Asia Argento, clothed and naked, eludes a Professional in low-budget hell
by Intrepid Professional Reporter G.
"By talking about myself I'm trying to understand who I am."
—Asia Argento, Melbourne Underground Film Festival on-line
"The truth is out there. But so is a whole lot of other crap.
"—Unknown
I see lovely Asia Argento romping naked and wanton down Knoxville's Jackson Avenue, howling, crying out to the very heavens, her dark Italian eyes highlighted by garish and smeary blue mascara, her pale skin and platinum-tinted locks kissed with an otherworldly sheen in the mothering warmth of an unusually temperate autumn afternoon.
Yep, that's just how I see it, in my mind's eye, and I'll bet that's the way it happened, too, only I don't know for sure. Because I don't have any official access to Ms. Argento or her production, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, a low-budget independent film being shot in and around Knoxville even as I type these words.
Not that I didn't try to gain such access, mind you; I am a Professional Journalist, after all, familiar with the Proper Channels. When I heard news that this exotic European film starlet, daughter of Italian creep-out auteur Dario Argento, had chosen Knoxville as the location for her latest project, I immediately set out to find K., who is the local production designer, or maybe the set designer, or maybe the set producer or the set production designer for The Heart, and who, I was told, could give me the Credentials I needed to essay this perilous assignment.
"I'm sorry, but the producers don't want to do any press before the shooting ends," K. said abruptly when I was finally able to reach her on a secure phone line, the number for which had been dearly purchased by another operative with more ambition than scruple. There was a smile in K.'s voice, but it was a smile with an undertone of sinister portent, a hint of menace and mean business that was enough to give even a veteran like me a chill.
So that was it. Access denied. No trespassing. Do Not Enter. Zip. Nada. Don't let the door hit you in the ass, Bubba. Go away!
Ho-ho, but it's never that simple, Jack. No sirree, I am a Professional, and this had happened before, more times than I care to think about, at least not without a gallon of malt liquor in front of me. Like that time in Vonore, with those goddamned snake handlers, backwater Jesus freaks with poison minds who didn't cotton to some heathen journalist interloper staggering around in their business. That got ugly fast, and required some quick thinking, not to mention a flash grenade and a working knowledge of diesel mechanics. But I'm getting off track, and that's a whole other story, one better told when the medication wears off....
Anyway, the alarms were sounding, screaming in my head like a thousand tortured weasels in some rodents' Purgatory. Something was all wrong about this whole affair, something dark and profoundly weird. And I wanted answers, dammit, answers that were quite evidently not going to come as a result of full frontal assault. No, this story would require finesse, resourcefulness, guile and no little treachery. And if I played out the hand just right, maybe I could get the scoop from straight from the source, from the director and starlet, from Ms. Argento herself.
Dossier: Asia Argento, 27, daughter of Italian horror film director Dario Argento and his long-time partner, actress Daria Nicolodi.
Dropped out of high school to pursue a career in film. Had acted in an impressive string of off-the-beaten-path indie flicks in just over a decade of work, until she cashed in by co-starring in last year's xXx, a lunk-headed major studio actioner with buff baldo Vin Diesel. Sources say she used the windfall to fund her latest feature-length directorial effort, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, which tells of a youngster's hard coming-of-age under the negligent auspice of his drug-addled mother, who is played by Argento. She describes the book as "an autopsy of America."
Argento is also a published author, photographer, artist and songwriter. Sources say she makes a fine penne alla bolognese.
It wasn't a lot, admittedly, but it was a start, a launching point for my furtive investigations concerning the elusive Ms. A and the strange purposes which brought her to bucolic Knoxville, Tenn. My hope was that my other contacts would fill in the considerable number of blanks and help me divine the nature of her mission.
After talking with W., I knew this wouldn't be easy. I had assurances that W. was discreet and reliable, that she hadn't been turned by the Other Side. Most of these assurances came from her husband, however, who conceivably had predispositions of his own. But it was a chance I had to take.
W. was sketchy about meeting with me in person, so we spoke on the phone. Her voice quavered with fear and desperation when she called; I felt like Redford in the parking garage with a shadowy Hal Holbrook, unraveling dark enigmas that would cast a mighty nation into a vortex of Chaos and lies.
"Um, yeah, I coached her—I mean Asia—a little on her Southern accent," W. said. "The movie, it's, um, set in West Virginia, so the speech is a little bit different from here. But not much."
W. related how she was smuggled into an empty room in a run-down housing project for the tutoring session, some kind of secret robber's den where the film crew could perpetrate nameless transgressions without fear of reprisal.
She assured me, however, that Argento was "really nice. And really hyperactive; she's starring in the film, directing the film, co-writing the film. She has a lot of irons in the fire. But she's Italian, and she has that kind of... Italian energy about her."
But as I pressed, W. grew increasingly circumspect. She let slip that shock-rocker Marilyn Manson would be in town soon to shoot a handful of scenes for the film, at which point she lost all semblance of composure, gacked as she was on self-preservation instinct and raw fear.
"I...we...they...Y-you didn't hear this from m-me...." she stammered. The line went dead.
C. was usually my most reliable operative, but tonight he was a mess, ripped to the tits on malignant adrenaline, a burnt-out shell of a man. Over the phone, his voice broke and quavered with every syllable.
"I've wired the lights," he sobbed. "I've dressed sets for scenes. I've shuttled people back and forth. I've run errands and done menial things. I've even filled prescriptions for members of the crew. I've basically taken it up the ass for the production department. And right now, I have nothing left."
I spoke slowly, in soft, soothing tones, trying to talk him down from this perilous window-ledge of hysteria before everything went hopelessly awry.
C. had gotten a late-night call from one of the production stooges, Angela or Susan or maybe Janet was her name, trying to entice him into taking on some pisshead assignment involving a hellbent ride to Atlanta in the middle of the night. Knowing his weaknesses, they had offered him cash, booze, and many other terrible inducements.
It was crazy all right, and probably dangerous. But I believed it was my chance to access the inner circle of this weird operation. And I needed C. to make it all happen.
"O.K., man, I'll...I'll see what I can do," C. mumbled. "Maybe I can line up a company car, or something. I'll call you right back when I find out what's going on."
I knew better of course; anyone who says they'll "call you right back" is either a liar or a desperate freak. But that's O.K., I didn't want him calling back too soon; I had things to do.
We would need a car, for one thing. I knew there was not one chance in shit he would be able to liberate a fully operational vehicle from those cheap bastards at midnight on a Tuesday, and definitely not one that was up to Mission Standards. I sure as hell wasn't using my car for this suicidal fool's errand, so the vehicle would have to be obtained by... other means.
All of which set me to thinking as I packed my briefcase, pondering the sanity of blazing off to ATL to retrieve a lost movie script, ripped on speed in a stolen car with a scruffy pill-freak zonked and drooling in the front seat beside me...
I didn't realize just how damned long I had spent ruminating over these various seemingly intractable problems until the phone rang again. Sure enough, it had been more than two hours since C. and I had hung up the first time, and now he was in real trouble, jabbering like some half-bright 4-year-old.
"I don't know what's happening, man," he cried. "They won't tell me anything... won't make up their minds... think I'm starting to lose it..."
I lost all patience. "You blubbering little turd," I snarled, which only made him sob all the harder. "Pull it together! What kind of a man are you?" Then, in calmer tones, I reiterated to him the importance of the Mission, how he really was my most trusted operative, how much I was counting on him to make this hairy deal go down. Oh, and the pills, the little blue ones, I mentioned them again, too...
"O.K., I'll see what I can do," he said, having finally regained a measure of his usual equanimity. "I'll call ——, see what she wants to do, then I'll call you right back."
Ho-ho, and we know where that one's going, Jack. I waited for 45 minutes, polishing my nunchukas, until finally I got restless enough to call C. and find out just what the hell was going on.
"I guess the deal's off, man," he said, sounding more relieved than anything else. Then he told me some jackassed fib about how they had found another copy of the script, or else got a new one at Kroger or some damn thing...
I was suspicious they were on to me; C. was loyal, but he was in no shape to be discrete. I was sure he had given me away. And that was almost certainly the real reason why this whole thing was scuttled, all that pigshit about getting a movie script at a middling all-night regional grocery chain be damned. I still needed Access, and I knew in my gizzard that this little setback would only make it that much harder to get.
Further efforts at getting Inside were equally futile, including a wrong-headed try at infiltrating the film's temporary production office on Gay Street one afternoon. The place looked harmless enough, plain white doors with long glass panes and a sign that read "Above All Things, Inc." There was a desk on the other side of a divider on my left as I walked in, and the woman sitting there mumbled something about how her bosses were sharing this building space with the film production crew.
It was an old trick, disgusting in its transparency—casting a surveillance operative in the role of disinterested bystander. I stayed on my guard, until a woman from one of the back rooms came down the front corridor, looked at me with piercing eyes and asked me if I needed any help.
"Mmmm, no, uh, just tell C. that M. stopped by," I said. I gave her a false name, of course, but she had made me, I could tell by her look, and all I wanted at that moment was to get out of there before everything went to Hell on a stick. I made my hasty way to the door and stumbled outside before she had a chance to rake me over the coals with further inquiry.
Then came the break I was looking for. Another operative, B., a new kid eager to make his bones with the Organization, filled me in on Asia's nude escapade, which had allegedly taken place only a couple of days before on Jackson Avenue. It was all part of a scene wherein Argento's character wigs out on bad drugs, drops trou and goes on a nutty rampage in the middle of a city.
What's more, B. told me, the crew would be filming out in the open again today, and double-A would be there—albeit clothed—directing scenes that involved the boy who is the movie's central character as he enters into a brief career as a pre-pubescent street preacher.
The shoot was near the Centre Square building downtown, right next to that statue of the man in the sinking rowboat. And sure enough, Asia was there, still in character with her bleached hair and bad make-up and an Am-vets party dress.
A big semi tractor-trailer with a purple cab was parked on Gay Street, and there were maybe 35 people standing in and around the perimeter of the shoot—some of them busy, some of them trying like all piss to look busy, and some of them useless as tits on a rock.
Me, I was incognito; I had been seen out and about too many times on this assignment not to cop some sort of disguise. With my rubber nose and a bad moustache in place, I eased my way through the bystanders, working my way ever closer to the center of the operation. With a little luck and some moxy, maybe I could get the drop on AA herself.
And then somebody dumped the bucket. It all started when some third-tier puke functionary—a look-out boy or a sandwich go-fer or maybe some kind of shoe-waxer—went giddy and desperate when he saw the little yellow reporter's notebook I had surrepetitiously stashed in the pocket of my Members Only jacket.
"You—you're a reporter, aren't you?" he croaked, all tremulous and weird. "I don't want you to print anything about me, do you hear? I'm just doing my job, man! I don't want to be in any newspaper!"
"Shut up, you fool," I hissed. "I don't even know your goddamn name. If you keep drawing attention to me, I could be killed!"
But it was too late; his mind had already snapped like a straw in a ceiling fan. "I don't want to be in any newspaper," he yelled. "I have that right as an American citizen..."
He gibbered something else that I didn't even hear, because at that point I could see that my cover was blown, and all my attentions were focused on the security goons who had jumped out of the back of the purple semi and headed towards me, their eyes full of hate and madness.
Instinctively, I fell back into a Viper Menstrus defense posture, a little-known Krav Maga stance that would enable me to kill two opponents simultaneously. Unfortunately, three of the bastards came at me at once, huge hairy brutes with deathshead tattoos and door-knockers for noserings. And the first one hit me in my blind spot, landing a vicious sidekick to the back of my knee just as I would have taken out his buddies with Menstrus kill shots.
Next thing I knew, I was sucking pavement, with size-14 boot tread imprinting the back of my neck and another 600 pounds of flesh and gristle weighting down my legs. In an agony of desperation, I managed to twist my head to the side and scream out, "Asia! Asia!", in vain hopes that she would take pity and liberate me from this tyranny of violence.
It was futile. She was oblivious, her head turned the other way as she looked at a 12-inch viewing screen, watching a replay of the scene that was filmed moments before the chaos erupted, of a precocious tot preacher telling of death and hellfire to the wonderment of the passive strangers who beheld him.
Then happy fate intervened. One of the city cops hired by the production crew to help with traffic control, a moon-faced kid with one of those obnoxious skunk-rug hair cuts, came ambling up to see what all the commotion was about. Everyone relaxed, including the vicious thugs who held me down. Without hesitation, I scrunched into a quasi-fetal posture and rolled, off the sidewalk and under the purple semi.
I spun back into the daylight on the other side, then sprang to my feet just as a public transit bus rambled up to the intersection where the film crew was shooting. In one continuous motion, I leaped, grabbed at a window, perched myself on the bumper and rolled down Gay Street to safety. "Shit on those people," I thought, clinging like mad Hell to the Haslam for Mayor bill on the back of the K-trans. "Shit on their movie. And shit on this whole story."
The next time I saw C., I knew from the glassy look in his eyes that he had been further co-opted by the Enemy, brainwashed like some hapless rice farmer trapped and beaten in a Third World death camp. "Mostly, it's all been a really good and positive experience," he said, much to my own disgust and loathing. "I've gotten everything I've expected to get out of it... well, except for maybe money."
The spark of free will and humanity was still strong enough inside him that he could sense my festering irritation, however, and he tried to salve my wounded pride.
"Don't take it too personally; doing press just isn't part of the program right now," he said. "Asia has all these things to worry about—production and managing and mediation—and no budget to work with. She only gets about one-quarter of what she needs. Parts of it have been a real nightmare."
"Parts of it, Hell," I snorted. "If you ask me, the whole damned thing has been one long, waking nightmare. Makes me wish I was drinking again."
I knew in my heart the bitterness wouldn't linger, though; I am a Professional, after all, and Tomorrow is always another day.
October 23, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 43
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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