Stan led his brigade over the terrain as though he was a seasoned Great White Hunter on a safari, intent on capturing the rogue lion that was terrorizing the local village. Add in a pith helmet, machete, and the sound of native drums beating in the distance, and it could have well been mistaken for an expedition trooping through an African jungle. Except this broad, flat trail didn’t exactly require hacking through vines and thick underbrush. Odds were, a novice Girl Scout Brownie could traverse the ample passage blindfolded. However, in Stan’s mind, every single step in the movie-making process was to be regarded as a serious endeavor. To him, it was nothing less than a mission, one that required a firm hand at the helm in order to guide the cast and crew through the inevitable travails that filmmakers encountered. To accomplish this, a bearing of unflappable poise at all times was crucial, and he was determined to maintain one—even after his lead actress had just vanished. “Don’t worry people,” he said. “Keisha’s a big girl. I’m sure she’s okay.”
“How sure?” Bryce asked, as if he expected Stan to provide him with a spreadsheet with a detailed probability analysis.
“Sure enough,” Stan replied, his hollow voice leaning a lot more toward uncertain than sureness.
They continued to plod on. The sun was higher in the sky now and shafts of light cracked through the foliage above. Even though Memorial Day was still a week away, and the typical heat of the summer season a month beyond that, the late-morning temperature was already pushing seventy degrees. The afternoon forecast predicted a high of near eighty, as an unseasonably warm high pressure system settled over the entire northeast section of the country, from New Jersey to Maine. With little breeze to speak of, the air was stagnant, and the humidity began to make its unwelcome presence felt.
Stan’s shoulders started to ache. His backpack felt like it contained a bunch of anvils instead of camera batteries and cables. He realized, however, that one complaint or gripe out his mouth could infect the entire Letter 13 team with an epidemic of grumbles, a plague of rotten attitudes that could ravage the entire production from within. He reminded himself that as the director, he had to set an example for the others, and if the leader faltered or displayed any sign of weakness, there was a more than even chance they all would follow suit. No, it was a burden Stan knew he would have to suffer in silence. That’s when he heard it. Or thought he did.
Stan thrust his hand in the air to signal a halt. “Hold it. Shush. Listen.”
The group stood still and trained their ears around them. From somewhere in front of them, at the outer limits of their hearing range, a faint sound floated their way. It was difficult to discern at first, but once they could isolate it, it became more obvious that it was a person, probably female and from the muddled yells, she was either in distress or her happy pill had just kicked in.
Irv provided the initial confirmation of hope. “Definitely a girl.”
“I think it’s her!” Dana had developed a kinship with Keisha, kind of an unspoken girls-against-guys type of pact, even though they’d just met that morning. She considered Keisha an ally, maybe her only one, and for that reason alone couldn’t contain her exuberance over a potential reunion.
“Only one way to find out.” Stan bolted ahead, while the others followed suit and hustled after him.
The voice grew louder and more distinct the farther along they ran. It was a mixture of cries and hollers, just not of the sort that sent tingling chills through the bones. These were more of the whooping-it-up variety, and as Stan was joined by his crew at the edge of a steep hillside and peered below, they found out why.
“Hey, you guys! Woo-hoo!”
Keisha laughed and waved at her colleagues gaping down on her. She was hip-deep in the middle of Esopus Creek, a sixty-five mile tributary of the Hudson River, popular with fly fisherman for its abundant trout and kayakers for the whitewater rafting. Most of her clothes were strewn about on the near bank. Only a shimmering, milky-white bikini top and low-rise bottom concealed her private regions. Her bare midriff revealed a dime-size, silver ring that hung from her pierced navel. Keisha bent down, dunked her head under the water, and then resurfaced. She flicked off the water like a frisky thoroughbred after a refreshing hose down.
For Stan, the sight of Keisha in a state of undress was an unexpected treat. He was mesmerized by her unbridled frolicking and, for a moment, forgot the plethora of snafus that plagued Letter 13. Wow. A smile seeped onto his face, and his eyes widened with the amazement of a guy who ordered a pepperoni pizza but found a million bucks inside the box instead. His brief paralysis was soon cured, however, by a sharp jab in his ribs by a flying elbow piloted by Dana.
“Ouch!” he yelped. It was unclear if Stan was truly hurt or just miffed about the rude interruption of his daydream.
“Wake up, Stan!” she barked.
He was well aware that his sister had no intention of allowing him even a second of pleasure, even if the object of his desire was one hundred and fifty feet away. From her warped perspective, if she had to be miserable, so did he. Stan shoved her away. “I am up!” He composed himself and resumed command. “All right, listen, folks. We’re going to use this.”
“Use what?” Bryce asked the question with the reluctance of someone who had the sneaking suspicion that the answer involved him and he wasn’t going to like it.
Stan gestured toward Keisha. “Get down there.”
“Forget it. I can’t swim.” Despite many hours of lessons as a young boy with an instructor retained by his parents (a scandal-plagued ex-Olympian forced to hire himself out to upper-crust clients in Long Island’s affluent shore communities), Bryce never mastered the basic aquatic skill of floating, let alone anything that resembled a freestyle stroke. For some inexplicable reason, the lack of buoyancy was an issue he could never overcome, and, as a result, he avoided any bodies of water larger than a standard-size bathtub.
“You’re an alien. You can assimilate to any human behavior.” Stan figured he would try to maneuver Bryce back into his character. After enduring the irksome events of the morning, he realized the less he dealt with the actual persona, the better.
Bryce remained unconvinced and came right back at Stan like a five-year- old at the dinner table asking his parents to explain why there were Brussels sprouts on his plate. “What’s my motivation?”
It was the classic—and clichéd—question actors fell back on when they had no other cards left to play. Stan recognized the ploy. He knew that, more often than not, it meant one of two things, and both gave a director agita. First, the actor was lazy, didn’t prepare for the role, and relied on the director to explain why even the most obvious action was required. It was as if the actor checked their brain at the door before they walked onto the set or stage, and therefore the ability to think for him or herself was no longer an option. The second reason was more sinister: the actor was gauging how well—or not—the director knew the character to determine if he or she could trust the direction given. This scenario was the domain of actors so arrogant and conniving that they presumed to know the role better than the person who created it. From Stan’s viewpoint, Bryce straddled both categories, but whichever the case, he was prepared with an ironclad answer he felt confident would end the discussion: “There’s a hot girl in the river and she’s nearly naked. How about that for motivation?”
Much to Stan’s chagrin, however, Bryce wasn’t finished. “And?”
Bryce gaped at Stan as if even the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe in her birthday suit beckoning to him below wouldn’t have been enough for him: Bryce still would have complained that he lacked sufficient motivation.
As they stared each other down in a kind of Mexican standoff, Stan came to the conclusion that to provide Bryce with the proper impetus he craved demanded a different tactic than what he had attempted so far. It was time, he realized, to employ the one sure-fire arrow left in his motivational quiver. Stan tossed his arm around Bryce’s shoulder and led him to the edge of the hillside. It was a s
teep descent, a wall of mud, weeds, and pebbles that cascaded thirty feet down to a narrow strip of land that bordered the water. Stan patted Bryce on his back. “And…THIS!”
He pushed Bryce forward with as much force as he could muster. Bryce teetered a moment on the precipice, but his feet began to slip, and he looked for a second like one of those lumberjack types trying to balance himself on top of a spinning barrel.
“Whoa. Whoa! WHOA!”
With nothing within reach to grasp onto, he plunged forward on his belly and slid face-first along the muddy slope.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!”
Bryce’s scream was music to Stan’s ears. He was giddy with a sudden spurt of adrenaline as he kneeled down, leaned over, and aimed his camera downward. From his angle, he could see Bryce’s body bouncing and caroming off various protrusions that lined the route. It was a bumpy ride all the way to the bottom and over in less than ten seconds, but for Stan, it was cinematic gold. “Great! Great!” he clucked.
Once he struck horizontal ground, Bryce’s hat flew off as he tumbled over a couple of times and landed in a heap on his back. He remained motionless for several moments before Stan’s voice called out.
“CUT”!
Bryce craned open his eyelids and with the sun directly in his sight line strained to see Stan perched on the top of the hill. He had a wide grin splayed across his face and his thumb raised in a triumphant gesture, like a Roman senator amused by the antics of his favorite eunuch. Dana joined him and watched as Bryce groaned and struggled to pull himself into a sitting position.
“That was a dirty trick, Stan,” she charged.
Stan shrugged off the accusation. “It worked, didn’t it?”
Dana was disgusted with her brother, but his suspect behavior was nothing new and, as she’d come to realize over the years, not worth pursuing further. In her mind, Stan was a hopeless, insensitive megalomaniac incapable of change. “So how do we get down there, Mr. Smarty Pants Director?
Stan snapped off a wink her way. “Follow me, toots.”
“And don’t call me that!” she protested.
Dana tried to slug him, but Stan just chuckled, danced out of the way, and trotted off. While Irv brought up the rear, Dana followed her brother along a winding path that seemed to lead away from their destination, but curved back in a wide arc and led them down in a gentle descent to the edge of the river.
By the time they arrived, Bryce was on his knees. Stan and Irv rushed up to him, but were greeted with an icy reception. He was a mess, splattered in mud top to bottom, and in no mood for Stan’s revelry.
“Boffo, Bryce, boffo!” Stan patted him on the back with such enthusiasm, it was like Bryce just won the Iditarod and set the course record to boot.
“I’m going to boff YOU!” Bryce batted Stan’s hand away.
“Actually boff is slang for copulation,” Irv coolly pointed out, “so technically, Bryce, you just said you wanted to hump Stan.”
Bryce was repulsed by the notion of such a liaison. “Screw you, Irv!”
“Forget it, Bryce. Just get in the water.” Stan was anxious to continue shooting. He knew the top directors worked fast for a reason. In movie production, the momentum and energy generated by a previous scene didn’t last long. Any delay and it would be lost, an opportunity wasted.
“Huh-uh, no way. No more of this make-it-up-as-we-go-along junk. I DEMAND A SCRIPT!” Bryce shouted with such ear-splitting volume, it was as if he was beseeching some divine Great Screenwriter in the Sky to hear him and drop one down.
A script. Stan had written a screenplay—it was a course requirement—but left it behind in his dorm room on purpose and provided Bryce and Keisha with just a barebones outline of Letter 13. He decided to direct from memory so the actors’ performances appeared much more spontaneous than the stilted deliveries often caused by a note-by-note regurgitation of written dialogue.
“You don’t need a script,” Stan asserted.
Bryce smirked. “Ha! Which really means you don’t a script.”
“Wrong. It’s in my head. Nobody actually writes a script anymore.” Stan realized the folly of the statement, but banked on Bryce’s naïve ignorance about the mechanics of filmmaking to swallow the baloney he was peddling. “Everything’s improvised. Much more natural that way, don’t you think?” Stan figured even Bryce would have a tough go arguing against anything deemed “natural.”
While Bryce considered his response, a hand reached out from behind and dropped the mangled felt fedora back atop his head.
“What’s up, guys?”
All heads turned to find that Keisha had emerged from the creek and joined them. Her hair and skin glistened as beads of water skated down her face and arms. Much to Stan’s disappointment, however, she was fully clothed again…