Just One Take

Based on true events.

I Said Print

I snarl as I wheel around. “Who said that?”

“Me, boss,” the kid says. Fucking actors! I call him a kid. He’s almost forty. But at my age, they’re all kids these days. And we stopped making them like we used to.

He’s standing there in his little black t-shirt, sleeves tight around arms he probably bought with a trainer and a stack of someone else’s money. Twenty-five million for this picture fifteen box office smashes behind him and still not an ounce of goddamn sense in him.

I take two steps toward him—slow, deliberate. The air smells like hot lamps and burned silicone, the sickly sweetness of fake sweat sprayed onto real sweat. The sound stage hums underfoot, all wires and plywood pretending to be the real world.

“I said ‘print it,’” I say. My voice is flat and gravel-worn. No need to shout.

The kid doesn’t back up. He’s new enough to think he’s brave.

“But I know I can give a better take, boss.”

I stare at him. Long enough for a silence to settle over the set like a tarp over a fresh corpse.

“Why?” I ask. “Are you into wasting everybody’s time?”

His cheeks pink. The makeup girl behind the monitor winces like she’s the one getting dressed down.

“I just thought I—”

“You just thought this fucking scene matters so much that you have to strip every ounce of the humanity from it and package it up with a tight bow even though it’s just a goddamn transition scene that no one is even gonna’ remember the moment they leave the theater—if it even manages to keep from nose diving to the cutting room floor?”

The kid’s jaw moves like he wants to answer but forgot how. I give him nothing but a hard stare until he swallows his pride and slinks away, his sneakers scuffing against the black matting under the camera rig.

“Let’s move on,” I say.