Hank Saddler appears, doing his speed-waddle, palms raised in some nonverbal sign of apology, smiling and nodding to everyone, especially Jess Burnham. George marvels at people in television who never get their appetite for star fucking slaked. Maybe that’s why they work in television. Saddler sits at the opposite end of the table from Featherstone, next to Burnham.
“So,” Featherstone says, “we know you have some concerns about the Real Time concept, Barry, and Harold and I—and George and Emily—want to give you a chance to get them out on the table from the get-go. This is transparency time, okay?”
Stengel turns to face George and Emily, pushing his elbows down hard on the table with a lot of body weight. This is clearly a man climbing onto a very high horse. His body language says, I’d go over there and knock some goddamn sense into you if I could.
“This fall, I will proudly celebrate my thirtieth anniversary in broadcast journalism,” he says. Is that Tom Snyder you’re impersonating, George thinks, or Ted Knight? “I’m proud of the news division we’ve created at the MBC, brick by brick, during the last year and a half. I’m proud of what we stand for.” Which makes you prouder—your piece on the East Asian economic crisis where the segment producer had the twelve-year-old Thai prostitute repeat the fellatio three times so his crew could shoot cutaways, or the Golden Gate suicide where you enhanced the jumper’s midair scream—to make it, as you said at the time, “real but sweetened”? You were probably proud in a different way of your bulletin about Clinton’s nonexistent heart attack, and your two-hour special on the ex-wives and girlfriends of all this year’s presidential candidates (which didn’t even win its time slot against Moesha). “George, you’ve spent time in journalism. You paid a few dues. You used to do some very decent nonfiction work, as I recall.” Fuck you, you patronizing, stupid, sanctimonious, middle-market news director asshole. “I just don’t understand how you think you’re going to get away with actors playing broadcast journalists. Or journalists trying to act. Or whatever the hell you have in mind. Maybe it’ll get ratings. But it will probably damage American journalism, and it will definitely damage the reputation of MBC News.”
Stengel leans back in his chair, proud and spent. Saddler has been taking notes. Everyone looks at George.
“Well, as Timothy said, we do appreciate your concern,” George says. “And your confusion.” He turns to the anchor. “Jess,” he begins in the scrupulously neutral fact-finding tone with which journalists and prosecutors ask tendentious questions. “Do you write what you read on NewsNight 1999? On NewsNight 2000, I mean.”
Stengel rolls his eyes. Burnham half grins. They both know where George is going.
“I tinker,” Burnham says. “I polish.”
“But you deliver stories and lines other people write for you—you perform scripts drafted by members of the Writers Guild of America East, the same union my NARCS writers belong to.”
“I didn’t know that,” Featherstone says.
George is still looking straight at Burnham. “Before commercial, during your bumpers, when you’re still on air for that long shot of the studio—”
“The newsroom,” Stengel corrects.
“—why do you scribble notes, or frown and dial the phone, or collate sheets of paper?”
“Because I’m still on air.”
“Right.”
“Because if I checked my makeup or stretched or ate pistachios or pulled out my copy of Martha Stewart I’d look dopey.” She smiles at him.
“So you’re doing a performance of seriousness. You are a serious journalist. And you play one on TV.”
Stengel says to Featherstone, “This is just semantic goddamn BS.”
“Let’s say you turn to Bill Rossiter for cross talk after a piece about, oh, the president’s anal warts, and you feel like laughing—you don’t dare smile, right? You fake a very, very sober expression and tone of voice. Right?”
Her grin widens.
“Or when you have a live back-and-forth with a correspondent in the field,” George continues. “He knows what you’re going to ask, and you know all the answers to the questions you’re asking—so you have to portray curiosity. Right? That’s virtuoso acting. Or when you shoot the subject of a story pretending to talk on the phone or pretending to examine a bullet hole in a doorframe. And at the top of the show every night, that jump-cut black-and-white taped piece of you and Bill and the producers interviewing and opening files and editing—was every bit of that real and spontaneous? And when correspondents do cutaways and ask their tough, probing questions to thin air—”
“Come off it, Mactier!” Stengel snaps. “There’s a hell of a big difference between standard packaging and presentational production value items, and a whole goddamn fake-news soap opera!”
“We’re not going to be making up news, if that’s what you think,” George says, staying calm, even smiling a little. “The news we deliver every week on the Friday show, on the news hour, will be one hundred percent bona fide. As straight and accurate and professional and real as anything you put on the air.”
Stengel makes a huffy whistling noise, half closes his eyes and shakes his head.
“You’re the pioneer in laying music tracks under straight news stories,” George says to him. “Didn’t you tell Variety that’s your ‘secret weapon’ against the major networks?”
“ ‘The older networks’ is the phrase we use, George,” Saddler corrects. “Not major, older.”
“On Real Time we won’t even go that far—no scoring of news stories. No reenactments, like I’ve seen Rossiter do on Point Blank.” Point Blank is the weekly MBC News crime show. “Some of our behind-the-scenes shots will be fictionalized, yes. The two half-hours earlier in the week are going to be scripted dramas—”
“Dramedies,” Featherstone interjects. “Dramedies.”
“—into which we intercut documentary footage, handheld stuff, cinema verité—shots of interview setups, travel, story meetings, editing sessions. The reporting will all be one hundred percent real. The difference is that we’ll shoot a lot more of ourselves doing it, and sometimes actors will be in the shots as well, delivering lines. It’ll be like—like two parallel universes that intersect.”
“How are viewers going to have any goddamn idea what’s real and what’s fake?” Stengel says. “They aren’t going to be able to keep your little game straight.”
George has not wanted to play the populist trump card because he isn’t sure he entirely believes it, but what choice does he have? The hangover is emboldening, he realizes, the woozy sleeplessness overriding his usual reluctance to cut and jab. It’s triage: defend Real Time, destroy Stengel. He even decides to address Stengel by his first name, a Dale Carnegie gesture he loathes, like winking.
“I guess I disagree, Barry. I trust the audience to understand the difference. They aren’t thrown when people from CNN and the Sunday morning shows appear as themselves in movies, are they?”
“George,” Featherstone says excitedly, “show them those decks from audience research about what happens to anchors’ Q scores when they guest on Leno and Letterman.” He turns to Stengel and Burnham. “We’ve got actual evidence!” He turns back to George. “You have those before and after charts, G?”
“No. No, I don’t.” Because Iris didn’t overnight the files. So that’s what “decks” are.
“Our research proves that viewers totally understand the difference between truth and nonfiction,” Featherstone says. “Bill Clinton played the president on NewsRadio, and nobody was confused. Remember the celebs playing themselves on Larry Sanders?”
“That was HBO,” Stengel says.
He probably has a point, George thinks. According to the MBC research, the lower a viewer’s income and education, the more apt he or she is to confuse entertainment and news, fiction and nonfiction. George isn’t about to cut Stengel any slack, however. He decides to take the full cheap shot.
“And we,” he says solemnly and slowly, �
��are the MBC, Barry.” Jesus, is he really making this speech? “As Harold says, the major networks—the older networks—were built on underestimating the intelligence of the American viewer. And now those networks are dying for the same reason. We’re supposed to be programming for the people out there who get it.”
“Harold’s line,” Saddler says, “is ‘insulting the intelligence of the North American viewer.’ ”
“You’re on a slippery goddamn slope here,” Stengel says. “News is news and entertainment is entertainment, and everyone knows the difference. No matter how you try to spin it.”
“Exactly,” George says, careful to maintain a friendly, collegial air. “Exactly. And every week Emily and I are going to be producing a little less than one hour of news and a little more than one hour of entertainment. And everyone will know the difference.”
“That’s just such bullshit, Mactier. Glib, dangerous bullshit.”
“No, Barry, I’ll tell you what that is: it’s innovation,” says Featherstone, angrier than George has ever seen him, angry in a way—a passionate, appealingly phony way—that seems perfectly calibrated to shut Stengel up. “That’s out-of-the-box thinking. That’s keeping it real. And that’s how we make this the New motherfucking Network for the New motherfucking Century.”
George and Emily exchange a glance. Their spokesman and savior is America’s oldest living wigger now performing the Act Three soliloquy from Mr. Doggy Dogg Goes to Washington.
“And Barry,” Featherstone goes on, “I want to make sure you get this straight. From the top. Real Time is, sure as shinola, a ten-foot tent pole in this company’s new broadcasting … new … what is it?”
“Paradigm?” Emily says.
“Our new broadcasting paradigm. New paradigms take a little courage, Barry, and a little faith. Listen, if Harold didn’t believe strongly in George’s ability to pull this off with integrity, none of us would be here. And we’re here with you as a courtesy, okay? Out of respect. For you and Jess and the journalistic dream. Not to give you an opportunity to be the Blah-blah Old Paradigm News Bummer Guy. Entertainment is Mose Broadcasting’s core competency. News is your core competency. But George is lucky enough to have entertainment and news as his core competencies. He’s broadband beta. You’re a sea creature, he’s an amphibian. You’re different species, but you both like water, okay? The four-one-one is: Don’t go zero-sum on me. We are not about set-tripping. Play nice, respect others, and everybody wins. You have to make a decision, Barry, a choice: are you down with the program, or not down?”
George has never heard such deeply felt and stirring gibberish.
“Timothy, as the president and editor-in-chief of MBC News, I’m in charge of maintaining the whole network’s nonfiction standards and practices. And I think I have an obligation—”
“Real Time is a go project. Period. Okay? The light is green. You don’t have to work with George and Emily—”
“No,” Emily says.
“—but working against them is a no way José. Big time. Capice?”
No one says a thing. Jess Burnham shifts her weight in her chair, leaning away from Stengel, turning herself into a bystander.
“Barry,” George says, feeling suddenly magnanimous, “we’re only going to share your facilities.”
“Not the news brand,” Saddler says.
“We’re not taking any of your air away,” Featherstone says.
“Or any of your on-air people or producers,” adds George.
“My people? My people? I’m about to be downsized by seventy-eight people, thanks to you. Thanks to your brilliant wife. Who says our online news video is like a bunch of parrots squawking. Is that what you think too, Mactier?”
Not exactly—what George thinks, what he has been saying for years now, is that not just MBC but all video online is like a talking parrot, or as he says in certain situations, like Dr. Johnson’s female preacher—a novelty, amazing but not compelling. So Mose is dissolving MBCNews.com, as Lizzie suggested. George suffers one of those complicated moments when fresh emotions (curiosity, satisfaction, a kind of emasculated dismay) are at odds with one another and with the expression (triumphant pseudo-empathy) still frozen on his face.
“Barry, Barry, Barry,” Featherstone says. “We’ve been through that. You know we’re just trying to put all our wood behind one arrow. And hey, most of those online folks are getting lifeboated over to Finale.”
“The new obitutainment show,” Saddler whispers in George and Emily’s direction.
“Yeah,” Stengel says to Featherstone, “last week you told me we’d be staffing up with entertainment-division people, this week it all comes out of my own hide. Thanks so much, Timothy.”
“I don’t remember saying that. If I did—”
“You sure did,” Stengel replies, taking the offensive. “You absolutely promised me staff from Freaky Shit!”
George remembers hearing Stengel declare, somewhere, that he would refuse to work with staff from Freaky Shit! “But Barry,” he says, “I thought you said you’d be a laughingstock if those infotainment banana-brains ever worked on one of your shows.”
Stengel, stopped in his tracks, looks at George. He’s actually breathing hard.
“Yeah,” Featherstone says. “Right. That’s right.”
George, with a flash of panic, realizes where he’d heard Stengel’s “banana brain” remark: eavesdropping from his cell phone in Minnesota. Fortunately, Stengel, cornered, tangled up in his own apoplectic dither, moves on.
“And Emily,” he says, red-faced, looking back and forth between Emily and Featherstone, “what about your involvement with Gore? How’s it going to look for one of the guy’s biggest fund-raisers and major advisers to be producing a quote-unquote ‘news’ program? How the hell are you going to be able to cover Gore?”
“ ‘Major adviser’ is really an exaggeration,” Emily starts, “and certainly, if there’s any question of—”
“Fuck Al Gore,” George says, pronouncing each word with gusto, shocking his partner. “Emily’s not going to be involved in shaping any of the news coverage. And we can’t wait to be tough on him.”
At the center of Emily’s forehead, where she had collagen from a human cadaver injected during Christmas vacation in order to smooth out her first deep furrows, the muscles tense and bulge.
“Or Bush Jr.,” he continues. “Or Dick Gephardt. Or Dick Holbrooke, or Dick Armey, or—”
“All the Dicks,” Jess Burnham says.
Featherstone laughs enthusiastically (real but sweetened), and accompanies himself on conference table with a quick two-handed drummer’s rim shot.
“Or Bill Gates,” George says, thinking of Lizzie’s and MBC’s involvements with Microsoft, “or Michael Eisner or Katharine Graham or Rupert Murdoch,” he continues, thinking of everybody’s former employers, preemptively and gleefully full-disclosing, letting a hundred conflicts of interest bloom. “Or Mike Milken.”
Saddler looks at Featherstone, who’s still enjoying George’s performance.
“Or even,” George adds with a small smile, “Ted Turner.”
Stengel’s previous job was at CNN. When he left for MBC, he took a half dozen senior producers and correspondents with him. Turner, asked about the raid by an Access Hollywood reporter a couple of days later at the premiere of Warner Bros.’ Batman 5, Superman 5, Earth 0, used the opportunity to refer to Harold Mose as “the Ho Chi Minh of broadcasting.” When Turner’s wife yanked on his arm, he stutteringly amended his dis. “What I mean is, uhhhh, Mr. Mose is the Saddam Hussein of broadcasting. The gentleman doesn’t play by the same rules we observe in the civilized world.”
Jess Burnham sits up and looks at George, then at Emily. “I don’t entirely understand how your show is going to function. And it may be a slippery slope,” she says, shrugging in Stengel’s direction. “But I’ve got a house in Aspen.” She grins again. “I’m afraid I kind of like slippery slopes.” She checks her watch and stands. “You
guys are going to have a gas. Let’s go, Barry. Time to go hear about nonmilitary military aid to noncombatant combatants in Chiapas.”
On the way back to his office, Featherstone does the talking. He congratulates George (“You literally rocked the house, man!”), and asks Emily if Gore’s youngest daughter is interested in a TV career (“She was at some fund-raising gig the other night at the Mondrian—born spokesmodel”). As they reach the top floor, they see the blond receptionist squatting in Featherstone’s office, evidently explaining a digital device to someone sitting just out of sight. She gestures out the door toward them, smiling a little nervously. The man holding the gadget leans toward her and cranes his neck to look. It’s Harold Mose.
“Hello, chief!” Timothy says with sudden startling fervor, abandoning in mid-sentence his solemn, sotto voce description of a “proposed multiphase reengineering” of Bill Rossiter’s on-air hairstyle. It’s as if a bolus of time-released methamphetamine just reached his cerebral cortex.
Mose stands briskly. He is wearing a blue turtleneck darker than navy, plush gray trousers, and black suede loafers. He has no jacket. Harold Mose is the only man whose clothes George regularly envies. (“Two words,” Featherstone said last year when Mose was named to the International Best-Dressed List. “Bespoke vicuña.”) George seldom wears a tie, but today, as on any weekday that he wakes up feeling wobbly, he’s put on the full executive costume, overcompensating, dressing the part of responsible adult. But now, in his unpressed gray suit and stained tie (a fresh dollop of room-service raspberry yogurt camouflaged, more or less, by maroon paisleys), George feels both under- and overdressed.
“Faith was showing me how she’s able to track your every move with her GPS gadget here, Timothy.” He looks over at George and Emily. “Orwellian, isn’t it?”
“Motorola,” Featherstone says.
“Do not ever tell Gloria about this thing,” he says, tapping the screen. Gloria is Mrs. Mose. “She’d have me wired up in five minutes flat.” He winks, then turns and heads back into Featherstone’s office. It is a silent command, somewhere between rude and informal, that they are to follow him.
Turn of the Century Page 28
