Apocalypse- Year Zero

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  Reading scripts was her job. She was a development executive – a D-Girl, as they were still called by some of the less “enlightened” companies, even the boys, the beautiful (they were always beautiful, as this was, of course, L.A.) young driven twenty-somethings fresh out of film school who worked as slave labor for the producers and the studios, reading and analyzing scripts and books, hundreds a week, evaluating their potential for film development. It was a coveted job, cutthroat beyond belief, because it was the fast track (second only to nepotism) to producer, or a higher-level studio executive position.

  Once upon a time, her name had been Valerie and she had had dreams of making movies. Now she was a D-Girl and her job was to prevent movies from being made. Her job was to say No, to hold the gates against the tsunami-sized waves of complete and utter drivel churned out by wannabe writers from throughout the country and sent to the studios, through agents, through managers, through contests, through psychotically optimistic cold submissions, all with the hopes of winning the SuperLotto – a film deal.

  When she’d first learned you could actually be paid to read, she thought she’d died and gone to heaven. She’d wanted twenty years of back pay.

  Actually, she’d been half right. The dead half.

  Her job was to kill other people’s dreams to realize her own.

  And that’s showbiz.

  Kid.

  Chapter 2

  LA is a great big freeway… put a hundred down and buy a car. In a week, maybe two, they’ll make you a star…

  It was Santa Ana weather (“Earthquake weather,” California natives always muttered ominously), merciless dry winds sweeping in from the desert, and already hotter than Doomsday. The air fairly shimmered with anticipation.

  D-Girl sped her leased Mustang convertible to make the lights on Wilshire, the only crosstown street with any aesthetic qualities whatsoever, even if they were mainly churches, and thought about killing her boss. She had her Starbucks triple venti latte (her only breakfast, because no self respecting D-Girl ever actually ate, not if she wanted to keep her job); she’d had her power step aerobics class; she was the thinnest she’d ever been in her adult life, an electrifying 105 pounds and floating in her favorite (size 2!!) Moschino suit - all of which meant she was flying on a rather pleasant rush of endorphins, caffeine, and a month of virtual starvation.

  She was ready.

  She made the turn onto Fairfax, heading up toward Hollywood Boulevard. Just a few miles now to the studio.

  Her boss, Joel Birnbaum, was a sociopath famous for his “tentpole” movies, a series of apocalyptic epics of mind-numbing stupidity: violent, sadistic, misogynistic, racist, homophobic assaults on the senses that consistently broke box office records, both domestically and abroad, and spawned endless mind-numbingly inferior sequels. The slime of slime, arguably the meanest man in a notoriously mean town. But working for this particular slime virtually guaranteed your career. Birnbaum broke his staff like other people broke horses and everyone in Hollywood knew if you could get the job done for him you could get it done for anyone – provided you didn’t kill yourself first.

  D-Girl had thought of killing herself, but now she had a much better idea. She was going to kill him instead. He was everything that was wrong with the world, the death of art and culture, evil incarnate. Over six endless, degrading months in which she had witnessed the ritual evisceration of more talented people than she’d ever thought existed on the planet, she had become convinced that killing Birnbaum was a moral imperative, a chance to do something meaningful with her life before – well, ending it.

  She, who loathed the NRA with a native Californian passion and had never even seen a gun in her life – outside a movie theater – had bought a 9-millimeter Glock (a Glock!!) from one of the hustlers who sold fake IDs and green cards on Rampart across from MacArthur Park, where it was rumored you could even purchase a hit on the mark of your choice for the low, low bargain price of a grand per corpse. But they didn’t take credit cards, and D-Girl thought it would be better all the way around, more dramatically organic, as it were, if she handled this mission herself. There was a certain poetic justice to it that would at least momentarily even the score for all the heartbreaking hopefuls who came flocking to Hollywood with their farmgirl/boy skin and apple cheeks and Homecoming Queen tiaras and celluloid dreams – only to be spit on, trampled on, and more often than not, end up smiling wetly out of the back pages of the L.A. Weekly under “Escort Services.”

  Birnbaum had more than once suggested that D-Girl was headed for that particular fate (while staring squarely at her chest, which to be fair probably puzzled him because it was so determinedly un-surgically-enhanced).

  Birnbaum, who said Faust when he meant Mephistopheles; who thought Mumbai was in Africa; who called every female character in any movie ever made, including Galadriel and Queen Elizabeth, “the girl,” who was constitutionally incapable of walking his own dogs or even walking to the door to turn on – or off – a lightswitch; who started every script notes meeting by shouting at the writer: “Where are the whores?”...

  No. She’d do it herself.

  D-Girl took another hit of triple latte, shifted to fourth, rested one hand on a silk-stockinged thigh, and mused that she might steal a scene from one of Birnbaum’s own movies: put the barrel of the gun in his mouth and make him suck it off before she pulled the trigger.

  Chapter 3

  Birnbaum had production offices the size of a mini-major studio on the World Studios lot in Hollywood. D-Girl made a left off Hollywood Boulevard and drove through the famous gates of World, winding through the narrow streets of the back lot to get to Birnbaum Productions. The false fronts of the New York street gave way to a lavish set of a small town plaza with the clock tower that was featured in Birnbaum’s breakout family movie, Time Tripper. The guard at the dedicated guard gate behind the clock tower waved D-Girl through, and she smiled thinly, thinking of the Glock in her Kate Spade bag. There were advantages to not looking like a terrorist.

  The metal gate lumbered open and she pulled into the circular driveway, past a four-tiered marble fountain that was a replica of the Trevi Fountain in Rome. Birnbaum always said, “From that greaseball movie,” meaning La Dolce Vita, which Birnbaum couldn’t have pronounced at gunpoint. D-Girl thought that maybe she’d give him that one chance: he could live, maybe minus his testicles, if he could pronounce La Dolce Vita, or even name the director.

  The production offices were a Greco-Roman monstrosity, more Caesar’s Palace in Vegas than anything remotely Italian.

  The double doors opened onto a granite entry room with a waterfall on one wall and a receptionist’s desk, behind which a model-gorgeous airhead sat, whose entire day consisted of saying, “Birnbaum Productions, how may I direct your call?” two thousand and seventy times and punching the button for the appropriate extension. D-Girl walked past the airhead, who per usual didn’t look at her, and into the atrium, a round room of glass panels around three quarters of it. The waiting area of couches and chairs and assorted exotic plants in thousand-dollar planters was in the middle of the vast granite floor, and four desks and office areas were set around the perimeter, for D-Girl and Birnbaum’s three personal assistants. There was no privacy at all; they worked in a fishbowl.

  In the center of what wall space there was, at the head of the bowl, were the double doors to Birnbaum’s office. The doors opened hydraulically via a button beside Birnbaum’s desk.

  The three assistants’ desks were empty. Birnbaum was already in a meeting; D-Girl could tell from the screaming coming from behind the supposedly sound-proofed doors.

  She was a half-hour early, so there was no reason to alert anyone that she was there. She crossed to her desk, sat in her chair and put her purse (with the Glock!) carefully into her lower drawer.

  The double doors whooshed open slightly and a terrified assistant scurried out (one of the three, all equally and constantly terrorized, and in constant rotation, rarely
lasting for more than a month, even if they did survive the first day).

  “He wants gingerbread pancakes,” the boy whispered, frantic.

  “Café Latte, corner of Crescent Heights and Wilshire.” D-Girl recited directions by rote. “Make sure the maple syrup is in a container on the side, with a lid, and bring four large one-percent Mochas, too. No whipped cream, no cinnamon.” She handed him money from the petty cash drawer, which she figured could have fed a province of a third-world country for a week.

  “Thanks…” Assistant One mumbled, swallowing bile, and bolted across the atrium for the front door.

  D-Girl checked the computer calendar to see who was being eviscerated within. It wasn’t good: the screenwriter of Birnbaum’s new pet project, Apocalypse. The original script had been a smart, compelling archaeological adventure story, a passion project, a spec by a first-timer (who had probably written a hundred scripts to get to the quality of this one), that combined different end-of-days predictions from different cultures from Mayan to Australian Aboriginal, and made a strong case that the string of recent worldwide disasters – 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and superstorm Sandy, the tsunamis in Thailand and Japan - were the prelude to the coming of the Four Horsemen. After Birnbaum’s special treatment the movie was now a giant and gigantically stupid disaster movie. The female lead, an archaeologist, had been turned into, what else? - a stripper (though she only “danced” to support her four-year old son - Birnbaum’s concession to the “family audience.” Said son of course lived with his grandparents back in Omaha so that “the girl” could fuck any random man who drifted through the picture). There were explosions or car chases every ten minutes by the clock, some incomprehensible subplot about Ukrainian arms dealers who precipitated the (of course) nuclear explosion that constituted the climax, and the Mayan end-of-world predictions had fallen by the wayside as the actual date of the predicted catastrophe had passed with the world remaining arguably intact. (“So make it Aztec,” Birnbaum had said. “Who gives a shit?”)

  The screenwriter had swallowed all sense of pride, ego and authorship and painstakingly incorporated all of Birnbaum’s mind-bendingly mediocre rewrites; remarkably, he was a talented enough writer that the movie still made some kind of sense. Nonetheless, he was no doubt being fired so Birnbaum could move on to one of his favorite A-list sellouts.

  The doors opened again with their silent hydraulic hiss and the remaining two assistants scurried out like cockroaches and dashed out toward the front door. They were both white as newly bleached sheets and D-Girl thought that wasn’t a particularly good sign.

  At nine-oh-nine, the double doors whooshed opened again and the screenwriter emerged. The doors closed behind him. He walked a few steps out into the atrium, then stopped, in a daze. He was pale and shaking; for a moment D-Girl was afraid he would vomit on the floor. It had happened before.

  “I’m fired,” he said aloud, to her, maybe.

  “I know,” she said.

  He stood for quite a while. Screenwriters were fired in Hollywood every day, of course, but D-Girl had no doubt that the firing had been sadistic in the extreme. Most producers didn’t bother to fire writers in person – they let the agents deliver the news. But Birnbaum reveled in it. He took special pains to get the writers in to do it himself, in person, and no agent would dare soften the blow by even hinting to their client what was in store. Birnbaum wanted to see the writers’ faces when he did it. D-Girl had long suspected that he recorded the firings and had edited them together into a personal DVD compilation – a screenwriter snuff film, as it were.

  The screenwriter was still standing in the middle of the floor. He was good-looking for a writer, she realized, in a dark-haired, Amerasian, over-six-feet-and-ripped, Keanu-as-Neo, sensitive dreamy intellectual kind of way, although he currently looked like death. He looked back at the doors.

  “Someone should do something,” he said. He was probably not aware that he had spoken aloud.

  “I know,” she said. She doubted if he heard her.

  But then he turned and looked right at her. “For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book: if any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things that are written in his book.”

  D-Girl looked at him, stupefied. She didn’t understand a word of it. Then for a moment, she thought she did. The screenwriter turned and walked slowly toward the exit. He walked carefully, as if he been beaten until every muscle in his body was aching, as if he’d been raped.

  D-Girl watched him go. She pulled out a drawer and looked down at the bulge in her Kate Spade bag.

  “I know,” she said softly.

  Chapter 4

  At ten-nineteen Birnbaum buzzed D-Girl into his office. D-Girl opened the bottom drawer, took out her Kate Spade bag, arranged the strap on her left shoulder, and went in.

  Birnbaum sat behind a desk that was a massive half-circle of gleaming teak – hawk-nosed, pig-eyed, a body that was as good as a seventy-thou a year dedicated personal trainer was ever going to get it. His 2008 Golden Globe for Best Picture sat centered behind him on a custom-built shelf. Joel Birnbaum had never been nominated for an Oscar and liked to boast that Oscars were for art house pansies; a Globe meant you had your fist wrapped around the world’s balls.

  He had D-Girl’s script breakdowns on Apocalypse in his hand and was slapping them against his thigh and scowling.

  D-Girl stopped in front of the desk and tried to breathe through her hatred and terror.

  “What in Christ’s fucking name is this fucking shit?” Birnbaum demanded.

  D-Girl kept her voice to a monotone. “Those are the character breakdowns for Apocalypse. They need to go out to casting agents today.”

  “I know what it says on the top of the page. I can read.”

  D-Girl refrained from saying that she had not to date seen any evidence of it.

  “Character breakdowns. You call this a character breakdown? ‘Family background, life aspirations, character arc’?”

  “That is a description of the female lead --”

  “The girl? You call this a description of the girl?” He ripped the pages up with a flourish. “The only thing we need to know is that she can suck the chrome off a hood ornament. Type that up and get it out there.”

  D-Girl looked at him without expression, turned wordlessly to go back out of the office, so used to obeying she’d forgotten what she had come there to do.

  “Wait a minute,” Birnbaum barked behind her. “Wait just a god-damn minute.”

  She stopped on the floor and looked back at him. He surveyed her, with mild outrage.

  “Are you disagreeing with me? Is that disagreement I see? Come here,” he ordered.

  He leaned back in his four-thousand dollar leather desk chair and waited.

  She walked slowly to the desk.

  “Over here, I said.” He meant the other side of the desk. He leaned further back in his chair, legs planted and apart. D-Girl looked at him with frozen fascination. Was he really about to – what? Demand a blow job? Force her to suck his toes?

  Her purse was on her shoulder – evidently Birnbaum had not noticed this anomaly - and the Glock was a hard bulge against her left breast. This is it, she thought, with dreamy detachment.

  She moved slowly around to his side of the desk, stopped in front of him, beside the panoramic window.

  Birnbaum stared up at her. “I decide what’s good,” he informed her. “Do you know why I get to decide what’s good?” She didn’t, of course, but he didn’t wait for her to answer before he motioned to the window. “Look out there. What do you see?

  She saw the Hollywood Hills, the Hollywood sign, sound stages, and the parking lot. “That Ferrari out there is my car,” Birnbaum said triumphantly, waving to his personali
zed parking spot. “That’s why I get to decide what’s good.”

  He clapped his hands together once as if the lesson were over. QED. D-Girl looked down at him, and she had no idea what she was going to say to him, no idea how to sum up the totality of his crimes. She opened her mouth.

  “Dream killer, “ she said. It wasn’t what she’d been planning to say, but now that she’d said it, she realized that it felt right. Birnbaum blinked and stared as if she’d lost her mind, which she would have to agree was probably the case.

  “What?” He said, too confused for the rage to have fully taken hold.

  “The earth dreams. You’re polluting the earth’s dreams.”

  His face was beginning to go that familiar apoplectic purple. “Are you fucking nuts? Have you lost your fucking mind?”

  “You steal dreams,” she intoned. “You crush dreams. You corrupt dreams. You pollute dreams.”

  He was watching her now with mild fascination. “You have lost your mind. You realize you’re done in this town—”

  “No. You’re done.” She could feel her hands shaking.

  Then it wasn’t just her hands, it was everything in her body. The shaking came up from her feet and through her entire being. She didn’t even think of the gun; she didn’t know how it happened, but suddenly she had the Golden Globe in her hands. It was remarkably heavy and she was bringing it down on Birnbaum’s head. The thud was immensely satisfying and the blood was redder than she thought possible, and thinner than the dyed glucose syrup they used on sets, thin like water. It splashed on her suit as she hit him again. He made a sound like a creaking chair. She held the statuette like a baseball bat, her hands wrapped around the globe part, and swung again. This time his jaw cracked and teeth flew.