The Next Best Thing (48 page)

Somewhere, in the depths of my hard drive, I still had the version of the script I’d turned in to the network, the script before I’d rewritten it for a slimmed-down Cady and removed any references to Daphne’s size, before I’d added Pete’s character and Taryn’s character and the scene where the grandma gets so cruelly dumped. Somewhere, on my contact list, I still had phone numbers for Annie Tait, and Carter DeVries, my favorite of the
three potential Daphnes. Before I could think twice or second-guess myself, I dialed Ginger’s number. Lucky for me, my most senior writer answered on the first ring.

“You want to do what?” she asked, sounding dubious but not immediately dismissive.

“The sets are still up.” I wasn’t actually positive that this was true, but it had to be too soon for anyone to have taken them down. Eventually, other set designers would come by to scavenge our walls and furniture, the same way we’d taken the bits of other shows’ sets—a wall here, a door there, a window reputed to be from Arnold’s bedroom on
Diff’rent Strokes
—but I didn’t think it had happened yet. “The props, the lights, the costumes . . .” Cady’s clothes wouldn’t fit Carter, but never mind. “Everything’s still there. We’ll do it in one night. One take per scene. We’ll shoot it on flip-cams and find someone to edit it . . .”

“Why not our guys?”

“I don’t want to get them involved,” I said. “The fewer people, the better.”

“I think,” said Ginger, “you should at least give everyone the option of being involved if they want.”

“The option of committing professional suicide?” I asked, only half joking.

Ginger sounded somber. “You know, you’re not the only one who noticed when there was a difference between what we wanted in the room and what happened on the air. You’re not the only one who’s been through this wringer. If you want a do-over, I think you owe people the option of deciding for themselves if they want to be part of it.”

My face felt hot. I swallowed hard before I said, “Right. Of course. I’ll start making calls.”

“Let me call the editors. You call the writers.”

“What about the actors? No, you know what? Never mind. I’ll handle that part.” I found myself on my feet, arms swinging
as I walked. I hadn’t felt so energized and excited since I’d gotten the green-light call, and even then, it had been enthusiasm tempered with pragmatism, excitement mixed with the realities of the situation. Now there were no constraints, no realities, no advertisers to impress or executives to appease, no critics, no ratings. No compromises. “If we actually do this, what’s the worst thing that could happen?”

“We could get in trouble with the network,” Ginger said. “They still own the show and all the characters.”

“They canceled us,” I pointed out. “What do they care? I say we go for it. We shoot it, we edit it, we put it up on YouTube. It’ll be like a thank-you note to the six people who were watching. And I’ll actually be able to see it the way it was meant to be.”

Ginger didn’t answer. I waited, feeling dizzy with a combination of excitement and terror. “I bet my dad could do the lighting,” she finally said. “When’s this going down?”

“Tonight,” I said. Word was out already, and if we waited any longer, the door would swing shut. Whether or not the network began dismantling our sets, the guards and the producers from other shows on the lot would know that we had no business being there unless we’d come to clear out our desks. I paced along the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street, my head filling with plans, figuring out what we’d need and who to call and whether it was even possible to pull this off. “And then come meet me in the writers’ room. Before we do anything else, I’ve got to see if my keys still work.”

*  *  *

Carter DeVries’s agent said it
was either the dumbest or the gutsiest thing she’d ever heard. Then she refused to ask her client if she was interested. “It’s fine for you to go burn bridges, but Carter’s got a new one-woman thing she’s working on, and she’s up for a part on a new scripted reality show. I’m not going to jeopardize that.”

“Is it
Butterface
?” The agent didn’t answer. I cringed, thinking of Carter, of whom Lanny had drawled,
I wouldn’t fuck her,
on some stupid joke of a reality show, competing to become pretty enough so that men who didn’t deserve her in the first place would find her desirable. “Just tell her to call me. If she thinks it’s crazy, she can tell me no.”

“I’m not crazy,” the agent retorted, “whether she is or not. So no. I’m sorry. I feel for you. But I can’t let my client sign up for this.”

Fine,
I thought.
There’s more than one way to skin a cat.
I tracked down Carter on Facebook, and she didn’t think it was crazy. She thought it sounded amazing. She even agreed to bring her own wardrobe—the outfit Daphne wears to work at the restaurants in Boston and Miami, the casual clothes she’d wear in the apartment—and to see if she could recruit a friend to do hair and makeup.

“I can’t pay you,” I said. Then I thought:
If I’m putting my own career on the line, why not spend my own money?
“You know what? I totally can pay you. I can pay you a thousand dollars.” I could offer everyone else whatever their rate would have been for one night’s work, and so what if that depleted my reserves? I had all this cash I’d been saving for a rainy day, and if this didn’t qualify, nothing ever would.

“I’m there,” Carter said. “And by the way, I would have done this for free pizza and a bag of Skittles. This is going to be awesome!”

So we had our Daphne. Penny Weaver had left for the Maldives, her manager coolly informed me, and I didn’t think Annie Tait would welcome my call. “Let me get Mom on the phone,” said Ginger, who’d joined me in the writers’ room, our war room, with a sack full of takeout from Chin Chin and her laptop. I’d printed out a dozen copies of the original pilot script, plus a contact list of all 186 people who’d had a hand in the show’s creation, and the two of us were working the phones.

“Do you think she’ll do it?”

Ginger pursed her lips and widened her eyes. “My mother? Are you kidding? I think she’s probably in her car circling the executive parking lot right now, just waiting for someone to remember she’s alive. So yes, I think she’ll do it.” She paused. “What about your grandma?”

“Honestly? I think she’d rather watch than act.”

“Give her a line,” Ginger advised, and I promised that I would.

“Now. Who’s going to play Brad?” I asked, figuring that whoever we found would probably do a better job of learning his lines than Pete Paxton had.

“I’ll bet Sam would be good.”

“Sam the writer? Our Sam?”

“He did that video,” she said. Her fingers rattled over the keyboard, and there was Sam, getting escorted out of a Lululemon store as he sang the praises of the cashier’s “Bikram booty,” which he rhymed with “spin-class cutie.”

“You call him. I’ll get extras,” I said, and dialed my grandmother’s number, and said the words I suspected she lived to hear. “Grandma, I need your help.”

“Name it,” she said.

“Do you think you can get about twenty extras to come to the Radford lot tonight at nine o’clock? I need . . .” I glanced at my script and the notes I’d made. “All ages and ethnicities, for the restaurant scene, another six for the apartment building . . .”

“Ruth Rachel Saunders, what are you up to?” she asked.

I was smiling, grinning from ear to ear, as happy as I’d been at work since this process had begun. “We’re putting on a show.”

“Well, then, you’ll need an audience,” she said. “Leave it to me.”

I called Cliff, the security guard, and told him that there’d be people coming through the gates that night for what I described
as a farewell party for
The Next Best Thing.
Then I called all the writers. “More pilot reshoots?” asked George. “You promised us we were done with all that.”

“This is special,” I said. I explained to him, like I’d explained to everyone else, what the plan was, what we’d do and how we’d do it. “If you don’t want to be part of this, I completely understand.”

“You can Alan Smithee me?” he asked—Hollywood code for leaving his name off the credits or giving him a pseudonym.

“Whatever you want,” I said. “But we were a team. We were a team when we did this, and I want us to be a team if we’re going to try to do it right.”

“Gotcha,” he said. “I’m in.”

By six o’clock the pizzas and drinks I’d ordered had arrived, and Carter, and her friend Matt the makeup artist, who’d gone to work on our cast: Carter as Daphne, Leanna Fairfax as Nana Trudy, Sam King as Brad Dermansky and Sam’s girlfriend Debbie in Taryn Montaine’s part. We’d gotten the guy who’d played one of Nana’s boyfriend’s evil sons to double as Daphne’s soon-to-be-ex, Phil. My grandmother happily agreed to her one-line role; then she’d sit in the audience and take it all in. I’d wanted to call in a skeleton crew to handle the lights and the props and the cameras, knowing the kind of trouble people could get into with the network and their unions for doing what I’d planned on, but somehow, the word had gotten out.

By the time I poked my head through the elephant doors and took a look at the stage, Reilly, my line producer, was sweeping the floor, and Abby, the prop master, was lining up vases and teapots and making sure Cady’s Rollerblades fit Carter. The actors were running their lines. George and Paul were fiddling with the lights. My plan had been to film with cell phones, and with the handheld digital camera Paul and Claire had bought after their daughter was born, and I felt my throat tighten when
three of the four cameramen quietly arrived and took their spots behind their rigs.

“You guys don’t have to do this,” I said.

“Ah, there was nothing good on cable tonight,” said Matty, who tended to speak for the rest of them. “You gonna call Chad?”

I shuddered at the thought. “I don’t think he’d be interested,” I said. I also didn’t think that Chad would work for anything less than his quote of $75,000, and while I could afford to spend some money on this insanity, I couldn’t afford that.

“So you’re in charge?”

“I guess so. What a cliché. Turns out what I really want to do is direct.” I looked at my phone, checking the time, as my grandmother led her friends into the bleachers and then rounded up the ones who’d be extras and started telling them where to sit or stand and what to do. It was just after nine o’clock. My plan was to begin the shoot at ten. I’d already called Dave and said I’d be spending the night at my grandmother’s, that she was having a minor surgical procedure performed early the next morning and had asked me to drive her and wait to bring her home.

“She doesn’t want her husband?” Dave had asked.

“It’s a girl thing,” I’d answered, suspecting that any intimation of the female anatomy—my grandmother’s in particular—would head off follow-up questions. It was the first lie of our relationship, but I felt okay about telling it. If Dave found out what I was doing, he’d either try to talk me out of it or drive down here to help. This was, I had decided, my show and mine alone. If I got in trouble, well, my show had been canceled already, but I couldn’t risk getting Dave in a bad spot with the network. “Come home when you can,” he said, and I felt my heart leap. Was his place where I lived now? “I miss you,” he said, and I told him that I’d see him soon.

At 9:45, we were ready to go. The actors were in costume, the cameras were loaded, the lights, rigged and run by Ginger’s
spry-looking eighty-year-old father, were shining brightly onto the apartment set. Sam was getting into character, swaggering around backstage like he was twenty percent more muscular than he was in real life, and Leanna Fairfax was fussing with her wig, murmuring her lines under her breath.
Your mother didn’t want you to have a little life, Daphne. She wanted the world for you.

I stuck my head outside the stage doors, certain that we were on the verge of being busted. At any moment security guards with flashlights and walkie-talkies and cell phones connecting them to Chauncey McLaughlin himself would shut us down and drag me off to showrunner prison. So far, though, the night was quiet, with just the usual cars and pedestrians moving around the lot, a breeze rustling the palm fronds, the Los Angeles river flowing through the concrete channel behind the bungalows. Was it possible that we’d get away with this? I thought of Big Dave’s Magic 8-Ball: No matter how you shook it, all signs always pointed to yes.

“Hey, Ruthie?” Ginger was calling me. “You gonna say something before we get started?”

“I hadn’t planned on it.”

“Oh, come on. Give us a speech!”

“Speech!” called Sam, and then Nancy and the rest of the writers took up the chant, and I found myself center stage, under the lights, in front of the camera.

“Wait, she needs makeup!” Grandma said as I took a seat in the couch of the apartment set. Carter’s friend hurried over with concealer and foundation and pots of powder and color. “Beautiful eyes,” he said as he lined and shadowed them, one hand resting lightly on my scarred cheek. “By the way, I think this is fantastic. Like, let’s put on a show!”

“I wish,” I said, and didn’t continue. I wished that I’d stood up for Carter and fought harder for Annie Tait; that I’d figured out how to get a decent performance out of Pete Paxton and that
I’d told the network to find another show, possibly even another planet, for Taryn Montaine to inhabit. It was too late for any of that, but maybe this could be at least a gesture toward making it right.