Muse-Auteur Relations. Chapter I.

Muse-Auteur Relations

Chapter I: Jack

Vivienne had cast her male role just the night before she first noticed Natasha, who had always sat in the back of her biology class. Before that day, while the teacher went on and on about the lungs, Vivienne had simply been too busy scribbling notes on her screenplays, and writing character profiles to notice much about the rest of the class.

She’d been trying to cast her leads for weeks now, and it seemed impossible. Now Vivienne was getting in that iffy zone where if she didn’t start shooting soon, she wouldn’t have much time for post production, and Vivienne didn’t like that, because post-production was where she put her films together. To top off the growing pressure of the upcoming deadline (she was making this film for her college application portfolio, after all), the counselor had pulled Vivienne into her office this morning, on her way to Lit.

It was quite an annoying conversation, because the counselor was, once again, trying to persuade Vivienne to apply to other colleges, aside from NYU’s film school. Vivienne had no plans to attend any other schools, so the suggestion did not go over too well. The counselor, seeing that she was losing, then proceeded to pester Vivienne about the state of her film, which she had to submit as part of her creative portfolio in order to be considered for admission into the film school.  Vivienne then had had to admit that she had yet to cast a female lead (which the film happened to center on). The counselor encouraged her to look within the school, possibly go to drama club and check out the girls there, which made Vivienne snort. Even she wasn’t quite sure what she was looking for, she knew for sure that it wasn’t an amateur seventeen year old drama queen who overacted.

What she was looking for was a muse, not an actress. The last thing she wanted was to watch someone walking around pretending to be something they weren’t. The dozens of glossy headshots in her bag were all stills trapping pretty but uninspiring young women who tried too hard to pretend. They were all so stiff, with their painted-on smiles and their vacant, perfectly lit eyes. Vivienne found them clone-like, boring, and completely uninspiring.

What she truly needed was not an actress, but inspiration, in the form of a girl. If she was to be an auteur, then she needed a muse, of course. There was no true artist she knew of that didn’t have at least one awe-inspiring woman to feature in nearly all of his works. But of course, since Vivienne aimed to be the first female auteur of serious cinema, it was only fitting that her muse was male.

Finding an inspirational male had turned out to be quite the task as well, but just last night, Vivienne had managed to find exactly what she’d been waiting for. She’d gone to the Metro, to see her favorite New York-based punk band, and the opening act was a local band, with Jack as the lead singer. As he screamed about the injustices of capitalism, pouring everything he had out into the microphone, Vivienne knew that this was her lead. Aside from his chiseled cheekbones, Vivienne found it utterly enthralling, the way he was straining to pour everything that he had into the song; his sweat, his anger, his vocal chords. Standing there, in the crowd, Vivienne could tell that all she had to do was put his face on a screen and the world would fall to their knees.

After the band finished their set, Vivienne didn’t even bother to stay for the main act. She followed the beautiful boy through the crowd, backstage, past the security. All she had to do was pretend like she belonged there, and Vivienne had grown up at enough backstage areas of all sorts of shows, so that was no problem. She caught him just as he was sitting down with a beer in hand. His shirt was drenched, he had eyeliner smearing and caking in the corners of his eyes.

Vivienne helped herself to a beer also and sat down next to him on the ratty couch. If she’d been any closer, she would have been on top of him. He grinned at her. She did not return the flirty smile.

She simply said, “You should be in my movie.”

He grinned even wider, coming closer. His cheekbones glistened with sweat. As he leaned toward her, Vivienne could smell the cigarettes and beer and sweat clinging to his holey white t-shirt, to his skinny black jeans, to his skin. It was a strong smell, and sort of musty, bur Vivienne found that she didn’t mind it very much at all. In fact, she leaned into him, nearing his mouth, almost touching. Just as he leaned in to kiss her, she spoke.

“Do you have a cigarette?”

He stopped, staring at her, trying to see if this was a joke. He knew he was attractive, he knew dozens of girls in the crowd he’d just preformed in front of would have thrown themselves at him, would have paid good money to be kissed by him backstage.

But Vivienne looked dead serious about the cigarette, and dead amused by his reaction, all at once. He handed her a pack of Marlboro Lights, and she took one and lit it.

“How about we negotiate out back?” She said, but it wasn’t really a question. She grabbed his hand and he followed her, out the back door into the alley, where she leaned against the brick back of the building, looking around at the nearly full moon and the glistening pavement of the alley in the dim streetlights.

“You know, sometimes after it rains, at night, there’s just this feeling, like Chicago just disappears. It turns into Gotham,” She states, and Jack is confused, but he is intrigued, too. Is this why she brought him out here, to tell him of her Batman fantasies?

“Does he ever come to save you?” He asks, leaning alongside her against the old brick.

“Who?” She asks, her eyes soaking in the moon. Her hair is dark, her bangs create dark hallows where her eyes ought to be, hiding them in shadow, which his gaze cannot penetrate. Her lips are beautiful, arrogant, assured, and most of all, alluring.

“Batman,” He said, whispering.

She lets out the smoke from her mouth, and it curls, elegant, before it scatters through the night air. She laughs.

“I don’t need saving.” She says. “I need an actor, for my film.” She shakes her bangs out of her eyes, and her gaze pins him still.

“I need you.”

She is not playing hard to get, Vivienne. The moment he thinks she is only interested in him being in her movie (which he hasn’t quite agreed to, but he knows he’d going to do, and he knows she knows it too), she kisses him, a deep kiss that promises more, much much more, and she leads him to her car, which is parked, in front of a fire hydrant on Clark.

She pulls an orange parking ticket off her windshield, and is inside the car before he has a chance to realize that this girl who dragged him out into the alley, in the middle of the night isn’t just anyone.

“Get in already,” She demands, as he stands on the sidewalk, staring at her car, admiring it. God knows cars aren’t his thing, but this is something special, something he’s never seen before. It’s like the automobile equivilent of his dream vintage Fender.

“Yeah, yeah,” Vivienne says, opening the passenger door for him. “It’s a Thunderbird. Get in.”

Jack obeys. The car is turquoise, and in perfect condition, just the sort of thing movie stars drove in the fifties. As she pulls out, impatiently, Jack feels the night air, humid from the rain, surround him. He doesn’t know who this girl is, or why she’s chose him, or why she is wearing torn jeans and crease-broken Converse and driving a car that costs as much as his childhood home. And he doesn’t know that at that moment his bandmates are packing up the equipment and wondering where the fuck he is, and getting pissed that he’s getting away with not doing his fair share of the work, and they’re jealous, because they know he went off with some hot chick.

And Jack has no fucking clue as to why she’s pulling into the parking lot of the iHop in Boystown. But he knows he that he definitely wants to find out.

Vivienne takes him to iHop, that night and lays it all out on the table; she tells him the shoot dates, she tells him the plot, her method of working, how much she likes improvisation. He tells her he’s never set foot in front of a camera, he’s never acted ever before, not even in the ninth grade play. Mostly because at his school, there was no ninth grade play, because the art class and the drama class got cut with the funding, because not enough people showed up to take those whatever-they-were-called state-wide tests.

But Vivienne doesn’t care, doesn’t care about the explanation, doesn’t care about his lack of experience. The only thing she cares about is that he looks good, he looks very very good, his dark hair falls into his eyes at just the right forty five degree angle, he has just the right amount of piercings (just an industrial running through his cartilage and a lip ring), and his jawline is very well defined. She only cares about how lithe-ly he moves and how long he holds his gaze when he looks her in the eyes, and how good, how beautiful and ethereal this will all look on camera. She can’t wait, she does a screentest, right there and then.

She pulls her 8mm out of her bag, and shoots, knowing that if he looks so right in this crappy 24-hour diner lighting, that he will look good anywhere, any time, any how. He is surprised, he pulls back toward his side of the booth, shrinking away from the camera.

Vivienne smiles. Stage-fright. 

That is something she can work with. After all, she does need at least one challenge to tackle as a director.