They never dated or acted together. What if these two icons were alive and living together? 929 words. Illustration by Mark Fearing.
“Todd call?”
“I don’t know – check the machine…”
“He said he was going to get me in to read.”
“You pick up my prescription at Rite Aid?”
“It’s two days’ work. I could play that role – a guy from Montana runs a gas station. I told them to send over Giant so they can see me do the western thing.”
“Jimmy, I told you — you need to take everything off your résumé with a ‘5’ in front of it. They don’t want anybody who worked before 1960. I took Some Like It Hot off mine last year.”
“You ever go in on NCIS: Temecula?”
“I go in on them all. Strasberg always said that you should use an audition as the first rehearsal for the part.”
“The thing about those NCIS series is you get residuals forever.”
“Your pension check come?”
“Come and gone. What about yours?”
“Used it to pay Roto-Rooter. The sink’s backed-up.”
“Again?”
“You see my Macbeth sides?”
“You doing Lady Macbeth?”
“They haven’t offered it to me yet.”
“Where they doing it?”
“Some theater on Melrose.”
“You can’t afford to do a waiver production now. It’s pilot season.”
“C’mon, Jimmy, how many pilot roles are there for a woman my age?”
“You don’t look a day over sixty-five.”
“Think so?”
“Well, maybe sixty-eight.”
“There’s this pilot over at CBS about a crime scene investigator with a cleft palate. He’s got a mother who helps him solve crimes.”
“The guy’s twenty-five, he’s got a mother, what… fifty?”
“Maybe she had him late in life…”
“Todd could have called and then hung up before the machine picked up.”
“You figure, if he got you in to read, he’d call you, right?”
“Sometimes they get busy and forget.”
“So call him.”
“That little pissant assistant of his always says he’s on a conference call.”
“What I do is I don’t hang up till they pick up directly. If you stay on, you tie up one of their lines. They hate that.”
“And then, when he does pick up, I can hear his computer keys clicking while he’s talking to me.”
“He checks his email while he talks to you? Call him when you know he’s in the car. He can’t drive, talk on the phone and do his email at the same time.”
“So he can fade out on me conveniently in the Sepulveda Pass? Forget it. What if I went to William Morris Endeavor?”
“You called them in March. They weren’t interested.”
“That was before I did Elementary.”
“It was three lines.”
“Yeah, but I blew Lucy Liu off the screen.”
“Jimmy, they’ll just send you out on the stuff that Scott Bakula turns down.”
“You know what we need? New headshots.”
“What’s wrong with the publicity stills from Bus Stop?”
“You don’t look like that anymore, Marilyn.”
“I don’t know — if they light me okay, I can look pretty good.”
“You’re the one saying I should take Giant off my résumé.”
“But a headshot doesn’t have a date on it.”
“All they have to do is IMDB you.’”
“I’ve got to get that fixed.”
“There’s this computer wiz who for five hundred bucks will hack into IMDB and get your date of birth deleted.”
“That the same guy gets you illegal breakdowns?”
“His nephew.”
“There’s this other pilot I’m trying to get in on at Netflix. Something about an elite squad of top-secret government auditors…”
“’DA.’”
“Huh?”
“Desperate Accountants. They’re talking to Rob Lowe.”
“I could play Rob Lowe’s mother, don’t you think?”
“It’s a stretch.”
“She’s psychic. She figures out who did it and tells him.”
“You know what I’m thinking? Maybe I’ll race the Porsche this weekend.”
“It’s pilot season, remember?”
“But if Todd can’t get me in on this NCIS thing, what’s the use?”
“Yeah, what’s the use? Sometimes I think I should just pack it in.”
“You keep taking all that Seconal, you’re going to.”
“Look who’s talking. I’m not the one racing my Porsche.”
“I won’t push it hard.”
“Yeah, right… Like Hefner said he’d never use that photo.”
“You use that as a headshot, you’ll get a lot of work.”
“Jimmy, I’m a trained actress. I want to do Strindberg.”
“What if someone leaks it to Todd that I’m thinking of going elsewhere?”
“How’s that going to happen if he’s always on a conference call?”
“I could get someone to slip it to Deadline Hollywood.”
“Who do you know talks to Deadline Hollywood?”
“You could call Miller for me.”
“Arthur passed, Jimmy.”
“No kidding? How come nobody told me?”
“You didn’t ask. I was going to go to the funeral but I was feeling too low. First Joe, now Arthur. It’s too much for a girl to handle. I get very blue sometimes.”
“Use it.”
“You think I should do Lady Macbeth depressed?”
“Why not? She’s got a lot on her mind. Remember what Stella said?”
“You never studied under Stella Adler.”
“Jesus, really? I thought I did.”
“Marlon studied under Stella.”
“Could you call Marlon for me?”
“Jimmy, you’ve got to start to reading the obits.”
“Serves the bastard right. He stole every one of my moves.”
“He said it was the other way around. So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to take the Porsche up to Salinas this weekend. There’s a straightaway near Cholame I can get it up to ninety.”
“First, could you drive over to Rite Aid and pick up my Seconal?”
“The traffic on Sunset’s real bad now.”
“Take Fountain.”
“Secret of success in this town.”
“Don’t forget some Drano.”
Funny and surprisingly touching. Could this be the author of "Naked Lunch on Avenue A: BLT and Bad Vibrations"?