Hollywood is an All Volunteer Army

by Steven Paul Leiva

  “Okay. Let’s talk.”

  He walked me over to the little pizza-by-the-slice joint to the south of the stand and offered to buy me a cup of coffee. I passed. That left him nowhere to go but to start.

  “There’s this girl, uh—” he corrected himself, “young woman. Bea—Bea Cherbourg. She’s been a customer here at the stand since she got into L.A. a couple of years ago.”

  “From?”

  “Back east. Connecticut. She graduated from Yale. She came out here to work in film.”

  “She’s an actress?”

  “No, anything but. She wants to write—and direct.”

  “Oh. A filmmaker.”

  “Yeah. I could tell because she bought all the film magazines. I mean from Film Comment to Variety. The whole range.”

  “I see the problem.”

  “No, no, actually she was doing pretty well. At Yale she had been in the Gamma Phi Epsilon sorority. It’s really a film club.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard of it. Created to create an ‘Old Girls Network,’ I believe.”

  “Yes, that’s right. And it works. It got Bea a job at Olympic Pictures.”

  “Because Sara Hutton’s running the place.”

  “Yeah. And she went to Yale.”

  “And was president of Gamma Phi Epsilon her senior year.”

  “That’s right. So she’s always interested in talent from there.”

  “And Bea is a talent?”

  “She’s very smart.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  Mike looked down. Then back up at me. “I don’t know. I mean, how would I know? But she thinks she is. Anyway, she didn’t get hired for talent at first. Not that kind of talent. Hutton hired her as a reader, and made it clear real fast that she would personally groom Bea into a top flight motion picture executive.”

  “Mike, where is this leading?”

  “Well, I—I’m not any good at explaining it. She should explain it. I—I want you to help her Fixx. I want you to talk her out of something.”

  “Out of what?”

  “Out of using your services.”

  “Mike, that’s somewhat antithetical to doing good business, and a habit I really don’t want to get into.”

  “Well…”

  “How does she even know about me to want the services I have to talk her out of?”

  “Oh, well, you know, she knows the rumors. You know, I mean, you know, you’re one of those rumors.”

  “Yes, thanks to good marketing I pay dearly for, but, usually people at her entry level…?”

  “Ah, well, I got to bragging that I knew you, and—you know.”

  “Mike…?”

  “I know, I know, it’s against our bargain, but—Fixx—I love her.”

  Mike is about thirty-seven or thirty-eight. Short, no more than five-three, wiry, with a tattoo on his left shoulder proclaiming the superiority of the Rebel Alliance, and one on his right that says: Rosebud. As I mentioned, he sports a long, black and white chin beard and loves a bit too much his old Sherman Oaks Newsstand baseball cap. I always had the feeling that the women he appreciated the most were probably those prominently featured on the covers of the magazines displayed closest to the cash register. The ones with names like: Juggs; Girls On Girls; Cum Agin’ and Hot & Horny. If I had ever taken the time to imagine what Mike thought would be the dream romance for him, I would have guessed a plot wherein Mike rescues from the low life and a drug habit the ex-child star of a late ‘70’s sit-com, now just a hint of her once irrepressibly cute self, but enough of a hint for Mike. I would not have imagined that he ever would have fallen in love with a Yale graduate climbing the Hollywood corporate ladder.

  “Does she love you?”

  “Of course not,” he said as a painful matter-of-fact, “and she doesn’t know that I love her, but—but I do.” He paused for a moment. Then he took a deep breath and said, “Something happened and she’s very angry and she came to me and she wanted to know if I could get her in touch with you because she wants to hurt people, she wants to hurt them real bad. Especially Sara Hutton.” He was quiet for another second while he got another breath. “She’s pure, Fixxer, you know what I mean? She’s a pure person, and suddenly there’s this hate eating her up, and she’s going to try to attack and hurt people who could—could squash her. I don’t want to see her hurt. So I want you to talk her out of it. I want you to talk some sense into her.”

  There was a glistening in his eyes, a potential for tears.

  “Where is she now?” I simply and quietly asked.

  “She’s in Blues+Jazz. Waiting for you.”

  “Do you want to come in and introduce us?”

  “No. I’ll take you there, I’ll point her out, but—but no.”

  “Okay, Mike. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Fixx, thanks, I mean, I owe you, man, I really owe you. The next really juicy information, free of charge. Free of charge.”

  “Well, we’ll talk about that at the time.”

  Then we walked up to the corner of Ventura and Van Nuys, passing the newsstand, to stand in front of the large, rusted-looking metal door of Blues+Jazz. It was a design choice of this small restaurant that featured live blues and jazz combos within its used brick walls and under its fake corrugated metal roof. I opened the door and allowed Mike to walk through into an open area dominated by the kitchen, which stood, cooks busy at their tasks, for all to see. Next to this area was the main dining room with black top tables that seated four in simple chairs, and a small bandstand up against the west brick wall. There were just a few scattered customers, most looking at menus, while a tall black man with used up eyes tuned his bass, another black man sat at the drums looking bored, and a white guy I pegged to be a jazz instructor at a local community college, looked nervously over sheet music at the piano.

  “That’s her there.” Mike pointed to a young woman sitting off to the side, a coffee in front of her which she seemed to be staring into. I gave her a good look. The assessment came quickly. If vulnerability were ever to have a poster child, she would have been it.

  Chapter Three

  To Kiss the Golden Arse

  “Bea Cherbourg?”

  I had walked up quietly and the sudden mention of her name startled her—but only slightly. She looked up at me. She had a good, strong face. The vulnerability was mostly exposed in her brown eyes, which were magnified just shy of distortion by glasses. The frames of the glasses were not really stylish, but they did, somewhat consciously on her part I assumed, reach for a style. They were oval, almost eye shape, making them mask-like, which was probably the intent. She had a long face with a strong jaw, but not one that made her look mannish. She had a long nose complimentary to her face, good complexion and thick, ginger hair that fell with a slight wave onto her shoulders. Her mouth was set straight with lips that were together and which were not quite thin, but certainly not sensuous. You could imagine, though, that when she smiled—if she smiled—it would be a pleasant one.

  “Oh, hi. You’re Mike’s friend?”

  “It’s probably more accurate to say that Mike is my friend.”

  “Oh.”

  “In any case, I am here at Mike’s request. May I sit?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  I sat and waved the waiter over. “Let’s order dinner, I’m starved.”

  “Do you want to stay here? I mean is this okay? When the band starts we’ll have to shout to hear each other.”

  “Yes, that’s true, but it also means that only we will hear each other.”

  The waiter came over and I ordered the baked ham dinner. She ordered a salad. The kind one picks at rather than eats. I also ordered a vodka tonic with a lemon twist. She ordered a Sam Adams lager.

  “What do I call you?” she asked after the drinks had arrived and the music had started. It was some cool jazz. Mellow.

  “What have you been told to call me?”

  “Mike calls you the Fixxer.”

&nb
sp; “He has been granted that privilege.”

  “And me?”

  “Tell me your story. Answer my questions. You will probably have no need to call me anything.”

  “I don’t really know where to begin.”

  I started to speak, but she cut me off.

  “Yes, I know, at the beginning. It doesn’t seem to me to be as simple as that, and yet, I consider myself a story teller. I mean, all I’ve ever wanted to do was to tell stories. From the time I was about eight. Stories that moved people ‘To tears and to action,’ as one of my teachers used to pound into us.”

  She said the last words with a slight laugh, slightly proud, slightly embarrassed. Then she paused, as if looking for something in her head—or for permission. “Continue,” I said, giving it.

  “Film—film is the story telling medium of our day, of this century really. Do you understand? Film, for better or for worse, is it.”

  “You sound defensive.”

  “Do I?”

  “Yes.”

  “My mother wanted me to be a novelist.”

  It made sense. Bea Cherbourg looked like a novelist. “Why aren’t you one?”

  “I think in images. I can’t help it. Even when I read a novel, a great novel, I see images, I don’t see words, I don’t even hear them in my head.”

  “Sounds like Evelyn Wood Speed Reading to me.”

  “No, it’s more than that, it’s—look when you grow up now you grow up surrounded by the moving image. Movies, TV, newscasts, music videos. It’s how we communicate.”

  By we she meant, of course, her generation. Whatever that was, she was implying by her tone that I was not part of it.

  “I never imagined that I could tell stories in any way but as a filmmaker.”

  The waiter came with the food, setting it down, asking if we had everything we needed. Bea smiled when she looked up at the waiter and responded yes. I had been right—about the smile.

  “You know, Bea, I’m getting to know who you are, but not what your story is.”

  “All story starts from character.” She smiled again. The eyes now peeked from behind the mask.

  “The same teacher?”

  She nodded. “He was brilliant.”

  “And you had an affair with him,” I stated.

  She blushed, but she admitted it, “Yes.” The color from the blush was complimentary. It brought to her face a certain loveliness. A certain old fashioned loveliness. I had a quick thought: I would love to see her smiling in clear, bright, windswept sunlight.

  “But it ended?”

  “Yes. I wanted to stay. Get my masters. Teach. Be with him.”

  “But he said you had to come out here. To Hollywood. Make a difference.”

  “Yes. When I came out here I thought I would waitress, or do temp work. I was kind of looking forward to it, you know, the struggle before the success. I thought I would meet up with some other struggling filmmakers; maybe get involved in a low budget, but interesting film. Wind up at Sundance. But I got a job right away as a reader at Olympic Pictures. I didn’t even go after it. They called me.”

  “Gamma Phi Epsilon.”

  “Yes, how…? Oh—Mike. He’s sweet.”

  “He’s concerned about you.”

  She repeated herself, “He’s sweet,” then picked an olive out of her salad and ate it. “Anyway, I was suddenly making good money. More than I thought I would be making at this point. I don’t come from a rich family.”

  “You got to Yale on a scholarship?”

  “Yes, so earning this kind of money was great. I leased a condo right up here on Dickens. Got a car, a BMW. You know, used but nice.”

  “How was the job?”

  “Interesting,” she furled her brow when she said it, as if the word was not quite adequate, “at first, then kind of—frustrating. Boring. You can’t imagine how many really bad scripts are submitted to the studio. To write reports making sense of them is a real chore. Out of a kind of a self-defense, I took to being kind of—I don’t know—funny about them I guess, sort of Dorothy Parker-like. After about two months, I was called into Sara Hutton’s office. I was really scared. I mean she’s the president of the company. I had seen her around the lot, but—but it turned out okay. I guess she liked my reports, liked the barbs I threw in on the really bad scripts. She told me that she had personally had me hired as a fellow sister of Gamma Phi, that that was very important to her. She also told me that I had been assigned only scripts that were coming in from the smaller agencies representing the weakest writers. That it had been sort of a test, and that I had passed with flying colors. She said this as she gave me a big hug.”

  “A big hug?”

  “It was creepy.”

  “Was it sexual?”

  “Absolutely. She’s a lesbian, you know.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Well, later, she even tried to—”

  “She’s bisexual.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I have it on good authority.”

  “Well, what’s the difference?”

  “Are you homophobic?”

  “No! I just don’t want to be violated—taken advantage of—by anybody.”

  “Is this what you are angry over?”

  “No. I can handle passes. I’m angry because she blackmailed me.”

  She quickly ran through the rest of the story. How Hutton had scripts from more established writers assigned to her. How she had begun to groom Bea for a development position. How Hutton had given her a raise. It was all kind of exciting yet frightening. She wasn’t sure it was what she wanted, becoming a motion picture executive. Then she decided to write her own script as a test, as a way to decide which road to take. Took her eight months of late night writing, but she was really happy with it when it was done. She had consciously taken the big, high-concept elements she knew the studio was looking for, but tried to place them in a well written, character driven script, one with a strong female protagonist. She showed it to a young agent she had been dating and he loved it. He made up a pseudonym for her and he submitted it to Olympic. Bea made sure it was assigned to another reader. It did well moving up the studio system, and the studio got excited and wanted to buy it. It was then that the agent revealed the true name of the author.

  “I don’t think Sara was really happy. She acted happy, but—”

  “It wasn’t her game plan for you.”

  “Yes, exactly. I mean she said, in a joking sort of way, but in a creepy way—”

  “Like her hugs?”

  “Yes—she said, ‘You know, I was just weeks away from inviting you to kiss the golden arse, but now I’m not so sure.’”

  “To kiss the golden arse?”

  “I had no idea what she met. When I mentioned it to others, people either didn’t know, or reacted strangely, in, you know, in a funny sort of way—but no one would explain it.”

  “Where does the blackmail come in?”

  “She said I couldn’t stay at the studio, they would consider it a conflict of interest, but she said she would go-out-on-a-limb and pay more for the script than they normally would, and contract me to be a coproducer on it. It all sounded great to me. So I left the studio that day, thinking I would have a check for the script in a few days and would start on the rewrite. The studio always orders a rewrite. The negotiations, though, dragged on forever over small points. For five months. I couldn’t believe it. During that time I didn’t earn a dime. I had savings, so I was okay for a while. The deal finally closed, but most of the money was tied up as bonuses, I got very little up front. Then, after I signed the contract, they announced that they wanted somebody with more experience to do the rewrite. I was shocked.”

  “You shouldn’t have been.”

  “I know, but that didn’t stop it from happening. Anyway, as a coproducer, they asked me to the meetings with potential writers. It was obvious from the way they interviewed the writers, all they really wanted from my script was the
concept. Then, after a writer was hired, in the first story meeting, Sara told him—it was a Him, of course—to throw out my main character and create a character who was just, well, just a girl. I protested. Loudly. I said, the whole reason I wrote the script was to portray a strong female who could triumph on her own. Who had inner strength of character mixed with human frailty. I really tried to, and I was most proud of having created a well rounded character. All story comes from character, I told them.”

  “How did they take being lectured to?”

  She shot a look at me, taking my question as censure, but a slight pulling back of her stare made it clear the censure was not unjustified. “Sara turned to me, smiled, and said, ‘I know what you were trying to accomplish with this character, but I really think we ought to go for the cliché.’ I was stunned. Not that she would want to do this, but that she would so gleefully announce it. As we walked out of the meeting this little shit VP, Don Gulden, leaned into me and said, ‘You’ll never be asked to kiss the golden arse acting that way.’”

  “The golden arse again.”

  “Yeah. When I got home, there was a message from my agent on the machine. I called him. He said the studio called with an ultimatum. If I wanted my producer’s development fee check—which wasn’t much, but it was the only extra income I had coming in—I would have to not go to any more meetings. ‘But it was my story,’ I said. ‘Not anymore,’ he said. ‘But what about the contract?’ I asked him. He said it didn’t matter. What was I going to do, sue Olympic? I had no other choice, I had no money left, I agreed.”

  “That was the blackmail?”

  “Yes, I was appalled. Then he said that they wanted me to know that Sara Hutton was very disappointed in me. As if that was information that would make me feel bad.”

  “It’s information that might frighten some.”

  “That I can understand, but this was as if it was supposed to hurt me on an emotional level. Like I had let her down.”

  She had hardly touched her salad, but she ordered another lager. “What can I do to get back at her?” She finally asked, her eyes dropping down as the question came up.

  “Someone once said that success is the best revenge.”