American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “I’ll just go find us another movie.” She smiled, before she turned back down the hall. The phone on his desk gave a little burp, a muted purr. “That should make it a little easier for you to afford me.”

  “Dark.”

  That’s what he said, though, when she finally did bring him that movie, in the form of an article from Texas Monthly. She brought him exactly what he needed, and he didn’t get it at all.

  “We can’t make this.” He shook the photocopied sheets at her and burped. “It’s too depressing.”

  “It isn’t.” She was ready to go toe-to-toe with him, leaning against his desk. “It’s hopeful.”

  “The studio will never make it.”

  “You don’t know that.” Indeed, what she didn’t, couldn’t say was that she knew the studio by now a little better than he did. She had Lucinda. He was spinning his wheels, no kidding, trying to get the animatronic gang back together for a sequel to Pete. But chimpanzees were no longer a slam dunk. The stuffed animals were all gone now, his office’s once vibrant chaos pared back to austerity. “I want to take it in.”

  He eyed her. This was new; she’d never tried to go around him. But y’know what, if she wanted to, why not? Why shouldn’t he let her go all the way?

  “They won’t bite. It’s not a movie.”

  “Wanna bet? I’ve got a nice car I could wager.”

  He laughed. But if he’d taken her up on it, he might’ve won a DeLorean. For once, Lucinda agreed with Beau.

  “I don’t know.” Emily took it to her personally, walked it into her cold, slate gray office instead of faxing or e-mailing. But Lucinda squinted up like Emily’s face might contain more of interest than the article. She didn’t get it either. “I thought you people made comedies.”

  “I thought you wanted my passion.”

  “I did. I do. Just . . . coal miners? That’s older school than Rosenfrog. You wanna bring Sissy Spacek out of retirement?”

  “It’s younger than that. It’s complex. The characters are interesting.”

  Lucinda snorted. What were you supposed to do with “interesting” characters? The article was about miners caught in a collapsed shaft. Difficult material, blue collar, and a television movie in the wrong hands. By 1998, studios didn’t make things like this. They did Shakespeare, if you set it in high school; they made spectacles in which the world was destroyed by fire. They did not make stories set in fucking caves, unless those caves happened to contain treasure and elves.

  “Tough stuff, Em.”

  “Tough,” Emily said, “but I want it. I gave it to David Peoples, and he loves it. He thinks the CEO is a great character.”

  “He is a great character, and David’s a great writer, but audiences don’t want to spend that much time in a hole. This is a Searchlight movie.”

  “Audiences do when they’re spending the time with Tom Hanks.” Emily flicked her finger at the executive, like she was dismissing an insect. “I want it.”

  “You want it.”

  Lucinda squinted at her, and Emily again had that feeling she was fulfilling a prophecy. When they’d met, Lucinda had asked her for her passion. This was it. Except Emily didn’t feel anything; her urgency was predicated upon something else, a cool dissociation. When she was a little girl, her father had taken her to see Bambi. It was the first movie she ever saw, and of course, when the fawn’s mother died she was completely inconsolable. Her father had carried her out of the theater and told her what parents always did: It’s only a movie, Em, it isn’t real, it’s just make-believe.

  It’s just make-believe.

  This was her life. Why couldn’t she feel it?

  “I do want it,” she said. “I do.”

  Lucinda smiled. And whether it was the prospect of defeating her old enemy, or the idea of satisfying her protégée’s wish, it’s hard to say, but she had the capacity to make this particular dream come true.

  “Rosenfrog’s not into it, huh?”

  Emily shook her head. “He hates it.”

  Lucinda nodded. Emily didn’t understand that either. She didn’t “hate” anything, didn’t have the energy or the drive or the meanness. How much easier her life would’ve been, maybe, if she had.

  “Yes,” Lucinda said. Tiger stripes of light fell on her desk, through slatted blinds to her right. “I’ll buy it for you. Not Beau. You’ll produce it.”

  Emily should’ve whooped. But it turned out getting what you wanted wasn’t any better. It didn’t clarify things in the slightest.

  “Is there anyone else into it?” Lucinda asked. “Other buyers?”

  “Scott Rudin. Karen Kehela.” Emily turned now, aware that piling on the names of competitors, the various entities around town who were after the same thing, was gratuitous. But it never hurt to know. Having something only really counted when you were taking it away from someone else. “I think Universal’s going to make a play for it for Ron Howard.”

  “All right,” Lucinda said. “I’ll call Markhamson, and we’ll make it happen.”

  X

  “WHO?”

  “Beau Rosenwald.” Emily’s assistant’s voice crackled through the squawk box at the bottom of Em’s desk in her new office in Thalberg.

  “Oh.” Is it so terrible that her first impulse was to say, I’ll call back? “Put him through.”

  “Honey!” Beau’s voice greeted her, pouring heavily into her ear. “How are you, sweetheart?”

  The one thing she could never get used to: her former boss’s obsequiousness, now that he could no longer just trample into her office at will to chew the fat, now that he was the needy one and she the possessor of power.

  “The same, Beau.” She exhaled, adjusted her headset. Sleepless, sore-nippled, but otherwise she felt the same. “I’m OK.”

  The possessor of everything: husband, studio checkbook, child. She didn’t quite have greenlight power, that was Lucinda’s, but it was close. And even so, it hadn’t changed much. The new job was just like the old job. There was more of it, and having a six-month-old to look after at home certainly complicated things, but at times like this? She only wondered why it wasn’t more satisfying.

  “I can’t believe,” Beau wheezed, “you used to be my intern. You did coverage for me!”

  “I did.” Dear Lord, the coverage on the script Beau was flogging to her now was terrible, both as regarded the quality of the script—it was awful, a straight pass—and of the reader’s report itself. Whoever wrote it deserved a basketball to the head. “A long time ago.”

  Her title now was executive vice president, at a branch of the studio that had been recently created to make movies oriented toward adult women. Lucinda Vogel had been tapped to run the specialty division, and Emily, to no one’s surprise, had come over with her.

  “So.” Emily leaned back, twirled a pencil between her fingers and cocked her head, listening through her earpiece. “About this script.”

  Late fall, 2000. How easily she took to a job that was all about the balance sheet, where she might not in a million years have greenlit the very movie that had gotten it for her. Coal miners? Not a chance. Some idiotic comedy about a displaced mob boss who becomes an urban schoolteacher, which would’ve been retrograde in 1989? Less chance even than that. Severin and I may have had our hands full that summer—I was in the beginning stages of a divorce, and Sev’s wife, Lexy, had miscarried in the spring—but Beau’s own hands were to remain empty, even as his ex-employee was on top of the world. Through her window in the Thalberg Building, Emily could see a field of orange poppies, a blazing carpet of them. In 1939, the year they made The Wizard of Oz, this lot had been MGM. So much had changed since then, but so much had changed too since what Emily couldn’t help thinking of as the Rosenwaldian Era. Like the Mesozoic, the Paleozoic.

  “Joe Pesci wants to do it.”

  Joe Pesci? In her secret heart, Emily smiled. Why not Jerry Lewis? Beau just bulled along, pitching stupid comedies to anyone who’d listen. And to those who wo
uldn’t. God bless him.

  “Beau. Sweetheart.” She was pretty sure he couldn’t even hear her teasing him, mocking his own style. “This isn’t for us. Sorry.”

  “What do you mean? This is for everybody. Listen . . . ”

  Even as she allowed him a minute to make his lamebrained case, she wondered: What was for “us”? Certainly not 27 Heads in a Duffel Bag, or whatever the hell he was blabbing about exactly, but Columbia Vita had been incubated in the mid-1990s, at a time when it was somehow believed that the adult female audience was the key to the future. This notion was already in dispute by the time they were off the ground—obviously, the key demographic was adolescent males—but David Markhamson, the English muck-a-muck who oversaw all three divisions of the studio, refused to pull the plug. He was loyal to his original idea and, it was said, to Lucinda, whom he loved.

  “Listen, Beau, I’m sorry,” Emily said, after an interval in which she allowed him to make an idiot of himself and so feel he’d tried. “It’s out of the question. Better for MGM.” Or some half-witted European financier who doesn’t understand Joe Pesci’s been dead since ’96, who probably doesn’t know Joe Pesci from Joe Piscopo. “This movie’s not for us.”

  “All right, Em.” She could hear how crestfallen he was, too, how easily he gave up compared to how he used to be. “We’ll keep trying.”

  Markhamson believed it was unwise to make movies for more than ten million dollars but less than eighty: you could make expensive spectacles or inexpensive indies, but the budgetary range in between was suicide. “The mushy middle,” he called it. And Beau Rosenwald was, alas, of mushier middle than most. His deal was up soon, and there was no way Sony would renew it.

  “That we will.”

  She hung up. Feeling a little twinge of sadness when Beau didn’t call right back, when her phone just sat there, silent.

  That fall, Emily White was thirty-one years old. She seldom even saw Beau anymore. Sometimes she’d spot him shambling around the lot, gray slacks and deranged hair, white shirt with the sleeves rolled, gold watch. He looked like a mental patient who’d escaped and mugged a Beverly Hills tailor.

  “Em—”

  “Huh?” She whirled. Lucinda was standing in the doorway, leaning into her office from the frame. Arms stretched behind her back.

  “You going to the Markhamson thing?”

  Emily nodded. “Seven thirty, yeah?”

  Lucinda, too, was pregnant. The proud father was her girlfriend of three years. Prospective motherhood wasn’t mellowing her in the slightest: it just gave her killer instincts new places to go. Already she was flinging money at schools, donating to the Center for Early Education on behalf of a child who wasn’t even born yet. She stood in the doorway with eight months of Versace-sheathed belly thrust into Emily’s office. The “Markhamson Thing” was a fund-raiser, spearheaded by the boss’s wife, to fight breast cancer.

  “Pick me up,” Lucinda said. “Maryse is sick and can’t go.”

  Just so, Emily wouldn’t subject her husband, an entertainment lawyer, to this sort of long-form boredom either. “OK.”

  Things had changed. The two women faced off, each one the other’s minor mirror in pregnancy and style. If Emily couldn’t match Lucinda for sheer meanness and drive, she could still do it for expediency. Who knew if she loved her husband, or her job, or the movies? Sometimes she felt the only adult thing she’d ever loved was Beau.

  “What’s eating you?” Lucinda said. And Emily shook her head, so as not to admit her sadness. She stood and walked to her window, where she gazed out at the hazy gray distances beyond the studio walls. She could see the Santa Monica Mountains, barely: they were white whispers, chalk marks on a scrim. Now and then with this view, Emily got caught up in that theatrical feeling she’d had the day she first met Lucinda, like her life was a play and yet she was the only actor in it.

  “Nothing. I’m just thinking.”

  “You don’t get paid to think,” Lucinda grimaced, playfully. “You get paid to do the math.”

  What is the matter, my lord?

  “Yep.”

  This maxim about the math was Markhamson all over, although Lucinda lacked the Englishman’s wry politesse, the way he could say such a thing without sounding crass. Pregnancy only seemed to enhance Lucinda’s crassness, in fact. She was distended in the way of a boa constrictor who’s swallowed a small mammal. Lipstick slashed her face in a way that was vaguely, perhaps even intentionally, crude.

  “Byron Lawrence?” Emily’s assistant’s voice came through the box.

  “I’ll take it,” Emily called back.

  Lucinda spun and went away, her dark frame, still skinny from the back, flouncing down the hall. Emily went to her desk and picked up the phone, this time to talk to a young operator from ADM whose swift, shrewd, and incisive proposals couldn’t have been less like Beau’s.

  “Byron?” Unconsciously, though, she mimicked her old boss’s mannerisms. “How are you, my dear?”

  Unconsciously, because Beau Rosenwald was almost gone from her life, but he was certainly not forgotten. Whereas Emily herself, imprisoned in the muted cocoon of her beautiful new office—it was sleek as a hotel suite, all piano blacks and elevator grays—had doubts about her own status. She leaned back, adjusted her headset, rolled up her sleeve. Her arm was pale as a calla lily.

  “Hmm.” She smiled. “Natalie Portman? I like that idea.”

  She drank from a glass of iced green tea. And wondered, even as she knew she’d arrived, where she was, and if she was ever really there.

  XI

  “I HAVE TO GET BACK.”

  “What?” I looked at Severin. “Dude, no, let’s share a cab.”

  “We can all share,” Little Will said. “It’s not a problem.”

  Interesting to see how far we’d come, as the three of us pushed away our plates at a restaurant called Home in the West Village. A narrow room with wooden booths jutting out of its eastern wall, a thin radiance beating down from overhead. We were scarcely three blocks from the place Beau had first come together with Severin’s mom. Maybe we owed our lives to this city after all.

  “I’ll get it,” I said, as I took a last sip of wine and reached for the check.

  “No, no, let Mr. National Book Critics Circle pick it up,” Will snickered.

  I pushed Severin’s hand away. “Rupert Murdoch’ll do it,” I said. “My corporation’s rock beats your HP printer’s paper.”

  Soon, I’d quit my job at Fox and be writing again. Soon, I’d finalize my divorce and move home to LA, but just then we were all together in New York, swirling around in our primitive adult fortune and dismay.

  “Remember Emily White?” I said.

  “Sure.” Severin shrugged. “What about her?”

  “She’s this close to running a studio now.”

  “Really?”

  Severin blinked, behind his glasses. I couldn’t tell if he was surprised or just indifferent. Little Will murmured. Huh. He probably didn’t remember Emily; he’d left town before her time really began.

  “Yeah.” I signed for the check, and together we tumbled out of our booth and into the street. Our thickening bodies roiled close to one another’s. We still moved like a small pack, like the teenage wolves we’d once been.

  “Look.” Williams stopped to ogle some Zeppelin bootleg in the window of a basement record store, bending over a metal railing to look down. “Cool.”

  “You’ve already got that one, Will.” Severin stood behind him, smiling faintly. Will’s mind may have been functioning almost normally again, sure, but occasionally he was hazy around the details.

  “I do?” Williams squinted, and Sev nudged me. “Fuck you, I don’t.”

  Severin burst out laughing.

  For a moment, our fuckups were something to laugh about. Severin’s fourth novel, Peckerhead—the one about a New York orphan’s search for his missing mother—had won the National Book Critics Circle Award. What could be wrong?

/>   “I remember better than you do,” Will muttered, as he spotted a cab on Avenue of the Americas and strode forward to hail it.

  Our voices were dead on the empty street, caroming flatly off the faces of the brick row houses and brownstones, our steps echoing a little as we scuttled up to the cab. Will was in a hurry to get home to his wife and six-month-old son; Severin, I guess, to whatever he was writing now, or else to Lexy, his own wife, who was also a novelist. I had no particular place to go, but I ambled after them.

  “You OK, Nate?” Sev grabbed my bicep after Williams ducked into the backseat.

  I nodded. What was there to say? I’d gotten married, and it had lasted all of three years. The marriage was scuppered by all the things you’d expect on my side: selfishness, spaciness, and inattention. You know my flaws by now. I wasn’t heartbroken so much as I was, simply, lost. I was my mother’s son and first I’d been Teddy’s, then Beau’s. How was I supposed to know what made adults capable of living together?

  “You hear from Lizzie?”

  I shook my head. I’d married a Waspy girl from Connecticut, a business-school blonde. Disaster. Sev squeezed my arm, and we dodged into the cab, his lime green shirt flashing in front of me as he took the middle. My brother the famous novelist, protective of me to the end.

  Or perhaps not. I flopped into the back beside him, on an unseasonably hot night in October. The cabbie shot up toward Eighth, where he’d loop around to Bowery, the direction we all needed to go. I might have envied Sev, but he was still as dark to me as he’d ever been.

  He stared straight ahead. Little Will did the same. The latter didn’t look like his dad, for whom I was also still searching all the time. Who knew why? The more I discovered myself in business, the more I feared I could be like him, the chilly executive; the more I felt myself and the elder Williams align.

  “You talked to Beau lately?” I muttered, but Severin didn’t hear. Or else he just ignored me. I thought he was on to his own apotheosis, was all: just as Beau had risen beyond his father, Severin had made it, and moved away.