“Who gives a flying fuck? We have a movie to get together before this jerk leaves office. It’s only funny because he’s so weird.”
“So what about Merrill? What’s he thinking?”
“He’s just the errand boy. It’s his father I worry about. I don’t want him to lose interest in this picture and fire our asses.”
“But we’re the only writers on the lot who have new ideas.”
“Ideas aren’t enough, Charlie. Getting a picture made is way more than that.”
“We’re only writers, so we can’t do much about this mess, can we, Bob?”
Bob looks at Charlie meaningfully and his irritation turns into something else. “You know, Charlie”—Bob exhales smoke expansively and tilts back in his chair—“I might have an idea about that. I might even get a producer’s credit.”
Greenway jerks forward, eyes alight. “Let’s clean up this script before the end of the day. I have plans for us this evening, at SC.”
* * *
At dusk Charlie piles into Greenway’s Buick and they take Santa Monica Boulevard to the 101, shooting downtown. The traffic flows easily, not like the jams that became famous in the 1980s. The city works these days, for the last time.
Charlie lets the air from the cooling vents stream through his long hair. At times he can scarcely believe he’s here, climbing a pyramid Charlie One never dreamed about. Endless fun—the heedless hubba-hubba wongbonga ding-dong rapturama that will ring through decades.
Charlie has now spent a long year of edgy work in LA, his ties to Chicago slipping away. Los Angeles City Hall and the skyscrapers downtown hardly impress Charlie, compared with the soaring pinnacles of Chicago, the city that gave the world the modern skyscraper. But there is news back home. James has signed up for the marines and is in Richmond, Virginia, for his first posting. Charlie went to Virginia Beach once with Elspeth in 1994, a disastrous vacation Elspeth spent deriding the US military as a fountain of war crimes. They had to beat a quick retreat from a biker bar near the beach where she’d had three martinis and let her mouth run off, sloppy drunk. Some Vietnam vets had threatened to cut Elspeth’s tongue out and eat it raw. She was monumentally pissed off that he hadn’t risen to her defense, but by then he had grown tired of fighting ideological battles with big, smelly men in leather jackets. Political correctness had become very old for him by the 1990s.
Turning onto the 110 Harbor Freeway gets them to the University of Southern California campus in excellent time. Walking through the campus and seeing the smooth white student faces reminds Charlie of the university education he has given up in this second life. He has few regrets. Education is what you have when you’ve forgotten all the damn details.
He strides through USC but thinks of Illinois. Trudy is studying at the University of Illinois for her bachelor’s degree in social science. If Charlie wasn’t going to become an attorney, she announced on their last date, then it was up to her to follow in her father’s footsteps. She spoke as if law were a high calling. Charlie has complete faith in her future as a lawyer. Elspeth just disappeared. Off in graduate school, he is certain, pursuing her Marxist utopia of command. Why was his first life filled with controlling women?
They stop in front of the USC film school. Bob waves a hand at the fake English architecture. He has always derided film school graduates from USC to Charlie, but now they need one of them. “This Lewis guy we gotta meet, he’s done some good small stuff, works out of the film school here. Young flash in the pan. But we can break the studio logjam with him, maybe.”
Bob checks his watch, looking out of place with his suit, short hair, narrow black tie. Charlie notices that his own long hair and now full beard are still a bit beyond the groove at USC, where the men’s hair is just mid-Beatles longish, their beards tentative. Charlie is now comfortable pretending to be about thirty.
After a few minutes of watching the girls go by, a somewhat older guy looking like a student walks up to them wearing jeans with a blue oxford dress shirt and brown belt, colors mismatched. He’s muscular but not tall.
“Mr. Greenway?” he asks uncertainly, eyes shifting.
“You must be Lewis Cantor.” The two shake hands. “This is my writing partner, Charlie Moment.”
Charlie studies Lewis as they shake—awkward but obviously genuine.
“Know a decent restaurant around here, Lewis, where we could talk?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Greenway—”
A cracked smile. “Bob.”
“Bob, but things haven’t been too nice down here for several years.”
“I heard. The riots.”
“USC has become kind of an oasis.”
“Okay. Let’s say we meet back at Chasen’s in forty minutes.”
“Could I ask you to drive me? My VW minivan is up on blocks these days.”
The maître d’ at Chasen’s welcomes Bob and his sawbuck with a well-oiled, papery smile. They have no problem getting a table on a Tuesday night. Charlie has come to understand that this second Hollywood sojourn is a sweet reprise for Greenway. The last time Greenway slinked back to Chicago, and his friend Nono Montini, under a humiliating cloud. Charlie suspects that there was some kind of breakdown.
Lewis seems a bit nervous in Chasen’s, but he plunges into his pitch without hesitation. “As I see the script, we need a quick feeling, like a Billy Wilder black-and-white, natural—but funny.”
“But not as forced as Kiss Me, Stupid,” Charlie interjects. He has been doing his homework. To Charlie One it was more like history, so he just needed reminding. Amazing, how the years of details come back, once you’ve lived them already. Just a hint and you’re back there again.
“You saw that picture, Charlie?” Bob smiles expansively, beaming, obviously feeling good, as if he has the power of a real producer.
But Lewis shakes his head. “No, no. I’m thinking of The Fortune Cookie.”
Charlie brightens. “What about getting Walter Matthau?”
“Washed up!” pronounces Bob with scorn.
Charlie marvels at the lack of insight that Bob parades like a badge so frequently. No wonder he’s a marginal writer, not much of a novelist, mostly a screenplay mechanics guy, Charlie thinks.
But Lewis is not be deterred. “No, I think that the studio is right about getting a Nixonian unknown. That way we can play your script right down the middle, between satire and uplift.”
Charlie blinks. When did Hollywood start this playing down the middle, having it both ways? He thought it was the 1980s. The films of the 1970s, like Chinatown, seemed so serious. Ironic, hip, but serious without being merely solemn. Even Shampoo, which would have had a joke every twenty seconds in 1988, hardly had any laughs when it came out in 1975. Will come out, Charlie corrects himself.
“Switching an Everyman for the president of the United States—the idea has an unavoidable charm.” Lewis is obviously ready to suck up to get this directing job, so fresh and bright out of film school.
Greenway smiles broadly at Lewis, holding an unlit Camel while waving his drink. “We have plenty more, just like that one. Right, Charlie?”
Charlie contents himself with nodding quietly, then fixes Lewis with a cool stare. This guy could be very useful, even if he’s short on clout. Lewis gets the concept, sees the possibilities.
Lewis’s eyes shift uneasily from Greenway to Moment. Yes—Lewis is starting to realize where the screenplay’s vision came from. Yes.
12 Lewis and Charlie are auditioning actors for the Nixon role. Tough work—but it’s the big time, Charlie keeps reminding himself. Gotta pay your dues. Besides, he doesn’t know how much longer this particular life is going to last, so he isn’t holding anything back.
Action Pictures has come through with production money and even some help from the casting department. From the expanded list of hopefuls Charlie dimly recognized a few and managed to get them into the first batch of auditions. Bob and Lewis have spent some time fending off attempts from vice president
s trying to insert their girlfriends and drug buddies. Lewis and Charlie are learning the slippery art of seeming to do as the VPs say, yet keeping the movie headed along their own trajectory.
Bob gave up earlier in the day, saying he had to meet with Merrill. Charlie was happy to send him off to beg for more production funds from the East Coast weasel. He would rather learn about the audition process.
The actor before Lewis and Charlie is thirty-six, a nervous, flinty Nixon look-alike with the heavy jowls and receding hairline required for the part, as far as Charlie is concerned. Charlie checks the name from the portfolio Xerox: Frank Stanton. Day job: Chevrolet salesman in Encino. Good, thinks Charlie, this is a man who can lie with ease. There is also something genuinely grasping about him, a shifty look in his eyes. Hard to fake.
“You’ve done some theater,” says Lewis neutrally.
Stanton replies in a solid Nixon imitation, showing that he’s a method-actor type. “Death of a Salesman, Picnic, you know. The usual stuff. I have the reviews in my portfolio.”
“Your movie experience—”
“Just a few one-line roles.”
“—minor, at best.”
Charlie marvels at the low-grade sadism that Lewis uses to grill Stanton. He has seen friendlier arrests of vagrants on Hollywood Boulevard.
“Pick up the script and open to page forty-three. Charlie, you lead off with the Tellinger line.”
“Now, Mr. President,” says Charlie from the script, “we aren’t supposed to nuke Ann Arbor just because Michigan has beaten the Trojans.”
Stanton shakes his wattles and speaks in a resonant, almost rich, voice. “Damn it, Tellinger! Can’t I have a little fun as president?”
“Sell me the line, Frank,” says Lewis. “Sell it.”
Stanton looks up at Lewis nervously, then focuses harder on the script, as if the Courier font is going to reveal more if it is scrutinized with greater care. Charlie notices sweat forming on the man’s brow. Perfect Nixon sweat, Charlie thinks. This guy is the best creep all day. Charlie decides to cast him for the part, whatever Lewis thinks.
“Damn it, Tellinger! Can’t I have a little fun as president?” The last syllable hangs in the air for three long beats while Charlie looks at Lewis, his big smile hidden from Stanton by his long hair and beard. Lewis looks back at Charlie, poker faced.
“Thank you, Mr. Stanton. Our secretary has your phone number.”
Stanton gets up slowly. “I would like to thank you for this opportunity, Mr. Cantor.” Still in character, he nods awkwardly at Charlie and leaves the office.
“I love this guy!” says Charlie.
“No, we can’t use him.”
“But he’s so real! He has that Nixon realpolitik feeling.”
“Realpolitik?”
Charlie feels exposed, showing too much education. “I mean, you know, that feeling that the guy would do anything to keep the world under his control.”
“You’re right, Charlie, he fits the part. But we still can’t use him.”
“Because . . .” Charlie scowls.
“Because the audience won’t like him. They aren’t going to spend ninety-two minutes with a guy they don’t like. He has to be creepy and appealing at the same time.”
“Like Matthau.”
“Exactly, except Matthau’s too expensive and he’s washed up.”
Charlie wonders how an actor could be expensive, be washed up, have an Academy Award on his mantel . . . and be a future host of the Academy Awards.
“You mean we need a convincing creep that Middle America can love,” queries Charlie, “just like Nixon?” The very idea tastes foul to him.
“Exactly. And I think I know where to find one.”
* * *
Among the many Hollywood Hills parties, the most useful to Charlie have more producers than directors, more directors than actors, and more actors than writers. So he goes to those when invited. He avoids other screenwriters, who always want inside dope on what producer is looking for a hot new script.
Mostly, Charlie just watches. The parties are short on listeners, so he supplies a patient ear and learns more than with his mouth open. He learns to make producers see specific scenes when pitching a project. Assembling a film is really about shooting scenes, sometimes months or even years apart, then squeezing them against one another in the final film. Each must frame the other, the transitions in mood accomplished in collaboration between the moment of shooting and the moment of truth in the cutting room.
Lewis got him invited to this particular party and now is working the crowd around the swimming pool. Charlie stands at the edge, silent.
“I think of myself as a writer, really,” a director says to him, well into a second bottle of Barolo, a great Tuscan red. He seems unaware that this is a cliché.
“So do I,” Charlie says, but the director doesn’t pick up on his irony and turns away.
Charlie glances sideways and sees another playing the listener role, nodding at the right places, saying little. The man wears a well-pressed double-breasted suit that makes him look like a shoebox standing on end. To Charlie, there is something midwestern about the suit and face. He works his way around to the guy, introduces himself, and gets back, “I’m Rog Ebert. My claim to infamy is I cowrote the screenplay for the Russ Meyer film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.”
“Somehow missed it,” Charlie says, intrigued to be talking to a man who had so much power over the movie business once he started to review films on television. At least in his last life.
Ebert grins. “Our next title is Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens, just to show I can go lower.”
Charlie laughs. He recalls this dog of a film will take a decade to do, it stinks so much. He likes the utterly non-Hollywood glee in the confessions. “Something tells me you’re not here to build a career.”
“Nope, I’m actually a film reviewer for a Chicago paper.” He gives a shrug, as though this is nothing. Already a tad too overweight, he probably gets ignored by movie types, Charlie figures. But his eyes are quick and shrewd.
“Ah!” Charlie does the I’m-from-Illinois-too number, trading horror stories about Midwesterners in Hollywood, and works Ebert around to how he reviews movies. Apparently, Ebert is too new on the scene to have producers buzzing around him, hoping for a favorable review. “So . . . what’s your reviewing method?”
Ebert says, “Relative, not absolute. I estimate a movie’s prospective audience, with at least some consideration of its value as a whole.” He stops, seems to realize the phrase is wrong, and adds, “But I want to get away from the term-paper pomposity that I learned at college.”
“All that sapheaded objectivity?”
“Right, take The Sound of Music. I said it should’ve been called The Sound of Money.”
Charlie laughs and Ebert says, deadpan, “It does that crucial thing, right? To play on an abiding human desire to be honestly manipulated and charmingly ripped off.”
“You’re funny.”
“My deep fanzine insight,” he says, rolling his eyes. “I come out of science fiction fandom.”
“Which means?”
Again deadpan, Ebert says, “It’s hard to explain puns to kleptomaniacs because they always take things literally.”
Charlie laughs, liking the nonlinear style. “Okay, I won’t try to compete. What are your fave films lately?”
Without pause Ebert rattles off, “1967: Bonnie and Clyde. 1968: The Battle of Algiers. 1969: Z. Now: Five Easy Pieces—”
“Not 2001?”
“I’m an SF fan, sure, but—hey, Action Pictures could do some SF films! It’s a ripe time for that. 2001 cleared the way.”
“Um, maybe. I’ve read a lot of it, could try something. And I wish I could get the Chicago papers here.”
“I’ll send you my reviews. People keep asking for them; there must be some kind of national market. But say—do try making SF movies! Drop me a note about the screening of your next movie,” Ebert
says, handing him a business card. “Expand minds!”
Charlie realizes Ebert knows much more than he lets on about how things work out here. And that Illinois guys stick together.
* * *
The strip club’s better days are long gone. Charlie wonders why Lewis has brought him here. Not only is the wallpaper peeling, the stained drinks menu is barely legible in the grimy light. Charlie can only make out that the prices are about five times the going rate at the regular bars and music clubs on Sunset Boulevard. He knows that the place will soon close as the music industry takes over every available nook in this part of town. The band is long haired and semi-hip. A scritch-scratch guitar comes in on the backbeat, along with paired lines of funky melodics sidling in, carrying the bass line, popping up bright in the main driving song. Bump-de-bump.
In the meantime, Charlie checks out the action on the small stage. Unfortunately for his young hormones, the stripper seems like an antique with stringy blond hair, sagging breasts and stomach. Probably a thirtysomething junkie, old beyond her years, he thinks.
He turns to watch Lewis scan the room. Lewis has no interest in the decaying flesh onstage. Charlie turns back to the stage. The older blonde is gone.
* * *
A shapeless middle-aged man has taken the stage. He has a receding hairline and jowls, his smile too eager.
“How did you like that, ladies and gentlemen? The last time I saw action like that, she was my wet nurse.” The drummer raps out a snare-drum roll and a rim shot. A bald guy barks out one sharp laugh.
“Anyway, folks. Did you drive here today? Did you check out the traffic? I saw a guy selling used cars parked on the 5 freeway, with their drivers still in them!” A few beats on a bass drum. A few more laughs. Not many.
Charlie leans over to Lewis. “Does he get any better than this?”
“Not really. But look at him. You want him to do better, to be funnier than he actually is. He sucks in your sympathy.”
Charlie inspects the comic with greater interest. There is something about the guy’s body language that is both greasy and sympathetic. Have him play stiff for the real president and then loose for the impersonator. Yeah, it could work.
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