Free True Hollywood Lies by Josie Brown

am a bit miffed that I lost him to some junior executive on his way to LAX, or whatever.” He stopped to catch a breath. “Still, has it crossed your mind even once that maybe—just maybe —it’s not any of those things that have me pissed? That maybe it’s just the natural anxiety I’m feeling for having to carry this lousy movie on my shoulders? And knowing that if this one’s a clunker, then it’s more than likely I’ll keep getting offered lousier and lousier scripts, and if the next one bombs, too, and then the one after that one, that my career will be in the crapper? All because this day, of all days, started out wrong from the get-go, and now everything is quickly going to hell in a hand basket, and I feel like bloody shit anyway, which means I probably also look like shit—”
    He was scared. And vulnerable. And oh so human.
    All that despite the fact that he was Louis Trollope: actor, heartthrob, and perfect male specimen.
    “No, no, Louis, you don’t! You look—well, just look at you! You’re . . . you’re Louis Trollope, for God’s sake!”
    That stopped him cold. Warily he glanced at himself in the full-length closet mirror.
    Did he see what I saw? Louis Trollope, broad of shoulder, strong of chest, narrow of hip, with those slightly tousled gilded locks and those piercing blue eyes that held—as claimed in O —“a mouthwatering soulfulness?”
    Of course he did. It was obvious by the loving look in his eyes as he scanned his own reflection in the mirror.
    There was a knock on the door.
    “Mr. Trollope? You’re wanted in the makeup trailer.”
    “Thank you. I’ll be right there.” Louis cocked his head and grinned shamelessly at me.
    “You’re right. I am perfect. And no matter what, I should never let anything, be it bad luck, or trivial mishaps, or others’ incompetence—yes, meaning you, my darling Hannah, beautiful fuck-up that you are—stand in my way.”
    With that, he clutched me close, gave me a heart-stopping kiss, and bounded out the door.
    Exhausted, exhilarated, scared, I sat down. Hard.
    That was no sisterly kiss. And he had called me beautiful.
    Then again, he had also called me a fuck-up.
    Fuck-up? Me? Why, what an overbearing narcissistic blowhard —
    And for the record, I had never, ever said he was perfect.
    He stuck his head back in.
    “Of course, I’ll expect no more of these kinds of inconsistencies. Your trial period can’t go on foreve r, you know. In light of that, I’ll make you a deal: I won’t dock your pay for today, but any further transgressions will have to be considered. That’s only fair, right? Now, grab the script, go dig up another Jamaican Blue, then meet me in the make-up trailer in five. Hmmm. Make that two.”
    * * *
    Louis was right: Breakneck , a modern-day cop-gone-bad noir-ish whodunit, had the potential to be a thermonuclear bomb at the box office.
    Yes, it had Louis going for it as its star—no thanks to Randy, who’d talked him into it over a year ago in order to fill the newly transplanted Louis’s dance card and, at the same time, bolster the crumbling career of another client, a third-rate director with a reel built on lascivious teen gross-out flicks.
    In Hollywood, though, timing is everything. Once Louis had broken out with Fast Eddie and his career path was set, Columbia was hellbent on holding him to his obligation with Breakneck . Unfortunately for Louis, by the time shooting began, any other A-list supporting actors who might have given its barebones script some heft were already signed up elsewhere.
    That left Louis with a supporting cast of mostly B players. In other words, the other actors could say they were in a Louis Trollope film, while he could only grin and bear it—and pray that the studio would hold the film’s release until February, when the news that he had indeed garnered those much-coveted Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for Dead End would either give this turkey some gravy or allow it to become a