“… suck me,” Alan hissed.
What next? Was the guy ready to whack him over a mistake? Alan tried to dial 911 to get a cop, trying to watch the road. Fast busy signal. Canyon; a coffin.
The tunnel was ahead and Alan was out of shoulder, road, time. He slammed on the brakes, skidded through dirt. Sat in exhaust and dust; a gas chamber. Frantic boot-steps. A sweating face at his window.
Alan stared forward, didn’t move, trembling. He could jam the 928 in reverse, floor it; maybe there was room, maybe he—
“Get out!” Pounding window.
The engine died. Wouldn’t start.
The man came around, peered in through windshield. Alan looked down, avoiding, afraid. The man tapped with false calm; fingertip rain.
“Now.”
“Go away.” Mouth dry.
The man became furious. Grabbed a big rock, smashed the driver’s window, reached through, opened the door. Yanked Alan out. Alan stood before him, paralyzed. Tried to get mad but couldn’t. Tried to fight back, resist; handle it. Wanted to talk reason; somehow be friends. But he couldn’t move, a terrified child.
“Don’t like the way you drive, asshole!”
A shaking voice. “… it was a mistake. I’m sorry. Please, let’s just—”
The man threw Alan against the hood, then dragged him over to the truck. Made him look into the truck cabin.
“Apologize to my girlfriend, you sonofabitch!”
A girl, nineteen, sat on the torn seat, nervous; embarrassed. Alan apologized but could see in her eyes how afraid she, too, felt. How impotent. He saw in her eyes what he knew she saw in his.
She looked like she might try to say something to make the guy stop, but Alan was suddenly punched in the gut, and stared up from ground at cowboy boots, coming closer. A boot was on his throat, the face started to put weight on it. Grinned, enjoying, glancing at his girlfriend for a praising look. But she had turned away, hating this. Alan couldn’t breathe; began to black out.
Alan’s eyes opened.
His body ached. He tasted blood and stared at a black wall with little raised words on it. Focused, realized it was his front tire. He rolled over, slow pain. Traffic whooshed in and out of the nearby tunnel. Horns echoed; teenagers.
He tried to get up, suddenly saw the truck was still there. Jerked back. Eyes searching. Was the Stetson waiting for a second attack? Went to take a leak? Come back and shove him over the side? Tie him to his steering wheel, cram a gas-soaked rag in his mouth, light it; push the car over the cliff? Alan crawled toward his Porsche, terror rising. Wanting to escape. Then, he heard it. Soft crying.
He stopped, stunned. Swallowed blood.
Legs protruded from bushes, beside the Porsche. Pants torn, red oozing onto boot embroidery. Alan slid toward him. He was bloody, unconscious. Clumps of his hair had been ripped out. Several fingers were bloated blue; snapped. Eyelids swollen. One ear hung partially from the head. There were bite marks.
The girl sat cross-legged in dirt, cradling him.
Alan stared in confusion; didn’t remember a fight. Had she tried to stop it and the guy hit her? Did she stagger back to the truck and take a tire iron, fight back; totally lose it? He couldn’t think straight. Could only remember being knocked out.
He tried to say something to her and she looked up. Began to scream. She told him to stay away; threw a rock at him. She said he’d almost killed her boyfriend. Alan didn’t understand, then looked at his own hands; knuckles bloody. Skin and hair under nails. He felt sick; lost. It was impossible.
He’d never been in a fight in his life.
subtext two
Stare glazed. Fingers plucking sofa fabric. Voice trying to water down deep fires.
“… you know, these network people … they just sit there and expect you to solve every problem they’ve created for themselves. Their crops wilt and you’re the savior who’ll reverse their dead schedule. Correct their bad choices. It just offends me. But you can’t tell them. They’ll punish you … politically fuck you.”
A sip of water. Feeling dust crawl over tongue and gums. Feeling irritable. Sounding calm.
“I try so hard to be fair, you know? But what’s the point? It’s like … I mean, Andy Singer is a barely fertilized egg and he hasn’t got clue one about innovation or quality. I mean, he’s ten fucking years old.”
An amused note taken.
“I’m only exaggerating a little. These are people who should be worried exclusively about clearing up their complexions and they’re running fucking networks. And I just act very friendly … but inside I’ve got this constant, running commentary going about which mind near me is most vacant.”
Silence. Two men, in a two-man church.
“Some of the things that little prick said in the pitch meeting the other day. When he said my friend Eddy, who’s dying, was nothing to him. Like he never existed. Like his whole life never happened.”
Face flushing. Fingers pointing; guns.
“I wanted to just …”
Styrofoam cup torn; skinned alive. A quick glance.
“I tell you my dad called me? It was strange …”
A haunted distance.
“Everything is strange …”
A lost smile.
two months later
creative
differences
The room was dim, padded like a psychiatric observation chamber. Five rows of thickly upholstered living-room chairs faced a huge screen, and the projectionist remained in the room behind, taking orders by intercom.
Two network panzers sat in the middle row, sipping coffee and talking about the latest gossip trickling in from CAA’s annual confront weekend, in Palm Springs, where all the agents spent two days telling each other the truth, in a way that sounded good.
Alan sat beside Marty and “The Mercenary’s” pilot second-unit director, Bo Bixby, a muscular, former stuntman who looked like a Norwegian Norman Mailer. Bo favored dressing in a smoky gray flight suit; a stoic obelisk. Alan called him “the line you draw between madness and fearlessness,” and Bo loved that.
He’d quit working as a stuntman after turning both knees to cheap hinges in a high fall off the Century Plaza Hotel for an episode of “Knight Rider” where Kitt the talking car got infected gaskets or some inspired twist a nation hungered to see.
Bo was famous for helicopter falls into airbags and always spoke very softly, as if his larynx was turned to 1. He’d become a second-unit director, handling the stunts and action the first-unit guys didn’t want to bother with for reasons of time or esthetics. Bo had done a million big action pictures and was one of the best. His footage got in your face with urgent realism.
A row in front of him, sat the two editors, Jack and Jackie, a married couple, who listened for which takes the producers preferred, so a fast first assembly could be managed and the network could see an early cut ASAP.
They were all there to see the first set of dailies and waited for Hector, who was late.
“Let’s run ’em for you guys,” Alan suggested. “I’ll run ’em again for Hector when he shows.”
“He must’ve stopped off to hallucinate somewhere,” cracked Greg Gunnar, network liaison number two, to Scot Bloom, network liaison number one. They both had happy little Montessori faces and were twenty-four and twenty-six.
“Yeah, exactly …” added Scot.
Alan buzzed the projectionist. “Brace yourselves, boys and girls,” he said.
Scot squooshed down into the chair, feet on the chair-back in front of him, loafers kneading. The lights came down and the screen was suddenly filled with huge underwater closeups of dead faces, eyes staring.
The camera did a slow creep through harsh glare, from one corpse to the next, and 747 windows could be seen in backgound, ghostly ovals. Glassy eyes and drowned stares anchored floating hair.
“Love scene …?” Gunnar delivered it just right and scattered chuckles rumbled in darkness.
“… very eerie,
Alan.” Scot was watching, tilting his head in a troubled posture, repelled; drawn.
“… little camera jiggle there,” said Marty, jotting notes onto a clipboard with a tiny light attached. “Second take should be better.”
Alan nodded. Liked what he was seeing.
He and Hector had been arguing about the look of this scene two days earlier and though Bo offered to shoot it, Hector wanted first crack. Bo agreed to set up the big tank on the back lot, gather stunt people who’d descend into the sunken fuselage cutaway, in passenger clothes, be seat-belted in, then wait for the divers with oxygen until the camera tracked past. Finding a kid actor who was a qualified diver to play the dead boy and getting parental sanction had been a bitch.
But now that his ex-wife was financially colostomizing him, Marty was motivated.
Alan watched, startled by the effect.
The white faces, slightly plumped by death, were exactly what he’d imagined when he’d written the scene. The crashed tomb with bottom-of-the-ocean lighting, filled with vacant, executed faces was stunning. More upsetting than he’d imagined it would be.
It was working and he was relieved. He’d been afraid Hector was going to take it his own way, if not outright fuck it up the ass with some bullshit approach, heavy on unmotivated zooms, bombast angles. He’d even considered firing him when he finally, actually realized how difficult Hector really could be; with or without coke.
When he’d told Hector in their first conceptual meeting about “The Mercenary” pilot that he wanted Corea to look cut-off and let it all play in the eyes, Hector, the ever-defensive child, had taken a long pause and Alan sensed the legendary wrecking ball of peevishness swinging. Hector fell silent and merely glared for two or three minutes as Alan explained his original vision, as creator.
Hector, rather obviously, couldn’t’ve cared less.
They’d argued for a long time, and though Alan never directly threatened to let Hector go, the implication was there. Especially when Hector told Alan about how he’d been tinkering with the script to get it “up to speed” and Alan smothered that fast.
When you boiled it right down, the more Alan got to know him, the less he wanted to. He was, true to all accounts, a lunatic. He was also a potentially grave liability and Alan had to watch him every step of the way for fear he’d go amuck and jackhammer the whole project into ego-rubble.
The underwater footage was over and the reels changed to a scene where A. E. Barek first meets his Army contact and old friend, General Jack Garris. In the pilot script, as written, the two had served together, as Black Berets, lived in trenches filled with corpses, and belly-crawled over their own dead men to slaughter enemies all over the globe. They’d hidden in treetops, killed together with bare hands. Garris was one of Alan’s favorite characters in the series.
Garris had become a general after escaping from a POW camp they’d both been held in while Barek wasted away in a hanging bamboo cage, after being captured, trying to make sure Garris made it. Thanks to Barek, Garris got away and he didn’t.
In the POW camp, where Alan had written graphic scenes of pain and degradation, Barek was tortured daily until Garris, working from the outside, helped him to escape.
The two-hundred-thousand-dollar escape scene included a helicopter armada and a shocking massacre at the guerilla guard village near the POW camp. Several teenage village girls would be filmed naked, bathing in a river, as Garris’s soldiers snaked through jungle, near shore, slitting throats.
The scene on screen, right now, was set in a red-light bar in Saigon, where two girls danced topless, and the actor playing Garris, Simon Buss, looked nonplussed about the reunion, drinking a Sapporo. It was the wrong performance and Alan hated it. Corea, face scarred by years of deadly missions, was animated and happy to see Garris and it couldn’t have been more wrong. Barek should’ve been weak and scathed by what he’d been through. Smiling was completely off. Things were emotionally backwards.
Alan was about to try and get Hector on his carphone when the door opened and light plunged in; a yellow King Kong arm. Hector entered, mumbled apology for being late, slumped into a chair in the front row, hair belted by a bandana. He sniffed like a Dristan commerical and Alan wondered if he was fucked-up.
“Hey, Hector …” said Bo.
Hector lifted his arm straight up, then dropped it. Greg Gunnar turned in his seat and whispered something to Scot who nodded. Scot faced Alan, spoke low.
“Alan, isn’t Barek a little big here?”
Alan tried to decide if he wanted to take the rap or just bust Hector in front of everybody.
“I don’t agree …” said Hector, loudly, overhearing. “I think the man is emotionally moved to be out of the camp and a bit joyous at this—” he waved fingers around, searching, “momentous re-bonding with his old pal.”
No one said anything and the scene continued to play, all wrong; false and strained. Simon, though he’d won two Emmys and stewed with fierce presence, wasn’t coming across. And Corea’s performance was dissonant; smiles and grimaces in search of a focus.
Hector had missed the point.
Marty discreetly bent his mouth to Alan’s ear. “What do you want to do? We can’t use any of this bar stuff. All needs to be re-shot.”
Alan whispered back. “I’ll have to get him to do it over. We’re already overbudget … we’re only into our third day. We’re all over the road if Hector doesn’t get our act together …”
Gunnar and Bloom had fallen conspicuously silent and the room went dense with wordless disapproval. Fear. Hector chuckled to himself at the scene and at one point called out with a confident, bemused voice.
“So, Alan … do you love it?”
Bloom, unable to miss the terrible awkwardness, tried to save the moment. He’d even planned for something like this, having told Alan confidentially, that morning, that if things got unworkable with Hector, the network would play bad guy and beat him up. Alan said he thought Hector would do a great job but listened appreciatively, wanting network support, especially if re-shooting was required.
“Hector … wasn’t the tone supposed to be more restrained in Barek’s performance?” Bloom sounded reasonable. Gunnar backed him up, saying that was how he’d read it, too. They both said the network, and particularly Andy Singer, had been “looking forward to that.”
Hector said nothing.
The room didn’t move. Alan and Bo exchanged looks.
Bloom took another stab. “Look, Hector, this isn’t … really the feeling we want with this guy.”
“Right. Or with Garris, either,” added Gunnar, to underline.
Hector didn’t turn his head. Just continued watching the dailies. “I see,” was all he said.
Alan cleared his throat, not anxious for an argument that would Jim Jones the whole production. Hector had done this too many times to too many other films. Alan wasn’t going to let him blow his first big pilot.
“Hector, we’re just talking about a readjustment. Not a new show.”
“Absolutely,” added Marty, looking right at Alan, trying to help.
Bloom picked up on the thought. “Look, maybe later in the year we can do an episode where Barek shows some bigger emotions. But for now, we wanna shoot for a certain feel.”
Silence.
“… so what are you saying?” asked Hector, staring dead-ahead, hair suffocated by the bandana.
“We’ll need to re-shoot,” said Bloom.
Hector said nothing. No amuck threats. No steaming tantrum. After several seconds of coffin-still, he simply stood, blocking the projection beam. Then, as his silhouette clung to the screen, he withdrew the .38 from his shoulder holster, turned to face them all, and shot Scot Bloom. The bullet went into Scot’s boyish chest and blood geysered from his monogrammed pocket.
Gunnar was in shock but managed to comfort the young programmer’s slumped form, like Jackie, when she held Jack in the limo, in Dallas.
Bo tried to lunge for Hector a
nd was shot in the thigh, as all looked on in horror. Bo fell to the floor, hissing in pain, bleeding on carpet.
Then, as if he hadn’t planned it at all, and was being forced into the decision by some outside force, Hector turned the pistol’s barrel to his own open mouth. He looked puzzled and made a stunned sound as he pulled the trigger and his troubled mind exploded, flocking walls, chairs, and Armani blends.
Bits of his tormented head even sprayed the screen and the nearly hysterical Greg Gunnar, who’d just joined the network, after graduating from Yale. This was the closest Greg had ever come to being touched by original thought and he screamed, face covered with Hector’s schizophrenic pulp.
Alan quickly moved everyone out of the projection room and called studio security. Marty went to the bathroom to throw up. Both editors were pale. One passed out. As they waited for an ambulance, Bo tourniqueted his own leg and talked about a “fag costume guy” he’d worked with on a huge feature who’d become depressed and completely severed his penis on location with a knife. The anecdote only made things worse. Alan went into the screening room to help Greg comfort Scot Bloom who was dying, losing blood, calling out for his mother.
When Jordan heard what had happened, an hour later, he called from his XJS and expressed shock. Then, just as he was about to enter a tunnel, he told Alan there was another guy he represented who’d become available and made Hector’s directing look hackneyed.
He said Hector was a moody guy and things like this happened sometimes. Alan was moved by the insight and as Jordan went into a tunnel, he broke up and vanished.
Alan went home early that afternoon and stared out at the Pacific. The bluish water looked like blood in a body and when it struck the sand, it was a wound that went up the coastline; a vast, never healing cut. He tried to comprehend how many things had gone wrong in a few hours. His director had shot lousy footage, a network liaison, a second unit director, and himself.
Alan smoked a joint, stared into space, and pet Bart until the sun went down.
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