Shadow Call

The rain in Los Angeles doesn't clean anything. It just makes the grime slicker, turns the dust into a paste that sticks to your shoes and your conscience and every surface you touch. I learned that in the first week, when I arrived with two bags of clothes and a one-way ticket and the naive conviction that I could disappear in a city of three million people.

I was wrong about disappearing. I was also wrong about a lot of other things.

My name is Betty Lane. I'm twenty-one, which in Hollywood terms means I'm too old to be a ingenue and too young to be anything else. I came from Decatur, Illinois, where the biggest excitement was the Fourth of July parade and the biggest danger was my father's temper when the whiskey ran out. I left when the whiskey ran out and the temper stayed.

Republic Pictures was a fortress of brick and shadow on the edge of Burbank. I was walking past it because the bus had dropped me at the wrong stop and the walking had become the only option. The lot was lit by sodium lamps that turned everything they touched into an orange that matched the color of bad decisions.

I was looking at the ground when a hand grabbed my arm.

"Hey," said a voice that belonged to a man who had never been told no. "You look like you need work."

I looked up. The man was maybe thirty, wearing a suit that had been expensive once and was now expensive in a different way--the kind of expensive that comes from wearing the same clothes every day for months. His face was all angles, like someone had taken a knife to it and decided to leave the cuts.

"I need a bus fare," I said. It was the truest thing I knew how to say.

He laughed, a dry sound like tires on gravel. "Me too, kid. But I'm looking for a face, not a financial adviser."

He was Dutch Callahan. I didn't know his name then, but I would learn it. Everyone in this town learned Dutch's name. It was spoken the same way people in other towns spoke God's: with reverence, superstition, and a healthy dose of fear.

Dutch was a director. Not a star--the stars walked around in sunlight, tanned and smiling and surrounded by people who told them they were beautiful. Dutch was the kind of man who worked in shadows, who made movies about people who made bad decisions and paid for them, who built reputations out of cigarette smoke and moral ambiguity.

"Come with me," he said, and I did.

The set was a bar, or at least a convincing approximation of one. Bottles lined the shelves, most of them empty, all of them catching the light in just the right way to look expensive. The camera was on a dolly that whispered across the floor like something alive.

"You're the extra who bailed?" Dutch asked the man next to him.

"No, sir. That's Vicky. She's at makeup."

Vicky emerged from behind a curtain wearing a tray of makeup sponges and a smile that had survived approximately seven thousand men. She was maybe twenty-five, with dark hair and darker eyes and the kind of beauty that comes from knowing exactly what you are and charging accordingly.

"This is her," Dutch said, pointing at me. "I need her in the background, third row, table four."

"I don't know anything about acting," I said.

"Neither does anyone else. That's why we call it acting."

The scene was simple: I was supposed to sit at a bar, drink something that looked like whiskey, and look like I had somewhere else to be. It was the kind of role that requires you to be visible and invisible at the same time, which is harder than it sounds.

But here's the thing about Dutch Callahan: he doesn't direct people. He directs truth. And when he said "action," the camera didn't capture a performance. It captured a moment of real, unfiltered life.

"Cut," he said after forty-five seconds. "Again. This time, mean it."

"Mean what?"

"Mean you have somewhere else to be. You're not waiting for the scene to end. You're planning your exit."

I tried again. And again. And again. By the fifth take, Dutch had stopped saying "cut." He just let the camera roll, and I kept moving through the scene, drinking my fake whiskey and planning my fake exit, and something real was happening underneath all of it. Something I couldn't name but could feel in my chest like a second heartbeat.

After the shoot, Vicky found me in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette and watching the rain make the asphalt shine.

"You're good," she said. Not "good for an extra." Just "good."

"I'm just standing there."

"Nobody's just anything in front of that camera. Dutch sees things. He sees the stuff people hide from themselves." She tapped ash into the puddle at her feet. "You got that look."

"What look?"

"The look of someone who's running but knows she'll never make it. Which is the most honest look in Hollywood."

I didn't answer. She was right, and that was the problem.

Dutch's lot had a cat. This was not unusual--every studio lot has cats, because the rat problem is real and the solution is simple and the cats are free. But Dutch's cat was different. It was a large black tomcat with one torn ear and a scar across its nose, and it sat on the director's folding chair between takes like it owned the chair and the chair and the lot and the whole damn town.

Everyone fed it. Dutch included. I watched him one afternoon, sitting on the edge of the soundstage in his worn suit, pouring kibble from a paper cup into his palm, and the cat eating from his hand with the casual trust of an animal that has learned, against all odds, to believe that not all hands are claws.

"It's not just the rat problem," I said to him. "You could hire someone."

"I could," he said. "But then I'd have to talk to someone who isn't a cat."

The mob came in through Johnny Voss. Johnny was a studio plant, a young actor with good hair and worse connections, and he moved through Hollywood the way a shark moves through water: gracefully, efficiently, and with the implicit understanding that he was there to feed.

He found me at the craft services table, which is where everyone in Hollywood is found at some point, usually at 3 PM on a Tuesday, eating something that is neither craft nor services.

"You're the new girl," he said. It wasn't a question.

"I'm Betty."

"Betty. Good. I like names I can remember." He smiled, and it was the kind of smile that movie posters are made of. "You interested in something bigger than background work?"

"I'm interested in getting paid."

"Me too."

What Johnny offered was simple and complicated in equal measure. He wanted me to meet a man, a producer who was thinking about investing in Dutch's next picture. He wanted me to be charming, which in Johnny's vocabulary meant "not ask too many questions and smile a lot."

I told him I'd think about it. This was a mistake. In Hollywood, "I'll think about it" is not a response. It is a provocation.

Dutch found me that night in my apartment, which was a room above a laundromat in East Hollywood and smelled perpetually of detergent and other people's lives.

"Stay away from Voss," he said. Not "would you mind" or "I think you should." Just "stay away from Voss," as if the words themselves had the power to create a barrier between me and the man I was supposed to avoid.

"Why?"

"Because Voss works for people who don't sign checks. They write them." He was leaning against my doorframe, and the light from the hallway turned him into a silhouette with a face. "You don't want to be part of that world, Betty."

"I don't want to be part of any world," I said. "I want to be part of no world. I want to be somewhere where nobody knows my name and I don't have to give it to anyone."

Dutch was quiet for a long time. When he spoke again, his voice was different. Softer. Or maybe I was just tired of hearing his hardness.

"There's no such place," he said. "But you can get close."

The night it happened, it was raining. The rain had been falling for three days, turning Los Angeles into a watercolor painting where the colors bled together and nothing had clean edges.

Johnny found me at the studio gate. He was alone, which in Johnny's world is more dangerous than being with a crew. Alone, he had to do the work himself.

"She doesn't like you," he said.

"Who?"

"The producer. The man I was going to introduce you to. He doesn't like you, Betty. Says you're too plain, too unknown, too everything that isn't what he wants."

"That's fine. I don't want to meet him."

"It's not fine." Johnny's face had lost the poster-boy quality. What was underneath was harder and older and not very pretty. "He's not just a producer. He's connected. And if he decides you're a problem, you're a problem."

I should have walked away. I should have gone upstairs to my laundromat room and locked the door and pretended I hadn't heard any of this. But I didn't. I stood there in the rain and heard Johnny's words and felt them enter me like a needle entering skin, small and sharp and impossible to remove.

Dutch appeared at the end of the gate like he had materialized from the shadows themselves. He was wearing a long coat and a fedora and looking like a man from one of his own movies, which I suppose was the point.

"Voss," he said. The word was a warning.

"Callahan," Johnny replied. The word was a challenge.

They didn't speak for a long time. The rain fell between them. The streetlights made halos in the puddles. Somewhere, a dog barked. In Hollywood, even the dogs know to be quiet when two men are about to decide each other's futures.

"Stay away from her," Dutch said.

"You can't tell me what to do."

"I can. And I am."

Johnny smiled, but it wasn't the movie poster smile anymore. It was something uglier. "You think you can protect her? You're a director, Dutch. You make other people's stories. You don't live in yours."

He walked away into the rain, and Dutch stood there for a moment, looking at nothing, and then he turned to me.

"Come on," he said. "I'll walk you home."

We walked in silence through the rain-slicked streets of East Hollywood. The city was a reflection of itself in the puddles, a double world where the real and the reflected were indistinguishable. I thought about the cat on the director's chair, and the way it trusted a hand that was usually holding a clapperboard. I thought about Johnny's smile and Dutch's silence and the producer who didn't like me for reasons I would never understand.

" Why do you do this?" I asked. "The cat. The movies. Protecting people who can't protect themselves."

Dutch stopped walking. We were in front of my building, and the laundromat below us was still lit, still humming with the sound of machines that washed and spun and washed again.

"Because nobody else is," he said.

I looked at him. The rain had soaked his coat and his hair and probably his conscience, but he was standing there, solid and real and saying the truest thing I had ever heard.

"Go upstairs," he said. "Lock the door. I'll wait until you're inside."

"I don't need you to wait."

"You do." He turned and walked away, and I watched him go, a man in a long coat disappearing into the rain like a character walking out of a movie that was never going to end.

I went upstairs. I locked the door. I stood by the window and watched the street until the shadows stopped moving and the rain stopped falling and the city settled into its wet, shimmering sleep.

In the morning, the rain would stop. The sun would come out. The puddles would evaporate. The grime would dry. And I would go back to the lot, and Dutch would stand in front of his camera, and I would stand in the background, and we would make movies about people who made bad decisions and paid for them.

That's the thing about Hollywood. It doesn't promise you truth. It promises you the illusion of truth, captured on film, played back in a dark room where for two hours you can believe in something real.

I'm still here. I'm still acting. And when Dutch calls "action," I still mean it.

The cat is still on the chair. The lot is still corrupt. And somewhere in the rain-slicked streets of Los Angeles, there's a story that hasn't been told yet, waiting for a director who isn't afraid of shadows and an actress who knows how to stand in them.

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Author Note & Copyright:

Author Note & Copyright: