Photo by Luis Morera on Unsplash
She dresses in rock shirts from the eighties and nineties, except one from 1977—T. Rex. She’s cut off the sleeves and sometimes the necks, showing her angular shoulders and biceps as sharp as her boney elbows. She’s usually in skin-tight black pants, her hips protruding like the edges of a bowl, holes in the knees from the sharpness of her bones. She’s narrow thin. So much so that some years back, she was often asked if she had any heroin by the young professionals and soccer moms creeping on Hollywood Boulevard. The junkies never asked. They could tell she looked like a needle but didn’t use them.
Last night’s makeup is often today’s. She protects her pale, near-translucent skin with a long-sleeved plaid shirt or a leather jacket, and a straw cowboy hat or a baseball hat that says Fuck Off in red letters. Her hair has always been unkempt and just slept in, but in 2010 it changed from her signature jet-black to platinum to hide the gray.
From a distance, you’d think she’s sixteen. In the same room, maybe forty. Beside her, a guess at close to sixty would be accurate. Then you would see her age in the lines around her blue eyes, shielded behind black-framed glasses. She could never see well – except through a camera lens.
Sitting at a table in Musso & Franks with fresh makeup and wearing leather pants and a Sid and Nancy T-shirt, she carefully eyes the crowd as she sips her martini. She’s earned her spot in the bastion of filmmaking connections where legends huddle. Her film school professor once told her to be pretty or tough or she wouldn’t get work. He winked at her. “Like it or not, it’s a misogynistic business.” “I’ll go with tough.” She flipped him off as he walked away.
She’s never stopped flipping off people, though she hasn’t always been tough.
Her first film job came when she was working at her mother’s Silver Lake bar. Two men with slick hair and matching personalities sat at stools in front of her. “Hey, baby. You look great in that shirt.” She moved down the bar. “Are there any parties around here, Honey?” She focused on scrubbing the glasses in hot, soapy water.
The slick men’s conversation turned to a movie they were working on—an independent production—and they needed an assistant director. She served them two more pints. “What sort of film?” It was a love story, one said. About female wrestlers, the other said. She told them she was in her last year of film school. “We like your look. If you’re twenty-one, you’re hired, Babe.” “It doesn’t pay much, Honey, and it’s in North Hollywood….”
She grew up in a bar and knew the score. North Hollywood wasn’t Hollywood. It’s where they made raunch movies with oily bodies either too young (women) or too old (men) or too much plastic surgery (both).
She showed up at the warehouse in Sun Valley—even farther from Sunset Boulevard than North Hollywood—ready to learn the ropes around the wrestling ring. Three actresses barely eighteen and higher than she had ever seen her father, screwed one another and a well-endowed mustache man in cowboy boots with an accent to match. This to create sixty minutes of footage. She’d seen worse, and it was two days of experience (that wouldn’t go on her resume) and two hundred dollars (that she needed). She studied the cameraman and threw mental daggers with each holler of “darling” by the actor, “baby” by the director, and “honey” by the producers.
Only Sam and Sam called her by her name. The first Sam, short for Samantha, was the set designer—“Frances, the filmmaker. Fabulous.” The second Sam–or Sammy–was the key grip—“Fierce Frances.” The couple knew another Sam, who worked at an indie record label. “Sam wants someone to document one of his bands,” Sammy said. “No fucking—on camera, at least,” Samantha added.
The cowboy put his meaty hands around the redhead’s neck while the one with a top knot and frilly socks wrapped her legs around his. Frances stepped outside where she alternated between smoking and screaming in her jacket. She vowed never to return to Sun Valley.
Two nights later, well after midnight, Frances met all three Sams at the band’s house on Yucca in Hollywood. It was the kind of place where anyone could crash if they didn’t fight or steal or burn the place down. Frances followed the trio through a room littered with wasted underage punkers who had just come from the band’s show at the Starwood, then along a hallway with holes punched in the wall, and finally into a kitchen that was remarkably clean in comparison to the house’s filth. The bass player—wearing motorcycle boots, tighty whities, and a fifities-era apron tied around his neck and waist—scrambled eggs. The remaining members had settled on mismatched chairs around a table with stacks of flyers and joints. They argued over who made the best eggs, what the order of the songs should be on their record, and if the bass player should get a tattoo on his back that said “chef” or “chief.” The Sams perched around the outside of the room and inhaled as the joint reached them while Frances, who also inhaled, hit record on her Super 8 handheld camera.
The next day, Frances woke before noon on Sam from the label’s sofa—clothes and boots still on. She filmed his album collection—T. Rex on the turntable (a good sign), then his books (including Lord of the Flies on his nightstand, a possible bad sign), and finally she captured the moment he squinted at her through hungover eyes.
Frances hung out with the band and Sam three more times, including two shows, before she edited her grainy footage. It became her final film school project—an A grade. Sam paid her five hundred dollars to own the footage and the completed film, and then cleaned out a few drawers in his house at the base of the Hollywood Hills. Frances moved in. No one called her “baby”—except Sam. No one asked her to make them coffee or screw—except Sam. She wanted to believe her elevated status was out of respect, but she knew it was because she was Sam’s girl. She knew this because after she moved in, Sam edited the title card of her film—and instantly he became the producer and director and she the cinematographer. “No one will take you seriously, Frances.” “And if I was a Frank they would? I’m the director.” “And you wouldn’t be if it wasn’t for me.” “Don’t ever screw me over again or—” “Or what?” “I’ll leave,” she said, pointing to her Fuck Off hat. “You leave and I won’t hire you for the next music video.”
Sam entered her film into a music festival. It won, the band became critic darlings, and no one knew Frances was the director.
After two years of music videos for Sam’s bands, bigger labels called Frances. The first video was for an all-female rock band and it paid five thousand dollars. She quit the bar, hired Samantha and Sammy and a few of the people that hung out at the Yucca house. The musicians perched on boulders in Joshua Tree with their instruments while the extras swirled around them. It was desert stoner rock and Burning Man before either existed. Frances knew the song was killer and her video made the women every rocker’s dream. The band and crew called her “Frances” or “Director.”
For the next video, which paid double the last, she flew to Florida with the record company’s A&R guy. “Listen, Honey,” he began as he settled beside her in business class, “this band’s going to be the next Stones. You make them look like rock stars and play nice, and we’ll be rolling in dough together.” Frances drank two scotch on the rocks and slept the rest of the flight.
She met the band and the A&R guy in the hotel for dinner that night. She wore her Fuck Off hat. The singer barely ate, and she could see he was hopped up on speed. “Big day tomorrow. Let’s get a good night’s sleep,” she said.
“Come on now, Honey. We’re partying in my room. I’ve got some sweet treats.” Mr. A&R pulled out a vial of cocaine.
“The name’s Frances,” she said to Mr. A&R Sleaze. Turning to the band, she said, “We’re going to make a video that will have every slut knocking on your hotel doors—but only if you get your pretty asses to bed and learn to tell the shits that ply you with drugs to,” she pointed to her hat, “fuck off.” They nodded their mops of black hair.
At the end of the first day, Frances knew the band would have a hit record and then fall into obscurity after screwing every groupie that landed in their dressing room. She hated the record exec, the song, and even the band. She vowed to never direct a video for dipshits—even for good money.
On her flight home, fresh from her disgust of the music industry and their churn-and-burn bands, she wrote a script treatment about a painter’s rise and fall thanks to his short-sighted agent and money-hungry gallery owner. Three months later, she pitched the script to an acquittance of Samantha’s. He said he would produce it if she could get one of the rising Hollywood actors to play the artist.
“No problem,” she assured him. “Jeffrey James will do it.” Jeffrey was one of the Yucca flop house guys she hired in her Joshua Tree video. At the end of the shoot, Jeffrey had said, “you have a stunning clavicle.” Frances had replied, “And you will have a stunning career if you watch who you screw.” Some talent scout saw him strutting in her video, placed him in a reoccurring role on a TV series, and then two films. He had that dirty hot vibe in the desert, and he came across as smokey sexy on camera.
For thirty days in Downtown Los Angeles, Frances filmed Wasteland starring Jeffrey James. She spent nearly every one of those long days with Jeffrey, and each night, she slowly drove home to Sam, who had started shooting up and sleeping with a blonde whose hair landed on their pillows. Frances was too invested in the movie to care about the demise of her relationship.
At the Wasteland wrap party, Sam showed up with his bimbo in a neon pink mini dress. Frances stood firm in her new motorcycle boots on the pathway to the producer’s Mulholland mansion. “Go home. You and your trash aren’t coming in.”
“I gave you your first break,” he screamed at Frances from the edge of the half-moon driveway. “Now you’re hanging out with these Hollywood posers.” He waved at Jeffrey, who stood several feet behind her.
“And you’re acting like a record exec scumbag—appropriate.”
Sam stepped toward her, his bimbo in fuck-me pumps teetering beside him. Frances stepped toward Sam, and Jeffrey followed at a respectful distance. She felt naked in the black slip dress, her leather jacket left inside, but she threw her shoulders back. “I’m done with your shit.”
“You owe me.” Sam raised his hand, and spit his words at her—“Baby, Honey, Darling, Bitch”—as his skull ring hit Frances’s cheek bone with a sharp whack.
Her head shot to the left, but she kept her footing. “You don’t own me.” She raised her hand and slapped him with the fuel from every Baby and Honey and Darling anyone has called her.
Frances briefly returned to the party with Jeffrey by her side, but any Wasteland victory was gone. Later that night, alone in her manager’s spare room, Frances cried big ugly tears. She cried from embarrassment—that Jeffrey had seen Sam slap her, and that she had spent ten years with someone like Sam. And she cried from rage that she let Sam steal her first accomplishment. She cried until the tears turned to anger. When the bruise on her pale cheek healed, Frances left her manager’s house, slipped into Sam’s place, and packed what was hers, including the music award for her short film, the one she directed, not Sam.
Wasteland had a cult and critic following, and Frances put a down payment on a house in Topanga Canyon. Jeffrey became an even hotter property and bought a house near Santa Barbara with two horses.
Frances took lunches at The Ivy with her caring manager and red-headed, ball-buster agent. Studio executives rolled up in their sportscars confident, then left emasculated from Frances’s sharp tongue and refusal to let their hand’s rest on hers.
Finally, she sat across from a woman who ran a production company known for making edgy teen flicks. “Word is you’re a bitch,” the studio head said as she sipped her sparkling water and drummed the table with her red nails. “Word is I am also a bitch. You want to be in this business, you have to play ball, but not play with their balls. Two films with me and you’ll make enough money to pay off your house. They’re shit, but they’ll sell. Then you can determine your path—money or art.”
Frances directed the two blockbuster films, which were shit—but quality shit, and paid off her house. She had more lunches, directed one more summer success, and now had dinners with higher level studio executives. She declined many films as she sought out projects with impact and passion. She had paid her dues and with twenty-five years of experience, she wanted respect.
But as her college professor had warned, it’s a misogynistic business.
After one of her painful three-cocktail work dinners at a hotel restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, the executive cornered her outside the lobby bathroom. He pushed her into one of the single-stall rooms, and then against the limestone wall. The cold seeped through her backside as his warm, round belly pressed against her thin hips. “I can make you a success – or take it away. Let’s go for the statue together.”
Frances shoved him back. “You touch me again, and I will grind one of your gold statues into your asshole. You don’t own me, and you never will.” She raised her knee into his balls just enough for him to squeal, then ground her boot heel into the top of his loafer.
She marched out of the bathroom and out of the hotel, not seeing Jeffrey with some wannabe starlet at one of the bar tables. Jeffrey had gone after her but stopped when he saw the executive, who was producing his current movie, come out of the same toilet with a limp to his normal swagger. Jeffrey went back to the starlet, got drunk, then ditched her before sex.
Frances’s phone stopped ringing, and the lunches and dinners evaporated.
She hid in her home with her German Shepard rescues and wrote two crappy screenplays before realizing the passion was inside her. She just had to dig deep.
Frances finally called her agent. “Come over, I have a story that has to be told–for me, you and every woman.”
Five years after the studio head had assaulted her, Frances sat cross legged on her sofa with her pups on either side of her. She told her agent the story of female musicians and journalists surviving in the male dominated music business.
“At least you didn’t say ‘film business’.” Her agent tugged on a red lock that had fallen loose.
“I want it made—not killed. The studios are too egotistical to get the parallelism.”
“Let’s make this motherfucker.”
Jeffrey heard about the screenplay, tracked down Frances, then told her he was at the hotel years before. “I think about you every time I see that prick. I wonder how many women were afraid to fight him. And men. I was weak. I should have raised hell.” He faced her, close enough she could count the lines around his eyes. “Please let me play the piece-of-shit record guy. I’ll kill it for you.”
Now, sitting with Jeffrey and her manager and agent in the booth at Musso & Frank’s, she holds her head high as she spies the executive who tried to kill her career, but instead forced her to embrace her passion. His hair’s balding and his girth flows around the sides of the barstool. He’s still Hollywood power, and actors who knew better continue to work for him—except Jeffrey. But a wide berth has developed. Soon, Frances thought, he will fall from his chair right on a statue.
Frances knows her film, Baby, Honey, Darling, B$$$$, was admitted to the Festival because Jeffrey was the star, but she is the reason it won Best Director. At her table, Frances feels the energy shifting—just a little. Female actors, writers and executives stop by their table to thank her, and earlier in the day a journalist hugged her and cried. She had patted the woman’s back, and said, “I know. I really do.”
“Congrats, Frances.” Jeffrey’s arm brushes hers as he reaches for his martini. “He’ll never screw with you again.”
She shivers from the familiar but still electric touch of her partner. “I won’t stop until he’s done.”
“I know. That’s why I love—and respect—you.”
Frances taps her glass against Jeffrey’s. His hair is salt and pepper, and his skin is soft around his jaw line, but to Frances he’s just as handsome as when she hired him so many years ago.
The two now divide their time between Topanga Canyon and Santa Barbara, and outside the paparazzi lurking in the corners of their lives, they live peacefully while they plan their next passion project.
Jennifer Clay’s writing career began on tour buses and backstage interviewing bands as a music journalist, even jumping out of a plane for a story. Before that, she was in a movie with a bunch of punker rockers. She moved down the road from Hollywood, works for a global company, and spends her happy time writing fiction. Visit her at jclaywrites.com.