Little Known Facts: A Novel (12 page)

Before the mostly regular Sony gigs, I worked as an assistant in set decoration at Paramount after spending six years at UCLA, the last two in the graduate screenwriting program. I moved to props within a year and thought that I’d only have to do this kind of work a little while longer before I’d have saved some money and found a backer so that I could start my own production company, Binocular Spectacular. Needless to say, it hasn’t happened yet. The truth is, without a friend in a high place, you often have to start on the lowest rung in the film industry, which is porn. You work as an editorial assistant to some coke-sniffing greaseball director out in the Valley, and you learn how to use the editing software and you pretend you don’t mind and maybe if you’re lucky, you move up to some B-level but more legit studio, and then from there, you keep going. If you’re lucky.

There’s no way around it. This town is superstitious about everything, especially good luck. If you have it, they love you. If you don’t, or don’t outwardly appear to, no one will give you the time of day or night. They don’t want to be tainted by you or your ugly luck.

The job I’ve been doing at Sony, however, isn’t without its rewards. I get to work closely with the actors, making sure the briefcase opens the way it’s supposed to, that the wristwatch the Eisenhower-era lawyer wears is the right one. Before I became propmaster, I sometimes had to run miscellaneous errands that other production people were supposed to do but managed to squirrel out of, like finding the star her favorite shampoo, which could only be purchased at salons in Palm Springs and Miami, or I had to race across town to pick up a prescription for the constipated cinematographer who didn’t want anyone else to know about his affliction.

The two movies I’ve liked working on the most during the time I’ve been at Sony have starred Renn Ivins. His son and I were undergrads together at UCLA for two years. When he was a freshman and I was a junior, we took a class together, a film studies course in which the professor kept trying to convince us that Godard was much more brilliant than Truffaut, which made me furious. The professor gave me a C because I questioned his arguments on a few occasions, but it seemed to me that each time I called him on something, he had no real basis for his claims. Ivins’s son didn’t ever say anything in class, and the couple of times I tried to talk to him, he was polite but it was clear that he didn’t really want to have anything to do with me. He played a game on his phone a lot under the desk and wrote in a notebook that had a picture of a black horse on its cover, the kind of notebook a girl would carry in the fourth grade, but maybe he thought he was being ironic.

I wondered about him, wondered what it was like to have Renn Ivins for a father, someone who has managed to make more of the right films than the wrong ones, though
The Writing on the Wall
from eight or nine years ago was a disaster, an ambitious one, I guess, but it ended up being a joke because Ivins had no business trying to play a transsexual opera singer. He must have thought that he hadn’t taken enough risks with his career, but seeing him in scene after scene with those ridiculous blond wigs and that frosted lipstick seriously made me wonder what kind of drugs he’d been taking when he read the script and talked to his agent about it. Didn’t he know that after
Tootsie,
all that needed to happen with the gender-swap thing had already happened?

Not long after he played the tranny, he made
The Zoologist,
one of the best movies I’ve ever seen, and all was forgiven. He directed and had a small role in it, and
Zoologist
is different from all the other movies he’s been associated with. The title character is a forty-nine-year-old woman who lives by herself in an old Texas ranch house with a huge number of stuffed animals, the toy kind, not the taxidermied. They all have names and she spends a lot of her time making clothes and writing little plays for them that she then stages. It’s an amazing film, one I wish I’d written, and maybe at some point I would have if a person named Pamela Liston hadn’t written it first.

I know a lot about Ivins, and though he knows next to nothing about me, he does remember my name when our paths cross at Sony. I know that he likes to eat maraschino cherries right from the jar when he’s out of sorts, probably because he’s worried about his business manager embezzling millions from him, or some con artist in Germany is going from city to city impersonating him and getting laid every time he turns around. I had to go out once during a blinding downpour and buy a jar of cherries for him. I know that he doesn’t like to gamble, even though he likes Vegas. He took part in a celebrity poker tournament last year because the prize was a half-million-dollar donation to the winner’s favorite charity. Ivins’s was an AIDS hospice in Pasadena where a friend of his from college died in the early 1990s. He won the tournament too, though I’m not sure how, because if he really doesn’t like gambling, how was he good enough to beat the other guys who do like to gamble and do it often? He might be lying about not liking it, or else he used to like it but doesn’t anymore. I blog about him sometimes and read other blogs about him, and I have some of his old costumes, items he left on the set and I collected. If I hadn’t, these things would have moldered away in the studio’s huge wardrobe storage area: three white T-shirts and a pair of running socks, a couple of pairs of khaki shorts, a pair of Moroccan leather sandals, and three hats—a derby, a straw Panama, and a wool fedora. I also have a pair of gold cuff links that he wore in
Pacific Coast,
a wristwatch (a stainless steel Seiko, not a Rolex), a pair of reading glasses (+2.0 magnification), and a tattered paperback copy of
The Stranger
(which he told a film critic at the
New York Times
is his favorite book, but I’m not sure if he’s actually read it. I’ve never seen him reading anything but a script). I’ve managed to obtain other clothes and trinkets of his, but I sold them on a sort of black-market website. I don’t sell anything on eBay because someone from Sony would probably catch me. Other things of his that I’ve picked up—an empty cherry jar, a half-used bar of Irish Spring (two stray hairs included), an old razor, a blank checking deposit slip, a few yellow pencils with teeth marks near the erasers, a stray wooden button, receipts from Starbucks, salt packets from the Habit and In-N-Out Burger, several sticks of Doublemint gum, silver foil intact.

Perhaps the best find of anything that I’ve ever collected: his cell phone numbers. They were written on a little yellow slip of paper that he’d wedged into the frame around one of his dressing-room mirrors. I suppose it might be hard to keep the two different numbers straight, but if he can remember all of those lines, I don’t really get it. I knew they were his because I called them to make sure. When he answered, I said nothing and hung up. He sounded like he’d been sleeping, and even if he hadn’t been, I knew that I was being a jerk, not saying anything, not even “Sorry, wrong number.”

If I ever did call and talk to him, if I ever said who I am and asked for his tolerance and patience and he agreed to talk to me for a little while, I have the interview questions ready. I’d like to make a documentary about him. One of the reasons I’m so interested in him is because he’s the kind of actor other actors respect, and he doesn’t ever really seem to fuck things up, aside from the tranny movie (which John Waters was supposed to direct, but the rumor is, he wanted to cast Keanu Reeves in the lead, not Renn Ivins). I’m not sure how Ivins keeps doing it, how so much of what he touches seems to blossom or at least not to wilt. My documentary project probably won’t ever happen, but if I did have a chance to ask him my questions, I have a pretty good idea how he’d respond to most of them.

Jim M.:
Of which role are you most proud?

Renn Ivins:
I like something about all of the roles I’ve played, but if I had to choose, it’d probably be
Javier’s Sons.
We shot most of it in Peru and I got to see Machu Picchu for the first time. It’s really an amazing place, and to think they built it before the discovery of electricity or the invention of the steam engine.

I also felt even more respect for human rights workers after making this film. They’re extraordinarily brave people, living and working in strange, hostile places, and fighting for abstractions like justice, peace, and equality, things that most of us take for granted in America.

JM:
What was your least favorite role?

RI
(laughs): Oh, I’ve liked every film I’ve made.

JM:
That’s a diplomat’s answer. What’s the real answer?

RI:
If you really have to know, I’d say that it was
Broken English.
Not because I didn’t like the cast or the director, but a lot of things didn’t turn out the way they were supposed to with that film. We were going to shoot it in Toronto, which is where quite a few films are made now because Canada doesn’t charge as much as a lot of places do for permits and other things you need to make a film. But we ended up having to shoot most of it in Cleveland, which was fine, overall, but I’m still not really sure why. Also, one of the stunt people, a young woman named Paisley Braun, died while driving a car off a bridge, which is supposed to be a pretty routine stunt. You can imagine that someone dying is enough to make any shoot tougher than usual.

JM:
Yeah, I can see how that’d be true. I heard somewhere that you didn’t like making Cloudburst, that it’s a movie you wish you’d never been associated with. But I love it, and the reviews were really good, weren’t they?

RI:
I don’t know who told you that I didn’t like making
Cloudburst.
I liked everything about it. Who’s spreading these rumors? Where did you hear that?

JM:
I read it online somewhere. I don’t remember where.

RI:
Whoever wrote that is full of shit.

JM:
Now that you’ve achieved a level of success that most people can only fantasize about, what’s next?

RI:
I don’t know if I’m really that successful. It doesn’t—

JM
(laughing): Of course you are. Unless you’re doing an independent project, you usually make a minimum of nine or ten million a picture. You don’t think that’s success?

RI:
Financially, sure. But there are other things that matter more. I’d like to take a year or two off and travel for leisure, rather than only for work. I’ve traveled all over the world already, but I don’t usually have much time to relax and sightsee when I’m overseas. I’d also like to write more screenplays. I really loved writing
Bourbon at Dusk,
and even though the whole process was pretty arduous—I nearly gave up on it about five times—it was immensely rewarding. More than acting is. Maybe even more than directing.

JM:
If you don’t mind me asking, I’m wondering if you’ve always been a ladies’ man, even before you became famous.

RI
(hesitates):
That’s your question?

JM:
I think a lot of guys want to know how you do it, but they don’t have the guts to ask.

RI:
How I do what?

JM:
How you handle all of the sexual attention.

RI:
Those are different questions.

JM
(pausing): You’re right. I guess what I really want to know is, how hard is it being faithful if you have so many women throwing themselves at you all hours of the day?

RI:
I’m certainly not a ladies’ man, and I don’t know if I have that many women throwing themselves at me. Certainly not at all hours of the day.

JM:
Come on. Of course you do.

RI:
Some days I do have to, you know, tactfully decline the offer of a date or two, but in general, it’s not like women are lining up around the block to give me blow jobs.

JM:
I’m sure you’ve had your share.

RI:
You sound like my ex-wives.

JM:
They both said that?

RI:
Yes. On many, many occasions. If I had a dollar for every time . . . you know the saying.

JM:
Your second ex-wife, Melinda Byers—

RI:
I remember her name. Thanks.

JM:
Your second ex-wife has a book coming out next month, a tell-all about the four and a half years she was married to you. What do you think about this? Didn’t you have her sign some kind of prenup so she wouldn’t be able to reveal any of the secrets of your marriage?

RI:
Secrets of my marriage? What qualify as secrets of my marriage? Do you mean like how often we had sex? Or how much she stole from me to give to her ex-husband, who used the money to buy heroin? Isn’t that all common knowledge by now?

JM:
I guess it’s a given that you wouldn’t be too thrilled about Ms. Byers becoming an author.

RI:
She’s not an author. She’s an opportunist.

JM:
And a scumbag.

RI:
Those are your words, not mine. Make sure that’s clear.

JM:
I’m sorry that you have to put up with these kind of things.

RI:
The price of fame. Needless to say, most people can’t afford it.

JM:
I heard she’s calling her book
This Isn’t Gold.

RI:
Not a bad title, I guess.

JM:
Does she mean it as in “all that glitters”?

RI:
I suppose she does. I haven’t read it.

JM:
Will you?

RI:
Not unless I’m kidnapped and threatened with beheading if I don’t.

JM:
What about your first wife? Are you two on good terms? Is she going to write a tell-all memoir too?