We're So Famous (15 page)

We haven't had a scene with Annette yet. The scene we filmed was another scene at the rehabilitation center. A group session scene featuring Caleb and Angie Boulevard, who act out a sequence as husband and wife where Angie has to confess that she has cheated on Caleb, monitored closely by Dr. Hatch and my character, Jane. The scene was pretty intense. Robert Anaconda, who plays Caleb, must be a method actor, or must have studied method acting anyway. His reaction was not the normal reaction you would expect if a husband finds out his wife has been unfaithful: He basically accepts it as part of human nature, and it's shocking in a quiet way (that's the best way I can describe it). When Angie Boulevard becomes confused by Caleb's reaction (Paque is very convincing), Jane, who you'll remember is having an affair with Caleb, challenges his
views. My role is really psychologically challenging and I stayed up the night before rehearsing with Alan, who read Caleb's lines. The trick to my part, as I might have mentioned before, is that no one knows about Jane and Caleb, but Jane takes the wild theories Caleb espouses in group session personally—for obvious reasons.

Paque and I hung around through lunch to watch Annette film her scene. Alan fussed quite a bit over her appearance—she wore a beautiful white gown—giving Cindy the make-up girl a lot of specific instructions. The scene as Alan explained it was that Natalie, or Talie, had been stood up by her cotillion date and called Caleb (who Alan filled us in was out of rehab by then). Caleb shows up in jeans and a shirt but Talie, as is part of her character, doesn't care what other people think and they go in and dance one dance and then leave.

The rehabilitation center was quickly transformed into a dance floor. The boom guy and the cameraman hung a disco ball above the four-by-four tiled floor. The cameras moved in and Annette and Robert Anaconda did a run-through without the music. The script called for Caleb to console Talie about being stood up, but Alan changed it on the spot to a conversation about their first loves. It was amazing to see Alan work—he dashed out the dialogue in about five minutes.

The film rolled and Annette and Robert Anaconda swayed slowly back and forth, staying within the tiles (which were their markers—Paque and I learned about that when we filmed
Plastic Fantastic
for my brother, Chuck, in New York). Annette and Robert Anaconda had an
instantly easy rapport and I felt a little embarrassed because they seemed like lovers. I thought we were going to have to spend all day shooting but when the scene was finished and the music stopped and the lights came up, Alan was crying.

That's it for today, he said.

It was a pretty awkward moment. Annette and Robert Anaconda went off somewhere and Paque and I had to hang around and wait for Alan, who just sat and stared into space until finally he got up and said, C'mon, let's go. We rode home in silence.

Oh, hey, you can check out the scenes we've done so far. They're on the Internet at
www.worldgonewater.com
. You have to have a special video thing in your computer and you have to have speakers. Alan showed it to us the other day and I think it looks pretty cool. It looks like a scene from an actual movie. When Alan first brought it up on the screen Paque said, I bet we'll sound like robots. But we didn't.

The phone continued to ring with interest in the movie and with offers for Paque and me. Alan said it was too early yet to start calling people back. The hype has to reach just the right level, he said, before we can really capitalize. Alan said so far the people who had called were ‘little fish' and that we had to wait for the right bite. It won't be much longer now, he told us. These things take on a life of their own.

We know something about that, Paque said with not a little hint of irony in her voice.

I know even more than she does. I never told Paque about my father—the one time she asked I said he lived in
Minneapolis, which is true, but I didn't tell her why. I'm always curious about rumors, about which ones make it to full-blown gossip and which ones turn out to be true (so few rarely do). In the short time we've been here it seems to me that Hollywood is full of rumors. Everyone starts a conversation with, I heard this, or, I heard that. Everyone is hearing things. I overheard a woman in Von's talking about how she heard that one of Michael Jackson's kids was ‘on death's door.' The woman she was talking to didn't even know Michael Jackson had kids, and the other woman assured her that he did.

I was just a kid—ten—when I heard the rumor about my father. Funny, now that I remember it, it was in a grocery store, too. I was with my mom and my brother and my mom ran into one of our neighbors. I forget their name now. My mom stopped to talk to them and my brother and I got bored so we ran over to the cereal aisle. Chuck loved Cap'n Crunch (he ate it breakfast, lunch, and dinner) and I wanted Lucky Charms but my mom always made us agree on a cereal (consequently I hate Cap'n Crunch). Chuck and I raced back to our mom, who had moved down the aisle and as we raced past the neighbors, I heard the man say, He's as gay as the day is long. Naturally I didn't know who he was talking about, or even what the phrase meant. And I forgot it until a few weeks later when Linda Pegg came up to me at recess and said in front of everyone, Your dad's a homo, you're dad's a homo. The others started saying, Homo, homo, homo. None of them knew what it meant—not even Linda Pegg—but they kept on until I started crying. I left the playground and ran home. I asked
my mom what ‘homo' meant, and she started to say something about how it means you're not like everyone else but she gave up and just started crying. That's when my mom moved Chuck and me to Phoenix. My father sent birthday cards for a while after that but pretty soon we just didn't hear anything anymore. Sometimes I wonder what he's up to and secretly I hope that he'll read something in the press about the movie and try to get in touch with me. I can't ask my mom. I don't know why I know that, I just do. And Chuck doesn't care. He says he can't even remember what our father looks like. Wouldn't know him if he passed him in the street, he always says. I told Chuck he probably looks a lot like us and Chuck said, Yeah, so what?

I thought about calling Chuck the other night. Paque and I were bored, and not tired, and we were flipping through the channels and we saw ourselves on TV. On C-Span2 (it's an egghead cable channel that usually has very boring programs on). We were just going from one channel to the other, talking about how many more scenes we would have to shoot before we could accept an offer for a real movie, when Paque's face lit up the screen. She was clicking so fast she didn't even see it.

Go back, I said.

Paque clicked it back and there we were in New York, the time we went to go see Paul Newman with Chuck. Chuck raised his hand and Paque said, God, this was embarrassing.

What's it doing on TV, I asked.

Sometimes they put stuff like that on TV, she said.

I imagine you're both used to seeing yourself on the
screen but I have say it was thrilling to come across ourselves randomly on the television like that. It made me feel like we were famous. And it made me miss Chuck. You always miss someone when you think about them, and seeing Chuck on TV like that made me miss him even worse. I wanted to call him and tell him to come out to Hollywood—he would love all of it—but not knowing exactly what was happening day to day made me hesitate. But I did call and left a message on his answering machine that I missed him much.

I hope you can take the time to write back. I'd appreciate any sort of advice you could give about what Paque's and my next move should be.

Daisy

Dear Sara and Keren,

You've probably had times when you realized something unknown was moving against the balance of things. Like when Siobhan left the group to be in Shakespear's Sister. There might have been a change of energy in the recording studio once Siobhan made up her mind, or maybe she skipped out on an interview, or was constantly late for shooting a video, etc. Once she left Bananarama you both could probably pinpoint the exact moment—in retrospect—that that conclusion was foregone.

Paque and I had that feeling one morning—last Wednesday to be precise—when Alan woke up early and disappeared. We had overslept and panicked when we couldn't find Alan (he keeps his bedroom door locked so we pounded on it, but knew he wasn't in there), especially since the interview Alan had arranged with
L.A. MovieNews
was that morning. By the time Paque and I realized Alan really wasn't home, the
MovieNews
people were knocking on the front door.

Just let them knock, I said, and they'll come back later.

Nonsense, Paque said, let's do the interview. Paque was frustrated at the pace of the
World Gone Water
shoot. The clips had been on the Internet for more than a week and Alan hadn't started returning the calls on the answering machine like he promised he would. Paque asked him when he planned on calling them back but Alan would just mutter something about ‘critical mass' and then he'd go in his room and lock the door.

So Paque and I would spend our days answering the growing cluster of fan mail on our website, which was fun
for a while. Guys were writing in and asking us our favorite color and what was our favorite food and all kinds of crazy questions. There were a couple gross ones too, but because it's over the computer it was sort of easy and okay to find those ones funny, too.

Then we got the letter in the mail from the toy company. Paque read it over and said, They want to make dolls of us. I took the letter and saw the bright pink logo. What should we do, I asked her. The letter said that if we agreed to the contract we'd receive $25,000 within a month of signing, against future sales of the dolls.

I wonder if we can help design them, Paque said. You know, what kinds of clothes they wear. Stuff like that.

Does it say anything about that in the contract, I asked.

There were a lot of things in the contract that we didn't understand, but we didn't see anything about us being involved with the manufacture of the dolls.

We signed the contracts. Paque wrote
Let us help with the outfits
at the bottom of each copy and we walked the envelope over to the mailbox on the corner so Alan wouldn't find out.

We did the
MovieNews
interview, too. We let them in and they set up in the front room. I don't think we knew what we were going to say—at least I didn't—and I just sort of followed Paque's lead. She's quick and I guess she decided that she was going to give them the most scandalous interview they'd ever printed. Before I knew it, I was going along with what she said.

They asked us what life has been like in Hollywood for us and that opened it up. Paque said, Well, you know, it's been a
little bit rock and roll. (Which I thought was a great answer.) For instance, take the other night, she said. Me and Daisy were hanging out with the guys from Counting Crows, we were getting cones at that great ice cream place on Olympic, and we run into Jack Nicholson, who is also getting cones with his girlfriend and his daughter. Jack invites us all to go with him to the La Brea Tar Pits—his daughter wants to look for dinosaurs—so we all follow Jack's Mercedes to Wilshire and we park and get out and the guys from Counting Crows keep telling Jack how much they liked
Chinatown
. Jack is very gracious and his girlfriend and his daughter go to the fence to look at the pits and Jack tells us about this great party at Dennis Hopper's house, which we go to sans Counting Crows. We never meet Dennis, and we didn't see Jack, but we met Gary Busey, who was walking around with Buddy Holly glasses on singing ‘Peggy Sue.' We tell them about Ashley Judd, who asked us if we wanted to go on a beer run—apparently she only drank lite beer and Dennis didn't have anything that wasn't imported—and we said, Sure, we'll go. Gary Busey came along too and he did this really funny thing with the Coke display in the grocery store, but then they wouldn't sell to us and we got kicked out.

Paque looked at me and I was biting the inside of my cheek so hard I could taste blood. Yeah, I said, but the night before was even cooler. Jerry Seinfeld had a party at the hangar where he keeps his Porsche collection. It was a really society affair. A champagne and caviar party. We ended up laying in the grass at the end of a runway at three in the morning with Seinfeld and Michael Richards, the guy who played Kramer.

The
MovieNews
people were making notes and hurried
to flip over the cassette in the tape recorder when it snapped off.

Paque gave them the best one though. She told them about going to Hollywood Park, the horse track, with Magic Johnson, who we supposedly met at Dennis Hopper's party. Paque described us going to the winning horse's stable after the race because Magic knew the owners. The house was full of people in tuxedos and gowns, mostly moneymen from Los Angeles, along with some Arab sheiks (I thought that was a nice touch myself). Someone rang a bell, Paque said, and we all went out to the stable, where Hallelujah, the horse who'd just won at Hollywood Park, was frolicking with Little Lady, the mare who'd won the Preakness and the Kentucky Derby the year before. Everyone gathered at the fence—even the ladies in gowns—and these two models came out in bikinis. All the men hooted and hollered and the models tried to settle the horses down. A guy who looked like a ranch hand came out and steadied Hallelujah. The models crawled under the horse like you would get under a car and cupped the horse's balls. Hallelujah danced around a little bit but the ranch hand had a hold of his reins and petted his nose as the models massaged him. The horse's thingie came out just like a ladder on a fire truck and everyone clapped and whistled. Little Lady came sniffing around and the two models and the ranch hand helped Hallelujah mount her. Once he was inside her, everyone lifted their glass. The two guys standing next to me and Daisy shook hands. There was a china bowl in the hall on the way out where you could win a trip to all three Triple Crown races by naming the soon-to-be horse.