Screen Play (27 page)

~
Thirty
~

On the second day of shooting we made hay, starting with an emotionally easy boardroom scene where Angel joins Meredith at work. On day one, I’d been nervous. On day two, I was all work. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, or missing Luke, or seeing Avril enjoying herself, carefree and happy.

Whatever the reason, I played that first scene with fire, opening up my gut, sensing the talent God had given me and trusting that I knew how to do this.

Joseph got out of his director’s chair after a particularly good scene and came over to kiss me on the forehead.

“This is the actress I first saw in New York,” he said. “Now keep this woman around for the rest of the production.”

Meredith was a character I understood completely, and while I listened to Joseph’s ideas, I drew her identity from deep within my creative soul. Her moods and words fit like a well-worn pair of jeans. Elijah and I gelled on camera and bantered comfortably between takes. I prayed every few minutes for God to renew my strength and kept Him in the forefront of all my thoughts.

At lunch, I was feeling really good about the day and checked my cell phone, hoping for a text from Luke to help keep the good vibe going.

Harper, leaving for Hawaii.

hope you are well.

Text me if you can.

miss you, Luke

I felt the pinch of missing someone I loved, but there was another feeling too, the excitement of looking forward to his return. Working on the film would make time race by, and I was
enjoying
this. I hoped Luke wasn’t already in the air and sent him a text.

Luke, send me a postcard.

You have my heart.

ps, the yacht was nice too.

Harper

It was the print story in
Variety
that got Hollywood talking, but a thirty-second video clip on
ET
drew hundreds of feedback messages on
ET’s
Web site. That same clip was viewed thousands of times once it was posted on YouTube. Much to Emily’s shock,
ET
focused on the faith theme for their story. The headline? “Is Hollywood Seeing a Resurgence in Spiritually Themed Movies?”

Sherwood Baptist Church had made substantial inroads in movie making after back-to-back hits with
Facing the Giants
and
Fireproof.
Their movies were unabashedly Christian. Just a few years earlier,
The Passion of the Christ
grossed more than 600 million dollars worldwide. The
ET
story went on to say that
Winter Dreams
was controversial because, in addition to having a spiritual theme, the lead actress was a Christian, and director Joseph Hagen had told a reporter that he shared my belief in God. She had then asked if that meant he was a Christian, and Joseph had answered, “I am a follower of Jesus Christ.”

The story shocked Hollywood. And though people like Emily worried the story might kill interest in the movie, the more optimistic backers of
Winter Dreams
were counting on that shock to drive moviegoers to the theater.

The first week of shooting was like one of those old African safari movies: a jungle excursion into long days of physically demanding work, following a great leader into the unknown and facing the occasional wild beast—usually an entertainment reporter.

Luke called once during that busy week, a call I missed since it came while we were filming. I hated imagining my phone locked inside my trailer, ringing away on the kitchenette counter. What made it worse was knowing that once Luke reached his island destination, there would be no more calls for a while.

Chalk it up to wishful thinking, but I still checked my phone every morning and on breaks for messages from Luke. I still sent him daily “I miss you” texts whenever the mood struck me, which was more often than not.

On Tuesday of week two, good news came through that little cell phone, not from Luke, but from his uncle Don. I was in the trailer, doing what I did far more than I ever expected to do on a Hollywood movie set: waiting.

“Harper, this is Don McCafferty. Luke’s uncle. We met a few weeks ago up here in Eugene?”

“Hi, Don. Yes, I remember.”

“Sorry to bother you while you’re at work, but Luke wanted me to get in touch with you to let you know he’s coming back early. He’s planning to leave Tarajuro today.”

“Don, that’s wonderful news! When did you speak to him last?”

“About an hour ago. We’ve kept in pretty close contact while he’s been down there. We’ve got a ham radio here in the office. He just asked me to call and let you know he’ll be back stateside in a couple of days.”

My brain busied itself, conjuring up all sorts of schemes of how we could see each other over the next four weeks. A planner by nature, I thought of coaxing Luke back to LA once or twice over the last month just to spend Sundays together. Who knows, maybe he could take some time off and stay longer; I’d return the favor as soon as my own schedule freed up.

“Thank you for calling, Don. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this news.”

“He’s pretty excited about seeing you, young lady. I expect you’ll hear from him as soon as he reaches Hawaii, if not sooner. Cell phone service is spotty around the South Pacific. Some places have it, others don’t.”

We hung up. I turned the latch on the trailer door and stepped down to the street where we were shooting on location. I attempted to calculate when Luke would return, doing the math in my head, time change plus flight distance, adding in layovers and sleep. I estimated with refueling and rest, it would take about twenty-four hours before he landed in Hawaii, thirty-six until his plane landed in the States. If I could keep focused on my work, a day and half would pass quickly.

I saw the publicist, Emily, on the set just once during the second week, whispering to Elijah while he chilled between takes. I didn’t take it personally, but thought she was avoiding me. She hadn’t scheduled any more interviews but didn’t really need to, thanks to the snowball effect giving the PR campaign a life of its own. By the end of the second week of shooting, freelance photographers and paparazzi were regularly interrupting our location shooting, and it infuriated Joseph so much he called for a closed set. He limited access to media, which led to rumors over what
Winter Dreams
was really all about.

True to the words of warning, I’d been photographed coming out of the grocery store without makeup, wearing a red ball cap and sunglasses, my hair tied in a ponytail. I could hardly tell it was me when the photo was posted on entertainment Web sites and chatter blogs as a glimpse into the “real world” of Hagen’s latest find.

I didn’t have time to think about it. Loni, my makeup artist and an avid entertainment news junkie, kept me informed on the set.

With news of Luke’s forthcoming return foremost in my brain, I had even less time to think about publicity. By midmorning on the next day’s shoot, I smuggled my cell phone onto the set, a definite no-no with Joseph. I only did it because I was on tenterhooks waiting for Luke to contact me. I asked Loni to keep an eye on it for me.

It wasn’t a distraction. Elijah and I were rocking and rolling in every scene Joseph filmed. For comic relief, I guess, and to keep Elijah and me motivated, Joseph took to hanging up poster board signs advertising the number of consecutive days he’d been “blown away” by the dailies. That Wednesday morning his assistant, Benji, ceremoniously walked on the set, hanging up a new poster board with a bold number “8” draw on it. The motivation worked. We couldn’t wait to start our next scene.

By noon, Luke’s arrival countdown had crossed the twenty-four-hour mark. Over a short lunch break, I took up watching my cell phone while Loni and a cameraman joked about how in love I was. I must have looked ridiculous, staring at my cell phone at an outdoor picnic table waiting for Luke’s call.

It didn’t come, however, and by 2 p.m. I was going over my calculations one more time. The whole thing was impossible to figure out accurately given all the variables and miscalculations I was obviously making. Disgusted, I ditched my phone back in the trailer and muttered my acceptance of the truth: “He’ll call when he calls.”

But by eight that night, I still hadn’t heard a word from Luke, and that’s when I started to worry. I tried calling him, thinking there was every chance he was having dinner in Honolulu, chewing on a steak, waiting to call when he thought filming had broken for the day. But all I got was the sound of his voice on the recorded outgoing message. I shut off the phone without leaving one of my own.

A while later, I couldn’t stand it anymore and decided to call Don. I punched in the number and felt a great sense of relief when he picked up on the other end.

“Hi, Don. This is Harper. Sorry to be calling you so late, but I wanted to know if you’d heard anything from Luke. I’m starting to get a little worried.”

“No, we haven’t heard from him yet. He told us by radio he’d be leaving Tarajuro for Hawaii through the Marshall Islands sometime before dinner yesterday. That’s the last we heard.”

“Is that normal, going so long without hearing from him? Shouldn’t he have reached Hawaii by now?”

Don was silent. I could hear little gasps in his breathing as he mumbled for words.

“Don … are you still there, Don?”

“I’m sorry, Harper. We don’t know why, but Luke’s radio went dark all of a sudden. We don’t know what’s going on. I’m at the office trying to find out. He may have landed on another island with a mechanical problem, or …”

“But he would have contacted you, right?”

“Harper, we just don’t know. It isn’t like Luke to stay out of contact, but he’s flying through remote areas hundreds of square miles wide. We don’t know if there’s a problem. We’re checking and trying not to jump to any conclusions.”

Conclusions.

“Now don’t overreact, Harper, but I’ve contacted the U.S. Coast Guard. It’s out of their tactical jurisdiction, but they have monitoring radar that they’re checking. I’ve talked with the missionaries by radio. They confirmed Luke took off around 6 p.m. our time.”

“And no one has heard from him since?” I asked, hoping for a different answer this time.

Don was silent, as if until that moment the situation had been hypothetical. Saying it out loud, that it had been twenty-six hours since Luke had left Tarajuro, meant there was trouble.

“No, we haven’t.”

“Who do we call, Don?”

Don scrambled to answer. “It’s not that easy. Luke’s flying over water in an area larger than the U.S. and Australia combined. We know his basic chart course, but satellite images show there was weather in the area. He could have strayed off course, and right now we don’t know if he ran into problems five hours or five minutes after takeoff.”

“Do you think his plane may have …” I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

“I’ve been in touch with the coast guard station in Hawaii. Nothing’s been reported so far. I’ve notified them that Luke’s plane is missing, but we just don’t know anything.”

I staggered to find a seat in the apartment, clutching the phone in my hand, doing whatever there was to do to keep myself from panicking. “What can we do?”

“At this point, nothing. We wait. That’s all we can do, Harper. I’m staying glued to the radio. The missionaries are contacting some of the nearby islands for any news. They’re just sick about this. When the sun comes up tomorrow, the coast guard will use one of its search planes to comb the area.”

“But you said it’s hundreds of square miles? How are they going to …”

“Harper, all we can do is wait.”