nailed that one.”
Two weeks later, he was on set for a hair conditioner, watching the product’s brand manager rise from his canvas chair and march with dainty urgency across the colored floor. “I really, I must.” His accent, his unshakable formality, his resemblance to a dapper mole, and his fevered love for his product were already mimicked by laughing art guys from the agency. “You cannot, Monsieur Donahue, pardon my insistence, you cannot light the Product like that.” He went down on one knee beside the dollops of hair conditioner on the glass pedestal. “You cast it in this excess of blue, and you blanch it of its essential identifying hues.” He let his other knee touch the ground and cupped his hands around the conditioner to demonstrate how its color changed in shadow.
Julian, Maile (his production assistant for the last four months), and Vlada (the director of photography) consulted, stifling laughter, avoiding eye contact. The afternoon crept away as Maile, on her knees before the glass pedestal, sprayed food coloring and Vlada handed gel after gel up ladders to grips while Mr. Rousselet sat next to Julian and stared at the video feed, and the two professional beauties in bathrobes who would soon lather their manes on camera sat in the far back under a NO SMOKING sign and ignited each new slender cigarette off the orange tail of the last.
Julian plugged his iPod into the studio’s sound system and felt a physical relief as the day’s silliness was replaced with a sense of purpose. The soundtrack effect, as he had learned decades before: music could inject the quotidian with significance, lyricism, uniqueness. The third song, a female voice:
“‘I’d sooner die,’ she said, she said, and she almost believed it, her little drama.”
The music swept through the cubical black room: the embarrassing idea of believing too much in one’s own little drama penetrated everything, here quickly like solar wind, there slowly but relentlessly as a line of ants. It affected how Mr. Rousselet leaned in to peer at the video assist, then squatted before the mauve mammarial domes of the Product and spritzed color himself. The music changed how the two models moved, surreptitiously touching each other’s fingertips in their shadowed cloud, how Vlada looked sadly through his viewfinder, his Serbian manner making everything around him tragic and unimportant at once.
Julian hadn’t loaded or downloaded any new pop music in months and could not at first understand the song’s unfamiliarity. No, yes, he had loaded a CD, the demo from that Irish girl at the Rat, loaded it two weeks ago and never listened since. It caught him by surprise, that afternoon in the studio and then later, the gloaming settling over the Manhattan skyline like colored mist over hair conditioner, as he walked with time to kill before dinner with a film-school friend in town for the weekend, a man who had risen fast in Hollywood to second-unit director but then stopped, happy to do well-paid crowd scenes and cutaways indefinitely, when in school he’d always insisted—nearly shouted—that a true auteur could only work outside the studios and would write, shoot, direct, and edit everything himself.
The demo CD had a little hiss, and the levels were too low here and there, and the bass was too hot on three tracks, buzzing his ears: the gritty authenticity of the rough-mix demo that had secured the deal that would produce a new CD with cleaner versions of these same songs. The guitar even screwed up its solo introduction on the very first track. The music stopped, and a male voice said, “Whoops.” There was male and female laughter, and they started the song again; they left the mistake there, a daring way to open a disc meant to wow dim, deaf record executives, and when the musician played it right the next time, Julian felt a humming in his neck and in his kidneys.
The next day, shooting was delayed almost immediately; Maile presented