The Hollywood Pact

Three

DAISY

"WHERE IS MY DECAF? EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT I CAN'T DRINK COFFEE!"

I sighed heavily as soon as I stepped into the set.

Brandi Mann, the protagonist of Hearts on Fire, was screaming through the staged living room with half her hair tidy in a Regency era style and the other half loose. Still, they looked incredibly soft.

Actresses always have perfect hair. I would die to know what products they put in their hair. Maybe they just washed... Something I did... three days ago?

"Where is Brandi's decaf?" The assistant's director and my boss asked me when I was putting my badge with my name blurred because the rain stained the ink.

We won a best direction Emmy last year, but no one had money to buy a damn badge for me.

"I just got here"

"Great. Now get a decaf for Brandi" she said.

She was in her forties, lived with the hair tied in a bun and screaming orders out there.

Before I could ask where the hell I would find a decaf, she was already on the other side of the set, having a serious conversation with the makeup artists.

That was my job after all — make whatever the people with a real badge asked. That includes buying food, medicines, Brandi's contraceptives and sometimes someone would call me to ask me about a scene.

In general, it was something like "Wasn't supposed to have a jar of flowers on the table? Put a damn jar of flowers there, then".

Even though this job is not what I expected, I loved the chance to be on the set.

The environment was amazing and inspiring.

We produced an 18th century TV show about the revolution. We were using an old house in the fictional city of the Channel. The local was transformed into an old room of the year 1776. There's two big red sofas and an enormous mahogany table with carving on the sides. But what grabbed more attention was the enormous painting from the Regency period with an image of two children running in a big field.

The production cost a fortune. TV shows and movies that passed in the Old Century always cost a lot for the company, so the channel needed assurance about the final product to approve the pilot.

In this case, the TV show was a huge success in America.

To sum up it was a historical romance during the independence of the United States between an English soldier that fought for England and an American girl, descendent of Prussian protestants that tried to fight in favor of her country. But being a woman and all... It was hard. Her father — and basically all men — didn't believe she was capable of fighting.

It was so good. I loved watching up close the development of the story and seeing what was going to happen next before everybody else. Even if most of the time I was getting a chocolate cake gluten and sugar free for Brandi Mann instead of paying attention to anything.

"We can't capture the whole house in this fucking sunny weather" That was director Stacker screaming "We don't have a sequel plan to follow. We can't have a brutal cut from England to America". He screamed to no one special.

"Well, the England footage is made in Texas, so we're never in England anyway" One of the cinegraphist said and received a hard look from Stacker as answer.

Director Stacker was hard to live with. In fact, he was responding to a series of processes about going against the work laws in past productions. However, Stacker won an Oscar in 2014 for his movie about the Civil War, so everybody just let him do his job. If there were some casualties in the set? Well, worth the risk.