Jimmy Ferrari was a time bomb.  Or not.  Just how much trouble, bratty behavior and potential violence lurked beneath the surface of the enigmatic actor was unknowable, but in light of that uncertainty everyone else on the cast, on the crew, and on the staff was always instinctively a little wary and careful around him.  He was, for many on the team, an anxiety-causing human question mark.

 Several years ago, when the star of another popular television series showed up with a handgun for the “table read” of one of the series episodes, placing the loaded weapon next to his binder and cup of coffee, he evidently expected the producers to make certain script changes he wanted.  He was wrong.  He was fired off the series the next day.  Although a great deal of aberrant behavior is tolerated in the television business in the name of creativity – and to protect the cash flow – insanity in combination with lethal force is generally not welcomed.  

But every series has its problem child, and for Garrison, a director on the moderately successful police procedural on which his friend Okun had a leading role, Ferrari was a constant headache.  His part was not as large as Okun’s.  It was never intended it to be, but Ferrari had gotten it in his mind that when he interviewed for the role, he had been promised it would be expanded and made more pivotal to attract a performer of what he thought to be his stature and talent.  Nothing of the sort had been mentioned, but this completely imagined promise governed his behavior and caused him to be disgruntled every time his character wasn’t central in an episode’s story, which was most of the time.  

“All you’re giving me to do is utility dialogue,” he complained, accurately enough.  Utility dialogue was exactly what the writers needed him to do and what they had written for him.  

Most likely the edgy actor was not packing heat, but he let it be broadly known around the set that he had been taking kick-boxing lessons.  He had spent hours at Gold’s Gym and wore close-fit t-shirts that showed off his ripped, hard body.  At some point during production of every episode he visited the producers offices with “ideas” to “enrich” the script, always involving ways of getting his character more central to the story-line.  They would toss him a bone by writing a couple of “texture” lines or a pretty good joke, although he usually blew the comedy with his over-broad delivery.  The meeting always ended in hugs and protestations all around of how much everybody loved everybody.  

Ferrari would return to his dressing room and brood.  He didn’t love anybody.  He hated everybody.  

When Garrison was directing an episode, he worked more closely and for longer hours with Ferrari than the writing staff ever did.  Ferrari, compulsively manipulative, tried to accomplish through performance what he couldn’t achieve talking to the producers.  He would change his dialogue during a take and although Eva, the script supervisor, and Garrison were careful about ad-libs, Ferrari got things past them just by wearing everyone down as they faced the pressure of completing the day’s work.  

The atmosphere on the set of Garrison’s show, and on every production all over town, became more tense when a popular actress on a cable series was stabbed to death, mid-morning, broad daylight, in a restaurant parking lot in Van Nuys.  It was a brutal and, apparently, motiveless crime, and the perpetrator was still at large.  

On the very afternoon of the actress’ murder, Ferrari confided to Okun that he had gotten into a road rage incident on Ventura Boulevard with a driver whom Ferrari described as a psycho.  It was not clear from Ferrari’s telling who was at fault for what had happened, if anyone, or how exactly the incident started.  Evidently gestures were exchanged and trash talk hollered through open windows while both cars drove too fast on the busy boulevard.  At some point the tightly wound Ferrari, driving a 3-series beamer and tail-gaiting the other driver, followed him up winding roads into the hills, the chase ending when the other car turned unexpectedly and slipped into a gated community.  Ferrari tried to scoot in after him, but the entrance pole had come down.  The guard wouldn’t let him in or tell him the name of the other driver.  

Ferrari told the security guy that he was harboring a criminal and could lose his job, obviously nonsense.  The guard was unmoved, simply regarding Ferrari as the nutcase that he patently was.  

And, although Ferrari had, at least toward the end of the confrontation, been the aggressor and the bully, he soon began to experience waves of mounting paranoia.  Ashamed of himself for losing it so completely, he began to worry that the whole incident might not end here.  He had been in the frame of a security camera at the guard gate.  They would have a record of his car, the license plate.  The other driver could track him down, come after him with his thug friends or a weapon and mess him up.  That was why he had hired a private detective to identify and shadow the other driver.  The detective found no evidence that the other guy was planning some harmful revenge, but Ferrari, constitutionally unable to stop ruminating about the slings and arrows that life threw his way, was not reassured.

Ferrari was also more amped up than usual around that time because he had made a foolish attempt to hold out on his contract, to try to squeeze a raise out of the production company and the network.  Again, he had radically overestimated his own importance to the series.  When the studio business affairs people called the network to see if they would renegotiate Ferrari’s contract a bit, the response was, “The guy’s a putz.  If he doesn’t show up for work, we’ll get somebody else.  And sue his ass for breach of contract.”

Ferrari had miscalculated badly.  He could make a grand gesture, which the world would little notice, walking away from a steady paycheck and what there was of his career, or he could return defeated and humbled to the series, already written out of two of the season’s episodes.  He chose to return, simmering.

Invariably he made life difficult for Garrison.  Handling the insecurities, worries and mind games of tempermental performers was occasionally part and parcel of Garrison’s job, but the constant edginess which Ferrari projected began to wear on the director’s own pysche like a virulent contagion.  He found himself getting testy, too quick to anger, and feeling in himself a new and unfamiliar paranoia, heightened after the sad, disturbing memorial service for the slain actress.  Her killer had still not been caught.

Garrison was driving home from a late night of shooting on location in a far flung rural area of the valley, tired from the heat and walking around in the heavy sod of a working ranch in his running shoes, his exhaustion exacerbated by Ferrari’s relentless attempts to rewrite the dialogue and “accidentally” (purposefully) changing the blocking.  It was after two in the morning, and it was that rare time in the most traffic-congested city in the country when the streets were virtually deserted.  As he drove the winding and unlighted Topanga Canyon road, he sensed that he was not alone in the car.  He was alerted by the smell – foul, acrid, organic – the odor, he reasoned, of an unwashed human with a crap diet or an animal.  He tried, like the detective protagonist of the series, to distinguish the facts from wild speculation.  He decided that the only scenario that fit the sudden presence of the powerfully unpleasant smell was that there was another creature in the car, a human sweating profusely and nervously awaiting the moment to attack, a human crouched in the footwell of the back seat, gun, knife or claw hammer in hand, poised and ready to strike.  But the evil-doer hadn’t made his move, so – logically – he had to be waiting for Garrison to get home, to accost the director when he pulled into the garage and gain entrance to his house to rob it.

The malefactor’s waiting game gave Garrison an opportunity, time in which to devise a counter-strategy.  Thinking ahead to his arrival at home, he pictured the hill on which he lived and the steep driveway that led up to the plot shared by three small houses at the top.   He would take the guy by surprise.  There was no way the stowaway could know exactly when Garrison would reach his house so Garrison decided he would brake as he came down the sloping street, throwing the passenger forward, then he would gun the engine violently and unexpectedly as he accelerated up the hill, knocking the guy back and momentarily stunning him.  At that point he would jump out of the car, open the back door quickly and use the metal water bottle he always took with him to the set to whack his assailant before he could make his move.  Garrison had staged sequences like this in his mind hundreds of times on action TV series.

As he turned onto the Pacific Coast Highway, the vast blackness of the ocean on his right, he incrementally lowered the volume on the radio to catch audible clues from the back of the car, but his passenger maintained a military-like, disciplined quiet.   Approaching Santa Monica Canyon, Garrison surrepticiously brought the water bottle close to hand.   He took Channel Road to Entrada, then the hairpin turn back up Ocean Avenue as it rose toward the bluffs over the PCH.  Without warning he made a hard right onto little descending Maybery Road, accelerating then slamming the brakes and finally torquing the car into his driveway, shooting up to the turn-about for the three homes at the top where he again emergency-braked to a violent stop.  Clutching the bottle, he jumped from the car, flung open the back door and looked at…an empty back seat.  

It was quiet and still, the neighborhood in deep slumber.  He could hear the distant crash of the surf below.  An howl hooted somewhere.  The view before him was completely clear, in the light from the car and the floodlight, which came on automatically, but he grabbed a flashlight from the glove compartment and made a thorough search.  He even looked in the trunk which contained canvas shopping bags, old tennis balls and a sports towel, but no predator.  He was totally alone.

Adrenaline still pumping, Garrison got back in the car, pressed the garage door opener and slid the car into its space.  He grabbed his script binder and satchel and entered his house through the side door.  

The criminal’s odor was still in evidence.  A chill went down Garrison’s spine as he imagined the demon-like creature invisibly following – or somehow magically sneaking ahead of him – into the laundry area which linked the garage to the kitchen.  Listening intently, he heard only the soft sighs and whirring of the refrigerator and other machines, the heart beat of the house at night.  He hopped his butt onto the washing machine, as he did when he wished to avoid tramping muddy shoes on the carpets, and slipped his foot out of his New Balance running shoe.  He immediately sensed the crook’s odor grow stronger.  In that moment he realized that the pungent odor of criminality he had smelled was the dog crap he had evidently stepped in, now mashed into the treads of the shoe.   

Man, he managed to joke to himself, you really stepped in it this time.

He slept heavily, visited by a stream of strange, anxiety-ridden dreams.   Morning arrived, gray and gloomy, as it often did close to the ocean.  Because of the late shooting the night before, the day’s call had been moved to noon.  He drove to the valley to get some breakfast at the Crave Café at Ventura and Laurel Canyon, a hangout for actors, writers and crew members working at the nearby studios.  

Garrison ate at the counter, checked the email on his phone, and was reading the Los Angeles Times while sipping his coffee when he happened to glance to his left and noticed Ferrari’s killer sitting on the stool next to him.  The world didn’t yet know that Ferrari had been murdered.  But Garrison knew in an instant.  He had quickly deduced the whole ugly scenario, as only someone who spent his life telling stories of violent crime could.  

The bony, unshaven man with gray-flecked hair had the look of a homeless person, maybe with prison time in his background.  Garrison had cast such roles many times.  Now the evidence of the malefactor’s crime was as blatant as it was frightening.  The ex-con had Ferrari’s wallet, open on the counter, so Garrison could clearly see Ferrari’s drivers license with a heavy-lidded photo that would have upset the actor’s vanity during his life.  He could picture Ferrari’s body, slashed like the actress, at the same time of day, flung into the weeds in the culvert of the usually dry Los Angeles river.

Garrison knew, of course, that he needed to call the police – and do it quickly – without alerting the perp.  As the criminal brazenly ordered eggs and bacon, juice and coffee, a sumptuous breakfast to be paid for with Ferrari’s credit card, Garrison stepped off the stool and backed away from the counter, keeping the grizzled perp in his sightlines.  

He was surprised that he felt not just horror at the crime but genuine sadness at the loss of Ferrari.  The actor was a nut-case, to be sure, insecure and a trial to work with, but at the end of the day, he just wanted what everyone in the business wanted, to have an important role, to do good work and to be respected for it.  He was a pain but he was, finally, a colleague.  He did have genuine talent.  He could at times be funny, even sort of endearing.  As Garrison lifted his cell to report the killing, he was already missing Ferrari.  Life was going to be a lot less interesting without him.  

He had moved away from the counter, toward the rest rooms, where he could speak quietly.  He dialed 9-1-1 and was about to press send when the criminal held Ferrari’s drivers license up to the waitress behind the counter.  

“Hey, Lauren,” he said.  “You know this dude?  Isn’t he on that TNT series?”

“He’s on something,” Lauren said.  

“You know which one?  I wanted to stop by the production office, drop this off.  It’s the dude’s wallet.”

“Their casting office is on Radford, across from the lot.  They’ll get it to him. Where’d you get his wallet?”

“It was like right on the sidewalk near McDonalds.”

“Geez.”

“I’ll go by that casting office on the way to my call.” 

Garrison regretted, once again, his rush to judgment.  The guy looked like a low-life because he was playing a low-life, as any director should have known, especially in this part of town.  At least he could be helpful, contribute to putting matters right.  

“I can take the wallet,” he said stepping back to the counter.  The actor and the waitress both looked over.  “I know him.  Ferrari.”

They considered him carefully.

“He works on a show I direct.  I’ll be seeing him later today.”

“Yeah,” the actor playing a grizzled, ex-con, homeless person said, appraising Garrison.  “You know, I’ll just drop it at the casting office.”

The man, who moments ago Garrison believed was Ferrari’s murderer, had made his own assessment of Garrison, and quite obviously he had his doubts.

About a week later Garrison got a call regarding looping for his episode.  Ferrari had been so out of control in trying to manipulate the script in his direction that he had scrambled the plot to the point that the story was now at best confusing, at worst unintelligible.  He had blown the key mystery upon which the narrative turned.  The producers weren’t about to tolerate the episode being damaged in this way, so they had essentially rewritten the script in editing the film to rescue the story.  This would require Ferrari re-doing many lines of dialogue on the dubbing stage, with large sections of his scenes now played on the back of his head and with new lines played over a close shot of another character’s twisting hands or tapping foot.   Instead of the usual two or three lines of looping, Ferrari had pages of dialogue to record, a line at a time.  He would realize what was up immediately.  Nobody could predict how he would react.  

Ordinarily the associate producer handled the looping sessions.  The directors were welcome to attend the sessions for their episodes, but they rarely chose to show up.  This time the producers asked Garrison to make sure he was there.  The associate producer, a competent young woman in her early thirties, knew what she was doing 

technically, but it would be unfair to throw her up, alone, against a difficult and possibly dangerous Ferrari.  They needed extra troops, so Garrison was drafted.

Garrison walked with apprehension down the mini-city streets of the studio lot, a passage he usually enjoyed.  He swung open the heavy door of a low-slung building.  The dubbing stage felt pleasantly cool.   Okun was just leaving.  He had dubbed four short lines in a few short minutes.  He was a good looper.  The sound recorders were playing them back to double check some technical issue, but his work was, as always, fine.  Okun was mildly surprised to run into Garrison because he rarely saw any director in this phase of post-production and he was not aware of what was afoot.  They bumped fists and Okun headed back to his dressing room.  Garrison threw his jacket and satchel on a bean-bag chair.  

“Am I early?” he asked Kendra, the associate producer.

“Right on time,” she said.  “He’s running late.”

No need to say who “he” was.

Garrison went to the snack table where there was an urn of hot water.  He selected a tea from the little basket, plopped it in a styrofoam cup, poured the water.  A slash of bright daylight announced the opening of the stage door followed by Ferrari’s sullen entrance.

“Hey, Jimmy,” Kendra greeted him with her usual friendliness.  “We’ve got coffee.”

Ferrari took off his jacket without a word.

Kendra held out several sheets of typewritten paper.  “Here’s the list,”

“I got it,” Ferrari said neutrally, without the usual comraderie that most of the actors and crew share at this point in the post-production process, when, in a sense, on any given episode, they were cruising toward the finish line.  

“Good morning, Jimmy,” Garrison said, sitting on a stool.  Ferrari nodded.  He chose to stand in front of the microphone to deliver his lines.  

“Okay, we’ll get going,” Kendra said.  “Number One.  Do you want to see it first?”

“Let’s just try it,” Ferrari said.  

The guy on the board flipped some switches.  A scene from the episode started to play on the screen at the front.  Warning beeps signaled the approaching space for the looped line.  Ferrari spoke his line.  He and Kendra both looked over at Garrison.

“Good for me,” the director told them.

“Moving on,” Kendra said.  

And that was how it went.  Ferrari was a proficient looper.  If he resented the amount of looping or the number of lines played on the bald spot at the back of his head or the entire strategy which the writers had employed to reconstruct the narrative of the episode, he showed no signs of any negative emotion.  His demeanor was a little like a dog who been swatted for stealing food off the table, slightly chagrined for a moment, but there was no sense he wouldn’t try it again.  The problem of this episode had been resolved.  The irritations of life-with-Ferrari would continue.  

Thirty minutes into the looping session one of the technicians shared the news – retrieved from some digital connection with the world outside – that a suspect in the killing of the cable series actress had been apprehended after a car chase in Glendale.

You could feel a tension, which nobody had consciously realized had been ever-present in the town for days, now seep out of the room.  

Garrison, even knowing that he would be frustrated and annoyed by Ferrari many, many more times in the future, found himself feeling, if not affection, a kind of bemused tolerance for the neurotic actor.  He was glad that what he was so sure he knew while sitting at the counter at the Crave Café had been a far-fetched fantasy.  He was glad that Jimmy Ferrari was alive.