Hollywood is an All Volunteer Army

by Steven Paul Leiva

  Hollywood Is an All Volunteer Army

  The Second Fixxer Novel

  By Steven Paul Leiva

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

  Copyedited by David Dodd

  Copyright 2010 by Steven Paul Leiva

  LICENSE NOTES:

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  OTHER CROSSROAD TITLES BY STEVEN PAUL LEIVA:

  NOVELS:

  Blood is Pretty – The First Fixxer Novel

  UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:

  Coming soon – Blood is Pretty – unabridged narration by Jonah Cummings

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  For Peter Anthony Holder

  &

  Stuart Nulman

  Two fine gentlemen from Montreal.

  Early readers. Early fans. Friends forever

  AUTHOR’S NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I must thank Todd Cronin for illustrating the cover of Hollywood is an All-Volunteer Army. I owe him more than I can say for his time, talent, dedication and friendship.

  Which leads me to thanking Peter Lonsdale, a friend of many years, but the last several being the best. He has done so much to support my creative efforts, not only with encouragement but with his own creative skills, smarts and sensitivities. Peter is the very definition of pal, good buddy, comrade, confidant, ally, chum, mate, amigo, compadre, and, of course—friend.

  And then, of course, there is my best friend, my wife Amanda. Such a cliché, to call your wife your best friend, but when so very true, what can you do but give in? So I have, and declare it with deep love.

  Chapter One

  Fairly Freaky

  We are often disconcerted by what we see when we look in the mirror in the morning. For gravity is an unkind force on our faces after eight hours of horizontal unconsciousness. Imagine, though, how disconcerting it is when you look in the mirror and see not yourself but somebody else. Now imagine what it would be like if that someone else was famous. What if, on your shoulders, you found a head that was a Monday through Friday morning habit for three million Americans? Worse than that, a head which, in its original form, holds little inside to be in awe of.

  “Fairly freaky.” Roee said as he wheeled in a room service cart.

  “Fairly freaky, indeed.” I said.

  “A damn masterpiece, if you ask me, Fixxer,” offered Michael Slayton, the Hollywood makeup man I had flown to New York to effect this transformation.

  “We are not questioning your talents, Michael. Indeed you can take our reactions as a compliment. Still, I wish it had been Bryant Gumble.”

  “Robert Jordan isn’t a semi-regular on the Today Show, you’re taller than Bryant Gumble, Gumble hasn’t been the host for years, and he’s black,” Roee reminded.

  “Yes, but he’s a better interviewer — and what does him being black have to do with it?”

  “Swanee, how I love you, how I love you, my deal old Swanee…” Roee began to quietly sing.

  “Really, Roee, you ethnic and/or cultural minorities should become less sensitive. Here I have altered my appearance to that of a gee-shucks, midwestern, all-American, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and no one seems offended by that.”

  “Being a gee-shucks, midwestern, all-American, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant is offensive enough.”

  “Jeez. Centuries of power, and where does it get you? No respect.”

  Roee just sighed a sigh he had worked to perfect and announced, “Your breakfast.”

  “What’s on the menu?”

  “A three egg omelet with fresh cut basil, Kalamata olives sliced into perfectly even quarters, and feta cheese left, as you prefer, in large chunks.” Roee revealed the meal with a flourish as he lifted the silver dome from the plate.

  I allowed myself a moment to gaze, smell, and salivate. “You cooked it yourself, didn’t you, Roee?” I said with the proper measure of delight I’ve learned he expects.

  “Kitchen privileges are not hard to come by when you can speak intelligently about sauces. And for you Michael,” Roee lifted another silver dome, “since you made no particular request, I took the liberty to whip you up some sourdough pancakes from a starter I once acquired in Alaska. As for embellishments, you have your choice of Canadian Maple syrup, a fresh raspberry compote I’ve made, or — and please don’t scoff, just try one bite — sour cream and honey.”

  Michael was amazed. “How did you know sourdough pancakes are my favorite?”

  Roee smiled. “How do we know that you’ve been collecting the underwear of a particular stripper at Bodies 2000 out in North Hollywood for the last six months?”

  The slam of this information reformed Michael’s face. “Oh. Yeah. I forgot.”

  “By the way, Michael,” I said as I took my first bite of the omelet and the full force of its hot flavor blessed me, “she’s got a drug habit — very nasty one, and despite the delicacy of her visage and the smoothness of her skin, both, I admit, very appealing, she is very, very dumb and dangerous. Best forgotten at this point, don’t you think?” I looked up at Michael and answered my own question with, I hope, a subtle force.

  Michael starred back at me. Then he looked down. Not in shame, I assumed, but in the dumbfounded wonder of it all. “You’re doing me a favor, aren’t you?” he asked sadly.

  “Yes, Michael. The pit of your stomach is telling you something different right now, but, yes, I am.”

  *

  I was in New York on a job. It had come to me, as all my jobs do, when my business manager, Norton Macbeth, called me up on the secure line of The Phone.

  “Larry Lapham,” Norton said without preamble.

  “Desperate to be Mr. Film Comedy, but somehow always comes in just shy of that,” I launched into what I knew. “His films gross well, which certainly impresses, yet he still remains somewhat unknown by the general public, and not really accorded the respect he probably feels he deserves by the industry.”

  “He wouldn’t argue with any of that.”

  “So what does he need fixed?”

  “Just that, he, he, he.” Norton often punctuated his sentences with a little staccato laughter.

  “What am I supposed to do? Blackmail Hollywood into respecting him?”

  “He thinks he knows the source of his troubles.”

  “Really?”

  “You want to talk to him?”

  “Will he make me laugh?”

  “Not unless you pay him, he, he, he.”

  “I was thinking of the unfortunate humor involved in the reverse.”

  “He can afford a lot. You can take it seriously.”

  “Then I can talk to him.”

  *

  Norton had arranged for me to see Larry Lapham at three in the afternoon that day. I was to meet him at his building on Washington Boulevard in Culver City across the street from the Sony Lot. Now there’s an example of the glamour of Hollywood gone shiny instead of lustrous. Instead of the old dream factory that was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the original occupant who built the studio lot, you expected a “Sony Lot” to
be pumping out the gleam of many gadgets housing transistors, light emitting diodes, microchips and other mysterious ways to manipulate electrical energy. Not true, of course, the lot still made movies. It was, I guess, just a name thing, that bothered me. Actually, the lot had been refurbished and now had the look of what you might dream a movie lot should look like — if you were a star struck, semi-literate farm girl in 1935. There is just something a bit discomforting about all the new façades they put on the office buildings to make them look like the golden-hued simple life of the Anytown USA that politicians keep getting elected to lead us back to. Of course my comfort was not much considered when the pricey American management team the Japanese had hired to run the place convinced them that if they really wanted to buy into Hollywood, they had to buy into fake — and love it. Of course, that management team eventually petered out. Now, as we sit here in 1999, ready to close out this 20th Century, the “Century of the Movie,” there’s a new team running the show. They probably think the façades are real.

  I much prefer Lapham’s building. Although he makes comedies with goofy yet charming characters who are cleverly made to slip on metaphorical banana peels, and who are often participants in humor derived from the various ways the mammalian body expels waste, the building that houses his company, Painted Dessert Pictures—Lapham’s from Arizona—is all clean, gray concrete, shiny, clear glass and cold, highly reflective steel. It’s a serious business making hoi polloi laugh.

  You enter the building from the parking garage where a very pleasant guard greets you with respect. Then you take an elevator up to the first floor and it opens onto a spacious area illuminated for the most part by the natural sunlight streaming through the two story floor-to-ceiling glass window in front of you. You almost don’t see the receptionist sitting at a semicircle desk against the glass, as your eyes are diverted by the view of the giant movie posters for upcoming Sony releases on the fortress wall of the studio across the street. Right now the posters were proudly hailing, The Day my Dog Died, a Sundance Festival anointed little independent film made by a guy in Montana that Sony’s classic division had picked up, and Blood Brothers, the new hit romantic comedy about twin vampires.

  “May I help you?” asked the young woman behind the desk. She was cute, almost marketable—but then, that’s not unusual here.

  “I have an appointment with Larry Lapham at three.”

  “Your name please?” Cute asked.

  “My name is, Mr. Lapham’s three o’clock appointment,” I said sternly.

  “Oh, well…”

  “Has he got more than one three o’clock appointment?”

  “Oh, well, no, but—”

  “There you are.”

  “But, how do I announce you?” There was confusion and worry and the hint of being yelled at often in the past for “fucking it up.”

  “As Mr. Lapham’s three o’clock appointment, emphasizing that I am the three o’clock appointment. Not the three-o-five, or any time thereafter.”

  She did so and was obviously told to send me right up.

  I ascended a wide, sweeping staircase, which lead to a second floor of balcony offices that overlooked the reception area. A smiling, well-tailored woman greeted me at the top of the stairs and showed me into Lapham’s office. It was a large, bright, L-shaped room, with a desk at one end, a large conversation pit of couches and chairs in front of a media center at the other, and a concrete and glass conference table in-between at the bend of the L. Lapham was standing behind his desk, backed by a large canvas seemingly painted by Picasso. It took my eye as it probably took the eye of everyone who enters for the first time.

  “It’s not real.” Obviously Lapham’s opening greeting to everyone.

  “Yes, I know. The rather inattentive brushwork points that out clearly. Nor is the Mark Rothko behind your assistant’s desk real. Both props, I believe, from your art world comedy, Abstractions, wherein Chevy Chase manages to destroy the treasures of 20th Century art in one four minute slapstick bit.”

  “You know my films?”

  “I have a VCR,” I said in a noncommittal way.

  “Well….” He lost his words here. He had to grope. “Listen, I don’t really know why you are here.”

  “I assume you asked for me.”

  “Well, no, not really. Look, I just took on Norton Macbeth as my business manager. The last one I had was getting me into these weird investments and—”

  “Norton is very conservative.”

  “Well, yeah, that’s what I thought, but then—well—you—uh…. Look I was just blowing off steam to Norton, and maybe I said too much, but he started to tell me about you and he pressed me to have this meeting and…. Look, I don’t want any rough stuff.”

  “Rough stuff?” I said with as incredulous an air as I could manage.

  “Well—you know….”

  “Tell me your problem, Larry.” I said it like an old friend. A transparent technique, but often effective.

  “Let’s, uh, let’s go sit down.”

  He led me to the conversation pit and sat in what was obviously his chair, the big one perpendicular to the two couches facing each other. I sat on the couch to his right on the end farthest from him to be able to observe from a distance. Already I had perceived that Larry Lapham was a geek grown successful. The Spielbergian beard he sported did not really hide a buck tooth, horsy face that could have comfortably housed the vocal tones of Disney’s Goofy going, “Gorsh!” When he walked to the couch, his mid-section led the way, almost as if some invisible hand was pulling him by his belt, but when he sat, he sat with the style of a man grown use to power and control. Nonetheless, you couldn’t mistake the unsatisfied air about him. Some “little” thing was pissing him off.

  “You know who Robert Jordan is?”

  “This country’s top film critic. The only one whose opinion can sell tickets, thus make a film.”

  “Or stop the sale of tickets.”

  “Thus break a film. Yes, unusual. The power the New York Times used to have over Broadway, he seems to have over film. Why do you think that is?”

  “He’s damn good. Really knows film, but he also knows how to play to a crowd. Without being too slick about it. He’s never given up his credentials for glamour, and he’s got that damn TV show, and his regular appearances on This Day, and his books. Gives him a hell of a lot of power, and that fucking ‘royal rating system’ of his: We are very not pleased; We are not pleased; We are indifferent—that’s probably the most damning one—We are pleased; We are very pleased. What the hell is that?”

  “I take it none of your films has gotten beyond his indifference?”

  “No. None of my films have gotten beyond, ‘We are very not pleased.’”

  “Nonetheless, you’re still successful.”

  “‘Successful’ is a relative term.”

  I looked around his office, making a point. “I suppose we are talking about the difference between a rich relative and a very rich relative.”

  “That’s part of it. I had the shock of my life when a Wall Street analyst told me that if my films had gotten raves from Jordan, the ‘winning’ atmosphere that would have built around my films would have effected a positive energy not just on the potential audience, but on the studio, the marketing guys, the exhibitors in the field making the decisions on how long to book my pictures. That energy, this analyst said, could well have equated to 21.4 to 33.7 million dollars more in gross per picture.”

  “Very precise figures.”

  “He’s a very precise man.”

  “Who you were talking to because you were thinking of taking Painted Dessert Pictures public.”

  He bore down a little now with his eyes. He was wondering how I knew that. I didn’t. It was a logical guess, but it impressed nonetheless. “Yes, that’s right, and I didn’t because I and my work were valued less than what I felt was appropriate. A value derived from the numbers, a mis-value derived from the perception.”

 
; “And now you need…”

  “I have a new picture coming out in a few weeks. I need Robert Jordan to give me a sterling review.”

  Lapham said it as if he was reporting that he needed a can of beans off a supermarket shelf. I was pretty sure that Jordan was no can of beans. “Well, outside of bribing him…”

  “No. He can’t be bribed.”

  “If we could find a dark secret, blackmail is usually effective.”

  “I wouldn’t condone that.”

  “And, you said no rough stuff.”

  “No rough stuff.”

  “Then I guess you just have to hope that he likes your picture.”

  “Why? That doesn’t seem to have affected his reviews of my work in the past.”

  “There’s obviously a story behind that statement.”

  Lapham nodded—and looked inward. This is where he was deciding whether to commit to a relationship of information with the Fixxer. Norton always does his job well. He had told Lapham that I would keep his confidence—keep it to use as I saw fit anytime in the future. That that was part of the deal. What he could get in return, though…

  Lapham finally spoke. “A couple weeks ago a guy I went to college with was in town visiting. We were roommates in the dorm my freshman and sophomore years at Penn State. I left after two years to get closer to home and study film at USC. I hadn’t heard from him since. He called up the office, assuming I wouldn’t talk to him. People’s warped sense of what Hollywood success does to you. I was delighted to hear from him. I immediately invited him and his wife up to the house. We had a great time reminiscing. Then he mentioned how on a business trip to New York he had run into the other famous person from our dorms connected to film. I was completely stumped. I had no idea who he was talking about. ‘Robert Jordan,’ he said.”

  The way of human nature is clear enough. “So what did you do to Robert Jordan when you were an 18 or 19 year old college kid to make him hate you all these years?”

  “I snubbed him, I guess. That’s all. Look, my friend really had to put him into context for me to even remember him, but then I got it. He was Bobby, this little, fat nerd on the floor above ours. He had really tried to force his way into our circle, but, you know, I wasn’t much more than a nerd myself—and from Arizona. I wasn’t looking to make friends with people with umbilical cords, but people with tow-ropes. Do you understand?”