Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  Gnomic sports metaphors and patronizing Socratic dialogues: the first top-level corporate headquarters meeting of her life, and it’s already turning out precisely as she assumed it couldn’t really be. She picks up her sharp new Mose Media Holdings pencil, and scribbles a reminder on her virginal yellow legal pad, HOCKEY = STOCK, ACAT. ACAT stands for All Clichés Are True. During the animal-rights insanity, she started keeping a list.

  Mr. Sales has got it. “You skate out there fast as the devil,” Randy says, “make sure your defensemen are doing their jobs, and you shoot that puck down the ice as hard as you can and skate like hell after it.” He radiates self-pleasure even more than usual.

  “And then, Randy, you are tossed out of the game. This game.”

  Everyone sniggers except Randy and Lizzie.

  “Mose Media Holdings has been playing hockey. Building a new network, just as the network business is crumbling, out of its very rubble—a cross-check, bam, the stock shoots up the ice. We score! The crowd roars! Our new internet and digital acquisitions,” Mose says, glancing at Lizzie again, “more hockey—whack, whack, whack, shoot them down the ice. And the crowd—the Market, my boss, that crowd—loved it. But then the stock price got big, and heavy—like what?”

  “A medicine ball?” Doug says.

  “On ice,” Mose says.

  This is the silliest five minutes Lizzie has ever spent in the company of adults not on drugs. But she knows the answer. And when a teacher poses questions, and the rest of the class is silent, Lizzie Zimbalist cannot say nothing.

  “Curling,” she says. “A curling stone.” She knows because George played as a kid in St. Paul.

  “The gifted transfer student,” Mose says. “I thank you. Canada thanks you.”

  Everyone smiles.

  “When Randy hits his stick as hard as he can against this forty-three-pound piece of granite, he looks like an idiot, he hurts his hands, and the stone just sits there.”

  Doug, Saddler, and the rest glance at Randy, who pretends to enjoy being the butt of the chairman’s joke.

  “Now our game must change. If Mr. Dugger had not so inconveniently fallen ill, we might have continued playing hockey for another period or two. But if we do now, we’ll hurt our hands, and the stone will just sit there. Let the WB and Fox and the other teams kill each other playing hockey. But we know our new game going into 2001 is curling, not hockey. And we make our stones move where we want on the sheet by strength, yes, hurling the stone up the ice from the hack, but also by fantastic focus and energy—sweep-sweep-sweep-sweep-sweep. And by indirection, not by pushing or hitting the stone, but by creating the circumstances—sweep-sweep-sweep-sweep-sweep—that make the stone move as we wish it to.”

  Five of the seven men listening to Mose write on their pads, and then so does Lizzie. (Arnold Vlig does not.) The five men are presumably writing hack, focus, energy, indirection; Lizzie writes ACAT: CORP. DRONES.

  “As players on the Mose Media Holdings curling team, what is your new job?”

  Randy and the president of Greetings Media both bark out, “Making you happy!”

  “Yes,” Mose says, a little exasperated, “but I will become happy, as the skip of this rink, if you get your stones home. Which you do by sweeping away the frost, by making it a little wet just in front of the stone?” Mose nods toward Hank Saddler, who turns to his assistant and raises his eyebrows, who goes to a closet in the back corner of the conference room. The assistant fetches eight white-handled, short-bristled brooms, and passes them out. They are imprinted with the logo of Mose Media Holdings, the slogan A NEW 59 FOR A NEW CENTURY, and each executive’s name.

  Everyone smiles.

  “You’ll be pleased to know, Elizabeth,” Mose says, “that our brushes have all synthetic bristles.” Saddler nods solemnly. “Unless you’d prefer hog’s hair or horsehair.”

  Everyone sniggers.

  As the meeting breaks up, Mose exchanges a few words with Vlig, then walks over to Lizzie. She enjoys and doesn’t enjoy feeling like a pet.

  “I’ll walk you back to your office if you have a second,” he says, sounding more earnest than usual.

  “Sure.” She folds the ripped top page of her legal pad, and leaves the E. ZIMBALIST broom behind her chair on the tiger-maple credenza that encircles the room. As they walk out, she notices jealous glances from Randy and Doug, and Saddler’s knowing smirk.

  “You’ll forgive my brutal reductionism in there,” Mose says.

  “Sure.” They pass Laura Welles, Featherstone’s second-in-command and the company’s second most senior woman. She works in Burbank. “I can tolerate brutal reductionism from a brutal reductionist who admits he’s a brutal reductionist.”

  Mose smiles. “You have to focus people. Same thing with my little curling digression. That’s the only way …”—he lowers his voice—“the only way the Randys of the world, honestly, are going to get it—to learn to repurpose and remaster themselves.”

  Lizzie looks at him.

  Mose says, “Hank put your phrase in my rotation. The Randys need some entertaining noise in order to receive the signal. Thus the curling nonsense. You are not required to display the brush on your office wall, however.”

  This is a man who believes his own bullshit, even when he knows it’s utter bullshit. “Thank you,” she says.

  He becomes a little solemn again. “Some people here are never going to get it. And some people, good people, are going to be casualties as we rush to transform ourselves into whatever new species of business can survive and prosper. There are always casualties. In evolution. And in revolutions.”

  “It’s true.” She feels a little sorry for the clueless Randys and Dougs and Steves.

  “I am so glad you understand, Elizabeth. This can be a tough, painful game. Have you spoken to Mr. McNabb yet?”

  “No. I haven’t.” She lowers her voice. “Although Arnold’s office sent me the draft termination package. I plan to have that conversation next week.”

  He nods. They have reached her office suite. William, her stern Mr. Danvers, looks up. “By the way,” Mose says, “Charles Prieve was once an employee of yours, correct?”

  “Speaking of terminations? Yes. God, what a mistake. Why? He’s not trying to get a job here, is he?”

  “No, no. He—he actually made some threats. To the company.”

  “Chas? What kind of threats? He’s not claiming I owe him money, is he?”

  “No, no, nothing—”

  “The last I heard of Chas Prieve, the Malaysian government was accusing him of being a pornographer. What a little worm.”

  “Yeah. Well, my dear, I’m off to Idaho—Saskatchewan south. You make sure your passport is up to date, eh? The glorious Gloria will be joining us in Tokyo for the whole trip, by the way, coming round the other way from London and Calcutta. Just in case that affects your choice of resort-wear.”

  “See you, Harold.”

  Odd, she thinks as she avoids William’s voodoo stare, that Mose said nothing to her about Real Time. But maybe that’s a good thing, not a bad thing—his way of trying to build a clean professional wall between an MBC producer and the producer’s Mose Media Holdings executive wife.

  36

  George watched every American space program launch, live, from Alan Shepard through Apollo 11. (It wasn’t post-lunar-landing disloyalty that made him indifferent to the rest of the Apollo missions, it was puberty.) He never envied the men crammed into the capsules, who reminded him of the boys who loved Indian Guides and hockey and curling more than he did. He envied the busy men in white shirts and ties fidgeting with Pall Malls at their consoles in that vast James Bond room in Houston. George wanted to be a mission controller, not an astronaut.

  “Show me the other bird,” says Oz Delehanty, Real Time’s codirector for news. A shot of a hallway in Sacramento appears on one of the thirty-six video monitors mounted in front of them. “I have that already.”

  The assistant director, sitting next to
him, says, “The Russian satellite picture isn’t live, you know, Oz.”

  “I know, Gretchen, I need Fullerton. I want to see the gun guy.” After a few seconds on another monitor, a new picture flickers on, beamed up to a satellite from a gun factory in southern California and back down to West Fifty-seventh Street, of a bearded man in a suit aggressively picking his nose with his right hand while his left hand rests on a pistol on a desk in front of him. “Thank you. Hey! Snot wrangler! Okay, I want to see the first Chyron.” On another monitor, still black, the words SIR FARLY LYMAN/PLANET OF THE KIDS DISTRIBUTOR pop onto the bottom of the screen.

  “Scotty?” the director says, looking forward, eyes always on the monitors, to the lighting director three seats to his right, “I’ve still got that hot spot that looks like it’s blasting right out of Jess’s ass.” Scotty shoots up and heads out to the studio.

  “I heard that, Oz,” Jess Burnham’s voice booms over the speaker in the control room.

  Oz pushes a button, then another, and says, “I’m your ass-blast guardian angel, Jess.” He lets the button go. “Can somebody manage the IFB, please?” Jess wasn’t supposed to have heard him.

  “Oz?”

  “Yes, boss?” the director says, turning his face a few degrees, a deferential symbolic turn. George sits behind and a little above Oz with Daisy; the Real Time supervising producer; the managing editor of the news hour; and Laura Welles, MBC’s programming senior vice president.

  “It’s Kidz with a z. And Farley is spelled wrong. It’s e-y.”

  They go live to tape in sixteen minutes. Barring a serious snafu, from six to seven o’clock they will run through the show without stopping. From seven until nine they’ll do any repairs and polishing they can. At nine-thirty P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, Real Time will be leaving the building.

  “George? It’s Henry Saddler.” Daisy is holding the phone. One of the intra-Mose call lights is blinking. He rolls his eyes.

  “Hi, Hank.”

  “Henry. In case I can’t get down there, I just wanted to say, George, that you know I’ve always admired you, and your risk taking. And despite the reputational problems and negative media coverage, despite, you know, everything, this Real Time adventure has been fantastic for MMH and the MBC and a rich learning-curve experience for everyone. I do mean that.”

  “Thanks. I tape in fifteen minutes. Thanks.”

  “And I do appreciate your gesture on behalf of the Seamlessness Initiative. I do. That is so sweet.”

  “Thanks, Hank.”

  “I want you to promise Henry Saddler you’ll avoid giving in to any negative self-talk. All right?”

  George rolls his eyes again. “I will. I do.” Whatever the fuck you’re talking about. “Thanks for calling. Bye.” He hangs up. “I guess you couldn’t tell him I wasn’t here.” He sees a Styrofoam case in Daisy’s lap. “Dinner?”

  “A thirty-eight-caliber semiautomatic Wise Weapon. From the gun man,” Daisy says, nodding toward the monitor on which the nose picker is now tucking neck flesh down under his collar. “A courier just delivered it. A gift. Programmed personally for you.”

  “That is so sweet.”

  Daisy smiles. He was given a gun once before, a .22, the rifle his friend Tuggy deeded to him the night before his exile to military school. “Does MBC payola policy cover handguns, Laura?” he says to Laura Welles, who’s on the phone but flashes a thin smile of acknowledgment.

  George has studied the show’s rundown for days, weeks. He’s stared at this sheet, the final sheet, dozens of times today. He looks at it again. Not counting the commercials (a parallel show inhabiting his show, like the alien in Alien, George can’t stop thinking—a pretty, $12 million, fifteen-minute, thirty-episode show about Volkswagens and Claritin and Big Macs), he has forty-five minutes to fill (on a budget of $398,400).

  The opening, which has been in the can since midafternoon, runs a minute thirty-five. The desk reads—Francesca and Jess taking turns summarizing the forty-two most important or entertaining of the week’s events, Jennings-Brokaw-Rather style—consume nineteen minutes of the program.

  “Who Got Rich This Week?” “America’s Favorite,” and “Kennedy World,” the three Weekly Short Formats (what the staff calls “Weak Shit Farts”), take up two minutes in all.

  A total of about three minutes, in fifteen-second chunks, will be given over to what they’re calling “real-time actions/reactions,” or ax/reax. These are to be spontaneous shots from the five robotic ax/reax cameras—mounted in the control booth, on the studio floor behind the manned cameras, and in the newsroom—of writers and producers watching and reacting to the show as it’s being taped. George sent around a memo yesterday emphasizing that the staff would damage the sense of authenticity if they dressed up for the Friday shoot. Nonetheless, there are a lot of freshly styled heads of hair and impeccably loosened neckties, many brand-new black jeans and pressed flannel shirts. Everyone, of course, is made up, at least lightly powdered, even the stage crew.

  There are four long stories, each running between four minutes forty-five and six minutes thirty. These are the “High & Inside” segments. First is the Farley Lyman piece. (It mentions North Korea, unavoidably, but he’s killed the Kim Jong-Il biological warfare package.) Then comes the story about the federal government’s lugubriously solemn new commitment to herbal nostrums and acupuncture. George figures that Featherstone’s main note on the show—“more fun, George, funnier, brighter Bob Altman—type stuff”—will trump his concern about pissing off the Offices of Alternative Medicine and Dietary Supplements.

  He killed the Gores; it was exclusive, but for the first Friday show it would be just too depressing to air six and a half minutes of Al and Tipper sounding upbeat about the future as they gambol in the Tennessee hills. Which gives George the space to run a better political story. Senator Buckingham Lopez (Governor Bush appointed him in April to serve out Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s term) is loudly pushing a federal law to outlaw all handguns except “smart” guns, like the Wise Weapon on Daisy’s lap. (A Wise Weapon will fire only if its owner says the phrase “Ready to fire” into a microphone inside the grip.) Real Time has learned (George knows it’s pompous, but he finds the phrase irresistible) that Bucky Lopez’s wife, Kimberly (“kissable Kimberly” he called her when he was campaigning for president), owns a large amount of Wise Weapon’s stock. George personally wrote the sentence, “Senator Lopez’s broken-record odes to ‘wealth creation,’ however, now have a new wrinkle—Real Time has learned that …” As it happens, Francesca is a passionate gun-control advocate. A camera crew filmed two takes of her arguing about the Lopez piece with its producer, a half minute of which opened Tuesday’s show. It was great television.

  The fourth “High & Inside” segment is about Bohemian Grove, the secretive annual summer gathering of businessmen and politicians in the woods of northern California. George’s favorite parts of the piece are the ultrahigh-resolution images of the encampment taken from a new low-Earth-orbit satellite operated by Sovinformsputnik, a branch of the Russian space agency. The best pictures are of Kevin Costner and Mikhail Gorbachev skinny-dipping together, and of Bill Gates and Vernon Jordan firing flamethrowers in a mock-mystical “retirement ceremony” for Jack Welch, the General Electric chairman. (George figures the satellite shots qualify as fun, funny, and bright.) The story was reported with assistance from the Bohemian Grove Action Network, which George had assumed for the last three months was an in-house joke between the correspondent and producer. On Monday, he learned that it’s a real organization, the same day the MBC lawyer warned him that the story might violate the new federal statute, sponsored by Dianne Feinstein and Sonny Bono after Princess Diana’s death, that outlaws “efforts to capture a physical image by intrusive technical means.”

  Featherstone gave George the go-ahead to ignore the lawyer’s concern. “I did love Sonny,” he said, “but this is a matter of national principle, isn’t it?” On the other hand, Featherstone badly wants R
eal Time to air Jude McAllister’s Deep Throat exposé. “It tested through the roof,” he said on the phone from L.A. “It’s a very fly segment.” “I know,” George replied, “and I really want to run it, maybe Week Four”—the twenty-sixth anniversary of Nixon’s resignation—“but right now, we don’t have it nailed.” He felt good telling Timothy no. Spending any more time and money to get the story also worries George, however. He’s over budget, even the revised 112 percent budget. All day he’s thought about scrapping the location in Sacramento, which would save seven thousand dollars in crew and satellite time, since a Board of Prison Terms ruling against Charles Manson seems like an exceptionally safe bet. But Real Time isn’t just a news show. As a dramatic matter, having set up the Manson story on location Tuesday, they need to resolve it properly in tonight’s show: the arc, the arc, the arc. “And once again,” Cole Granger can say very soberly in the studio an hour from now, after the news comes through, “California state prisoner number B-33920 has been denied parole. Jess?”

  Gordon Downey has arrived and taken Daisy’s seat beside George. He has nothing to do in tonight’s show (although he’s nominally “directing” the ax/reax shots of the staff and crew).

  “George,” Daisy says from a phone at the other side of the control room, “it’s Michael Milken’s office calling.”

  “We trashing Milken in the show, George?” Oz says, looking at the monitors, always the monitors.

  “Uh-uh. No, Daisy,” George says, “tell him we’re shooting.”

  “I’m still seeing the hickey on Francesca’s neck,” Oz says, which sends a makeup woman a hundred feet away running onto the set.

  “Four minutes,” says Gretchen, the assistant director.

  “Oz?”

  “What is it, George?”

  “We never decided what to do about that little gap between the logo and the video wall.”