MIKE: [interrupting] Don’t need any dialogue. The intention’s clear.
COLIN: [clenched teeth] I’d like him to make the point—
MIKE: [interrupting] You wouldn’t hear what he was saying in any case over the exhaust and the rock track.
COLIN: What are we making here? A cartoon? We’re twenty minutes into the episode and only twelve words have been spoken.
MIKE: This is an eighties series in a visual medium, mate. If you can’t tell your story in images, don’t tell it at all.
COLIN: Mike, we share ninety-nine percent of our DNA with the chimpanzee. The bonus of that extra one percent is language. An astonishing facility for language. There are sixteen distinct meanings for the word ‘beat’, but we can instantly recognise which of the sixteen is intended by context. When the most advanced language computer tried to translate ‘The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’ into Russian, it came out ‘The vodka’s strong, but the veal is pallid’.
MIKE: What point are you trying to make?
COLIN: How can we ever know our characters if they’re never allowed to speak? We’re writing a series about chimpanzees! Before you can be interested in a character, you’ve got to know how they speak and think, how they justify what they’re doing, to themselves and to each other, how they cope with the big questions: life, death and meaning; how they view the tragic irony of being transient specks of living matter in an infinite and incomprehensible universe!
MIKE: Okay. What do you want him to say?
COLIN thinks.
COLIN: ‘We’d better check this one out, Zac.’
MIKE hesitates, then taps it out. COLIN frowns and stares at MIKE. He doesn’t understand the new assertiveness.
Some weeks later, MALCOLM, the merchant banker, enters. COLIN and MIKE stand in front of him. MALCOLM has a thick script in his hand.
MALCOLM: [indicating the script] You really think this is going to sell to a US network?
COLIN: Yes.
MALCOLM: You’ve sent the script across?
COLIN: Yes.
MALCOLM: You’ve had some response?
COLIN: Nothing definite, but a high level of interest.
MALCOLM: From who?
COLIN: The reader at NBC said she found the concept intriguing.
MALCOLM: The concept is five years too late. It’s ‘Miami Vice’ Down Under.
COLIN: On the surface it’s a little similar—
MALCOLM: [interrupting] Colin, this is the seventh ‘Miami Vice’ I’ve been given in the last six months.
COLIN: There are a lot of novel twists. One of the cops, Zac, is a PhD.
MALCOLM: In astrophysics? A cop in Darlinghurst? And the other’s an ex-world surfing champion and cordon bleu cook? Colin, this is shit.
COLIN: So is ‘Miami Vice’.
MALCOLM: That’s classy shit. This is absolute shit.
COLIN: I can’t see the difference.
MALCOLM: Which is exactly why the chances of you getting a network sale are about the same as the monkey accidently typing Hamlet. The writers of ‘Miami Vice’ don’t sit down and say to themselves, ‘I am going to write shit’. They write at the highest level they’re capable of and when they finish they think they’ve written a masterpiece. When someone who can write at a higher level tries to imitate them it’s a disaster.
COLIN: [taking the script] I hope you’re big enough to admit that you were wrong.
MALCOLM: I’ll be delighted to admit I was wrong. You get a pre-sale from the Americans, we’ll finance.
COLIN glowers and moves towards the door. MIKE turns to follow.
[To MIKE] That project you’re working on with Elaine Ross sounds like something we’d be interested in, Mike.
MIKE: [embarrassed] Oh. Right.
MALCOLM: Send me a script when it’s done.
MALCOLM exits. COLIN and MIKE stand outside the office.
COLIN: What’s the script you’re doing for Elaine?
MIKE: [embarrassed] It’s about a guy whose kids die in a fun park accident. Said she offered it to you and you turned it down.
COLIN: I couldn’t see a film in it. Seemed like a worn-out theme to me.
MIKE: I think it’s strong. I think it’s a winner.
COLIN: [waving the script] We’ll get this one up. He’s not the only merchant banker in town.
MIKE: That’s the game we’re in. When it’s hot, run with it; when it’s cold, bail out.
COLIN: We’ve spent months on it. We’re not giving up yet.
MIKE: It’s dead, mate.
MIKE exits, KATE enters, COLIN paces up and down. KATE watches him.
COLIN: I can’t believe it. He’s never written anything and Elaine’s got him working on a script she really cares about.
KATE: It’s exactly what I told you would happen.
COLIN: He’s never written a thing in his life!
KATE: He’s the co-writer of ‘Coastwatchers’.
COLIN: Everyone knows he couldn’t have written any of that.
KATE: Do they? How?
COLIN: They know my record. They know his.
KATE: What do you think Mike’s been doing out there since ‘Coastwatchers’, Colin? Going around the cocktail circuit admitting that he didn’t write a word?
COLIN: I’m the only writer in the country who could do that script of Elaine’s. It’s got to have characters that are individual and who live. Elaine must be off her head.
KATE: You can’t expect her to wait around forever when you turn her down flat.
COLIN: I would have done it eventually.
KATE: You’re impossibly arrogant sometimes, Colin. She’s expected to wait round for ever on the off-chance?
COLIN: If I can’t get this series into production I’ll have no money coming in all next year.
KATE: Not to worry.
COLIN: Not to worry? Do you know how much Penny’s school fees are now?
KATE nods. COLIN examines her narrowly.
Have you been drinking?
KATE: I’ve had a few glasses of champagne. I’ve just got a forty percent rise.
COLIN: Forty percent?
KATE: It won’t be that much after tax.
COLIN: Forty percent?
KATE: I’ve been promoted.
COLIN: To what? You’re only two rungs under God now.
KATE: Ian’s become national manager. I’ve got his job.
COLIN: [choking on the words] Congratulations. That’s wonderful.
KATE: I get his old office on the seventeenth floor. You see the whole harbour.
COLIN: Really.
KATE: You must come up and have a look. On a sunny day when the eighteen-footers are out, the combination of striped spinnaker, sparkling blue water and sky is absolutely overwhelming. I don’t know how I’m ever going to get any work done.
COLIN: That’s wonderful.
KATE: You were right about Sydney. It’s the most exciting city in the world. I couldn’t live anywhere else. [To the audience] I’ve got to be honest. I loved that moment. Deep at the heart of every marriage between professionals there’s a struggle for supremacy, and if one partner gets too far ahead for too long, the marriage goes sour. Colin had had his years of being lionised. It was my turn.
COLIN: [dully] Will you still be going to London?
KATE: Oh, yes. And the promotion means my living expenses go up by seventy dollars a day. I’ll be able to have a ball.
COLIN: [dully] Great.
KATE: [to the audience] Marriages can be awful. Right when your partner’s at his lowest ebb, you sink in the boot. I’m not proud in retrospect, but at the time I loved it.
KATE and COLIN exit, MIKE and HELEN enter, MIKE talks on the telephone. HELEN watches him.
MIKE: [into the phone] Sounds great. Why don’t I come around and we’ll talk about it? [Pause.] Yep. That’s fine. See you then.
He hangs up and notes down the time and place in his diary.
[Exultantly] Terry Severino want
s me to write a movie for him.
HELEN: Mike, you can’t take on any more work. You’re doing five already.
MIKE: When you’re hot, you run with it. Next week you might be colder than Melbourne in May.
HELEN: How are you going to finish any of them?
MIKE: I’ll manage.
HELEN: You’ll kill yourself.
MIKE: Honey, it’s make or break time. They’ve thrown me the ball and I’ve got to run with it.
HELEN: Look at your hand shaking.
MIKE: [taking tablets] You want to live in this dump all your life?
HELEN: Don’t take any more of those tablets, Mike. You’re stomach’ll dissolve.
MIKE: Add up the numbers in the contracts I’ve signed in the last two months and it comes to more than I’ve earned in the last ten years.
HELEN: Look, I know I give you a hard time about this house, but—
MIKE: [interrupting] Honey, you are un poule superieux.
HELEN: A what?
MIKE: A top chook. You could’ve had any guy in this city, and don’t think I don’t know it. I am going to put you in a mansion on the waterfront with a boat moored outside, because anything less is an insult.
HELEN: Mike—
MIKE: [interrupting] Honey, there are women out there with a tenth of what you’ve got who’ve treated me like shit. How do you say ‘thank you’ to someone who’s given you more than you ever hoped for and much more than you deserve? This is the only way I know how.
HELEN: Mike, I’m really moved, and I am, believe me, but I’d much rather be living here with you, than sitting in a waterfront while you’re in intensive care.
MIKE. Honey, for the first time in my life I’ve found a game I might win. Suddenly, there’s a doorway, and I’ve got a foot in, and I can see myself through and on the other side and nobody’s putting me down anymore, and do you know what that’s like to me? That’s like being in heaven. Bliss.
HELEN exits.
[To the audience] Problem is, when you take on half a dozen big jobs at once, you do eventually have to deliver. I started living on a diet of milk and indigestion tablets and as the telephone calls started coming in my brain log-jammed with fear and dread. No shortage of ideas. Brilliant ideas. But between the idea and the typewriter something happened. There was some freak circuit in my brain that, right at the last moment, in the instant before the idea hit the paper, turned gold into shit. I was in a waking nightmare. I was a grand opera singer who hears the nightingale inside her head, opens her mouth, and out comes the croak of a frog. The phone kept ringing and I extended the dates again, and again. My brain was on the point of exploding. My stomach already had. I looked down, teetering on the brink of the success I’d always dreamed of and saw the crocodiles below. There had to be a way out. Had to.
MALCOLM enters.
MALCOLM: I raise finance, Mike. I don’t want to get involved in production.
MIKE: Malcolm, listen. Let’s have a long hard look at this industry of ours. Over four hundred films in the last ten years and only one has done big business where it counts: in the US.
MALCOLM: It’s a hard market to crack.
MIKE: It shouldn’t be, Malcolm. We’ve been failing because we’ve been going about it in a half-arsed way. We bring over a few faded American stars and plonk them in a cliché-ridden Australian wank, and think we’ve made something international. We’ll never make true international product that way. We have to go the whole hog. A big production house with ten or twelve projects going at once and everything international. International scripts, international stars, international directors. Malcolm, there’s no reason why Australia couldn’t become one of the world’s great production houses. Climate’s better than California, technicians are much cheaper. Got good local actors for the supporting roles.
MALCOLM: The Americans can’t understand their accents.
MIKE: Bring out tutors. Voice coaches. It can be done, Malcolm. I swear to you, it can be done. The Canadians make better American movies than the Americans, and the reason they succeed is that they don’t feel they have to make pissant little movies about the Canadian way of life. We’ll have all the Advance Aussie patriots having hernias because we put American number plates on Aussie cars, but stuff ’em, Malcolm. Stuff ’em. If we’d just be honest with ourselves for a change, we’d admit that our accent is bloody awful for the simple reason that we never open our bloody mouths. It was good enough in the old days when grandad was out in the bush and had to keep the flies out, but it’s death to the international saleability of our product.
MALCOLM: What’s the precise deal you’re suggesting, Mike?
MIKE: You pay expenses to get me to LA so I can line up the talent and do the deals. Every project I get up we split the profits fifty-fifty. If I don’t get anything up, all you’ve lost is a few plane fares.
MALCOLM: You’re convinced it could work?
MIKE: The world’s a global village, Malcolm. A merchant banker in New York has got far more in common with you than a sheep farmer from Walgett, right?
MALCOLM: [nodding] It’s high time we stopped being so bloody parochial.
MIKE: [nodding] Stuff the gumnut clique. Let’s start making hard-headed, rational business decisions for a change. The North American market is three hundred million, ours is fifteen. Where does the future lie?
MIKE and MALCOLM exit. COLIN and KATE enter. COLIN reads a newspaper. He puts it down like a man who’s been hit in the solar plexus.
COLIN: [in a strangled voice] Kate, this is like a nightmare.
KATE: What?
COLIN: Malcolm Bennett and Mike McCord have just floated a joint production company with a hundred million dollars worth of projects slated for the coming year.
KATE: Is there some other Mike McCord?
COLIN: God forbid.
KATE: Why would Bennett go into partnership with—?
COLIN: [interrupting] Why did I go into partnership with him? He’s Mephistopheles doing the rounds of the industry.
KATE: [reading the paper] They will make films that will ‘compete on the international market without sacrificing their essential “Australianness”.’
COLIN: I feel devastated.
KATE: I don’t wonder.
COLIN: I feel as if, suddenly, I don’t know how the world works anymore. There are producers all over the city screaming for scripts he hasn’t finished, and the reason he didn’t finish them, I suspect, is that if he ever did, he’d be revealed as a total charlatan. He’s risen to the top on the basis of ‘Coastwatchers’, in which he hardly wrote a line, and six scripts that no-one has ever seen! In the sort of world I can comprehend, a man like that wouldn’t be up there deciding our futures.
KATE: He has to be found out eventually.
COLIN: This is the first time in my life I’ve actually felt I could kill.
KATE: He has to be found out.
COLIN: I don’t think he will. Anyone who can rise so far on the basis of so little has to be some kind of… genius.
KATE exits. ELAINE enters at a cocktail party. A background of chatter. ELAINE stands by herself. COLIN walks in and practically bumps into her. He looks confused and searches for something to say.
Ah. Elaine. How are things?
ELAINE: [cuttingly] Things are fine. I’ve just taken a third mortgage out on my house, my bank manager’s given me thirty days to reduce my overdraft by twenty thousand… life is very full and very exciting.
COLIN: [embarrassed] Ah. [Struggling] Script progressing?
ELAINE: [with a deadly edge] Script progressing? Script? You would possibly be referring to the Sanzari script?
COLIN: Yes.
ELAINE: No.
COLIN: Did Mike finish it?
ELAINE: [coldly] Thank you for warning me against him, Colin.
COLIN: It’s not my place—
ELAINE: If you see an old friend about to cast twenty thousand dollars to the wind, don’t you have a slight obligation to speak
a few words of caution? Do you think I enjoy taking out mortgages?
COLIN: The script was bad?
ELAINE: Script? I got fourteen pages and had to go around to his flat and demand it!
COLIN: Elaine, I couldn’t warn you. I’ve never seen a word that he’s written!
ELAINE: I’ve seen several, and they’re etched on my brain. ‘Okay, Rogan, this time the game is up.’ ‘I’ve got news for you, Mason: the game has barely begun.’ ‘I thought you might say that, Rogan, but there’s something I think you ought to know: I shuffled the deck. I hold the trumps.’
COLIN: I’m relieved.
ELAINE: I imagine that anyone who didn’t have to pay five hundred dollars for that little exchange, would be.
COLIN: I started having nightmares that the man actually had talent. I couldn’t find any other explanation for his meteoric rise to the top.
ELAINE: He won’t last. [Reassessing] He probably will.
COLIN: I’d like to write the Sanzari story, if you’re still interested.
ELAINE: I sold the rights.
COLIN: To who?
ELAINE: To Mike McCord.
COLIN: Elaine, you’re joking.
ELAINE: I wish I was.
COLIN: You can’t be serious. Have you heard about some of the projects they’re doing? A fifteen-million-dollar drama about lesbian nuns set in Cincinnati.
ELAINE: Starring Brooke Shields.
COLIN: Why did you sell Sanzari to McCord?
ELAINE: It was the only way I could get my twenty thousand back.
COLIN: Why did I ever come to this city? The water in the harbour’s not blue, it’s cold and hard and green!
ELAINE: Emerald. The Emerald City of Oz. Everyone comes here along their yellow brick roads looking for the answers to their problems and all they find are the demons within themselves. This city lets ’em out and lets ’em rip.
COLIN: You can’t let it off that easily. This city is evil! Glitter, money, fashion, fads, corruption, compromise—
ELAINE: [interrupting] Intelligence, professionalism, hard work, standards, flexibility, dedication. It’s got the best and the worst, and if you choose the worst, you’ve only got yourself to blame.
COLIN: [gesticulating] There’s no forgiveness here. No compassion! If there isn’t a dollar in it, it just doesn’t happen.
Emerald City Page 7
