THE NEXT MORNING, JUDE AND I SIT SIDE BY SIDE, FACING OURSELVES in the mirror, as the makeup crew dutifully transforms us into Stanhope Goldstein and Peter von Luftig.
Madge and her assistants work fast, in a more focused way now, but the makeup still takes almost three hours, and I’m too wired from coffee, and too anxious in general, to snooze through any of it.
They’re careful to differentiate Stanhope’s particular cauliflower deformities from Peter’s. It’s obvious that Peter is a totally unnecessary character anyway, but there’s so much already wrong with Oren’s script, why dwell on that?
Plus I’m not going to rain on Jude’s parade. He is so excited.
“Look at us!” he squeals, as Deb delicately adjusts the cauliflower florets growing out of his face so they’re in a different arrangement from mine.
The makeup is only from the neck up, thank Christ, so it’s up to the costume department to figure out the rest. They try out all different kinds of stuff on us—from black trench coats, which give us that cliché cauliflower-gangster look, to these skin-colored body stockings that make us look like a sexually ambiguous ice-skating duo in a super-fucked-up Olympics.
When we try on Mexican ponchos with sombreros, I realize Oren’s begun texting the costume department with some last-minute ideas. It’s a sad testament to how little anyone understands who or what we’re supposed to be that we go through maybe twelve different looks before Samantha Childress—who refused to take any measurements, fitted us for nothing, and is pretending this whole thing isn’t happening—gives us these cream-colored tunics, belts, and stretch pants. Now we look like Luke Skywalker twins at a Costa Rican yoga retreat. Oren texts back: Fabulous! Just as I pictured them!
Samantha rolls her eyes, carts off the remaining looks, and then we’re off.
When we get to the set, escorted by a small entourage of makeup and costume assistants, it’s total pandemonium. As soon as they see me, the crew all give me this please save us look. The second A.D. fills me in on the morning’s events.
Oren is still in the process of filming the end of his first scene. Apparently Lorenzo Mayberry was awakened from his deep hibernation to play the evil shaman, wearing not a “tan robe,” as the script indicated, but a shimmering, silver, three-piece suit that made him look like a futuristic game-show host. Having never been treated for his lifelong narcolepsy, he fell asleep twice in the middle of speaking his lines.
Then Oren decided Juston Bieberman should have a monologue on his walk back to his farmhouse, before the killer cauliflowers burst out of the ground, to show the character’s “inner torment.” Oren is dressed in white H&M overalls and an oversize straw hat (Samantha is purposefully making him look like a buffoon, and he has no idea).
He’s trying to remember his new lines while simultaneously directing Jip to follow his new blocking, which is frustrating the hell out of the camera crew. The floor is a mess of colored tape, marking the different camera positions and Oren’s own marks, which keep changing. Whenever Oren can’t remember his lines, he takes it out on everybody else, like they’re the ones messing up the shot.
“‘But of course,’” he mumbles, stumbling out of frame, “‘I would never steal the shaman’s seeds. For what am I, except a good man who doesn’t do that.’”
“Stay on your mark!” someone yells.
Oren waves him off, annoyed, and continues. “‘I don’t need stolen seeds. . . . I enjoy moonlight and long walks by a beachfront, and melons and nice books about pigeons and playing darts, that’s me, a nice farmer fellow, I would sooner . . . sooner . . .’” He stops and looks down, holding the sides of his head, trying to remember what comes next. He kicks the ground, scowling at the crew. “Where are the songbirds? Cut!”
“What?” the camera op screams.
“I asked for a flock of songbirds to lift off at that moment!” He mimes birds swarming around him.
“What the hell are you talking about?” a production designer screams.
“I asked for songbirds!” Oren yells. “I need a flock of them to lift out of the trees and circle around my head . . . singing. Where’s the bird wrangler?”
Someone tells him there is no animal wrangler at Moldavia.
“No birds?” Oren says, incredulously. “No birds? What is going on here? We had birds in The House That Moaned Murder. I distinctly remember that.”
Someone explains those were just random birds flying above the outdoor shoot.
“Also,” says Oren, his straw hat slipping over his eyes, “I need like a piece of straw or a stem to chew on. Don’t farmers chew on stems or straws when they speak?”
Oh, dear God.
“Ah!” he says, seeing us, running over. “Look at you. I changed my mind about the whole purple cauliflower thing because this is just perfection.”
“How is it going?” I ask, tentatively.
“Oh, you know,” says Oren, taking off his hat, looking around, like he’s not sure where he is or how he got here. “I’m getting into my groove. I need a stem to chew on.”
First A.D. Eric comes over, tapping his watch. He looks like someone who’s just returned from a horrible war. “We’re losing time.”
“You know,” says Oren, “I don’t think we need this monologue after all. We have a usable take of me coming back to the farm sans monologue, right?”
Eric’s face reddens. “Of you just walking home? Yeah. From four hours ago.”
“Great,” says Oren. “Let’s just use that and move on to the next setup.”
“The crew will need lunch soon,” says Eric.
Oren giggles. “Do I look like Chef Boyardee?”
“I didn’t suggest you start grilling hot dogs.” I’m starting to like Eric. “I’m just saying we need to get the crew down to the commissary soon. We’ve been here all morning. People need to eat.”
“Sure,” says Oren. “Let’s just do this next scene and then we can all get fed!”
Eric emits a long sigh and says something into a walkie-talkie. There’s a staticky reply, and then in a flash Jude and I are fitted with AMSPEC harnesses.
We get prepped to fly while they set up the rig. At least an hour goes by while they reconfigure the lights and change the camera positions. The floor is retaped. We barely rehearse, and then we’re up in the air, dangling over the pumpkin patch. “Aren’t we supposed to burst out of the ground?” I shout down.
“I’ll get that shot later!” says Oren.
“Yes, but . . . we’re flying over undisturbed dirt,” I say, pointing down. No one’s tending to continuity or any of the details at all, which concerns me.
“That won’t be in the shot,” says Oren.
“It is in the shot,” says the camera op.
“Just frame them higher,” he says.
“If we frame them higher, the light reflects off their wires,” says the op.
“Can’t we digitally delete that in post?” says Oren.
Yes, they can do that in post, the assistant camera op explains, but that takes time and resources. It’s best to get everything as close to perfect during production—a good piece of advice that Oren doesn’t seem to pay any attention to.
Oren, the camera op, and Jip have a heated conversation—or more like an argument, half of it in Dutch—about how they want to handle this, which results in them having to move the camera and change the lights while we just hang there.
“No, we can’t do a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree pan!” someone shouts. “We’d have to move walls. It would take all day to relight!”
“I don’t see why that’s not an option, but fine, yeah, yeah,” says Oren, waving away Jip. “Wat je ook wilt!” He comes over to us, looks up, and explains that for this first shot, the camera will be tight on our faces and he’ll shout his lines off camera.
Oren throws a pair of headphones around his neck. He runs over and sits in a director’s chair with his name chalked on it, intensely studying the shot on a monitor.
Someone tells Oren they’re ready.
“Quiet on set!”
“Roll sound.”
“Roll camera.”
“ACTION!” Oren shouts.
“‘Are you the farmer Bieberman?’” I yell down, trying not to crash into Jude.
There’s a long pause.
“Darn it all,” says Oren, clasping his head. “Sorry, I’m sorry. Can someone give me a shooting script?”
Someone literally hurls a script at Oren. “Great. Let’s go again!” he shouts.
“We’re still rolling!”
“ACTION!” Oren screams.
“‘Are you the farmer Bieberman?’” I yell again.
Oren loudly pages through the script for way too long. Then: “‘I am him. Who is asking?’” he shouts over at us.
“‘I am Stanhope Goldstein, leader of the Killer Cauliflower Revolution.”
At that moment a primal, earsplitting roar erupts from behind the farmhouse, and an enormous werewolf crashes through the front of the facade. Clipboards, pencils, papers, walkie-talkies, everything goes flying as people scatter, screaming. The towering werewolf, with glistening silver fur, yolky eyes, and fangs covered with bloody slime, lunges into the pumpkin patch. He drops into a predatory crouch and then rises up again, claws extended, howling a bloodcurdling cry at an unseen moon.
“Holy shit!” someone screams.
Part of the set collapses on top of our fly system, sending Jude and me spinning out of control, in danger of coming loose and plummeting down right on our heads. “Help us!” I scream. Two brave crew members run over with ladders and quickly dismantle the equipment as the werewolf scampers around; we plop down safely on a pile of leaves only a few feet from the salivating monster. We rip off our harnesses and scramble away.
The creature begins to growl. “I want human meat!” he roars in a deep voice. The monster looks around at everyone cowering, trying to pick out his lunch.
Do werewolves talk? I’m not sure they do. This one sounds a lot like Lester Carver, Moldavia’s super-tall, super-talented resident creature actor, who works with the creature effects department on the secretive third floor of the Whale Wing. They’re led by eccentric genius Jasper Raines and his genius wife, Barbara Pandova, to create some of Moldavia’s most memorable monsters.
The werewolf roars again, swiping at the air. The remainder of the set crumbles behind him, leaving the werewolf standing in a pile of wreckage, a cloud of dust partially obscuring him. Rust-colored light shines through the dust, backlighting the werewolf’s silhouette and all his coarse body hairs, making them look like tiny needles.
Hayley appears at the other end of the room. Her mouth is open wide. Our eyes meet, and I get a sickening feeling. I acted like a child. I should have pulled the plug on this yesterday, but I let Oren get to me—again. And he was right: I wanted revenge. My judgment got clouded, and I almost got people killed. I had no idea it would get this bad.
“Cut!” Oren yells.
The werewolf gives a vague nod, turns around, and then stalks off the way he came, through the destroyed set, disappearing into the darkness beyond.
Blasted, my dad would say. He used to say that whenever a bulb randomly exploded, with a loud pop and a sprinkle of glass, but then it became synonymous with anything that went disastrously wrong.
There’s momentary silence. Then everyone who took cover behind equipment, or ran to the far corners of the room in terror, starts to convene sheepishly in the center of the room to survey the damage. “The set is toast,” says Joaquin, the production designer, shaking his head. “That’s at least two weeks to rebuild.” Work boots crunch over broken glass. Several walkie-talkies crackle. People cough, waving dust away.
I pick myself up off the floor, and help Jude up. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” says Jude, a little dazed. “You?”
Oren runs over, looking thrilled. “I told you!” he says, clasping his hands in front of him. “I just needed today!”
“Oren, what the hell was that?” I say.
“I wasn’t sure where to go with this whole cauliflower thing. It was getting a bit long at four hundred pages, and I thought: What if we subvert expectations? At the beginning, people would think this is just another movie about a farmer being attacked by mutant cauliflowers . . . but then, boom . . . it becomes a classic moonlit werewolf tale.”
“That makes no sense!”
“People have a hard time understanding something truly unique. At first people never get it.” He points at me. “At first. This would be different. Revolutionary!”
The crew has been listening in to this conversation, looking at one another in disbelief, and then looking at me like, Do something.
“We can rebuild the farmhouse,” says Oren with a fleeting, nonplussed glance over at the destroyed set. “It was worth it to get that shot! In the meantime we can focus on more intimate scenes, particularly when the werewolf, Kevin Shane Modigliani, goes to battle with Stanhope and Peter for control over Dr. Frankenstein’s summer villa—”
“This was your grand plan? To have a werewolf appear for no reason?” I have to end this now. This is only going to get worse the longer I prolong it.
“Dario. This horror film will reprogram audiences for generations!”
I think about Cassidy Blackwell coming, the possibility of having to sell Moldavia to Rusty Blade, and all those awful Backpacker movies they make. Still, this is so much harder than I thought it would be.
I take a deep breath. “Oren. I need you to leave the set now.”
“Yes, we should probably break for lunch—”
“No.” I have to rip the Band-Aid off. “I’m sorry. You’re fired.”
My words echo. There’s an awful silence.
“I’m . . .” Oren opens his mouth but it just hangs there, open.
I turn around to face the crew slowly gathering around us. “Can everyone give us a minute, please?” They all make a show of murmuring to each other and pretending to go back to work, picking up loose nails here and there, but intently focused on what’s happening between Oren and me.
“Dario,” says Oren with an uncertain smile, “you can’t really fire me.”
I beg him with my eyes not to make this worse than it already is.
Oren, his straw hat falling over his eyes, starts backing away. “Can I please have another chance to get this right?”
“We don’t have time . . . or the money. I’m sorry.”
There’s another endless pause while he stands there, his mouth still hanging open. Then he turns to everyone, and thumps his heart with his fist. The crew gives him a respectful, relieved, generous round of applause.
He takes in all this imaginary glory. Then he gets into his golf cart and zooms off. Everyone watches him go. The whirring of Oren’s cart gets farther and farther away and then, closer and closer, as Oren suddenly reappears. I take a breath, steadying myself for a longer confrontation, but Oren looks equally as surprised to see us. He grips the wheel tightly, incensed, and then slowly steps out of the cart, pointing at the ground. “I . . . lost my keys. . . .”
“So what do you want to do?” Eric says to me, after Oren finally leaves for the second fucking time. The makeup crew sets up chairs, this whole triage station on the set so they can get Jude and me out of our sweltering makeup as quickly as possible.
“Oren suspended production on No Chance in Hell?”
“That’s right.”
“Is the set still intact?”
“Everything’s ready to go,” says Eric. “We just need three more days on it.”
Suddenly, I’m making decisions. They’re just pouring out of me, involuntarily, like I was always studio chief, and I always knew how to delegate and solve things. “Okay. Can you be my second unit? Finish production on that while we regroup and I figure out what we’ll shoot next. I’m officially killing The Ciller Cauliflowers.”
Eric agrees. He can rally the crew, and we won’t lose too much time if we divert resources back to the other film temporarily, but I have to make decisions about what comes next fast. Then it hits me—I have three days to come up with another idea to replace this cauliflower fiasco.
I have some more back-and-forth with Eric about scheduling. Then he says something about them not resuming filming at all, on anything, for another two days.
“Wait, what?” I say. “Two days off? I’m confused.”
Eric looks surprised. “It’s Crepuscular Dusk.”
I forgot the first Friday of every month begins a Moldavia tradition—two days off so everyone can rest and get their wits back from the seven-day-a-week, thirteen-hour-a-day grind. There’s always a giant costume ball in the grand ballroom of the Carpenter Wing that begins at midnight of that first Friday. Resources like costumes and party food are recycled and redirected, so these soirees wind up costing the studio very little money.
Eric says this ball will take place in the slightly smaller ballroom of the Karloff Wing, since the graveyard set from No Chance in Hell is still spread out all over the other ballroom, and they’re behind schedule.
Hayley and Franklin come over.
Hayley tries to tell me something, but I’m still in studio chief mode, so I quickly explain my plan to them, and they seem to think it’s a solid next step, although no one has a clue what we should film next.
“I didn’t handle this well,” I tell Hayley. “I was just . . . so pissed at him.” I wince whenever I think of Oren’s face, that naïve devastation washing over him when he realized what was happening. “How is he? Have you seen him?”
“That’s actually why I came over,” says Hayley. “He’s not great. He’s standing on the roof.”
“He’s what?”
“He’s on the roof,” says Hayley. “Threatening to jump.”
We run out to the west lawn, the remains of my vegetal face falling away like so much tempura. By now it’s midafternoon, and the sky is becoming a bright, blank white that threatens anything. Firm gusts of wind stripe the lawn silver as the grass shudders. A bunch of the crew run out after us, and then the crowd slowly grows.
Oren is standing on the roof of the turret where his bedroom is. His window is wide open below him, and the curtains are blowing out. It looks like he climbed out his window and used a rope with a grappling hook attached to pull himself up onto the roof above. Oren is wearing a brown monk’s robe with the hood up, hiding his face. He’s holding a bell, which he rings once, grimly, as we all fan out in a loose Stonehenge formation around the open window.
Oren isn’t that high up, and the turret, one of the smaller ones, is over a big flowerbed, so he would probably only sprain his ankle if he fell. So really, he’s just standing there, looking like the cover art of a mediocre death-metal album, threatening all of us with the possibility of his own sprained ankle. Of course he could always fall the wrong way. As soon as I have that thought, I get scared. “Oren!” I yell up at him. “What are you doing?”
Head down, and shrouded, he responds only with another ring of the bell.
“Jump!” someone shouts. There’s a nasty burst of laughter. I turn around and the laughter immediately stops. Some of the younger, scruffier dudes in the props department are looking down, stifling laughter. Assholes.
“Oren,” says Hayley. “Come down from there. Let’s talk.”
Oren rings the bell once, takes a step closer to the edge. And then I just completely lose my shit. I fall to the ground and clamp my hands over my ears, desperately trying to shut out this whole experience. I press my forehead into the grass until it hurts. “Oren, get off the goddamn roof!” I scream into the ground.
I’m having flashbacks of Hugo. Oren is doing this on purpose. . . .
He’s all that’s left of my family. If I lost him because I was callous and vengeful, because of this stupid movie or this stupid studio, I don’t know what I’d do. I’m furious at my dad for putting me in this position, and furious at Oren for fucking up his one chance and leaving me no choice. I pound the grass. “Oren!”
“Take it easy,” says Jude, pulling me up. “This is a delicate situation.”
“Do something!”
Jude walks toward the castle, looking up, shielding his eyes. “Oren, I totally get you,” he says. “It’s hard when you want to do something different, or are different, and no one understands you. Trust me, I know. I love the idea of the cauliflower movie suddenly becoming this old-fashioned werewolf thing. That’s so cool. I totally saw it in my mind when you set up that amazing shot and freaked the fuck out of everyone. It was something Kubrick would have done.”
Oren slowly turns his hooded head to face Jude. He’s listening.
“Keep going,” I whisper to Jude.
“And it was so generous of you to invite me here and put me in one of your awesome horror movies. I’ve already had the best day of my life. Please don’t jump before I get to know you, and read more of your stuff. I think you’re a genius, and one day everyone’s going to know that. So don’t hurt yourself, man! I’ve known too many people who have hurt themselves in my life, and I don’t want to know another one, especially one I really admire.”
We all wait and see, with bated breath, how Oren will react. He gives us an almost imperceptible nod and rings the bell again. He looks toward me.
“Please come down,” I yell. “You’re really scaring me now!”
“Your brother loves you,” says Jude. “I know this ’cause all he did at Keenan was talk about what a cool guy you are. People are stressed right now, so decisions get made quickly and brutally. It’s not worth dying over. Please, let’s talk down here.”
Oren starts slowly backing away from the edge. I feel such a powerful hit of relief, it’s like I injected it. I turn to Jude. “Oh my God,” I say. “How did you do that?”
“I’ve talked people off ledges before. I’ve helped people who were on the brink.”
“Who? Who have you known who’s hurt themselves?”
“People,” says Jude with a shrug.
I hug him. “I love you, man. Thank you for talking my brother off the roof.”
“Ooooh no,” says Jude, pulling away, clapping his hands to his cheeks. “I actually didn’t help at all—he’s jumping.”
“What?”
I turn back in horror just in time to see this brown blur drop over the roof and into the flower patch below, followed by the rustle and crunch of mashed flowers, a muffled oof, and a dull ring. It’s the awful sound of a grown man who has lost sight of who he is, whose dreams just got dashed, jumping off a roof that isn’t high enough, and landing on his own bell.