Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,38

to squirrel out of, like finding the star her favorite shampoo, which could only be purchased at salons in Palm Springs and Miami, or I had to race across town to pick up a prescription for the constipated cinematographer who didn’t want anyone else to know about his affliction.

The two movies I’ve liked working on the most during the time I’ve been at Sony have starred Renn Ivins. His son and I were undergrads together at UCLA for two years. When he was a freshman and I was a junior, we took a class together, a film studies course in which the professor kept trying to convince us that Godard was much more brilliant than Truffaut, which made me furious. The professor gave me a C because I questioned his arguments on a few occasions, but it seemed to me that each time I called him on something, he had no real basis for his claims. Ivins’s son didn’t ever say anything in class, and the couple of times I tried to talk to him, he was polite but it was clear that he didn’t really want to have anything to do with me. He played a game on his phone a lot under the desk and wrote in a notebook that had a picture of a black horse on its cover, the kind of notebook a girl would carry in the fourth grade, but maybe he thought he was being ironic.

I wondered about him, wondered what it was like to have Renn Ivins for a father, someone who has managed to make more of the right films than the wrong ones, though The Writing on the Wall from eight or nine years ago was a disaster, an ambitious one, I guess, but it ended up being a joke because Ivins had no business trying to play a transsexual opera singer. He must have thought that he hadn’t taken enough risks with his career, but seeing him in scene after scene with those ridiculous blond wigs and that frosted lipstick seriously made me wonder what kind of drugs he’d been taking when he read the script and talked to his agent about it. Didn’t he know that after Tootsie, all that needed to happen with the gender-swap thing had already happened?

Not long after he played the tranny, he made The Zoologist, one of the best movies I’ve ever seen, and all was forgiven. He directed and had a small role in it, and Zoologist is different from all the other movies he’s been associated with. The title character is a forty-nine-year-old woman who lives by herself in an old Texas ranch house with a huge number of stuffed animals, the toy kind, not the taxidermied. They all have names and she spends a lot of her time making clothes and writing little plays for them that she then stages. It’s an amazing film, one I wish I’d written, and maybe at some point I would have if a person named Pamela Liston hadn’t written it first.

I know a lot about Ivins, and though he knows next to nothing about me, he does remember my name when our paths cross at Sony. I know that he likes to eat maraschino cherries right from the jar when he’s out of sorts, probably because he’s worried about his business manager embezzling millions from him, or some con artist in Germany is going from city to city impersonating him and getting laid every time he turns around. I had to go out once during a blinding downpour and buy a jar of cherries for him. I know that he doesn’t like to gamble, even though he likes Vegas. He took part in a celebrity poker tournament last year because the prize was a half-million-dollar donation to the winner’s favorite charity. Ivins’s was an AIDS hospice in Pasadena where a friend of his from college died in the early 1990s. He won the tournament too, though I’m not sure how, because if he really doesn’t like gambling, how was he good enough to beat the other guys who do like to gamble and do it often? He might be lying about not liking it, or else he used to like it but doesn’t anymore. I blog about him sometimes and read other blogs about him, and I have some of his old costumes, items he left on the set and I collected. If I hadn’t, these things would have moldered away in the studio’s huge