“Thanks for coming so fast. When’d you get here?”
“Yesterday afternoon. I stayed at James’ place last night.”
Rob had bent to sit down but froze with his butt in the air. “You didn’t tell him …”
“No, he doesn’t know why I’m here.”
“Good.” Rob lowered himself the rest of the way into his chair. “You look great.”
I sat across from him at the patio table. “You don’t look so bad yourself.” The lack of a ring on the fourth finger of his left hand only added to his physical appeal, but my eyes kept going back to the scar on his face. “How did you get that?”
“BASE jumping on Baffin Island. A cross draft hit me and I kissed a rock on my way down.”
“You BASE jump?” BASE jumping wasn’t an extreme sport in my opinion — it was a stupid sport. The risks far outweighed the thrills. Bungee jumping was my extreme limit.
“I did that day. We were up there shooting a thing for National Geographic. The guys had one more jump scheduled before we lost the light and they asked me if I wanted to try it. I figured, why not? I’d already shot their first three jumps and nothing bad had happened.” Rob was sounding dangerously similar to James — justifying stupid actions by saying it was okay because everyone else was doing it.
“What did you jump off?”
“A thirty-five-hundred-foot cliff.”
Rob was the first person I’d ever heard openly admit that he’d jumped off a cliff because everyone else had. Mothers around the world would have cringed if they’d heard him. “Weren’t you scared?”
“A bit. Mostly of the polar bears on the ice where we landed, though. Those are some big mean bears! But I got some amazing shots, so it was worth it. Hey, that reminds me, I saw your piece in NG on Applecross. You’re getting pretty good with the camera. I was impressed.”
“Thanks.” My pictures had impressed a professional cameraman. That felt good. But a different camera was concerning me. Rob’s camera sat on the bar with its lens pointing toward me. “Is that thing still on?”
He went over to the bar and turned the camera around. “Nope, and it’s not a thing. It’s my constant companion. You may call him Icky.”
“Icky?”
He smiled and winked as he sat back down. “It’s an Ikegami.”
“And that means something to me because…?”
“Like you, it’s a brand.”
“You can stop that now. It’s wearing thin.” He had already doubled my usually allowed quota of one Butler Hotels joke per conversation.
“Sorry, I couldn’t resist. That was the last one.” He relaxed back into his chair.
“Maybe now you can tell me what’s going on?”
He nodded slowly. “Why don’t I just give you a sound bite about what’s been happening and then you can ask questions. Deal?”
“Deal.”
He took a deep breath. “Okay, here we go … just before Ted’s team blew up Albert, Pam found a severed foot. Pretty well everybody thinks it was a fake foot, but I’m not so sure, especially since the rest of Kate has been conspicuously absent from the set ever since the foot was found.”
I waited for him to go on, but his mouth stayed closed and he just smiled at me.
“That was one heck of a sound bite!” An incredibly effective sound bite, too. My curiosity had been detonated. “Who are Pam and Kate?”
“Pam’s one of our production assistants, although she might be adding chicken wrangler to her list of credits now. She’s the one who radioed Esther a few minutes ago. Kate was a PA, too. After hours she moonlighted as Dan’s location slut.”
I instantly thought of James’ Mandy. Location slut was an accurate moniker for her, in my humble sisterly opinion. “You don’t like Kate.”
“I don’t respect Kate. Or, if I’m right, I should say that I didn’t respect Kate. She seemed like a nice enough kid, and she wasn’t a bad PA, but she had too many stars in her eyes. She had an encyclopaedic knowledge of almost every television show that’s aired in the last thirty years. I mean, really, who actually knows all the lyrics to The Flintstones theme song? Kate did. And she had a severe case of fan-itus extremis.”
“How old was she?” I’d picked up on Rob’s use of the past tense so quickly and easily that it worried me.
“Early twenties? Pam would know.”
Would James end up like Dan — a sixty-plus man having sex with someone who was young enough to be his granddaughter? He was well on his way down that road with Mandy; she was young enough to be his daughter. “Was she using Dan for his production contacts?”
Rob shook his head. “Kate didn’t think like that. Have you met Mandy yet?”
“Unfortunately, I had the displeasure of meeting her yesterday.”
“Yeah, she’s a piece of work. She’s a professional user, but Kate was too naive to think that way. She didn’t go after Dan the way Mandy sunk her claws into James. She was impressed by Dan’s resume and maybe she even liked him, God knows why, but I don’t think she was using him. The use and abuse went the other way. Dan’s always likes having a sweet young thing in his bed — and he likes to brag about it, about how he’s got more stamina than Hugh Hefner, without needing Viagra. A few of us old-timers have worked with Dan a couple of times over the years and more than once he’s shown up on the set with a new fiancée, as he calls them. The engagements, paid or otherwise, usually last the duration of the shoot. This time he showed up alone and didn’t get engaged until the third day he was here. Whether or not Kate knew she was just something to do on location is anybody’s guess.”
“Maybe she figured it out and left?”
“Leaving behind her foot and her luggage?” Rob shook his head. “I may work in fantasy land, but that doesn’t mean I believe it.”
“You said something about Albert being blown up right after the foot was found. What did you mean by that?” Maybe blow up was a technical TV term? Albert didn’t look like he’d been explosively blown up to me.
“That he was blown up. With explosives. How else would you blow somebody up?” Rob shook his head as if he couldn’t believe that I’d asked such a dumb question. “They strapped him into a skiff, loaded the boat up with explosives, drove it by radio remote until it was in the middle of a shot, and blew him up.”
“But I’ve seen him. There isn’t a scratch on him.”
“They didn’t blow up the real Albert!” Again, he looked amazed by my apparent stupidity. “They made a dummy, and named him Albert. He’s not exactly the most popular guy on the shoot. It was a cathartic blowing up for all of us.”
“Maybe the foot was a cathartic foot, not a real one?”
“That’s the problem, no one knows for sure. Pam threw it away. She swears it was a fake, but it’s mighty coincidental that Kate suddenly left the production at the same time. And the special effects guys aren’t bragging. That, in and of itself, is strange. They like to brag about their stuff if it’s good. If it’s bad, they blame it on materials or the production crew.”
My thoughts started to get dizzy trying to keep straight what was real and what was fake. “Why didn’t you get it out of the garbage to look at it more closely?”
“It’s not in the garbage. It’s fish food now. Pam threw it out to sea.” The doorbell rang. (I didn’t even know I had a doorbell.) Rob stood up and started to walk into the villa. “Adam was in the chopper doing beauty shots when she tossed it and he says he caught her throwing it away.”
A few minutes later he came back onto the patio, pushing a wheeled table. There were three covered dishes on it, two glasses, a bucket of ice, and six Diet Pepsis.
“Are you sure you don’t want any?” he asked after sitting down and lifting the lid off one of the covered dishes to reveal fries, coleslaw, and the largest bacon cheeseburger I’d ever seen.
“It’s only ten thirty …”
“My shift started at six.”
I stood up to get the cordless phone from t
he bar. “They screwed up the drinks order. You asked for Diet Coke, right?”
Rob nodded while he chewed his first bite of hamburger. “But Donnella wasn’t there. She’s the one with the secret stash of Coke.”
“You make it sound like it’s something illegal.” I read the label on the back of the phone to see what number to dial for room service.
“It pretty well is around here.” He scooped up a forkful of coleslaw. “Dan signed some mega product placement deal with Pepsi. Name the Pepsi product, Doritos, Lays, Mountain Dew, Ocean Spray, those you can get. But Coke products? Nada! Dan banned them from the island for the duration of the shoot because he didn’t want them accidentally showing up in a shot.” The coleslaw finally made it to its destination.
“But I don’t like Diet Pepsi and I’m not part of the show.” I put the phone back down on the base. “How do I find this Donnella person?”
“She’s the head of housekeeping, but she won’t give you the Coke unless I talk to her first. She could get in real trouble if Dan found out about her stash.”
“I wouldn’t tell him.” I returned to the table and dejectedly opened a can of Diet Pepsi.
“She doesn’t know that. All she knows is that your last name is Butler — ergo you either work with James on the production or you’re here to check up on the hotel.” He wiped a drop of mayonnaise off of his lower lip. “I’ll talk to her, but you have to promise to never tell Dan where you got it and to only drink it here, in your villa. There are cameras everywhere and if you’re walking around with a Coke product you’ll ruin every shot you’re in.”
“Promise,” I said with my fingers crossed behind my back. I’d keep the name of my Diet Coke dealer secret, but had absolutely no intention of keeping the second half of my promise. In fact, I planned to go out of my way to break it. Once I scored I was going to make darn sure that I had a can of Diet Coke in my hands at all times. “Let’s get back to Kate. What makes you so sure that it really was her foot?”
“Kate had a little blue octopus tattooed on her ankle and Pam said she saw part of a tattoo just like that. And Kate’s gone. The thing is, Kate never would have quit, even if she’d figured out that Dan wasn’t after her for her personality. This job meant everything to her, especially with the movie crew just coming in. That’s what she really wanted, to move to LA and work in features with the big stars.”
“Maybe she got offered a job in LA?”
“Uh-uh. This was her first production job. She didn’t have any experience, never mind enough experience to get a job on features.” He pushed plate number one aside and started in on the large Caesar salad on plate number two. “She tried getting friendly with the DOC …”
“DOC?”
“Director of cinematography. He flew in with the second unit.” My face must have given away the fact that I, once again, had no idea what he was talking about. “The special effects guys, they came in early to test stuff out.”
“James said you were shooting a reality show. What do you need special effects for if it’s reality?”
Rob didn’t do a very good job of hiding his laughter. “Careful, I’ll have to start calling you Virginia if you keep talking like that.”
“Virginia?”
“Yes, Virginia … hate to break it to you, there isn’t a Santa Claus, and as for reality TV, well, it’s real TV — a product that’s produced to entertain.”
“So the explosion, the blowing up of Albert, that the special effects guys did, that was part of the reality show?”
“Technically, yes, it happened while we were shooting the reality show, but what we were shooting was the commercial crew who flew in to shoot the commercials that the last two contestants had to make as their second-last challenge. The special effects guys are here for the movie, not the television show.”
“And not for the commercial, right?”
“Right. They had to come down early because, go figure, the airlines won’t let you transport explosives on their flights, so they had to source as much as they could locally and they weren’t sure what kind of explosions they’d get out of the stuff they found down here.”
“What do you mean the kind of explosions? Things either go boom or they don’t.”
“And some explosions have big booms, some have little booms, and sometimes a director wants an orange flame, sometimes he wants a whiter, hotter looking one, he might want black smoke or he might want white smoke …”
“And sometimes he is a she. There are female directors, too, you know.”
Rob ignored my comment. “Sometimes a car is supposed to burst into flames and flip in the air, sometimes it’s supposed to just smoulder …”
“Not really, except for the foot. If it was a fake, it would have had to been made by the special-effects makeup crew. A prop like that would be expensive. Way too expensive for a joke.”
“But they did blow up Albert, right? Why? They aren’t even working on the television show.”
Rob shrugged his shoulders. “For fun? I bet Dan had something to do with it, though. He’s a media whore and an outtake like that would definitely get airplay on a show like TMZ or Access Hollywood, and a simple boat explosion wouldn’t cost much. Dan could anonymously make sure the clip got leaked and then sit back and enjoy the free press promoting the show. He’s been behind a bunch of the jokes that the crews have pulled on each other.”
“Which crews? The television people, the commercial people, or the movie people?” I felt like I was standing between three mirrors in a house of mirrors at a carnival, surrounded by a multitude of distorted images of reality.
Rob picked up my glass and took a sip of my drink. “How do you drink this carbonated stuff? It’s awful!” He went over to the bar, bent down, and then stood up holding a can of iced tea — Lipton Iced Tea, presumably a Pepsi brand. “Let me give you a synopsis of who’s doing what down here.”
“Please!” People were blowing up, but they weren’t. There were crews and teams and units, all of whom were shooting something or other, but no one had been shot.
“First off, forget about the commercial crew. They came, they shot, they left. They were only here for a couple of days and we were pulling long shifts, so Kate didn’t get a chance to know any of them. Now for the reality show, James came up with the series idea. He put it together and brought Dan in. He did that partly because of Dan’s distribution connections with the U.S. networks and partly to get himself into features with Dan — theatrical releases, the movies shown in theatres. We, the television crew, have been here for a couple of months and we’re almost done. James’ company hired us, but we technically work for Dan, too. Once we’re out of here, Dan’s company is going to shoot a feature on the island. His producer hired that crew out of LA …”
“But I thought Dan was the producer of the movie?” A few more mirrors popped up in my mental carnival.
Rob shook his head. “Uh-uh. He’s the executive producer. He makes the deals; for financing, distribution, stuff like that, and executive producers have final approval on the director, the leads —”
“The what?”
“The stars. The producer, or producers, there’s usually a couple of them, take care of actually making the show. They hire the crew, but the director, hired by the executive producer, usually has final say on the big-ticket crew members, like the TD, DOC, senior editor, people like that. The producers hire the regular crew, arrange for craft services, transportation, rent the equipment, and stuff like that.” Rob stopped talking and started laughing — at me.
“What?”
“Your face! Now I know what dumbstruck looks like. It’s really not that complicated, you know.”
“Maybe to you! To me, it’s like you’re speaking a foreign language. You’re using terms
that I’ve only ever seen on the movie screen when I’m leaving the theatre. Nobody reads them and I guarantee you most people don’t have a clue what they mean.”
“Okay, how’s this — you don’t know exactly what everyone in a shoelace factory does, right?”
I nodded and resisted the urge to ask what shoelaces had to do with anything. For all I knew shoelace was a technical term for yet another complicated aspect of television or movie production.
“All you care about is that shoelaces are made and you use them. They’re a product, right?”
Another nod, with very little actual comprehension propelling it.
“We, all of us working on this island, either for Dan or James, we’re just shoelace factory employees. We work on the line, making a product. You don’t have to know or understand what each one of us does. All that matters to you, the consumer, is that we do it and that you can go out and buy shoelaces whenever you want.”
“But we’re not talking about shoelaces! We’re talking about movies and television shows.”
“They’re the same thing when you get right down to it. They’re products. The only difference to the audience, or consumer, is that movies seem a lot more glamorous. To the guys who actually work on them, they’re not. We show up, punch in, do our shift, go home at the end of the day, and the product gets made. We light, look, and listen. That’s it. And we probably have more fun doing our jobs than the guys in the shoelace factory. I mean, look around! I’m getting paid to be here — it really is a sweet job. Upper management, the exec producers, make sure that the right product gets made, based on market conditions or what the consumer wants, and find store shelves or movie screens to sell the product from. Middle management, or the producers, make sure that the production line runs smoothly, on time and on budget.”
The mental mirrors in my head were sort of, almost, starting to come into focus. “The shoelace thing, that helped, a little.”
Rob checked his watch. “I’m running out of time, so it’ll have to do for now. Can I get back to what’s going on here? Are you good on who’s doing what?”