The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [3]
“He’s right, you know,” her mother said. “Female nudity isn’t controversial anymore. Tell the director that he needs to film a penis if he wants to get a reaction.”
“Okay, I’m beginning to think that you don’t understand the problem,” Annie said.
“What’s the problem, honey?” her mother asked.
“I don’t want to take my top off. I don’t want to take my pants off. I definitely don’t want Ethan to take his pants off. I want to film the scene the way we rehearsed it.”
“Well, that sounds pretty boring to me,” her mother said.
“That does not surprise me,” Annie said and once again hung up the phone thinking that she had chosen to surround herself with people who were, for lack of a better term, retarded.
A voice from the next stall said, “If I were you, I’d tell them to give me an extra hundred thousand bucks to show my tits.”
“That’s nice,” Annie said. “Thanks for the advice.”
When she called her brother, Buster said that she should climb out the window of the bathroom and run away, which was his solution to most problems. “Just get the hell out of there before they talk you into doing something that you don’t want to do,” he said.
“I mean, I’m not crazy, right? This is weird?” Annie asked.
“It’s weird,” Buster reassured her.
“No one says a thing about nudity and then, the day of the shoot, I’m supposed to take off my top?” she said.
“It’s weird,” Buster said again. “It’s not totally surprising, but it’s weird.”
“It’s not surprising?”
“I remember hearing that on Freeman Sanders’s first movie, he filmed an improvised scene where some actress gets humped by a dog, but it got cut out of the movie.”
“I never heard that,” Annie said.
“Well, I doubt it’s something that Freeman would bring up in meetings with you,” Buster responded.
“So what should I do?” Annie asked.
“Get the hell out of there,” Buster shouted.
“I can’t just leave, Buster. I have contractual obligations. It’s a good movie, I think. It’s a good part, at least. I’ll just tell them I’m not going to do the scene.”
A voice from outside the stall, Freeman’s voice, said, “You’re not going to do the scene?”
“Who the hell was that?” Buster asked.
“I better go,” Annie said.
When she opened the door, Freeman was leaning against a sink, eating a sandwich that looked like three sandwiches stacked on top of each other. He was wearing his standard uniform: a black suit and tie with a wrinkled white dress shirt, sunglasses, and ratty old sneakers with no socks. “What’s the problem?” he said.
“How long have you been out here?” Annie asked.
“Not long,” he said. “The continuity girl said you were in the bathroom and people were starting to wonder if you were just scared about taking off your top or if you were in here doing coke. I thought I’d come in and find out.”
“Well, I’m not doing coke.”
“I’m a little disappointed,” he said.
“I’m not going to take my top off, Freeman,” she said.
Freeman looked around for a place to set his sandwich and, apparently realizing he was in a public restroom, opted to hold on to it. “Okay, okay,” he said. “I’m just the director and writer; what do I know?”
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Annie yelled. “Some guy I’ve never met before comes by my apartment and I just stand there with my tits out?”
“I don’t have time to explain the complexities of it to you,” Freeman said. “Basically, it’s about control and Gina would want to control the situation. And this is how she would do it.”
“I’m not going to take off my top, Freeman.”
“If you don’t want to be a real actor, you should keep doing superhero movies and chick flicks.”
“Go to hell,” Annie said and then pushed past him and walked out of the restroom.
She found her costar, Ethan, enunciating his lines with great exaggeration, pacing in a tight circle. “Did you hear about this?” she asked him. He nodded. “And?” she said. “I have some advice,” he said. “What I would do is think of the situation in such a way that you weren’t an actress being asked to take off her top, but rather an actress playing an actress being asked to take off her top.”
“Okay,” she said, resisting