There is a document that is feared and dreaded throughout Hollywood.
It is called a
perquisites sheet
.
Supplied by an A-list celebrity's agent prior to a shoot, it details the star's requirements. Their transport wishes. Their dietary needs. Their (often grotesque) personal proclivities.
Mariah Carey demands Cristal Champagne with bendy straws, and kittens and doves for her dressing room. Justin Timberlake insists that all doorknobs in the vicinity be disinfected on a rolling two-hour schedule. Jennifer Lopez requires that everything in her dressing room be completely white--curtains, couches, candles, flowers, and wallpaper.
The perquisites sheet is non-negotiable. Its demands, however unreasonable, must be satisfied to the letter. This is the reality of working with a "name".
In 2025, one month before her fiftieth birthday,
Mad Men
alumnus Christina Hendricks signed on to appear in a TV ad for telecom giant TeraKnyfe. Her agency delivered her perquisites sheet three days prior to the shoot.
Its contents were as follows:
- Roja Haute Luxe floral-scented perfume
- A salon-grade makeup station with 360 degree ring lightning
- Artisanal vanilla-birch triple-wick candles
- A bottle of Dom PΓ©rignon, 2008 vintage
- A set of hand-blown crystal flutes, for Ms C. Hendricks and her PA, Ms Z. Danieloupolis
- A Himalayan salt lamp
- An 18-year-old boy
* * *
Why am I here? Dad's never taken me to a film shoot before.
David Schneider stood at the center of the chaotic set, his palms sweating.
A blitzkrieg of noise hammered against his skull. His dazed eyes drank in pandemonium and nearly drowned: he saw carpenters assembling a stage, gaffers running lines for lights and electricity, rigging technicians assembling camera mounts and locking down dolly tracks. Everywhere, a swirling
Cirque du Soleil
of movement, flux, and noise.
The set held thirty people, all frantically preparing for Christina Hendricks' arrival...and one who was doing absolutely nothing.
A pair of production best-boys hustled past David. He heard their whispers.
"Why's that dumbshit kid just standing there?"
"Leave him alone, he's the director's son."
David's face burned with shame.
Dumbshit kid.
Then he saw his father in the crowd and lunged for him. "Um, dad! Is there anything I should be doing here?"
"Nope!" His father didn't even turn around. "Just have fun, kiddo!"
Ivan Schneider was a large, loud, obnoxiously hard-working ad director who spent all day juggling hundreds of plates and treated his son as just another piece of spinning crockery. A problem to be assessed, triaged, then handed off to someone else.
"But dad, this is really awkward. Everyone's staring at me..."
"No, don't thank me. I've been meaning to take you along to a shoot for years!" His dad absentmindedly waved the production schedule clutched inside a meaty fist. "Really show you how an ad gets made. Consider it another birthday present! Now, if you'll excuse me..."
His dad stomped away to yell at someone.
A birthday present.
David didn't
feel
like he was eighteen years old.
Take the first decimal off that number. Or maybe the second.
A vicious punch stung his arm.
"Ow!" He turned, and saw his friend Greg.
"Have a good birthday, Gayvid?"A smirk twisted puffy, debauched lips, gleaming wetly under sharp greyhound eyes.
Greg Torrance cut a tall and scrawny silhouette. He was David's age but had the swagger of a man ten years older. Ten years
meaner
. They'd been unlikely friends since grade-school: the heir of three generations of famous TV directors; and the heir of three generations of worthless alcoholic deadbeats. Yin and yang; two boys trying to fill their emptiness with the other's substance.
Greg wanted David's wealth and privilege. David would have gladly giftwrapped it to him in return for a glimmer of Greg's cool, streetwise toughness. He was honored that Greg wanted to be his friend, and took his endless teasing and mockery in stride.
It's how friends talk to each other, right?
David didn't know. He'd never really had any friends, aside from Greg.
He pretended to laugh at the
Gayvid
jibe, resentment tearing claws through his chest.
You're not doing any work either, but nobody's asking why you're on the set. Or calling you a dumbshit kid. Damn it, Greg, what do you have that I don't?
He watched Greg saunter away, pinching a D-girl's ass as he went. She slapped away his hand, squealing in shocked delight. David felt a bitter surge of envy as they started flirting.
Of course Greg gets away with that. If I pinched a woman's ass, it'd be the last day I saw sunlight.
Then Greg's gaze flicked over the D-girl's shoulder to the street. His eyes went wide.
A limo was pulling in to the curb.
"Fuck me! It's Christina! She's here already! C'mon, Dave, or we'll miss her!"
* * *
The limo door swung open. Christina Hendricks got out.
She stood; brushed a crease from her elegant equestrian riding jacket, and smiled at the thirty-plus men of the film crew who'd gathered to receive her.
David's jaw clenched--she
hurt
to look at.
She was tall. At least 5'9 in stockinged feet, and her black Louboutin Pigalles lifted her to a valkyrie-esque 6'0. Flame-red hair fell in pigtails around her refined chalcedony-hewed features.
She blew a kiss to the lovesick men, then crossed from the limo to the set. She walked with the slinky, ice-cold deportment of an international runway model.
Her body, however, was not engineered to runway spec.
Christina Hendricks was built like a schoolboy's fantasy. She was pornographic.
Obscene.
Erotically overfleshed in a violent, lust-maddeningly way that turned boys into men and men into pigs. Her hips were sybaritically wide. Her rump could have fit two normal butts inside it. A chic equestrian riding jacket caught and snatched her figure into a perilously overfilled hourglass. Her massively thick legs and ass were poured into backstitched silicone jodhpurs that gripped every debaucherous curve of hip, thigh, and calf.
Huge breasts wobbled ponderously inside her riding jacket--the tightly-cut navy-blue fit did nothing to hide the bowling-ball sized mountains of flesh violently jolting and rebounding with each step she took. David sprouted a honking erection at the sheer amount of