Daddy's Girls (16)
The producer came to see her before lunch to find out how she was. He expressed his sympathy about her father, and said he was glad that she was back. The director came in a little while later. They were shooting back-to-back the scenes that she had missed while she was away. She would be on set all of the next day. But she was happy to be back in her real life. Whenever she went to the ranch, it reminded her of how trapped she had felt when she was young. All she had wanted to do was get the hell out. She always felt as though her life had begun when she left and went to L.A. Even starving there in the early years had been better than being on the ranch. She always felt as though she had been switched at birth and didn’t belong there. The last thing she wanted was to be a hick. She was a city girl to her very core. She knew Caroline felt that way too. Only Kate loved life on the ranch, and must have had an overdose of her father’s Texan blood. She was a cowboy just like him. She smiled thinking about it and went back to work.
She worked hard for the next two days to catch up, and on Friday afternoon, the director let them break early. They had covered a lot of ground that week, and the producer was coming on set to have a word with them. Usually, a general meeting with the producer meant some unpleasant change on set. It was rarely good news, but there had been no recent rumors, and everyone hoped it would be some ordinary announcement, maybe a big name actor joining the show, a better time slot than the one they had, which would have been hard to improve, or an important new sponsor. Everyone was in a good mood when the producer and executive producer showed up. The executive producer waited for silence on the set. They hardly ever saw him. He was the money guy, dealing with investors, insurance, and the overall planning of the show. They were in their tenth season, and everything was pretty well set. He had two other major shows on the air, one of which had just debuted in the fall and was a huge hit.
“Well, we have good and bad news for you.” Two of the actors on the show had been nominated for Emmys. Gemma had been nominated in the past but hadn’t won at first. She had won one in their third season. And the show had won a Golden Globe Award from the foreign press several times. “We’ve had a record year for our tenth season, thanks to all of you.” He smiled at them. “And the show is still solid. We’ve been debating this for a long time, trying to figure out the life span of the show, and at what point we should elegantly fold up our tents and go home, before we start to slide. We’ve been discussing it with our wonderful writers for months.” He paused. “As much as we hate to do it, our decision is that we’ve really done it. We’ve stretched as far as we can go. We want to go out on a high, not when people start switching to other channels when we come on. So the bad news is that when we wrap in June, that’s going to be it. The show is over. But the good news is that you’ll be free to pursue all the other projects that I know many of you are itching to do, feature films, other series, Broadway shows. I know several of you are ready to spread your wings, and now you can.
“For those of us who have settled into a comfortable routine here, including me, this is a good kick in the butt to get us going and become more creative again, and reinvent ourselves. We’ve had a great run, folks, and now it’s time to take a final bow, and leave the stage.” There was dead silence on the set when he finished, and then an explosion of chatter and exclamations as everyone started talking at once. Their contracts would determine how they got paid, but none of the contracts had showed up yet for the new season, and this was obviously why. The show was over, and they only had a few weeks of shooting left before the hiatus, and this time it would be permanent. The show was over. They didn’t want to wait to be canceled by the network one day. They wanted to leave on a high, and for a minute, Gemma was too shocked to speak to the actors standing next to her.
“Fuck,” her co-star said to her, “and they call that good news? I have three ex-wives and five kids to support. Shit. I never saw that coming.” He looked panicked.
“Neither did I,” Gemma said, “and I only have me to support, which is bad enough.” In the past ten years, she had grown comfortable in a lifestyle that she couldn’t manage without the show, and thinking it would go on forever, she hadn’t saved a penny, and lived a life of first-class travel to luxury hotels at fabulous destinations, drove a Bentley sports car, spent a fortune on jewelry, expensive restaurants, and had a heavy mortgage on her house. It was a major shock, and would take some serious figuring to slim down her overhead. Everything but her mortgage would have to go. She didn’t want to lose her house. She had to call her agent immediately to find work. Hopefully she’d be in major demand for another show. She’d only done minor things on the side for the last decade, a perfume campaign, a hair products line, an occasional appearance on a movie made for TV, and one in a feature film. She didn’t need the work and didn’t have the time, and she liked playing hard during the hiatus, frequently in Europe. She hadn’t had to seriously look for a job in ten years.
She left the set quickly after the announcement, and didn’t stick around. She called her agent when she got home, and he came right on the line. He spoke even before she did.
“I know. I just heard. I’m going to have a dozen calls by five P.M. I didn’t expect that at all.”
“Neither did I. Our ratings are through the roof,” Gemma said, still in shock, and a little angry now. It seemed so unfair. And it was going to turn her whole life upside down, in a very unpleasant way.