I'm Glad About You(87)

This news was delivered to all of them during a costume fitting in the wardrobe trailer. Alison thought Lars’s head was going to explode. “Sequins? Is he f*cking insane? Where the f*ck did they find sequins in the middle of the f*cking jungle?”

“Well, for that matter, where did they find a pink silk sheath?” observed Molly, the imperturbable costume designer.

“She had it. She brought it with her from the States, it’s been in her backpack for six years.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t say oh like that’s impossible, it’s not likely, but it’s possible that she would squirrel away a piece of her previous life as a debutante but it is not possible that she would carry around a pink sequin dress for six years, that’s insane.”

Alison kept her mouth shut and sat there. They were surrounded by hundreds of dresses and scarves and steam irons. Lars preferred issuing orders and having them intuitively understood by someone who had decent and reliable taste, like Molly, who had worked on three films with him; this being summoned to the wardrobe trailer did not suit him.

“I can email them a rendering in half an hour,” Molly explained, the soul of patient cooperation.

“He doesn’t really want to see a rendering, he wants to see her in the dress.” This from weirdo Norbert, the producer-slash-factotum who always insisted they implement any demand the studio put forward, bar none.

“But we don’t have a dress, we will have to build the dress, and this is supposed to shoot tomorrow,” Molly explained. “If he really wants her in a sequined dress—”

“He definitely wants the sequins, it’s really important to him. The dress really needs to be more special.”

“Well, we can do that but—”

“We are not PUTTING her in a sequined dress!” It was the first time Alison had ever seen Lars’s cool Icelandic prince act start to crack. What was the big deal? The whole idea that she had any dress at all stuffed into a backpack for six years was preposterous. The whole sequence in fact was ridiculous, and had actually just been added to the script last week, apparently as a total excuse to put the hot young female lead into a slinky dress and watch her play Mata Hari for a couple of minutes while the boys ran around and placed detonators on the periphery of the drug lord’s compound.

Lars finally threw in the towel. The compromise—if you could call it that—was gold sequins. But it came at a cost. Lars never threatened to walk off the picture, as that was not his style. But, Ryan told her in a whispered phone call, the entire town was talking about the degree of interference that the studio was inflicting on him. It was unheard of.

Rumors of studio intervention were flourishing everywhere. The band of brats (so titled with a saucy sisterly flair by Alison) tossed the unverifiable information about carelessly as they sat to the side and waited for the DP to finish lighting.

“I heard they’re going to reshoot all the bar sequences,” Evan observed.

“I heard we were going to reshoot all the action sequences,” Robbie countered.

“Gordon hates all the sets, he says it looks cheap.”

“He wants to rebuild all the sets?”

“He wants to send us to Mexico,” Robbie insisted. “That’s what my agent says.”

“Cut it out.” Lars had fought valiantly for a location in Mexico, but the studio bean counters had put their collective foot down. There was a drug war going on in Mexico—not a pretend one, a real one, where real drug cartels were shooting real bullets at each other and anyone else who happened to be in the vicinity. Under these circumstances, the insurance company had decisively declined to offer any kind of coverage to this particular production. So Mexico was out, and Colombia too, and the farther south they went in their search for an authentic Latino jungle the more the complications flowered and decayed. Finally, the only answer was building a Mexican rain forest in the desert hills just outside downtown Los Angeles. Which cost a small fortune. Now Gordon didn’t like the sets and he was going to send them into the middle of the Mexican jungle and put all their lives at risk after all? Well, anything was possible. Alison was learning: Any amount of insanity, not to mention dough, was tossed about these movies like confetti.

Although Lars never blew his cool (other than during the War of the Sequins) the disagreements with the studio became increasingly intense, making their presence felt on the set with a weary regularity. The editor had put together some rough cuts of scenes which Gordon asked to see well before the DGA rules allowed him to get a look at it. Rightly, Lars refused to let him look at the footage. But some exec managed to sneak a flash drive out of the editing bay and he took it straight to Gordon’s office, so Gordon did in fact see footage he had no right to see, and he wasn’t happy. In spite of everyone’s delight at the dailies, he expressed his unhappiness with the direction of the scenes, the look of the sets—that rumor turned out to be true as well—and demanded substantial reshoots. After hours of wrangling with executives, Lars refused to reshoot a single frame, at which point Gordon threatened to pull him off the movie. Phone calls were made to and from the DGA, and agents and execs screamed at each other regularly, and one day the lunch break extended into two hours while it was determined whether or not Lars would return to the set, which if he didn’t would put the entire movie in jeopardy as well as cost the studio millions. Then, suddenly, it all got settled somehow and everyone went back to work.