American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “Are you fucking deaf?”

  The girl, whose name was Emily White, couldn’t move. She’d worked here for three months, at Beau Rosenwald’s Red Sled Productions, and never once had he spoken to or acknowledged her in any way. Until now.

  “I was just looking for—”

  “For what?” Beau sneered, when she couldn’t finish the sentence. “A chance to get your ass reamed?”

  For my coverage. She’d come in here looking for a script report she’d written, and now Emily White was in trouble. She scrambled in advance of Beau’s tantrum, her body a blonde blur—white shirt, yellow hair, and the palest skin imaginable—as he whisked out from around his desk, grabbed a basketball that was on the floor, and hurled it at her.

  “Get. The. Fuck. OUT!” Beau yowled. He stood in khakis, aviator shades, a baseball cap, an untucked shirt. “Getthefuckout!”

  The ball bounced against the wall, slapping off a framed poster for a remake of Bringing Up Baby, which had earned this studio $97 million last year. Emily bolted for the door. She left behind the reader’s report she’d been looking for as she ran out into the hall, hoping to make it to the bathroom before she blew it even worse.

  Inside the stall, Emily burst into tears. Even as she’d left the office she could hear Beau Rosenwald—my God, the guy was every bit as big a dick as people said—switching gears into the wet sycophancy for which he was equally famous, murmuring into the phone, Sorry, snookums, my intern. “Snookums?” Jesus fucking Christ. Was the studio executive fooled, did she think Beau was a nice person? Or did she not care? When you made as much money as Beau had—last year, Columbia’s domestic take topped two hundred million, and Beau’s output accounted for more than half of that—she supposed it didn’t matter.

  She crouched in her yellow stall and sobbed, sobbed and sobbed.

  She’d wanted to work for someone else. Two summers ago, while she was still at UC Irvine, she’d interned in the mailroom at ADM and had hoped to go to work for Sydney Pollack or Art Linson. Instead she’d gotten a call from someone at Red Sled. Dill Gibson was the smartest guy she’d known in school, one of her oldest and dearest friends. His father had written some ghastly road movie Beau had produced in the seventies, one of those boring period pieces that would never rate a revival. Now he was Beau’s assistant, calling to see if she’d be interested in working for him. It’s not ideal, he’d admitted, speaking of the schlock the producer was churning out today, and of his chimp-starring basketball movie in particular. Pete’s not exactly the sort of movie we had in mind while we were taking Border Cinema and the Queer Idyll. But you could learn. Beau’s a total pig, but still better than Joel Silver. So she came in and met with Beau’s VP, an anxious and unpleasant redhead named Darcy Klein, then was “introduced” to Beau, which consisted of being paraded into his office for fifteen seconds while he was on the phone, before she was hired on the spot. For no money, for nothing but the privilege of working for someone who at least made movies, whose company was not just another one of the dim satellites that cluttered every lot in town: actresses with vanity deals, some corporatocrat’s nephew who had ambitions, the action star who probably never read the scripts of even the movies he was in.

  Emily had to remind herself of this while she sat in the bathroom and cried. She had to remember that there were “producers” and there were Producers. Beau was among the latter, of whom there were few. After Bringing Up Baby, his third consecutive hit, the studio had offered Beau his deal, which was nonexclusive—first look—and included a generous discretionary fund. They gave him a lavish office in the Capra Building, where he now perched, rather pretentiously, behind an architect’s drafting table. He had aspirations, apparently. It wasn’t that he wanted to make Balls and Strikes 2: Out of the Zone, but there were responsibilities—Emily’d heard the spiel from the VP and knew it came down from the top—to the studio, to the audience, and to those people who loved family films. The company had real movies in development, Darcy explained: a contemporized version of David Copperfield, a biopic of Madame Curie, a radical reworking of The Beast in the Jungle that was supposed to be written by a hot young playwright from New York. Darcy hired Emily because Emily was smart, because she “got it” and had taste, and Emily decided not to mind the VP’s cuntiness because she, too, had taste and was smart. Emily wouldn’t want to be that way, herself, a shrill bully who abused her creative executive for being five minutes late in bringing her an energy bar, but she admired Darcy for being successful in what was still, no matter who ran the studio, a boys’ club and a men’s game.

  Would she have to become like Darcy? This is what Emily wondered, as she finished weeping in the bathroom behind the copier. Was that what it took? Did you have to be so feral, a mean little animal in a Prada suit? She came out of the stall and ran cold water, splashed her face and stared herself back to normalcy. You could succeed in this business and be nice, couldn’t you? By the time she emerged back into the drudgery of her day—she could hear Beau thundering to his assistant, Get me my son on the telephone . . . NOW!—Emily was calm as she ever was, running over to the commissary to get people’s coffees, photocopying, photocopying, photocopying. The incident was already forgotten.

  “Emily!” That night her phone rang. She picked up on a man’s voice she didn’t recognize. It was gruff and raspy, panting almost like a dog’s.

  “Yes?” She hated answering the phone at home. All day long she had to answer with the company’s name (and who did this guy think he was? Rosers/Rosebud/Red Sled . . . the allusion was obvious, but Beau Rosenwald was no Orson Welles), so she struggled not to do the same on her own time.

  “Beau.”

  “Who?”

  “Your employer.”

  “Oh!” She sat up. What in God’s name was he calling her at home for? She was there in that miserable apartment she had in Beach-wood Canyon, with its dust bunnies and warped cherry floors. She lived in the same twenty-three-year-old’s deep Hollywood squalor my friends and I did, then. She went to the same clubs, same parties. The walls were the color of weak tea, grimy with human contact.

  “I’m calling to apologize. I did something bad today.”

  “You did?”

  “I threw a basketball at you. You were there.”

  “Um, yeah.”

  “I’m not so far beyond the pale I think that’s acceptable. I’m really sorry.”

  “OK.”

  “Did you write this coverage of Mr. Bones?”

  “I did.”

  “It’s excellent. That’s why I’m calling, really. You’re a great reader.”

  She sat on her couch, watching her starved gray cat, Henry—she couldn’t afford to feed him either—arch his back on the sill; the dingy lintels and listing floors covered with unpaid parking tickets and note-scarred scripts and empty video boxes. Thanks, she was about to say.

  “Have breakfast with me,” he blurted.

  Was he hitting on her? Probably. She was pretty enough, or almost pretty enough. She had a kind of puffy, blonde, innocent sweetness, more like that of an actress from the thirties than the stringy collagen birds of today.

  “Tomorrow, at the Peninsula,” he added. “Meet me there at seven thirty.”

  “I—”

  She couldn’t say no, partly because he’d started this off with an apology, but also because she wasn’t sure if he was coming on to her. She winnowed a hand through her thick (dyed) blonde hair, a cornsilk yellow that was the only unnatural thing about her.

  “Sure.”

  She was a little thick around the middle, big-chested but not “perky.” She was more deliberate than the other women in his office, the vice president and the creative exec. She started to say something else, just to prove she wasn’t afraid of him. Abruptly, however, he hung up. Click.

  Emily sat for a minute in stunned silence. The thought made her flesh crawl: what if this big, hideous man was actually hitting on her? She’d been to his house once, the big Mediterrane
an place in Santa Monica—she went to deliver a script when he wasn’t home—and so could picture him, alone in his kitchen, masturbating into a cup. Why a cup? She had no idea, but this is what she pictured.

  She shivered. Then she laughed out loud.

  VI

  “WHERE ARE YOU FROM?”

  The question took her by surprise. Any question would’ve taken her by surprise, she supposed because she’d never—it hit her in that moment—heard Beau ask one. What the fuck are you doing in here? didn’t exactly count, and Did you write this coverage? wasn’t a question so much as a request for confirmation.

  “Hermosa Beach.” She fumbled her way into her chair. She couldn’t believe he was already there, waiting for her at 7:28 AM.

  “And where’d you go to school?” He folded his Wall Street Journal, rested his well-kept hands on the edge of the table.

  “Irvine. Film studies.”

  “Film studies?”

  “I was an English minor,” she admitted. “But yes.”

  “So you like books!” He cackled, like this was an important discovery.

  Ah, Emily White. Would it have made a difference, I sometimes wonder, if she had fallen for me instead of for Sev? If I could’ve diverted her even a little? I have to wonder, given all she would eventually do for old Beau. But for Emily White, the surprise was how easy it was to sit and have breakfast with the man. Much easier than she’d supposed. The room was palmy and bright and welcoming, filled with that terror-kissed languor of LA hotels.

  “So how did you end up here, at Red Sled?” He angled his wrist in a way that seemed to show off his watch. Was he nervous? My God!

  “Dill brought me in.”

  “Dill?” Beau laughed. “My assistant?”

  “I’ve known him forever,” she said. “He’s really smart.”

  “Smart enough to know when someone else is.”

  Emily blushed. Something about him encouraged candor. He was nervous, she realized, but not hitting on her at all. “I just wanted an internship with an active producer.”

  “No matter if he makes shitty movies.” Beau smiled, knowing exactly what she meant. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell. You can say what you want about my lousy comedies and I’ll pretend I never heard.”

  “I . . . ”

  She liked him! Inconceivable. Of all possible eventualities, this was the one for which she was least prepared. The man had such a reputation! They ordered milk-steamed oatmeal, and his manners were impeccable. The bananas fanned out across the top, the blood-bright strawberries too. He removed these things delicately with his jagged-tipped spoon.

  “Mr. Bones isn’t really my sort of thing. It’s Darcy’s.”

  “Right.”

  “But you’re able to explain it to me better than Darcy can. You’re brighter than she is.”

  “No.” She was bright enough not to fall into that trap, certainly. “Darcy has incredible taste. I learn from her.”

  “It’s good to do that,” he said. Impressed by this also, the way her ambition was tempered by common sense. “Learn from your bosses, learn from your colleagues. I always did.”

  He smiled. Incredible how his former antagonists and foils, Williams or Sam, could suddenly be filed under the rubric of wisdom. Beau was almost sixty, now. After plastic surgery, his face had the sun beaten plainness of a middle-aged actor’s, red and reticulated and swollen. His beard was down to a light scruff and his hair was the dull metallic color of unpolished steel.

  “What was it like in Hermosa Beach?” He stirred NutraSweet into his coffee. “I’ve lived here thirty years and have never been.”

  “It’s incredibly boring.” She could see him seeing her too. Emily White. Pale, five eight, with wavy hair that fell to her shoulders, coral lips, and green eyes. She had a mole above her lip just like Cindy Crawford’s, but somehow, it didn’t quite add up to all-out combustible beauty. Too sweet. “I hated it, growing up.”

  “So you fled all the way to Irvine. The mean streets of the big city.”

  She laughed. How could she not? She thought of a proverb she’d heard growing up: El hombre es como un oso, el mas feo, el mas hermoso. A man is like a bear, the more ugly, the more beautiful.

  “How do you afford all this?” he asked. It was eight thirty, and he showed no hurry to get back to bossing her around. The check was here ten minutes ago. “What do your parents do?”

  “I don’t afford any of it,” she said. “Am I buying you breakfast?”

  “Of course not.” He dragged the check over now. “No way.”

  “Well, then. My mother was a schoolteacher. Dead, now. My father worked for Lockheed Martin, but he’s in a wheelchair. He was in a car accident a few years ago, so he’s on SSI.”

  “Oh.” He rubbed his hands together. “My mother died young too. My dad had a shoe shop. In Queens.”

  From outside came the sound of people splashing in a swimming pool. Sugar sparkled on the tabletop, like diamond dust; at such an hour, the room’s green and plant-scattered stillness seemed a form of perversion.

  “Do you want a job?” Beau said, as the waiter came over and whisked the check from his hand. Emily White, I think, reminded him of what it was to be genuine. “A real one?”

  VII

  WHAT WAS THE bee in Beau’s bonnet? When had the man become such a pain? Those little fits like the one he had back when Emily first came into his office were typical these days, and if he could still turn around and act like a pussycat . . . he really had become an ass. What had changed? Was it that he no longer had a partner who cooled him out, offered a more rational model of human behavior? Did he need another psychiatrist?

  In 1991, he’d gotten married and was now divorcing again—blink and you missed her, that third Mrs. Ro—and lately his kids had gotten into some sort of a jam with Little Will. Oh sure, he knew all about it, the overdose and the memory loss and the whole foolish shebang. Heroin? Who did that shit? Only schvartzes and gangsters did when he was younger, hardcore Italians and weirdo beatniks. He’d met one of those once, in New York. Herbert Huncke. Now he was so shaken he visited Little Will in the hospital. Can you believe it? Digging deep to look after his old vanquisher’s son, who seemed to be just as tough as his dad: there’d been some scare about his memory, but evidently the kid was progressing just fine. It really upset Beau, though, and the first thing he did upon finding out what had happened was drag Severin by the ear and throw him into rehab. Me he wasn’t worried about—I told him I was clean and he believed me—but Sev? He hustled my brother out to Malibu for one of those thirty-thousand-dollar drug-free “vacations.” I don’t want to hear about it, Severin. You’re my son, and smack isn’t marijuana.

  The funny thing was, it wasn’t necessary. All by himself Sev kicked everything except pot and began working like a maniac to revise his second novel. Even as I kept struggling, he began taking meetings around town on his own. And you want to know what I think? I think this pissed Beau off: the fact that his son was writing, and in fact, writing well. Isn’t that nuts? His son was talented, and this bugged the shit out of him.

  He’d never admit it, but I know it bothered him. Even when he was finalizing his divorce that summer—the third Mrs. Ro was his dog walker, a twenty-four-year-old UCLA grad who vacillated between wanting to become a hygienist and wanting to run an animal shelter; she talked about these two things alone, so incessantly he finally had no choice but to divorce her—even that didn’t wig Beau out as much as this did.

  “God.” He was talking to himself, now. “Why would anyone do such a thing?”

  “What?” Emily was on the couch in his office. “Do what?”

  “Write.”

  They’d just wrapped up a meeting. Six months had passed since that breakfast at the Peninsula, and Emily was now his creative executive. She and Severin had been dating for a little while, and though Beau wasn’t aware of their involvement, this he would’ve been proud of if he’d known. Severin showing good judgment for on
ce.

  “Would it be so bad?” Emily laughed. She bent and picked up the notes she’d taken on a yellow pad, during the pitch that had just ended. “We meet with writers all day.”

  “Exactly.” Beau nodded at the door, toward the kid they’d just dismissed. “That poor schmuck is going to do this nine times in the next forty-eight hours. And it’s just gonna leave him with a lot of hard work festering in a drawer.”

  “OK,” Emily said. Perhaps unconsciously, she took Severin’s side. “But he can come up with another idea after this. He controls the future. We just sit here and wait for people to bring us the gold.”

  “Or the shit.” Beau yawned. The girl had a lot to learn. “Not that there’s necessarily a difference.”

  Ten thirty AM. The meeting had ended on the dot. The coffees weren’t cold, the phone had interrupted them three times. Emily was the one who could handle the writers. That was why my father trusted her. She might’ve been full of airy-fairy ideas, but this was why he liked her. There was an openness to her, a seeming simplicity and sweetness he’d all but forgotten was possible. She smelled of distant Malibu afternoons. Is it too much to suggest she might’ve reminded him of someone from long, long ago?

  “How come you never bring Dill into these meetings?” Emily said. “He’s great at story.”

  Someone closer to him than anyone, maybe. More beloved than anyone had ever been.

  “He’s too much like his pops. His father was the most undisciplined writer I’ve ever met. He was so busy being a genius, he never buckled down to work. Dill doesn’t ask the right questions. Someone comes in here and wants to remake Vivre sa Vie, he doesn’t say, Who’s going to see that fucking movie, since nobody saw it the first time? He says, Ooh, Shoot the Piano Player, fucking Bresson. He doesn’t understand the—”

  “We should remake that.”

  Emily White looked the same just then as she had in the beginning. She was perhaps a little better dressed. Gray pinstripe jacket, sunglasses propped up on her head, bottled water tucked under her arm. She’d figured out a few things, and Darcy was on vacation, so she was in Beau’s office alone.