I'm Irene Castel. From 1961 to 1993 I was a script supervisor in television, the person next to the camera who makes sure everything matches. Seventy-two years old, one new hip, one daughter, two grandchildren, one best friend with a Buick. As of July I live with my daughter's family in Woodland Hills, which is a revision I never expected to be handed.

A word about the colors: when a script is rewritten, the new pages come out on colored paper so everybody knows which version they're holding. White is the first draft, then blue, pink, yellow, green and on down. My pages go the same way.

The earlier drafts: The White Pages (February-July 1998) · The Blue Pages (August-December 1998, the hip) · The Pink Pages (January-June 1999, the house)
Stories from the script binder are marked as such, if you'd rather skip the family news and get to the horses.

Sunday, September 26, 1999
EXT. SUZANNE'S BACKYARD, WOODLAND HILLS - LATE AFTERNOON

Planted a lemon tree today.

You can't take a tree with you when you sell a house. The buyers' paperwork was very clear on that point. So on Friday Martin drove me to the nursery and I picked out a little one in a five-gallon can, just like Bernie did in 1970, and this afternoon Martin dug the hole, Nick filmed, Hannah watered, and Suzanne and I stood there and argued about whether it was straight. It's straight. I checked it from two angles. Old habits.

It'll be a couple of years before it gives anybody a lemon. I've decided to be here for that. That's as close to a plan as I've made since I retired.

The new people in the bungalow had their baby last week, a girl. They sent a card with a photograph of her in the kitchen, in that light. On the back the mother wrote, "We're keeping the lemon tree happy." It's on my dresser next to Bernie.

Do I know my place here yet? No. Some days I stand in the right spot. Some days they move the camera. But the chair from the set is in the family room now, next to the couch, and I didn't put it there. Hannah did. She says that's where the script supervisor sits: close enough to see everything, just out of the shot.

Wednesday, September 22, 1999
INT. FAMILY ROOM - NIGHT - THE PREMIERE

Night of the Cul-de-Sac had its world premiere Saturday night in the family room, on the big TV, with the lights off and popcorn in the good bowls. Twenty-two people, including the zombies' parents, the retired fireman, Frankie, and Mrs. Kearney from next door, who covered her eyes and peeked.

It's good. I'm not saying that as a grandmother. I'm saying it as somebody who has sat through a great many rough cuts. It's funny and it moves, and there's a shot near the end of the lead zombie standing alone in a lawn sprinkler at sunset that I would put up against anything I worked on in thirty-two years.

Then the credits rolled, white letters on black, and near the end it said SCRIPT SUPERVISOR ... IRENE CASTEL, and Hannah read it out loud, and everybody clapped, and I had to go into the kitchen for a glass of water. I knew right where the glasses were.

Tonight there was a new program about the White House, with everyone walking and talking down long hallways while the camera backs up in front of them. I sat there thinking about the poor script supervisor on that one. She's going to need good shoes.

Sunday, September 12, 1999
INT. SUZANNE'S KITCHEN - NIGHT

Rosh Hashanah began Friday night. I asked Suzanne, very formally, if I might use her kitchen, and she laughed so hard she had to sit down. So I made my mother's honey cake in her oven, which runs hot, like everything in Woodland Hills, and Hannah and I dipped apples in honey for a sweet year, and Martin, who was raised Presbyterian, said the blessing in careful Hebrew that he'd been practicing in the garage.

The Emmys are on tonight, and we're all going to watch. I've been watching those shows for forty years, and I'll tell you now what's going to happen, because it always does. A great many people will thank a great many people, and nobody will thank the script supervisor. I don't hold it against them. If we did our job, they never knew we were there.

Monday, September 6, 1999 — Labor Day
EXT. CUL-DE-SAC - NIGHT - WRAP

That's a wrap on Night of the Cul-de-Sac! Eleven shooting days, six zombies, one very patient neighborhood and two hundred and twelve continuity notes, which Nick says is "kind of a lot for ten minutes." I said Precinct Nine averaged four hundred an episode and nobody complained. He said, "Grandma, everybody complained." He's been reading the binders.

Wrap party in the backyard. Martin grilled. Frankie brought a cake with a zombie hand coming up out of the frosting, tasteful as zombie hands go. The zombies came in costume, and the retired fireman from my morning walks came by to see what the fuss was about and stayed until ten.

Suzanne and I did the dishes together afterward. She washed, I dried. Standing up, this time. Neither of us said a word about the kitchen, and I put every glass back exactly where she keeps them.

Sunday, August 29, 1999
FROM THE SCRIPT BINDER, No. 8: WHERE TO STAND

Every new script girl learns the same first lesson, usually the hard way: where to stand.

You have to be close to the camera, close enough to see what the lens sees and hear every word. But you can't be in the shot, or in the operator's way, or the dolly's, or in the actors' eyeline, or in front of a light, or under the boom, which in my case, for twenty years, was held by my husband. You find your spot, and then every time they move the camera you find it again. Nobody puts tape on the floor for you. You work it out yourself, forty times a day.

My first week on Tumbleweed Station I stood in a cowboy's eyeline and he threw his hat at me. On St. Anselm's, my last show, the camera operator used to say I was the only thing on the stage that never needed to be told where to go.

I've been thinking about that all week. I have been standing in the wrong place in this house for seven weeks. Too close to the kitchen. Too far from the family room. It isn't that there's no place for me. It's that nobody is going to put tape on the floor. I have to work it out myself, and then when they move the camera, work it out again.

Sunday, August 22, 1999
INT. SUZANNE'S KITCHEN - DAY

Well. I did a stupid thing.

On Thursday, while Suzanne was at school getting the library ready for the fall, I reorganized her kitchen. I only meant to straighten the spice drawer. By three o'clock I had moved the glasses next to the refrigerator, where they make sense, and the pots under the stove, where they make sense, and labeled the pantry shelves with Martin's label maker, which also makes sense.

Suzanne came home, opened a cupboard for a glass and found a colander. She stood very still. Then she said, in a voice I recognized because it's mine, "Mom. This is my kitchen."

We had words. Real ones. She said she spent her whole childhood asking permission in my house and she will not do it in her own. I said I was only trying to be useful. She said, "You don't have to be useful. You have to be here." Then she went out and sat in her car in the driveway with the engine running, which is what I do.

I put every single thing back where it was. It took me until eleven at night. I worked from memory, like continuity. I got it all, except I think the colander was on the left.

We haven't talked about it since. We've talked about everything else.

Tuesday, August 17, 1999
INT. FAMILY ROOM - NIGHT

There's a new quiz program on at night with Regis Philbin where people can win a million dollars, and the whole family watches it together, which is the first time since I moved in that I've seen all four of them in one room without anyone being asked. Hannah shouts answers. Martin knows the money questions. Nick knows anything about movies after 1975. I know anything about movies before.

Tonight a question came up about an old picture, and I said the answer before Regis finished reading it, and everybody turned and looked at me like the dog had spoken. Hannah said, "Grandma! You could win a MILLION DOLLARS." Martin, who is an accountant, said, "Before taxes."

It was the first night I sat on the couch instead of the chair by the door.

Sunday, August 8, 1999
EXT. SUZANNE'S STREET - DAWN

I've started walking at six in the morning, before the heat. Twice around the block is a mile; Martin measured it in the car. The hip is good. Better than good. The surgeon said it would outlast me, and on some mornings I think I might let it try.

The regulars at that hour: two young mothers with strollers, a man being walked by a Great Dane, and a retired fireman who says "Morning, young lady" every single day. I've decided to allow it.

Friday Nick took me to see the new ghost picture with the little boy in it. I won't say one word about the ending, because Nick made me swear on the binders. But I will say that on the drive home I went back over the whole picture in my head, shot by shot, and the script supervisor on that one earned every penny. Nick said, "Grandma, that's what you took away from it?" That's what I always take away.

Sunday, August 1, 1999
EXT. CUL-DE-SAC, WOODLAND HILLS - DAY - SHOOTING DAY 2

Days one and two are in the can. (It's videotape, not film, I've been told. I'm going to keep saying "in the can.")

Frankie came out of retirement to do the zombie makeup. She drove over in the Buick with her kit from 1986, which still had a jar in it labeled WILDER WOMEN – SISTER #2. By noon she had turned six teenagers into the walking dead with oatmeal, food coloring and cotton balls, and the neighborhood children were lined up along the curb to watch. Nothing gory. I promised Mrs. Kearney.

I dug my old Polaroid out of a box and took a picture of every zombie at the end of the day, front and side, so tomorrow they'll match. The lead zombie, a very polite boy named Oliver, had his left arm in a sling in the morning and his right arm in the sling after lunch. I caught it. Nick said, "Nobody will notice." I said, "I noticed."

Some things never change, and I've never been so glad of it.

Sunday, July 25, 1999
INT. NICK'S BEDROOM - NIGHT

I've been hired.

Nick is making a short picture in August, before his senior year starts, to send with his applications to film school. Ten minutes. He wrote it himself. It's called Night of the Cul-de-Sac, and it is about zombies in Woodland Hills, which he says is a satire. Of what, I asked. "Of Woodland Hills," he said.

He knocked on the den door Friday night with the script in one hand and a pencil in the other and said, "Grandma, will you be my script supervisor?" Like he was asking me to the prom.

I said, "What does it pay?" He said, "Craft service," which means snacks. I said, "I'll need a chair next to the camera." He said, "I already brought it in from the garage."

I've read the script three times and made forty-one notes. Nick has accepted six of them. That's about the usual percentage.

Sunday, July 18, 1999
INT. SUZANNE'S HOUSE - THE DEN (MY ROOM) - NIGHT

A hundred and eight here on Wednesday. Woodland Hills is where the thermometer comes to retire.

The den is my room now. My bed, my dresser, Bernie's picture, and my chair from the set, the one the grips made; it came over in the truck. Martin's desk is in the garage, with my four hundred binders on the new shelves behind it, so the poor man does the family's taxes surrounded by Precinct Nine.

Here is the trouble, and I'll say it once. I don't know my place. On a set you know exactly where you stand: next to the camera, just out of the shot. Here I don't know when to come out of my room, or whose turn it is to do the dishes, or whether it's rude to watch my programs in the family room when Hannah wants hers. Everyone is kind. Everyone is so kind it's like being a guest star. And guest stars leave at the end of the week.

Saturday, July 10, 1999
EXT. BUNGALOW, STUDIO CITY - DAY - COMPANY MOVE

Escrow closed yesterday. The movers came at seven this morning, three men and a truck, and by one o'clock thirty years were in the truck and the house was just a house.

At the end I walked through it alone while Suzanne waited in the car. In every room I did what I used to do at the end of a day on a set: stood in the doorway and looked for anything left behind. A hairpin in the bathroom drawer. A lemon on the back step. That's all. I put the hairpin in my pocket and left the lemon for the new people.

I didn't cry in the house. I cried on the Ventura Freeway at about the Reseda exit, which is a very ugly place to cry, and Suzanne held my hand across the front seat and drove with the other one, which I would have scolded her for on any other day.

Earlier drafts: The Pink Pages · The Blue Pages · The White Pages · back to the top