Carter's Big Break (15 page)

I don’t answer him because it won’t make any difference. I’ll just wait for next week’s tabloids to find out why Starvados Sbarro was crying at Chatêau Marmont.

I feel so alone as I pedal toward home. I could talk to Lynn, except she’s working like a dog for the costume designer’s assistant, and she doesn’t have time to deal with my issues. My parents would freak out and not let me be in the movie. I dialed Abby’s number about ten times, but I never let it go through. I really thought that she might call me . . . like she can sense how much I need her, but she didn’t, so I keep it zipped like Hilary thought I would.

We get back into the shooting, and she acts like nothing happened. We’re mostly doing walking shots on the streets of Merrian. Hilary is trying to be really nice to me and the rest of the crew, but I can’t help but stiffen up when she gets close. I’m like a dog that’s been smacked one too many times, and I can’t help but flinch. People take pictures and stop to gawk, even if Hilary isn’t in the shot. I guess the thinking is, if you’re important enough to have this crew running around, and the camera is pointing at you . . . you must be a somebody! It’s pretty cool because I know (along with the rest of the cast and crew) that I’m a nobody, but the general public has no idea! Feel free to worship me, people.

We’re almost two weeks behind schedule, and Phil is running around like a chicken with its head cut off. He’s yelling at everyone to do their jobs faster, but his hysterics seem to have the opposite effect on people. When someone is doing their best and someone yells at them to “HURRY THE HELL UP!!!” it seems to fluster them and actually slow things down. It sure as hell isn’t my problem; I can’t act any faster, but Phil still waits for me outside the bathroom as if the whole production is waiting for me to poop. This dude’s going to give me hemorrhoids!

As much as I’ve been dreading the crying scene, I’ve been looking forward to shooting the scenes at Merrian High. It’s cool to be at school when there aren’t so many people, and the ones that are here are staring at me like I’m a big shot. A couple of cute girls are checking me out when I stumble out of the makeup trailer. I walk over to the craft service table and eat M&M’s until one of the girls says hi to me.

“Hey,” I mumble with a mouth full of chocolate.

They ask if I’ll sign their copies of
US Weekly
.

“Sure, d-d-do you guys go to college around here?” I ask, knowing they’re in high school . . . because I’m so smooth! I’m thinking about inviting them back to my trailer when they look down at my scribble and ask, “Who the hell is
Carter
?”

I shrug as if to say, “Who do you think, baby?”

They walk away in disgust, and I hear the tall one say, “I thought that was Starvados Sbarro.”

The short one adds, “No, that boy is obviously his stand-in. He’s no pizza magnate. . . . You can tell.”

I ask the empty bowl of M&M’s, “Please tell me what a pizza magnet is.”

We’re still waiting for Hilary to arrive, and Phil seems especially pissed off today. His assistant tells me that they’re setting up a classroom shot, and they’re going to try to add Hilary’s face to someone else’s body in postproduction.

“You can do that?” I ask.

He seems annoyed when he says, “We make movies . . .
We
can do anything.”

He’s an assistant, so all
he
can really
do
is get coffee, but whatever.

McDougle is playing the teacher who rats me out after inspiring me to write a great paper about my terrible life. She has all the dialogue, and probably needs to concentrate, but I see her coming out of her RV, so I go over and say hi.

In a
Kung Fu
accent I mutter, “De masta and de student finaaally meet on de field of baddalle!”

She replies, “Carter, how much candy have you eaten today?”

“De Masta say, nooo too much can-dy for de powaful stu-dent! Whuuuuu-aaaaaahhh—!”

She interrupts my crane kick. “Carter!”

“Yeah?”

“Stay focused,” she demands.

We walk into the classroom full of extras. Abby is sitting with Jeremy, so I give them a nod and take my seat behind them. Jeremy waves, but Abby doesn’t seem to notice. She’s wearing one of Hilary’s costumes, and she has blue dots glued all over her face. C. B. is intensely working out how he wants the camera to move, and another guy is using the tape measure to figure out how far away Abby’s dots are from the lens. I should be focusing on this scene. I don’t have any lines; I’m just supposed to look anxious and angry, but I’m trying, unsuccessfully, to get Abby to look at me.
HELLO!!! The star of the movie is over here! The guy that the camera and lights are pointing at?! The guy who doesn’t have dots all over his face so he can be edited out later?
I flex my jaw just in case she looks over. I clear my throat. Why the hell won’t she look at me?

C. B. yells “Cut” before I realize we were shooting anything, and he seems really happy. “Nice work, Carter . . . that was some raw emotion,” he says as he checks the gate and starts breaking down the camera.

Phil tells everyone that Hilary is finally here, so we’re moving on to the hallway scenes.

Abby is told to change clothes and remove the dots from her face because she’s going to have to be an extra for the rest of the day. She and Jeremy are in the hall shot with a few other kids, and so is College Carter Dumbass. Great! I was told he got the part of Jeff Becker, the d-bag that tries to steal my girl in the movie. Abby would say, “Art imitates life,” if she was talking to me.

C. B. directs Abby and Jeremy to walk through the frame holding hands like they’re boyfriend-girlfriend. I think it’s pretty funny, but Abby is all business, so while they’re rehearsing I mumble, “Cute couple.”

Abby mouths the word, “Concentrate!” very seriously in response . . . as if I need her help here. Like, who the hell does that little extra think she is?! Telling
me
, the pretty-much star of this movie, what to do with my—

“Carter!” C. B. yells in my face and snaps his fingers. “Are you ready to shoot one?”

I look toward Abby and say, “Shoooot, I was born ready.”

She rolls her eyes, and C. B. walks back to his camera.

This is the scene where Hilary tells me that Jeff Becker has asked her to go to prom. She talks about it as a joke, like “ha-ha,” but my character knows that she’d really like to go, and gets pissed about it. I have this whole monologue I’m supposed to say, but I forgot to look at it during our last break. Hilary must be having one of her bad days because she doesn’t even say hello to me when they usher her onto the set. We walk through the moves a few times to get the background people to move correctly (friggin’ extras!).

C. B. asks Jeremy to stop “prancing” a few times, but Jeremy is too fabulous for his own good, so C. B. recasts College Carter Dumbass to play Abby’s fake boyfriend.

I quietly tell C. B., “Yo, that’s the guy playing Jeff Becker . . . would he really be walking down the hall holding hands with this other girl?”

C. B. explains, “They’re background; it’ll just look like shapes walking through the frame.”

“Oh yeah, cool, um, couldn’t you get one of these other extras to do that? I don’t care; it’s just that that guy’s nineteen and she’s fifteen, so it may be illegal, you know?”

C. B. glares at me and says, “How about
I
direct
this
movie and you get the next one?”

“Yeah, cool, whatever—”

He barks, “Background action!”

The extras start to move, and Abby whispers something into College Carter Dumbass’s ear. He giggles and whispers something in response.

C. B. yells, “Hilary and Carter . . . ACTION!”

I’m just supposed to be getting stuff out of my locker at this point, so I lean against the wall to try and pull myself together and not freak out. Did Abby just make fun of me to him again? Hilary walks up and says her line about the dude asking her out. I’m supposed say, “‘Why don’t you just go to the dance?’” but I’m so pissed off at Abby while I’m listening to Hilary that I just bite my lip and shake my head.

Hilary says her line, “‘Isn’t that lame?’” and I’m not getting it together, at all! I’m shaking with anger. I still haven’t said a word, and I don’t think I’ll come up with anything anytime soon. My brain is so defective and filled with Abby’s little mind games that I decide to head-butt the locker, hard.
BANG!!!

Hilary stops acting and asks, “What’s wrong with you?” I look her in the eyes and try not to fall down. I grab my head and struggle to remember why the hell I just head-butted a locker. Hilary has no idea that I’m ridiculously pissed off at a couple of whispering extras. I rock back on my heels, and she grabs my wrist to steady me before asking, “Why are you doing this?” But I jerk my hand away. She gets back into character and decides to skip over my monologue about why I hate prom. She tries to say her next line, “‘I was joking . . . I don’t even want to—’”

BANG!!!
I kick the locker as hard as I can. The metal crunches under my foot. Hilary jumps back in shock and repeats her last line, “‘I was joking!’” but I don’t even acknowledge her; I just glance toward Abby and limp out of frame.

C. B. yells, “CUT!”
Phil and his assistant ask, “What the hell was that?”
It’s dead quiet until C. B. exclaims, “
That
was amazing!” and starts clapping. Then everyone is applauding my screwup . . . except for Abby, Hilary, and the crew guy who’s going to have to replace the locker door. C. B. continues, “Carter you really are the next Daniel Day-Lewis! Cut the fluff and get to the pain, brother!”

I nod a half-assed thank-you and hobble toward craft service to get some ice for my swelling head and foot. I need to figure out what scene is coming up next, and why I’m such a freak.

I change my shirt and look over the script as the knot on my head continues to grow. It’s a big fight scene that takes place in the middle of the movie. It begins with Hilary/ Maggie exiting the school with a group of jocks, and they discover me digging in the Dumpster. The guys call me a bunch of names and then beat me up. This event definitely happened to C. B., because he’s talked a lot about it, and it seems like he’s really looking forward to reliving the moment. I guess putting a humiliating experience from your life into a movie, book, or play would be therapeutic and possibly the ultimate revenge. It’s kind of sad, though, because I know a-holes like the guys who beat him up. The jerks who think it’s funny to pick on someone weaker so they can feel stronger. I won’t mention it to C. B., but I bet those kids don’t even remember punching him or calling him a dirtbag or throwing him into a trash can. I’ll bet they recall the time they gave a homeless guy a dollar or helped an old lady cross the street. They may have even read
Down Gets Out
, or they’ll see the movie and have no idea their cruelty has not been forgotten. It’s brewed inside a guy for fifteen years. A guy who now drives a Ferrari. So whatever, I guess.

Phil’s assistant walks me to a ladder that’s set up in the trash area behind the school. I’ve never been back here and I know why . . . It stinks, bad! You wouldn’t think it would smell this bad in the summer. And you might think that for a movie they’d bring in a special Dumpster for the actors, a new Dumpster, perhaps a
clean
Dumpster, or a Dumpster without maggots! You’d be wrong. The lights are all set up and everyone is watching me. I had such a good response to my last couple of scenes that I don’t want to ruin it by puking all over myself, so I hold it down, get into character, and try not to breathe through my nose as I climb into the disgusting metal box. Trash is all over the place, but they’ve got one of the bags marked for me to pull food out of. It’s got plastic pizza and something that looks like meat loaf inside. It may be a prop, but it smells like poop.

C. B. holds the camera over the edge and films me stuffing an old backpack with this weird cuisine. I try not to look too disgusted as I do it. C. B. rotates the camera back to shoot me climbing out and my reaction to being discovered by the group of kids. Hilary is supposed to be in the middle of the gang, and she’s supposed to look embarrassed for me and then run away. But when I pop my head over the side of the Dumpster, I see Abby and Jeremy standing there with a group of extras. A smile flashes across my mouth before I can get a hold of it. I shake my head in disgust for ruining the shot, and climb the rest of the way out. Abby screwed me up again!

C. B. says “Cut,” then looks up from his camera and asks, “What was with the smile?”

“Sorry, I was expecting Hilary, and when I saw somebody else it jacked me up.”

C. B. explains, “Yeah, she needed to take another break, so we had to use your girlfriend as a stand-in—”

“Ex-girlfriend,” I clarify.

“Uh-huh.”

I whisper, “Abby’s not my girlfriend—”

He continues, “Whatever, Carter, what you just did was brilliant. . . . For your character to look up, into the most embarrassing situation of his life and see the girl that he’s hopelessly in love with, and smile just before the humiliation sets in. That’s genius—”

“I am not hopelessly in love with her.”

C. B. grabs me by the shoulders and quietly says, “I’m talking about the movie. But you should know, for your own sake, that you are hopelessly in love with that girl.”

I exhale pointedly as if to say, “Whatever.”

C. B. tells the crew that we’re moving on to the next shot, where the boys in the group heckle me and give me the beat-down. They will add Hilary into the scene when she’s ready. The scene is quick, and I know the lines, but what C. B. hasn’t gone over is how the other actors are going to
pretend
to kick my ass.

They have two cameras set up to capture the fight, but no one has gone over the choreography. The lights and sound equipment are all ready, but they’ve done a horrible job of casting this group of ass kickers. C. B. has been complaining about this problem for a while, but Phil always tells him, “When you produce your own films, you can fly in actors for the small parts and cast the locals in the leads. Until then, we’re using the cheap local talent for these nothing characters.”

So Jeremy, College Carter Dumbass, and a bunch of other drama-department types are playing tough guys. I don’t know how this is going to work, but I climb into the Dumpster anyway.

He has them huddled up like a powder-puff football team. Dang it. He’s trying to psych them up to beat me down, and I realize why no one has talked about the pretend stage fighting . . . because C. B. wants it “real.” Yet another great thing about casting a “nobody” in your movie is that, not only does he not get to call his agent, union, or stage mother to stop you from putting him in a Dumpster with maggots or throw him from a moving train . . . but he also won’t blow the whistle on your pill-popping starlet, and you can actually kick his ass when the script calls for it! How awesome am I?!

C. B. calls “Action,” and College Carter Dumbass says his line with a slight British accent. “‘What do you think you are doing, dirtbag?’”

I’m just trying to climb out of the can, and I don’t look at them when I say my line. “‘This isn’t what it looks like, guys. I’m on the recycling committee—’”

Eventually I look up at this posse of pussies assembled to kick my ass, quite possibly the only crew less intimidating than the Get Up Gang. Jeremy is standing off to the side with his hands on his hips. His jaw is flexed and his head is tilted, like he’s trying to be tough, but it’s the gayest thing I’ve ever seen, so I start laughing.

C. B. angrily yells “Cut!” because a bunch of the crew guys are cracking up too, and now this band of merry men are really mad at me. Skinny arms are crossed, faces turn red, and I can’t stop cackling.

“Sorry, everybody. My bad,” I say.

C. B. approaches the
West Side Story
hooligans (Abby made me watch it) and tries to hype them up again. He tells everyone to “Be professional!” before he calls “Action,” and I start to climb out of the Dumpster. College Carter Dumbass says his line, louder this time, and I take a deep disgusting breath. I focus on the nasty smell, and it keeps me from laughing as I tell my shoes, “‘I’m on the recycling committee.’” I shoulder my backpack and try to walk past. I hope it looks like I’m trying to focus on catching up to Maggie and not that I can’t look at these emos without cracking up. But then Jeremy slaps my face, hard, and screeches, “‘Look at us when we’re talking to you, dirtbag!’”

I grab my face and ask, “Dude!?”

Before anyone can say anything else, College Carter Dumbass shoves me in this very theatrical way. It doesn’t hurt, or move me, so I knock his arms away and push him back. He stumbles and then falls to the ground.

C. B. shakes his head. “Cut!” I throw up my hands like, “What am I supposed to do?”

Phil yells at everyone to break for lunch. He and C. B. seem extra stressed. Phil is telling C. B. to make it work, and C. B. is yelling at Phil for ruining his film. I think they both really want to save the scene, so I walk up and regretfully say, “Hey, I know a few dudes who wouldn’t mind kickin’ my ass.”

Phil asks how soon my boys could get here, and I tell him, “Depends on how much you’re paying.”

C. B. interjects, “Two hundred a piece, cash, for about an hour’s work.”

“They’ll be here in ten minutes.”

Phil looks pissed, but he knows how unbelievable the fight would be if Jeremy and the Jets were allowed to continue.

Everyone goes into the school cafeteria to eat, but I’m not hungry after hanging out in that Dumpster. Phil gives me his cell phone, and I start to round up my boys.