What Movies Made Me Do by Susan Braudy Page B

watched her sweaty brow over the flame. I knew Jack saw this movie as his chance to do serious work, and she wasn’t catering to him enough. I said, “Anita, Michael sent me here to fire you.”
    She whammed the crutch into the fire and looked at me in disbelief.
    “The studio wants to relieve you of your post of captain of this—” I deliberately looked around the room at the steaming pot in the fireplace, the littered table, and two white chickens with red combs pecking at her cameraman’s bare feet.
    “This piece of modern art,” she said sharply.
    I focused on the pink peeling spot on her nose. I felt exhausted by a mix of power and guilt, like I was swatting a butterfly with a huge hammer. “Michael is tired of your arty meshugas, and he wants to bring in a new director next week.”
    “What’s Michael’s problem,” she snapped, “besides his brain, his personality, his self-image, the size of his dick, and his world view?”
    “You.”
    “Fuck all,” she said expressionlessly.
    I summoned my energy. “You won’t talk to him, you’re a million dollars over budget, eight days behind schedule, you’re making war on the hottest leading man in the business, you wait for fog and full moons, budgeting items likefifty thousand dollars of dry ice, losing crew members, you closed your set, you won’t show Michael dailies, you’re writing new women into the Bible, and he’s tired of me lying to him about it, and you’re driving me crazy.”
    “This always happens,” she said haughtily.
    “Except for one big factor,” I said in my best imitation of Michael’s menacing voice.
    “Yeah?”
    “Jack isn’t happy.”
    “Then let him start popping happy pills,” she snapped back, but she whistled between her teeth. I saw she had a liquid shine in her eyes, she was fighting tears. “He wants to be the director,” she said in a soft wail.
    “Then you better start calling him Mr. Director-Sir. You ask for his help in your rewrites?”
    She snorted rudely.
    I looked her in the eye. “He’s studied directing with the greats. He could direct this movie.”
    “What’s he been up to?” She was measuring me with wounded eyes.
    “He’s been on the telephone.”
    “To you?”
    “Yeah, and then Michael when that didn’t work.”
    Anita kept looking at me like she’d been smacked.
    “Michael will do anything he says. You know what that makes him?” I continued.
    “Not the director,” she said softly.
    “If he can get the director fired, what does that make him?”
    “A horse’s ass.”
    “It makes him the star,” I insisted. “There’s a fine line between bravery and self-destruction and you crossed it—”
    We were pointing our fingers into each other’s shoulders.
    “I stand behind my work.”
    “You’re a good director, but you need nine million dollars to set up a camera.”
    “I’m an artist.”
    “If you don’t cooperate, you’re no artist, you’re unemployed. When Michael gets the word out on how difficult you’ve been, you’ll be dead in Hollywood. You’ll be making chalk pictures on sidewalks.”
    “Bullshit.” She sagged against the kitchen table. “What can I do?”
    “We go a long way back,” I began, “and I never lie—”
    “Cut the melodrama.”
    “What would Cecil B. De Mille do?” I teased.
    “What about Hermann Hesse?” These were her two college heroes.
    “You like De Mille better,” I said.
    “Big deal.”
    “He got his movies made,” I said sharply. “Things could be a lot worse.”
    “I got trouble,” she said in a small voice. “You got it made—all the free lunch you can eat and you sit around dreaming up ten-million-dollar movies to develop.”
    I groaned, noting she was changing the subject. “You’d hate the politics and all the time I waste in meetings smiling at stupid hustlers trying to sell me junk.”
    She said sadly, “I hate directing. I compromise and compromise and at night I can’t sleep thinking about all the