Sunday, July 19, 1998
INT. BUNGALOW KITCHEN, STUDIO CITY - NIGHT

A hundred and three degrees in the Valley today. I sat at the kitchen table with my feet in a dishpan of cold water, the way my mother used to in Stockton, and made a decision, which I'll write down here so I can't take it back.

I'm getting the hip. Dr. Farouk has me down for October, after the heat, because I told him I refuse to recover in August. He said it was the most reasonable thing a patient had said to him all year.

The front steps did it. Five of them. On Tuesday I got halfway down, to the third one, and couldn't go up or down for a full minute. I just stood there holding the rail with the newspaper under my arm like a fool. A boy on a bicycle stopped and asked if I was all right. I said I was admiring the view.

Other news: Nick has a video camera. He bought it with his own money from the frozen yogurt place. He's been filming everything: the cat, his sister, his own feet. Today he filmed me for ten minutes talking about the old westerns and then said, "Grandma, you have to stop looking at the camera." I said, "Young man, I spent thirty-two years telling people not to look at the camera." He's going to be a director. God help him.

Sunday, June 14, 1998
FROM THE SCRIPT BINDER, No. 4: WHICH HAND
INT. PRECINCT NINE - SQUAD ROOM SET - NIGHT (1974)

Precinct Nine ran seven seasons, which in those days was a lifetime, and I worked every episode but four. (Suzanne's appendix, 1975. A story for another day.)

Our star played a detective sergeant who carried his gun in a shoulder holster under his left arm, so he drew it with his right hand. In one scene he pulled it and pointed it at a door. The director shot the wide shot in the morning and came back for the close-ups after lunch, and after lunch our star, who had eaten a very large lunch, drew it with his left.

I said, "Excuse me. He drew with his right in the master." The director, who was having a bad week, said, "Nobody will notice." I said, "I noticed." He said something I won't type on a computer my grandson set up. Then he walked over, looked at my notes, sighed like a tire going flat, and said, "Once more. Right hand."

The rule on a set is this: the script supervisor is always right, and nobody thanks her unless she's wrong. I didn't mind. Being right was the pay. (The actual pay was also fine.)

Friday, May 15, 1998
INT. BUNGALOW LIVING ROOM - NIGHT

Frank Sinatra died last night. The radio has played him all day. Bernie and I danced to "Summer Wind" at Suzanne's wedding in 1979, Bernie on his bad knee and me in a dress the color of a bruise that Frankie insisted was "mauve." I've been playing that record tonight, and I'm going to play it again after I type this.

My birthday was the second. Seventy-one. Nick gave me a mouse pad with a picture of a movie slate on it, the black-and-white clapper. He's very pleased with himself. I'm very pleased with him.

FROM THE SCRIPT BINDER, No. 3: THE COFFEE CUP
INT. HONEYMOON HEIGHTS - KITCHEN SET - DAY (1967)

Our leading lady on Honeymoon Heights drank the prop coffee. Every take. Nobody ever told her it was breakfast coffee that had been sitting in an urn since six. She said it helped her "be in the scene." Fine. Except if she drank half the cup in take three, and we used take three for the wide shot and take seven for the close-up, that cup would go from half empty to full to half empty again in the space of three lines.

So I started marking her cup with a grease pencil, a little line at the level of the coffee, at the top and bottom of every take, and writing it down: T3: start full, end half. The prop man thought I'd lost my mind. Then a note came up from the editing room: "Who is doing the coffee? Thank her." That note is still in my binder. I have it in front of me right now.

Tuesday, April 21, 1998
EXT. BUNGALOW BACKYARD - MORNING

The lemon tree is blooming. You can smell it from the kitchen with the window shut. Bernie planted it in the spring of 1970, our first spring in the house, out of a five-gallon can from the nursery, and it has given us, conservatively, forty thousand lemons. I have given lemons to every neighbor, every mailman and every crew I ever worked on. When Bernie died I gave a bag to everyone who came to the house. I didn't know what else to hand people.

We bought this house in 1969 for $31,500, which Bernie said was highway robbery and I said was the last smart thing we'd ever do with money. I was right, for once, about money.

Suzanne brought Hannah by on Sunday. Hannah is eleven and wanted to know if I ever met anybody famous. I said I met hundreds of people who were famous for a while. She said that doesn't count. She's right. It doesn't.

Sunday, March 29, 1998
FROM THE SCRIPT BINDER, No. 2: THE HORSE
EXT. TUMBLEWEED STATION - MAIN STREET - DAY (1962)

The star of Tumbleweed Station, as far as I was concerned, was a palomino mare named Duchess. The actor who rode her was fine. Duchess was a professional.

Except about marks. A mark is where a performer is supposed to stop so they're in the right place for the camera: a piece of tape for a person, a little mound of dirt or a sandbag for a horse. Duchess hit her mark beautifully on take one. On take two she stopped a foot short. On take three she sailed right past it and walked out of the shot to go look at the catering truck.

My job was to write all of it down. Which take, where she stopped, which way her head was turned, whether the saddle blanket was the red one or the blue one (the prop man had two and did not always tell me which), and whether the actor had the reins in his left hand or his right. Because a week later a man in a dark room would try to cut take two of the wide shot to take five of the close-up, and if the reins jumped from one hand to the other, it would be my name he said.

By the second season the wranglers came to me to ask where Duchess had stopped the last time. I've been prouder of other things. Not many.

Sunday, March 8, 1998
INT. ORTHOPEDIST'S OFFICE, BURBANK - DAY

My hip has opinions. It's had them for three years, and this winter it started voicing them on the front steps, all five of them, every morning when I go out for the paper.

Dr. Farouk showed me the X-ray on the light box. Arthritis. "Bone on bone," he said, cheerfully, like a man pointing out a view. He says I'll need a new hip eventually, and that "eventually" is up to me. I said I'd think about it. I've been thinking about it for three years.

Frankie took me to lunch afterward at the deli on Ventura. Frankie did makeup on Honeymoon Heights, which is where we met in 1965, and she's been my best friend ever since, through two husbands (hers) and one (mine). She's seventy-four and drives a Buick like she's being chased. She said, "Get the hip. My sister got the hip. She dances now." I said her sister danced before. Frankie said, "Not like this."

Sunday, February 22, 1998
FROM THE SCRIPT BINDER, No. 1: HOW I GOT THE JOB
EXT. BACK LOT - WESTERN STREET - DAY (1961)

In 1961 I was thirty-three and typing in a production office on a lot in the Valley. (I won't say which. They're still there, and so are their lawyers.) I typed scripts, call sheets, memos about the coffee budget. One Monday the script girl on a half-hour western called Tumbleweed Station didn't come in. By lunch we'd heard she had driven to Las Vegas over the weekend and married a stunt man. By two o'clock the director, a big red-faced man who'd made B pictures for twenty years and could yell in two languages, came into the office, looked at the four of us at our typewriters and said, "Which one of you pays attention?"

The other three girls pointed at me. I've never known whether that was a compliment.

He handed me her binder, her stopwatch and her pencils, walked me out to the western street, and said, "Watch everything. Write it all down. If anybody asks you a question, answer like you know." Then he walked off. That was my training. That was all the training there was.

I didn't sleep for a week. I loved it from the first day.

Sunday, February 15, 1998
FADE IN:
INT. BUNGALOW DEN, STUDIO CITY - NIGHT

My grandson Nick, who is sixteen and believes I came west in a covered wagon, came over Saturday and set up this computer on Bernie's old desk. It took him four hours and one trip back to the store for a cord. He then spent twenty minutes explaining the mouse to me, as if I had never held anything smaller than a telephone. I told him I spent thirty-two years in television keeping track of which hand an actor held his cigarette in, take after take, and I thought I could manage a mouse. He said, "OK, Grandma. Now double-click." I could not double-click. We're working on it.

He says everybody has a home page now and I should have one too, and I could write about "the old days." I said the old days were the sixties. He said, "Exactly."

So. My name is Irene Castel. I'm seventy, seventy-one in May. From 1961 to 1993 I was a script supervisor in television, which is what they called a script girl when I started, and what some of them still called me when I finished, at sixty-six. The script supervisor sits next to the camera and makes sure everything matches from one shot to the next: the words, the coffee in the cup, the length of the cigarette, which way everybody is looking. If you ever watched a program and did not notice a man's tie was knotted in one shot and loose in the next, that was somebody like me, earning a living.

Nick thought "Script Girl" was a funny name for the page. I've decided it is.

I'll write when I have something to say, which Bernie always said was all the time.