Entry #57

On the Set of The WaterGIRL
      Starring:Ali Larter, Chris Klein, and Cathy Bates
      StarringTagline: He was The Devil, she’s just Mephistopheles!
by Jack Baker


The irony is that this is a set. It has been constructed very carefully so that you won’t notice. The light coming through the window is not the sun on a cloudy day, but a bank of lights that rents for $2,000 a week. The rusty cans belong to Sony. The stains of food on the dishes will never sprout mold because they were applied with paint by a graduate of the USC film school named Jerusa Cohen.

Jerusa loves film more than anything in the world. She knew she wanted to make movies when her parents made a choice that was every bit as right artistically as it was wrong parentally; they showed Fellini’s Satyricon at their only daughter’s eighth birthday. It set Jerusa afire. She produced her first film exactly one year later. She called it Mockumentary of My Ninth. Jerusa placed her father’s American Express card in the pool and filmed it. Then she pushed Valerie Guggenheim into the water. When Valerie told her parents what Jerusa had done, Jerusa showed them the tapes spliced together. Valerie was grounded for trying to steal Mr. Cohen’s credit card.

Jerusa spends over an hour setting the sink and then she takes a still shot of it for her resume. It is the emptiest thing she’s ever seen. It breaks her heart. She cannot help stealing a rose from the adjacent set and tossing it in the sink. She takes the photo again and then throws the rose away.