands behind Marcel, with the plant in its tin pot on the same table, and she writes MARCEL in capitals on a notepad.

Aubert, with his gobsmacking theatricality, actually acted out the tremulous first steps of literacy from an individual who had never been taught.

Josie leans in closer. Her hair falls over his shoulder, their heads almost touching, and she guides his hand.

“Cut!”

The third scene was the most harrowing for Eppie.

It was the scene of Josie stealing the gun.

Josie waits until Marcel is asleep, which is to say until he is sitting upright with his eyes shut, near daylight. She lifts the gun off his thighs with both hands, like a cat stealing fish, and sneaks away. Marcel does not wake, for Bebe’s note in the margin says that he trusts Josie unconditionally.

And therein lies the tragedy. Josie’s self-destruction of her found paradise.

They were, by the end of that Thursday, a day and a half ahead of schedule. Nobody said so out loud, for the Gods of stagecraft were fickle beings.

Tuesday morning.

2nd of September.

Today, they were filming in a federal building—two buildings, in fact—and Eppie learned another trick of the trade.

The lobby was real. It was the ground floor of a working office block on lower Broadway, rented for four hours on a Tuesday morning, with its own actual security desk, its own actual people coming through it with coffee, and a location manager standing by the revolving door with a clipboard and a stack of release forms.

For the shootout, the floor was narratively “upstairs”, but in reality, it was in a vacant level of a different building entirely, four blocks away, that had been empty since a law firm left it.

The illusion was necessary because of their budget ceiling.

Dressing an entire federal floor meant desks, phones, blinds, filing, and that wasn’t even the troublesome part. The trouble was forty day players told to come in workwear and to sit at a desk for hours. As a compromise, Bebe had written the sequence so that the crowd and the violence never shared a frame.

In the sequence, Josie moves through a real lobby full of real strangers.

The picture cuts, and everything that happens after was on set B.

In the real office building, Josie tells a day player playing security that she’s somebody’s niece, and her face is so guileless and her eyes so pleadingly blue that the man allows her to slip through. Nobody looks at the satchel. They should, but this is a movie, and logical elasticities have to be observed.

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Inside the office lobby, she sees Hollis, who she has been stalking since the morning. She follows him at forty feet, captured by a long lens that cuts out the real crowd, then walks into the men’s room where Hollis has gone to relieve himself.

Through the door in Set A—

—into Set B, on Wednesday morning.

Such was the magic of movie-making.

Wednesday afternoon held the first time Eppie would hold a gun across two lifetimes. It was also the film’s second climax, the one where Josie “corners” Hollis in the bathroom, only to be cornered in turn.

The bathroom was a real ’80s office block purgatory, on the empty floor, with four stalls and a window that did not open and tiles the colour of a swimming pool. Other than sanitation and simulated urine stains, the room remained untouched.

There was no dialogue in the first two minutes of the scene.

Hollis goes into a stall to piss. Josie walks all the way down to the furthest stall, closes the door, sits on the cistern, and loads the Beretta 92FS. It was only after the armourer put the unarmed prop into her hands that Eppie realised just how big guns were. Narratively, Josie has seen Marcel maintain, clean and handle the gun daily, as a ritual, and so knows what to do.

In the stall, she struggled with the magazine. Then she turned it round and found that her arms knew the weight already. A quart of milk was two pounds. So was the Beretta.

But she does not know that the sound of the mechanical catch is like a dog whistle to DEA men like Hollis.

Next came the hardest scene in the film, at least for Eppie, who had never performed action shots, not even in theatre. What complicated the shot was that the bathroom tiles made the scene all-hands-on-deck for every department from sound to art to lighting.

They had enough budget for two takes only.

This time, they rehearsed.

Ferroni had one, maybe two chances to blow up the tile and shatter the mirror with her missed shot—visually represented by Josie shooting her own reflection beside Hollis.

“From the top,” Ferroni ordered, camera rolling to check for lighting.

The narrative thread ran as such: A suspicious Hollis comes out of the stall, gun ready. He walks to the basin. Josie emerges holding the gun toward his head, her hands trembling from the weight. She doesn’t realise just how visible she is because of the mirrors. She is, after all, a kid, and not a pro. Hollis turns, then gives the most horrifying diatribe.

On camera, Hollis dried his hands, his coat open, his gun hidden from Eppie, who pulled back the stall door with one hand, gun raised, then placed both hands on the enormous metal implement.

“Who the hell are you?” Hollis seemed both amused and confused. “Do you know where you are, little lady?”

Then Eppie spouted her manifesto of vengeance for Petey. “He was only five years old! He loved dinosaurs!”

Then Cooper would give his villain’s diatribe.

To shut him up, Eppie mimed the shot.

At which point Cooper would knock the gun from her hands, ram her head against the bathroom door, and sock her in the gut to incapacitate her. In the next sequence, Hollis would be mid-execution when Tull stumbled in to stop his mentor from yet another unforgivable act.

They repeated the choreography for about thirty minutes. Until the stunt coordinator was satisfied.

“Alright,” said Ferroni. “Let’s do the real deal.”

Just as Eppie psyched herself up, Cooper interrupted the setup and spoke for a few moments to Ferroni. When he was done, he took her aside like they were still at LAPA, then looked at her critically.

“You’re acting sloppy,” he said.

Eppie opened her mouth.

“There’s no hate, only fear,” Cooper said. “You did everything else so well—the loss, the grief, the anguish—but hate… not so much. Why?”

Eppie considered her teacher’s words.

She wasn’t sure herself. Perhaps it was because she had a charmed life? Even now, what she felt for Emily, the aide who had pushed her overboard, was disbelief rather than hate.

“I know this isn’t theatre,” Cooper said to her. “But that’s no excuse to channel inauthenticity. Hatred is not a feeling; it is a decision that has already been made. Think about Titus. You know you have it in you.”

Her [Script Analysis] churned.

“I did it in the kitchen,” Eppie protested, well aware that her true skills were lacking.

“Yes,” said Cooper. “But you have not brought it today.” Her teacher was not unkind about his criticism. “Can I give you some advice?”

“Please…” Eppie nodded demurely.

“Think of me as William Chen,” her teacher said, and the words struck Eppie to the core of her body, like a liver shot.

Cooper did not raise his voice. “A good actor must channel emotions that are his or hers, and yet live outside those very same emotions. So long as you are holding the reins, don’t be afraid to gallop.”

He smiled. She could see that Cooper loved teaching. God, how he must be missing teaching.

Was there something or someone she hated? Truly hated?

Eppie stood in a bathroom on an empty floor, closed her eyes, and put herself back in the Old Music Building with the lights off. She saw a girl who was frightened of the dark. A girl who screamed, then bargained, then promised anything at all through a door — three times over — because an absolute bastard had thought her suffering was funny.

Fine, Eppie told herself. Hatred it is.

“Ready!”

“Rolling…”

“Action!”

What came out of the stall was a hatred so genuine that it radiated from her eyes, an emotion made physical by her expenditure of [The Facial Landscape]. She didn’t channel herself, for her feelings for William were resolved. Instead, she injected the red-hot rage she felt for what had been done to Mio, whose entire life had been derailed and changed by the callous lust of an apathetic man-child. She took on, like a second skin, the rage that Euphemia should have felt if she had been braver, if her former self had possessed the gall to push William off the roof.

“He was only five years old! He loved dinosaurs!”

The line came out as a howl. The room felt it. The boom recorded it. Even the tiles felt her existential anguish.

Cooper’s Hollis looked at her with something between surprise and amusement, the marks of a true psychopath.

WILLIAM CHEN! Eppie realised. Holy shit, her teacher was literally playing William Chen, which was possible, because he had probably seen William with Valorie for about four years, and had recorded everything about the boy that was detestable.

The nose of her gun trembled.

Hollis snickered, then delivered his eleven lines of manifesto, mocking the death of her family, playing up the necessary evil that was the DEA’s work in the Bronx. Coming from a black man in an agent’s suit, speaking with a neutral American accent, it was doing the lord’s work.

The gun in her hand fired, and the charges in the wall and the ceiling and the mirror went off. She flinched and fell backwards from the recoil, her [Act Natural] preventing her [Strength] from overcompensating.

She missed Hollis.

Then their memorised sequence kicked in.

Cooper crossed the eight feet in a second and struck the smoking gun from her hands. His other hand grabbed her hair, which had by now lost the scrunchy from her old home, and then he slammed her into the open stall’s door in a fantastically controlled pantomime.

Eppie’s own act was far less controlled, though her [Agility] more than made up for what her [Act Natural] failed to compensate for, for she had really considered slamming her face on the promise that she would near-instantly heal via [Causality].

Then the punch arrived; Eppie knelt, still fighting William—

And she hurled.

She wasn’t struck, but the empathy was too strong, and her body remembered.

The stunt coordinator had a heart attack, but Ferroni kept rolling, because he knew the pair were student and teacher, and there was no way Cooper would keep in character if Eppie was actually struck.

She lay on the bathroom floor, coughing, with her hair in her own sick—

Then Hollis pulled his gun from the holster and placed it carelessly against her head.

Then the door opens, and Tull comes in, but that would be another scene, with the cameras set up from another angle.

From the floor, she watched Kelvin barge into the room and stare aghast, with genuine horror and empathy, at his mentor holding a gun to the head of a young woman with her cheeks in a pool of discoloured liquid.

Camera A and B were still on Eppie and Cooper, so none of Kelvin’s face had yet been captured.

What was captured instead was on camera C, on a steady rig, following Kelvin over his right shoulder so that the viewer saw exactly what he did.

Cooper did not miss a beat. He looked up at his mentee, the boy he’d been raising to replace him, and sighed. In an ultimate act of irony, he took his gun off the girl’s head and decided he wanted a coffee instead.

That, and he wanted the man who was with her. The Pro.

“Clean her up, take her upstairs,” Hollis announced cheerfully, as though he wasn’t about to execute a child. “I have questions.”

“Cut,” yelled Ferroni, fighting his jackhammering heart. “Check the gate.”

The moment the words were uttered, Eppie sprang up, sprightly as a sprig in spring, and said she was completely fine.

The crew, who had been holding their breath, breathed at last while Cooper helped her to Wardrobe to clean up and sanitise.

What they did not know was that Eppie’s elation was framed by something only she could see.

They still had the rescue to film, so after Polaroids, Eppie was cleaned up and redone to resemble her bedraggled state while her first set of costumes were bagged.

Meanwhile, Kel’s separate entrance shot took about six takes, even with Cooper’s intervention.