FICTION: TOJ, Chapter 4: Off The Grid

Howard meets the production crew of his first investiment in European porn.

Bad vibes out here on this rocky butte.  Twenty yards from Howard and Raimondo, Alessandra Amore and Franzello argued heatedly in Italian. Her eyes darted from side to side and she shook her head in a definite no.  In his detached manner, Franzello was trying to calm her down.  He turned his head toward Raimondo and winked.  A playboy who won’t take no for an answer.    

The crew was trading glances, lifting their eyebrows and sharing the smirks of an inside joke.  Raimond tilted his head to the side and pushed his earbud more firmly into its crook.

“Is her body mike on?” Howard asked.

Raimondo nodded and, smiling, bent down to pick up his shooting script.  He explained that today’s scene called for the Empress’s chariot to be portaged by two slaves toward a rendezvous with Caesar. But in this scene she is thirsty, bored, and in the company of men who need some respite.

“See,” he said, pointing to the script.  “Only two slaves.”  Then Raimondo pointed to a lean-to shelter where four men paced in their dress of dirty robes, tied off with crude leather belts.

“She don’t know it til now, but Franzello is asking her to take four slaves.”

“And how does he intend to do that?”

Wait, wait, Raimondo indicated with a single raised finger, listening intently. 

Alessandra Amore’s arms were folded.  She still shook her head no, but her protests were no longer infused with her initial vigor.

“Franzello!” exclaimed Raimondo.  “He can get a woman to do anything.  He like Fellini.  Il maestro could get anyone to do anything, anything he want on his films.”  Raimondo’s face was as ebullient a teenager’s.  In Italy even the pornographers were serious about Fellini. “You know the story about Fellini and Ettore Manni?” asked the Production Assistant.

Howard said he didn’t.

As Franzello and Alessandro closed down their negotiations, Raimondo told Howard about the Italian film star of years past.  He explained how Ettore Manni had been chosen by Il Maestro himself for the role of Dottore Katzone in Città delle Donne.  “Ettore was thrilled,” Raimondo said. “To play a seducer of ten thousand women!”  In his youth Ettore himself had been a Katzone of sorts, a great ladies’ man.  But in the late seventies, Ettore was growing old and getting fat. It was on this set that Fellini took personal revenge on him.  The great director humiliated Ettore, called him out for being sbiadito, a drunk, a has-been. Still, Ettore stayed on the production. There were so many women, the lure was too great!  But then, one morning Ettore was a no-show.  Some crew members went to his hotel room in Rome.  There they found him: dressed as a cowboy, he had blown his balls off with a revolver. The actor had bled to death.

Raimondo paused and let this sink in. 

“So was it murder or suicide?”

Raimondo circumflexed, looked to the sky. “When il maestro hear about it, you know what he say?”   Howard shook his head. “He say it a shame, but . . . it proved that the script work.”  

Raimondo’s eyes were as wide as the world and might have contained as much: lust and terror and cruelty and all that runs along those circuits that feed humanity and drive it to destruction.

Howard shook his head as if to empty it.

Across the way, Franzello stood up and spread his arms wide, the grin of a conquest upon his lips.  It was settled.  He clapped twice to get everyone’s attention. “Avanti!” he said.  There would be four slaves in the scene after all. 

He waved over the crew and actors. Time to block.

Raimondo slinked lazily toward his duties and repeated, “Like a cowboy.”  He and Franzello herded the crew and actors, rhythmically stroking johnsons, into position. 

Alessandra Amore was left alone on her folding chair as Franzello spoke to everyone else.  Perhaps he knew he’d already asked enough from her.  She was dressed as the Queen of Egypt in a costume that could have fit the bill for a high school drama production.  Seated just ten feet from the cliff’s edge, her flat stare hung somewhere out over the sea.  With a bathrobe drawn tightly around her, shivering against the wind high on this exposed bluff, she appeared to maintain, out on that blush-and-foundation front, the poise that a beautiful woman feels she owes the world.  But to Howard she looked like someone who had reached for the core of a belief, some solid foundation of strength that now she needed, but was no more, for it had been eroded and strewn to the winds long ago.