My Best Friend's Nude Scene

The two of us were together at a casting call, filling out our information by hand because this rather small-time gig wasn't guaranteeing they'd give back our headshots. I don't know how bad Liz wanted the job, but I was giving up hope as I saw the mob of amateurs swarming in. I hate wide-open calls. Almost all of the "actors" you're competing against don't know what they're doing, no clue whatsoever, and in most cases, it's a good indication that the producers don't' know what they're doing either. I looked at Liz and we both gave our fake audition smiles, like it was practice, but it was really just a code between us, saying, "Doesn't this suck?"

I glanced down and noticed Liz putting down her list of works: "'Time of No Reply' (Play), 'Crimes of the Heart' (Play), 'The Music Man' (Play)," etc. Most of them I knew and I imagined almost all of them were from college productions. Then I noticed something I had never seen before: A film.

"What the hell is

Bare Hunt

?"

Liz put a hand over her application and gave me another smile. This one was the rare "you're invading my privacy" smile. In fact, that was probably the first time I'd seen it. We'd known each other for a little more than a year, since she had transferred to Gates College here in Chicago, but we were closer than just about any other couple in the Theater Department, at least any couple that wasn't hooking up.

"What? Not a fair question?"

"Just a little bit of b.s.," she whispered, then smiled again. I bought it, for just a few seconds, went back to filling out my form; after all, I had an audition coming up, and even though I didn't expect much from the results, I had a certain mindset about the whole thing--I was good enough at it that I was the faculty member everybody came to see when they wanted audition help. Then I looked back at her, investigating, until she turned back and asked, annoyed, "What?"

"That's not a made-up title," I said, smirking. "I've bluffed my way through before. There are a hundred titles that would work for that.

Love Sick

?

Danger Zone

? Those are the kinds of titles people give as a fake movie they were in. Nobody would ever track it down." These were in the early days of the IMDB, back when we were still fascinated by it and before all the indies were hooked up with it. Liz just studied me, took a breath through her nostrils, and groaned.

"It's not a made-up movie. I'm just not in it."

"Ah," I said, then I laughed and resumed filling out my application. "Should be easy enough to find."

"What does that mean?"

I shook my head. "Just going to check it out. See why you picked that one, out of all--"

"Don't," she said. I glanced at her, expecting she was going to find it just as funny as I did, but she was halfway serious. "Mike, for real... don't."

"That bad?"

"It's... yeah, it's about the worst," she admitted. "Sorry, it's just really embarrassing. I knew the guy who was making the movie and he knew I was an actress, so he gave me this small part. I was just starting in theater, I thought it would be something for my resume... but really, I only ever list it when we're going out for film work. It's not even on my regular resume, you know that. I'm terrible in it. If I thought I anybody would be able to watch it, I'd never list it. But it's not even in print."

"Okay."

"I'm serious, don't tell anybody at Gates about it," she said, and she was practically begging. "I'm not proud of it. Awful, first-role stuff."

"What did you do that was so bad?"

She took another breath as she thought about it, then said, "I'm just pretty flat. I'm the neighbor. I knock on the guy's door and complain that I smell something dead. The guy's a serial killer, so... you get how that goes. I'm just there to create tension. The audience thinks I'm about to get killed or something. That's it. And it's the worst thing I ever did."

"Hey, we all got to start somewhere. You should be able to laugh at it."

"I've never even seen it," said Liz, then she returned to her application with speed to make up for the interruption. "Don't want to see it."

Okay, she was in a bad mood. I picked up on that easy enough. We were both in pretty bad moods, feeling like the audition was going to take up most of our day and give us nothing in return--we were right, the roles went to a few pretty kids with no acting experience whatsoever. The best thing I got out of the day was that information about Liz's movie. I looked it up online and couldn't find anything about it, which was unusual, but I knew IMDB wasn't always 100% complete. A few days later I tried again, remembering that the spelling had been "B-A-R-E." Nothing on IMDB still, but I did find a website selling it--they were sold out, and it looked like the website hadn't been updated in a couple of years. It did look awful, too--a skinny guy with blood streaks on his face, laughing that goofy Joker laugh. I'm sure they were going for

American Psycho

, the timing was about right.

I noticed that Elizabeth Sanderson was third on the cast list. That might have been order of appearance, who could tell from the back of the box. That was one of Liz's stage names, I know, one she had talked about having given up before returning to her real name, Elizabeth Sachs, which I had always told her was better.

I probably would have let it die except for the fact that Liz had embarrassed me back in November, when we were doing auditions for the last production of the year, which was the second one I had helmed since getting a faculty position at Gates. We were doing a little show called

Save it For a Rainy Day

and I had printed up some scenes of dialogue for actors to audition with, but of course allowed people to bring in their own work, too. Liz had talked about eight students into auditioning with the same piece--a monologue from a really awful play I had shared with her not long before that. I had sworn her to secrecy and she had gone and typed it up for all of the actors to put on for me just because she thought it was funny. So yes, I thought I was justified in digging up her old bad movie performance to show the Theater Department. In my mind, I imagined it happening in one of her grad classes, or even better, if I could get it to start playing in a room where she was teaching Acting For Non-Majors.

This may make it sound like we weren't friends. Liz was actually my best friend, even more so than my girlfriend, Emily, which I wasn't about to tell Emily, but she kind of suspected, I think. There was nothing romantic going on between me and Liz, but it wasn't because we wouldn't have worked--the timing was just screwed up. Emily had been a student in my first class at Gates, also Acting For Non-Majors, back when I was a grad student. We got along so well and she enjoyed it so much that she decided to spend a lot more time in the Theater Department, taking classes with all the other instructors, usually the ones I recommended. I don't think Emily really took acting as seriously as the rest of us, but she was making a stab at an acting career in her spare time after graduating from Gates, though most of her money came from working at her mom's law firm. I think even she knew she'd break down and go back law school when the acting bug wore off. Anyone would look at how easily Liz and I got along and assume Emily walked around jealous all the time. Not so. She loved Liz almost as much as I did.

Before Liz arrived, Emily and I were really good friends, just like me and Liz, and although I had my reservations, it was pretty clear to me that Emily was one of the hottest girls that I had ever had a chance with--the fact she was so into me almost made it kind of weird, like I was looking for what was wrong with her. But I overcame my worries and gave us a chance. Not long after we started dating, Liz transferred to Gates from Rose University in San Francisco. We were just naturally simpatico. She didn't warm up to everyone easily, this skinny girl with a classically beautiful face but these arty kind of glasses, shaggy dark hair, turtlenecks and khakis all the time--that and the fact she seldom smiled made people assume she was a snob, bursting with pretension.

It's hard to say how much I liked Liz. It was bizarre how fast we became friends. I had just started as an assistant professor at Gates and the senior faculty pawned off duties like guiding the grad students to me, so I worked closer with Liz than almost anybody. We liked all the same bands, early R.E.M. and later Tom Waits and a strangely intense fondness for Suzanne Vega that maybe no one else in the world shared. She had never seen

Waking Life

, but took an instant liking to it when I loaned her my DVD. She turned me on to

Mr. Show With Bob and David

, which I had somehow missed as an undergraduate. I took her to see

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

when Emily wrote it off as a Jim Carrey movie based on the trailers, and Liz and I both flipped for it. Yet it wasn't just all those surface agreements. At heart, Emily was a lawyer, a lawyer born to a lawyer, and she didn't really argue passionately so much as build a case, assemble evidence, and then make her case to you; Liz was passionate, just like me, and we could both lose our heads in an argument if we cared enough about it. We got into a real argument once about whether it would scarier to be chased by Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees, and people would've thought we'd never speak to each other again, as crazy as it got.

I can't pretend I never thought about cheating on Emily with Liz--but I didn't. Emily was beautiful, a real stunner, an expert at wearing make-up and dressing for the people around her, but in spite of that, I found Liz more attractive. I'm not kidding when I say she was beautiful. She had a weird haircut that led to her wearing a wig in the two plays I had seen her cast in, and she dressed like a Beatnik straight out of a movie, but I kind of liked those things. I loved Emily, I trusted Emily, and we had a relationship; but Liz and I had a

rapport

. If I lived a little more dangerously, I probably would have broken up with Emily and asked Liz out. I was 99% sure that she would say yes to going out with me. But fear wasn't my main reason for not doing so. The weird truth is just that I was busy. I was working like hell at my new job, trying to make my second year smoother than my first, and I had a lot of added responsibilities that I brought on myself by trying to do plays in the city, outside of the college. So many of the faculty members that I respected were doing their acting or directing with the college alone, like they had given up on anything else, and I didn't want to end up like that. All of this just led to Liz and I falling into a pretty comfortable relationship that, yeah, at times could be weird.

That weirdness got magnified when I managed to buy a copy of

Bare Hunt

.

It turned out some yardsaler had a copy of it for sale on eBay. No description, so I couldn't even be sure it was the right movie, but it had the right year and the title was spelled right. Again, this was all just going to be a joke. Maybe I was a little curious to see it, but only because Liz had made it sound like she had put on a performance worthy of

Plan 9 From Outer Space

. If it was truly that bad, I promised myself, I would probably bury it and never speak of it to anyone, just as promised; what I expected, though, was that Liz was just like all other actors I knew, self-deprecating and pretty critical of her older work. I would take a look at the scene she was in, have a laugh or two, maybe let some of the other faculty or grad students see it. Just returning the favor for her using my bad monologue to embarrass me last year. But unlike her, I planned on being merciful--somewhat merciful.

The movie arrived in the afternoon as I came home from my last class on Wednesday. Emily was working until 6, as usual, so I popped it in and figured I'd watch it while fixing dinner. The first two minutes of the movie were a shocker, but had nothing to do with Liz. There was panicked breathing and a black screen, then some blades of light coming down through a trapdoor to reveal a woman's arms trying to climb out. Finally, the light gets better as the woman crawls up into a room lit by fluorescent lights and--holy shit, she's naked! No, it's not Liz. Believe me, I wouldn't make that mistake. It was some blonde girl with bigger breasts and a somewhat different body shape than skinny Liz. But I sat down on the couch and forgot about dinner, if just for a few minutes.

It wasn't

that

bad. The naked woman in the beginning of the movie--who was running naked in and out of bright lights throughout this building, all doors locked to her, until she main character killed her--was pretty awful, hired for one reason, that was obvious. But the guy playing the serial killer was better than I thought he'd be, had kind of a weird face, which is sometimes the case with indie movie actors, but believable and not embarrassing himself. The director of photography did a really great job, though the editing wasn't as impressive. I almost got lost in the story, which was pretty generic, as I waited for Liz to appear.

There she was. Knocking on the serial killer's door, waking him up as he's still covered with blood and passed out from some orgasmic killing spree, not long after the scene at the beginning of the movie and following some flashback that was done in a tolerable sepia tone. He opened the door instead of just talking through it, kind of hard to believe, but at least I got to see Liz. Wow. She had her hair cut real short, like '80s New Wave short, no glasses so her bright blue eyes were entrancing, and she was wearing--well, it wasn't a sweater and Dockers. She had on cut-offs and a T-shirt, playing some kind of sex nymph who flirted with the main character. I didn't even hear her dialogue the first time I watched the scene, focused too much on the fact I hadn't noticed her breasts were as big as that.

I rewound it. "There's some kind awful smell coming from your... oh my god!" I thought, wow, that's it, he's got to kill her now. That wasn't how it played out.

"What?" the character, Leonard, asked.

As Katie, Liz asked, "What happened to you? Are you alright? You're covered with..."

He looked himself over and grew a little more panicked, but not much. Leonard said, "Oh... this. I hit a deer. I felt like I had to get it off the highway. To make it safe for everyone."

Katie smiled, that familiar smile of Liz's, and strangely enough, that seemed to solve all her problems. "Wow. But you're alright?" He said he was. "That must be what the smell is. It's terrible. Doesn't it bother you?"

The actor took in a deep breath--it was actually a good moment in the scene, one of the better things in the movie. And then he said, "I guess I've gotten used to it."

"Well, I can... I can help you clean up... if you want..." Her flirting was turned up high, but Leonard shot Katie down pretty quick. He promised her he had it under control and that he would get rid of the smell. She smiled, even flirtier. "Okay. If you need me... for anything... I'll be right next door."

As she walked back down the hall, the camera lingered on her. I could see why Liz was reluctant to share her movie debut with the world. She wasn't bad, not her best, but nothing to be humiliated by in her performance; but the camera did track her walk down the hall just a little bit longer than necessary, focused on her ass. It was an amazing ass, I had to admit. It wasn't that I had never looked at it. I had just never had a chance to see it so perfectly displayed without the fear of being caught. Those cutoffs were like the frame for the Mona Lisa.

About thirty minutes after the memorable turn by Liz's ass, Emily came home. She asked me what I was watching, and I didn't know how to explain. She knew I wasn't really a horror guy.

"It's a long story--but it's a terrible movie. I'm kind of watching it as a joke."

"Oh. Fun."

I should have given the movie some credit; true, it wasn't

The Shining

, but I had gotten pretty absorbed in the grotesque story. It was essentially

American Psycho

, but done without a sense of irony and the guy wasn't living the high life in the least. A real working-class serial killer. The lead actor had a few decent scenes, even if he kept caving in to his impulse to go over the top. There was also a fairly engaging scene where Leonard brings home a hooker and he's about to kill her, but then the phone rings in the next room--so the phone wakes her up out of her boozy haze and it seems like she might escape. He had started undressing her when the phone went off, so she's trying to run out of his apartment into the hall completely topless. It's not easy for any actor, but attractive young actresses always seem vulnerable to the exploitative nude scene. I was glad I never had to deal with doing nude scenes, but then, my auditions were pretty infrequent and never for anything trashy.

"Ooo! Boobies!" gasped Emily, and both of us broke up in laughter. "Tell me again... why are you watching this?"

"I'll tell you later," I said, wishing she'd go back to being quiet.

We watched for several more minutes. Emily covered her eyes at the bloodier parts, and I had to make fun of her for it, as I usually did. Squeamishness at a real movie I could forgive, but every body part in this movie looked like the appendage off a wooden mannequin or somebody's school lunch dowsed in stage blood. I was happy for her attention to the movie, though, even when it was exaggerated terror, since her usual routine was to tell me all about how she wanted to quit her job and about these weird rivalries she had developed with the other women in the law firm.

"...But I don't even know why Danitra's getting involved, because honestly, what's it got to do with her? I'm, like, this close to talking to Vera about it. At least I could get her moved to another office--oh! That girl's a dead ringer for Liz."

I looked back at the screen and saw my friend had made it back into the movie. I really thought that was it for her, maybe she'd come back in at the end when the cops caught the guy or something. I had barely been paying attention when Leonard put the remains of one prostitute into a garbage bag and carried her out to the car, but shock, the camera alerted us to the fact his front door hadn't locked. Liz's character, Katie, came storming into his apartment like she owned the place. She was complaining about the noise. The way some of those hooker actresses were screaming, it's inconceivable another human being wouldn't have called a cop in real life. But I ignored that because, hey, Liz was right there in the slaughterhouse, just a closed door separating her from a bloody bathroom.

She had her hand on the knob, and I thought for sure she was either going to open it or the psychopath was going to surprise her from behind--as these movies do. Instead, she heard some rattling in the bedroom. I had assumed the other hooker was dead when he hit her with the hammer. Oh, shit! I have to confess, I was spellbound as the Katie character went to the bedroom, knocked, asked if Leonard was inside, then opened the door.

There was the hooker, missing a leg, all of her teeth, and half her face. Emily the drama queen claimed she was going to throw up. The effect wasn't bad, but they only gave it a brief shot in the film. It wouldn't have looked good as anything more than a quick shot. Liz screamed--some good scream work, worthy of Jamie Lee Curtis.

That's when Leonard grabbed her from behind. Emily yelped, and I was pretty surprised myself. I had just been thinking that the movie wasn't as bad as Liz made it out to be, and she really hadn't embarrassed herself in it. Not everything was first-rate, but as a film credit and an indie movie, it had its strengths.