Always and Forever Will I Know What You Did Last Summer
There’s news of an exhibition. Good! Yes! Deadlines! Now the rest of the movie will be finished. Da Boss was pacing around the room like one of my kind, pecking at his sleeves and scratching the floor and cutting up the wood. “Monica, what do you think about water?… Do you think it actually has a taste and they’re lying to us? Heh.” Da Boss was starting to laugh like Beavis and it was driving me insane. I told him to stop and then he switched to Rasta so I urged him to return to Beavis. “Okay. Heh.” At least he forgets the second “-heh.”
We’ll be working on the preparation of the “breakdown” section of SATUR-19, tentatively titled “Time Waits for No One,” although no on-screen titles will be used as such. Instead, a variety of title cards will be incorporated, drawing from names to phrases to quotes to obscure inside jokes or laughs that might make two or three people howl. Da Boss says this is his way of “playing the audience like an organ”—different people laugh harder at different things. Da Boss is trying to spread the laughter, if not evenly. I think he’s crazy, but so are most filmmakers worth working for.
“Whatever happened to the woman who directed The Night Porter?” Da Boss thinks I’m Wikipedia. “Her name was… Cavani. Lili… no, Lil…uh… Lillian? No. Uh, heh—” I had to spur-claw him for that. No more HEHs in my editing bay. Da Boss was most upset that I’d stained his new linen suit. I told him he may suffer for fashion, but I’ll never suffer fools. Her name is Liliana Cavani. I kept importing the photos he’d given me to scan and use in the “breakdown sequence,” a series of childhood photographs and found photos of various artists and public figures: Kurt Cohan, Billy Corgan, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Elliott Smith, Nicolas Roeg, Madonna, three of the four original members of KISS, Stockard Channing, Tatum O’Neal, Elizabeth Taylor, Charlie Rose, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, Conrad Hall, Al Franken, Jennifer Lopez, Louis Farrakhan, Barbara Steele, Jeremy Thomas, Lynn Hirschberg, and Gary Indiana.
“Where did you find all of this stuff?” Da Boss waved me off. He was still talking about The Night Porter. “That movie is incredible. INCREDIBLE. Two major movie stars in an expertly made big budget Naziploitation-slash-sexploitation masterpiece… it’s a major film… Dirk Bogarde sought out the director—Cavini, whatever—when he saw a previous film of hers on television. Where is that film? Why hasn’t the Criterion Collection released and restored it? I don’t even remember what it’s called—do you, Monica?” I told him I wasn’t paying attention when Liliana Cavani was making movies. “Well you should’ve been. She’s great.” I threatened to spur-claw him again before shrinking back into my editing position: like a lotus, ready to fly like a hawk, serrated, salted, on call for duty.
The next picture is in the set is one of me, Rooster, and Bennington. I haven’t seen them in a year and a half.
—Follow Monica Quibbits on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits