Winter Jacket: Finding Home (7 page)

“Good.” Troian stood from her desk and grabbed her cell phone and some of the script copies. “Now that we’ve got that settled, let’s go meet the rest of the writing rats.”

Walking into the writer’s trailer felt like the first day of school, only this time I wasn’t the teacher at the front of the classroom. The sounds of laughter wouldn’t quiet down when I walked in the room. The voices and the whispers and the curious looks would only intensify; I was the new kid in school. I wouldn’t experience the rush of power and the control that came with writing my name on the chalkboard. There would be no lecturing to a room full of students hastily scribbling down every word that I said. Whereas the classroom had always brought me calm, I now felt disequilibrium.

I’d been in the writer’s room once before when I’d last visited Troian. Only because of her job title had I been allowed into the inner sanctum of the show’s workings. Typically no one except for the writers was allowed in the space: no spouses, no actors, no network executives.

The walls were still covered with headshots of actors and drawings of the inside of space ships. Originally the program had been slated to be on a space station, but the network hadn’t been prepared to foot the bill for an elaborate set when they’d only guaranteed us four on-air episodes. The show now took place on a utopian planet, sometime in the distant future. If we were a success we could always blow up the planet later and move to a spaceship.

A wooden table, long and functional, dominated the room. It was covered in pads of paper, pencils, script pages, and candy. Lots and lots of candy. Seated around the table were four others who looked vaguely familiar from the one time I’d been in this room. Troian hadn’t introduced me to any of them my first visit around, but now they were my new co-workers. They looked younger than I remembered, though. And more attractive. Sonja was in the room as well, setting up a laptop at a smaller table wedged against one wall. It was her job to record everything said in the writer’s room. One never knew when an unintentional moment of brilliance might happen.

Troian strode confidently into the room with me following behind. My anxiety spiked when we walked through the door. Everyone in the room had been working together for months now, learning the strengths and weaknesses of each other’s writing styles, and meshing professionally and personally. I was replacing one of their colleagues at the table, and I had no idea what had been their relationship with this person. From what Troian had told me, the guy had been dead weight in the writer’s room, but maybe everyone had liked his personality. Moreover, I had no previous experience as a television writer. I hadn’t had an interview or an audition as a freelancer—I’d gotten the job because of Troian, based on the suggestion that the main character in her show be part alien.

The chatter in the room settled down with Troian’s entrance. Apparently
she
was the teacher at the front of the classroom. “Guys, you remember Elle,” she said, thumbing in my direction.

A murmur of hellos followed her brief introduction, but one clear voice rose among the mumbling: “Hiya, Elle.”

The greeting came from a man in a sweater vest and a white Oxford shirt unbuttoned and rolled to his elbows. He had a mop of brown curls on his head and boyish dimples.

“Hey,” I said back with a brief wave to the room.

I sat down in the only available seat at the table, which was between a tall, angular man—the only person in the room who might have been older than me—and a short, round woman with a cascade of dark hair that ran down the center of her back. Even though she was sitting down I could tell she was close in height to Troian.

I set my workbag, now heavy with unfinished scripts, on the floor and retrieved a yellow legal pad and pen from my bag. I placed them on the table in front of me, that feeling of being back in school coming over me again.

The man in the chair next to me introduced himself. “I’m Edward,” he said, thrusting his right hand in my direction.

“Hi. It’s nice to meet you.”

We shook hands and I could feel the bones of his hand shift beneath the skin. His lips were thin and his nose was long and narrow. He had the same build as a scarecrow and a hawkish look on his face.

“And I’m Gloria,” the woman on the other side of me piped in.

The first thing I noticed about Gloria was her eyelashes. They were long and lush, and if not for her equally impressive hair, I might have suspected they were fake. “Hi, Gloria. Glad to meet you.”

“I thought you’d have an accent,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“I thought you were from Minnesota, like Troian.”

“Oh,” I said, catching on. “Troian and I met when we were both living in Minnesota. But I’m originally from Michigan.”

Gloria’s features crunched. “Isn’t that the Midwest, too?”

“Geographically,” I confirmed. “But people in Michigan don’t usually have accents, especially if you’re from a city in the Lower Peninsula.”

Gloria looked more confused than before. “The what?”

At the head of the table, Troian cleared her throat. “Good morning, everyone,” she began, drawing everyone’s attention. Side conversations came to an end, phones were set out of view, and everyone turned in her direction. I was instantly impressed.

“I trust you all had a nice weekend and are ready for a busy week,” Troian continued in a warm, but serious tone. “Sonja has e-mailed you the schedule for the week, so I’d like you all to familiarize yourself with that sometime this morning. Today we begin filming episode three, so once I get a call from Jackson that they’re ready for us, we’ll head over to the set.”

Gloria tilted in my direction. “Jackson’s the director,” she said quietly.

“Thanks,” I whispered back.

Troian’s gaze flicked in my direction, and I stiffened like I’d been caught talking out of turn. Old habits die hard. “But before we go any further,” she continued. “I’d like to take a moment to formally introduce the new face in the room. As you know, I made the decision to let Derek go a few months ago.”

“Good riddance,” Edward mumbled beside me. I sat up straighter in my chair. Maybe I didn’t have such big shoes to fill.

“I sincerely appreciate all the hard work you’ve done to lessen the impact of his absence while we finalized the details in finding his replacement,” Troian continued. “Dr. Elle Graft is a tenured English and Composition university professor. But she’s not here to correct our spelling and run-on sentences,” she joked. “She’s also a published author who comes to us with high recommendations.”

Troian’s introduction and the heavy gaze of my peers had me squirming uncomfortably. High recommendations? From whom? Troian herself?

“I encourage you to introduce yourself to her throughout the day and to help her feel welcome.” Troian’s words were cut short by the buzz of her cell phone. She glanced at the screen. “That’s Jackson,” she announced. “Let’s head over to the set.”

We gathered our things and followed Troian out of the writer’s trailer. Troian walked ahead of us, talking animatedly on her phone. I lingered behind with the other writers, knowing that I’d need to become acquainted with them if I wanted to eat lunch at the cool kids’ table.

I fell into step with Gloria and Edward. Out of everyone in the room, first impression told me they seemed the most down to earth and the closest to me in age. “How do you like working on Troian’s staff?” I asked.

“Troian’s a good head writer,” Gloria observed with a bob of her head. “You’d never be able to tell this is the first show she’s run.”

“How about the other writers?” I questioned.

“We get along well. When you spend as much time together as television writers do, it’s got to be collegial,” Edward observed.

“Guillen—the guy in the sweater vest—thinks he’s a hot shot because he sold a screenplay,” Gloria noted.

“Anything I’d recognize?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe,” Edward shrugged. “It’s one of those fast cars, big explosions, guys with special-agent skills, kind of movies.”

“Aviva, that tiny thing in the giant emo glasses is the baby of the group,” Gloria continued. “It’s her first time writing for a show, so she’s a little green.”

I looked toward the woman Gloria referenced. She had her head bent toward the screen of her cell phone and texted while she walked. She reminded me of so many of my millennial students, although I suspected she was about a decade older than them.

“I guess that makes me the new baby of the group,” I observed aloud.

“Guillen’s new to the team, too. The network brought him on to punch up the fight scenes and explosions,” Gloria said.

“Because who needs smart, snappy dialogue when you can just blow things up,” Edward snorted.

“So that’s the entire team?” I asked.

“That’s it for the staff writers,” Gloria confirmed, “but you’ll see a few producers float in and out of our meetings periodically with notes for us.”

“And don’t forget Jane,” Edward noted.

Gloria groaned. “Yes, and then there’s Jane.”

I arched an eyebrow. “Do we not like her?”

“Jane is a creative consultant who sometimes sits in on our brainstorming sessions,” Edward noted.

“She’s pretty useless—doesn’t contribute much of anything,” Gloria complained. “She’s basically a mole from the network who shoots down ideas she thinks would be too expensive to shoot.”

“So watch what you say in front of her,” I guessed.

Edward grinned. “Exactly.”

We reached the set a few minutes later. I sat in a canvas camping chair along with Troian and the other writers and quietly observed all the moving pieces buzzing around me. Technicians dressed all in black tested the lights and perfected shadows, they moved microphone boom stands around, and checked audio levels, and made sure each setup had continuity from the scene that had been shot before.

The pilot had been filmed months ago, but in many ways, episodes two and three were more important to the show’s survival. They needed to orient the first time viewers who had missed the pilot while continuing to progress the storyline to hold onto the people who had watched before. In the world of academic writing, we called it repeating yourself but with a difference.

“I saw you chatting it up with Edward and Gloria,” Troian observed from her chair beside me.

“Yeah, they were catching me up on all the gossip. Good news though, they seem to like you.”

Troian rolled her eyes. “Awesome. Because that keeps me up at night.”

An attractive young woman walked past us and smiled and waved at Troian.

“That’s our Paige,” Troian said, nodding after the retreating woman. “Her real name is Monica. She absolutely loved the addition of making her character not entirely human, by the way. You should introduce yourself as the person who came up with that idea.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said, voice wavering.

Being on set was significantly different than being in Troian’s trailer or even being in the writer’s room. It made me realize that this was a proper television show. My ideas, my words, they would soon be beamed into American living rooms to be absorbed and critiqued.

“Where are the aliens?” I said under my breath. Everyone on set looked fresh faced and attractive, and I didn’t see Paige’s best friend who was supposed to be a tentacled octopus creature.

“Makeup and prosthetics cost money,” Troian said. “The network completely changed my vision of the show because they’re not willing to sink money into a program that might not even get a half season.”

“So no aliens?”

“They changed the aliens to mutants, kind of like
X-Men
. You can’t tell the difference between them and the humans now. They’re an invisible minority. But it works,” Troian shrugged. “And actually, it adds another level of intrigue with mutants trying to pass as human because humans are higher up on the food chain.”

“Like the movie
Pinky
.”

“The what?”

“Seriously? You’ve never heard of
Pinky?
Starring Jeanne Crain as a light-skinned African American woman trying to pass as white in a pre-civil rights America?”

“Nope.”

I shook my head in disapproval. “For people who work in Hollywood, you and your cohort know very little about the movies.”

Troian patted my knee. “I guess it’s a good thing you’re here to educate us.”

“Quiet on the set!” someone yelled.

Troian leaned closer to me. “Okay, so I want you to listen to how the dialogue plays out; we may have to rework the cadence of the scenes,” she quietly instructed. “You should also be observing the chemistry between the actors; think about their strengths and weaknesses that we can highlight or hide in later episodes.”

I nodded. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was determined to do a good job at it.

“Marker. Scene four, Take two. Rolling.”

Jackson, the director, peered into the monitor that showed what the camera was shooting. “Action!” he called out.

I tried to follow the scene as it played out for us on set. Paige was at school, the one place where humans and mutants co-mingled. Much of the rest of the world resembled the Jim Crow South—a world of “separate but equal” where nothing was actually equal. The schools had been recently desegregated, using the language of an earlier time period, but humans and mutants still sat on different sides of the classroom, used different bathrooms, and drank out of separate drinking fountains at school.