Rewrite

by Gregory Benford

  Confused, Bob starts to search through the piles of paper on his desk. He needs to keep distance from such an obvious loser idea. “Let me give you the treatment for Bitch.”

  But Charlie is already backing out of the office. “Just have Gladys bring a Xerox to me, okay?”

  Bob looks up, blinking at this new world. “Sure thing, kid.”

  * * *

  A few weeks later Charlie has recovered from his first attempt to push a science-fictional idea, so after lunch he finds himself talking to a story editor. Rog Ebert’s enthusiasm may have a point—Hollywood is wide open to fresh ideas now. Charlie has written a five-page approach about discovering life on Mars, portraying how it would really be, hard and gritty and unforgiving. A story editor likes this “a whole lot,” a “breakthrough concept”—but she has her own creative input too.

  “I want a magic moment right here, at the end of the first hour,” she says.

  “Magic?” Charlie asks guardedly.

  “Something to bring out the wonder of Mars, yeah.”

  “Like . . .”

  “See, when the astronaut is inside this cave—”

  “Thermal vent. From an old volcano—”

  “Okay, okay, vent it is. In this vent, he’s trapped, right?”

  “Well, not actually; the vent is where he discovers this lichen—”

  “So he’s banged up and he thinks he’s going to die and he thinks, ‘What the hell.’ ”

  “What the hell.”

  “Right, you get it. He says what the hell, he might as well take his helmet off.”

  “Helmet. Off.”

  “Right, you got it. Big moment. Cracks the seal. He smiles and takes a big breath and says, ‘Oxygen! There’s oxygen here. Let’s take off these helmets!’ Whaddaya think?”

  “I liked the robot with a mask better.”

  * * *

  Charlie takes the afternoon off to cool down. He goes west up Sunset to the UCLA bookstore to find something to read, something to make sense of his life. While he tries not to think about his flickering moments, they are always there as a fear around the periphery of his new life. He wants to see some words that will make sense of what happened. Maybe even settle for lies from traditional religions, if only they will work to quell his anxiety.

  While he is looking through the textbooks on comparative religion, he notices a leggy blonde eyeing him farther down the stacks of the textbook section. He wanders in her direction, carrying one book on Hinduism and another on Hinayana Buddhism.

  As he gets closer, he notices that she has a book on the films of the fifties. “You in film school?” he asks.

  She smiles sweetly but not quite shyly. “Uh-huh. Are you taking comparative religion?” Her face is breathtaking, fine features set off with blue eyes.

  “No, I’m not a student here.”

  “Do you teach?”

  Charlie realizes that he does in fact look “about thirty.” Near this girl’s blond youth, it makes him feel awkward. “No, not at all. I’m a screenwriter, actually.” Using the word “screenwriter” also makes him feel uneasy, but he has no taste for being a professor again, not even in another person’s misapprehension.

  “Have any scripts I could look at?”

  She probably assumes I’m a waiter or a store clerk writing on spec, Charlie thinks. Maybe it’s the T-shirt and jeans, or all the hair. She has me figured for a loser. The thought irritates.

  “Did you see Dick?”

  “That piece of Republican propaganda? No way.” Her lips curl with disdain.

  “I wrote it. Well, with Bob Greenway.”

  She blushes and looks down, evidently fumbling for words. “Uh . . . I’m sorry. I—I thought you were more of an experimental-movie type.”

  Charlie laughs gently, his tone forgiving. “We can’t all be Fellini. You can apologize for your good taste over a coffee, okay?”

  “All right.” She shows some relief, and her broad white smile makes his heart beat a bit faster.

  * * *

  After spending the afternoon with Michelle, especially after her lips gently touch his when they say good-bye, Charlie finds himself energized. He gets into his Mustang and pops in a new Stones tape. He now prefers the naked lightbulb swinging by a black cord of the Rolling Stones to the lit-up rotating chandelier of the Beatles. He feels that the Stones will keep the flickering multiverse away. And with Michelle, maybe all of this is all that is real.

  Charlie savors the sharp, slanting light rippling over him as he zooms through backstreet traffic, but he is plotting as he drives. He thinks back to the Mars pitch to the story editor. Maybe he should have said, Sure, we can take the helmet off. When can the studio cut a check?

  Downshifting and popping the clutch to get that lion roar, he heads up the Hollywood Hills to the new home. He bought it outright for cash, paying a tiny fraction of what it will be worth in the 1990s. It’s got a Jet Propulsion Lab disregard for mere gravity, all angles and slanting beams hanging the wedge-shaped thing out over dry air. As he makes the jackknife turns with lots of tire howl, he catches glimpses of it hanging above—hiding behind eucalypts, as if waiting to spring out, all elbows, on passers-by.

  He parks in the drive and hums “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” as he passes beneath the trumpet vine with its sweet, downward-dipping yellow flowers swarming over the roof’s lip. Or maybe now he can.

  * * *

  Charlie is working long and hard at the studio and this night has lingered to get some script points nailed solid. The studio grounds lie deserted, which to Charlie makes them echo with the glamorous luster of Old Hollywood. Ghosts of the great seem to whisper in the back alleys, their shadows flickering just at the edge of vision.

  He fits his key into his car and suddenly the whispers and shadows condense. An arm yanks him around, pinning his hands. A gloved hand claps over his mouth. Someone behind him ties his wrists.

  He can’t see who they are in the gloom. They lift his feet off the ground. A man—Charlie can smell the sweat—lifts him by his shoulders. Charlie wriggles. Not a word spoken. Until—

  “Hey! Whozzat?”

  It’s the voice of Ernie, the night guard.

  Charlie thumps down hard on asphalt. He watches two figures run away into the dark, followed by a flashlight beam. One short and stocky, the other shorter and small.

  A shot cracks the night. Charlie rolls over and sees Ernie sighting along his .38 revolver.

  “Nah!” Ernie spits out. He lowers his aim.

  Two more shots. Charlie hears two yells, one high pitched.

  “Winged ’em!” Ernie yelps, happy.

  Charlie gasps, “My hands!”

  Ernie bends and unties his bonds. “You hurt?”

  His shoulder aches, but Charlie says, “Nah. They didn’t have time to do much to me.”

  “Damn funny. Usually it’s the stars they go after.”

  Charlie gets up, a little wobbly. “Nobody kidnaps writers.”

  Ernie smiles. “You got it. Get a look at ’em?”

  “No. Can’t figure why they’d want me.”

  Ernie marches him around to the guard office, and he alerts the others on watch. One of them has already found an unlocked gate at the back. “They’re gone by now, no question. Out the way they came—only a block from your car.”

  Ernie brushes off Charlie’s clothes and walks him back to his car. Charlie has no idea what the hell that was about.

  15 Charlie is noticing competition from other upstarts. A lot of them work night-shift jobs as waiters and worse, but they churn out scripts for anyone at Action Pictures who will listen. Merrill has them sit through endless script workshops run by Greenway—who charges for his wisdom and secondhand smoke. Charlie now works alone and delivers his finished scripts to Merrill, Lewis, and Bob. Much better to spend time imagining scenes, dialogue, odd defining moments for the camera’s eye, instead of arguing with Bob.

  Action Pictures is accepting him as the
ir bankable young writer. Small steps toward the new cinema are adding up into his own style. With a little push from the studio, an LA Times puff piece says he has “bold curiosity for the fresh, brash risk-taking, raw ingenuity.” He mails a copy of it back home to Chicago. His father’s voice booms with pride on the phone. But no word from his mother.

  Good start, getting some good ink—but what next? He could work his screenplays, sure, but there might be better ways to play this. Carefully he tries to excavate everything he can from Charlie One’s movie memories. It was a great time for film during his first life, as the sixties became the seventies. The Cassavetes guy was making avant-garde movies with handheld cameras, shooting grainy black-and-whites with pocket change. Movies like The Trip, he recalls, shot by the low-rent Roger Corman, caught the wave of druggie culture. Charlie remembers—what odd details come up!—that The Trip highlighted an actor who wrote his own script, Jack Nicholson, whom he has met in passing. Nicholson is well on his way to building his reputation as Hollywood Hills’ party boy.

  The major players to be, guys like Spielberg, started back in the 1960s but didn’t catch on until the early 1970s. Spielberg’s TV movie Duel was about an ordinary guy pursued by a crazed driver of an eighteen-wheeler across a rugged western landscape. Charlie remembers it well, with all the hallmarks that Spielberg made a cottage industry—deft cutting, shots of boots as the characters walk into cheap diners, gas stations at night, brooding highway landscapes. In this, Spielberg paralleled Stephen King, with their shared taste for small scenes with character flags that open out the narrative flow. A boy calling his lost dog seconds before a shark attack, a passing glance at the camera, self-involved kids calling one another names while danger approaches.

  So where is Spielberg? Charlie decides to look.

  He finds the man quick enough, because Hollywood is a self-centered one-industry village. They agree to meet in a Westwood café, a mediocre Greek place. Spielberg is waiting at a small table al fresco—cap, shades, long hair, sharp eyes. Charlie is in shades and long hair himself, with his fuller beard complementing his mustache.

  “Nice to meet you, Mr. Moment.”

  “Charlie, please.”

  They order drinks. Charlie is never asked for ID. His body language says at least thirty.

  “I liked Dick,” Spielberg offers.

  “Thank you. I enjoyed Amblin’.” Though actually he hadn’t.

  Spielberg tries to hide his surprise that a mainstream screenwriter, even one with the cool-hippie look of Charlie Moment, has seen his very minor early effort. Charlie of course saw it in his last life, when the smallest item from the Spielberg oeuvre was cherished by film cognoscenti. Charlie hopes to impress Spielberg, but instead his comment has disconcerted the man.

  After that the conversation doesn’t go very well. They spend some minutes on cagey back-and-forth about possible movie projects, but Charlie realizes that Spielberg has his guard up, as if Charlie is competition for the Crown Prince of Hollywood title that Spielberg will soon win. Or did, last life. Charlie is impressed with Spielberg but knows that this isn’t their moment. Not yet.

  Only on the drive home does he recall that Richard Matheson wrote the story and screenplay for Spielberg’s first hit, Duel. They’re probably wrapping on that TV movie right now. With Matheson, Spielberg doesn’t need a writer. Not yet.

  * * *

  Charlie phones Michelle to go see the Truffaut at UCLA, Shoot the Piano Player. She is a little stiff when they meet again, but he plies her with some measured wit about Truffaut and New Wave French cinema, and he soon has her animated again. He barely notices the film, which he saw more than once on both IFC and video. Who would care about French film if they had such a woman next to them, stroking their arm, squeezing their thigh? Charlie thinks.

  Walking her back to her room is like ascending a staircase for Charlie. He has feelings for Michelle he can’t remember from his last life, and the newness of it catches him off guard. When they get to her room, he is surprised by himself. His body isn’t ready to go. He seems to want something else.

  But Michelle just matter-of-factly takes her clothes off and gets into bed. A bit awkwardly, Charlie does the same.

  Between the light-yellow sheets, she slides toward him. He manages to position himself so that only their chests touch.

  “I want to get to know you better.”

  Michelle looks at him quizzically. “Like what?”

  “Like what you really want from life.”

  They talk for some minutes, and then hours, kissing from time to time. It isn’t until 1:00 a.m. that Charlie’s body demands its tithe. Charlie is gentle with the girl, as if he doesn’t want to break off the parts of a china figurine. But near the end she grabs him forcibly, pulling him down on her repeatedly with the vigor required to make both of them come.

  Breathing heavily afterward, she says, “At last! I’ve wanted to do that for days.”

  He lets the talk of the evening glide over him as he drives home. He does not know how to surf these waves of introspection that snatch him up and plunge him into frothy emotional surf. And then there are his flickering moments, when this world seems to unspool from a hidden film projector. He shudders against the Mustang’s bucket seat, remembering those. What would explain them? Could he be epileptic?

  Charlie pushes that thought away by wondering how much trouble he has found for himself with Michelle. Dark clouds with purple bellies, boiling beneath the cottony white topping of fresh love, come lumbering over his horizon.

  * * *

  Charlie phones Spielberg, who is shooting a commercial in Laguna Beach. Their conversation goes better this time. Spielberg needs start-up money to go up the ladder from USC. Advertisements shoot fast, pay well. They arrange to meet again.

  Charlie goes down to Laguna the next day, and within half an hour the Spielberg gang has him in a pickup basketball game on the half-courts at Main Beach. On the small courts you run less and maneuver more.

  Charlie marvels at the energy of his young body; he hasn’t pushed it so hard before. Perhaps the freight of middle-aged caution slowed him down, made him forget about the surging joys of athletics.

  But not on this vibrant sunlit day in Laguna. He makes dunks—double pumps, spin shots, classic alley-oops. Shouts of glory, high fives, backslapping, grins and glowers. Charlie keeps up but isn’t there to shine. It is enough to pour himself into the game. Everybody there has the moves. Trick dribbles, footwork fakes, the collapsing full-court press. The fine art of the slap steal, the squeeze, the trap. And the one-on-one sparring—blocking, getting in the other guy’s face, hitting the outlet man on the fast break, maxing your free throws. Charlie’s body sings.

  They finally break for beers. This time Charlie and Spielberg talk about everything but movies, grinning, getting into the beach groove. Spielberg keeps his baseball cap on, the emblem that will become a cliché for striving comers. They exchange wry comments, Charlie hanging back and letting the guy come to him.

  But Spielberg has a tight little entourage around him, and Charlie can’t seem to take the right tack with them. They are TV people, caught up in hammering out shows for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, Marcus Welby, M.D., and a new series getting started, about a detective named Columbo. Mass production work, not Charlie’s kind of thing at all. Spielberg will make it big in movies, but that comes later. Now he’s in TV land. Maybe the work on Duel is downstream; Charlie doesn’t ask.

  They walk down the beach a bit and hit the surf in their cutoffs. The brassy, salt-air day is fine, never mind career ambitions. Charlie thinks of Jaws, a big hit years away. Perhaps this day will let him acquire Spielberg for the project at Action Pictures, an investment that could lead somewhere. Among them Charlie’s a movie guy, higher in the pecking order, and he understands their hungry looks.

  A guy named Lucas comes by and downs a few beers, and it takes a while before Charlie realizes the quiet guy is the Star Wars creator. Lucas is stiff, phleg
matic, and seems interested only in Spielberg. Not really one of the boys.

  Late in the afternoon Spielberg talks with Charlie in a California-casual way, vacillating between politics and movies and gossip. Does he really know Lew Wasserman? Charlie knows enough now to downplay his associations, since everybody his age is doing the opposite. It works. Nothing said, but Spielberg’s look conveys respect.

  “Hey, maybe we can work sometime,” Spielberg says in farewell.

  Charlie shrugs. “Sure, let’s.” But he knows he has Spielberg on his hook.

  On the drive back he takes it slow, windows down, following Laguna Canyon Road up through the Irvine Ranch. There are still plenty of orange groves in Orange County, and he drives slowly through the biggest, savoring the thick citrus aroma that swarms through the windows and up into his head.

  * * *

  Charlie knows that he is a decent scriptwriter but no genius. Reading a few dozen great scripts from the 1940s onward proves that. He has learned about camera angles and moving shots, but he will never be a brilliant director like Spielberg. Instead he has perspective—maturity, sure, but far more; he knows how future tastes will run. He can keep ahead, sense the coming anxieties in need of release in the dark tunnels of movie theaters, where the human tribe gathers and watches the flickering screen, like early humans hearing stories by firelight.

  Charlie’s plans solidify. He will go with the flow, look for fresh angles, and stay ahead of the wave.

  * * *

  Lewis is full of ideas for Switching, so they go to Merrill and make a deal. Lewis will get cowriting credit, and Charlie will get an associate producer credit, each on a shared card. The three of them are starting to get comfortable working together, sharing tasks according to ability. Charlie is the idea man, Lewis the canny worker between dialogue and scene setup, and Merrill . . . is Merrill. Charlie wonders why he took such a dislike to Merrill in the first place.

  Bob’s Bitch on Wheels is a harder task. Their screenwriting meetings start out tense, coffee fueled, protracted. But then Charlie hits on a strategy of letting Bob’s instincts rule, just helping him with the mechanics of scene construction and the dialogue of the younger characters. Bob can’t write for characters born after 1940, so he appreciates Charlie’s dialogue, while still feeling that he has control. This in turn lets Charlie and Lewis work on Switching unimpeded by Bob, who is too busy steering his project. Charlie One’s insights help with all of this.