What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [10]
Two
The Actress was set to arrive in Bakersfield in the morning. She would be driven from Los Angeles, picked up from the studio at 6 a.m. sharp in a black sedan, and carried over the mountains into the city of Bakersfield to meet with the Director. She was a dedicated actress, script in hand as the sedan wound its way out of the quiet Los Angeles morning, a croissant and a carton of juice to sate her appetite. The driver respected her need for silence, her head bent over the script. She fought the nausea of reading against the car’s steady thrum.
The Director had told her explicitly not to worry much about the entire script: they were shooting only two exterior shots, coming quietly into Bakersfield without a lot of fanfare, and the rest would be filmed at a Los Angeles studio. The Actress already knew her lines, but it never hurt to read again or to review scenes that had nothing to do with her. The exteriors were to be shot on the outskirts of the city, somewhere along Highway 99: A woman is driving a car on a road, all alone. The woman has no one to talk to, hence the Actress had no real lines to rehearse. But the Actress knew, at the very least, that her facial expressions would have to match the mood of the final edit, would have to match what she saw in the parentheticals scattered all over the script: there would be voice-overs, something else telling the story besides her own face.
She put down the script and watched the slope of the hills roll by in the October morning light. Excursions like these—trips to actual locations, away from the studio lot, all in the name of authenticity—made her wonder about the fuss, whether it was much of a role at all. The Actress had two children and a husband at home. Luckily, most of this film was scheduled to shoot in Los Angeles; it was becoming too difficult to get away from the city for work. The roles had to be studio-shot for her to be able to accept them, but these days that meant only the smaller pictures or television. Color was splashing across enormous screens and that meant directors wanted to go out to the Painted Desert, to the skyscrapers of New York City, even Japan—the real thing, not a backdrop, had to appear on the screen. At first, she believed it to be nothing more than the directors and the studios wanting to show off their enormous budgets, but the films coming over from Europe flashed with a bold realism that signaled a readiness to deepen the craft. Even the actresses appeared as if they were hauled in from the street, frighteningly believable and fully invested in their roles, not a hint of studio training in their performances. Maybe they were not even actresses at all, but authentics: a housewife, a drunk, a gold digger, a prostitute.
She had her own doubts about her ability. Sometimes she wondered if she hadn’t been born twenty years too late, the way she’d been ushered in, discovered when she was up north in the Valley, way past Bakersfield, at the little college where she had modeled. Ushered in: a little star on a string, handshakes with the right people, a contract to sign, scripts to read, and her cooperation at every turn. In exchange, a whole bevy of people hovered around her: hair stylists and publicists, women who led her to Los Angeles department stores for personal fittings, awards ceremony appearances. A whole other life that had nothing to do with acting, nothing to do with any realism, nothing on the level of those European actresses, who came from places rising up out of the rubble of the war and knew a thing or two about stories.
Her scene today would be a woman driving a car, not a word said to anyone. Tomorrow, a character actor would arrive for a scene to be shot somewhere to the east of this very road she was traveling, maybe out by Lancaster. In the scene, the woman has pulled over to the side of the road to sleep for the night, only