Selling Out

by Dan Wakefield

  “Urgent.”

  That was the last message left by Ravenna with his service. The two before had just said to call her, the last one said urgent. It was almost three in the afternoon when Perry got back to his condo from another night of carousing with Ronnie that ended up with his passing out on his buddy’s couch again. It was getting to be a habit. He had hoped to just sink into his own bed and “General Hospital” while sipping some Pepto Bismol and munching on a bag of nachos. When he really wanted to hear an “All clear” from his answering service he got an “Urgent.” Of course he had to return the call, even though his head was splitting.

  “Darling, you’ve only got two hours!” Ravenna practically shrieked.

  To live?

  “Two hours to what?” Perry asked, using all his powers of concentration to frame the question.

  “To get to Larman Kling’s office.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Sweetheart. Larman Kling did Planet Zero, and his latest is Schtick, which happens to be outgrossing everything this week at the box office. He’s hot right now.”

  No wonder the urgency. No wonder Perry had to get to this guy’s office by five o’clock. He was hot right now. By nightfall he might be cold again. The only question was why anyone who was hot was interested in seeing him.

  “What’s it about?” Perry asked suspiciously.

  “A project he thinks is ideal for you! He was gaga about ‘First Year.’ Went bananas when I told him I represented you.”

  “What’s the project?”

  “Darling, go find out! And hurry, I don’t want you turning up a minute late to this meeting and you’ve got to get to Century City. Ciao.”

  Perry hung up the phone and started taking off his clothes, dropping them on the floor, leaving a trail as he headed for the shower. He switched on the cold water and made the mistake then of going to take a look at himself in the mirror.

  He was old.

  Maybe the shower would make him new. That and a handful of aspirins were his principal hope.

  Larman Kling was not like the cool, sophisticated brand of independent producer whom Perry had so much admired in his initial round of meetings. Nor was he one of the meatball-chomping Neanderthal types. In fact he was not like anyone or anything Perry had encountered before, in Hollywood or elsewhere.

  “Sha-boom, sha-boom, sha-boom, sha-boom,” Kling chanted as he clapped his hands in rhythm to his words while he stalked (frenetically) back and forth through his office.

  “It’s the pace, the pace, the pace; that’s the key to this story,” Kling explained, rubbing his scalp with his knuckles so hard it made him squint. Perhaps that was the source of some interior electric body current that caused his reddish hair to frizz out as that of a cartoon character who has just stuck his finger in a live socket. He was wearing basketball shorts, sandals, and a T-shirt with a large red bug stenciled on it that served as the symbol of one of his hit horror movies. He suddenly wheeled and pointed a finger at Perry.

  “Can you get it? Can you hear it? Can you do it?”

  “The story, you mean?” Perry asked.

  “The pace!”

  “Well, I think so, sure.”

  “Let’s hear it, then!”

  He beckoned to Perry, motioning his head as if trying to coax the right answer out of a thickheaded student.

  “Sha-boom?” Perry said, hesitantly.

  “Let’s hear it!”

  Perry cleared his throat.

  “Sha-boom, sha-boom, sha-boom, sha-boom,” he chanted, as Larman cocked an ear and listened, tapping his foot and nodding. Soon he began to smile and join in, pacing and clapping and chanting his “sha-booms” along with Perry’s, stepping over and around the water beds and mattresses that composed the only furniture of his spacious office. The place looked like a wholesale bedding showroom, but instead of being located in an old warehouse, it was here in this long glass-walled penthouse at the top of one of the towering futuristic office buildings of Century City, on, appropriately enough, the Avenue of the Stars.

  Perry’s head was still pounding from his excesses of the night before; fighting the effects of booze and cocaine with aspirins was like trying to defend against ICBMs with blasts from a BB gun. Each “sha-boom” he uttered was like a nail driven into his brain; still, he pressed on, wanting to please the eccentric producer, wanting to have a shot at the job. He didn’t even know what the story was yet, only what the “pace” was supposed to be, yet that was not the most important factor.

  The most important factor was that Perry was broke. This assignment, if he got it, could save the day. The going rate for a feature was a hundred grand. That would bail him out and give him enough to get through the next six months, after taxes—at least he hoped so, he wasn’t sure any more. At any rate it was the best hope he had of saving his dire financial situation. Of course, he still had his integrity, and he wasn’t going to take on the job if it was something about giant bugs terrorizing a small town in Oklahoma. He knew it was no such thing, of course, or Kling would never have sought him out for the work. Perry was known as a “people writer,” that is, a writer who only did stories about ordinary, law-abiding citizens, plagued by the familiar problems of daily life in the 1980s, rather than by invasions from outer space, or the Brontosaurus That Ate the Bronx.

  Thankfully, Kling stopped chanting, nodded his approval, began scratching his head again, and, locking his hands behind his back, began to pace the room while he recounted the plot of the movie he wanted to make. He reminded Perry of Harpo Marx with a voice.

  “The power is the power is the power,” he said, launching into his story. Kling seemed to suffer from some sort of compulsion to repeat almost everything he said at least three times, a practice that, instead of making things more clear, made them incredibly more difficult to follow. As best Perry could tell, the story was about an ordinary American family who discovers its seemingly ordinary pet possesses psychic powers, and, when the six-year-old son teams to interpret the dog’s insights, discovers that the next-door neighbors are part of an international narcotics ring. The story was an original idea of Kling himself, and he had already commissioned a script by a veteran Hollywood screenwriter, but was disappointed. In other words, this potential job was a rewrite.

  “I don’t even know if I can rewrite someone else’s material,” Perry said.

  “The point, the point, the point,” said Kling, wagging his head with enthusiasm, “is I don’t want a literal rewrite, I want you to read this script and then put it out of your mind, throw it away, stow it, shove it, and create your own powerful interpretation of the story.”

  “I’ve never done anything on that—uh, well, on psychic subjects,” Perry said. “Why would you ask me to try? I mean, I appreciate it, but I would think you’d prefer someone who knows the genre.”

  “You’re fresh, fresh, fresh, so fresh!” said Kling. “That’s what I want, the fresh I saw in your TV show, and out of that will come the power.”

  “Well, I’ll certainly think it over,” Perry said.

  Kling pressed a copy of the script on him, and then, evidently exhausted, went to lie down on a mattress in a corner of the room. Perry took that as his cue and left, hurrying out to the first bar he spotted in the big Century City complex.

  After he had a Mexican beer he called Ravenna.

  “Not only is the story crazy,” Perry complained, “this Larman Kling is some kind of madman. I mean, I’m talking goofball.”

  “Darling,” Ravenna said, “he gets pictures made. Now read the script and think it over. If you do this, it will not only solve your cash flow problem, it will mean you’ve broken into features.”

  It was true. It didn’t matter if you wrote a script of the worst movie ever made, it only counted that you’d written a feature that got produced, released, and distributed. Perry had found out that this was the secret of Cyril Heathrow’s success. He had once had one script produced, and since then was consistently
paid sums in the $250,000 range for turning out other scripts, even though no others had been filmed.

  With all these practical matters in mind, Perry read the script that night, as he gulped down some wine. Given the basic idea, it did not seem all that bad. He called Kling the next morning and asked him what he thought was missing from it.

  “The magic, the magic, the magic!”. the intense producer exclaimed.

  Perry promised to think about it further.

  What was to think about?

  A man who had $4,000 in cash and a $3,000-plus a month mortgage that was part of a monthly nut of $10,000 (which meant you had to make twice that to have it after taxes) was being offered an opportunity to make $100,000 without breaking the law, and in the process, advance his career.

  So what was the problem?

  Perry stoked up his pipe and settled back on the couch to face his decision honestly. He admitted to himself what was bothering him about this seemingly golden opportunity. Oh, of course he had known it all along but it was too worrisome, too confusing—and at the same time too childishly simple—to deal with head-on, and so he had kept pushing it back.

  The truth was that a year ago—hell, even a week ago, before he knew he was broke—he would have laughed scornfully at any suggestion that he might even remotely consider doing a rewrite of a script about a family whose dog possessed psychic powers.

  Are you serious?

  Yet here was the virtuous writer himself, thinking over the offer, for no other reason than desperately needing the money.

  There was a term for that.

  It was called “selling out.”

  It was against all the values and dreams that Perry had grown up with, a mockery of the lofty ideals of his literary heroes.

  Hey—can you picture Henry James being in the same room with Larman Kling, much less considering doing a rewrite for him? Surely not even Scott Fitzgerald, in the depths of his own dark night of the soul in Hollywood, took on assignments whose plots revolved around psychic pets!

  On the other hand times had not just changed, time itself had seemingly been put on fast forward, like the speeded-up tapes on a video cassette recorder. Henry James was not just a tintype now, he was more like some ancient God, as remote as Zeus. Fitzgerald was a figure of legend, and the games and wars that meant so much to him now seemed closer to the life of Troy than of today’s Los Angeles.

  Maybe that’s the sort of thing the Vees had in mind when they said the term “selling out” (which they hadn’t even heard for ages) seemed “quaint” to them, a relic of the nineteen-fifties, like hula hoops and Ike buttons, a problem for that now primordial creature of the post-war American world, the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.

  Perhaps they were right, perhaps Perry was needlessly flailing his conscience and letting outmoded cultural guilt get him down simply because he was trying to apply the standards of the past to the realities of the present. When he thought of it that way, he saw that there were damn good reasons for his taking on this assignment besides the money involved!

  By doing this rewrite he could learn more about the craft of filmmaking, a craft he wanted to master. He’d be working with a successful producer—OK, so he wasn’t the most intellectual or sophisticated of the new breed of movie moguls, but the bottom line was (remember?) he got pictures made. Besides, the reason Kling wanted him to take on this assignment was to bring some class to the project. Perry was getting the opportunity for the very reason that he was regarded as a quality writer. He could write quality dialogue—hell, that’s what he was being hired to do! If Kling had wanted Harry the Hack he could easily have found hundreds of such eager robots, but no, he had purposely sought out a writer of quality. And he wanted the very best that Perry could deliver.

  Despite this impressive accumulation of evidence, Perry felt a sudden yearning to talk it over with Jane. Maybe just because he was so used to doing that during the past five years. She seemed to have a knack for pointing out angles he hadn’t observed, for alerting him to possible pitfalls he hadn’t been aware of, and even for showing him positive aspects his own deliberations had overlooked. He even went and sat in front of the phone for a minute or so. Then he sighed, trying to imagine explaining to Jane the advantages of doing a rewrite job and the need for quality dialogue in a script about a psychic dog.

  No.

  She was too far away from the realities of the business, too far out of the picture. Maybe if she had stuck it out, had stayed here until he got it all together, she could have advised him as intelligently and sensitively about this as she had about so many other things. Of course, if he had been a little more intelligent and sensitive about her own feelings out here, had thought just a little about her own welfare instead of devoting total attention to his own, maybe she would be here now, beside him.

  Damn. It was too late for that kind of thinking. Besides, it was just a cop-out. The fact was, Jane was simply too far away to be of help now. From clear across the country, in a farmhouse in Vermont, this whole thing would sound crazy. He was the one who was here, it was his own ass that was on the line, and he damn well better deal with it. Perry told himself it was time to stand on his own two feet and think for himself, anyway. He stood up and went to the refrigerator, throwing his shoulders back as he walked. He got out another beer and opened it, beginning to feel cheerful and confident.

  The outdoor terrace of the Polo Lounge was the perfect place to celebrate. The colors of the clothes of the beautiful people (not just socially, they really looked physically beautiful, too, tan and sleek and perfectly proportioned) blended with the tropical blooms of the flowers, the stately green palms and the pink hotel, everything softly illumined by the warm sun.

  Perry was back on his Perrier, the drink of success. The drink of people who were so together and confident they didn’t need a drink. At least not at lunch. It made him feel crisp, clearheaded, concise.

  “You look a lot better than last time,” Pru Vardeman said, no longer scrunched beneath her silk shawl but expansively throwing back her shoulders and tilting up her chin as she smiled on Perry and, at the same time, nodded acknowledgments and blew occasional kisses to actors, producers, directors and agents of note who were also having the pleasure of lunching here this lovely day. Vaughan, sticking to his personal style in Ivy League jacket and tie, raised his own Perrier to toast his pal.

  “We’ve all come a long way from Harvard Square, Moss-back,” he said with a satisfied grin.

  Perry laughed.

  “From Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage to the Polo Lounge!” he said.

  Pru laughed too.

  It was like old times.

  At last.

  The Vees were delighted at Perry’s landing the job with Larman Kling, who they assured him had moved beyond his earlier horror flick and sci-fi stuff and gained high regard as an artist with the success of Schtick; but more important, was hot right now. This was not only good news for Perry but for the Vees too; if Perry had a feature credit under his belt it would make it much easier for Vaughan to eventually make “The Springtime Women.” Instead of being a handicap to a project Perry would be an important element once he had the feature credit in his cap.

  “Oh, and I almost forgot,” Vaughan said. “I read that treatment you gave me. Not for me, but I think it might be just what Phil Clausen’s been looking for. I hope you don’t mind I sent it to him.”

  “Huh? Hey, no, thanks, but he already passed on it.”

  “Well, he mentioned that, but he thought he’d like to take a fresh look at it. Anyway, it can’t hurt.”

  “Hell no,” said Perry, shrugging loosely, relaxed, warm not only with the sun, but success.

  He could feel a pleasant sensation, a sort of glow in the area between his stomach and his groin.

  He was hot.

  When Perry got back from lunch and called his service, instead of the familiar “All clear,” he had seven messages. It was as if the word of his being hot, a desirable
person to call, had gone out through the atmosphere. There was a message to call his public relations person, who no doubt wanted to get his new deal in the trades as well as the atmosphere. Perry smiled, feeling glad he hadn’t fired the guy out of fear of being broke. It was smalltime to try to cut corners and save a few bucks. “Don’t think poor” was one of the vital rules of survival in this high-stakes game he was playing now—not just playing, but winning.

  When he called Ravenna, her secretary got her right away. No delays, nothing about being in a meeting, when she was simply filing her nails, oh no. Not for a hot client. He hoped she had closed the deal so he could get right to work; he was anxious, eager, to get that sparkling dialogue onto the page, to establish the sha-boomlike pace of the story of the psychic dog. He had already begun to wonder if perhaps Ravenna, with her wily negotiating power, had even got him a little more than a hundred grand for the job; maybe a little sweetening of the pot, up to—say—one-twenty-five?

  “Darling,” she cooed, “I think we have our deal.”

  “Great,” Perry said, “how much?”

  “Well, Ralph Stilleta—he’s business affairs for Ursa Major—is a real hardass. He started at thirty, told me he was absolutely holding the line at thirty-five, but I got him to thirty-seven-fifty! With a guarantee on the back end of another five if it goes to film!

  Perry was speechless for a moment. Had Ravenna confused him with some other client?

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t understand. What’s this shit about thirty-something? You said I ought to get a hundred.”

  “Perry, I beg your pardon. I said no such thing. That’s out of the question.”

  “You, Ravenna Sharlow, did not tell me I ought to get a hundred grand for doing a feature? And isn’t one of the whole points of my doing this to get a credit for a feature?