American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “So you like the script,” Bryce said.

  “Love it. It’s existential, you know? Deep.”

  “Yeah,” Beau said. “Mitchell did an excellent job. He’ll do a polish, but—”

  “Shit,” Sam said. “The script is complete shit.”

  “Oh?”

  The room was kitschy, fifties absurd. Pineapples floated; there were big blue goblets flavored with Curaçao; bowls topped with jets of yellow-white flame circled the room like fireflies.

  “My client is not doing this picture. I came here for the exquisite pleasure of letting you know, you’ll make this movie in hell.”

  Davis lolled. He seemed almost will-less, as if loving the movie were one thing, making it quite another. He was as blonde as a ski instructor, handsome and dumb, with a cleft chin and a pedigree that included a turn at the Yale School of Drama. He brushed a long lock of hair away from his eyes.

  “So?” Beau smiled. “Looks like we’re at an impasse.”

  “We are. The client and I are leaving.”

  Beau threw one arm up on the back of the banquette. “Is that right?”

  Sam swung his feet back into the booth, happy to join a fight. He looked at Davis. “This lardass pissed on my floor.”

  “I was a little overexcited.”

  “This”—Sam flourished his hand in small circles—“person. This human being.”

  “Yes. Did you get my apologetic note?”

  Davis just leaned back a little farther. His green eyes were worn and dull, a forest color. “I heard about that also.”

  “You fucked up,” Sam said. “C’mon Davis, let’s—”

  “Client.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You called him ‘the client.’” Beau leaned, calmly. “Davis can’t make up his own mind? Is he meat?”

  Bryce sat quietly beside Davis, as if the two actors were in one world and the barking elders in another. Beau was all of thirty-eight, but he held seniority.

  “Pretty nice, huh Davis?” Bryce lifted his eyebrows. “That’s my guy.”

  “You’re a fine one to lecture me,” Sam snapped.

  “It’s not a lecture. Consider Davis’s interest. Why shouldn’t he do this movie?”

  “Because it’s uncommercial.”

  “You said Mellow Yellow was uncommercial, and Blake Edwards made a killing.”

  “Mellow Yellow was a comedy. I have no idea what this is.”

  “It’s a poem.”

  “A poem!” Sam’s eyes flashed contempt. “You’d be unemployed even if you were potty-trained.”

  Davis smiled, a curved and scornful look that was the key to his success. It gave his bland face an air of superciliousness, even danger. He’d used this look in a movie with Paul Newman, playing a young ranch hand apprenticed to a cattle rustler; with Steve Mc-Queen, he was a rival racer; against Lee Marvin, he played a rube cop on the trail of an aging bank robber.

  “A poem.” He thumbed his lip. “I dig it.”

  “You dig it?” Sam looked at him. “Davis, the sixties are over.”

  “No, no. There’s love there, between the brothers. I dig that.”

  “Nothing happens, they just drive around for ninety pages until it gets violent.”

  “So? That’s life, isn’t it?” He looked at Beau. “I really like this.”

  Beau couldn’t believe it. The waiter came by and he ordered a pupu platter, winking sarcastically at Sam. For you. The older agent stood up.

  “This is suicide. You know that, Davis? This could kill your career.”

  “It isn’t suicide.” The word hung over the table a moment. “I’d like to do it.”

  “You would, huh?” Sam’s voice was phlegmy, tremulous. “How come?”

  Davis just leaned back, cool as ever, and shrugged. “I think it’s neat.”

  Neat. Now the men faced one another and ate and drank and were as civil to one another as they could muster. Davis’s dopiness, his aw-shucks manner that played against the smile was the reason besides, the genius in casting him opposite Bryce.

  “This picture could destroy you,” Sam glowered, clutching a skewer of shrimp poke like a tiny conductor’s wand. “You could never work again.”

  “Naw.” Davis shrugged. “It’ll take more than a poem to destroy me.”

  Poor Sam! He looked like a little buzzard, pointing his stick at Beau.

  “The king of Hollywood, eh Sam?” Bryce chuckled. “That’s you?”

  Sam jabbed. “You think I’m old-fashioned. My time will come.”

  “I never said that.” Beau leaned across. “But you don’t understand this movie.”

  Sam’s face was painted red by the light above the booth. There was something primitive and ugly, garish and loud and at the same time civilized about this place: the waiters in their island shirts and the affluent customers, the Mexican busboys and the six-dollar drinks served in voodoo goblets. Sam licked his lips and lifted a finger.

  “Everything comes around. There are worse things in life than being antiquated.”

  He shook his head sternly. Beau laughed out loud.

  “Come on, Sam.” He crunched an egg roll. “Let’s be friends.” He swallowed. “Let’s not let animosity get in the way of doing business.”

  Sam smiled. He might have been waiting the whole time just to let Beau’s euphoria crest. “Oh, I won’t. But there isn’t any business to do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This movie isn’t set up,” Sam said. “Davis won’t commit without a guarantee.”

  “So?” Beau belched. “Any studio in town will make it with him.”

  “Maybe. But he still needs a real offer. Pay or play. Davis?”

  The actor just grunted. He had returned to the lolling, indefinite posture he’d held at the beginning. “Neat” the project may have been, but love wasn’t about to trump money.

  “Come to us with an offer.” Sam smirked at Beau and folded his hands with serene assurance. Glasses flamed around the room, a lounge piano tinkled, the perfect setting for an adding machine ritual. “Then we’ll talk.”

  “No.” Chain-smoking Jeremy Vana was a good friend, but not crazy. “I’m sorry, but no.”

  “Why not?” Bryce snorted. “Let’s hear the studio executive’s reasons.”

  Jeremy was beefy, blond, with a thick beard and a square jaw. He looked like an old-school politician: there was something almost nineteenth-century about his crooked, sturdy frame. He flicked a cigarette into the standing ashtray by his desk.

  “Davis isn’t as bankable as you think. His next picture’s a turkey.”

  Antsy Jeremy. He might be expected dead of a heart attack before he was forty-five. Yet he was their appointed salvation, there on the Columbia Pictures lot when it was still in Burbank. His office was like a Mandarin explorer’s, a room full of parchment shades and faded leather. An antique globe stood atilt by the couch where Beau and Bryce both sat. Davis’s next picture, in which he played Thomas Egerton, Lord Chancellor of England, would turn out all right, but others who’d told our men the same included Ted Heller at Fox and Lewis Spruill at Universal. Paramount had passed, and they brought it back to Jeremy. Still no. MGM, no; UA, no. Dennis Hopper had agreed to direct and they’d come back to Universal. Absolutely not. They’d gone outside the box to Hammer Films in the UK and even met with Melvin Van Peebles. You can imagine how that went. Now here they were in Vana’s office again.

  “I wish I could tell you something had changed,” Jeremy plunked one boot onto his desk. “But I’m going to get shit-canned if I make this movie.”

  “So?” Bryce sneered. “You’re gonna get shit-canned anyway. That’s what happens to studio executives.”

  Failure had made Bryce reckless. He hadn’t worked at all in nearly a year. Now he lolled contemptuously, having kicked off his shoes to show bare, bunioned feet. He wore running shorts and a sweat-soaked Fighting Illini T-shirt.

  “How am I supposed to help you fellas?”
Jeremy laced his hands behind his head. “Seriously.”

  Beneath that boxy, almost Lincolnian beard lived an interesting man. His blue stare was dully attentive, the look of someone who invested too much time in the brackish, illogical process of studio filmmaking.

  Beau stood up. Like an orator without an argument. “You can make this fucking movie, Jeremy.”

  “No can do.” He’d worked with Beau before and so was equal to the usual tactics, wasn’t about to be snookered by that gentle badgering that was like being cuffed, relentlessly, with damp towels.

  “Why not?”

  Jeremy sighed. There were so many reasons. This studio had teetered on the lip of bankruptcy a year ago, and a picture like this wasn’t going to help. They’d been here before, and Jeremy was about to resort to chucking them out of his office once more.

  “What’s that?” Bryce leapt up. Yippy and irrational, so like his onscreen persona, he pointed and stalked toward Vana. “Whaddya got on your face, Jer?”

  Jeremy had pushed up out of his chair but now froze. “Huh?”

  “There.” Bryce approached. “Right”—he jabbed just below Vana’s left eye—“there.”

  Jeremy flinched. “That’s just my freckle.”

  “No sir.” Bryce shook his head. “Too big. That’s a melanoma, my friend.”

  “A melawhich?”

  “A melanoma. That Coppertone’s no good for you. You need a dermatologist.”

  A dermatologist! Bryce was into some weird shit, but at least he now bothered to wear clothes once in a while. The mark was black as a fly, just above the cheekbone. It mightn’t have been noticed by anyone who wasn’t accustomed to hunting for such things.

  “Tell you what. You get that checked out and it’s nothing, we’ll never set foot in here again.”

  “And if it isn’t?”

  “You’ll push this movie,” Bryce said. “Whether it shit-cans you or not.”

  Jeremy laid his hand on that old-fashioned globe. He spun it. On the coffee table beside it were a backgammon board and two sweating glasses of iced tea. On the walls were one-sheets for The Way We Were, I Never Sang for My Father, 1776. Through the window, beyond Jeremy’s desk, they could see where an elaborate castle had been built for Lost Horizon.

  “All right.” Mortality trumped common sense. “All right.”

  Beau had been through enough. It was late 1973, and if he didn’t get this movie made soon he’d go back to New York. Or wade into the Pacific. Severin and Kate were five. He’d given up being a part of the best and most innocent years of their lives to chase these meaningless hopes and fugitive elations. He could feel the helplessness rising in his chest, the desperate knowledge that he could only, once more, be disappointed.

  “Jeremy,” he said, “I love you. But I hope you’re fucking dying.”

  IV

  PRODUCTION BEGAN THE following spring. The Dog’s Tail would shoot in New Mexico and a few days in Georgia, for the modest budget of $850,000. Davis and Bryce were the two brothers, and Udo Kier, of all people, was their mute pursuer. For a brief, delirious instant John Schlesinger had agreed to direct it, but left to do The Day of the Locust instead. The director they had ended up with was a relative unknown, a young German named Morrison Groom. Mitchell Gibson was on the set, and Davis’s girlfriend, and Beau. Everyone’s expectations were low. They waded into the desert with too much script and too little story and a director whose experience amounted to a few episodes of Laugh-In and a documentary feature on Aboriginal songlines, with all the audience that implies. The weight of the movie, such as it was, sat on Davis’s shoulders. Jeremy Vana climbed the steps of the star’s Airstream trailer, the only one on the set.

  “What the fuck is going on here?”

  He squinted into the trailer’s humid darkness. The windows were all taped up and the shades drawn. There were dim intimations of nudity, the smell of enclosed human sweat.

  “Shut the door, Jer.”

  “Why in God’s name?” It took him this long to see they were only meditating, the actors and Davis’s eighteen-year-old girlfriend, who was also in the film. “Why are you just sitting here in your trailer?”

  “Shhh.” Bryce spoke. “Throw that cigarette away.”

  “Where’s Morrison?” They were all shirtless. Even the girl, Li, who had a child’s bony shoulders, her profile pert and pubescent-looking in the dark.

  “How should we know? Cocksucker’s crazy.”

  “He doesn’t speak much English,” Davis murmured.

  “Your director abandoned you?”

  “I wouldn’t say abandoned. He’ll be back.”

  “Where’s Beau?” As he stooped in the doorway, Jeremy’s eyes adjusted until he could see Li’s face. She was Asian? Indian? In any case she was perfect, with skin so smooth it seemed like igneous rock, giving off neither heat nor moisture.

  “He’s with Mo,” she said. “Both of them just went into town for groceries.”

  Mitchell squatted in the dirt outside. Supposedly “working on the script.” Vana might as well have trusted a monkey with a typewriter, since all he ever seemed to do was write things up and then throw them away, barely stopping to read anything between. Fuck all these people. Jeremy turned. Li stuck out her tongue at his retreating back.

  “We saved your life, Jerry! Never forget it!” Bryce called.

  A spring-weight gray jacket was slung over his hand; he clutched a briefcase. He looked like a disappointed salesman. His tie dangled, fat as a parched animal’s tongue. “It was fucking benign.”

  He left them alone after that. What was to be said? In the rocking calm, the roaring quiet of the desert, he’d let them sink their careers. And his, if need be.

  “I got it!”

  Beau sat up. He’d kidnapped the writer in hopes of forcing a little “inspiration,” and here it was the eve of the scheduled first day of shooting. They were bunking at a wan motel in Flagstaff, Arizona—the L on the neon sign was out, delighting Mitchell to no end—and it was three o’clock in the morning. “What is it?”

  A tap dripped. Beau’s yellow bedspread was psychedelic Dacron hell. A wrecked crate of champagne, a congratulatory gift from Williams, lay underneath the writer’s table. Mitchell sat by the window, gazing out at the buzzing pink sign.

  “Come look.” In front of him were an Olivetti and a bottle of Kahlúa. An array of index cards fanned across the table. “Just look at this.”

  Beau came over, in his underwear. A week was enough to grow used to Mitchell’s midnight fancies. The writer was skinny and blond, with long hair and round glasses. He looked like a distaff John Lennon, feminized by twittering mannerisms.

  “What if Udo steps up his pursuit at the beginning?”

  “Huh?”

  “We turn it around in the middle here. Look.” Not gay, sexless. Mitchell was a strange cat. He pointed limply at one of the cards. “What if they meet Udo there, instead of where we had it? We’ll put that other sequence up front.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It would. It could. If. If—”

  He had these incredibly long fingers, which he used now to shuffle the cards into an unfamiliar order. There were fifty-six of them, whittled down from ninety-four.

  “See? See, Beau?” His voice was high and excitable. “If we do that, Udo suddenly has motive.”

  “Because the boys have kidnapped his sister.”

  “Right. Right!”

  April ’74. It had taken them two years to figure this out, and at 4:00 AM in this misbegotten motel opposite a Texaco station Mitchell began to type like a fiend. Beau stood beside him. He’d grown a beard, taken to smoking a pipe. He looked like a hobbit. Mitchell wore a white kurta with an embroidered neckline, bell-bottoms, and sandals. Their problems had no solutions, even if the movie cohered. Beau’s hole of debt was so deep his fee could only allow him to break even. He went to the kitchenette and kissed the two pictures taped to the freezer’s pebbly door.

>   “Ha!” Mitchell barked, keys rattling. “Fagstaff! Falstaff!”

  Was it a sin to love the girl child better? Both Kate and Sev would be six in April. “You finally figured it out, huh Mitchell? Why not two years ago!”

  A cockroach hurried across the floor by Beau’s feet, monstrous, blurry. He’d last seen the kids three months ago, at a hearing held to reestablish his partial custody. Rachel had looked drawn and exhausted. Something was going on with her. She’d dropped a bunch of her clients, stopped returning his calls, was mute when Beau harassed her in the hall. Why are you doing this, Rach? Why?

  Nothing would ever put things right.

  “And—action!”

  These words always sounded tinnier to Beau than expected, the clapper barely louder than a clipped fingernail. That they initiated his movie meant nothing. The studio paid him, as they were obligated to do upon commencement of principal photography. Beau stood with his hands in his pockets and watched. He wore an ascot and no shirt, mirrored sunglasses. Indeed, Beau Rosenwald had gotten weird. Udo Kier stood beside him, not needed for this scene in which the boys pulled up in their GTO. The first shot was a long view of the highway while the car, no bigger than a distant bird at first, arrived at last at a gas station that was the film’s only “set.” The brothers’ names were Hector (Beller) and Hal (Davis). Li staffed the station’s diner. She played the disputed sister, originally the boys’ but now, according to Mitchell’s rewrite, Udo’s, a dusky sphinx whose silence mirrored that of the desert. The inside of the diner, which had been built in the gas station’s former garage, looked like a Western saloon, its apparatuses all dating back to the end of the last century.

  HECTOR

  No fucking town with these here cows.

  HAL

  No fucking cows either.

  The BOYS get out of the CAR.

  HAL (CONT’D)

  Let’s pump ourselves some octane and split. Flagstaff’s 150 miles.