Da Boss is moaning. “I’ve got pneumonia.” He keeps moaning—I mean groaning, groaning. Not “moaning.” There was nothing sexual about the noises he was making. “I think I’m going to die.” I walk around the corner from my editing desk to his office. Something grim: Da Boss is surrounded by empty water bottles and soda and coffee cans. There are yellow legal pads everywhere covered in indecipherable scribble, nothing you could read or make any sense of (or money out of). Da Boss is moaning I mean GROANING and he got up enough strength to ask, “Could you tell me a story?”
I feel bad for him—he sounds like Derek Zoolander. Oh, fuck it—why not?
“I remember the first day of editing you were playing a song I can’t remember, something with the words ‘reason to believe’ in there, otherwise lots of pop song mishmash—loved one, somebody else, baby, honey, all of that. And then it all went hollow. I was talking like James Carville is right now: ‘I’m in a very, very dark tunnel.’ But it wasn’t over. Then I was being beaten by gorillas…”
Da Boss isn’t amused nor soothed by my story. He’s about to get angry and I’ll have to hurt him. I’ll have to hurt him. Make him bleed? I don’t want to, but it’s going to happen. He’s been breathtakingly retarded lately and it’s making my work VERY DIFFICULT because if I don’t get X, Y, and Z done by a certain point then A, B, C, and D won’t be ready and all the rest… you understand… Okay… wait… he’s still not getting it… still not understanding… wait a tick… got it?… no, not yet… I think he’s coming around… no, still stupid… ‘Where is my guitar’… (I hid it in the basement)… Don’t know what you got till it’s gone… I’m bracing myself for another stupid evening in this conclave… not the Catholic kind, the mad scientist kind… in addition to editing the movie I’m also inventing a new kind of tornado…
After a few back spasms and a chili fry here and there, Da Boss is in bad shape. I can’t work without him. He is, unfortunately, the source of my mojo… and without him I can’t work… so for now we’re going to go through the movie frame by frame and fix what’s wrong with it. Not hard—more than two weeks (I never count time until it’s two weeks out), less than an hour to focus on (the final 20 minutes have already screened, in addition to other segments of the movie which we do need to look at), plenty of “great stuff” in there already. Qualm? Problem? Are we still in the same place where we started from? Does Da Boss have anything to say?
“Sounds good to me, Monica. Put it in the gold panel in the opening credits, followed by the red and yellow checked panel, then the silver star panel…”
And so on it goes and goes it will go forever now for another more time for another long time for another more than two weeks for another more than two weeks for another than
—Follow Monica Quibbits on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits