Free True Hollywood Lies by Josie Brown Page A

subtle reminder to Academy voters that Louis, too, had paid his Club Hollywood dues.
    Did I say B players? Let me clarify that, since, in fact, Louis’s cast members ran the gamut:
    There was Simone Cavanaugh, who, in the 1950s, had been a winsome ingénue with a slew of Academy Award nominations of her own. Never having won, though, she did what all actresses of a certain age do: she took all roles offered—any role at all, no matter how bad the movie might be—then chewed up the scenery in hopes that the nostalgia bug would bite enough voting members to give her one more shot at Oscar gold. To do so with Breakneck, however, she’d have to convince her fellow SAG members that her role as a drunken down-on-her-luck Beverly Hills movie star wasn’t just typecasting.
    Donnie Beaudry, now fiftyish, was always the sidekick, never the lead, as he was here, playing Louis’s partner on some prototypical L.A. police squad. Donnie was most definitely a B, having never ever gotten anywhere near an A movie.
    Still, to Donnie’s credit, he had over a hundred films on his resumé. What, you don’t remember Western Horizon , or Café California ? Perhaps that’s because those films never made it onto a marquee. However, if you’ve got a couple of spare brain cells to kill, check out the straight-to-video titles on Netflix and you’ll find a trove of Donnie’s duds. There was one way in which Donnie had put himself on the A- list, however. He’d married onto it: Bethany Revere, a starlet with a fembot physique and a black belt in judo who had found her niche playing woman-in-terror-who-later-get-revenge-by-kicking-butt roles, was now being groomed by the producing powers-that-be to take it up a notch: say, save the world, as opposed to just her own skin and that of an interchangeable significant other. When asked by the curious tabloids (in the nicest ways possible, obviously) just what she possibly saw in Donnie (who’d had a walk-on in one of her very first made-for-TV movies), Bethany purred, “Let’s just say he’s got a very slow touch. . . ” That immediately had the paparazzi asking the local L.A. madams if any of their girls, or, for that matter, their Bel-Air matron clientele, could verify—off the record, of course—that his very slow touch was in fact accompanied by a very long schlong.
    And, finally, Rex Cantor, a chiseled-cheeked Actor’s Studio grad who’d had a couple of costarring roles in a few highly acclaimed indie films. And yet, somewhere in the past eight years or so, his path to stardom had somehow veered off course. Why? That was hard to say. Perhaps he had said “No thanks” to too many of the kinds of projects that might have catapulted him onto the A-list. Or, perhaps he had stuck it out with the wrong agent for too long. Or, perhaps he’d developed a rep for drug use that had film producers and their insurers running in the opposite direction. In any regard, playing the bad guy in a Louis Trollope film could only work for him if he had the chops to upstage Louis, which he did. (And maybe that was the real reason Louis was so rattled.)
    While Louis played his scenes, I stood on the sidelines ever at the ready, gray cell in one hand, red cell in the other, finalizing the New York and London arrangements. By 10:30 the hotel reservations had been confirmed, Tatiana’s tulips had been ordered, and all was good in the world—at least, good enough that I could sit down for a few minutes.
    Donnie’s pert PA, a chesty, corn-fed Midwestern blond cutie named Christy Tanner, offered up a hot cup of coffee and a croissant.
    “Want to join us?” She pointed over to a table behind the set, where two other PAs were huddling, well out of audio range of their various bosses.
    “Sure, I’d love to,” I said, taking a long sip as we walked over to them. The only guy in the group, the slightly built baby-faced Freddy Pugh, who was cuddling a chubby pug dog with a rhinestone-studded collar, readily