All the while I'm adjusting my boobs, scratching my crotch, flushing bloody tampons down Warner Bros toilets, talking about and thinking about my clit and my vag—when they were horny, when they were dry, when they were angry and happy and cried. I looked like a woman. I had tits and ass and a vj. But I talked like a man—like a sailor—like my father: direct, bossy, judgmental, self-assured, genius.
Two actors are playing a scene, exchanging numbers.
I step in front of the camera.
"Who wrote this?"
"We're still rolling."
"Well fucking cut then! Who put this in here? I didn't write this!"
"I did," says Ruiz.
"Why. The script is locked."
"If they don't exchange numbers it doesn't make any sense."
"And how is that?"
"They won't know how to meet each other."
"Listen to me. There's no 555 in my screenplay. Watch old movies. People meet each other all the time, like in churches..like two guys meet in a church and then one says to the other, 'Let me know if you find anything,' then the other guy says, 'Ok.' Then they both get up and leave. They don't have each other's telephone number! They don't know what hotel each other is staying at! It doesn't matter!"
"But it's unrealistic. They wouldn't be able to get back in touch."
I look at Ruiz, shocked.
"Will you please tell me the last movie you watched that was realistic? Movies aren't realistic!! That's why people love them so much! Because they're free from the business of deciding when to meet and telling each other their phone numbers! Exchanging contact information is for real life, Ruiz, not for my movie!"
"Ok, Miss Lauren."
"Also, locked script—do you know what that means? It doesn't mean the script is perfect, ok? It doesn't mean that. It means we've decided to stop working on it and we're moving on. Anyone else makes any changes to that script..I'll..I'm not really sure what I'll do but whatever it is, it'll make Hannibal Lecter jealous. Fucking go again."
They say power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I admit, the power of directing was like a drug for me.
"Tuesday, you blow the least-stopped up side first."
She drops her tissue and looks at me.
"It's the stopped-up side that I'm interested in clearing."
"It's an illusion—it's one of life's many illusions. If you blow the side that seems least stopped up, you'll clear more of the obstruction."
"Do you know everything, Lauren?"
"I'm just a student of the world, Tuesday. Why don't you pick up your tissue and try again."
The star Tuesday Walker goes in her purse and makes an issue out of blowing the most-clogged side of her nose.
Everyone on set is completely silent as the dainty little superstar and I have a staring contest and then she walks all the way across the stage to the farthest trash can possible to throw away her Kleenex.
Or there's me:
"No. We need this shot. They have the boring conversation on the bed, made bearable by the fact that Amanda's undressing and feeling Tuesday's cunt, while Haines is exposition, exposition, exposition—a bunch of details the audience isn't going to remember anyway. Then if you just cut away from the scene, the scene doesn't have an ending—there's no button! So we need this shot so that at the end of the scene we can cut to a single view of Walker's face, in orgasm, shot from above, over Amanda's back. Boom! That's the end of the scene. You're right—it's not a sex scene. Not a real one anyway. But, literally, it is a sex scene because that's what the characters are really doing. Do you think, in the world of the characters, Amanda went up to her friend's apartment to give the audience exposition? No! She went up there to fuck! So even while to us the scene is about exposition and explaining a few details and that is really why the scene is in the movie, to them it's about a quickie at her apartment and without this quick little shot at the end..they never actually fucked in the scene. It gives it umph, it gives it pump, and you can't set up her undressing without seeing her cum so we're gonna do this boring exposition scene but at the end we're going to give it one and one-half seconds of lasciviousness that jumps the action forward. Do you see how it jumps the action forward? Have you seen Cape Fear, the remake?"
No one answers.
"Fuck it, just set up an overhead shot of that bitch cumming."
I light a Kamel.
"You smoke?"
"Since I was 12. Overhead shot. Bitch cumming. Body double of Amanda Haines over top of said bitch. Go."
And little by little, we etched it out. Some days it really was like water running a canyon and we'd only get one shot—or two. Then things would speed up and we'd shoot 4..5 pages. Shelly Kind hated me. Marcus Howell hated me. Warner Bros and Tuesday Walker and Amanda Haines hated me. About the only person I had on my side was Kristi, but I think on day 100, when everyone who started out on my crew was still on my crew, when the cast was still intact and punching it out—bleeding scenes that surprised me—they were there because they felt something growing on our set, and that was the knowledge that we were making something spectacular.