Media Platforms Design Team
*****
Media Platforms Design Team
Who is the Sexiest Woman Alive?
A mystery in four parts.
Clue #2: "She towers over everybody."
You are witnessing the revelation.
Media Platforms Design Team
*****
Media Platforms Design Team
FADE IN:
Media Platforms Design Team
A man's voice plays over the credits on an otherwise blank screen. This is the writer, speaking to himself
Media Platforms Design Team
WRITER (VOICE-OVER)
The Chateau Marmont is the kiss of death in a celebrity profile. I see the words Chateau Marmont, and I just stop reading.
ESTABLISHING SHOT of the CHATEAU MARMONT, chichi hotel on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood.
WRITER (V.O.)
It's like opening a movie with a voice-over. Who listens?
CUT TO:
EXT. HOTEL COURTYARD -- DAY
The sun falls evenly on empty tables set for lunch. The hotel bears the practiced look of a European castle, re-created where it should not be.
WRITER (V.O.)
No, be positive. It's good. You have a table outside. You got here first. She will meet you at the table, and you will stand and look her directly in the eye. Don't look her up and down. There will be plenty of time to look at her. There will be pictures in the magazine. People only look at the pictures anyway.
CUT TO:
CLOSE SHOT of the previous page of this magazine. A hand turns the page revealing photos of CHARLIZE THERON, Esquire's Sexiest Woman Alive, unveiled in full for the first time -- supine, in a black bra, on a bed somewhere.
WRITER (V.O.)
Maybe I should buy her something. A token. I like to give gifts. That's really true. I should write a column on that. Gifting. Don't make verbs out of nouns. That would be a good rule. I could give her candy. Or cigarettes. She smokes.
CUT TO:
EXT. INTERSECTION, L.A.
Men are at work. CHARLIZE THERON, 32, sits in traffic in her SUV. She bangs the steering wheel in frustration. She has dressed in a rush, clothes yanked on: tight halter, clingy top, shorts up to here. Gigantic sunglasses. She looks at the clock, then slides her hand -- longish, slender, adorned by a single tiny ring -- across the seat, pulling an iPhone from her purse, and dials her publicist.
CHARLIZE
I'm late. You need to call and let him know I'm on the way.
(beat)
And find out how you pronounce that name.
DISSOLVE TO:
EXT. HOTEL COURTYARD
CLOSE ON CHARLIZE's face. She looks into the camera and pulls off her sunglasses.
CHARLIZE
I'm bad.
She stands, waiflike and hard-edged all at once, in front of the WRITER, who sits at a table between two hedgerows. A pack of Marlboro Lights sits in the clean ashtray, unopened.
WRITER
No. Not bad. Just late. Everyone is late.
CHARLIZE
You weren't. You were probably early.
WRITER
I've been late before. I promise.
CHARLIZE
I've been wondering how to pronounce your name.
WRITER
It's easy.
CHARLIZE looks around at the growing lunch crowd, hoping she doesn't know anyone.
WRITER (V.O.)
Celebrities are always out of proportion. Too big for the space they are in. Or too small. They glance, fidget, always aiming for a moment you can't see, until everything they do becomes a ritual of affect. They long to sit in the darkest corners in the restaurant. They pretend they don't like being watched. Please. Such pretense. But this one...
CLOSE ON CHARLIZE's face. Her eyes hold the gaze of the camera directly, disarmingly. When she was younger, she looked like she knew she was hot. Now she looks like a person who knows exactly what's going on -- everything sorted and rich in the possibility of desire, everything painful and cheap, cruel and unspoken in the world around her -- and it does not scare her.
WRITER
I bought you cigarettes.
CHARLIZE
No, you didn't. You did! I quit. Well, I'm quitting.
WRITER
Oh, Jesus. What fun is a long conversation without cigarettes?
CLOSE ON CHARLIZE's mouth, her lips bent in her particular smile, sexy and knowing, a little bit leering, just sweet enough that you feel wont to assume some connection, some secret between you. This is the big trick of sexiness. The big lie. But it's no trick at all for her. She bites down on the pack of cigarettes and unspools the cellophane with her teeth, a luscious and familiar dissection.
CHARLIZE
Now you're bad.
CHARLIZE grabs the chair next to the WRITER and puts her legs up. They are as long as the afternoon.
CHARLIZE
I have been working on that. On not being late. And I've been doing better.
The waiter brings her drink. She squeezes the lime, licks the juice from her fingers.
WRITER
What did you do this morning?
CHARLIZE
I was pulling weeds in my fishpond.
WRITER
Alone?
CHARLIZE
My dogs were with me.
The writer looks at CHARLIZE's hands. They hold steady, cigarette pinched on a downward tilt. She draws hard. Her nails are clean.
WRITER (V.O.)
It's this way with beautiful women. You always hope they are alone.
CUT TO:
P.O.V. SHOT of CHARLIZE's hands, from her point of view, tugging in the slime in a large fishpond. She is covered in the slime, wet with it. Working in cut-offs and a T-shirt. She is pulling, yanking, at the earth. She grew up on a farm. She knows what work is. She stands and draws a wet hand across her face.
WRITER (V.O.)
She devours whatever she looks at, without greed or arrogance, simply because the world delights her. It tastes good to her. She's easy to talk to. Talking is fun for her. She will argue and cajole, careen from one subject to another.
BACK TO SCENE:
CHARLIZE is lost in a moment. Suddenly, she seems sad. She is sad. The WRITER, surprised, asks why, quietly.
CHARLIZE
My dogs. One of my dogs -- he died. He was just a real dog, you know? You could see his spirit. People sensed it immediately. He watched you so deeply, he worried about you. We found him on the streets in Italy, sick and sort of mangy. I worked to make him well and brought him back to live with me here. Fuck. He was his own creature. He used to wander away, up the beach, and people would call me and say he was two miles away, that he'd come for a visit. They weren't angry. They loved it. He looked in on people, kind of watched over them. Then he got so sick, and it was fast, and all I was left with was the sense that he lived this large life and he didn't belong to any one person in the first place. So...
She stops talking, waves a hand at nothing. Her eyes are wet with tears. The WRITER looks at the sky, takes a sip of his drink, filling the moment.
CHARLIZE
So he died. Two weeks ago. Six years old. So I'm feeling that today. That's what I'm feeling.
The scene fades, slowly, to the same conversation, a few minutes later. CHARLIZE is laughing now.
WRITER
Really? There are movies of yours you hate?
CLOSE ON CHARLIZE, smiling at the thought of regret, as if the concept were a mere amusement. The WRITER construes this as braveness.
CHARLIZE
Reindeer Games. That was a bad, bad, bad movie. But even though the movie might suck, I got to work with John Frankenheimer. I wasn't lying to myself -- that's why I did it. I mean, he directed The Manchurian Candidate, which is like the movie of all movies. Fuck regret. Just fuck it.
WRITER (V.O.)
See? Smart. Hard-assed. Pretty funny. She runs with these stories, and while she does, I have to look. That's what this job is: drinking with the Sexiest Woman Alive. And I have to point out -- despite my sensibility that wants not to offend women -- that there is a lot of flesh. There are a lot of parts -- tanned arms, even the tips of her fingers, when she jabs the air to make a point. I have to look. To set her up as a series of parts, and present her as a whole.
EXT. HOTEL -- LATER
CHARLIZE smokes a cigarette with her legs up. She spins the ice in her glass.
CHARLIZE
I grew up on a farm.
WRITER
I know. In South Africa.
CHARLIZE
Once, we were dealing with a lake -- my mom was, anyway -- that they had to fill in. The whole thing. And that moved her. My mom, she drained it and took every fish in this huge tanker truck and moved them to another lake. We were back there last year. And there was this lake, full of those fish, and I looked at her and said, "You did this. You made this."
CUT TO:
EXT. LAKE, SOUTH AFRICA
A vision of CHARLIZE. The sun falls in long diagonal columns. This is the writer's construct. CHARLIZE sits on a little chair in the middle of a sprawling plain, legs up, smoking a cigarette. We go CLOSE on her face. She speaks, as if to the writer.
CHARLIZE
You did this.
BACK TO SCENE:
The WRITER snaps to, picks up his pen, remembering he has a job to do.
WRITER
You know what I need?
CHARLIZE
What do you need?
WRITER
I need to see you moving around in the world. I can't just imagine this stuff. I need to see you doing regular things. Like in your first Esquire interview. Your mom gave you a ride. You went up to the writer's room. I mean, that is ready-made material right there. It'd be easier if I can see you doing something.
CHARLIZE
What, you don't like the Chateau?
CUT TO:
INT. WRITER'S HOUSE
TITLE: TWO WEEKS EARLIER
The WRITER is on the phone in his office, having just rolled out of bed. His cup of coffee balances on his knee. He's speaking to his editor, playing bridge online as they talk.
WRITER
I'm sure she'll be fun. I don't care what we do. Just one thing: No lunch at the Chateau Marmont. That's the kiss of death.
The WRITER sips his coffee and listens.
WRITER
Exactly. Right. I don't know. We could go bowling. Just not the Chateau. Nope. Never been. I don't even know what it looks like.
BACK TO SCENE:
EXT. HOTEL COURTYARD
Back at the hotel, the hedges rise up dully. It is as muffled and quiet as an empty golf course.
WRITER
It's not such a great setting for the piece. How do you describe it? Meantime, I have to watch you. You seem to get that. But I'll just tell you that I hate describing women's bodies. What am I going to say? Stunning? Red-hot? Great eyes? Fucking wow?
CHARLIZE laughs, a guttural laugh, and her head falls back, exposing her neck to the world with a kind of joy. It is so...long.
WRITER
But you don't seem to mind me looking at you. You seem unfazed.
CHARLIZE shrugs and smiles, as if watching a child discover some truth.
WRITER
And I don't feel like I'm doing my job. We're just sitting here. I mean, we're lounging. You haven't moved in forty-five minutes.
CHARLIZE
I know. I actually hate it here. I didn't want to come here.
WRITER
What?
CUT TO:
INT. ESQUIRE OFFICE
TITLE: ONE WEEK EARLIER
The WRITER sits at his desk, reading, with his feet up. DAVID WALTERS, assistant editor, twenty-sixish, blond and bearded, leans over the top of the cubicle. He's a smart guy. Went to Duke.
WALTERS
I just spoke to Amanda. She says Charlize insists on the Chateau.
WRITER
Fuck.
WALTERS
I know. You okay with that?
WRITER
What choice do I have?
CUT TO:
EXT. HOTEL COURTYARD
CHARLIZE pinches her eye shut against a waft of smoke.
CHARLIZE
What choice do I have? I can't go anywhere. Not if we want to talk. This is L.A. I mean, if you can find me some taco place, a place where we can go, sit around, drink beers, argue politics, and be left alone, then take me there. I'll go with you. I'm yours. Those places don't exist for me. There aren't any little joints for me.
The screen FREEZES. The background fades, the moment at the Chateau untiles itself in some fashion and is replaced, retiled, and patched in all around CHARLIZE and the WRITER, who are suddenly sitting across from each other at an empty taco joint, another place of the writer's contrivance, this one grittier in detail than the lake, glowingly lit by the late afternoon sun.
CHARLIZE and the WRITER are in the middle of something, something like an argument, something like a hashing out between friends. The place is the WRITER's daydream, but the conversation is real.
CHARLIZE
So what do you think will happen with Roe v. Wade?
WRITER
I'm the writer. I ask the questions.
CHARLIZE
Just tell me. Just say it.
The WRITER takes a bite of his taco and looks past her, out the window. Traffic, faces, movement. No one looks in. He knows people would pay to trade places with him.
WRITER
I dunno. I suppose they won't overturn it. I suppose they'll just incrementally make it tougher and tougher to get an abortion. It feels like they have a plan. I suppose they'll use the wording of Roe v. Wade to do everything but overturn it.
CHARLIZE
Like they did with Brown v. Board of Education.
WRITER
Yeah. Sneaky. Like that.
CHARLIZE
See, I tell my friends that and they laugh at me. They think I'm panicking.
WRITER
Maybe so.
CHARLIZE
The changes are small, but they add up. A lot changes in one lifetime. When I was a little girl in South Africa, people pointed to America as a sort of example. It seemed sensible, principled, governed in an admirable way.
WRITER
Now?
CHARLIZE
(chewing)
Wherever I go, no one wants to talk about America as a superpower. It's all about India and China. What's their model? What's next for them? They're the superpowers now. Not us.
WRITER
Do people still think of you as South African?
CHARLIZE
People still say, "What do you know? You're an African." But they said that to me in Africa, too. "Go back to Europe." But I fucking told them I was an African. I know what I am now, too. I'm American. I will fucking say it, too. I grew up in a country that learned the lesson that you can't impose your way of life on twenty-six different kinds of people just because you call yourself righteous. I think there are lessons this country still has to learn. Doesn't mean they can't be learned.
WRITER
Does that have anything to do with why you did In the Valley of Elah? I mean, it's a war movie. A kid goes AWOL after coming home from Iraq, and you're the detective trying to help his parents find out what happened. It's confusing, it's ambiguous, it's about guilt and duty and -- it's great.
CHARLIZE
I wanted to make the movie precisely because it evades formulas about guilt. It's hard to tell things in black-and-white now, during this war. I'm drawn to ambiguity, The blank look on the kid's face at the end -- it chilled me. It was exactly what was called for -- the sense that these soldiers had been devalued to the point where if at any given time one of them wasn't being violent, another one would have.
They are quiet now. It is the two of them, in the taco joint, some tiny storefront on La Cienega. We pull back, through the window, out past her SUV. We hear the writer again, this time talking to us.
WRITER (V.O.)
She said all this, but of course we didn't go to a taco joint. She wanted to, really did, but we didn't. Couldn't.
CUT TO:
CLOSE ON a page in Esquire, showing a letter to the editor from a reader, circled in red:
"Another feature writer robs the spotlight from his subject. Kyle Marvin, Ypsilanti, Mich."
CUT TO:
INT. CHARLIZE'S BEDROOM -- MORNING
TITLE: ONE WEEK LATER
Charlize sits up in bed, wearing nothing but a tank top, her hair pressed into an unnaturally attractive wedge, signifying a deep sleep, inner peace. Clothes strewn on the floor, ashtray on the windowsill. She is on the phone with the WRITER, who has called from the East Coast to follow up.
CHARLIZE
(laughing)
Ah, shit. You're going to have to dumb me down, aren't you? That's right. Go ahead. You wouldn't want me to sound scary. Dumb me down.
WRITER
Hey, hey, hey, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to dumb you down. I'm just saying, talking about Roe v. Wade, about the war, about the Supreme Court? Not sexy. We talked about this. I just have to compress that part of the conversation is all. I'm not dumbing --
CHARLIZE
We had an intense conversation. We talked politics, sure. But I talked about my dog dying. I fucking cried about it in front of you. That's pretty rare. Sexiness is rare at least, isn't it?
WRITER
I agree. I mean, sure. Yes. But we never went anywhere. I mean, there was no taco place. I never even saw you move.
CHARLIZE
I think you saw me get up to pee.
CUT TO:
EXT. HOTEL COURTYARD
Returning to the hotel, little has changed. Different waiters. The courtyard is now empty, a half-eaten rib eye sits on CHARLIZE's plate. She wants this boxed for her dogs.
WRITER
You get worried? Talking about this stuff?
CHARLIZE
I only worry about the details. People read that you have a drink, or God forbid, you have a cigarette in your hand while you're drinking, and all of a sudden you're falling apart.
WRITER
Nobody says you're falling apart.
CHARLIZE
And if you say the word fuck once, they don't let go of it.
WRITER
You said it like nine times in the last five minutes.
CHARLIZE pushes her plate forward, puts her feet up again. She takes out a cigarette.
CHARLIZE
Have you been counting my drinks, too?
WRITER
I know what you drank.
CHARLIZE
Two. I had two drinks.
WRITER
I know.
CHARLIZE
You had five.
WRITER
Seven. I had two before you got here.
CHARLIZE
Fuck.
WRITER
I was early. And I walked here, remember.
CHARLIZE pushes up from the table and stands.
CHARLIZE
I have to pee, Tom. Then we'll get out of here.
She rises and presses both hands against her belly, either because she needs to pee or she is trying to center herself. But the gesture is startling and subtle. One forgets how tall she is. The hands seem to signal the end of things -- the conversation, the banter, the lunch. Certainly the movie. The camera holds on this. It's an easy shot, a beautiful woman with her hands laid across the flesh of her flat belly.
CLOSE ON the WRITER's face, clearheaded, appreciative, he nods a little, witness this time to something grand. As she walks away, she must know the WRITER is watching her, and she must know that her figure, swaying almost architecturally on her towering heels, takes the sex with her. At the corner of the hedge, CHARLIZE turns and meets the WRITER's eyes. He is caught staring, but neither of them is surprised or embarrassed by his gaze. He likes regarding her, and she doesn't mind being looked at. They have told each other this much.
*****
Who is the Sexiest Woman Alive?
A mystery in four parts.
Clue #2: "She towers over everybody."
You are witnessing the revelation.
Scarlett Johansson is the Sexiest Woman Alive 2006
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