Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  “I don’t mind the gap if you don’t,” Oz replies coolly. “Bernie, you’re wobbling,” he says in a different voice to a cameraman.

  “I’m a complete and utter amateur, needless to say,” says a voice from the darkness behind and to the right, “but couldn’t you just shmoosh your logo and your video wall together?” George turns to look. It is Harold Mose. He’s grinning. As is Hank Saddler, holding the heavy metal door open. Standing just behind them in the dark, her face bathed in red from the exit sign, is Lizzie.

  “Hi,” George says. “Hi.” Should he stand up? Should he go shake Mose’s hand? Should he kiss his wife? Gordon offers his chair. For the first time in the last hour, Oz actually turns around. George decides to remain seated. Lizzie gives him a nervous wave.

  For a few long seconds, no one moves or speaks. Mose takes a deep breath, in and out. “Everyone breathe!” he commands, still grinning. “My new executive vice president says it’s the great tension antidote.”

  Everyone relaxes. Except George and Lizzie.

  “We’ll get out of your hair,” Mose says, turning more solemn than George has ever seen him, “but I did want to pop in and let everyone here know that all your hard work has been appreciated. I wish—well, I thank you all for having been part of this adventure. The world will little note nor long remember what I say here, but it can never forget what you did.”

  “Thirty seconds,” Gretchen says.

  “Are we leaving the building?” Oz asks. He means: is the signal being piped out correctly to Burbank.

  “We’re leaving the building,” she confirms.

  “As are we,” Mose says. He salutes, and Lizzie waves at George again as Saddler lets the control room door close with a vacuum-sealed whoosh.

  “Stay where you are, camera two!” Oz shouts. “Roll tape.”

  “We have speed?” the AD asks.

  “Speed!” a voice from the squawk box tells her.

  “Everyone’s speeding,” the AD says. “Twenty seconds.”

  “Oz,” George says, Saddler on his mind, “I don’t want this going out on the in-house system.”

  The director pushes a button and speaks. “Master control, this is TV one, please take us off the router.” He lets the button up. “You’re running silent and running deep, George,” and to his AD, “Put camera one online.” After a pause he says, “Up in ten. Nine—

  The AD takes over the countdown: “Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two …”

  And Oz snaps his fingers on the unspoken one.

  Up comes the Real Time theme music, which the composer calls “a Radiohead—Aaron Copland hybrid,” playing over a quick-cut montage of the week’s events—Hurricane Candy’s devastation of Miami Beach, Hillary hugging Al Gore, an oil refinery exploding in Venezuela, Prince William’s last home video of the Queen Mother, the Aspen forest fires, the oar’s-length victory moment of Paul Allen’s galley ship in the Brunei harbor, Quentin Tarantino’s acquittal, a swarm of Black Hawk helicopters firing into the Mexican rain forest, Senator Paul Wellstone on his barefoot “Venceremos” walk through southern Mexico, on and on, sixty-two separate shots, each an average of a half second long. (This cold open is George’s bow of obeisance to Saddler’s Seamlessness Initiative, although it’s the way he wanted to start the show anyway. “I want it like a trailer for a Jerry Bruckheimer movie,” he told his producer. Thus the explosions.) Then the fast sequence of aerial shots of eight skylines (New York, L.A., San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., London, Moscow, and Beijing, shrinking and morphing into the letters R, E, A, L, T, I, M, and E, followed by the fiction/nonfiction boilerplate and then highlights from the Tuesday and Thursday shows—Francesca with an editor at a computer pointing at an explosion on the monitor, Jess arguing with a cop, Francesca watching a grenade explode in Chiapas, correspondents and nameless staff talking, writing, laughing, hefting video cameras, catching taxis, yelling into phones, running in backward media stampedes down courthouse steps. It is by far the most expensive forty seconds of the show.

  Then the picture freezes.

  “What the fuck!” George screams.

  “Stop tape,” Oz and Gordon both say.

  “That’s a bust,” Oz says. “Stop all tape. Stop everything.”

  “What happened?” George asks.

  No one says a thing. Then—whoosh—a skinny older man, one of the videotape operators, pokes his head in and says, “Tape machine broke down. We’ll be switched over in thirty seconds.” Whoosh.

  “Restarting at 7:02,” Oz says.

  George pushes his IFB button and leans into his gooseneck microphone. “Jess and Francesca, tape problem. It’ll be a couple of minutes. And have a great show.”

  Whoosh. One of the associate producers rushes in, thrilled and panicky.

  “George!” she shouts. “They’re letting Manson out! I’m on the phone with Sacramento! They gave him a parole date!”

  Oz pushes a button and says over loudspeakers, “Hold on, everybody. Change of plans.”

  “Holy shit,” George says.

  “My Lord,” Gordon says.

  “So we’ll put Manson at the top,” George says. “Kill Farley Lyman. Holy Christ.” He turns to the associate producer as she whips back toward the door. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah,” she turns to tell him and whooshes out.

  “Get Cole over to the correspondent position,” Oz says. “Well. I guess hell froze over.”

  Television control rooms exist to contain bursts of pandemonium like this. Oz and his technical directors shout into microphones to change lights, change the ‘Prompter, ready tape, wire up Cole Granger. George whooshes out and onto the set to tell Jess, Francesca, and Cole what’s going on.

  “Get the bird from Sacramento up,” Oz says. “I need it now.”

  “Open’s ready.”

  “Tape is rolling?” the AD asks. “We have speed?”

  “Speed!” a voice from the squawk box tells her.

  “All tape is rolling; we’re speeding.”

  “Everyone’s speeding,” the AD says. “We have velocity. Thirty seconds.”

  George feels lucky, blessed: he has a camera in Sacramento, he has an uplink, and he has the satellite. Thank God, George thinks, thank God for the demands of the almighty dramatic arc.

  “Put one online. Up in ten again,” Oz says. “Nine—

  “Eight,” says the AD, “seven, six, five, four, three, two …” And the opening bars of Radiohead-meets-Copland swell again, followed by the opening montage and title sequence. This time, through, all the hokey prepackaged urgency is honestly thrilling.

  “Make your move, Bobby,” Oz says, “and … cut back to two!” he says, snapping his fingers each time he says a number, on the cuts from camera to camera. The music and title animation end. “And, take”—snap!—“three. And, take”—snap!—“one, take two, ready three … and”—snap!—“take two.”

  Gordon, overcome with excitement, is pantomiming camera numbers and finger snaps in unison with Oz.

  “And …” Gordon says too loudly, “acting.”

  “Cue them,” Oz tells his stage manager over the IFB.

  In the studio, the stage manager, standing in Jess’s and Francesca’s lines of sight, has formed his right hand into a pistol, like a child, and squeezes off an imaginary shot at the camera next to him.

  “Good evening, I’m Francesca Mahoney.”

  “And I’m Jess Burnham. It’s July fourteenth, 2000. And this is Real Time.”

  37

  At last. Saturday morning he woke up thinking he was in a dream, a dream about waking up, because he felt fine. Sunday morning, after another eleven hours of sleep, it was the same—is this real? is this real?—and he wanted to yelp and skip like a man released from some underground cell, like a quadriplegic who can suddenly walk. He kissed Lizzie on Sunday afternoon before she left for the airport. He really kissed her, even though she’s heading for California, and then ten days in Asia with Harold Mo
se and the goblins from Fifty-nine. And today he feels fine again, the third morning in a row. It’s Monday; he’s slept late, and he feels just fine.

  The first week of shows was imperfect, like the first of anything. He has a notebook full of notes. There were a hundred blemishes and glitches and clunky patches. Gordon Downey has to go. His instinct for schmaltz and act-break cliff-hanging made the pure documentary scenes seem bogus. The digital video trick with Manson on Tuesday was a mistake, George will now admit, despite his public apologias last week. The writing in the Tuesday and Thursday shows wasn’t great, but what’s clear is how much less writing they’ll need. Instead of half documentary and half script, as he was guessing, they’ll be able to get away with more like seventy-five—twenty-five. Simply dropping the camera crews into Jess’s and Francesca’s and the correspondents’ lives—crawling out of bed, badgering a producer on the phone, cutting a story, snapping at each other over at dinner, chartering a plane, watching NewsNight 2000 from the makeup chair—is generating some of the best scenes. Francesca needs practice at live interviewing. (Her unscripted question to the Wise Weapon guy, “But why are you in the business of making any kinds of guns?” provoked an entire Molly Cramer column yesterday.) Jess is superb, especially in her Tuesday-Thursday acting scenes, though she has to work on the ad-libbed profanity; one of the reviewers thought her bleeps were a scriptwriter’s running gag.

  But the show will get there. It can become great. “Innovation and boundary pushing are always to be encouraged in the TV wasteland,” the Washington Post critic wrote, “and it is certainly true that there is nothing else like Real Time on television. The troubling question remains, however, whether all innovation, like human cloning or last spring’s ‘mental-modem’ scare, is necessarily a good thing. Just because we have the ability to do something doesn’t always mean we should.” Is it a good thing or a bad thing, Daddy? George reminds himself to have Daisy dig out the 1913 reviews of The Rite of Spring.

  And Manson! Manson! Such orgasmic fortuity, such a once-in-a-lifetime bull’s-eye! The Board of Prison Terms vote is in dispute now that a majority of the nine commissioners claim it was all some terrible procedural mix-up—but who cares? Manson has been the story on every network and cable-news channel all weekend—he’s on the cover of all the newsweeklies today—and George was there, with a live camera, exclusively! Real Time in real time! Talk about launching a brand.

  When the phone rings he jumps out of bed, jumps, making himself smile. It’s eight-sixteen. He wonders if it’s the ReadyAim school-bus system screwing up again, or another reporter with more awestruck questions about his Charles Manson prescience.

  “Hello?”

  “God.”

  “Emily?” She must be calling to congratulate him, mend fences, act nice. Fine! “Thank you. Pretty cool, huh?”

  There’s a pause. “You didn’t hear.”

  He kicks open the trapdoor and peers down into his worst-case netherworld. Mose Media is being sold. Jess Burnham quit. They canceled Real Time. Then he imagines Emily’s worst cases. Her boyfriend Buddy Ramo was trampled to death by a stallion he was Rolfing. A right-to-life Democratic vice-presidential nominee. MBC canceled NARCS.

  “No,” he says, “what?”

  “Timothy killed himself.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, my God.… Jesus, Emily.”

  “Weird, huh?”

  Timothy Featherstone? “If I had to rank everyone I know according to probability of suicide,” George says, “Timothy would have been at the absolute bottom. Way below me.”

  “Mmm.”

  “When?”

  “Last night.”

  “How?”

  “Gun. In the Hummer. In Burbank.”

  “Jesus. That’s so depressing.”

  “Burbank?”

  “Well, yeah, and the Hummer too, but I meant, you know, killing himself. I talked to Timothy Friday night. He called and was all ‘Supercalifuckingfragilistic show, homeboy.’ Completely normal. He asked about little business things, in his normal, stupid, excited way, like why Ben Gould owns the rights to some Robertson Davies novels Mose wants Timothy to turn into a miniseries. Wanted. Is there a note?”

  “Nope. And they say he wasn’t sick.”

  “My God.” He sighs. “My God.” He pauses. “You and I should get together sometime, Emily.”

  “Yes? All right. I liked it, George. The show. It’s what you wanted. Right?”

  “Yeah, it was. Thanks.” And fuck you, you backhanded harpy, with the stressed “I”—as opposed to everyone else, you mean, who hated the show?

  “So. We’ll connect.”

  Nothing like a suicide to harsh a mellow. On their third date, Lizzie had actually said to him, “You’re sort of harshing my mellow.” It made him wonder if she might be stupid, and not just young. The only other person he has ever heard use harsh as a verb or mellow as a noun is Featherstone, in Las Vegas last January, when George was trying to decline to put Sandi Bemis’s room and rental car on the NARCS expense account.

  The phone rings again.

  “Emily?”

  “No, George, this is Dora, in Mr. Mose’s office. There’s a meeting at nine-thirty this morning in the small conference room on Fifty-nine. Can you make it?”

  “Sure. Of course.”

  After moving one mile in twenty-five minutes (“FDR is crippled from the Twenties on, northbound, use alternate routes, Shadow Traffic, 1010 WINS!”), George has the driver get off at Thirty-fourth Street. He doesn’t stop the guy from turning up Third Avenue, even though the extreme east side in the Thirties and low Forties is to George the saddest piece of Manhattan, sadder than the scroungiest blocks of Harlem or the Lower East Side, sad in some permanently modern Diane Arbus way instead of a Jacob Riis way—not poor, but bright and blasted and hopeless. The few old stores and buildings aren’t old enough to be charming, and the new “luxury” apartment towers are not just undistinguished but grotesque, freakishly tall stacks of cheap diarrhea-colored brick with views of the First Avenue hospitals and each other (and for the fortunate few, Queens). The streets are peopled by lonely menopausal flight attendants, cut-rate Donald and Ivana Trumps, unusually crabby Korean shopkeepers, single mothers clinging to the first or last rung of respectability, contagiously unhappy people. Poor Timothy Featherstone.

  There’s a meeting, Dora said. The vagueness, the passive voice, and the fixed time all sound to George like a post-Timothy briefing. Not Does ten work for you? Or Harold would like to see you. Mose will say how shocked and saddened he is by Timothy’s demise; that Laura Welles will fill in as interim acting president of the Entertainment Group; that Timothy would have wanted us to persevere because there’s no business like show business. Of course, George’s particular obsessive-compulsive disorder requires that he repeat to himself, between sensible speculations, They’re going to fire me, even though he doesn’t really believe that. Mose can’t “fire” him, anyway, since George is an employee of Well-Armed Productions. And they don’t cancel shows after one week on the air. Tuesday and Thursday did not get spectacular numbers, but 5.4 and 5.9 are higher than the average MBC rating. The newspaper opinion pieces were nearly all antagonistic, but who didn’t expect that? Even the damning reviews, which ranged from querulous to curious to bewildered, called the show dangerous, not lousy. Maybe Mose has notes. Mose might have smart notes. Or maybe, he thinks, they’re going to ask him who should run MBC News now that Stengel’s gone. Maybe they’re going to ask him to run News. And he’ll say, “That’s very, very flattering, but …” Or else they’re going to fire me. Maybe they want him to pitch in on the search for Timothy’s replacement.

  His new phone is on its third ring before he recognizes the straight beep. Ben is calling.

  “You really hold a grudge, George, don’t you?”

  “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “Hey! Bucky Lopez! You gutted the guy! The show was good, by the
way—but George, the thing on Bucky was brutal.”

  “It’s the business we have chosen. That’s what you taught me to say. What grudge?”

  “Remember how you got it into your head that Bucky dissed you somehow at my party in Vegas?”

  “That isn’t a grudge.” Perhaps you sensed a fleeting desire on my part to assassinate him, but that’s merely a private quirk of mine, nothing serious. “I thought the guy was a honking asshole, but I wasn’t angry at him. Our piece isn’t going to destroy him.”

  “So, are you the conquering hero over there now? Did they love the show?”

  “I guess. I hope. I’m on my way to a meeting with the big boss.”

  “Hey! You reported high, right?”

  George looks outside, and smiles. When Ben uses Wall Street–speak in real life, he isn’t trying to be funny. Ben forgets that not everyone talks that way all the time. The car has just passed the mammoth Nike-town store and the mammoth Warner Bros. store and dead ahead, across Fifth, is the new James Bond Casino Royale (which is a restaurant, bar, shops, and mammoth video arcade, not a casino).

  “I guess,” George replies.

  “Definitely! The smart-money trade for the last month was to be short George Mactier, right? With all the stories and columns saying you’re Moloch. You beat expectations. You reported decently, so now you’ll soar. Watch.”

  “Ben, you’re not trying to produce a movie or TV show based on a Robertson Davies novel, are you?”

  He doesn’t answer at first. “No.”

  “This guy at the network said he heard you were.”

  “I’m not making any movies, or any TV shows. That I promise. The open’s in ten minutes. Got to go.”

  “Okay. I’m at MBC, anyway.”

  It’s nine-twenty, so he’ll go straight up. He walks past his regular elevator bank and hooks around to the hidden opening for Fifty-nine. The guard finds his name on the computer list, touches the screen with his pinky to make GEORGE MACTIER disappear, and waves him into the elevator. Its interior, the only one like it in the building, consists of alternating strips of cherrywood and sandblasted glass. (The insides of the regular elevators in the Mose building are striped green-and-gold laminate with two-inch-by-two-inch cherrywood veneer “accents.”) It’s possible they’re going to fire me. Now that George has successfully launched two prime-time shows in one year, he wonders if maybe they want to extend and enrich his deal. His market price is rising. Mose must have seen last week’s story in the trades about Time Warner giving the executive producer of Hero a new, ten-year, $55 million contract with Warner Bros. TV, and letting him develop a Time Inc. monthly magazine that Variety described as “true-life stories of good triumphing over evil.”