I DECIDE TO LET MOLDAVIA GUIDE ME A LITTLE, AND SEE FOR MYSELF just how off the rails Oren’s little cauliflower project is. I have to properly assess the situation before I can nix the flick.
It’s been four and a half hours, and Madge doesn’t think I’m hideous enough.
“Oh, what we’re doing to that beautiful face!” she frets, opening drawers, rifling through plastic containers in cabinets as I sit back in the chair and stare at my transformation in the mirror. Earbuds dangle down in my lap, playing faraway jazz.
They’re using rubber and foam latex as prosthetics, as well as globs of putty and mortician’s wax, to turn me into the scariest vegetable monster that’s ever been put on celluloid, since we have loads of competition there.
What they’re going for is some sort of Cronenberg-style melding of teenager and cauliflower. But the nature of my mutation, and of who I am at all, is a mystery because not even Oren comprehends this script—or his own characters. All we know is that Stanhope is the humanoid result of a shaman’s curse.
Oren gave the makeup crew loosely scribbled notes on a Post-it that no one could decipher, and then ordered several crates of cauliflowers so everyone could just, like, stare at them, hoping for inspiration, which made for one thrilling afternoon, I’m sure.
There are photos of cauliflowers all over the walls. There are also these creepy sketches Madge made of Stanhope as this hulking hybrid vegetable-boy. The only awful part of the makeup so far was the contact lenses, the color of dirty snow, which make me look like the victim of a shipwreck in the Arctic. I just hate putting anything in my eyes. Every few minutes Deb, Madge’s assistant, asks me to turn to her. She snaps a bunch of photos, and texts them to Oren, who’s somewhere else in the castle.
He texts back every time: More. Much more!
“More of what?” says Deb.
“We need sealer,” says Madge, and Deb runs off somewhere.
“What do you think?” Madge spins me around in front of the mirror.
“I’m just glad I’m not an asparagus.” A few hours ago I looked like someone smeared with doughnut glaze, but as they continued layering on the prosthetics, I got freakier. Now I’m starting to look like a giant wasabi pea.
Madge gets back to work. I lose track of time and nod off. When I wake up, I almost scream at my reflection. My neck is sprouting these cabbagy leaves, and my face is the actual head of the cauliflower—my dead gray eyes peering out of all these waxy white stems and florets. I look like a vegetarian-friendly version of the Elephant Man.
“Congratulations, you’re one of the healthiest foods in the world,” says Madge.
Oren’s been texting that he’s ready to see me.
I have so much cranial makeup on, I have a hard time making it down the staircase. I stagger, reaching out. Then I see something moving out of the corner of my eye. I yelp and almost fall down the stairs, but it’s Oren. He’s straddling the bannister, slowly sliding down it, with this insane expression on his face: bug eyes, delirious grin. He’s wearing a flowered yellow shirt with a super-wide collar, purple ascot, and fleece riding pants with leather patches on the knees.
“Please don’t sneak up on me,” I say, teetering, but it comes out all muffled.
Oren squints. “What did you say?”
“Please don’t sneak up on me!”
“Your keys are in the beak of a commie?” he says.
I try to grab onto him and almost fall down the stairs again.
“I’m sorry,” says Oren, “I just can’t understand you.” He hops off the bannister, looking at me. “Amazing! Look at you.” He spreads his arms. “Stanhope is alive!”
But I don’t feel particularly alive. I feel like I’m the living embodiment of Oren’s cluttered mind and his cracked logic—a horror movie in itself, but not one I want to watch or be in. Oren puts his fist under his chin, takes a step back, and studies me. “You know, I think I’d prefer you to be one of those purple cauliflowers.”
I adjust one of the prosthetics on my face so I can speak better. “No.”
Oren runs a finger across his lower lip. “You don’t see him as purple?”
“Who?”
“Stanhope.”
“I don’t know who Stanhope is supposed to be.”
Oren looks aghast, like there have been volumes written about Stanhope and his origin story, and I just haven’t been doing my homework. “He’s the leader of the killer cauliflowers, of course!” he bellows. “Who else would he be? The pool man?”
I take a breath. “No one seems to know who he is, though. Like . . . as a character.”
“Well, I don’t know why that would be. You definitely look like the Stanhope I imagined. Less purple, perhaps, but let’s not dwell.”
“Let’s not.”
He takes a sharp inhale. “So. What did you think of the script?”
God, I’ve been dreading this moment. My mind instantly goes into overdrive, wondering how honest I can be without hurting his feelings. “I think it needs work,” I say, treading carefully.
“Well, of course. This is my first go! What’s your recommendation?”
Burn it. Never write another word again. Never speak of it again.
“Maybe, like, sharpen the dialogue a bit? Figure out what the story’s about?”
“What do you mean?”
“Figure out what you’re trying to say.”
Oren places a hand over his heart, as if someone just told him he won a Pulitzer. He affectionately adjusts one of the cauliflower stems sprouting on my forehead. “You mean the story is so compelling, I should just swim around in it some more to further perfect what’s already so close to perfect it’s astounding.”
I don’t think I said that. I look around for a witness, but I can barely see out of my foggy lenses, and I’m feeling very unsteady on my feet.
Oren pokes my chest with his index finger. “Keep going.”
I’m feeling more and more uneasy. “Uh. Develop the characters. Figure out what the movie is really about. Like, what’s the subgenre, the theme, the general tone, or the point? Because like . . . nothing’s clear to me. I have no idea what you’re going for at all.”
Oren hugs himself. “I’m so glad you loved it.”
“I’m saying—”
“I know,” says Oren, suddenly wistful, “it’s strange . . . we’ve been out of touch for so long but still I was all nervous what you were going to think. Isn’t it great how the script mashes genres in a totally unique way while asking: What does life mean? What is death? Why do bad things happen to good people?”
“Is it . . . really asking those questions?”
“It asks so many questions,” he says, his voice swoony.
It’s clear Oren hasn’t heard a word I’ve said, and now I’m getting scared. He’s so lost inside his head, and his fantasy of all this, I’m not seeing a way in. There probably won’t be a happy resolution to this.
“Anyway!” says Oren, clapping his hands. “Shall we?” There’s a red golf cart with an angry monster mouth painted on the front parked at the bottom of the staircase. Oren motions me in and takes the wheel.
“When did we get one of these?” I say.
Oren steps on the gas, and my huge cauliflower head slams back hard against the seat as we go flying through the castle. “A month ago. It’s saved me tons of time! And it’s so fun, right?”
A few crew members leap out of the way, trampling over electrical wires, as we race through the halls, making these wild twists and turns at top speed; the wheels squeak across the slick marble floors. After a few minutes of this, it dawns on me that something is wrong. “Where are we going?”
“The Karloff Wing?” His voice goes up at the end a little.
“Oren. Are you lost?”
His face is all scrunched up, intensely focused ahead. But suddenly we’re back at the same staircase. “Good,” he says, pointing at it, putting the cart in reverse.
“We just went in a big circle.”
“I . . . lost my keys here.”
“You don’t have keys! You live in a castle with a bunch of rooms that never lock!”
How often does Oren actually leave his room?
He hops out of the cart.
“Oren!” I shout. “Please don’t make a thing of pretending to look for your keys.”
But he’s doing it. He’s pretending to hunt for his keys around the edge of the staircase. “I had them earlier,” he’s muttering, making a big show of patting his pants down. My head is starting to feel really heavy with all the wax and shit piled on it.
“Ah!” Oren yells, pointing down, like he found them.
Fifteen minutes later, after we circle around some more, Oren finally breaks down and asks directions from a passing member of the kitchen staff, and we arrive on set.
The exhausted-looking crew is standing in what once was the parlor of the Karloff Wing but is now a leafy pumpkin patch filled with fake pumpkins that look totally real; the facade of a dilapidated farmhouse towers over us. The set is amazing.
“My brother is here! Stanhope is here!” Oren screams as he careens in, nearly running over our gaffer as he skids to a stop.
I get out after him, wobbling, top-heavy, trying not to fall over. Everyone just stares at me silently.
“So what do you want to do here?” a young goateed guy asks Oren. He wears an earpiece and holds a clipboard. I soon learn his name is Eric, and he’s Oren’s first A.D.
It’s obvious everyone has been here all day, in a state of inactivity and confusion, and no one’s eaten yet. Jip is standing behind the camera, hands on his hips, a viewfinder hanging from his neck, muttering to his camera op.
“So what’s going to happen,” says Oren, making large gestures, “is that Stanhope is going to rise from beneath the soil and fly over the pumpkin patch. At that point, lasers will shoot from his eyes. Stanhope will declare himself leader of the Killer Cauliflower Revolution, and then he’ll give that speech about the state of humanity.”
“What speech about humanity?” I say, but it comes out all muffled.
There’s silence, then the sound of feet shuffling. “We’re set up for that other shot you wanted to do,” says Eric.
“Which shot?” says Oren.
“The one where the farmer guy—”
“Juston Bieberman?” Oren interrupts.
Everyone cringes at the name.
“Right,” says Eric, flashing me a pleading look. “Where he comes home from seeing the shaman and makes tea.”
“Oh!” says Oren. “Well, I’m not in costume for that.”
There’s a tense pause.
“We thought that’s where you’ve been all this time,” says Eric. “Getting dressed.”
“I don’t know all my lines yet. Time got away from me. I . . . misplaced my keys. . . .”
“We lost a lot of time,” says Eric, quietly. “Most of the day.”
“Ah,” says Oren, clearly trying to hide his panic. “Time.”
The script supervisor, this nervous-looking woman in a dark hoodie and glasses, flips through the call sheet; pages of the shooting script, today’s scenes, are attached. “There’s no dialogue here,” she says. “The shot is just you coming home from seeing the shaman.” She squints at the script. “And then you put on a pot of tea.”
“Well, let’s do Stanhope’s speech. He’s already in makeup.”
“I thought today was just a makeup test for him,” says Eric, frowning. “He’s not even in costume.”
“What speech?” I say.
“Last looks!” Oren screams.
“We’re not remotely ready!” someone screams back.
“It will take hours to change the setup,” says Eric. “Hours.”
“What if we just move a little more quickly?” says Oren.
“It doesn’t work like that,” I tell Oren. “They have to relight everything. That takes a lot of time.”
Eric glances at me, and then Oren. “Um. So . . .”
Oren picks up a megaphone. “Can we set up his flying rig?” Oren asks into the megaphone, making everyone jump a foot into the air. “Where is the Laser Man?”
“What is a Laser Man?” I ask, holding my ears.
Oren looks at me, dumbfounded. “The man . . . who makes all the lasers.”
Every single time I wonder: Is Oren kidding? The answer is always: Nope.
“I want them to look like they’re really shooting out of your eyes!” says Oren.
Eric stares at Oren. “There’s . . . no such man.”
Oren’s eyes go wide. “No Laser Man?” It’s like someone told him the Easter Bunny just died. “I don’t understand. Is he on vacation?” Oren tries to say something authoritative into the megaphone, but it just rings with deafening feedback.
“Where did you get that thing?” I ask.
Oren holds it out, displaying it for me, all excited and proud. “It was ordered for me last week. On Amazon dot com.”
“There’s only, like, thirty people here,” I say.
“Please,” says Oren, “we won’t get anywhere if you just argue.”
I try to level my gaze, but my head is so oversize I almost tip over.
“What do you want to do here?” says Eric. Maybe only I realize this is the second time he’s asked that in under ten minutes.
Oren discards the megaphone. “Listen up! I know this is my first time at this end of the lens! It’s a historic day! I came of age on the set of The Minotaur’s Masseuse as my father’s second A.D. I remember handing him cups of coffee as he composed his shots. It was almost like I could see through his eyes, but they weren’t my eyes, they were his eyes. We have to go on—through my own eyes, not his eyes.”
Everyone starts to get restless, so Oren just amps it up.
“We’re not going to get bought out by a studio that placates the masses, keeps making the same soulless crap over and over! We’re still a family at Moldavia! We owe our fans! And our future fans! And ourselves!” Oren traverses the set, fists clenched at his sides. “We have to fight!”
Hayley appears on set, watching Oren, her tongue pressed into her cheek.
“Fight!” Oren shouts, tripping over a cable.
Eric quietly suggests they wrap for the day, and Oren immediately agrees.
The crew breathes a collective sigh of relief. They’re famished and beleaguered, but they all manage a smile for Hayley as soon as they see her. They fan around her, like she’s the sun of their solar system. She talks with a few of the production designers, tapping at design sketches with a pencil, waving at people, while deftly shutting up a few crew members who seem to be mocking Oren, by giving them a single sharp stare.
She comes over to me with no reaction to my appearance whatsoever, like she runs into vegetable hybrid monsters every day around here. “So,” she says, “what’s your plan here, studio chief?”
Things are so chaotic, there wasn’t even a chance for the crew to mutiny. But I saw their desperate faces. I felt the tension. How does Oren not feel that? I wonder if he’s really that oblivious. “Obviously, we have to pull the plug,” I say.
Hayley nods. “Yeah, we need time to figure out what can replace this.”
Oren runs over to us, carrying a bunch of pages under his arm, dropping a few behind him. “Hi, guys. So that was a little rough, admittedly, but it was my first day. I bet Robert Altman’s first day was rough too, right?”
“I’m sure he knew how to get to the set, though,” I say. “I’m also sure he knew what scene he was shooting.”
“Who knows, though, right?” Oren starts shuffling through the pages.
I clear my throat, loudly. “Listen, Oren—”
“Dario.” He looks up at me, his eyes glossy. “Truthfully, I . . . I froze. I felt like I didn’t know if I could do it. I kept picturing Dad shaking his head at me. I really saw him at one point, looking down at me, a free-floating specter, a specter, telling me I could never do this, I could never be him, that I was a talentless fool.”
I look him in the eye. “But you aren’t him.”
“I know! But how can a creative man work when confronted by his father’s mocking specter? Could James Cameron work under those conditions? Could Werner Herzog?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Let’s call them up and ask that very question.”
“I panicked. Instead of getting in costume, I started worrying the script wasn’t good enough. That I could go deeper, really explore the psychological vicissitudes of these characters—all their foibles and peccadilloes—”
“Are you talking about the cauliflowers?” I ask.
“I want this to be truly great!” says Oren. “Different from anything we’ve ever done. So I ran upstairs and crouched. I crouched under a table in a sewing room and I started rewriting the whole script. Why? Why did I do this?”
I feel like my wax face is starting to melt. “Oren. You’re hysterical.”
“I did this,” he says, taking great heaves of breath, “I crouched there because I wanted this script to be perfect, and it’s not perfect yet.”
Hayley and I look at each other.
“I ate a salad,” says Oren, spreading out his hands, really setting the scene for us.
“What?” says Hayley, frowning.
“Yes, for lunch, about a year ago,” says Oren. “I looked in the salad, and there were some tomatoes and sprouts, lettuce of course, and this single lone cauliflower, this little fellow. And then it just hit me. There’s a film in this.”
The world will never know what might have been if Oren had eaten a meatball sub or some cottage cheese that day. He’s totally adrift from reality, and sinking under his own whacked-out ambitions.
The second A.D. approaches Oren and makes him sign off on tomorrow’s call sheet, forcing him to confront a schedule someone else had to make for him. “So tomorrow,” says Oren, “we’re going to make up for today. Promise. We’re going to shoot two major scenes in quick succession. Juston Bieberman’s return to his farm and then Stanhope rising out of the earth and giving his speech about civilization.”
“What speech about civilization?” I say.
Oren looks baffled. “I didn’t give it to you?”
I shake my head; a cauliflower floret hits me in the eye.
Oren starts madly flipping through pages. Then he hands me a stack of rumpled, tea-stained paper. “You only need to learn the first twenty pages for tomorrow.”
I snatch the pages. “Oh, is that all?”
“I guess we’ll have to wait on the lasers. I really thought we had a Laser Man.”
I clap my hands together. “Oren, look, I’m sorry, but—”
“Dario. I wasn’t sure at first how this could work. It’s hard . . . being a visionary—lonely, in a sense. But it is nice to have you back, supporting me. We all grieve in different ways. I didn’t expect, after all that prep and fanfare, how shocked I’d be by Dad’s death. How much it crushed me. Working on this script, preparing my directorial debut is the only thing that’s kept me sane over these last weeks.” He lays a hand on my arm. “Maybe, finally, we’ll truly become the brothers we were always meant to become.”
Oren exhales, dramatically, and runs over to talk to Jip. They point at the farmhouse, having a heated debate. Oren continues the conversation while looking through the wrong end of a viewfinder.
“I can’t believe he pronounced debut with a full-on French accent,” says Hayley.
“I don’t know how to take this away from him.”
“Look, Dario.”
“What?”
“No, look.”
She points at everyone on set—they’re all breaking for the day. I hear the sound of children. A few crewmen are reunited with their wives (who must work in different departments). Two of them have newborn babies. I watch these dudes put down their equipment and rock their wailing babies. A little boy, maybe five or six years old, finds his dad, one of the carpenters; the guy picks him up and lifts him in the air.
“I get it,” I tell her, feeling the pressure. “There are kids and families here.”
I guess I always knew, growing up here, that kids live here. But seeing it now, from the other side, is a totally different story. Whole families depend on this place. Every decision I make matters.
Hayley crouches down and ruffles the hair of a little redheaded boy. She looks up at me. “He knows how to press your buttons. He knows how to manipulate you, and he does it well. He’s more devious than you think.”
“He’s just a little kid.”
Hayley rolls her eyes. “Oren, you twit. Oren.”
“Oh.” I duck to the side as two crewmen walk past, carrying a skeletal wooden doorframe, a piece of the set, I guess. “Yeah, I know.”
“Just don’t fall for all that impish guile,” says Hayley.
I suck in my lips. “Is it an act?”
“Not totally,” she says, “but he knows what he wants and how to get it. He knows you came back here because you’ve been yearning your whole life for a real family.”
I take a step back, sawing my arms through the air. “Whoa. I’ve been purposefully avoiding all that crap for the last six years. Is that what you really think?”
Hayley smiles at the little boy and then turns the same smile on me like a follow spot. “Am I totally wrong?”
I don’t get the chance to respond. More kids run over, circling her. Of course she knows every single one. While I wait for her to pull out a magical umbrella and float away, Franklin comes over dressed in a natty pinstriped suit. He leans over and whispers something into Hayley’s ear. She stands and flips her hair over her shoulder, and they converse in low voices. Hayley gestures at me. “Okay. Tell him how it works.”
“Well,” says Franklin, removing his glasses, “in order to keep the studio running, every day is scheduled down to the hour. The studio has to work on a fairly regimented schedule so we can churn out a certain number of features a year.”
“We can’t lose days like this,” Hayley adds. “Your dad would give the production staff an estimated budget and they’d make a production schedule of the entire shoot in advance—since sets needed to be built, costumes made. We would never divert from that schedule unless something went very wrong.”
Franklin explains about stripboards, and cards color coded by location. I get a headache encompassing every part of my head.
“Oren was a good A.D.,” says Hayley. “He’s a capable producer too. He isn’t so bad at the behind-the-scenes stuff—if you tell him exactly what you need and when.”
“He’s basically an Irish setter,” says Franklin.
“But he has zero experience as a director, actor, or writer,” says Hayley. “And we can’t afford to play around right now while he figures out what movie he wants to make.”
We watch Oren zoom off in his cart, waving, while everyone dives out of his way.
“He’s just so excited,” I say.
“All I can do is tell you how your dad ran this place,” says Hayley.
The way Hayley acts with the little kids, with the crew, diplomatic and balletic, makes my heart swell; she’s smart and capable, and there’s a boundless kindness wrapped around it all. I don’t want to let her down. But I don’t want to break Oren’s heart either—he’s just starting to see me as a real brother. I never knew how much that even mattered to me till now. Christ. Is Hayley right about all that?
I’m in an impossible position.
“Cassidy Blackwell from Rusty Blade Films will be visiting in about two months,” says Franklin. “He may come prepared with an offer. He had some sort of loose understanding with your father that we’re not privy to. It’s preliminary, as I said. However, if our goal is to preserve the Moldavia legacy, we want to be in as strong a position as possible . . . just so we can look at all our options objectively.”
“Jesus,” I sputter, wiggling my fingers around like mad, “that’s in no time. . . . How am I supposed to . . . ? This is so stressful. . . . How can I possibly get the studio back on track by then? How? How? I’ve inherited a sinking ship!”
“We’re here to help,” says Franklin.
“Then help!” I take deep inhales until I catch my breath. “Sorry. I have to think,” I tell them, pulling at my face. “And I can’t think in this . . . fucking . . . cauliflower thing. Where’s Jude?”
“In your room,” says Hayley. “He was lying in bed reading comic books last time I checked. Oren never told anyone when or where he was needed.”
Everything was a disaster today—day care, meals, the filming itself—because there was no shooting schedule. No one knew what was happening. This is also my first official day as studio chief—a fact not lost on me or on anyone else, probably.
And I feel bad for Jude. He needs somewhere to be. He doesn’t like to be alone. I managed to let him down too. Franklin tells me everyone is heading down to supper now.
“I’m really hungry too,” I say, looking around. “And I can’t eat wearing all this makeup. I can barely move my mouth.”
At that moment, someone from the makeup crew sidles up to inform me, having overheard this conversation, that we should probably get started now, because it might take up to three hours to remove all the makeup and prosthetics.