Junior Year Box Set

I’d imagined this was probably like a soap opera, with the name My Butterfly. But it turned out to be a crime drama where girls with butterfly tattoos go missing. Haru Doi played the sister of the first victim and presses the police to look for her. She becomes a little detective of sorts.

“You better read the last part,” Hana said, pointing at the last five pages.

“Wow, that might not be good,” I said in shock when I’d read it.

Time to go to the studio. On the ride over, I showed the last five pages to Saul.

“It does leave it open to a sequel,” was his only comment.

◊◊◊

I noticed right away that this wasn’t a movie set like I was used to in LA. First, I didn’t have my own trailer. Not that I was seriously looking for one, but it just highlighted to me there were significant differences in the budget. All the actors for the day were jammed into two rooms to get ready.

I was sent to wardrobe, they did a quick makeup job, and I was rushed to the set. I guess I should have known that it would be very different when they planned to shoot a 45-to-50-minute episode in five days. A typical movie ran about 120 minutes, and it could take four to ten months to shoot.

I wasn’t quite sure who the director was. Someone pointed at a mark on the floor, and I was told to say my lines. Then they sent me back and put me into a different outfit. I was stunned when they didn’t have me do the scene three or four times so they could get different camera angles. That might have explained why I didn’t know who the director was because everyone was pushed back, and there were multiple cameras running.

I was thankful that Hana stayed glued to my hip. While I could pick up the gist of what everyone was saying, if it hadn’t been for her, I would have been lost.

The general outline of the show was that Haru played a young woman whose sister had gone missing at a party. It was written as Veronica Mars meets Silence of the Lambs, which made it much darker than your usual crime drama. The police weren’t taking the disappearance too seriously because the party was held at a major company’s chairman’s home, where his son hosted the event. This caused the police problems because the company employed a large number of the area’s residents. The last thing they wanted to do was offend the chairman.

I played the sketchy son of one of the higher-ups at the firm. The first several episodes had been about Haru working her way through suspects. Then there was a second party, and another girl went missing. No one knew if the girls had simply gone off somewhere or if something terrible had happened. There was no sign of a struggle or any evidence of foul play.

Haru’s character had found a picture of the four friends who had each gotten a butterfly tattoo. Two of the girls had disappeared. In the most recent episode, a third girl hadn’t come home, and the police had started to get involved. The third girl was the chairman’s niece.

My morning scenes had been establishment acts. They showed me in different settings with the other guys who Haru had been investigating. She noticed I tended to be in the background, but never far from the main characters. Besides being a little sketchy (that reads possible drug dealer), I was also not considered very bright. They made me out to be the affable yes-man who would never fit in because I wasn’t Japanese and hadn’t grown up in the inner circle.

Haru’s character was trying to remember who I was and how I fit in. After a morning of quick takes, it was finally time for me to have my first scene with her. She found me before we went on set.

“There’s my boyfriend,” she said to me, giving me a hug. “My real boyfriend wasn’t amused.”

“Sorry about that. I’ve had a few faux girlfriends for publicity. I assumed you were looking to use me for the publicity,” I said and then blushed. “That just made me sound conceited. What I meant to say is, ‘I was only trying to help.’”

“The show’s producers loved it. You might have guessed that when they offered you a role.”

“I thought it was a quick cameo. I didn’t plan to be in the final six episodes.”

“They tell me that when they got you on board, they rewrote the ending.”

We were called onto the set, and I finally figured out who the director was. I had a bad feeling when he gave me my first direction.

“You can’t help yourself from being arrogant, because you’re an American. But I need you to be timid and come across as a follower. We won’t find the true depth of your evil until the final two episodes. In this scene, I need you to act as if Haru is beneath you, that in your eyes, she is just a girl. You can’t be bothered to give her the time of day. Towards the end, you will somehow show compassion, and you will offer to help her find out what is happening. This will give you your ‘in’ to finding out what the police are doing to find the vile person who has taken the girls.”