by Nick Cole
The ringing that penetrated the Executive VP’s dream started just as he finished up his doctoral level defense for putting Navajo children on the moon. His professors, their wizened and bespectacled faces rapt with joy and admiration, looked questioningly to the back of the cavernous schoolroom. The ringing phone, a black antique from the 1940s, rattled on a small end table. The rings were irregularly spaced. When the Executive VP thought the last ring had rung, he began again on his final point. But again the phone would ring, interrupting the reverence of the hall.
The Fox! screamed his dreaming mind. He launched forward, casting a sleep-logged arm lamely in the direction of the phone. He failed to take his feet down off the desk before performing this maneuver, and instead ended up folding himself into a V. His hand missed the phone and slammed painfully into the desk, causing the receiver to jump off the cradle and land on the blotter. The tiny voice of the Fox could be heard on the other end.
“Fox, is that you?”
“Yeah. What was all that?”
“Nothing,” answered the Executive VP, still folded into an uncomfortable V.
“Sounded like you fell.”
“I didn’t fall.”
“Sounded like it.”
“Well, I didn’t.” Pause. “And…”
“And, I thought you might have hurt yourself, that’s all,” mumbled the Fox.
“No. When I said ‘And,’ it was a way of saying, ‘And why did you have me wait all night.’ What time is it?” He looked at his Patek Philippe and sighed heavily. “It’s one thirty in the morning. Do you realize that, Fox?”
“We stopped at a Denny’s. I tried to call you while my Moon Over My Hammy was being cooked. You didn’t answer. That was like five hours and twenty-seven minutes ago.”
The Executive VP didn’t know what was more incredible, the Fox’s ability to pretend he was the human equivalent of the Greenwich atomic clock, or the fact that somewhere in the world was a dish titled Moon Over My Hammy.
“Right, Fox. And what was so important you just had to talk to me tonight?”
“I only have a few minutes. We’re at a gas station right now, heading toward Sacramento.”
“Why is the production moving in the middle of the night? We have to pay overtime. Technically they’re still on the clock until we release them at a hotel.”
“I think that’s the least of your problems. Forget the crew. Half of them are film school students anyway. When the unions get wind of this you won’t even have to pay them. Probably. Unless their parents sue, I think. I’m not sure.”
“Who will sue?” asked the Executive VP with fresh new urgency. Lawsuits had a way of waking him up.
“Everyone, probably. The producer, that Jay Jameson guy, he replaced all the no-shows with kids.”
“Really?”
“Yep. And they destroyed a light set yesterday,” tattled the Fox.
“They did?”
“They did. Forget about it though. Listen up. We spent two days shooting an exterior sequence for page nineteen.”
The Executive VP quickly found the shooting script and flipped to page nineteen. He studied the page for a long second and then exclaimed, “It just says ‘ALAN Exits bar and walks to car. Bar sign flickers out. Fade out.’ You spent two days shooting that?”
“We did,” cried The Fox, almost proudly. “And we did a lot more than just provide you with footage. The studio is now the proud owner of a run-down diner that we completely refurbished for the daytime exterior shot. You also now own one entire crop of pumpkins from next year’s harvest, courtesy of the farmer who sold them to us for use of the field adjacent to the location.”
“We don’t have to pay to shoot onto a location, as long as we don’t physically enter it,” said the Executive VP.
“Yeah, but what if we throw up on it?”
“Huh?”
“Yep. You see, the next morning, after the bar scene, when Alan, or Kurt if you prefer, wakes up in his car, he gets out and looks around. In one improvised take, Kurt throws up all over the barbed wire fence and into the property of the farmer, who just happened to be watching us from his tractor. We’d had to pay him to shut it off so the noise wouldn’t disturb the sound recording. Anyway, apparently the vomit entered his property line and ruined, according to him, next year’s crop.”
“Ah. I see,” said the Executive VP, his satisfaction at having understood evident in his sudden melancholy tone.
“Listen. I’m not a money guy or what you might call an accountant…”
Who in the world would use the term “money guy,” thought the Executive VP.
“… but the director is making choices that are costing this production a lot of money. Even a working stiff like me knows that if I’m making overtime so is everybody else. And why are we driving through the middle of the night after shooting all day? Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because Jay Jameson, the big producer, found a bar near Sacramento where we can shoot the interior for page eighteen. We have to be there by morning so we can shoot all day while it’s still quiet, before the night crowd gets there.” The Fox let that hang. “You know what that means?” Without waiting for an answer the Fox said two words. Words that would cause any studio executive worth his Patek Philippe to hang his head in the most abject posture of disappointment. “Golden Time.”
“Absolutely not!” It was a knee-jerk reaction on the part of the Executive VP, as was the matching shudder of righteous indignation. Instinct prevailed. True to the Jungle Code of all studio executives, he pounced and denied. Never, not even if the entire studio was on fire and it was now or never to get story-crucial scenes from specific continuity important sets before they were forever burnt to the ground, would he authorize Golden Time. Never ever!
Golden Time. Every day, every member, from actor to grip to catering person, is paid a rate for his or her time on the set. That rate pays you for eight hours, not including your lunch. After eight hours, the rate increases to time and a half. After twelve it hits double overtime. At sixteen hours of work, the mythic “Golden Time” is reached, and every crewmember is paid their entire daily rate every hour. After that, the production shuts down and heads roll.
“I know!” cried the Fox. “I’ve maybe been on Golden Time three or four times in my twenty years in this business. Even then, people, big people, lost their jobs. I don’t see how you can stop this one. We’re just a few hours away from our next location and we either start shooting or check the entire crew into a hotel and let them rest for twelve hours. And I’ll bet you the reservations haven’t even been made yet, so there won’t be any hotel to check into until noon or later. The crew will have to be paid until then, so we might as well shoot, but once we start shooting we can’t stop, can we?”
“No, I guess we can’t,” mumbled the Executive VP.
“You wanna know what I think?” taunted the Fox.
Silence.
A swallow.
Lips licked.
“What do you think, Fox?”
“I think he’s trying to ruin the picture.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
What’s It All About?
Langley Banks wanders among the trucks, grateful for the stretch his well-muscled body has been screaming for throughout the long night trek. Grips hefted cables and kits past him while the camera crew watches the students unloading the heavy crates. They smoke cigarettes and drink steaming cups of coffee, taunting their charges, who in turn are still new enough to love what they are doing. They are doing what they have always dreamed of doing. Making movies. They are grateful for the backbreaking work. They are having the time of their lives.
Langley walks toward the main road and greets the craft service guy, who is happily grinning. He has just struck a deal with the restaurant across the way to provide the production�
�s catering and meals for the rest of the shoot at this location. The craft service guy has worried about this since they moved locations and drove through the night. In his t-shirt and cowboy hat, with a huge grin on his face, he jerks his thumb over his shoulder and indicates the diner. “Get somethin’ to eat and tell ’em yer with the crew.”
Langley decides this would be a good idea.
Soon, without the standard two-motorcycle patrol officer crossing guards that are so common in LA film shoots, he crosses the road all by himself. In a moment, he is striding through the gritty parking lot of the diner. The suffocating warmth of the long night of bus travel has faded and now the morning air is chilly.
He enters the diner. He is the first movie person here. He heads directly to the counter, a simulated wood grain affair, complete with a pageant of flavored syrups and sugar in a large bowl shaped like a pig. The air is heavy and sweet with the smell of butter and pancakes. Smoky bacon hovers above the rest of the aromas.
He sits down and hopes no one will recognize him. He isn’t dressed like he usually is for the photo spreads and publicity shots that are a constant in his life. He wears a ball cap, a corduroy jacket, and khaki slacks with a plain gray t-shirt. For a moment he thinks about taking off his hat. But the rest of the diner’s occupants—the cook with his fry hat, the waitress and her paper cap, even the truckers and an old man—are all wearing hats.
The waitress, a platinum blonde on the early side of her forties, greets him. He wonders if he can hear a drawl in her voice or if it’s just the local accent. She plants a menu in front of him and pours him a cup of black coffee he did not ask for. She sees the quizzical look on his face and says, “Ya don’t want coffee?” Her voice is sweet like blueberry syrup. Just as thick.
“No. Fine. Coffee’s fine. I love it.” She turns back to the kitchen and rattles off a medley of orders. Words like “Adam and Eve on a raft” and “wreck ’em,” along with incantations of “short stack” and “lookin’ at ya,” fly off into the back kitchen. Her voice is an easy cadence. She is an easy rhythm. For a moment Langley considers what it would be like to know her. To know her every morning of his life. To even love her. He wonders as he stirs his coffee, adding sugar until it’s perfect. He brings the cup to his lips, takes a sip, and sighs a little. “Ah,” then to no one in particular, “Honey, that’s a great cup of coffee.”
“Huh?” says the waitress.
“Nothing. I just say that…” He’s caught. It’s his first Hollywood story. Normally he tells the story whenever anyone asks. It’s a story about his first agent. An old guy from the old school who was half blind and all out of touch. The first audition the old guy got him was for a coffee company commercial. A husband drinks a cup of coffee at the morning breakfast table, then thanks his wife with the line Langley has just spoken. Langley shows up at the audition and every other actor there is in his late thirties: successful, young dad-looking, sporting strong-jawed, freshly-shaven mugs. Langley was eighteen at the time and didn’t even need to shave twice a week. The casting director was not pleased. Without a chance to even read for the part, Langley was tossed from the audition.
His agent soon closed up shop, retiring at the age of eighty-seven.
Langley helped clean out the ancient talent rep’s tiny office. The agent’s son, a lawyer, picked the old guy up because his driver’s license had been revoked due to extreme age. They drove away leaving Langley standing in the alley with a box of books the agent no longer wanted. That was how Langley Banks, soon-to-be teen heartthrob and burgeoning movie star, had gotten, and lost, an agent within his first week of being in Hollywood when he was just a brand new nobody with everything to prove.
Now, under questioning from the waitress, he lets the story go. It has no place here in this diner. Instead he just says, “I always say that. It’s a thing.”
“Oh, I get it. I do the same thing when I drive through a tunnel. I always honk the horn twice and lift my feet up.” Her laugh is a cute chirp followed by the most delicate of snorts. “’Cept we don’t have no tunnels around here.” She seems sad for a moment, remembering bygone tunnels and people from other places.
She asks him what he wants, and he orders.
He is soon eating. He ordered pancakes, bacon, two eggs, and two sausages, along with a side of hash browns. The entire meal cost two dollars and ninety-nine cents. It was called “The Farmhand.”
While he was eating, another waitress arrived. She was very pregnant, young, towing a boy her age with a shaved head, wearing a jean jacket, thick jeans, and heavy work boots stained with mud. She took off her red sweater, revealing a gold and white waitress uniform that made her look even more pregnant. The boy muttered something in her ear and made to leave.
“Now Charlie, don’t you leave without eatin’!” The order came from the cook in the back, a thick-necked balding man with a wide smile where a gold tooth shined forth for all to see.
“No sir. I got to git to work early this mornin’. Sorry,” apologized Charlie.
The young waitress, whom Langley assumed was the kid’s wife, clutched his hand and whispered in his ear. It was a hot breathy whisper, too loud from the rock and roll music they’d probably been listening to in the car on the way to work through the early morning valley fog.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “We got the money. Stay.”
He shook his head and then looked at her. Langley knew the look. It was the look that said they didn’t actually have the money. Not with a baby coming soon. The boy turned to leave, pushing open the inner door of the diner. In the dessert case mirror Langley watched everything. He watched her heart break and the blame settle over her. Like somehow everything was all her fault. He watched her ache.
The bell rang at the pick-up window. “Charlie,” thundered the cook, like some casting director’s dream of a hard-as-nails drill sergeant. “I told you to stay, son. Fellow came in here a few minutes ago, ordered, then up and left. I saved his plate. Knew you was comin’.”
He placed a large plate of freshly cooked, steaming food in the window.
The pregnant girl’s hopeful smile ignited like a rocket breaking away from the gravity of this earth and all the mortal problems that weigh us down. Breaking away from sacrifice and the constant “never enough” of their current situation. Heading out into the universe of a single moment more with the one you love. That stuff that we sometimes forget love is all about.
Pam, Langley’s blond waitress, stared eagerly at Charlie, nodding her head. “Yep,” she said. “He sat right there and then he jumped up and lit out after he got a call on his cell phone. Paid for it and everything,” she lied brightly.
Charlie sat down, and the plate was in front of him. If he had not been hungry and he was merely acting to show them how hungry he was, then he was a better actor than Langley would ever be. The pregnant girl with the red sweater and hair to match flitted and fussed over him, ecstatic as she began her shift.
Langley paid the check that had been placed in front of him seconds after the meal was finished. Pam refilled his coffee once more and told him to stay warm out there. He said he would try. His promise seemed to make her genuinely happy.
Outside the air was clean and fresh. As he was getting ready to cross the road by himself once more, his cell phone rang. It was one of his many agents, for he was no longer managed by one feeble old man, dealing and trading in the tactics and ethics of a bygone Hollywood. Now he was managed by a hyper-efficient, state-of-the-art, finger-on-the-pulse-of-society career management team. His career as a youthful star was overseen by no less than five agents with a support staff of twenty. All of whom had been against him doing this movie.
It was one of the junior agents. It was a “hush-hush” and “by the way” kind of call. “Nothing official, everything’s great, I just wanted to warn you” call. Daily Variety had run an article expounding on the studio’s high hopes f
or Kurt’s buzz-worthy effort. Anonymous sources had used phrases such as “picture-stealer” and “breakout performance.” Langley’s agents, all five, had been engaged in a series of heavy conference call exchanges, attempting to deal with the damage Kurt’s performance was doing to their rising star. The meetings had started as merely something to consider and evaluate in relation to their asset (Langley), but had soon evolved into full-scale battle plans to deal with what was now being called “The Kurt Threat.” Inter-agency warfare was just days, if not hours, away.
Each of Langley’s agents had voted on what to do and all had voted similarly to the desires of Langley’s head agent, who then laid out a bold course of action. Every same-suited agent, every like-minded lackey knew the future of the agency, if not all Hollywood, depended on this mission being fulfilled. Nothing was more important than the protection of their sacred cow. Langley.
A phone call would be placed.
A lieutenant was selected to place a confidential call and try to relate to Langley, as a wiser, older brother might, the delicacies of the situation and the possible complications it presented. He would also suggest that Langley consider doing a better job than Kurt. This approach seemed least likely to “rock the boat,” and since it was the head agent’s plan, it had received a unanimous and overwhelming heartiness of support.
After the bombshell had been delivered by the junior agent, Langley, still not comprehending the agents’ collective position, sat in silence as yet another big rig roared down the county road outside the diner. His agent on the other end of the line, who had no perspective other than his Hollywoodland view of power and struggle, waited for Langley to embark on a rage worthy of Lear. Or weep with the abandon of Oedipus.
