By: Elaine Lennon

“Action.”

I dreamed I killed my co-star last night. You could say it was a long time coming. You see, twenty years ago, when I was a mere starlet, she took the screen role that had been written for me. By my boyfriend, now my husband. He had no say in what happened in adapting the play that had brought him acclaim, with me in the lead. Or so he said. We didn’t speak for two weeks when that happened. I had a film career anyhow, no thanks to him. Now I was bringing home the bacon.

So here we are, I’m playing opposite her in a film that they call ‘meta’ because it’s about a film within a film and she’s playing me and I’m playing her or something ridiculous. I took it because I was told I’d get awards and I like to do a film a year and I wanted the money to pay for a new property and get away from my first home to the glorious location shoot – Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Dolomites.

“I can’t wait,” he said. “The kids will love going to school there. We can stay on for Easter and maybe the summer! They’re young enough not to be upset by the change of scenery.”

I put an end to that talk straight away.

“I just can’t see it. I’m in every scene. I need my space. I won’t be able to go through my process if they’re around. Take them to my folks in Florida. They won’t know the difference from a sun-kissed pigsty.”

Red Stiletto, White Telephone. The screenplay was Fed Ex’d and I immediately called my agent. The title was a red flag.

“Lulu! What on earth kind of thing have you got me into? It sounds ludicrous!” I was leafing through one hundred and forty-odd pages of crazed dialogue and action.

“True, the title doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. It’ll probably be changed. It’s a mix of giallo and Thirties comic melodrama, a mishmash of Italian genres,” she said. “You know he’s a style maestro. Hugely influential. And you’re the lead. It will look tremendous. He loves his ladies so you’re going to be most favoured.”

“One of the two.”

“But you’re the one who’s got the moneymen. If you don’t do it the film dies. It’s that or a black and white art film in Mexico City. You do not want to go there, in any sense.”

“I haven’t read to the end. Do I die? Or is it one of those gory thrillers?”

“There’s a little action, nothing to worry about. The writing is very strong. Morbid but not too supernatural. A touch of grand guignol. Fiction blurs with reality. You’re playing this famous actress and the role she’s taking on in the autobiography being brought to the screen by the woman director whom you are supposed to vaguely resemble. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Modern. With murder.”

“I’m not looking for a literary critique. So, I’m the avatar of my co-star who’s playing a film director doing a hokey take on her life. Effectively there are three of me. And I’m playing two of me. And I’m not getting on well with my on-screen director who’s irritated at the way I’m acting out her character. That should be fun. Am I getting my max?”

“And more perks than you can shake a stick at. Best hotel, luxury car. European hours. Just stay off the ski slopes. We don’t want you breaking your neck.”

“Who else is in it? Anyone good? Who’s going to play the woman director whose story this is?”

Then she told me.

“Iris Rondel. She needs a hit. You know, you do look a little alike. It works for the premise even if you do come from opposite sides of the planet and sound so different. You can work on the voices, I guess. I like the idea. What do you think?”

I clenched my fist. Counted to ten.

“Wonderful. Can’t wait. It’s about time we shared a screen.”

Like all actresses, I travel light. I packed my bags with my usual stock of unused yoga mat, laxatives, athleisure wear and knitting paraphernalia. Visine drops, clingfilm for my thighs, rice snacks, gum, a Kindle with all my Method acting books because I wanted to have all the feelings. I sent my Vuitton trunks ahead and thanked my lucky stars I would be gone out of the family madhouse for two months all by myself.

                                                            *

It was raining when I got there. So much for pretending I was Claudia Cardinale in The Pink Panther. In the wet I look more like Capucine.

I rushed to my suite and spent four hours putting on makeup to make it look as though I wasn’t wearing any.                                                             

I was ushered by a production assistant to pre-production press round which seemed rather previous – apparently I had no alternative but to attend.

I told them what they all want to hear from actresses nowadays, how much I would miss my family, what I thought about war (I was against it), what designer I wore to the Academy Awards last year (I hadn’t been), what I thought about acting opposite Iris Rondel: I got over that with some bland compliments. We got back to the usual stuff: clean eating, mindfulness, identifying with my last role. That’s what they want – suffering for your art.

I had only been to one awards ceremony recently. There I was at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures gala even in Los Angeles where I thought Meryl Streep was going to present me with my prize and it turned out to be Roma Downey. I mean.

“Is this for real?” I had mouthed to my agent as I mugged for the stills photographers.

That’s showbiz.

                                                            *

Back at the hotel I perused the gifts in the shop and remembered to buy some stuff for the kids because I knew I would be too immersed in my characterization to think of it for the next eight weeks. Then in my bathroom I punched the wall in frustration when I saw the eye bags under the unflattering lights and wished I’d had some filler.

I arrived at dinner half an hour late. Fashionable? Probably not.

“They’re all the same,” he was saying, bullying the long table of acolytes. “Divas. Wannabes. Neophytes. Established stars. They all need support, they all need to be loved.”

I arrived at the welcome dinner in the local restaurant but nobody had thought to warn Fantini that I was standing right behind him. And that I spoke fluent Italian. The table fell silent.

He turned around and broke into a wide smile that reached the big black spectacles he sported to camouflage scars beneath his eyes. I was facing was my demon Other.

“Bella!” He stood up and kissed me on each cheek, twice.

“The first time I saw her, the ceiling fell right in on me. It was love at first sight. Eternal devotion. I swore I would direct her and win her an Academy Award. And I will!”

I held up my hand as if to say, Troppo.

A waiter seated me to Fantini’s right. It was a long night.

                                                                        *

            The call sheet was pushed under my door before I went to sleep. I liked the hours, they were far more civilized than anything I made in Hollywood or wherever they’re calling Hollywood these days – Atlanta, Vancouver, New Jersey, just as long as there are the right tax breaks. I didn’t have to be in makeup until eight a.m. Luxury.

            The sides hadn’t been enlarged. The production assistant hadn’t taken note of my request. Those pages with two pages of script on one A4 page are always too small. I would have to get my glasses on, just when I’d been trying to retrain my eyes. I went back to the original script and checked there were no changes. Except there were. There was nothing but changes. The new ones were on pink paper. I had to sit up half the night to re-learn everything I’d studied and had off by heart. Welcome to filmmaking Italian style.

            I wore the biggest dark glasses I could find to the location when the car picked me up in the morning. I looked a sight.

            Fantini came into the caravan to welcome me to the set.

“Do you have any ideas?”

I didn’t suggest anything.

That’s what they all do. It’s a trap. The minute you make any suggestions they call you difficult, a wannabe screenwriter. Let me tell you what I’ve observed. The screenwriter automatically hates you because you were never on his wish list but if he’s on the set he’s the guy you need to impress so he writes you more lines and gives you more scenes. Of course I have ideas. My whole job is to have ideas. I interpret, I represent, I figure. I create a backstory in addition to what’s in the script. I do research. Once I spent a whole day learning to be blind in a school in New York. It was hell. I had to wear contacts that blunted my impact – my eyes are my best feature. I had to rely on gesture and voice. And my voice often irritates people, so the reviews would have you believe. My accent is somewhere between the Azores and Newfoundland, one wrote. Everyone’s a critic.

Iris bounced in the door, kissing the makeup lady whom she had worked with before. She stood in front of me, insinuating herself into my space so I had to get up to greet her.

“I have always wanted to meet you!” she squealed. “I practically owe you my whole career! How have we never met? I never see you at the award shows!”

I couldn’t have said it better myself, but, hell, I had a career too and it was better than hers, awards be damned.

“I couldn’t be on set this long without a support structure,” she said to me, making a moue while affecting an air kiss. Not what you expect from Australians, really, all this gesturing and expressivity. I prefer to save it for the roles.

She told me she had brought her husband and that her children were enrolled at a local school for the duration.

I nodded sympathetically

In Hollywood they used to say, Underneath all that phony tinsel is the real tinsel. She wasn’t the real tinsel, she was the ratty old box it came in, with holes nibbled by mice and plastic facial inserts and Botox jabs pointing around her lips. She was incredibly tall and pale.  And she was thinner than me. The crew loved her. I suddenly realized I had agreed to the wrong role. Me and my short waist and my long legs made me difficult to dress and now she turned up and she was the darling on the set.

                                                            *

Be quicker. Be slower. Be more truthful. Be deeper. Be whatever. How I get there is nobody’s business but everyone thinks knowing how stars act is important. Everything lives or dies with the audience. If they don’t like it or even if they do, they don’t need to know what goes into preparation. You just have to look the part. Inside and out.

Face, hair, teeth. Shoulders, shoes. I was ready.

“Quiet on set,” said the assistant director, a young blond guy wearing a three-piece suit with big headphones clamped on his ears.

I was standing in a wardrobe.

Iris was costumed as a voluptuous velvet vampire, playing dead on an elaborately decorated four-poster bed. There was a white telephone on the frilly table to her left.

“I don’t get what’s going on in this scene,” I said. “I thought she was playing the director and I was playing her.”

As Fantini approached me across the studio floor with increasing caution, Iris’s eyes were trained on him as though she could eat him for breakfast.

“It’s like an improv in murder, this is the giallo element,” he said. “You don’t have to do anything but react.”

“She’s dead,” I said, pointing at Iris.

“Yes, yes, for now. Forget about that. Just make big eyes like that silent movie actress, Clara Bow. Zasu Pitts? Whoever. Remember I’m doing this from your perspective. You react, yes?” He seemed very happy with himself and shrugged and waited for my response.

I wanted to ask that hoary old question, What’s my motivation? Instead, I just sighed and said, “How do you want me?”

“This isn’t the theatre,” said Fantini. “The script as written.”

“You mean rewritten,” I said.

“Play nice,” Fantini said, eyebrows lower than a lizard’s.

I pretended I was listening.

Fantini went back and sat on his director’s chair.

Iris closed her eyes and did her Vampira act.

“My entire life is cosplay,” I said. Nobody was listening.

I was seething on the inside. On the inside of a wardrobe.

                                                                        *

I’m quite disciplined. I don’t eat. If I did, I would look – well, different. I have big bones. If I had regular meals on a film I wouldn’t fit into my costumes, for a start. They’re all made sample size for runway models. Lunch would put an end to my career. I will sit with the crew for a few minutes to look like I’m being social but in reality I spend most breaks getting sewn into costumes. There’s no time for food. I make sure I have sufficient supplies of red licorice and breath mints and Coke Zero to get me through every production.

My leading man is a well-known Italian – handsome, saturnine but blue-eyed and highly charismatic. That was the deal. They could hire one of their national stars as long as they got international sales with me on it. I saw him in deep conversation with a very beautiful young woman.

He joined me as we stood on our marks.

“Who was that?” I asked, trying to be friendly with a guy who really had no interest in me.

“A fan. I was telling her about my estate in Tuscany.”

“I bet you told her all your trees are sequoias.”

“Oh, I don’t grow them, they’re native to California.”

I give up.

                                                                                    *

I was spending a lot of time by myself. I had to look at my reflection in the mirror and gear myself up to changing my appearance, subtly at first, then to more extreme applications of makeup and eyeliner to resemble the female character as she becomes more unhinged. My hair got bigger and blonder. I fancied one day my face actually changed unbidden, right before my eyes. It was as if I was becoming Iris. Or Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? My mental state was becoming fragile. I sensed it. I couldn’t trust myself. I felt like I was blending into my character’s persona. But which one? I was playing two people and imitating a third. My persona was in two parts, then three.  And I was starving, apart from anything else. But if I ate anything substantial my cheekbones would disappear under a layer of fat. They are my best feature, everyone says so. I have a flat face, a big mouth, wide set eyes and a button nose. It’s perfectly photogenic but it wasn’t always like that. If you can find my first television movie you can see the one I was born with. I had it bobbed otherwise I’d have been able to play Virginia Woolf in The Hours without prosthetics. Thankfully nobody cares about that stuff nowadays. The planes on her face shear off in different directions and wouldn’t make sense in real life but when she’s shot in profile everything works wonderfully, said one critic. Well. That’s how I express myself. Not consuming. But looking like I have consumption. With cheekbones that could cut glass.

I looked at the next day’s sides. It was the big one. The call sheet had me on set at ten for makeup. That wouldn’t take long. I already looked like death. Alabaster. I could call it Method acting but I knew I was losing my mind. I related far too much to my character. I was inhabiting it too naturally. I had no soundings. No technique. I was grappling with memories as I had been trained to do. I was embodying something over which I had no control. I was simply reacting. Or, to be more accurate, I was pretending to listen.

The truth is you cannot control affect through technical talent alone. The camera has to love you. You have to learn about frame and aperture and lens length and lighting. If Marlene Dietrich hadn’t studied cameras she’d have looked like a Berlin washerwoman, which is more or less what she was. And Marilyn Monroe had very fine tiny blonde hairs on her face which gave her a luminosity that reacted to the physics of photography. So do !. So it goes.

“You are a very remarkable woman,” said Fantini as I took to the floor in full costume, my face ravaged with sleeplessness, my eyes filled with eye drops to make me look more conscious than I really was, shivering not with cold but fear.

I was in a trance. I no longer knew who I was.

“You are the creator and the destroyer,” Fantini whispered to me. What? Who was I?

Goodness only knows what he was whispering to Iris. He spent longer with her that day.

Somewhere deep inside me I didn’t like it. Ego is a terrible thing.

Iris looked me in the eye. “You’re starting to look just like me,” she said.

“Isn’t that the point?” I said, a little too briskly. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” I added, softening a little.

But she was right. And she was rattled.

                                                                        *

They say revenge is a dish best served cold. Well, they say a lot of things. Everything is copy, for one.

“Her highness isn’t wearing underwear again,” the hairdresser whispered to me as Iris left the van before me, sheathed in ruffles and curls.

“I am rightly served for showing pity to a scoundrel,” I murmured. It’s one of my favourite lines to quote and nobody ever recognizes the source. Am I the farmer or the snake? You choose.

I walked on set. There was an air of tension. It was the fight scene, the climax of the film and we had run over by a few days. The principal financier had been visiting and the producer’s assistant was grumbling.

I was trained in holding the gun by a guy whose accent was so thick I only vaguely grasped what he was saying. Point and shoot, basically.

The issue was the recoil which was ferocious. I had to place my left hand on my right wrist to keep it steady.

Iris stood in front of me and we acted out our final scene. We had been fortunate that the shoot was mostly in sequence and this was the last day.

A stunt choreographer had spent an hour going through our movement with Fantini and the cinematographer checking the wide shot before doing the close ups.

We walked through the action, blocking each step.

In the wide shot I didn’t have to pull the trigger because the camera was so far away.

When the lighting was adjusted, Iris was trembling. I smiled at her but she looked glazed. I wondered was she on something. She seemed to have lost her confidence. Or maybe she was just lost in the moment.

They were doing the close up. I pulled the trigger. The force made me jump back.

Iris fell to the floor, blood pouring from her head.

Nobody moved.

I was steadying myself from the recoil again, exhaling deeply.

“Check the gate,” said Fantini, rather pointlessly since he was watching on the monitor like everyone does these days.

The cinematographer nodded.

“Let’s do one more,” said Fantini. “Iris, is that okay for you? Can you stand in the same way one more time?”

Iris didn’t get up.

            The A.D. went over to her and shook her. The blood kept oozing.

            “That’s not blood bags!” he shrieked. “That’s real blood!”

            I couldn’t hear properly. The effect of the shot had rendered me a little deaf and everything went around in my head a few times.

            “Nobody touch the gun!” shouted the A.D. “Call the medic!” He was leaning over Iris’s unmoving body, slumped in the shape of a question mark.

Her husband ran over from where he’d been watching, like he had done most days on the film.

“Have I killed her?” I stood with the gun in my hand. The armourer ran over and took it away from me. Was Iris dead?

I ran over to Iris, pulled her hair off her face and tried to give her the kiss of life. The A.D. pulled me off her.

“I got the bullets!” I screamed, falling to the floor in a dramatic swoon.

I was mumbling when they put me in an ambulance, passed out, my wig askew.

“Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of car/The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s balm.”

“Good grief,” said Fantini. “She thinks she’s Lady Macbeth!”

I spent a few days in a local hospital. My husband came to visit. Deconstructing my character had made my own personality disintegrate for a spell, according to some society psychiatrist. I went to a discreet facility in Switzerland for a rest cure.

The set armourer was arrested and has spent the last year in prison. She was high as a kite when she loaded the pistol and nobody knew she’d put live rounds in the barrel. She’d bought them from some truffle hunter who’d been out in the mountains hoping to get a good yield and sell them to the wealthy actors living in the neighbourhood for the season. She saved some money and used what remained of the budget for her drug habit. It was a deal that had turned our travelling circus into a different kind of shoot. Well, they do say you should play the action word.

It was Iris’ last performance, obviously. On the grounds of good taste they didn’t show her dying moments in the final edit but everyone says she’s going to get the Academy Award. Posthumously, of course. It should have been mine.

One critic wrote: “It’s a film in quote marks. It probes the idea of cinematic authorship, particularly the notion of auteurism. It’s a witty dissection and a self-referentially playful mosaic that vividly and deliciously interrogates Fantinian tropes of doubles, dichotomies, parallels and reflections portrayed through the imagination of an actress who thinks she’s better than she is, in a parody of a performance.”

“She gave the performance of her life,” said Fantini in the EPK they sent out on the press rounds and it’s an extra with the DVD. He wasn’t talking about me, the person who turned his lousy picture into a roaring success.

It was about time Iris was acknowledged, I suppose. She had no more to give. I made sure of that. I even administered the kiss of death, if you really want to know. It didn’t do Marilyn Monroe any harm, she’s bigger than ever. This was the PR win of the century.

I am a bad actress.

No more drama.

I have done the state some service and they know it.

What I really want to do is direct.

Cut.