Laugh Lines Page 13

  “Do you still consider yourself the Boy Genius of Hollywood?”

  “Never been a boy.” Pushing forty and running scared.

  “Why have you come here to Toronto, instead of going back to Hollywood?”

  Taxes, pushers, alimony . . . take your pick. “Gregory Earnest convinced me that ‘The Starcrossed’ was a vehicle worthy of my Krishna-given talents.”

  “Have you met the people who’ll be working for you on “The Starcrossed’?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Have you read any of the scripts?”

  I gagged over the first six pages. “Looked over some of the scripts and read the general concept of the show. Looks great.”

  “Do you think Shakespeare and science fiction can be mixed?”

  “Why not? If Will were alive today, he’d be writing science fiction.”

  “What do you think is the best film you’ve ever directed?”

  Without an instant’s hesitation, Westerly replied, “The one I’m working on now. In this case, the entire series, ‘The Starcrossed.’”

  But in his mind, his life flashed before his consciousness like a videotape spun at dizzying, blurring speed. He knew the best film he had done; everyone in the room knew it; the one original piece of work he had been able to do, the first major job he had tackled, as a senior back at UCLA: The Reawakening. The hours, the weeks, the months he had spent. First as a volunteer worker at the mental hospital, then convincing them to let him bring his tiny pocket camera in. Following Virginia, sallow, pathetic, schizophrenic Virginia through the drug therapy, the primal sessions, the EEGs, the engram reversals. Doctors, skinny fidgety nurses who didn’t trust him at first, Virginia’s parents tight and suspicious, angry at her for the dream world they had thrust her into, the psychotechs and their weird machines that mapped the brain and put the mind on a viewscreen. Virginia’s gradual awakening to the real world, her understanding that the parents who said they loved her actually wanted nothing to do with her, her acceptance of adulthood, of maturity, of her own individuality and the fact that she was a lovely, desirable woman. Mitch’s wild hopeless love for her and that heart-stopping instant when she smiled and told him in a voice so low that he could barely hear it that she loved him too. That was his best film; his life and hers recorded in magnetic swirls on long reels of tape. Truth frozen into place so that people could see it and understand and cry and laugh over it.

  He had never done anything so fine again. He became successful. He directed “True to Life” TV shows and made money and fame. He married Virginia while they were both still growing and changing. Unlike the magnetic patterns on video tape, they did not stay frozen in place forever. They split, slowly and sadly at first, then with the wild burning anger of betrayal and hate. By the time he directed his first major production and was nominated for an Oscar, his world had already crashed around him.

  “Do you really think ‘The Starcrossed’ is award-winning material?”

  The question snapped him back to this small stuffy overcrowded room, with the news people playing their part in the eternal charade. So he went back to playing his.

  “‘The Starcrossed’ has the potential of an award-winning series. It won’t be eligible for an Oscar because it’s not a one-time production. But it should be in contention for an Emmy as Best Dramatic Series.”

  Satisfied that they had put his neck in the noose, the news people murmured their thanks and headed on to their next assignments.

  Westerly went straight to the studio, while two of the PR flaks took his luggage to the hotel. He almost asked why it took a pair of them to escort his one flight bag to the hotel, but thought better of it. If he raised a question about it, Westerly knew, they’d wind up assigning a third PR man to supervise the first two.

  Gregory Earnest met him at the studio, looking somber in a dark gray jumpsuit. His face was as deeply hidden by bushy beard and tangled mane as ever, but since Westerly had seen him last—many months earlier, in Nepal—Earnest’s face had subtly changed, improved. His nose seemed slightly different, somehow.

  “I’m glad you’re finally here,” Earnest said, with great seriousness. “Now maybe we can start to bring some order out of this chaos.”

  He showed Westerly around the sets that had been built in the huge studio. The place was empty and quiet, except for a small group of people off to one side who were working on some kind of aerial rigging. Westerly ignored them and studied the sets.

  “This is impossible,” he said at last.

  “What?” Earnest’s eyebrows disappeared into his bushy forelocks. “What do you mean?”

  “These sets.” Westerly stood in the middle of the starship bridge, surrounded by complicated-looking cardboard consoles. “They’re too deep. How’re we going to move cameras in and out around all this junk? It’ll take hours to make a single shot!”

  Earnest sighed with relief. “Oh that. You’ve never directed a three-dee show before, have you?”

  “No, but . . .”

  “Well, one of the things audiences like is a lot of depth in each scene. We don’t put all the props against the walls anymore . . . we scatter them around the floor. Makes a better three-dimensional effect”

  “But the cameras . . . .”

  “They’re small enough to move through the standing props. We measured all the tolerances . . . .”

  “But I thought three-dee cameras were big awkward mothers.”

  Earnest cast a rare smile at him. It was not a pleasant thing to see. “That was two years ago. Time marches on. A lot of transistors have flown under the bridge. You’re not in the Mystic East anymore.”

  Westerly pushed his glasses up against the bridge of his nose. “I see,” he said.

  “Hey! There you are!” A shout came echoing across the big, nearly empty room.

  Earnest and Westerly turned to see a stubby little guy dashing toward them. He wore a Starcrossed tee shirt and a pair of old-fashioned sailor’s bell-bottoms, complete with a thirteen-button trapdoor in front.

  “Oh God,” Earnest whined nasally. “It’s Ron Gabriel.”

  Gabriel skidded to a halt in front of the director. They were almost equal in height, much to Earnest’s surprise.

  “You’re Mitch Westerly,” Gabriel panted.

  “And you’re Ron Gabriel.” He grinned and took Gabriel’s offered hand.

  “I’ve been a fan of yours,” Gabriel said, “ever since ‘The Reawakening.’ Best damned piece of tape I ever saw.”

  Westerly immediately liked the writer. “Well, thanks.”

  “Everything else you’ve made since then has been crap.”

  Westerly liked him even more. “You’re damn right,” he admitted.

  “How the hell they ever gave you an Oscar for that abortion two years ago is beyond me.”

  Westerly shrugged, suddenly carefree because there were no pretenses to maintain. “Money and politics, man. You know the game. Same thing goes for writers’ awards.”

  Gabriel made a face that was halfway between rue and embarrassment. Then he grinned. “Yeah. Guess so.”

  Earnest said, “I’m taking Mr. Westerly on a tour of the studio facilities . . . .”

  “Go pound sand up your ass,” Gabriel said. “I’ve gotta talk about the scripts.” He grabbed at Westerly’s arm. “Come on, I’ll buy you a beer or something.”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Great. Neither do I.” They started off together, leaving Earnest standing there. Behind his beard, his face was redder than a Mounties jacket at sunset.

  * * *

  The studio cafeteria was murky with pot smoke, since smoking of all sorts was forbidden on the sets because of the fire hazard.

  “Now let me get this straight,” Westerly was saying. “The original scripts were written by high school kids as part of a contest?”

  They were sitting at a corner table, near the air conditioning blowers, sipping ginger ales.

  Gabriel nodded slowly. “I
’ve been working since summer with Brenda and Bill Oxnard to make some sense out of them. I’ve also written two original scripts of my own.”

  “And that’s all we’ve got to shoot with?”

  “That’s right”

  “Krishna’s left eyebrow!”

  “Huh?”

  Westerly waved at the encroaching smoke. “Nothing. But it’s a helluva situation.”

  “They didn’t tell you about the scripts?”

  “Earnest said there were some problems with you . . . you’re supposed to be tough to get along with.”

  “I am,” Gabriel admitted, “when I’m being shat on.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  Gabriel hunched forward in his chair. “So what do we do?”

  With a small shrug, Westerly said, “I’ll have to talk to Fad about it . . . it’s the Executive Producer’s job . . . .”

  Gabriel shook his head. “Sheldon split. Went back to L.A. as soon as his girl moved out of his apartment, and turned over the E.P. title to Earnest.”

  “Earnest?” Westerly felt his lip curling.

  “The boll weevil of the north,” said Gabriel.

  “Well,” with a deep sigh, “I guess I’ll have to mention it to Finger. I’m supposed to have a conference with him tonight . . . .”

  “I thought he was back in L.A.”

  “He is. We’re talking by phone. Private link . . . satellite relay, they tell me.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’ll just tell Finger we have to get better script material.”

  “You can read the scripts, if you want to.”

  “I already saw a couple. I thought they were rejects. I’d like to see yours. At least we’ll have a couple to start with.”

  Gabriel looked pleased, but still uncertain.

  “Is there anything else?” Westerly asked.

  With a grimace, Gabriel said, “Well, I hate to bring it up.”

  “Go on.”

  For an instant, the writer hesitated. Then, like a man who’s decided to step off the high board no matter what, “You’ve got a reputation for being an acid freak. Did they bring you in here just for the name or are you gonna stay straight and do the kind of work you’re capable of doing?”

  So there it is, right out in the open. Westerly almost felt relieved. “Both,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “Finger and Earnest called me back from the Roof of the World because I have a big name with the public and I need money so bad that I’m willing to work cheap. They know I’ve blown my head off; I doubt that they care.”

  Gabriel gritted his teeth but said nothing.

  “But I care,” Westerly went on. “I finally got off the stuff in Nepal and I want to stay off it. I want to do a good job on this series. I want to get back to work again.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit, buddy.”

  “You’re not kidding me? Or yourself?”

  “No kidding.”

  Gabriel broke into a grin. “Okay, buhbie. We’ll show the whole world.”

  By the time Westerly got back to the studio, the quiet little knot of technicians who had been working on the aerial rigging had turned into a studio full of shouting, milling people. One of the men was hanging suspended in the rig, wires disappearing up into the shadows of the high ceiling, his feet dangling a good ten meters off the floor.

  Gregory Earnest seemed to rise up out of the floorboards as Westerly stood near the studio’s main door, watching.

  “That’s Francois Dulaq, our star,” Earnest explained, pointing to the dangling man. “We’re getting him accustomed to the zero-gravity simulator.”

  “Shouldn’t we use a stuntman? It looks kind of dangerous . . . .”

  Earnest shook his head. “We don’t have any stuntmen on the budget. Besides, Dulaq’s a trained athlete . . . strong as an ox.”

  Dulaq hung in midair, shouting at the men below him. To Westerly, there was a faint tinge of terror in the man’s voice. Someone yelled from off in the distance, “Okay, try it!” Dulaq’s body jerked into motion. The rig started moving him across the vast emptiness of the studio’s open central area.

  “Hold it!” the voice yelled; the rig halted so abruptly that Dulaq was almost thrown out of his skin. Westerly could feel his own eyeballs slam against his lids, in psychic communion with the man in the rig.

  “Shouldn’t we test the rig with a dummy first?” he asked Earnest.

  For the second time that day the executive smiled. “What do you think we’ve got up there now?”

  It was agonizing to watch. The technicians spent hours setting up the lights and whisking Dulaq backward and forward through the spacious studio on the aerial rig. They slammed him against walls, amidst frantic yells of “Slow it down!” or “Watch it!” Once the rig seemed to slip and Dulaq went hurtling to the floor, only to be snatched up again and yanked almost out of sight, into the shadows up near the ceiling. From the far corner where the technicians manipulated the controls came the sounds of multilingual swearing. And from the rigging itself came shrieks and groans.

  Finally, the star of the show went gracefully swooping past Westerly, smiling manfully, as a trio of tiny unattended cameras automatically tracked him from the floor, like radar-directed antiaircraft guns getting a bead on an intruding attack plane. The technicians were clustered around the controls and watched their monitor screens. “Beautiful!” somebody shouted.

  Meanwhile, Dulaq had traversed the length of the studio, still smiling, sailing like Superman through thin air and rode headfirst into the upper backwall of the starship bridge set.

  Westerly heard a concussive thunk! The backwall tottered for a moment as Dulaq hung there, suddenly as stiff and wooden as a battering ram. Then the wall tumbled, taking most of the set apart with a series of splintering crashes. Amidst the flying dust and crashing two-by-threes, and all the rending, shrieking noises, Westerly clearly heard the same master technician shout out, “Hold it!”

  They got Dulaq down from the rig, nearly dropping him from ten meters up in the process. He was still smiling and apparently conscious, although to Westerly his eyes definitely looked glassy. The technicians bundled him off to the infirmary, which fortunately was in the same building as the studio. By the time Westerly got there, a smiling medic was telling the assembled technicians:

  “He’s all right . . . didn’t even get a splinter. I took an x-ray of his head and it showed nothing.”

  The technicians smiled and joked and went back to their work. As they dispersed, Westerly introduced himself to the medic and asked permission to see the star of the show.

  The medic graciously ushered him into the infirmary’s tiny emergency room. Dulaq was sitting up on the only cot, still smiling, with an icepack perched on his head.

  “Hi,” Westerly said. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Okay.”

  “That was one terrific shot you took out there.”

  “I got worst,” Dulaq mumbled. “Onst, against de Redwings, I went right t’rough da glass.”

  They talked together for about a half hour, as Westerly’s heart sank lower and lower. This is the star of the show? he kept asking himself.

  “Do you think you’ll be all right to start working on Monday?” he asked, feeling his head give a body-language no, despite his conscious efforts to keep it from shaking.

  “Sure. I could go back now, if ya wanna.”

  “No! No . . . that’s all right. You rest.”

  Westerly got up to leave, but Dulaq grasped his wrist in a grip of steel.

  “Hey, one t’ing you do for me, huh?”

  “Uh, sure. What?”

  “Don’t gimme no long speeches t’remember, huh? I don’ want no long speeches. Too tough.”

  Krishna, Shiva and Vishnu, Westerly prayed. Why have they done this to me?

  “Sure,” he told Dulaq. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Okay. No long speeches.”

  “Right.” />
  Dulaq let go of him and Westerly ducked through the accordion-fold door of the little sickroom, rubbing his wrist.

  The doctor was at his cubbyhole desk.

  “You examined him thoroughly?” Westerly asked.

  “Yep,” said the doctor.

  “Did he talk that way before he hit his head?”

  The doctor glowered at him.

  Westerly had dinner with Rita Yearling, who seemed incredibly beautiful, utterly sure of herself and dismally cold toward him.

  His hotel suite was sumptuously furnished, including a strange electronic console of shining metal and multicolored buttons that squatted bulkily in the far corner of the sitting room. Gregory Earnest had explained that the device was a three-dee phone station, which would link him instantaneously via satellite with Finger’s private office in Los Angeles.

  Somehow the phone loomed in his mind like an alien presence as he and Rita ate their dinner at the other end of the sitting room, near the windows.

  Rita was polite, respectful and distant. The vibes coming from her were strictly professional, totally impersonal.

  “Do you know Bernie Finger very well?”

  “Of course.”

  “He discovered you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Through an agent?”

  “Oh, on his own.”

  “Where was that?”

  “It doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  “No, I guess not. Um . . . what do you think of Ron Gabriel?”

  “His brain’s in his crotch.”

  “And your costar, Dulaq?”

  “No brains at all.”

  And so it went, right through dinner, all the way through to the ice cream dessert that neither of them would do more than taste.

  A part of Westerly’s mind was almost amused. Here he was having dinner with the loveliest woman he had seen in years and he was bored silly by her. While she referred to other people as brainless, she came across as heartless, which in many ways was infinitely worse.

  Finally he pushed aside his coffee cup and glanced at his wrist. “Finger will be calling in a few minutes, if he’s on time.”