Rewrite

by Gregory Benford

  “What’s his name?”

  “Shecky Brown.”

  “We’ll have to change it.”

  “I don’t think it’s his real name anyway.”

  13 Shecky is popping sweat, flustered by the makeup girl adjusting the thickness of powder on his cheekbone. He sits behind an enormous desk in a mock-up of the White House’s Oval Office, or at least half of it. The young redhead leans over him, her full chest provocatively close to Shecky’s face.

  “Listen, babe, can’t you just put your lips together and blow it off me?”

  The crew laughs, not for the first time. The makeup girl’s face shows only a trace of a frown. She’s used to actors, especially the ones who think they’re funny.

  “Okay, Shecky,” calls Lewis from his high director’s chair, “settle down. This isn’t burlesque anymore.”

  “Sure, Lewis. I gotcha.” The man has an eagerness to please that sucks Charlie in. Charlie wonders if this is part of the appeal of Richard Nixon himself, a man that Charlie always instinctively loathed, never more so than when he was the Grand Old Man of the GOP, during the Ford and Bush presidencies.

  “Now, Shecky, this is where the Speaker of the House is going to call you about the meeting of the Appropriations Committee. You don’t know what appropriations are, right?”

  “I sure don’t, Lewis.” The man’s sincerity and comic timing cause another ripple of mirth among the crew. Charlie sees that Shecky indeed has no idea what Lewis is talking about. Perfect, he thinks.

  “All right, we don’t have a voice track for you to follow, so I’ll say the lines that we’ll edit in from the Speaker’s side of the conversation.”

  “Sure, Lewis. Whatever.” Shecky is obviously confused.

  “I’ll be your prompt, okay?”

  “Sure, sure.”

  “Clapper!”

  The man with the clapper lunges toward the camera. “Dick, scene forty-seven, take one!” Crack—the clapper comes down, audiotape visibly spooling. Charlie marvels at how audiotape and film were separately synchronized in the glory days of film. It strikes him as bizarrely crude.

  The sound effects man makes a telephone ring as Shecky looks at five phones on his huge desk, eyes bulging. He picks up one, listens while the ringing continues, picks up another, still more ringing. On his third try the ringing stops.

  “Hello, this is the president.” His jowls break out into a fatuous, self-satisfied grin. “The president of these United States of America!”

  Lewis reads from the script, flat, without finesse. “Dick! Speaker Crumhollow here. We have your bill stuck in Appropriations. Is there any way we could make a deal?”

  “My bill, my bill? What does it come to?”

  “Thirty-six million,” reads Lewis.

  “That must have been a lot of steak dinners.”

  “Well, the lobbyists paid for them.”

  “So why do we have to pay for them again now?”

  “Cut!”

  Lewis looks around uneasily. The crew stops filming and relaxes. “Charlie, let’s talk.”

  Lewis stands up on the footrest of his director’s chair, the chair unnaturally pyramidal behind the cameraman, and climbs down using the armrest as a grip. Charlie wonders if Lewis has a bit of Napoléon in him, although he knows that Napoléon’s height issue was a piece of Austrian propaganda. They talk away from the crew, Shecky looking at them anxiously.

  Lewis frowns. “Charlie, do you think that the lobbyist-steak-dinner joke is going to be picked up here?”

  “Some people will get it. The rest will have the sense that Shecky doesn’t know what he’s talking about, even if they are a bit confused about what the Appropriations Committee does.”

  “So then they will sort of share in Shecky’s confusion, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Okay, I think we can do this scene on those two levels.”

  Charlie smiles with as much warmth as he can project through his long hair and beard. “Sure you can.”

  * * *

  Charlie and Bob Greenway are munching on sandwiches in Bob’s air-conditioned office, bottles of Pepsi on the desk.

  Bob talks with his mouth full. “Now’s the time to sell the studio on two more projects. That way if they pass on one, we’ll still have the other. One will be science fiction.”

  “Good plan, Bob. There’s momentum from Kubrick’s 2001 we can ride on. Even after two years.”

  Charlie is surprised that the studio system just plain doesn’t get the technical accuracy and hard-edged grandeur of 2001. Their idea of a near imitation will be Silent Running, a maudlin, sentimental, forgettable pic, which hinges upon nobody’s realizing that a space-borne greenhouse would get less sunlight as it cruised out to Saturn. Charlie could field that script idea himself, but even thinking about doing it makes him shudder. Ugh.

  Certainly, Hollywood isn’t ready for the dislocations of Philip K. Dick that will gain momentum in the 1980s and ’90s. Charlie found out from Ebert that Dick lives in a small apartment in drab Santa Ana and doesn’t wear sunglasses indoors. Not the Hollywood type at all.

  “And this time I want a guarantee on my producer’s credit. Full-card credit. I still don’t know if they’re going to stiff me on Dick, even after I lined up the director and the lead.”

  Charlie admits to himself that Bob got the ball rolling by recruiting Lewis, who came over with the studio as a hot new-idea director. Still, he feels slighted that Bob hasn’t tried to get him a producer’s credit also. Not even associate producer, a standard gimme that means nothing. This leads him to think about other inequities in their relationship.

  “You know, I could use some air-conditioning, Bob.”

  “Your apartment too hot, kid?”

  Charlie hates that Bob knows he is still only twenty. He likes to think of himself as “about thirty,” especially since he has actually slogged through fifty years. He feels like some odd synthesis of both.

  “That’s not it. I was thinking of getting an office here on the lot.”

  “Well, this is our office, isn’t it?”

  “Then where’s my desk?”

  “There isn’t room for another desk in here.” Bob shrugs.

  Charlie realizes that there is no arguing with Bob. He will have to wait for his situation to improve. There, Lewis will come in handy. They are headed into a whole new age for movies, the Second Golden Age, as it will be known. Bob doesn’t understand that directors aren’t going to be studio flunkies in the 1970s.

  * * *

  Bob takes Charlie to lunch at the studio café with a seasoned, swarthy scriptwriter sporting many broken blood vessels in his large nose. This is the one Charlie learns to call the Wise Hack, whose favorite line is “Shit has its own integrity. It has to be true to itself.” The Wise Hack knows that a certain exuberant badness often leads to passing popularity and absolutely cannot be faked. “Great pop stuff has to be written by second- or third-raters who utterly believe in the importance of what they’re doing,” the weathered man says over a pastrami sandwich.

  So certain eternal truths emerge. Children in jeopardy hold audiences, endangered pets, too, and women stalkers—all rivet the eyes. The more gunshots the better, but not much blood—you want the kid audience too. Scenes of men fondling their guns, though good, should be kept to a few—the critics will get what you mean, but not the audience. Fistfights are always good, but write in some acrobatics to make it look original—the actors like those because they get credit for the big, physical hero work done by their stunt doubles. Happy endings? Is there some other kind?

  So instead Charlie takes a new trajectory, the flip side of the Wise Hack’s. Sure, have a clear plot. Respect and bow to the three-act truth. But use wit with a dash of undercutting irony, mix action with mood scenes, stay hip to new counterculture signals. A touch of bittersweet in the happy ending is better than schmaltz. Most important, do fresh things. Keep audiences guessing. Slip them some satire when they least ex
pect it. Keep the jaded gatekeepers, those lined faces scowling in pitch sessions, guessing how scenes will turn. Show them the arc, then surprise them with jump cuts and reverse twists. That is the coming future of the next Golden Age. His future. Go cool.

  * * *

  Finally the afternoon heat in Charlie’s apartment is too much. He zooms over to the studio and storms into Merrill’s office suite, past the obligatory, elegant, high-cheekboned secretary, interrupting Lewis talking to Merrill.

  “Merrill, I need an office, see—or my agent will petition about contract violations. I’m supposed to have a goddamn office.”

  Merrill looks delighted to have an opportunity to take Charlie down some. “But you have an office with Bob.”

  “You know that’s bullshit, Merrill. Bob doesn’t share it with me.”

  “That’s between the two of you, I’m afraid, Charlie.” Merrill’s tone is as slippery as beef tallow.

  “Merrill, I talk with Charlie every day on the set,” Lewis comes in, steel smooth. “It would be a lot more convenient for everybody if he worked here regular hours.” Merrill blinks, surprised, but his lips purse, calculating. Charlie watches the ideas shift across his face. Merrill sees that Charlie and Lewis are now allies, a fact lost on him before. He recalculates the balance of power, sees that Charlie’s days as Bob’s protégé are over.

  “Very well, Charlie. You know I like you. You’ve really brought a young perspective to the studio. I’ll get you that office. Would you like a secretary, too?”

  * * *

  Having an office gives Charlie more status. He meets people in the studio café and soon enough is pitching his new idea to a movie producer over lunch. Following Rog Ebert’s urging, he’s invented a space drama.

  “Sharp idea, Charlie,” the heavyset studio guy says, sipping coffee. “Everything seems set. That female lead character is particularly right, a match of motivation with the plot.”

  Charlie looks at the sidekick producer, a woman in her thirties, wanting her reaction. She leans across the table and says, “She’s just about right, now. Only . . . how about halfway through, the male lead tears off her face and—she’s a robot!”

  Charlie looks around the studio eatery. At murals depicting famous scenes from old movies, at the current crop of tanned stars in shades dining on their slimming salads in their casual finery . . . at the sweeping view of little purple dots that dance before his eyes because he has neglected breathing after that last remark. “Robot . . . ?”

  “Just to keep them guessing,” the woman adds helpfully. “I want to really suck the juice out of this moment.”

  “But that makes no sense in this movie.”

  “It’s science fiction, though—”

  “So it doesn’t have to make sense,” Charlie finishes for her.

  14 The premiere of Dick is at one of the old Westwood cinemas. The creaky barn has seen better days and the tatty curtains give off a moldy flavor. But Charlie has never been photographed on a red carpet before—even a scrungy used one. Charlie doesn’t merit the multiple shots that the film’s stars receive—Sherwood Wrightman, born Shecky Brown, and Sally Kirkland as the president’s wife. They preen and strut, courting the press. It strikes Charlie that Hollywood isn’t a lot different from high school. There is always a prom queen and a class president, always an audience of geeks and dorks. And the show must go on, good or lousy.

  Charlie’s parents are goggle eyed by the Hollywood glitz laid out even for such a minor film. Charlie has already seen the film in almost final form, sitting next to a tense Lewis, who would cross his legs more often in scenes that were a bit awkward. Charlie felt too much pride of authorship to be critical of the finished product, at least while watching it alone with Lewis.

  Charlie likes how the lack of background music, imposed by a budget crunch in postproduction, gives the film’s humor an ironic hue. He decides to use that method on more-solemn work in future, too.

  When the movie ends, there is a respectable round of applause, and Lewis takes a bow along with Shecky and Sally. Even Merrill gets a bow and a round of applause. Of course, Charlie will have an edge on them now. It was his idea, and some people know. The right people too.

  * * *

  The review in the Friday Los Angeles Times is generally positive. The directing is “fresh,” and Shecky is described as “a natural.” Sally Kirkland gets great press. Reading the paper in his new office, Charlie is unsurprised that the script is never mentioned in the review, as if the movie grew out of an organic collaboration between actors and director, a mushroom in a basement. The invisible screenwriter.

  He walks down the balcony to Bob’s office. Bob’s secretary gives Charlie one of her warning expressions, but Charlie is not to be stopped on this day.

  Bob doesn’t look up before starting in on his tirade. “The fuckers! I give them a hit movie—”

  “We haven’t seen any box office numbers, Bob.”

  “—director and star, both, and I don’t get a full producer’s credit.”

  “Maybe next time?” Hoping for a single-card credit at this stage of either of their careers is like asking for Mars on a plate.

  “Goddamn right. And I want a bigger office now too.”

  Charlie heaves a long sigh, but he can tell that Bob doesn’t notice. Clueless. He understands how Bob’s last shot at Hollywood failed, and knows that nothing has really changed—except that Charlie’s here with him now.

  * * *

  The numbers are indeed good. Though the slow rollout of the picture is frustrating for Charlie, he has come to understand that the days of the massive opening weekend are still mostly in the future. Word of mouth and published reviews are more important in the 1970s—and theirs are good. The satire commingled with respect allows the press to play the film any way it likes. For New Republic, the movie “reveals the festering sore that is the Nixon White House.” In National Review, the only publication that discusses the screenplay thoughtfully, the movie is “a welcome attempt to humanize the much-maligned, too-often-underestimated Nixon administration.” The New York Times seems puzzled but concludes with a positive recommendation. It will be a while longer before people see that New York isn’t the cultural be-all anymore. Time equivocates but quotes an unnamed White House source as saying that the president got a laugh out of it. Charlie wonders if Nixon has even seen it. But then Merrill tells him that the White House was sent its own print—and hasn’t returned it. Maybe somebody there watched it.

  Charlie and Merrill have been getting along better, now that Dick is a success, and Merrill wants another high-concept picture out of Charlie and Bob, with Lewis directing again. Lewis is edgy, but Charlie can tell that Lewis wants to work with him again. They have a generational rapport that leaves Bob and Merrill on the outside. They get each other’s allusions to dope and Hendrix and sex, and they get the way they make those allusions, not smarmy or lecherous, but slightly ironic, a bit obscure. Just, well, cool. But then, it’s easy for Charlie to be cool when he knows what’s coming next.

  Still, Charlie is surprised by the commercial success of Dick. He was ahead of the wave, and it paid. He’s eager to take advantage of the momentum, so he decides to continue with a father-son identity-swap screenplay. Rather science fictional, but present time; his attempt to pitch outright SF has soured him. Plus, he has a desire to write about the feeling of finding yourself in a much younger body for no apparent reason. It’s terrain that he wants to push out of his head into the external world. He wants to make some sense of what has happened to him. Writing as therapy.

  He pitches the identity-switch idea in Bob’s new “producer” office. Bob has been mollified by an official memo declaring that he is now a producer-writer. It’s all about Bob getting back for his humiliation in the 1950s. Charlie wonders how much longer his career is going to be tied to Bob’s sense of entitlement and injury. This day doesn’t help.

  “Charlie, your idea is just pathetic! Who’s interested in thi
s young-old thing? Kids are kids. Adults are adults. Ne’er the twain shall meet, and let’s keep it that way.”

  “I tell you, Bob, there could be a lot of jokes in this picture. And some good uplift.”

  “Uplift!” Bob’s snort goes a little too far and he has to blow his nose. Charlie waits patiently, feeling he has been waiting between Bob’s expostulations for too long.

  Bob is soon ready to orate again. “What Hollywood needs is a return to the gritty realism it had before television made people all soppy. The Postman Always Rings Twice. Double Indemnity.”

  “Chinatown.”

  “What?” Bob looks mystified.

  Startled, Charlie covers up. “Uh, I was thinking of going Chinese for lunch.”

  “Sure, kid.” Bob’s tone becomes magnanimous. “We can let you and Lewis work on your identity thing, as a side project. You help me with an idea I’ve been working on—Bitch on Wheels. Who knows, maybe both pictures will work.”

  “The studio will let you use ‘bitch’ in the title?”

  “Times are a-changin’, my boy. They never would have let a long-haired kid like you on the lot before either.”

  “What about Fonda and Hopper?”

  “See what I mean? They shot Easy Rider on a long road trip away from here. I want to do an updated noir, with the bored young wife of a rich older man, his young nephew, the young couple spending a lot of time together. They decide they have to kill the old guy. But you know what—”

  “The old guy tricks the younger man, frames him for murdering his wife, the younger man is fried, while the older man ends up alone and wiser at the end.”

  Bob’s mouth is slack. “Did you look at my treatment?”

  He didn’t have to. “It’s a deal, Bob. I’ll cowrite with you if you’ll put in a word with Merrill for my own switcher screenplay.”

  It’s going too fast for Bob. “Uh, I’ll cowrite your film with you if you like.”

  Charlie can tell that Bob is just being polite to stall, which suits Charlie fine. “No, you’ve taken me a long way, but I can’t lean on you forever, Bob. If I need any help, I can probably get it from Lewis. He learned a lot at SC.”