Page 45 of My Unscripted Life

“Can I get a little more light over here?”

A woman in a tool belt with heavy gloves on adjusts the angle on the oversized light in the corner of the room, until the chair Rob is pointing to is bathed in a soft glow.

It’s the last day of filming. We’re shooting three scenes, and when we’re done we’ll hear Rob callThat’s a wrap!And then everyone will pack up and go, back to LA or New York, off to work on another movie or a TV show. There will be other jobs and other cities and towns. It feels sort of like what I imagine high school graduation will feel like, when everyone’s off to colleges all across the country. Only with the movie, there’s no promise of summer breaks and holidays back together. I’ll probably never see a lot of these people ever again.

I may never seeanyof them.

There’s an excitement on set as we barrel toward the finish line. Today the entire principal cast is on set, including Paul and Gillian, whom I’ve barely seen since that first day in the conference room. It’s still weird to me that stars as big as them can be in a movie and actually film for only a few days.

We’re in the studio today, filming in a high school classroom set that’s been set up in what was probably an old conference room. The set designer ripped out the flat, oddly patterned office carpet and replaced it with that ugly linoleum you see in high schools everywhere, sort of off-white with veins of brown going through it. There’s a whiteboard and a caged clock on the wall and one of those big bulky teacher’s desks at the front, while the rest of the room is filled with rows of classroom desks, the kind with the little table attached to one side that’s never actually big enough to hold your notebook, your pen,andyour arm.

Gillian and Lydia are sitting in two of the student desks while hair and makeup attends to them. Paul is perched on top of the teacher’s desk in front of them, checking his teeth in a compact mirror for bits of his breakfast. The scene today is one where Kass and her mother are meeting with Mr. Greenfield, Jonas’s mentor and Gillian’s character’s old flame, to talk about how Kass is bombing her classes, which her mother blames on her relationship with Jonas.

Ruth has sent me into the room with a box of props for the scene. Just general classroom-type stuff: erasers, a pen cup, a stack of books with generic spines meant to look like big classic tomes. I busy myself placing them around the room, checking every once in a while to make sure they’re all in frame and not cluttering the shot. Ruth will be in to check my work and adjust things, but I want to get it right the first time.

I’m rearranging the stack of books on the desk so the colors of the spines will complement one another when Rob appears at my side.

“Dee, right?” he asks.

My heart starts to pound, and I instantly wonder what I’ve done wrong. I do a quick scan of the props to make sure there aren’t any obvious brand labels or something showing, but I don’t see anything. “Uh, yeah. Yes. That’s me,” I sputter.

Rob nods. “I just wanted to tell you that you’ve done a great job here. You seem to have a real eye for set design. Ruth’s mentioned your work is good, and from working with her you probably know she’s not overly effusive with praise,” he says. He tilts his cap up on his head and swipes at his forehead. “And I know asking you to do those paintings was really out of left field, but they turned out great. I really think you could have a future in set design. Or studio art.”

The whole time he’s talking, his face remains pretty stern, like he’s still really considering the words he’s saying, and it’s probably good. Because if he were smiling at me right now or showing even the tiniest bit of enthusiasm, I’d probably scream or cry or launch into a serious giggle fit. Partly because it’s such a supremely awesome compliment, and partly because it feels so much bigger than I imagine getting accepted to Governor’s School would have. I’ve wandered so far off the path I had imagined for my summer, and yet I wound up in almost the same—maybe even better—final destination.

“Oh, wow, thank you,” I reply. For some reason I’m whispering, like we’re in a church or a museum. I think it’s because I know that right now I have only two volume settings, quiet andholy wow, greatest day of my life!

Rob reaches up and adjusts his Yankees cap. “Listen, if you decide you want to pursue this, I’m more than happy to be a reference for you.”

Yup. Definitely better than Governor’s School.

“Thank you,” I say, my voice leaping to the upper registers. Rob winces and nods at me, and I decide to shut my mouth before I annoy him enough that he rescinds the offer.

“Okay, people, let’s get going. Rehearsal?” he says. Everyone takes their places, Gillian, Lydia, and Paul on their marks, camera and lighting crew behind their equipment. Rob adjusts his headphones so he can hear the dialogue from the hall, where he’ll be watching on the monitor.

“Rolling!” Rob calls, and the echoes ofrolling rolling!bounce off the linoleum. “Action!”

The scene begins, with Paul talking in this gentle teacher voice, and Gillian answering back in a snappy, angry tone. Lydia is slumped down in her seat. After a few beats of silence, Rob calls cut.

“Lydia, your line,” he says, and she jumps slightly in the desk chair.

“Oh, uh, right,” she says. Kathleen hustles in with the binder to show it to Lydia, who looks annoyed and embarrassed.

“We good?” Rob asks. Lydia nods, and Kathleen disappears back into the hall. “Okay, from the top. Action.”

The scene begins again. Paul, then Gillian.

The silence.

“Lydia!” Rob snaps, and she starts her line, but it’s too late. “Still rolling, from the top.”

And the scene begins again. This time Lydia says her line, only she stutters over a few words. I can hear the sigh from my perch in the back corner of the room behind the camera. And so it goes, with Lydia flubbing her line or forgetting her line for the next four takes. At one point Gillian leans over to offer her a squeeze on her shoulder, a comforting gesture, but Lydia leans away from it. Her face is a mask of anger and irritation, but it’snothingcompared to Rob.

“Okay, cut!” Rob stomps into the room. He marches over to Lydia, his hands on the desk as he leans down toward her ear. But even though his voice is hushed, the room is completely silent, and also small. Everyone can hear his every word when he tells Lydia, “I don’t know if it’s jitters or exhaustion or what, but take five, get yourself some coffee, and get your shit together. Got it?”

Lydia nods, then rises and bolts from the room. Rob turns to the rest of us. “Take five. Don’t go far.”

A few of the crew members take the mini break as an opportunity for a smoke, and hustle out the door and down the hall. I figure this is as good a time as any for a bathroom break, since the pipes run over the ceiling of the classroom set and we’ve been given strict instructions not to flush during shooting.

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