Living the Role

Golden Oak Ranch, Newhall

It was already close to 4 PM when Ronan brought the car up to the gate. A barrier arm lay across the road, and past it the road ran on between the oaks and out of sight. A guard post stood a few feet off to the side, small enough that one man filled it, and the man inside came out with a clipboard held against his ribs.

Ronan had the window down before the guard reached him.

"Sir, can I help you?"

"Hi. Ronan Mercer." He kept a hand on the wheel. "I’m on the NBS show, «Castaway in Time». They’ve got a section of the ranch rented out, and I should be on your list for it."

The guard tipped the clipboard into the light. There was more than one production on the page, and he worked down through them with a finger. "Let me find your name here." It took a few seconds. "There you are. All right, sir. There’s a map for this, so let me put you on it."

He went through it at the window, turn by turn, which of the roads to take and which two to stay off because another show was working out of them that week. Then he took a folded paper map, marked the area Ronan was supposed to be in, and handed it across.

The ranch ran to 890 acres. It was a film studio the size of open country, and Dinsley Pictures rented pieces of it out all year round to anyone who needed hills, dirt roads and buildings that could pass for another century. Dinsley was one of the Big Four studios in Hollywood, and the ranch earned for them year after year without the studio ever having to shoot a frame on it.

"Thank you for the help."

The arm went up and he drove in. The paving ran out about thirty yards past the gate and the road went to dirt from there, so he took it slow, with the dust coming up behind him the whole way. The car was still new to him and he had no intention of putting the first scratch on it out here.

Parking was a flat stretch of open ground with cars on it already, standing in rough lines with no markings under them. Past the last of them were the trailers, rows of them, and generators running, and cable taped flat along the dirt, and lights up on stands with nothing burning in them yet, and crew moving through all of it carrying things. Half of them had jackets on already, for the cold that was coming later.

’This is the production, all right.’

He found a space and was still walking in when a young woman came out to meet him. Red hair, a radio at her belt, a folded schedule in her hand.

"Ronan?"

He nodded.

"Hi, I’m Helen, production assistant. You’re early, and early is good. Hair and makeup first, then wardrobe after that, and there’s food in the tent behind the trucks until 6 PM. Do you want me walking you up to set after all that, or are you fine finding it yourself?"

Ronan put a hand up. "I’d rather you took me through it, if that’s not putting you out, because five years I’ve done background and I’ve never worked anywhere like this. I’d only be guessing at all of it."

"You’re not putting me out, that’s the job, that’s what a PA is for." Helen had already turned to start him in the right direction. "It’s five minutes on foot. Come on."

So she took him through the whole of it, one thing after another. Hair and makeup, wardrobe, the food tent behind the trucks, where the toilets were, which trailer had his name on it, and where he could stand once they were rolling without ending up in a shot he had no business being in.

It was only a few minutes before he had it all straight. His memory was good, so none of it cost him anything.

The ranch was on a different scale to any studio he had worked on. A backlot gave you a street with nothing behind it, and the moment the camera turned too far it found a wall.

Here the ground itself went on long past anything built on it, and it kept going in whatever direction the camera happened to point. What they had built on it was the Province of New York in 1732: houses, a road running between them, a well at the end of that, and fronts with nothing standing behind them.

He walked it a while longer before he went and found his trailer, his name printed on a card slotted into the door. Inside, he made himself something to eat and ate it, and after that he sat down with the script and read in peace.

He was well into it when the knock came.

He opened up and found Jane. Plain clothes, hair not done, and none of it made the slightest difference to how she looked.

"Why are you shut in here?" She had a hand up on the door frame. "Hiding from me?"

"Not at all. Reading the script, same as always."

She was smiling at him. "That’s what I figured."

Once they’d both settled in, Ronan looked over at her. "Don’t you have your own trailer?"

"Am I not welcome here?"

"Ha. Of course you’re welcome."

"You should be proud I’m even willing to go through the script with you."

"Yes, yes." He put it in the period voice, low and formal. "I suppose I ought to thank you, Mistress Kingsley."

Jane laughed, and none of it touched the real reason she’d come out to his trailer.

She’d come to check. What she felt at the end of Episode 2 wasn’t hers, and she wanted to sit across from him with the work between them and prove it. She’d gone so far into Rose in that scene that she’d brought her back out with her. That was all it was.

Except Episode 3 was sitting in front of her too. The kissing, the touching, all of it written down and scheduled for the next few days. Her cheeks were getting hotter while she sat there.

She cleared her throat and reached for the pages. "So. Why don’t we go through the next scenes?"

"Yeah." Ronan was already turning to the right page. "We can run a quick rehearsal before filming starts at 6 PM."

They traded lines for about an hour, his and then hers. After that they went out for hair, then makeup, then wardrobe.

* * *

At 6 PM exactly, filming started, and the schedule was strict for everyone on the ranch.

Episode 3 had Elijah and Rose on the run from the authorities, so there was action in it.

Ronan was doing extraordinary work, and the fight was where it showed most. He came through it looking like a man who’d trained for years in something built to kill. Kali. A stick in each hand, both of them working, the strikes short and fast and landing where they’d take a man out of a fight.

The fight choreographer came over afterwards to ask where the kid had learned it. None of it looked like something he’d been walked through two days earlier.

Hours went by like that, and then whole days. Four days at the Golden Oak Ranch without anybody going home once, and Episode 3 was nowhere near finished.

They came off set at 6 AM, ate, and were down by 7 AM, and they were up again by 4 PM to start it over. Ronan and Jane had their own trailers to sleep in, and so did Henry and the senior crew, because the production paid for that. Everyone else slept in the tent.

* * *

At around 5:30 PM they started getting ready for the next scene, an interior this time, on the working barn set. It was the place Elijah and Rose ran to with the authorities out looking for them, and it was the scene the whole production had been waiting on. The romantic one.

Jane was nervous. She knew how ridiculous that was, because a few months ago she hadn’t known this young actor existed, and here she was, unable to get herself level before a scene with him.

’It’s work. That’s all it is, and you’ll be over it by the time the episode’s finished. You don’t feel anything for him, Jane. You went too far into Rose and you brought her home with you. That’s all this is.’

She was still telling herself that when Henry’s voice came across the barn.

"Alright, here we go. Action."

Jane put herself away and Rose came up in her place. She looked over at Ronan, shy with it, and found Elijah looking back.

"There is something I have wanted to say to you." Rose couldn’t hold his eyes for long. "You have stood between me and all of it, every day, and I have not once thanked you for it." Her head came down. "You would not be here at all if not for me. It is my fault, all of it."

Elijah didn’t answer. He took out the tobacco he’d lifted off one of the men hunting them and took his time lighting it. The time he took was the answer. He wouldn’t argue with her, and he wouldn’t tell her she was right either.

He drew on it deep. The smoke came out of him slow and thick.

The set went quiet. Ronan had never smoked before in his life, and nobody had expected much from it. Henry already had a way to cover the moment if the kid coughed on it or held it wrong.

None of that was needed. It came off him like something he’d done every day for twenty years.

His eyes were heavy the whole time the smoke was in him. As it thinned out they cleared, as though whatever he’d been carrying went with it.

Nobody called cut.

Jane forgot she was in a scene.

She was dazed, and none of it was Rose. Rose would have been looking at Elijah. Jane was looking at Ronan, at the young actor in front of her doing more with a piece of stolen tobacco and no dialogue than most of the people she’d worked with could manage with a full page.

Minutes ago she’d told herself it was only Rose, and that it would pass.

It wasn’t going to hold.

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