Steven Axelrod's Open Salon Blog

Life in Hollywood: The Meeting

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:11:38 -0500

Robert Janss’s second floor office in the Warner Brothers executive building was book-lined and quiet. The furniture was worn, expensive and comfortable. Most executive offices were piled high with scripts, their titles magic-markered on the spines, careless heaps of them like cars in a junk yard. There were none here; no framed movie posters from Warner Brothers movies, no computer, no fax machine. The only telephone was an old black rotary model which had somehow become hip again. The inconvenience of dialing didn’t matter to Janss. People called him. On the rare occasions when he returned a call – there were still perhaps five or six people more important than he was – his secretary handled the mechanical details. “I think I have the last telephone in America that actually rings,” he liked to say.

Janss was shrewd and well-educated. He followed his hunches, even when that meant almost capsizing the studio on money-hemorrhaging projects like the previous year’s three hour civil war epic First Manassas. “What’s wrong with Gettysburg, can’t you call it Gettysburg? People know about Gettysburg,” Howard Rappaport, the studio’s Vice Presdent for Theatrical Distribution had whined at him.

Janss was unrepentant about the film’s failure at the box office. “If we don’t make a great film occasionally, there’s no excuse for us,” he liked to say. And in fact the movie did get into the black eventually, after the foreign sales – it was huge hit in Japan - and the even longer director’s cut DVD, which appealed to a growing cult of civil war fanatics and Rick Haigley fans.

Janss was given to vivid turns of phrase (“Sam Goldwyn with brains”, someone had christened him, years ago), and however bitter and resentful they might have been, the people he fired generally left with a quote or two to share at their next job.

He had recently told an assistant that her rationale for some blunder was “As meaningless as the nutrition facts on a candy bar wrapper.” When someone else had tried to put an optimistic spin on the budget overruns on a recent production, saying that the money was all “On screen” and finally ending with the lame cliché, “Every cloud has a silver lining,” he had lost his temper and shouted, “Yeah! It’s called RAIN!”

On the subject of an aging movie star whose impending mortality had prompted her to take up various fringe spritualists, he had snorted, “What do you expect? Oil of Olay only takes you so far.” A famous actress was “beautiful, until you actually talk to her. It’s like biting into a mealy peach.”

No one wanted to be the target of his conversational ice-pick. But the group he had assembled in his office today was even more uneasy than usual. Dwight Goforth, whose full title was Executive Vice President, World Wide Production, had just green-lighted a sixty million dollar budget for a film written produced and directed by unknowns. They weren’t “hot off the film festival circuit” unknowns. They weren’t “music video and British TV ad” unknowns. They weren’t “Dogma 24 eurotrash hipper-than-thou” unknowns.

They were just unknown.

The writer had done some episodic TV work, the producer worked for a direct-to-video outfit. The director didn’t seem to have done anything, except make friends with Douglas Troy. As Troy pretty much hated everyone, that was an accomplishment in and of itself, but perhaps not sufficient to warrant turning over quite this many millions of dollars to him.

Janss, who had been raised in Boston and spent most of working life at the studio’s corporate headquarters in New York, was unaware of Michael Gersh’s Hollywood lineage, nor would he have cared much if he had known about it. Mike’s grandfather was a writer? His father was a producer? Janss’s grandfather spoke Yiddish; his father was a fly-fisherman – Janss didn’t know a kvetch from a yenta and he couldn’t cast a fly without strangling himself on the fishing line. Family wasn’t a qualification; the various Bush children proved that.

Lenny Feinstein, Executive VP, Production, had brought the project to Goforth. He was thin and bald and he looked like he lived on matzoh and Maalox. Goforth, the burly, white-haired salesman, let Feinstein handle the details and absorb the stress. There was a lot of it and it showed. Today he was going to have to explain why they were going ahead with this misbegotten project. But the answer was simple and obvious: Douggie Troy wanted them to.

That’s why Troy was at the meeting. Having Rick Haigley around wouldn’t hurt matters, either. Janss was a little star-struck, and though his office was austere, his home was crowded with vanity shots of him and everyone from Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts to Gerard Depardieu and Judi Dench.

A bigger problem for Feinstein was Howard Rappaport. Howard had made it clear that he didn’t think he could sell a picture about a father and son where the father was such an unredeemable pain in the ass. He hated time travel stories and the mob was “the kiss of death”. No one understood how he came to these conclusions (Janss himself had pointed out that the world was enthralled with The Sopranos; and Mafia themes hadn’t hurt Martin Scorcese any). But Rappaport was intractable. And he was often right. He had been at Fox more than twenty years before, when Alan Ladd Jr. had been trying to put Star Wars into turnaround. Laddie screened for the other studio heads, hoping someone would take it off his hands for the money they had already sunk into the project. Rappaport had begged him not to do it. He liked the film, but more importantly, he had taken his twelve year old nephew to a screening and the boy had basically talked about nothing else for weeks. Rappaport had understood before most people, the value of the twelve-year of audience. As it happened, no one else had wanted the film, so Fox released it and Howard got his way by default, though without the merchandising and sequel rights he had begged them to take.

Janss had been working for another studio then. He was one of the men who rejected Star Wars. It was one of the great regrets of his life and one of the moments he was referring to when he said “There are days when I’d fire myself.”

Rappaport’s nephew was in his thirties now, an internet movie geek with his own web-site, and still a reliable source of information and opinion. Rappaport had leaked him the Unfinished Business script.

He hated it.

Rappaport and Feinstein had never liked each other and their jobs were fundamentally adversarial anyway. Janss looked around the room sourly – the fact was that no one here liked anyone else very much. Roscoe Henderson, the burly jock whose Oakland As cap covered a spreading bald spot, leaning against the door jamb like a body guard and obviously longing for a cigarette, was the executive in charge of the production. Was he an ombudsman, a liason, a go-between or just a go-fer? That was up to him. Janss knew he wanted Feinstein’s job. And Feinstein wanted Goforth’s job and Goforth wanted to run the place; they all despised Rappaport as a bean counter. Rappaport sneered at them as the deluded dreamers whose unmanageable flights of ego-fuelled fantasy he had to make presentable to the general public.

If this movie tanked as he was sure it was going to, they’d all be blaming each other and there would be plenty of blame to go around. If it succeeded, the three stray humans Troy had rounded up – and Troy himself, of course – would take all the credit.

It was a shitty life, but it paid well.

Janss enjoyed the silty currents of ambition and resentment and hatred and simple terror that churned away, just under the surface of these meetings. He liked seeing people at their worst. It made them easier to control.

At the far end of the room, by the big window that looked out through the dusty leaves of the oak trees to the circular parking lot. Douglas Troy and Rick Haigley were huddled together, drinking cups of the Starbuck’s breakfast blend that Troy insisted on, talking quietly, trying their best to ignore everyone else. After the formal greetings they had cut this small private space for themselves. Well, let them have it. Stars were like spoiled children, the child emperors of some barbaric country whose tantrums were lethal and whose approval was fickle at best. A pinched faced prepubescent dwarf in golden robes ordering the chef decapitated because there weren’t enough marshmallows in the hot chocolate: that was Janss’ vision of the average movie star. Which was why Troy always got his breakfast blend and Haigley always had pots of fresh violets from his favorite Trancas nursery in his trailer.

Flatter and defer to the man with the gun at your head – that was just common sense. When you were holding the gun, things were different. That was how you balanced things out and Janss was looking forward to redressing matters with Troy’s three stooges this morning.

When they finally showed up, ten minutes later, the couch and both chairs were taken – even Henderson had finally grabbed a seat. The three stooges were forced to stand in the middle of the office looking as uncomfortable as they obviously felt. Janss liked the tone; it was as if they had been called into the Headmaster’s office, with the discipline committee in attendance. They weren’t going to be thrown out of school – not yet; but they weren’t going to enjoy the curriculum he had planned for them, either.

“Care to handle the formalities, Doug?”

Troy introduced Mike and Jim and Bill around the room. Hands were shaken. Mike and Rick Haigey just stared at each other.

“Gotten laid yet?” Haigley asked. The muscles of his face had lifted a little, but it wasn’t what his fans would have called a smile.

“Very funny. I’m married, Rick.”

“I know, kid. I wasn’t invited. But I read about it in the trades.”

“That’s how I found out about both of yours.”

“But the stories were bigger.” Haigley turned to Janss. “My Dad always says we get our family news from the trade papers. And it’s true. I saw he was in the hospital last year in Christy’s column. I never did make it onto Cora’s rolodex.”

Janss was sitting forward in his chair – this was a new level of tension. Haigley and Gersh were like leopards at a waterhole. There were levels of strangeness here that made the normal business rivalries seem docile and denatured by comparison. Everyone had moved away from the two of them, as if they expected an actual fist-fight. But it didn’t happen. They just kept staring at each other.

“I wish that were true,” Mike was saying. “But she never had the guts or the good sense to blow you off. It was easier for her to be forgetful. That was why she played the flake all the time.”

“You still think she was playing?”

“I think she was a recovering alcoholic, Rick. Then she was a cancer patient. And now she’s dead. All right? So leave it alone.”

“Well, she would have been proud of you, anyway. Faking your way in here. So what’s the pecking order? Let me guess.” He pointed to Bill. “Engine.” Then Jim: “Passenger car”. Finally he turned back to Mike. “Caboose. Am I right? I hope so because the word fits you perfectly, bro.”

“We’re not brothers,” Mike said, automatically, to no one in particular.

Roscoe Henderson stepped in. He had a rough-hewn knack for diplomacy; he didn’t mind plunging his hands into murky situations and pulling glutinous slimy things apart.

“You can’t tell the players without a scorecard,” he said. “But these two guys? They’re actually step-brothers. Mike’s Mom married Rick’s Dad. It was a big scandal back in the ‘eighties. There’d been bad blood between the families for a long time. Rick’s grandfather named names at the McCarthy hearings. Mike’s grandfather was one of them.”

“He went to jail,” Mike said quietly. “He refused to rat out his friends.”

Haigley shrugged. “That was a long time ago.”

“Not to me.”

Janss said, “Is this going to affect your working relationship?”

Mike answered too quickly, “Of course not.”

“We’re all professionals,” Bill added.

Haigley turned on him. “Oh really? What’s your profession? Breaking and entering? Office squatting? Or are you just an all around con man?”

Troy put his hand on Haigley’s arm. “Rick,” he said. It seemed to be enough. Haigley drew back into himself.

“It’s good they have a history,” Roscoe announced with surreal good cheer. “They know each other. They have short-hand with each other.”

Haigley raised his right arm one inch; his hand a stiff-fingered karate blade. The gesture was for Mike only, as was the snapshot flash of a malicious grin: they both knew the kind of ‘shorthand’ Rick liked to dispense.

“Would you say that was accurate, Rick?,” Janss persisted. “The two of you can work together?”

“Sure. He’s used to taking my shit. Aren’t you, Mike?”

“I don’t know. It’s been a while. I’m out of practice.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve heard it’s just like riding a bicycle.”

There were a few seconds of excruciating silence; then Janss’s assistant Tory poked her head in the door.

“Can I get anyone anything,” she asked.

“We’re fine, thanks,” Janss said.

Troy raised his cup millimetrically.

“Some more coffee for Doug. That’s all.”

Tory disappeared. She was back in a moment with the coffee. The tension in the room was creepy, but Douglas Troy had smiled at her and she felt like the whole hormonal balance of her body had changed. Some stars seemed like miniature versions of themselves when you saw them in real life. Troy was the opposite. At six foot three he seemed even bigger than he was in the movies. And that smile was like an overdose, like shooting up something you were supposed to snort. She sat down at her desk, ignored the incoming phone calls and focussed on breathing.

“I have some questions for Gersh,” Troy was saying, on the other side of the door. “Some things I have to feel confident about before we start. If he’s going to produce my picture. Do you have brand loyalty, Gersh?”

“Excuse me?”

“The things you buy. Do you care who makes them? Because I do. I judge people by their brand loyalties. We live in a world of products. Our choices define us. Don’t you agree?”

“Well – “

“Coke or Pepsi?”

“What?”

“It’s a simple question. Do you prefer Coke or Pepsi?”

Mike hesitated. Could this insane trivia actually be important? Would his answers determine whether or not their movie got made? He studied Troy’s humorless, attentive face.

They would. They definitely would.

He couldn’t second guess the guy. He had to go with the truth. It was like playing Russian roulette. He put the barrel against his temple and squeezed the trigger.

“Coke.”

Troy smiled; click.

“Apple or PC?”

“PC”

Another smile; another empty chamber. Click.

“Compaq or Dell?”

“Dell.”

Click.

“Post Raisin Bran or Kellogg’s?”

That one was easy. “Post.”

Safe again.

“Nissan or Honda?”

Trick question. “Toyota.”

Troy laughed. “Good boy. Levi or Wrangler?”

Mike was on a roll. “Levi.”

“Conran or Ikea?”

“Pottery Barn.”

“Unpretentious. I like that. You’ll be able to afford Ikea soon, kid. Johnny Walker Black or single malt?”

“Lagavullan.”

“I love it. The kid is broke but has the best Scotch in the fucking world in his house. Makes you feel rich. Probably takes you all winter to drink it. Am I right?”

“Just about.”

“Lagerfeld or Hilfiger?”

“I don’t wear cologne and I don’t think you do either. The difference is, I’m embarrassed by perfume, and you just don’t give a shit.”

Troy turned to Janss. “This boy is good. Bounty or Viva?”

For a second Mike wasn’t sure who Troy was talking to.

“Excuse me?,” he said.

“Bounty or Viva?”

“You buy your own paper towels?”

“You’re stalling. Which is it? Bounty or Viva?”

“Viva – if I can find it without the stupid decorations.”

Troy strode over to him and clapped him into a quick, painful bear hug. When he let go, he turned to Janss.

“All right. He’s OK. Now get on with it.”

“We’ve decided to go forward with the project,” Janss said, “Under certain specific conditions. First of all, the budget will not exceed thirty million dollars, above and below the line. Any other figure anyone else might have discussed with you is a fantasy. Even that amount means that Doug and Rick will have to take deferred salaries in return for a percentage of the first dollar gross. I disapprove of this practice. We’re taking all the risk. I jokingly asked them if they’d care to assume some of the liability if the picture doesn’t perform at the box office.” He left a little pause. He lifted his eyebrows and smiled coldly. “They declined.”

“I’ll do it when Spielberg does,” said Troy.

“Steven helped get us into the mess in the first place. Ironically, he now runs his own studio and has to deal with the rapaciousness of others. In any case, let me take matters in the order that they appear on the credits. The writer: Mr. Hotaling, I’m sure you’re aware of the problems in your script. My staff had prepared extensive notes, but there’s no need for you to see them. They’re being forwarded to Andrew Carnovan, who’ll be doing the rewrite.”

Jim started to speak. Janss held up his hand.

“I know, I know. It’s an honor. Andy is an Academy Award winner and a close personal friend of mine. He took time out of his busy schedule because I’m the godfather of his child, and because we’re are paying him an appallingly large amount of money. More than ten times what we are going to pay you, which is Guild minimum.”

“But … the Basic Agreement gives me the right to the first revision and – “

“You waived it. For the good of the project. You’ll still get a story credit, unless Mr. Rappaport prevails and the time travel and organized crime elements are eliminated.”

“I - ”

“Please, Mr. Hotaling. The general feeling in this office is that writers should be seen and not heard. Mr. Gersh: Your role as Producer is going to be strictly limited. Casting, locations and all other production details, including hiring of DP, editors and technical crew, production design and even story boards as well as procuring licenses and permissions to shoot will be the responsibility of the Executive in Charge of Production, Mr. Henderson, here. All his decisions will be cleared through Mr. Goforth’s office. Of course your input and contributions will be welcome. And if you pay close attention to Roscoe, you’ll learn a great deal. Think of it as six semesters of film school in six weeks.”

Mike took a breath. “So … will I have any authority on this shoot?”

“Roscoe will delegate as appropriate.”

Mike wanted to say something, but his mind was a sputtering blank. Janss had turned to Bill.

“Mr. Terhune. I have seen your student films. I liked them. Particularly the one where you more or less incited a riot among the African Americans whose neighborhood surrounds the USC campus. That such a riot might happen had occurred to many people. Your idea that it might be quelled by the opportunity to be in the movies shows a level of cynicism I find disturbingly racist. That the actual mob went out of control and was in fact routed by the prospect of appearing in your movie I find almost as amusing as you do. I spoke to some of your instructors. They all detested you. Several felt physically intimidated as well.”

“How about you?,” Bill asked.

“I find you entertaining but I have you safely outnumbered. However I am not going to jeopardize this studio’s money or my own reputation gambling that your abilities equal your collegiate hubris. So I’ve hired a very competent director, Kyle Solomon, as insurance. Kyle directed our Thanksgiving themed-thriller Giblets as well as Giblets II, The Leftovers. He comes out music videos, he’s made dozens of them. He’s a field marshal and a traffic cop. He’s not an artist. That may be his primary qualification.”

“Hold on. The deal is, I’m directing the picture,” said Bill. Mike was amazed. Bill would stand up to anybody. And even better than that, he always seemed to find the words to do it with.

“No,” said Janss quietly. “The deal is, you are directing the picture until you go one minute over schedule or ten cents over budget. The deal is, you are directing the picture unless I disapprove of your behavior, your style or the footage you’re shooting. I will be having the dailies FedExed to me. If you fall behind or the product is unacceptable, Kyle Solomon will step in and you will be removed from the production. You will be paid in full, of course. While you remain on the picture you will fly coach. You will be permitted no trailers, no entourage, no special items or services. You’re going to be economizing and you’re going to need every penny. Once again, you’ll be waiving any privileges guaranteed by your Guild’s basic agreement and agreeing to all my terms. Tory has the paperwork on her desk. I need it all signed in triplicate by the end of the day. Any questions?”

“What if I don’t like the re-write?”

“What if a prisoner doesn’t like his dinner at Terminal Island?”

“He goes on a hunger strike.”

“And gets thrown into solitary confinement. Or in your case, he gets escorted off the set by burly fellows named Jake and Gordo. We’ll tell Variety it was creative differences.”

“Right. I’m creative. And you’re different.”

Janss shrugged.

“I think we understand each other. And I have another meeting.”

“Bob.”

Troy spoke softly, a resonant whisper that jerked the room into the adrenaline spike animal stillness of panic. One word; but it felt like a gun shot.

“Doug?” Janss was pressing his palms down against his desk as if he was trying to stop it from lifting off. Or maybe he was trying to keep himself from sinking.

”This isn’t going to work, Bob.”

“What exactly are you – “

“It’s unacceptable.”

“I – “

“Do you understand what a partnership is? Not a set of legal protocols and binding agreements between greedy assholes who can’t trust each other without the threat of litigation. But an actual partnership. My father was a police officer in Trenton New Jersey. Did you know that? He and his partner covered each other’s ass. Not their own – each other’s. If you attacked my Dad’s partner, you were attacking my Dad. And that was a bad idea, Bob.”

“Okay. That’s very interesting, but I don’t – “

Troy laid a massive arm over Bill Terhune’s shoulder.

“This man is my partner.”

“Doug, come on, this is – “

Troy waved his other hand at Jim and Mike. “These men are his partners.”

“Hold on. Let’s just – “

“Attack them and you attack me. Do you want to attack me, Bob?”

“I’m not attacking anyone. I’m just trying to get a movie into production with the kind of reasonable indemnities and safeguards that the stockholders of this company will accept. These … people – they’re first time filmmakers. We have no guarantee – “

“They’re artists,” Troy said. “You saw Bill’s movies.”

“Student films shot on a shoe-string!”

“All the more impressive. As you told me yesterday.”

“We’re talking about millions of dollars here, Doug. The fact that someone can put a picture together on super 8 film with no budget - ”

“It didn’t look like a no-budget movie. That’s the point. The race riot scene - ”

“The race riot scene looked real because he actually started a fucking race riot! They could have burned down the whole University of Southern California film school and then he would have had that on film, too! Something really cool to show his pals in prison! He has no sense of reality! He’s a reckless arrogant egomaniac and jail time would have fixed his attitude problem fast.”

“Good point,” Said Troy. “But you’re not on the high school debate team any more, Bob. Though you’d still get an ‘A’ and maybe even a little golden star on your report card. I’m not going to argue with you. I’m going to explain the way things are. First of all, Roscoe here is going to help Mike in any way he can, but he’s not making any decisions and his main job is going to be going for donuts and staying out he the way. Second, no one is rewriting the script on this picture. It doesn’t need to be rewritten. It’s just fine the way it is. Finally, no one is replacing William Terhune. If I see Kyle Solomon or any other fucking hack within a mile of any location where we’re shooting, I will personally kick his ass and make sure the only job he ever gets again will be second AD on some fucking exercise machine infomercial. If Bill goes over budget, you’re going to pay the extra money. If he goes over schedule, you’re going to wait. And you’re not going to see one frame of film until he’s ready. This movie isn’t going to be made by committee and it’s not going to be made by studio executives. Because if you break just one of these rules just once, then I’m off the picture and Rick is off the picture and you have no picture. That’s reality, Bob. Are you starting to get a sense of it? Because I’m late for lunch, you have another meeting and these boys are starting pre-production today.”

After a few seconds of poisoned silence, Janss smiled and stood.

“There’s no need to get upset, Doug,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll be able to work this out to everyone’s satisfaction.”

After the meeting, back in Terhune’s office, Bill paced the floor in a tantrum of vindicated joy.

“Did you see that?” he kept saying. “Did you see what Doug did?”

Mike and Jim were still too stunned to give him the ecstatic response that he wanted. Mike sat drinking a V-8 from the office wet bar, smelling the new carpet, watching the hard rectangles of desert sunlight resting on it. They seemed so heavy, he half expected the rug to be indented when they finally moved.

“It doesn’t quite seem real,” he managed.

“Why? Because only bad things happen to you? That’s the way losers think and that’s why they keep on losing. Why don’t you just yank your head out of your ass for a second and look around you, Mike. We’re the future of Hollywood and Doug Troy knows it. If he has to push around some studio flunkies to protect us, so what? That’s fucking fun for him.”

“I wouldn’t call Robert Janss a studio flunky,” said Jim. He was looking out the window. Moving his eyes across the main street of the lot, from the big water tower at one end to the dusty hills that rose behind it at the other.

“Well, what do you call somebody who doesn’t have any real power, who struts and preens and postures and then caves when the big boys show up and start laying down the law? What do you call somebody who pushes people around because he thinks he’s bigger than they are and kisses ass to the real thing the way he did today? I call that a flunky. ‘I’m sure we’ll be able to work this out to everyone’s satisfaction.’” His mimicry was cruel and precise. “What a pussy.”

“That was a weird moment,” Jim said.

“No it wasn’t! Weird would have been Doug Troy letting that guy fuck with his project.”

“So this is Doug Troy’s project now?”

“You’re goddamn right it is! Lucky for us. Don’t believe everything you read in the tabloids, Jim. Douglas Troy is one of the good guys.”

“I guess.”

“I don’t know,” Mike said. “Something’s askew there.”

“I don’t believe this. He rolled over those assholes like an eighteen wheeler hitting a jack rabbit. They’re fucking road kill, man. And for one reason: so I can direct Jim’s script the way he wrote it.”

Mike shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

”Why do you think he did it?”

“Forget it.”

“No, tell me. I’m interested.”

Mike turned to him. “All right. I think he did it because … it’s just – it’s what he likes to do. He wasn’t sticking up for us. He was humiliating Robert Janss. We were the excuse. That’s all.”

“That’s crazy. To be more specific, that’s paranoid.”

“Just be careful.”

“Doug’s an artist. So am I. That’s what people like you and Janss don’t understand.”

That was always Terhune’s last resort, his killing blow. When all else failed he invoked the ascendancy of the unique over the interchangeable, the talented over the merely well-organized. Mike had no answer to that. He knew his limitations.

“Well, I hope you and Troy make lots of movies and have a wonderful career together,” Mike said finally. “You’re obviously soul-mates.”

He didn’t argue any more. He knew he was lucky to be working on a studio film. It was a fantastic opportunity and so far at least, Douglas Troy had secured it for them. He had ridden to their rescue like the cavalry in an old movie. Maybe Bill was right. Maybe Troy really was a decent guy. It was possible; a lot of Hollywood reputations were warped and exaggerated. And Mike’s judgments of people weren’t flawless. He often became good friends with people he had disliked when he first met them. Maybe he’d become friends with Douglas Troy. But he knew that was a long shot.

Then there was Rick to deal with. Rick had won their childhood war decisively: he was a star and Mike was a nobody. Of course this movie could change that, could alter the balance slightly, but even Rick couldn’t be so grotesquely petty as to begrudge his step-brother this tiny particle of success. Mike ran that sentence back in his mind. It sounded good but he didn’t believe it. Still, whatever his concerns, there was nothing he could effectively do about them. His only real option was to ignore the toxic swirl of personalities and do his job.

Mike had always been optimistic. Ordinary things – the smell of the ocean in the air, the taste of fresh orange juice in the morning – cheered him disproportionately. He knew Douglas Troy would be trouble, but he figured it would work out somehow.

“How bad can it possibly get?,” he asked himself that evening, driving home from the studio over the Sepulveda pass, away from the smog and heat of the Valley. It was a rhetorical question, posed to the lights of Westwood and the Santa Monica mountains looming above him, to the still air and the wind flooding into his car window smelling of eucalyptus.

If he had asked Douglas Troy instead, the actor would have grabbed Mike around the shoulders, dazzled him with that ten million dollar grin and said, “Excellent question, Gersh! Let’s find out together.”

Life in Hollywood: Necessary Monsters

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:11:32 -0500

For months after it happened, Hollywood gossips had speculated about what a young, first time producer could have possibly said to the highest paid movie star of the late twentieth century that would cause him to stalk off the set in a rage and quit the film a day later, sinking it utterly at a net loss to the studio of close to forty million dollars.

Variety reported the incident, saying that “artistic differences” had prompted Douglas Troy to “ankle” the production. But the crew on location in Manhattan who saw Michael Gersh leaving Troy’s trailer with a split lip suspected that art had very little to do with it.

The incident made Michael Gersh famous for a little while, as a curiosity, rather than a hero; the way a self-ordained lesbian priest might become famous for throwing a custard pie at the Pope. But he never told anyone what had actually happened on that bright cold November afternoon, and Troy never spoke about it either. With the dramatic finale unexplained and unresolved, interest in the whole matter eventually faded.

But Mike thought about it often. Despite the consequences to his career, his wife’s increased bitterness, and the industry consensus that he had been an irresponsible, self-destructive prima donna, he found his behavior impossible to regret. He hated bullies. They had ruled his childhood in the form of big kids, teachers, and camp counselors. The memory of those despotisms could make him, at unexpected moments, fierce; even dangerous, though the results were often dire. Some bullies actually were as strong as they pretended to be.

And Douglas Troy had turned out to be one of them.

It began with Bill Terhune; things always seemed to begin with Bill Terhune in those days. Mike had been sitting on the tiny terrace of his Westwood apartment in the deliciously clean and chilly air of an October morning, having a cup of coffee with Jim Hotaling, when Bill called.

Jim had been hanging around a lot lately. He was recently divorced and lonely. His high school sweetheart was back in the mid-west now. She had hated Los Angeles even more than Mike’s wife, Janet, whose loathing could occasionally be mollified by a bout of shopping, a picnic at Zuma or a hike in the canyons.

All Jim’s wife had ever seen in L.A. was smog, fast food, traffic jams and the corruption of her husband’s genius. As for Jim, he knew he was no genius, and eagerly awaited the pleasures of corruption. After twenty-five winters in Winnetka, Illinois, he loved the heat and tolerated the smog. He was stoical about traffic jams and he loved fast food.

His wife wanted to live in a mountain cabin eating whole grains with a novelist who would one day (preferably after an early, tragic death) change forever the thinking of his generation. It took her a while to realize that this was not what she was going to get. When she finally accepted the fact that she was living in Hollywood with a guy who liked eating bacon cheeseburgers and writing chase scenes, she did the reasonable thing and left him.

“Remember Love Story?,”Jim was saying. “Ali MacGraw says ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry.’ What a load of crap. It’s exactly the opposite. In my experience, love means having to apologize almost continuously.”

Mike laughed. “Sounds familiar,” he said.

Then the telephone rang.

Mike picked it up on the second ring, pushed the button to open the connection.

“Hello?”

“Here’s the difference between us, Mikey,” said Bill Terhune. Even at this hour his voice bristled with aggressive self-satisfaction. “You’re just waking up, sipping coffee, putting off the work you didn’t do last night, which - sorry, but I have to mention this - happens to be pulling another hundred and fifty thousand dollars out of a million-dollar budget that’s too tight anyway, killing a night shoot, canceling the caterer, axing an explosion or two ... that sort of stuff, glamour stuff, and thinking about calling in sick at the office. Which is - I have to mention this, too, Mikey, not to rub it in, just for the sake of comparison - Vista Films, a bunch of two-bit losers who grind out direct to video garbage, a market that’s basically dead anyway. Whereas ... I am in my office at Warner Brothers, whose average budget per picture last year was forty three point five million dollars, chatting with Douglas Troy and, getting ready to start pre-production on a picture called Unfinished Business - ”

“That’s Jim’s script!”

“What? What about my script?” Jim said, tugging at him.

“Exactly,” Terhune continued. Mike tipped the phone so Jim could listen. “While he’s over there at your impromptu breakfast club, bemoaning his fate, and wondering why nobody wants to buy any of his down-beat, depressing scripts about dysfunctional families and alcoholic assholes ... I’m sitting here actually getting them made. You’re complaining that nothing’s happening. I’m making things happen. That’s the difference between us.”

“Bill. What the hell are you talking about?”

“Want to produce a movie?”

“What drug are you on right now? I want to be sure I never take it.”

“-- because, if by some chance you actually do want to produce a movie I strongly suggest you get your ass over to Burbank and bring Jim with you. I have a drive-on for you at the Barham Gate.”

And then he hung up.

They were sure he was kidding, but you could never be totally sure of anything with Bill Terhune. They had nothing else to do except eat bagels and procrastinate, so they compromised and ate the bagels in the car.

Half an hour later they were walking across the hot asphalt to the line of brown, two-story office buildings on the north side of the studio lot. They climbed an outside stairway to the second floor, following the gate guard’s directions. It was at least twenty degrees hotter in the Valley and it was getting hotter all the time; solid, blinding desert heat. It was air-conditioned in the second floor hallway. The chill wore off quickly as they padded down the carpet looking for Bill’s office. Soon the air felt normal, which meant that when they went back out into the white glare of the late morning, it would feel like strolling into a pizza oven.

“But it won’t smell as good,” Jim remarked when Mike pointed this out.

The door to Bill’s office was open. A secretary was typing and behind her they could see Bill himself in another larger room, with his feet propped up on the desk, reading the Hollywood Reporter.

He stood when they came in, massive and daunting as usual, shaggy and broad-faced, his hair in a ponytail. Like a grizzly bear, he made simply standing erect seem like a form of physical threat. He grinned at them.

“What do you think?”

Jim grinned. “I think you do it with mirrors.”

“Yes, I admit there’s magic involved. But unlike your average journeyman magician, I’m glad to reveal how I do my tricks. Actually, that may be the best part.”

“So tell,” Jim said.

“First coffee - I know I interrupted your breakfast. Carol,” he called out. “Three coffees. Milk, no sugar.” He turned back to his friends. “In half an hour we have a meeting with the head of the studio, the Vice Presidents of Production and distribution, the executive in charge on the picture and a couple of actors named Haigley and Troy.”

“Rick Haigley?”

“No – Melvin Haigley, his first cousin with the speech impediment. Of course Rick Haigley.”

Mike said, “I’m supposed to work with him?”

“Hey -- for this kind of money you can let bygones be bygones.”

“Bygones? What do you mean, bygones? Nothing’s bygone. I don’t believe this.” Mike paused, stunned for a second. Terhune was grinning at him. Mike spoke slowly, as if to a large retarded person holding something fragile and expensive in his puffy, unlined hand. “I’m curious. What makes you think he’d be willing to work with me?”

“He’s fine with it. Relax. This town runs on nepotism. Just sit back and enjoy it.”

“Rick hates me, Bill.”

“You’re deluded. The guy couldn’t care less. You hate him, but deal with it on your own time. Okay?” He turned back to Jim without waiting for an answer. “They all think you know what’s going on, so I have to tell you a few things before we walk in there. They want re-writes.”

“Who does?’

“Everybody does. Barry Stein wants rewrites. Dwight Goforth wants rewrites. Troy wants rewrites. I have all their notes. You’ve already agreed to them.”

“That was cooperative of me.”

Carol walked in with their coffee.

“I love your script, Mr. Hotaling,” she said. “I cried.”

“Thanks ...”

“I’m so excited for you guys. I’m writing a screenplay myself.”

Bill laughed. “The favorite indoor sport of the Los Angeles basin.”

“It’s perfect,” Mike added. “A game with no rules where everyone loses.”

“Not everyone,” Carol said. “You guys are the proof of that.”

Bill flashed her an evil smile. “But we cheat.”

“He cheats,” Jim corrected. “I just do what I’m told.”

“And I’ve never seen either of these guys before in my life,” Mike asserted. “Is this the DMV? I just came to take my driver’s test.”

Jim took a last swallow and set his cup down. “We’ve had our coffee. Now tell us how you did it.”

Bill turned to Carol. “Stick around. I’d like you to hear this.”

“But the phones -- “

“I’ll take care of the phones.”

He put each of the lines on Hold, one at a time. Then, with the little plastic buttons pulsing unobtrusively on and off, isolating them from the world outside, Bill tilted back in his chair and began.

“The trick of cheating,” Bill said, “isn’t breaking the rules. It’s ignoring them. You can get away with anything if you don’t announce to people that you’re doing it. Once I stole a sixty dollar art book. I was leafing through it and I walked outside to check my parking meter. There was nothing furtive about me so no one noticed. I’ve lost the book but I never forgot the lesson. It came in handy when I decided to set up a fake office at Warners. I drove in with a delivery six weeks ago, found an empty office and went to work. I bullied them into giving me a phone, that was the first thing. Gotta have a phone. I told Maintenance it was supposed to have been installed two weeks before and that I was losing five thousand dollars a day because of their incompetence. They said they didn’t have any paperwork on Terhune Productions. And I said -- ‘That’s a great excuse. Tell your boss you lost the paperwork. Better yet, let me talk to your boss.’ So I got my phone -- and my desk and the rest of it. But that was just for show. I could make phone calls from home. What I’d really done was given myself physical proximity. I’d been on the outside for years. Now I was inside. The trick was using that fact. So I mingled. I walked around. I poked my nose into sound stages and cutting rooms. I saw plenty of stars and directors, but they were always walking fast to somewhere else, talking to six other people. I needed to slow someone down and get them alone and I needed to do it fast, since it was only a matter of time until Studio Security wised up and threw me off the lot head first.”

“So what did you do?,” Jim asked.

“What would you do?”

“I’d call my friend Bill for advice.”

Bill shrugged. “I ate lunch. A classic Hollywood career move.”

“I don’t get it.”

But Mike did. He sat forward and said, ”The commissary.”

“Give the man a stuffed panda. I started eating long lunches at the commissary every day and one day I saw Douglas Troy eating alone at a corner table. Everyone was looking at him, but no one came near him. And I mean ... this is other movie stars. I heard Clint Eastwood saying something about wanting to talk to him but not knowing what to say. Part of it is what a great actor he is and how he influenced all of them and all that crap. But they were scared, too. Clint Eastwood was scared of this guy. Hey - he’s been in jail, he’s been in psychiatric hospitals, and that wasn’t for research, pal. He’s supposed to have killed a couple of guys. He brags about it. Maybe it’s bullshit, but even pretending that you killed someone is pretty goddamn weird. And there’s something spooky about his face. You believe it. Anyway ... he’s been shooting interiors on the lot for six weeks and no one’s come near him. All I could think was - this guy is perfect for the father in Unfinished Business. So one day I took a deep breath, walked over to his table and sat down.

“He said, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, kid?’ He really called me ‘kid’. I love that. I said, ‘You’ve never won an Oscar. Here’s your chance.’ “

“And you pitched him the movie?,” Jim asked incredulously. “Right there at the table?”

“Not exactly -- not the way you understand the word.” Bill addressed the others. “Jim has never grasped the basic principles of pitching a story. What Jim does ... tell me if I’m wrong, Jim -- “

“Oh boy, I’m about to learn a Valuable Lesson.”

“No you’re not. If you haven’t learned it yet you never will. And it doesn’t matter anyway. You’re a hot writer now. You don’t need to pitch stories any more. They’ll pitch stories to you.”

“Why can’t I quite believe that?”

“Because all of your imagination goes into your work. You never apply it to your real life. And you’re cynical. Which means you’re scared. Okay -- first of all ... Jim tries to keep it short, because he knows the morons he’s pitching to have the attention span of toddlers on a caffeine jag. So he spits out five or six boiled down story ideas, as if they could see the whole picture in their heads from a few sentences. But they can barely see the whole picture in their heads when they’re sitting in a theater watching the finished picture. So that’s a miscalculation. Then he gives the premise and the plot twists away up front, to grab their interest. Okay, he’s got their interest, but he can’t do anything with it because he’s already told them all the interesting stuff. Like with Unfinished Business, he’d say ‘When a college kid’s father is shot on Christmas Day, he uses his access to a top secret experimental time travel project to go back in time two weeks so he can talk to his father and say all the things he never managed to say before the inevitable happens. But once he’s back in the past with nothing but his father’s obituary in his pocket, he finds out that his father was killed by the mob over gambling debts. He staked everything on some big horse race and lost. And on the other side of the obituary, there’s the racing results from the day before the killing. All the winning horses are listed. Which means -- all they have to do is stay alive for two weeks and their problems are over.”

“So what’s wrong with that?,” Jim asked. “I’m interested.”

“You’d better be. You wrote the thing.”

“But I mean -- “

“You’ve blown the story in the first five minutes. They’re ‘interested’ but they’re not hooked. They haven’t had a story experience. When you start filling in the details and sketching in the chases and the father-son squabbling, they don’t care. They’re just sitting back punching holes in it. And you’ve already lost. Because a story is something we grasp one piece at a time. You have a secret advantage when you’re pitching that no finished film ever has. Your audience really doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. They haven’t talked to their friends, or read reviews. There’s no ‘buzz’, no fanboy website spoilers, no TV ads. You’ve got a blank slate. No one has ruined it for them, unless you do it yourself. The way Jim does.”

“So how did you do it?,“ Jim asked testily. “If the lecture is over.”

Mike sympathized with Jim’s annoyance. Bill was annoying. But maybe you had to be a pain in the ass to succeed in Hollywood; or at least be friends with one.

“I told him the whole story from the first shot,” Bill said. “I have the script memorized from page one to the end, but I didn’t bother with the fade in, iris to black interior exterior night day dissolve to bullshit. I just said: ‘It’s Christmas Eve at Hollywood Park. Only the hard-core gamblers are at the track; the guys with no one to buy Christmas presents for. It’s the second race and Ray Brackett is screaming for a horse named Four Leaf Clover as if his life depended on it. Which it does.’ And I took it from there - the race, the chase through the paddocks, the murder .... moment by moment, scene by scene, straight through to the end.”

“How long did it take you?”

“An hour and a half - just like the movie. We were alone in the commissary by the time I finished.”

“What did he say?”

“He said ‘Who have you shown this to?’ I said ’ No one.’ He said ’Who’s the writer?’ I said ‘A pal of mine.’ He said ‘Who’s the producer?’ I said ‘A pal of mine.’ He said, ‘Who’s the director?’ I said ‘Me.’ He said ‘You’re pretty sure of yourself.’ I said ‘Lucky for me.’ Then I said ‘Hey, it’s a great script but I didn’t write it. That’s not my job. My job is knowing ‘em when I see ‘em -- and then making ‘em work. Which is your job, too.’ He said ‘Some little punk from nowhere is telling me my job.’ I said ‘I’m from Boston. And you know I’m right.’ He said ‘How much development money has Warner’s given you?’ I said ‘None.’ He said ‘So how are you going to set this up?’ I said ‘You’re going to help me. You have access and I don’t.’ He said “Access to whom?’ I said ‘Rick Haigley, for the son.’ He said ‘Rick practically is my son. I’ve known him since he was three weeks old.’ I said ‘His agent won’t return my phone calls.’ He said ‘Get me a copy of the script.’ So I handed him one. He said ‘You’re prepared.’ I said ‘Boy Scout.’ He said ‘Me, too.’ And that was it. I shook his hand, walked back to my office and got arrested. They charged me with trespassing and fraud and a few other things -- including resisting arrest.”

“You resisted arrest?,” Mike asked.

“Just a little. The cop shoved me. I shoved him back.”

“You’re certifiable.”

“Yeah, well ... so they took me to the Burbank jail. A minimum of thirty days, until my trial comes up. They let me call my lawyer. Total waste of a quarter. He says ’I told you not to do this,’ and refuses to come up with the five thousand dollars bail. So I say to him ‘You’re fired’. He just laughs. That’s a treat -- sitting in jail and your lawyer laughing at you. He’s been trying to call me for the last three days, the maggot. Good luck with that idea. So anyway ... the Burbank jail was pretty nice. It was clean. One of the guys brought me food from the Taco Bell down the street. He really liked me. He even smuggled in the trades for me. Shit - that reminds me. I’ve got to read his screenplay. The place was still jail, though. It was claustrophobic. Ever been stuck in an elevator? I couldn’t sleep. I look back on it, it’s absurd. I had a cell to myself, I had a bunch of cops who thought I was the most interesting thing that had happened to them in years. And I was only there for six days. But that was more than enough, believe me. The cops didn’t really believe my story. They enjoyed it, but most of them figured I was just a bullshitter.”

“Which you are.” Mike pointed out.

“Which I am. But not just a bullshitter. As they found out the following Saturday, when Douglas Troy bailed me out. It was pretty funny, actually - one of the guys had busted Troy when he was working vice out of the Malibu substation. And Troy actually remembered him, can you believe that? It was like a high school reunion. And the day after, Doug --”

“You call him Doug?,” Jim asked

“Hey, it’s his name, all right? He has La Barca cater a huge Mexican dinner for the night shift. I told him about the burritos from Taco Bell and he thought it would be a nice gesture. He even paid for strolling musicians. This guy’s supposed to be some kind of monster, but sorry, I just don’t see it.”

“How did he find out you were in jail?,” Mike asked.

“He gave the script to Haigley, and Haigley loved it and the two of them came looking for me. Somebody told them where I was. Everybody was very apologetic. The charges were dropped and big shots who wouldn’t have spit on me two weeks ago are sending flowers and champagne. What can you say but “Hooray for Hollywood”? I got a real office, an actual secretary, and a production deal. Which meant it was time to call you guys. All you have to do now is convince these people that you’re human. Which might be quite a trick. Fortunately, you don’t have time to worry about it. The meeting’s in five minutes.”

Life in Hollywood: Coverage

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:11:55 -0500

Americans in the media-pickled late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries spent a startling amount of time imagining themselves as the heroes of their own movies. They dressed for the audience, posed for camera, skewed the random events of their lives into Hollywood plots. They framed shots from the reflections in shop windows, took random songs from passing cars as the sound tracks of their lives. Often, they did it unconsciously; you could see it in the way they walked and swept their hair off their foreheads and glanced at themselves in their rear-view mirrors.

Michael Gersh and Rachel Scanlon, though they had never met, had in common an opposite mental habit. When life was going badly, when they felt discontented or disappointed, they tended to see their lives not as a movie, or even as a screenplay; but rather as the debunking coverage report on a movie script that was never going to be made.

The turn of the twenty-first century was a time like that for Rachel, and the coverage she wrote in her head served the same function that real coverage provides for studio executives: extracting the essential story from the useless tedium of the day-to-day slog.

This is how it went:

Coverage report

Title:

How to Not to Succeed in Hollywood

(While trying everyone’s patience to the breaking point)

Summary:

A hapless wannabe screenwriter moves in with her slimy agent and dishes with other losers while her career goes into the toilet.

Synopsis:

We begin with Rachel Scanlon (30) and Todd Richter (35) in bed together. Though obviously a lot of fun for everyone involved, it’s a little too NC-17 to ever be shown anywhere, with the possible exception of ‘home video night’ in a Malaysian whorehouse.

Stacey Clark (30), Rachel’s best friend and room-mate, strongly disapproves of Todd, a notable local sexual predator. She admits he’s sanitary, though: he only uses women once before properly disposing of them. Rachel points out that she’s clearly not in the ‘used-Dixie-cup’ category, as Todd has been seeing her regularly. The girls squabble and make up with a product-placement riddled shopping spree.

Todd prefers her in sexier clothes, but otherwise they seem to be getting along fine at this point. A montage of the happy couple at the Norton Simon Museum and the La Brea tar pits (“Dinosaurs used to live here.” “I can see why they moved.”), having romantic dinners and strolling on the beach, screams out for one of those sappy Allan and Marilyn Bergman theme songs, soon to get its own cheesy production number on the Oscar show.

On the career side, things are not so rosy. Rachel finally lines up another meeting with her nemesis, Elaine Littleton (37), Head of Development at Twentieth Century Fox. Rachel ends the session with a self-destructive tantrum (“Here’s a newsflash for you, Elaine: no one cares what you think! No one’s interested in your pointless ‘feedback’ and your idiotic ‘notes’ so do everyone a favor and just for God’s sake please SHUT UP.”)

Rachel’s friend Jim Hotaling (27) is impressed with this kamikaze approach, and it does win her some fleeting respect, which she quickly squanders by ridiculing film executives who want her to write Mr Ed: The Movie or a remake of White Heat with a ‘girl gangster’. She suggests remaking 2001: A Space Odyssey with a girl monolith.

No one is amused, least of all Todd.

After a Hollywood party where she listens to miserable TV writers making excuses all night (“Sure it’s trash – but the subtext makes a statement!”), she comments that there should be an Emmy for best rationalization. Todd dismisses her as a hopeless snob, wishing her good luck with her Finnegan’s Wake miniseries.

She fends him off sexually, and confronts him the next day: she wants more from him. She wants a real love affair. And she wants to move in. He agrees.

Now, let me just say that even the average Jerry Springer guest, who’s been chained up in the basement while her transvestite husband molests their house pets, would probably acknowledge this is a bad idea. Stacey tries to talk her out of it when Rachel comes by to pick up her stuff. Her final plea is a promise: she’s not going to take another room-mate. Rachel can come back any time she wants.

So Rachel starts living with Todd and winds up cooking meals ironing shirts, and cleaning up after the maid, just like her mother. After a few months of this domestic limbo all the bad news comes at once. Stacey is fired from her TV show over salary demands, the film script that Jim had been shopping secretly has been ruined because a family friend at Warner Brothers promised to read it, but gave it to the story department instead. Some snide jaded punk trashed it; now it’s ‘tainted goods.’

Rachel has her own calamity. Her favorite script, the one about her mother, had been bought by Columbia for a low-ball price. Now she finds out why: they had a similar story in production and wanted to avoid a lawsuit. So her script is dead. She isn’t happy; Todd doesn’t care.

“So I’m supposed to go on a crying jag because your first script is never gonna get made? Most people never get their first scripts made, honey. But most people don’t get sixty-thousand bucks to take the sting out of it.”

The crisis fades and life grinds back to normal. Rachel redecorates, has more futile meetings and circular arguments with her control-freak boy-friend. He spies on her as she works on a new script and lets his respect and envy show for a few seconds, which just makes him more impossibly annoying later.

It all comes to a head on the night of the new Millenium. All of Todd’s crazy right-wing friends have gathered to watch the end of the world as described by Peter Jennings (apparently unaware that the failure of all computers in a global electronic meltdown might interfere with their TV reception). One of them shows Rachel and bullet and says “In two months I’ll be trading this for food.” A real fun crowd.

Rachel blows a fuse, cooking and bussing dishes while the wolf-pack in the living room scarfs the munchies, spills the beer and sizes up the sex appeal of every female news-reader and correspondent.

She throws another one of her patented tantrums and stalks out of the house. Eventually she comes back, of course, and Todd regales her with the sad stories of his Dickensian childhood (Abusive Dad, suicidal mother, etc). Naturally, they kiss and make up and we leave her trundling into the future with psycho-boy, nothing resolved and not much reason to care.

Comment:

The title of this piece is a little too on the nose for my taste. This isn’t a movie. This is why people go to movies in the first place: to get away from the dreary, day to day misery of life. This “Rachel Scanlon” is a pathetic delusional freak. Are there really women like this? I mean outside of some Lifetime cable movie about battered wives?

She winds up back with Todd because of a few maudlin sob stories? I’d check them out before I believed the guy. Come on! Forget half-empty and half full. This glass is totally empty, girl – not to mention cracked, and there’s some green goo crusted on the inside of it. Wise up -- take a quick drink from the tap and get the hell out of there!

As to her friend and the room-mate, even the most high-brow Sundance jury would say, “Damn, they just painted the lobby! It was drying during the show, and I missed it.” I don’t need to pay good money to see a bunch of pampered yuppies whining about their sob stories. I get enough of that shit at home!

Suggestion:

Pass.

Rachel laughed. That was a little harsh, but so were the ‘jaded punks’ who wrote the studio coverage.

She was driving west on Sunset, through Brentwood and Pacific Palisades, Steely Dan playing on her favorite oldies station. Babylon Sister, the perfect soundtrack choice. Forty years from now, in a rest home in New Jersey, unable to remember what she had eaten for breakfast that morning, this song would still put her back in Los Angeles at the start of the new century: driving fast with the top down, the rain-washed air flooding over her, headed for the beach.

She could even imagine a moment of senile nostalgia. Life wasn’t anywhere near as bad as her dismissive reader’s report suggested. Her scathing little summary left out so much. For one thing, it didn’t begin to touch on Todd’s overwhelming physical attraction, or the cruel but invigorating way he saw through her. He was impossible to trick or bluff. Yes, she hated the string bikinis he wanted her to wear, but in every essential way she’d still be naked with him, even in a burkha.

It wasn’t just the feeling that got lost in a two page summary, it was the details, the texture and taste of life as you live it, without plot points and second act reversals. Like the morning she had driven back to Stacey Clark’s apartment in Play Del Rey to pack up her stuff and move out.

It was a hot, still day. Not even the ocean was stirring. There was no wind and no traffic on the streets. Clouds lay against the sky like fat white dogs with their heads between their paws. It was the kind of day that made Rachel understand why tropical cultures had never managed to invent anything except the grass skirt and the afternoon siesta.

Stacey was on the couch eating a tangerine popsicle, watching an old William Wyler movie on AMC, when Rachel burst in. It was one of Rachel’s favorites, Solomon’s Seal; and her favorite part was playing as she walked through the door. Robert Mitchum, an American soldier in London just before D-Day, is trying to get the lovely demure Madeleine Carroll to spend the last night of his furlough with him at a hotel. They’ve just met in a Soho club, danced together and had a few beers. Now they’re walking down a war-darkened Picadilly, toward the blacked-out Circus. It’s after curfew and they have the streets to themselves.

Rachel sat down quietly on the couch. Stacey curled her legs up to make room.

“I love you,” Mitchum said.

Madeleine Carroll pulled her hand away from his. “But you don’t even know me.”

“Women always say that, and it completely misses the point. The question isn’t ‘Do you know this person well enough to convince her that you’re qualified to love her?’ Look - we start off in life and we know nobody. But we choose the people we want to know. We make those decisions somehow. So the only question that matters is - do you want to know me? Because I want to know you. Badly.”

Rachel was saying the lines under her breath. Stacey caught her and they finished the speech together. Then Robert Mitchum kissed Madeleine Carroll and the air raid sirens began and Stacey clicked off the television.

“Sorry, I just had to see the end of that.”

“No, it’s great. Even at ten O’clock in the morning.”

“Sunday morning, just for the record. I made coffee.”

“Great.”

Rachel walked into the kitchen and poured herself a cup.

“What’s going on?” Stacey called from the couch. “Everything okay?”

There was a short awkward silence. She realized she was nervous about telling Stacey. Seeing her plan through Stacey’s cool, practical eyes was like looking at your body under the fluorescent light in a department store changing room. She sipped her coffee.

“I’m moving in with Todd.”

Stacey sat up. “Oh.”

It was a perfectly neutral syllable.

“Come on, Stacey. It’s going to be good.”

“Well, I guess this is the wrong moment to say ‘You don’t even know him’. You have Robert Mitchum on your side.”

“Who cares about Robert Mitchum? I have Sidney Gersh on my side.”

“Sidney Gersh?”

“The writer, Stacey. You have to know the writer.”

Stacey shrugged and followed Rachel upstairs. She sat in a chair watching Rachel move briskly from closet to suitcase and back again, whistling. Stacey seemed to be enjoying her own torpor, absorbing the heat like lizard on a rock. Rachel was almost finished by the time she roused herself to speak.

“Seriouly, Rachel – old movies aside. Don't you think this might be a little hasty?" she said.

“For you, getting up this morning was hasty."

“No, really - how long have you known this guy? A month?"

“Five weeks.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

"And five weeks ago you were saying he'd drop me after one night.”

"But this is a real commitment."

"That's the whole point, Stace. He finally committed himself."

Clearly, Stacey was too groggy to argue effectively. She shrugged.

"Well … all right. But if you ever want to come back here - for a night, or a few days or permanently - that's fine with me."

Rachel paused. There was a stack of carefully folded shirts in her hands. "I wonder what your new roommate would think of that?"

“I’m not getting a new roommate."

"Not even Sam?"

"This is your place, whenever you want it."

Rachel looked away. It had to be said.

"I might never want it."

“I know.”

For the first time since she had decided to move, Rachel felt uncertain. There was a challenge in the clear-eyed generosity of Stacey's offer. For a moment, the long-standing fact of their friendship dwarfed the heat of her romance. She dropped the shirts into the open suitcase.

"Won't it be expensive, living alone?"

"I can afford it."

There was only one thing left to say on the subject, and Rachel said it.

"Thanks. I hope I don't have to take you up on the offer."

“Me, too.”

They hugged for a few seconds. Then they started carting suitcases downstairs and out to the car. Stacey set the laptop down carefully on the front seat.

"I just hope he makes you happy," she said.

"He does."

"I don't want him to hurt you."

"He won't."

Stacey straightened herself and stood with her hands on her hips. Her face was bunched into an unforgiving squint. "He better not,” she said. “Or I’ll come looking for him.”

She stood that way for a moment, in that angry stance, small and stern and slightly comical. But Rachel believed her.

"I'll tell him you said that."

"Good. Tell him I know karate."

They embraced again and then Rachel drove slowly up the alley toward Culver Boulevard, her small dauntless friend getting smaller every second in the rear view mirror. Stacey raised a hand to wave just as Rachel turned the corner, out of sight.

Less important things got lost in a quick summary, too, like the flora and fauna of Los Angeles, the spindly palm trees and lining the streets in town, the giant coreopsis, mustards and lupines that lined the Pacific Coast highway in the spring. As to fauna, the most interesting creatures were the Beverly Hills women who apparently did nothing but shop all day long. Contrary to the old slogan, these women were both too rich and too thin: pampered to the point of despair, and anorexic. They wore mink when the temperature fell to fifty degrees; they had eye-tucks and face-lifts and laser peels and nose-jobs and surgically augmented breasts; they had their cellulite pounded by Norwegian women for five-hundred dollars an hour. They lived in lavish houses crowded with huge, unused rooms. They drank their morning decaf huddled in their kitchens, and talked to their families by intercom. They had dead marriages and pre-nuptial agreements. Boredom, botox, sun-poisoning and rigid diets had stiffened their faces. When they met each other, they had conversations like this one, which Rachel had overheard one day in Gelson’s:

"I just got back from China."

"Fantastic. Did you get any bargains?"

It was nightmarish. Intellectually you knew you weren't going to marry some television producer or studio executive and move into a cavernous mansion in Holmby Hills. You were never going to be so debased that you saw an entire continent with a billion people, a dozen languages and a thousand years of history as a place to get "bargains".

Still, it was scary. Rachel felt a kind of vertigo standing near those women, as if they were at the bottom of a pit she could fall into at any time. They didn't seem human, somehow - they had turned themselves into insects, leading microscopic, busy, highly structured but mindless lives, frantic little beetles of consumption scuttling from store to store.

Rachel managed to avoid those women most of the time; she did her shopping on Pico Boulevard. Pico was too far south to be fashionable, too shabby and too cluttered. But the clutter was the whole point - it was cluttered with the best kosher French bakeries, the best Chinese restaurants, the best furniture and lighting stores, without ornament or pretension. Merchandise was dumped into open warehouse spaces with names like Furniture City and Lamp Land, and though it always seemed hopeless at first, you always wound up finding exactly what you were looking for.

Rachel spent three hours one day in F&S Fabrics, a huge warren of connecting rooms piled high with rolls of silk and cotton and wool, surrounded by polka-dots, stripes, florals, plaids and the energy they generated. Everyone shopping at F&S was planning to make something themselves instead of just buying it off the rack somewhere. She liked choosing among the flat rolls of combed Egyptian cotton flannel and French muslin and then watching it get cut on the broad tables, noting as her mother always had if they were generous with the yardage or not. At the end you had a soft, neat pile of folded material that would end up as a new dress or a transformed couch. Rachel loved to sew and she was an expert with her complex electronic sewing machine.

She realized as she was pulling it out of its case one afternoon a few days later that this was the first time she had touched it in more than a year. Her sister Mary's sewing machine, an old Singer handed down from their grandmother, was never even put away. Rachel thought of her sister in Vermont, making children's clothes, hooking rugs, stenciling walls, devoting her life to self-effacing women’s work. Attending quilting bees - anything as long as it was anonymous and communal, so long as it called no attention to herself. When Rachel had gotten angry that quilts went unsigned, even the most beautiful - the 'building block' quilts that prefigured Vasarely, the dark Amish quilts that surpassed Rothko - Mary had just smiled that infuriating Madonna smile of hers and said, "You're missing the point, Rachel."

Well, she was still missing it. She wanted credit for her work, it was part of being a professional.

She had to smile at that: she was a long way from losing her amateur standing in Hollywood, and she knew it. If there was a screenwriter's Olympics she could enter it with a clear conscience. Being paid a little money here and there didn't change anything, going to a lot of meetings didn't change anything; as it turned out, even having your script purchased by a major studio didn't change anything. Only a screen credit would do that: "Written and directed by Rachel Scanlon" in ten-foot high letters, white on a black screen. It was so easy to imagine, which of course just made it worse.

She knew what her father would answer to this train of thought: you chose this life, honey. You knew the risks. He'd say it gently, he always said hard truths gently. That was where Rachel both envied and dismissed her sister the most: Mary had opted for the safest, easiest life imaginable, a happy, bucolic marriage, densely populated with neighbors and children, baked goods and snowmobiles and hearty breakfasts. Mary had found a refuge from everything that Rachel was fighting. She was living her mother's life, doing all the same things in the same order.

As an idyll, it struck Rachel as grimly claustrophobic. She was one of those women who would have gone crazy with cabin fever on the Montana frontier. There was snow on the ground from October to May in Brattleboro and the temperature frequently dropped to forty below zero at night. Still, whatever the circumstances and hardships, Mary had succeeded. That was the crucial fact, the splinter of old wood under the skin, ignored but infecting: until Rachel and Katy got married they would always be failures in their mother's eyes. Even if Rachel made millions of dollars in the movie business and won Oscars, she would still be a failure. She could just hear her mother's response on Academy award night.

"So, you won an Oscar! Big deal! Will it keep you warm at night? Will it give you grand-children? Will it support you in your old age? Which is not that far off, Rachel! This sick life you lead is aging you fast!"

By a conscious, physical effort, she shut off her mother's voice. It was all too easy to write Kay Scanlon's dialogue. But Rachel had been well-trained, and part of her still knew that Kay was right. Smug, grating, insensitive - but right.

Rachel recalled a letter from Mary - it had come a few months before, full of rural news. She was "putting up" jams and vegetables for the winter, mulching the garden, re-roofing the barn. Susan, one of Rachel's two nieces, was probably going to get a horse for Christmas. Enclosed with the note was a photograph of their boy Seth, aged six, standing between two yellow Labrador retrievers that Mary had raised from puppy-hood. Their huge old house, a converted granary, filled the background.

Rachel had stared at that picture for a long time, feeling a twisting ache of jealousy, a sudden almost unendurable longing for everything she had spurned: house, family, dogs, a husband who loved her - the permanence of it, the certainties and the comforts. All of Mary's children had been born at home; their father had caught them and cut their cords. It was extraordinary. Mary had beaten the system which had defeated their mother and she had done it simply by being happy, by loving her chaotic, leaky house and her husband and the snow.

Rachel had visited them three summers before. After a week in the noisy, over-populated, half-renovated house, they had driven to Texas Falls. The two women had stood by the edge of the water while the children played and shouted in one of the pools. After a long silence filled with the white noise of the stream, Mary had turned to her and said, "Don't get the wrong idea about us, Rachel--it isn't always Seventh Heaven around here. The winters are … drastic."

Rachel had felt strangely chastised by that remark. She was an outsider, a trivial observer on the fringes of Mary's life. It was clear that Mary was talking about much more than the weather. Her life was composed of struggles that Rachel couldn't begin to understand.

Mary wasn't surprised that her sister had wound up in Hollywood, still unmarried, chasing a career in a land where it was always summer, at the farthest possible remove from blizzards and dirty diapers. But that didn't stop Mary from feeling jealous; she longed for the freedom and the glamour and the excitement of the movie business. She saw every film she could, she subscribed to Premiere and Entertainment Weekly. She envied Rachel's talent and her single-mindedness; she was blithely certain that Rachel would eventually succeed and introduce her to movie stars.

It really did even out. They had chosen different lives and some part of them regretted it. Their reciprocal envy kept their lives in balance and stabilized their friendship. They carried part of each other, that other choice, around with them all the time, like an unanswered question. Mary with her pictures of George Clooney and Rachel with her Simplicity patterns, unable to resist the urge to play house.

And of course she was good at it. Maybe too good; her coverage report had gotten that much right. But she wasn’t just marking time. Todd was a part of Hollywood, intricately wired into the day to day business of making movies. And she was living with him; that was one of the few clearly marked paths to success in this town. That sounded horrible, but she hadn’t had any devious master plan when she fell in love with him. It had just worked out that way. She had been wandering around in the forest; Todd lived in the clearing.

It was an image that crossed her mind often. The movie business was like a dense woodland, full of people wandering around, lost but hopeful, looking for a clearing in the center. In that clearing, people like Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, Robert Zemeckis and David Fincher and Eric Roth and Steve Zaillian wrote, planned, rehearsed and shot movies. It all happened in a matter-of-fact way; success and the collaboration of other successful people were taken for granted in that sunny world. Its inhabitants were scarcely aware of the immense forest that surrounded their tiny glade of complex deal-making and creative freedom. They never thought about the dark woods populated with the frustrated and the futile, the ambitious and the avaricious, the artists and the con-artists, the convicts and the victims, all of them conniving, making connections, making a living, living vicariously, waiting on tables or just waiting, taking their chances, taking meetings, taking coke; impoverished mercenaries, bleak opportunists in the land of opportunity.

Everyone Rachel met told her they knew a way into the clearing. But if they knew the way, they’d be there already; they wouldn't need the services of an unknown screenwriter. Todd was there; he could get her there. He really did know the way. She had a guide, now. It was only a matter of time.

For Rachel, the past and the future were as different as cats and dogs. The past was catlike, aloof and separate and stubborn. But the future was like a large white dog, some ideal combination of Labrador retriever and St. Bernard: loyal, loving and infinitely tractable. The big, shambling dogs of her childhood had always given her hope and so did the prospect of a new year to begin.

It was January, it was 2000, she was in love and she had a screenplay to finish. She felt a surge of the old optimism that had brought her to California in the first place. She could write all the debunking coverage on her life she wanted, but it didn’t stop on page 110 with some contrived third act resolution or lame twist ending (She was really dead! This was all a dream!). It just kept going. In fact, it had barely begun.

She had problems, but she could solve them; she had complaints, but she could cope. The future seemed to stand in front of her, panting softly and wagging its tail, eager to get outside. The door was open. It seemed that easy this morning, taking the rest of her life in her hands – a single step into the sun-wind of a late summer morning, the big dog sniffing the bushes, leading the way.

LIfe in Hollywood: Lust and Pine-Sol

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:11:18 -0500

The apartment was a mess. It had been terminally messy for more than a week, but neither Rachel nor Stacey had been able to rouse themselves to the Herculean cleaning job the place had become. It was degenerating fast. Even the dishes in the kitchen were daunting. Every plate and glass they owned was dirty. Pots and silverware and crockery were submerged in a filthy pool of standing water in the sink, crusted with ancient food. Rachel knew she could either spend the next five hours cleaning up, or she could spend the next five hours ignoring the chaos and getting some much-needed writing done.

She turned away from the kitchen resolutely and sat down to outline her terrorist script. It was going well, and she had even managed to make some dialogue notes. Then the phone rang. She was certain it was Todd and she froze, as if he were outside the door, listening for any creak or rustle that would prove she was at home. The phone rang five times before Stacey's answering service picked it up.

She went back to work but she was rattled and her hand had developed a slight quiver and her writing looked clumsy on the page. She was losing her concentration. She tried another sentence or two and then threw her pen down angrily. This was absurd! It hadn’t necessarily been Todd on the phone. This was teenage behavior. She couldn't even pretend that she didn't understand herself. It was all oppressively obvious: she had driven to Todd's house and thrown herself at him because he was attractive and she was needy. It was an understandable lapse. He was the perfect tonic after her sterile years in New York and the celibacy of her time in Los Angeles. He was a monster, but that was all right: she was already thinking of how she could use his blunt, edgy mannerisms and his harsh style of talk for a suitably despicable character. There was a lot of material in Todd Richter. And the best part was, he was so oblivious to himself that he wouldn't even recognize the portrait.

She had to focus on what was important now: she had sold Next of Kin. She had hardly even thought about that. She had earned sixty thousand dollars, minus ten percent, which made it fifty four, minus thirty percent for taxes … she squinted, enjoying the calculations. That made roughly thirty six thousand dollars in take home pay, by doing a piece of she would have written for nothing. She had never gotten a check for more than five hundred dollars before in her life. It had taken her a month to write Next of Kin. That meant her net earnings for the project – so far – were nine thousand bucks a week. With weekends off, that came to eighteen hundred dollars a day. For a six hour day, she was making three hundred bucks an hour. Not bad.

She shrugged her shoulders and laughed softly; only in Hollywood. But the big question remained -- what was she going to do with all that money? First of all, a really great stereo system: Sony CD player, Advent speakers, dubbing cassette deck, Braun receiver. CDs; and a CD burner. She would raid Tower Records with a thousand dollars in her pocket. A new 42 inch TV – and a DVD player. And a couple of hundred DVDs – from The Abyss and Annie Hall and Alphaville to Zabriskie Point, Zelig and Z. What else? A new lap top – a Dell inspiron 8000 (Sam had been raving about his), with more memory than she could fill in a lifetime and a Lexmark laser printer. Then there were the shameless luxuries -- good French writing notebooks and German fountain pens from Flax, a case of white wine, some bottles of Veuve Cliquot, a side of Scotch smoked salmon …

And of course, clothes.

The names of her favorite stores exploded in her mind like a 21-gun salute: Ann Taylor, Saks, MacKeen, I Magnin, Jag, The Left Bank shoe company, a dozen others--there were clothes she'd been coveting for months. Perry Ellis, Donna Karan, Claude Montana, Ann Klein and Christian Dior.

And shoes - Manolo Blahnik shoes, Dolce and Gabbana shoes, Casadie shoes, Maud Frizon shoes. She could even get new running shoes, and socks, and throw out all her old bras and panties. She'd hit the lingerie department of Bonwit Teller like a hurricane, and she'd never have to buy underwear again. She could even buy herself a great vat of Chanel #19--a lifetime supply at the rate she used it.

And a decent wrist-watch, and books, cartons of books. Complete sets of books, Conrad and Faulkner and Orwell; Robert Benchley and P.C. Wodehouse and Graham Greene. Alice Munro and Alice Walker, Jane Austen and Jane Smiley and A.S. Byatt.

This was the important stuff. A one-night stand with some Hollywood creep was trivial by comparison. She was finally a professional writer. That was what counted most. For the first time since her arrival in Los Angeles she had authentic good news; not hopes or fantasies, but clear and undeniable good news. She had to call home and let her parents know. Her work was respected. People were willing to pay her just for writing, and people were willing to pay Stacey Clark just for being an actress.

Both of them were single, self-supporting women; self-made capitalists, selling their commodities in a free market. It was full of pirates and con-men, but any free market was sure to be full of pirates and con-men. She could handle them -- as long as she remembered to stay out of their beds.

"Did you join the union?" her mother asked.

It was half an hour later.Rachel was sitting on the couch with the phone in her lap. She was already having second thoughts about the call.

"I don't have to until I sell another script. So, no--I didn't."

"Why not?"

"Well... there's a lot of work you can't do if you're a member of the union -- ”

"Sweatshop work!"

"It costs fifteen hundred dollars just to join and then you pay dues every year. And for what? I mean – what have they actually accomplished? Ten cents more in foreign residuals? A good dental plan? Writers are still treated like dirt."

"So? Join up and bore from within. Change it, make it better! It probably needs some young blood."

"It probably does. But not mine."

"I can't believe this! I can't believe what I'm hearing. Did your grandfather get his head bashed in at Ford's River Rouge plant, did Harry Bennett's goons firebomb his house so you could grow up and sneer at the unions? What's the matter with you?"

"What's the matter with you, Mom? I finally have some good news. Can't you just be happy about that?"

“I'm sorry, honey. Who's your agent? Did he get the best deal for you? Did he fight for you?”

“I’m sure he did.”

“What are they paying you?”

"Sixty thousand dollars."

“That doesn't seem like much."

"It isn't much. This is a first script."

"Then he's not much of a fighter. I could have gotten you a hundred thousand dollars. Your Aunt Phyllis could have done better for you than that. You keep your eye on this agent of yours."

"Mom, I'm happy to have the money. It seems like a lot of money to me."

"And I'm happy for you sweetie. But you don't take your eyes off this agent for one red-hot second."

"What possible reason could he have to hurt me? He gets paid when I get paid."

Kay Scanlon laughed a short bitter laugh. "No man likes to see a woman get too successful. That's true in the garment district and it's true in Hollywood and everywhere else. So you watch yourself. You're riding for a fall and this agent of yours would love to see you hit the dirt. You don't have to believe me. Just keep your eyes open. All right?"

"All right."

Her mother finally got off the phone.

As usual, Bill began by apologizing for her.

"Your mom gets a little out of line, but she just doesn't want anything bad to happen."

"I know, Dad."

"She's on your side."

"I know that."

"And in this case she may be right. But anyway, it's great news. I'm not surprised, though -- I knew you'd do good out there.”

There was bad news on his end. A show had gotten panned in Philadelphia; but he made light of it. "Maybe God is telling me it's time to retire," he said.

"I don't think so, Dad."

"Well, we'll see. My experience in theatre tells me that while you can't win them all, you can actually lose them all."

There was a fatigue in his voice that she had never heard before. There was nothing she could do about it; she had no quick solutions and he wouldn't have wanted them anyway.

"Is Mom keeping your spirits up?" she asked finally.

"I’ll tell you, Rachel. I look at her and I know I'm lucky. No matter what happens to this play in Philly or the one that's going into rehearsals next week. I felt the same way when you and your sisters were born. I feel the same way talking to you now. You cheer me up, kid. Just by being alive. You don't have to do a goddamn thing except breathe."

She hung up a few minutes later feeling the usual mixed emotions. Her parents were too complex to judge easily. Her father had actually hurt her much more than her mother, and in the early days, it was only Kay's will and devotion that had held the family together. Belligerence was her mask; self-pitying kindness was her father's. They were like a great comedy team, always a little ahead of their audience. You never knew which jokes were serious. They had lived with their poses so long that Rachel couldn't tell where invention ended and truth began. Probably the truth encompassed all the contradictory impressions: her father was the arrogant impresario, the sophisticated wit, the distracted genius, the adulterous drunk, the faithful teetotaler, the abusive father and the quiet, generous Dad she had just talked to. Her mother was the long-suffering wife and the shrew, selfish and generous, short tempered and patient; an earth-mother and a kvetch. She lived for her children and resented them bitterly at the same time.

Her parents' marriage had always been a mystery to Rachel and it remained one. It seemed that they had traded places again. Bill seemed diminished and Kay was ascendant right now. The years of defeat had shrunk Bill. He desperately needed a success. A comeback, though he could never call it that, never admit that he had been gone for the last decade. But he had been glad to hear her news, whatever was going on in his own life. And even her mom had admitted to being happy for her.

The phone call had renewed her energy. She went back to the script feeling ingenious and adept. She untangled several knots in the story and wound up doing three hours of solid work. It was almost seven in the evening when she finished. But when she got up to stretch she felt inexplicably sad. It wasn't until her stomach rumbled that she realized she was hungry. That was typical. Generally, when she was either tired or hungry and feeling rotten because of it, she didn't see it that way. She felt well-rested and well-fed; but the world was rotten. She had no possibilities, no hope, people were crooks and liars, death was everywhere and nothing was worth the trouble. Then someone, often Stacey these days, would tell her to get some sleep or force-feed her and extraordinary things would begin to happen. Human nature would improve radically. So would the weather. Her prospects would start looking up and life would seem delightful again.

She hadn't eaten all day -- no wonder she was in such a bad mood.

There were sure to be a few people she knew at Barney’s Beanery by now, and she could use a dose of ordinary conversation. She could also use a plate of ribs. Or two.

When she walked in Nancy Gitlin, Nancy’s friend Jim Hotaling and a shaggy, bearded writer just in from Chicago, named Duane Nagel were arguing about how to deal with producers. Nagel had met that morning with a gruff producer on the Burbank lot who’d told him, "I have a hundred ideas a day, kid. But I don't have the time to sit down and push every one of them through the computer. Life's too short. So I hire writers like you to color in Easter eggs for me. That's how I work. I put down the dots. You connect them.”

Jim Hotaling laughed out loud at that. He was a pudgy, nervous, shrewd television writer with an unkempt beard and hair that was already starting to gray. He had a bad marriage behind him. He looked forty but the sun had aged his skin badly and Stacey was certain that he was thirty-five at the oldest.

"I'll tell you that guy's secret. He thinks he's a writer." Jim hitched himself into a more comfortable position on his chair and pushed away a plate of denuded ribs. "He went into the movie business because he wanted to be creative. I know it sounds ludicrous. But that's the point. That's where you come in.” He gestured to a passing waiter. "You have a crucial role to play in this man's fantasy life. Which isn't half as much fun as it sounds. Another Kronenbourg," he said to the waiter.

Rachel was leaning forward with her elbows on the table. "Okay,” Jim continued. “Your job, as a Hollywood writer, is to make guys like him feel like writers."

"I don't get it."

"Look--he has an idea. It's vague and hazy and if he could make it clear it would be stupid and lame. You take the idea and make an interesting story out of it. He makes suggestions, and you re-write so that his ideas fit in without the seams showing. The finished piece of work feels like he wrote it. All his ideas are there. Of course you made them work and put a little spin on them. But he isn't too clear on where he leaves off and you begin. Which means that he can go around town calling it his new project. You let him get away with it because he'll only fight for a project if he feels proprietary about it. You know better. That's why he resents you. That's why you have to be very polite with these guys. You give them the story credit, you share the screenplay credit if you have to. You stroke them. You lie, you do the dance. You make them feel like writers -- and that's how you make it in this town."

It sounded horrible, but it had worked for Jim. Also, he was tireless. He had spies in every production office and network. He knew every show that was going on the air and every show already on the air that was looking for new writers. He knew about every assignment in town a week before his agents and had already accumulated five or six (or ten or twenty) story lines appropriate to the occasion. He gave himself no credit for story telling; his facility was more memory than inspiration. He was an archivist of old television programs. He had a file which contained the plots of every program that had lasted more than one season since the fifties, from Gunsmoke and I Spy to Ben Casey, Bonanza and The Waltons. The older the better. Programs had always copied each other, re-cycling story-lines from season to season. It was wasted effort to think of anything new. He had tried that at first. But no one wanted anything new. New ideas gave programming executives migraine headaches. He was convinced that all a TV writer had to do was mix and match. "I don't plagiarize," he would say. "I anthologize." He had used the same episode from Bonanza, suitably revised, in four different shows so far. A recent sale to ER had been cobbled together from bits of Medical Center, Doctor Kildare and Saint Elsewhere; it was almost too simple.

Jim was a cheerful, self-proclaimed hack writer. He hadn't sold out; he had no higher aspirations to betray. He didn't want to direct movies, or even write them. He hadn’t always been this way, but he didn’t like talking about his past. It didn’t matter; he never lacked for conversation. He was pragmatic, unpretentious, and contented, which made him good company.

Talk turned to a new film called Oblivion, North Dakota. It was based on a novel by William Wood Kessler, about a college professor on sabbatical who becomes involved in a blood feud in a small, mid-western town. They were all enthusiastic about the film; they were fighting about who deserved the credit.

"It's a typical Douglas Gelb movie," Duane was saying. He puts his stamp on everything he does."

"That's just dumb. Rachel can tell you -- ” But Rachel was already working on the basket of bread in the middle of the table. Her mouth was full. She lifted her hands to tell Jim he was on his own. Jim shrugged and pressed on. “Look -- if it's anybody's movie, it's Harold Levy's."

Duane laughed. "But he's just the producer."

"Just the producer? Gimme a break."

"I mean it -- no one has ever been able to tell me exactly what a producer does."

"Are you interested?"

"What?"

"Because I'll be glad to tell you." Duane shrugged. Jim took a healthy swig of his beer and launched into his dissertation.

"First of all, there are lots of different kinds of producers. They’re not all like the idiot you met today. At the bottom you have the guys who helped get the money together, or did the uncredited work on the script or happen to be screwing the star. They're called associate producers or something like that. Sometimes writers get that kind of credit if they've been on the set for whole shoot, revising the dialogue -- it means they can get a salary for extra work. Then you have the guys who put the deals together, make phone calls, assemble the stars, the script, the director, and the line producer … then move on. Your typical line producer is just a hard working guy. He’s there every day, he's like a glorified production manager. He has to make sure everyone gets out to locations, and that the locations have been organized. He makes sure everyone has their costumes and their props and their lines and their lunches. He keeps the budget down, fights with the studio and reminds the director to wear his lucky fishing cap." He took a breath and another gulp of beer. "Then there's guys like Levy."

"What do they do?" Duane seemed genuinely interested now.

"Everything."

"I worked with Levy," Nancy put in. "He's old Hollywood. He was a boy wonder in the days when movies were a producer's medium. Like, Gone With the Wind -- I mean, that was a David 0. Selznick film. Everybody loves it but who knows Victor Fleming? And why should they? I mean, he was just the director. When people ask why they don't make movies like that anymore, the answer is that most of the men like David Selznick and Harold Levy are dead.”

"I still don't know what he does," Duane insisted.

"Okay," said Jim. "First of all he comes up with the story or buys the book, in this case. He supervises the script and goes through a dozen drafts until he gets what he wants. Guys like Levy are hell on writers. When the script is right he makes the deal, hires everybody, casts the picture and bargains head to head with studio guys who are basically scared shitless of him. He works with the production designer to make sure it looks right. He scouts locations, supervises storyboards, rules the production meetings, brow-beats the special effects people, interviews the stunt guys, and figures out the budget down to the last penny. Then becomes a line producer, making sure the director sticks to the budget, checking every shot, watching the dailies, making suggestions firing people if they need firing, even the director. Once they wrap the picture, he supervises the editing, the sound mix, the looping, the music. He sees every inch of film, okays every barking dog and car horn on the sound track. When the editors and the mixers and the foley guys and the cast and the director all go home, he goes to war. He has to start fighting the distribution department at the studio to make sure he gets the right kind of release, in the right theatres and the right number of theatres at the right time of year, with the right advertising budget and the right ads. He does everything, Duane. He's the first one there and the last one gone. That's why he gets the Oscar for Best Picture."

"Okay, okay."

"You have to live here for a while to appreciate a guy like Levy. Almost everybody you meet is an idiot. Listen to this story. You'll see what I mean. A guy from Paul Stark Sackler's production company called me a few months ago." Everyone sat forward. Sackler was one of the most powerful and extravagant producers in Hollywood. "He said Paul has an idea for a script and he wants you to write it. I was knocked out. What an opportunity for a nobody TV writer. So I said, 'What's the idea?' And he says to me, 'I can't tell you much about it but it's set in Miami, it's about cocaine smuggling and it's got a lot of salsa music in it.' That was all he said.”

"What did you say?" asked Nancy.

"What could I say? I said it sounded like a pretty good idea, but I wanted to hear a little more about it before I got involved. He said, great, don't worry. I'll set you up a meeting with Paul. Two weeks later I'm in Sackler's office and he's saying to me, what do you think? I say, your guy didn't really explain too much about the story. So he starts pacing. 'Here it is,' he says. 'The movie is about cocaine smugglers. It's set in Miami. And there's a lot of salsa music in it.’” Rachel was already laughing, but Jim raised his hand. “Wait, there’s more. He says, 'Listen to this. Matt Damon is the guy. Ben Affleck is the best friend. Gwynneth is the girl. Well? What d'ya think? Incredible, or what?' That was all he had. I couldn't believe it. I told him I didn't think I could do it. I just wanted to get outta there--this guy had serious brain damage. But that isn't even the punch line. That happened today. I was having a meeting with some other crazy producer and I told him this story. I thought it would be good for a laugh. But he wasn't laughing. I kept coming to the funny parts and he was just staring at me, more and more pissed off. Finally he said, 'Is Sackler making that movie? Does he have a deal? He can’t make that movie! That's my movie! I'm making that movie!' You see what I mean? They’re all insane."

Sam and Stacey came in half an hour later. Stacey sat down next to Rachel and said, without any preliminaries, "Where were you last night?"

"With Todd Richter."

"Tell me everything."

No one was listening to them, so Rachel told her everything, from Todd's phone call and his good news to the kiss in his office, her night in his apartment, and the day she had just lived through. Her ribs and a salad came in the middle of this narration and she ate steadily for fifteen minutes before continuing.

"So," she said, finally, "I decided. I'm going to just fire him."

Stacey winced at her. "You sound confused."

"But I'm not. I know exactly what I feel."

"And you felt just the opposite last night."

"I know, but--"

"That's my point, Rachel. That's what confusion really is. People always assume it's just sort of chaos and not knowing what to think. But it's really one certainty after another. Each one feels permanent but none of them lasts. Sometimes it takes another person to help you understand what's going on."

"Like you?"

Stacey grinned. She left a small pause for dramatic effect and then said, flatly, "You're in love with him."

"Bullshit!"

"Why do you say that, because he scares you? And you think he's a jerk? And you never want to see him again?"

"That’s a good start."

"Sorry, but I know you, Rachel. I've seen you in love before. The symptoms are so obvious. You're like a kid with the measles."

"You want to bet?"

Stacey laughed. "Okay--sure."

"The apartment is a pig-sty. It's been getting worse and worse for weeks. The tile in the bathroom needs to be scrubbed, the walls need to be washed. So do the windows. It's a full day's work."

"So?"

"So the loser cleans it all up -- alone."

"You're on."

They shook hands.

Fifteen minutes later, Todd Richter walked in.

Rachel looked up and then down again, frantically, her breath caught half-way up her throat. Was this a coincidence? Or had he been looking for her? Why had she come to one of her familiar hang-outs? Her CIA heroes would never do something so careless. Todd was standing by the doors quartering the room with his eyes. He was alone. Rachel concentrated on her salad and tried to shrink inside her clothes. Sam was saying something to her, but his voice was just another part of the surrounding noise. She watched her hand with sickly interest. The fork was vibrating in her fingers. Her stomach began to roll over slowly inside her. She knew she couldn't eat another mouthful of salad. The taste of the dressing would make her vomit all over her friends. But she didn't want to put the fork down, either. She had no idea what she would do with her right hand if it didn't have a fork in it. She started re-arranging her salad in its bowl. Tension was crawling up her back like a large insect.

"...right, Rachel?" Sam said in his horrible, booming voice. He was staring at her expectantly. She looked up at him without raising her head, nodded.

"Yes," she said softly, hoping it was the right answer.

Then she felt the hand on her shoulder. She looked up into Todd's face. He was smiling coldly down at her. She was blushing, she could feel the heat behind her cheeks.

"I've been looking all over for you," he said.

"I've been hiding."

"I called today. You were there. But you let the service pick it up.”

"I know, I'm sorry."

Stacey listened to this exchange with a sort of appalled fascination. Todd and Rachel were so caught up with each other they created a field of solitude around themselves. This was the man Rachel had dismissed ten minutes ago. She was gathering together and pulling towards him like iron shavings in a grade school science experiment. Stupidly, Stacey thought to herself: so this is what they mean by animal magnetism. She could feel the air oscillating silently between them and she knew she was in the presence of something much stronger than the ties of affection and mutual interest that bound her to Sam Rasmussen.

"Let's get out of here," Todd was saying.

"All right, I just have to pay first, and..."

"I put your dinner on my tab."

"Yes, but I should at least--"

"Come on."

It was an order.

He helped her up. The whole table had fallen silent, watching. Rachel squeezed Stacey's arm as she got up, but said nothing. She shrugged foolishly to the others and then let Todd lead her out of the restaurant.

Stacey watched them go. She realized with a shock that she had disliked Todd Richter instantly. It was hate at first sight.

She left with Sam a few minutes later and they talked the incident over. She decided that she might very well have over-reacted. Rachel might have wanted to tell Todd off, but she could hardly do that in the middle of a crowded restaurant, in front of all those people. Stacey would have wanted to go someplace private herself. Sam agreed with her. He hadn't felt any particular charge from their conversation; he advised her not to worry.

Stacey stayed over at Sam's house that night, and the next. A full day had passed before she got back to the beach. She came home early in the afternoon. Rachel's car was gone. Stacey picked up the mail, unlocked the door and stepped into the astringent smell of Pine Sol.

She slumped against the door jam; of course. There was no need to look around, but Rachel would want her to make a full inventory, so she did. The rug had been vacuumed. The stains that had been driving them crazy had been lifted out with K-2R. The living room had been dusted and all the wood had been polished. The windows sparkled. The kitchen was immaculate; not a single dish was in the drainer. The linoleum had been scrubbed two shades lighter and then waxed. The wood cabinets gleamed. She opened the refrigerator. It, too, had been cleaned out. All the dead stuff had been thrown away, all the shelves had been shined. Upstairs, the bathroom had been polished; the fixtures shone and even the stains on the grout were gone. Both of their rooms and closets were impeccably neat, dusted and vacuumed. All the laundry was done and the beds had been changed. The terrace had been washed down.

Stacey came back inside. Rachel had cleaned the walls, too. Not a smudge remained. They were pristine. She had left the apartment cleaner than the day Stacey moved in. There was no note, no message. None was needed. Stacey sighed. She didn’t feel like celebrating.

This was one bet she had very much wanted to lose.

Life in Hollywood: Sex and the Single Screenwriter

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:11:21 -0500

The Santa-Ana had picked up. It moved through the streets beside Rachel with a deafening whisper, gliding along like a convoy of black limousines. It was after midnight when she pulled up at the address on Fountain Avenue in West Hollywood. As she got out of the car, a styrofoam cup flew past her. The street door was open and Rachel walked inside, out of the wind. The sudden calm reverberated in her ears. She pushed her hair off her face and walked up a flight of carpeted stairs to apartment #3.

There was no light under the door and the hallway was silent. She heard a car skidding on Sunset, a squeal of rubber that ended with an angry burst of car horns. The wind roared by steadily. She knocked, and waited. There was no movement from inside. She knocked again. Nothing. She felt a stinging flush of relief: maybe he wasn't home. The thought startled her; she hadn't realized she was afraid. She heard footsteps. A bar of light came on under the door; she flinched back from it. More steps. She took a long deep breath and let it out slowly as the locks clicked and the door swung open.

In the first second that he saw her, surprise flickered across Todd Richter's face; then it was gone. "Hello. The wind is making everybody crazy tonight."

"Don't talk," she said softly.

She stepped into his apartment, put her arms around his neck and kissed him. The hunger leapt between them, pent-up for hours. Todd kicked the door shut and pulled away long enough to say, "Bedroom."

She was already pulling his shirt off, kissing the matted hair on his chest. Still kissing her, not breaking the tangled connection between them, he started walking her down the hall. She let him guide her, seeing herself suddenly through his eyes, the woman he had wanted, probably since the first time he had met her. But he hadn't known how to approach her; his one attempt had been a disaster. Perhaps he had even given up, after this afternoon. And now she was his, utterly his, about to be laid out in front of him like the smorgasbord at Scandia; taste anything, eat as much as you want.

She'd seen his eyes flick to her legs when she crossed them in a skirt; she had caught him studying the outline of her breasts, her nipples stiff under the light cotton of a short-sleeved shirt. She had sworn that she would never let him come closer than that. She had actually enjoyed his frustration. It had given her a taste of power over him; she realized that now. It diminished his control. Somehow she had known that he couldn't dominate her completely as long as she withheld her body from him. Her back was to the bedroom door, then the door was opening behind her.

She shouldn't be here. She should get out.

Todd was dangerous.

And yet the danger excited her even more. Her fear and horror turned to lust; everything turned to lust. She was hurtling down the curves of a mountain pass, brakes disconnected, aching for a crash.

The bed hit the back of her knees and she was falling. She seemed to fall for a long time before the soft mattress caught her. She watched as Todd untied his robe and shrugged it off. He was naked underneath, his massive powerful body covered with black hair. His erection stood stiff out of the coarse shadows between his legs. It was shockingly big, a separate animal, one-eyed and alert. She saw herself leaping off the bed, dashing for the door, but she felt too heavy, pressed into the soft comforter by the weight of the swollen craving between her legs.

He loomed over her and every nerve in her body seemed to be pulling upward towards him. He unbuttoned her pants and unzipped them. The rasp of metal on metal tore at her, but she lifted herself with a dream-like absence of volition and he slid them off. They vanished and he was beside her, enclosing her in the heat and the harsh musty smell of his body. They were kissing again, deeper kisses, his hands moving over the soft material of her shirt, feeling the contours of her bare breasts beneath it. The pleasure jumped through her and she wanted his flesh on hers. But he was playing with her, kissing her shirt, circling the wet fabric with his tongue. She ran her hands down his back, the chain of muscles and fur that led to his buttocks.

He slipped his leg between hers and pulled her shirt open. He stopped then, just looking. She was trembling; his stare was almost tactile in its intensity. He started kissing down her throat to her breasts, his tongue flicking her nipples. She heard herself moaning and she arched her back, pressing herself to his mouth. She wanted his mouth everywhere, his hands everywhere at once.

He was moving down her body, and she felt his fingers under the waistband of her panties, easing them over her hips and down her thighs, over her knees, freeing them from her feet and throwing them across the room, baring her. He rose on his knees between her legs, just staring at her again, memorizing her naked below him, stomach muscles fluttering with tension, thighs parted. She felt delirious, absolutely possessed, twisting under his gaze.

"Now," she said, "please, now."

Todd smiled. "Oh, no. Not yet. Not for a long time."

He started with her feet; kissing them, sensitizing them, running his tongue between the toes, then moving up her calves, pausing behind her knees, then working his mouth and teeth up the insides of her thighs. His hands were caressing her ass, lifting her, sliding between her and the bed, separating the cheeks.

Rachel was writhing and crying out now, panting, twisting the comforter in her hands. The longing felt like a serrated knife edge, a cut that was sugar on her nerves, parting the flesh without blood. His tongue came to the brink of her vulva again and again. She could feel his breath taunting her. She hurled herself up towards him and felt the first hot touch of his tongue, opening her, finding the slippery oyster of her clitoris, drawing it into his mouth, releasing it stroking her, first delicately then harder, bearing down until she felt an orgasm begin to sizzle in her blood. She was pulling at his hair, reeling on the brink, and he pushed her over the edge. She started to come, bucking up and down, but he stayed with her, relentless and pleasuring until the ecstasy receded.

He moved up her body again, drying his face against her hips and her ribs, and kissed her. She was famished for his mouth. Finally he entered her, the head of his cock parting each layer of resistance, deeper and deeper. She had never had a man that deep inside her. It was soft and gentle at first; then he pulled himself almost all the way out and the avid wanting rushed back. He plunged himself in again, speeding up, and she was thrusting her hips in rhythm, raising her legs to have him deeper still, their bodies slapping together. She crossed her legs around his back. Waves of ragged bliss rose up inside her but refused to break. Todd seemed to know it. He varied his rhythm, slowing down into languorous, circular stabs, stirring and coaxing her. His fingers were parting her ass, caressing down from her vagina, exploring. They lunged together, perfectly synchronized now, faster and faster. He found her anus, brushed it lightly and then let his finger slip inside and out again, matching his thrusts.

She almost passed out in the sudden surge of pleasure; then she was coming over and over again uncontrollably, the steep waves finally crashing on the sand and she was crying out with each breath, gasping as Todd pumped himself into her and she felt his explosive orgasm pulsing inside of hers.

Todd rolled away first. Both of them were slimed with sweat and the bed was drenched. The wind was still rushing down the deserted streets. The room was hot and airless.

"How about a long, cool bath?" Todd asked. "I have the biggest bathtub in Los Angeles."

Rachel found this hysterically funny.

"Let me have it," she said. She reached over for his arm and pulled him down onto the bed again.

It was another two hours before they finally wobbled into the bathroom and slid into the giant tub. It stood apart from the wall on four clawed feet, twice as long and half again as deep as the prefabricated ones in most apartments. They sank into the cool water and let their legs mingle.

"Where did you get the tub?" Rachel asked.

"A girl bought it for me. Some shop on Melrose. Paid a fortune."

"Who was it?"

"Just a girl, Rachel. Just a girl. We broke up a long time ago. She wanted a relationship. You know the type -- went to a shrink and called him a 'therapist'. Tried to get me eating health-food slime -- raw fish, soy bean pudding, whatever the hell it’s called."

"Tofu."

"Tofu, right. Fucking slime. She kept saying, 'you don't relate to me. All we do is screw all the time. Is that all you want? Am I just a sex object to you?' So I told her, I said, relating bores the shit out of me. Relationships are a dime a dozen. But a good sex object is hard to find. What can I say? She left me. But I got custody of the bath tub."

There was a long silence. The tap dripped. A dog started barking in another apartment and stopped just as suddenly.

"Say it," Todd murmured. "It's all right. Say it."

"You know what I'm going to say?"

"I'll say it for you. You want the same thing."

"Maybe. But I'm not the same person."

"I know. Believe me, I know. Listen, I'll tell you something. Most people out here are idiots. No education. No stamps on their envelopes if you know what I mean. Tofu for brains. But everybody has a few words that sound smart, or they've picked up some funny-farm philosophy they can spout at you. You get used to that shit -- you get used to dating actresses who have some issue they're angry about, and they've memorized Oprah Winfrey’s opinions, and they can bark them out, just like a trained dog."

Rachel laughed. "But you like it. You like the starlets. They're easy for you."

"You were pretty easy yourself."

She kicked him. "Watch out. You’re just getting to the hard part.”

“You know, I knew something was up when I read Escapade. I figured you'd be a real wise-ass like your characters. Not letting anything get by you, calling all the bullshit. Some fat, clumsy broad who has to make jokes to get by. There's a lot of women like that. Men too. Look at the writing staff at any sitcom. Go down to the Improv some night. Best of all –- check out the L.A. film critics. Dorks on parade. Anyway, the point is, what the fuck am I saying? Oh yeah -- I didn't think you'd be beautiful."

Rachel winced and Todd pounced on it.

"I know that expression.”

"What expression?"

"A little flattered. Mostly annoyed. You've heard it all before. That’s the problem. You've been told you're beautiful too many times by all the wrong kinds of men."

She was intrigued. "What kinds of men?"

"You know -- young ones. Stupid ones. Weak ones. Romantic ones. The usual crowd of losers."

"What kind are you?"

He smiled. “You tell me.”

"All right.” She squinted at him critically for a few seconds. “You’re romantic. No, I mean it. I saw that champagne in your office today."

"And you drank it, too."

"I certainly did. Way too much of it."

They both laughed.

"You're wrong, though. As far as I'm concerned, love is just a good way to get your ass kicked. I was in love once -- all I got out of it was guilt and scar tissue."

"What happened?"

"Just about everything."

"Anything in particular?"

"I'll tell you someday. Not tonight."

There was another silence. "You were looking at me, weren't you?" Rachel asked after a while. "At the end?"

"You noticed that?"

Rachel nodded.

"All right, I'll tell you. I love to watch a woman's face when I'm making her come. It's the only time I feel like she's really mine."

"But that's absurd! For all you know, she's fantasizing about someone else. Or just faking it."

"You weren't faking it."

"No."

He ran his foot up the inside of her thigh under the water, caressing her with his toe. A low charge of pleasure flared through her and she squirmed. "It wasn't just me, though," she managed. "You were there, too; I felt it."

"I know, but it's secondary. What I really love is taking a cool, self-possessed woman and making her totally lose control, when I put her through so much anticipation that she's about to explode and she's begging me to let it happen, and then so much pleasure that she's screaming and thrashing around on the bed, and her toes are cracking and she's just an animal, totally wild, and knowing I took her there. I made it happen. That's what I love. Sometimes I don't even come at all. It doesn't mean that much to me."

She stared at him. "It did tonight."

There was a strange moment of silence, like the shifting light when clouds filter the sun for a few seconds and make the spring air melancholy.

"Yes, it did," Todd said finally, speaking to the bathwater.

She took his foot in her hands and stroked it. "Tell me why."

He looked up; and the clouds moved on, releasing the sun. "First you tell me something. What did you think, the first time you saw me -- that first day you came into the office?"

"I thought, this is the most attractive man I've met in years. Which means he’s probably a total nightmare and I should be running away as fast as my feet can carry me.”

“So what do you think now?”

“I think it’s too late to run. I’m in his bath tub.”

“And maybe you were wrong.”

“What? So you’re really a nice guy who just acts all mean and tough to hide the vulnerable little boy inside him?”

“Fuck you. Like you’d spend five minutes with that guy.”

Rachel splashed him. “So what did you think that first day?”

"When you walked in my office? I thought -- this is your chance, buddy. Right out of nowhere, some friend of one of Foley's clients. A total fluke. This is it. And I had this sick idea that if you ever left I'd never see you again."

“You were pretty self-controlled. I thought there was nothing on your mind but contracts and commissions."

"Good. I didn't want to take any chances. Scare you away."

"But you shouted at me and hung up on me and -- "

"That was business. It still is. That’s not gonna change, and you wouldn’t want it to.”

He leaned over and kissed her. It made her lighthearted and she realized that he was right. She liked the cruel streak in him. It made her feel safe. It was like a vicious Doberman Pinscher licking her hand. He was on her side after all. Besides, she had always rooted for the villains in cartoons and movies. The heroes were just dull. There was something inherently tedious and one-dimensional about all that stalwart nobility. Inane handsome guys charging around doing good deeds put her to sleep faster than a slug of cognac.

When they finally stood to towel off, the fatigue hit them. It was almost three-thirty in the morning. They walked back to the bedroom. Todd kissed her once, climbed into bed and put his back to her. He punched the pillow down and appeared to fall asleep. Rachel had wanted to talk some more, and this abrupt ending to the night irritated her. It was like lights out at summer camp. She stood in the middle of the floor for a few indecisive seconds and then slid between the sheets gingerly. Todd didn't stir. Could he possibly be asleep already? She felt uneasy. Wind continued to flood the streets. A car without a muffler punched a diminishing series of holes in the silence. Todd's bed was too soft. She didn't belong here. She didn't even have a toothbrush or a change of clothes. She decided to get up and get dressed. She could be home before dawn if she moved fast enough and the deserted streets would be pleasant in the half-light. She needed to sleep in her own bed. She needed to have breakfast with Stacey and hear the sane, measured things Stacey would say to her. She was pleased with this resolve and she rolled over on her side for a few seconds before leaving.

Todd was gone when Rachel woke up. The room was full of harsh morning light and the clatter of traffic from Fountain Avenue. The room still smelled of last night's sex, an aroma that Rachel classed with half finished drinks and full ashtrays. It was ten thirty in the morning. She had slept badly, dreaming that she was back in high school. In the dream, it was almost summer and she realized in horror that she had been skipping science class all year. Oddly enough, no one had seemed to notice, but now she was going to have to take the final exam. She was totally ignorant of the course work, and when she showed up for the test the teacher would realize that she had been cutting class for months. Someone, was it the Principal?, was saying "This is one mess you won't be able to talk your way out of," as she was escorted to the classroom.

She woke up in a miserable fog of dread, and as the particles of her consciousness assembled, the sense of dread remained. The memory of her dream was already fading, but the memory of last night remained alarmingly vivid. She was certain she had made a disastrous mistake. She pushed the covers back and walked into Todd's bathroom. It was alien, full of male paraphernalia: a bottle of after-shave, a hair-choked razor, condoms, slivers of raw-smelling soap. He hadn't used the condoms last night. Rachel wore an IUD, but he hadn't asked about it. He obviously didn't care. Pregnancy wasn't his problem; his women looked out for themselves. Abortions were legal in California and Rachel could afford one; that was all he needed to know.

She took a long shower but it didn't help. She still felt soiled and sluggish. She faced herself in the bathroom mirror. Why had she come here? How could she have let any of this happen? Most important, was there anything she could do about it now? Well, first of all, she could get out of his apartment. She pulled on her clothes as quickly as she could, and walked downstairs to the street.

There was a ticket on her car. This was street cleaning day, between eight and ten o'clock in the morning. Of course the street hadn't been cleaned. The gutters of Fountain Avenue were littered with paper and soda cans and cigarette butts. She took the ticket off her windshield and flipped it over. It was going to cost her sixty dollars.

She swung over the door into the driver's seat and soon she was headed west on Sunset. She didn't like Todd Richter. That was the simple point at the center of this raw mood. He was weird. He drove like a lunatic. He was always on the brink of a tantrum. He was unstable. And what was all that stuff about watching women come? It had seemed so charming and vulnerable in his big bathtub, but the sincerity of his confession seemed transparent to her now: the Junker cordiality of a Nazi.

She had been dazed with sex last night, sated and stupefied. That was another thing. There was something hideous about the sex itself. It was ghoulish. It was perverted. It was so one sided, so out of her control. He had taken over completely and even joked about it later. He made no secret of his preference for sex objects or his contempt for women. But despite her anger and disgust a little secret worm of pleasure was moving through her, even now in the glaring light of the day. She liked being his sex object. Some part of her liked it; but the fear she had felt was real, and though it had turned into lust last night, the lust had burned out and the fear was left, sour and gritty like ashes, like the cigarette butts she hated so much.

Rachel accelerated off Sunset toward the San Diego freeway. She stared at the city as she drove down the ramp. There was a good view from this elevation and it was breathtakingly ugly. In the few seconds above it before locking herself into the mass of traffic, she realized why. The cheap buildings, low to the ground, dwarfed by the infestation of signs and billboards glittering in the desert sun and swathed by pollution were the accidental by-products of greed. The city had helped her to understand greed: it was the state of mind in which everything came second to money. Everything - aesthetics, taste, style, humor, affection, ordinary human feeling, even health and safety. Los Angeles was a transient town. People came to get rich and then escape; they'd been doing it for eighty years and Los Angeles in the year 1999 was the sum of what they'd left behind. It had the cheap, temporary look you might expect from the worker housing and saloons thrown up by the big mining companies at the turn of the century. It was a boom town at the moment, but Rachel could easily imagine it going bust. It had the look of a potential ghost town already. She could just see the sand blowing through the prefabricated doorways and the weeds sprouting through the cracks in the sun-baked asphalt.

She hit a pot-hole and the car shuddered. All right, she said to herself. You made a mistake. That's okay, people do it all the time. You made a problem for yourself. But you can solve it. The solution was already forming in her mind. Fleeing Todd's office yesterday, her very first thought had been to fire him and get a new agent. That was a good idea. The thought of daily contact with Todd Richter after last night was preposterous. Of course, she had signed a one-year contract with ICM, and she couldn't invoke the ninety-day clause since Todd had actually procured work for her. Todd could fight her legally. She shrugged. Let him: Sam would help her -- it would become a legal matter to be decided in court. And she would never have to see Todd Richter again.

She had to smile; it was a bracing thought. It cheered her as she swung off the Marina Freeway and started up Culver Boulevard toward the ocean and home.