Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  “What’s Lucas’s problem? And why are we getting their notes this morning?” If the script changes at this point, and Angela or Lucas isn’t going to say some lines that are in the script, the first assistant director or the script supervisor will have to let all the camera people know, and the sound department, and the guy who swings and dips the boom microphone, and so on down the line.

  Phoebe sighs. Gordon explains. Both are relieved that Daddy has come to make everything okay. “Lucas says ‘looking like a pussy’ isn’t going to get him film work or win him an Emmy. He wants Cowboy standing during that final speech, not sitting on the ground with Angela standing over him. I say fine. Let’s get to work.”

  “He also objects,” Phoebe says, “to Jennie winning the argument by ignoring him, and getting the button. And Lucas wants to call the smuggler ‘the screwy slant-eye’ instead of ‘the screwy Asian kid.’ ”

  Angela, Jennie, Lucas, Horace, Cowboy—five names for two people used interchangeably by everyone all day long. Sometimes George thinks this is the biggest difference between producing news and entertainment: in the former, the talent always play themselves, Ted Koppel is always called Ted Koppel. Not that the difference is absolute—Jerry Seinfeld played Jerry Seinfeld, and Jess Burnham has been Jess Burnham only a little more than a year.

  “Oh, Mr. Man can stand up, I guess,” George says. “But the line is the line.” He pauses and says softly, “Film work?”

  “On the lines,” Gordon says. “I think his note was really a reaction to her note.” On “her,” Gordon nods hard right, toward Angela’s trailer.

  “What’s her problem?” George asks Phoebe.

  “The Hawaii Five-O joke.”

  “She doesn’t get it?”

  “She thinks it’s racist.”

  Phoebe shrugs as George stares at her and then Gordon for an appalled, uncomprehending moment. He breathes through his nose, in and out fully, the way his wife tells him to do. He thinks of his $16,575 a week. “Gordon,” he says, “can you go shoot the Hawaiians getting whacked now, so we don’t get any further behind? Thanks.” He knocks on the RV door. He thinks of Lizzie’s line about the truth of clichés. The richest child he knows is a brat who behaves like a ghastly little adult, his star is a capricious diva who considers herself the Simone de Beauvoir of show business (even though she’s under the impression that Simone de Beauvoir was Jacqueline Onassis’s mother as well as Jean-Paul Sartre’s lover).

  Her hair is being combed and twisted and teased. “George,” she says, glancing back and forth between their reflections as he sits down beside her. On the wall behind them, also reflected in the mirror, are the posters for her best-known feature films from the eighties—Killer and Killer Again. “Thank you.”

  He smiles. “You’re welcome, Angela.” Then, “Well, I guess that settles that. I’m glad we had this chance to talk things through.”

  “Don’t tease. Everything is not a joke, George. But I want you to know I appreciate your collegiality.” She pronounces it “college-ality”; because he’s wearing a tweed jacket over a cardigan and carrying a spiral notebook, George thinks for an instant, maybe college-ality is what she means. “I just don’t think I can do it. I can’t …” As she searches for le mot juste, her chin jabs toward the script sitting beneath the platter of sun-dried boysenberries on the counter. (A steady dressing-room supply of sun-dried boysenberries is one of Angela’s contractual requirements, along with a production assistant to take care of Peacemaker, whom she likes to bring to the set.) “I cannot … validate Lucas’s racist remark. Do you know? Mary Ann,” she says to the stylist calmly, “I can still see that same fucking piece of frizz by my left ear.”

  “He’s not going to say ‘slant-eye.’ ”

  “No, the other one. In the script.”

  George knows what she’s talking about. As the scene ends, two pot smugglers from Maui are on the floor, apprehended and bleeding. Cowboy Quesada has a speech that ends with the line, “And your little creep here isn’t the gook we want.” Jennie O’Donnell, Angela’s character, is supposed to ignore Cowboy and say to her black sergeant before she walks off-camera, “Book ’em Dan-o.” That’s the button of the scene, and the end of the act.

  “I don’t think you’re validating anything with that line,” George says. “Except that Lucas is sort of a pussy and a dope.” George momentarily worries: is one not supposed to use “pussy” in this sense? “Cowboy, I mean.”

  “But the Hawaii Five-O reference, it’s just so—it’s Jennie saying, ‘These suspects are Pacific Islanders and so I’m going to make a wisecrack referencing their race.’ It’s just bad form.” Although Angela Janeway grew up in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and on NARCS plays a character who grew up in Middle Village, Queens, her off-camera speaking manner is from some imaginary place out over the Atlantic due east of New Haven, where classy Americans still have nearly British accents. The verbs she favors—validate, referencing, empower—save her from being a straight Hepburn impersonator, the same way that in brand-new old-looking houses the skylights and cathedral ceilings and giant TV screens remind you that it isn’t really 1903. “I wouldn’t go there, George. I never even watched that show. That isn’t me. That just isn’t Jennie.”

  “That just isn’t Jennie” or “Cowboy wouldn’t do that” are the euphemisms actors and producers and directors and writers use instead of “I hate the line you wrote” or “Your acting is phony.” It’s a white-lie etiquette code meant to spare feelings, but not because show business is humane: candor would provoke arguments and name calling, which sends people stomping off sets, which delays shooting schedules, which results in overtime, which is expensive, which is impermissible, particularly in television, and particularly at MBC.

  It isn’t you, Angela, George thinks, because you have never intentionally said anything funny that wasn’t scripted for you by somebody else. “It isn’t you, Angela. I appreciate that. But it is Jennie. Jennie didn’t get an MFA from Yale.” You dog, George. “Jennie doesn’t read books—she does watch TV, that’s her frame of reference.” You brazen self-loathing dog. “And as you’ve put it so perfectly, Jennie keeps the painful parts of life at bay by making jokes.” You pathetic brazen self-loathing corndog whore, George. “And that’s why Angela Janeway is playing her, because she can stretch, and she can go there. ‘Book ’em, Dan-o’ is a witty line. ‘Book ’em Dan-o’ is the right line. Trust me, Angela.” When he’s trying to persuade actors (or his children) to do something, George exempts himself from his rule against resorting to first names. Gestures and statements he regards as inexcusably oleaginous come across to actors as menschy. What he considers tasteful adult reticence, Angela Janeway and Lucas Winton consider cold and aloof. Occasionally during the last year, George has forced himself to talk like an asshole Merry Chatterer so that his actors won’t consider him an asshole Inscrutable Hardass. “Okay?”

  The stylist squirts and brushes the star’s hair one final time.

  “Mary Ann likes the line,” Angela says, glancing toward the stylist. “She said it’s ‘postmodern,’ didn’t you, Mary Ann?” The young woman smiles.

  “So we’re all set?” George asks.

  Angela keeps him waiting for an answer, and waiting. In her pouty old-fashioned girlishness, like a lot of actresses (and so entirely unlike his wife), Angela sometimes reminds George more of a female impersonator than of an actual modern woman. For the first time since he’s been in the trailer, Angela turns to look directly at George instead of his reflection.

  “I suppose.”

  “I love you,” he says with an inflection that puts it somewhere between smarmy and a good-natured parody of smarm. “Let’s go to work.”

  “George?” She doesn’t ask the question, she strings it out, waits to be solicited, like in a script. Talent.

  “Havel’s a no, but I’m still working on getting Mandela. A guy I know ghostwrote his autobiography. If we can’t get him for a cameo here, I’ll try to book him on
Real Time—the new show. With you, as yourself, like we talked about. I promise.”

  “Actually, the new show is what I was going to ask about. About a recurring role.”

  “You want to be on Real Time?” This could be a good idea. It is probably a terrible idea. Good or bad, the idea is now here in the trailer with them, like a small, panicked animal. George has to deal with it—pick it up and pet it, or trap it, something. He needs to keep Angela happy but he can’t commit to anything. Enthusiastic but cautionary. Is this the definition of temporize? “That’s a really interesting idea, Angela. But Real Time at its core is going to be a news program. Real news.”

  “Oh, I know, George. I’ve read your treatment. It’s really quite brilliant. That’s exactly why I’m so highly motivated. Reality is so much more exciting to me than”—she waves toward the script—“this. Sandy Flandy was going to talk to you, but I said, ‘No, I need to talk to George myself, directly, artist to artist.’ ” George has never in his life thought of himself as an artist. “ ‘So he can understand how totally serious I am about this.’ ” She tosses a handful of dried boysenberries into her mouth. “You know about my work internationally. This is not some silly actress ego trip, George,” she says, chewing, her mouth completely full. “It’s about War and Peace and Dostoyevsky’s selfish steam.” She swallows.

  War and Peace and Dostoyevsky’s selfish steam? George doesn’t know the line. He’s clueless about all but the most obvious poetry references, such as “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” and “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” Typical pretentious Angela.

  “You know?” she continues. “Not my personal self-esteem so much as American women’s, our f-ing self-esteem as a gender.”

  Ah: war and peace and just our f-ing self-esteem.

  “You think you could manage the work, on both shows? With all your outside commitments?”

  “I’d resign from the Creative Coalition, and Friends of the Mexican Citizens Movement for Democracy, and all of them. So that I’d become objective.”

  “Well, this is a big idea. We haven’t even thought about”—he hes-itates—“casting. But I’m completely flattered that you’re interested. I mean, as a vote of confidence in the show. Let me talk to Emily about it.”

  “Sandy says I’m nuts, but I’ll audition. I don’t really audition.”

  “I know. I know.” Since he’s already faking a placid, interested smile, he goes ahead and asks, “Angela, where’d you happen to get hold of the Real Time treatment? From Timothy?”

  “No, from Aries, your darling assistant. She is so fantastic. So warm and giving. Cute name, too. You don’t mind that I talked to Sandy about it, do you?”

  George shakes his head, and then, trying to move beyond his rage at motherfucking loose-cannon Iris, lets Angela’s mention of Sandy Flandy remind him of Sandi Bemis, Featherstone’s second-string girlfriend, the pet aromatherapist who wants to enlighten and exploit Angela’s German shepherd. “Where’s the dog?” he says, looking around the trailer. “Out exploring Great Kills?”

  Angela looks at George for a long moment and then crumples back into her makeup chair, crying, sobbing, out of her mind. “Head back!” Mary Ann says to Angela, and begins placing cotton balls around her eyes, building a pair of tiny dams to hold back the rivulets of tears from the cosmetically perfect facial plains. “Peacemaker passed on,” Mary Ann whispers to George as he heads for the door.

  She’ll perform the line as written, but now she’s a soggy, quivering wreck who wants George to make her an anchorwoman. Peacemaker may have died, but now George doesn’t have to ask her to enroll her dog in an aromatherapy class. One step forward, one half step back. As George heads to the set to let Phoebe and Gordon know that he has solved the Angela problem, he passes Lucas Winton, who is tugging down on his prop bulletproof vest, apparently trying to expose some chest hair. “George,” he says, “we are not rewriting, are we?”

  “Nope. Let’s go do the scene.”

  “Hey, George—when do I get my travel expenses?”

  “That’s a Barbara conversation.” Barbara is the NARCS production accountant.

  “Quote, ‘All out-of-pocket expenses incurred by talent for the purpose of promoting the program shall be reimbursed,’ unquote.” Lucas Winton flew his own plane down to Washington last month to appear at a press conference for Decent Entertainers Against Dope, a new group whose members vow to make citizens’ arrests of fellow actors and crew members if they see them using illegal drugs. This is approximately the fifth time he has asked George to reimburse him for the money he spent on aviation fuel. “My PR gal says Access Hollywood aired my ‘For me, NARCS isn’t just acting’ bite again last week. You can’t buy this kind of promotion, George,” he says as George gives a big shrug and says again, “It’s a Barbara conversation,” and keeps walking.

  Talent. Such a funny noun, George still thinks, after fifteen years, the way it’s used in show business and news. On one level it’s thoroughly denatured and pliable, like Silly Putty. Anybody the camera points at is talent, whether singular (But George, Sylvester is talent) or plural (But George, Angela and Lucas are talent), with the definite article (He’s the talent, George, not you) or without. But for all the one-size-fits-all, the word is still talent, with the distinct implication that everyone except actors (and news anchors and correspondents) are just … regular people, mortals, grunts, grips. And conversely, depending on who is using the phrase under what circumstances, talent can also be loaded, discreetly turned into code for pampered dumbbell or vainglorious martinet or nine-hundred-pound gorilla.

  In front of the cameras, at the center of dozens of motionless people and tons of equipment, the two actors playing the Hawaiian drug dealers are on the ground, the one who’s supposed to be shot staring at the dark red syrup drizzled around his shoulder wound. One of the three actors wearing DEA windbreakers, his MAC-10 propped against a lighting stanchion, seems to be practicing tai chi, or impersonating a cat. The silk, a giant stretched square of white fabric to make the sunlight more perfect, hangs overhead like an angel’s trampoline.

  “Checking the gates!” the first assistant director announces, to everyone and no one.

  Each camera’s own first assistant (or focus-puller—focus-puller, George’s favorite of the filmmaking Dickensianisms) crouches down and slides out a tiny metal-framed glass pane from behind each lens to examine it with a magnifying glass. He’s looking for a “hair in the gate”—by which is not meant a human hair (as George spent weeks last summer being teased for assuming) but rather any stray sliver of celluloid.

  “Moving on?” the first AD asks Gordon and George, who is just back from Angela’s RV.

  Gordon looks at George and says, “Happy here?”

  George raises his right arm and draws a circle in the air, a hand signal meaning Yup, move on that he learned last year from watching Emily run the first six episodes of the show. Making the gesture still feels phony to George, but it pleases him too, the wordless macho theatricality. (Last fall Max visited the set when Dennis Rodman was guest-starring as a crack dealer turned born-again Christian congressman. “Dad,” his son asked at the end of the day, “did you do the basketball-ref signal for traveling just because Dennis Rodman was in the show?” Since Max always seems a little upset when his father reveals some new depth of sports ignorance, George just smiled and shook his head.)

  “Moving on,” the first shouts to the group. And a moment later, “Reloading camera!”

  “Resetting lights!” the lighting designer announces.

  “Resetting props!” the prop master announces. The show’s armorer (another delightfully premodern job title) collects his prop Glocks and MAC-10s and AR-15s.

  While George was coddling Angela, Featherstone arrived, and he now sits in the canvas chair imprinted with the words GEORGE MACTIER in cursive script. He is, of course, talking on one of his two phones. George crouches to look at a v
ideo monitor with Gordon, watching the taped replay of the fight scene they had just shot. Behind him he hears a snap, and a sound like little rubber snakes slithering away. He turns to see Featherstone fiddling happily with his not-available-in-North-America Ping-Pong-hemisphere phone as if he’s giving an in-store demonstration.

  “King George! Truly fantabulous work going on here this morning. They were really wailing.” He pockets the phone and walks over. “Gordy is making some mega-auteur choices, literally. Truly amazing they pay us to do this, isn’t it, guys?”

  No, George thinks, they pay me to do this, and I pay Gordon to do this. They do pay you, and that truly is amazing—although I don’t believe it’s this, precisely, that you get the three million dollars a year to do.

  “So,” Featherstone says a little more quietly, “Lady Macbeth has PMS and won’t do your Hawaii Five-O gag? You got to have that. It’s such a genius blow for the act break.”

  “Angela’s okay. She’ll do the line. She’s just upset because her dog is dead.”

  “Peacemaker died? My God! Well. No wonder.”

  George nods, a little humbled. Until it froze to death he didn’t know that his own children’s turtle was named Josh, and yet the second in command at the fifth-ranked television network in America knows the name of the dog owned by one of the stars of one of his twenty-seven prime-time shows. That is executive aptitude.

  Just then Angela arrives, with Mary Ann the makeup woman trailing her with a handful of dry cotton balls as a contingency.

  Featherstone fixes the star with a fraternal gaze and stops her before she steps onto the set, gently grabbing her by both shoulders. “Angela? Use it. Use the grief.” Angela’s eyes open wide, as if God has spoken. “It’ll be good for the work—and you know what else, Angela? It’s what Peacemaker would want you to do.” She nods, wiser, warmed, blessed. Again George is humbled. It’s a gift Timothy has.

  “And when you’re up to it?” Featherstone says, now back to his regular Featherstone FM chirp, “Xoloitzcuintili. You are definitely a xoloitzcuintili person, Angela. It’s really just the minidisk German shepherd. Better fidelity, smaller size.”