Death of a Blue Movie Star (Rune 2)

Once, halfway through the assembly, two hours into the process, she set them off accidentally. The rows of rectangles clicked against one another with the sound of chips around a Las Vegas roulette wheel.

Double shit ...

"I would've thought you'd've started from the other side," Mary Jane contributed. "That way you probably wouldn't've bumped into them as easily."

"Doing good," Larry said quickly.

"Is this art?" a fuming Rune asked him as she crawled over the twenty-foot sweep of gray seamless backdrop paper to set them

up again.

"Don't start."

Finally, hours later, she got the little army of dominoes arranged and backed off the paper without breathing. She crawled to the first one and nodded to Larry.

Rune glanced at the camera operator, a nerdish, bearded guy who sat in the seat of the Luma crane boom. It looked like earthmoving equipment. "Make sure you got film," Rune said to him. "I'm not doing this again."

"Lights." Larry liked playing director. The lighting man turned the lamps on. The set was suddenly bathed in oven-hot white light. "Roll."

"We're rolling."

Then Larry nodded to Rune. She reached toward the first domino.

The dominoes fell and clicked as they spread over the paper, the camera swept over the set like a carnival ride and Larry murmured with the preoccupation of a man who was getting paid two hundred thousand dollars for five days' work.

Click. The last one fell.

The camera backed off for a longer angle shot of the entire logo: a cow wearing a top hat.

"Cut," Larry yelled sternly. "Save the lights."

The lights went out.

Rune closed her eyes, thinking that she'd still have to get all the little rectangles packed up and returned to the prop rental store before six; Larry and Bob wouldn't want to pay another day's fee.

Then the voice came from somewhere above them. "One thing ..."

It was Mary Jane, who'd watched the whole event from a tall ladder on the edge of the set.

"What's that?" Mr. Wallet asked.

"I'm just wondering.... Do you think the logo's a little lopsided?" She climbed down from the ladder.

Mr. Wallet climbed up, surveyed the set.

"It does look a little that way," he said.

Mary Jane said, "The cow's horns aren't even. The left one and the right one."

Mr. Wallet looked at the fallen dominoes. "We can't have a lopsided logo."

Mary Jane walked forward and adjusted the design. She stood back. "See, that's what it should be like. I would've thought you'd tried a test first."

As Rune took a breath to speak the words that would send her straight to Unemployment, Larry squeezed her arm. "'Ey, Rune, could you come out here for a minute, please?"

In the hall she turned to him. "Lopsided? She's lopsided. What does she think it is, oil paint? It's not the Sistine Chapel, Larry. It's a cow with a fucking top hat. Sure it's going to be lopsided. She's on some kind of a power trip--"

"Rune--"