Enterprise, Inc.

“Cut!” I said, my stomach grumbling as the crew dragged lights and cameras from the living room into the Holy of Holies. “Let’s set up for the final scene. And again, everyone please, extra careful in the bedroom.”

Cut. My least favorite of words. I hated cutting. Wished I could just film on and on into oblivion. Like drinking without blacking out or closest to my heart, eating without getting full. But reality has an infuriating way of extinguishing our desires: the costs, the crew, the spins, the bloating, the end. Yet beyond the material concerns, that afternoon there was only one thing that could derail my plans for salvation, which I’d convinced myself wouldn’t happen. Couldn’t. I’d planned this production to the penny and to the minute and still had at least three hours to complete the film that I needed to redeem my career, salvage my relationship, resuscitate my life. And though I’d swallowed down the anxiety when the dominatrix-cowgirl and her pony trotted into the apartment and ignored the gutter punks rummaging through the pantry and had stopped the trio of pornstars from catwalking in Nadine’s lingerie and ensured all my deadbeat art school friends removed their shoes inside, in retrospect, sometimes it’s better to listen to your gut, that if you cup your ear to your bellybutton and tune in, the staticky broadcasts have something to say. And what was mine saying if not to cancel the rest of the shoot, to tell the gaffer stomping atop Nadine’s West Elm rug to strike the lights, to throw out the pornstars on her Casper mattress, for Maia and her pony to gallop back to the stables, to end it all now, which I by no means did, which means I’m either brave or a total idiot. And after nine hours, countless kettle chips, puddles of soda pop, a triple-bypass cheeseburger, a bathtub of coffee and a brick of shortbread from my favorite Brooklyn bakery, I’d nearly shot every scene of Enterprise, Inc., the latest film in my slim, but respectable - and if you believed the critics, incomprehensible - ouvre. Indeed, I was prepping for that final bedroom scene when I suddenly wished I’d been listening to whatever had been brewing in my belly.

Maia tipped her Stetson, sauntering into the bedroom in stilettos and a leather bikini leading the pony by the bridle. She cuffed the three adult film stars to the bed frame and picked up Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks from the nightstand, paged through it.

“You like Gramsci?” I asked.

“I prefer Emma Goldman, my politics lean more Anarchist-meets-neurotic Jew,” she replied. “But I figured what with all Marxist lit I’ll be reciting in this scene, it might make more sense to subvert the hierarchy inherent to filmmaking, the director being a direct stand-in for a fascist despot.” Maia twirled a handcuff on her finger and in a quick, one-two move, she cuffed my wrist, and then the ankle of one of the prostrated male actors. “How do you filmmakers call it? Breaking the fourth wall?”

“Hey there, we’re on a tight schedule,” I said, trying to break free, but the cuffs were real. Toes tickled my hand - the naked actor attached to the other end of the chains winked at me. “Unlock these, will you?”

“You casted a dominatrix,” she cooed, palming my shirt collar, as if to comfort me, only to suddenly rip my shirt open. Giggles from the boys on the bed. “Well, you’ve got one. On your knees, you fat fascist pig.”

“OK, let’s roll everyone. Bring me a monitor,” I said, in my deepest, most directorial baritone. I never dug improvisation, but what the hell, one shot and I’d be back on my feet, back on schedule, back to finishing the film that I needed to save my life. Maia uncurled a whip, snapped it over the bed. The pornstars squealed. I turned to Maia. “At action, start calling us neo-lib Biden Industrial Complex abusers while flogging your whip. Then the pony will trot into frame.”

“I said quiet piggie!” she snapped.

“Now, we don’t have much time,” I said, shirt rent, chained to a bed of pornstars, Maia the dominatrix much more dominating than I’d expected. The PA passed me the monitor. The shot looked insane, but I made insane art films and had to admit, maybe it worked. “Camera speed, sound speed, let’s bang this out.” I was about to bark my favorite of words when that PA, however, stood staring at me. “What is it, buddy?”

“Sorry to bother you Antoine,” he said. “But there’s a woman at the door.” Looking up from the monitor, I searched past the production assistant, across my living room filled with the deadbeat art school friends, into the kitchen where the gutter punks polished off a bottle of wine, and finally, between all the people, props and equipment, I spotted at the front door the one problem that threatened to sink all my comeback ambitions: Nadine. Beside the door jamb, she glared into the glow of her iPhone, thump flicking up and down, her go-to move when suppressing rage. For a second she eyed me, the chaos in her bedroom, her chained, half-naked boyfriend, the fully nude men in her bed, Maia - a white woman no less! - in a leather bikini. She didn’t look pleased. The PA sipped an overpriced, artisanal IPA brewed in some nearby brownstone’s basement. “Says she wants to speak with you.”

“Remind me your name again?” I asked.

“Kev.”

“Kevin from Heaven,” purred the pornstar I was cuffed to, winking; extending his manicured toenails towards the PA.

“Thanks Kev, well, that’s no woman, that’s my partner Nadine. As you can see, I’m a little tied up, so do me a favor: invite Nadine in, fix her a coffee from craft services, ask her about her day, her job, she loves to talk about her job,” I said. “Tell her that we’ve just got to finish this bedroom scene and then everyone and everything will be gone.”

Kevin from Heaven left to relay the message and I returned to completing the last couple of shots. Could I be this close to completing my masterpiece? I felt giddy at the thought. As my cinematographer tweaked the camera settings, I was about to shout my most favorite of words, action!, that intoxicating one-word command, when the first light smashed into the floor. Snapping around, I found Nadine in the living room eyeing another light worth untold thousands.

“Party’s over,” Nadine said, prowling towards the craft services station we’d set up beside the mantel place in the living room. I had to assume she wouldn’t destroy her own framed photos or the single award I’d won from the Sundance. No, Nadine would go for the craft services table littered with junk food. That woman, a conspiracy theorist health Nazi, loathed junk food. Smirking, Maia dangled the keys before me, I snatched them and freed myself. Nadine scanned the room. “Everyone out of my apartment.”

“Nadine, relax,” I said, putting my girth between her and the food. The short jog winded me. I checked my watch, my wrist red from the cuffs. Nadine must’ve escaped the PR gulag early. She wasn’t supposed to arrive home for another few hours. I picked up a donut from the table, took a bite, clasped my torn shirt closed. “Everyone will be out of our apartment soon.”

“Our apartment?” Nadine snapped, her voice laced with a ginger shot of venom. “You haven’t paid rent in what, a year? You’re flat broke. I pay for everything, including the wine those homeless kids are drinking.”

“Hey bro, we’re gutter punks,” one of them slurred, swigging from the bottle. “Not people experiencing homelessness.”

“Dude, we didn’t steal anything,” added another, uncorking a natural skin contact orange. “We liberated it.”

“There’s a horse crapping in my bedroom,” Nadine noted. “Nice.”

“It’s a pony,” said Maia, the cowgirl-turned-dominatrix. “I warned Antoine, you can’t housebreak them.”

“Antoine, I want this gone,” Nadine said, glancing about the room, no doubt tallying up what all the food, gear, and talent in her apartment must’ve cost. Nadine was no fool and must’ve realized that the IMF cocktails of loans and grants she’d given me to restructure my failed life - a gift that totaled a whopping $20,000 - while I searched for a real job had in fact been squirreled away to produce my film, Enterprise, Inc. And we were shooting on film. Super 35mm black and white Kodak to be exact and at $290 a roll, it hadn’t come cheap. Nadine’s 121 pounds of SoulCycle-toned flesh shifted from one hip to the other; a kink on her afro shuddered. “Tell me, where did you get the money for all this?”

“I’ll explain everything,” I swore, swatting away her concern. Then I made a calculation, one of a million that happens in a relationship, but a fatal one, I see now in retrospect. “Let me just finish this last scene. We’re almost done. Then everyone will split, everything cleaned up and we can talk.”

By the way Nadine rolled her big beige eyes I realized I’d miscalculated. This wouldn’t be some scrap swept under the rug. My film, Enterprise, Inc., the one I hadn’t mentioned once to my partner, the one I’d been stashing away all the loans she’d given me, the one whose eventual success would endear Nadine to me once again, had crossed a line. My lovely partner exhaled, blood pulsing through the vein popping out of her forehead.

“You used the money I gave you, my money, the money I earned working 65 hours a week in Midtown, and wasted it on another movie? Better to hawk this to some pawnshop,” she said, picking up my most prized procession from the mantel - the award I’d won from Sundance in the video-art section. Palming it, Nadine tossed it up and down like a pitcher a baseball. That award, a symbol of all the promise and failure of me as an artist, a partner, a person. Nadine stepped towards the kitchen, I assumed to stop the gutter punks from liberating the entire liquor cabinet, but I see now, in retrospect, only to buy herself the proper purchase. Then she threw my award at me. And though I’m a heavy man, a size 44 waist and snug inside an XXL shirt, I’m fleet footed and ducked. My award dented the plaster, fell to the floor. On her way out the front door, Nadine pitched over a camera on a tripod. “Bye Antoine!”

When the door slammed shut the pony let out a shrill neigh. Kevin from Heaven picked up the felled camera. The gutter punks drained the orange wine and my art school friends migrated back to the couch, this time with a $45-dollar six pack from a Brooklyn micro-pub. I wondered if I should chase after Nadine, cancel the rest of the shoot, patch up my relationship, do what I knew I should do. But I didn’t want to waste all the money she’d loaned me, didn’t wan’t to throw away my last chance to direct a movie that actually went somewhere, didn’t want to say cut or that’s a wrap. So I returned my Sundance award to the mantel, fisted a handful of M&Ms from the craft services table and returned to our bedroom with the three naked men, the dominatrix, the pony. The crew hadn’t fled and in fact was ready to roll so I did what any failing filmmaker on the brink of penury, eviction and a catastrophic breakup would do. I double checked the shot list I’d sketched in my trusty Moleskine notebook, picked up the monitor, ignored the alarms blaring in the depths of my bowels and in the most authoritative tone I could muster called out my favorite of all words:

“Action!”