Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  The security man on Fifty-nine gives George the usual hard, blank stare, but the woman at the reception desk recognizes him and smiles. As she says hello, she pushes two different buttons, one to unlock the glass door and the other to notify the next gatekeeper down the line, but does it so subtly that George doesn’t notice.

  Dora’s assistant, Lucy, meets him at the next turn, and leads him to the conference room.

  Hank Saddler and Laura Welles, Featherstone’s deputy, are already here. Fifty-nine-style greetings are exchanged, even more self-serious than usual. George carefully lays his briefcase on a counter near the window, next to Hank’s and Laura’s things. It’s clear this is going to be an executive-suicide trauma-coping exercise, one of those harmless events that the profession of human resources was invented to stage. He wonders who else is coming. Laura is looking back and forth between her hands, and out the window, toward downtown. She seems nervous, unaccustomed to life here in Mose Media elysium, inside the abode of the blessed on Fifty-nine. The mood in the room is funereal. Poor Timothy.

  “Harold so much wanted to be here personally, George,” Saddler says, “but he had to leave Teterboro at nine for Sun Valley. The Herbert Allen event. Then we’re off to Asia!”

  “Ah.” Mose isn’t coming. So they’re definitely not going to talk to him about taking Stengel’s or Featherstone’s job, not that he expected that, or wants either one.

  “Also, George, before the meeting gets started? I don’t want you to feel any culpability whatsoever over Timothy’s death. Like they say, guns don’t kill people.”

  Welles looks at him.

  “I’m sorry, Hank,” George says to Saddler, “what do you mean?”

  “The gun. The suicide weapon? I thought you knew. It was the smart gun the gentleman in your story sent to Timothy on Friday.”

  “My God. Really? Jesus.”

  Saddler gives one of his pastoral nods. “It almost makes you think certain shows are, you know, cursed, doesn’t it?”

  George thinks of Timothy alone in his military vehicle, turning the Wise Weapon to his head, and then having to utter his scripted, obligatory last words, “Ready to fire.”

  Arnold Vlig walks in with another, younger man carrying a brown accordion file. George has met Vlig only a few times before. The permanent pained expression and thin black hair combed straight back from his sloping forehead remind George of a Slavic Richard Nixon, Nixon homelier and physically fit. Maybe they are going to offer him some big job after all. But no: Laura Welles wouldn’t be here.

  “George,” Vlig says, and shakes his hand. “You probably don’t know Stan Snyder. He’s one of our outside counsels.” Snyder nods as he sits.

  “We’re all so sad about the show,” Saddler says. “I guess the whole Larry Sanders, Truman Show, EDtv, Lateline Zeitgeist is just … well, like Laura says, ‘very two years ago.’ ”

  In the floor beneath him, he hears wood creak and the clatter of a latch opening.

  “I don’t know what you mean, sad?” George asks.

  Saddler is suddenly upset. He looks at Laura Welles and back to George. “No one sent you a hard copy of the new testing? You were supposed to be faxed overnight.”

  Now Laura Welles is upset. “Timothy’s office was handling it,” she says to Saddler, “but yesterday … I guess it slipped through the cracks. Here’s an extra,” she says, glancing as briefly as possible at George as she slides an inch-thick report across the table.

  It’s called “The MBC Real Time Post-Premiere Testing,” and it’s dated today, July 17, 2000.

  “What is this?” George says. “What post-premiere testing?”

  “Well, of course we tested,” Saddler says. “In fact, we used a new outfit, the best. Very intensive focus grouping last week, in real time (no pun intended), and then all day Saturday in Tucson, Charlottesville, and, and …”

  “Omaha,” Laura Welles says.

  “Omaha, as well as New York and Burbank. And—well, I’ll let Laura summarize. She speaks the language.”

  “Do I? I mean …” She looks from Saddler to Vlig.

  Vlig nods once.

  “George,” she says, “the bottom line is, I’ve never seen such negative test results. Across the board. And it’s not just indifference. It’s deep confusion and active dislike. The viewers who didn’t mind the Friday show (and that was very CBS, very over-fifty) absolutely despised the Tuesday and Thursday shows. The viewers least unfavorably disposed to Tuesday and Thursday were very uncomfortable with the half-hour drama form. And they were generally unable to distinguish between the fictional and nonfictional components. And they despised the news program. In two of the focus groups, leaders had to pay participants bonuses just to stay and watch the Friday show all the way through.”

  Saddler is doing a slow, continuous nod. Vlig stares at George. Stan Snyder is riffling through his own stack of multiply tabbed papers.

  The drop is a shock, and he sees the trapdoor dangling as he rushes past, down, down into the murk.

  Welles flips to a tabbed page on the report. “Women and men over thirty-four can’t stand Francesca.” She flips again. “Men don’t like Jess at all, especially over-thirty-fours, blue collar and white collar. As soon as the gay thing was brought up on the Thursday show, we saw tremendous viewer turnaway in the testing. On Friday, North Korea was a big turnoff.” She looks up at George. “As we knew it would be, from the advance research.”

  Rather than falling, the sense is now of midair suspension, pitching and yawing upside down and sideways in the dark, nauseated and half dead but almost gloating about it—I told you so, I knew it, I told you so.

  Welles doesn’t look up as she continues. “Viewers didn’t understand the point of the gun-control story.”

  “The point?”

  “Whether it was pro or con.”

  “It was neither. It was about a conflict of interest. It was about politics.”

  She looks up. “Exactly. As we knew from all our pre-air testing, politics is death among the under-fifties, especially women, which was your only major audience segment still showing signs of life after Tuesday-Thursday.” She returns to her tabbed pages. “Viewers found Bohemian Grove ‘elitist,’ and they don’t want to hear another thing about Bill Gates or Sexgate. Big turnoff.”

  “There was nothing about Clinton,” George says.

  “Vernon Jordan,” Vlig explains. His bass croak is startling.

  “Manson?” Saddler says.

  “Right, the Manson problem,” Welles says. She turns to George. “A majority of people in the Friday night and Saturday morning focus groups thought the Manson story was fictional. Of course, you were warned about that issue in your pre-air BetaWeek testing. Then as the news, and then the confusion over the news, spread during the day Saturday, our groups became angry when they viewed the shows. They blamed your Real Time story for causing the Manson parole decision.”

  Saddler, his lips pursed, is still nodding.

  “The highest scores, and they were uniformly low highs, were on the alternative medicine story”—Vlig and Saddler exchange a quick glance—“and two of your short features, ‘Who Got Rich This Week?’ and ‘America’s Favorite.’ ”

  Welles looks back down and flips to a page near the end of her report. “We even tested your completed non-run stories, your bank, and …” She shakes her head. “Test subjects were disappointed by the Farley Lyman story—they assumed that an exposé about a British ‘sir’ would involve Princess Diana. Plus the attack on children’s television was a big turnoff.”

  “It is not an ‘attack on children’s television,’ ” George says.

  Welles closes the report. Vlig continues to stare at George, as does the lawyer.

  “The research firm,” Saddler says, “hasn’t had scores to match these since 1973, they told us, for some Gilligan’s Island remake that didn’t even have Gilligan or the Skipper!”

  “Li’l Gilligan,” Welles says.

  Deep i
n the bottomless dark, he kicks his feet and waves his arms wildly, which would probably be hilarious if it were a cartoon.

  “Every single demo,” says Saddler, shaking his head again but sounding almost boastful, “… ix-nay.”

  “Not quite,” Welles corrects. “You didn’t do badly in A- and B-county college-grad eighteen—to—thirty-fours. But that’s a tiny slice of a slice.”

  “And we’re not MTV,” says Vlig. Vlig leans forward. “George, I want to ask you something. Why did you charge ahead and violate the celebrity-image and paparazzi laws? Didn’t the lawyer warn you specifically about that?”

  “She did. But she said it was our call with the satellite imagery. And Timothy gave me a go-ahead.” Welles looks a little disgusted. “Who complained? Gates? Kevin Costner?”

  “Bohemian Grove isn’t the problem, George,” Saddler says, glancing at Stan Snyder.

  “Not the legal problem,” Vlig says, taking his eyes off George for the first time in the last five minutes.

  “It’s that darned Manson,” Saddler says. “His lawyers say we violated his right to control his image. He is a celebrity.”

  It is a cartoon. But not Bugs Bunny or Wile E. Coyote; one of the new cartoons, surreal and scary as well as funny.

  “That’s crazy,” George says, “it’s news.”

  “You’re entertainment,” Snyder the lawyer says. “And California has a statute against commercial appropriation of a celebrity name and/or image. There are no exemptions for celebrity felons. And speaking of what Mr. Featherstone did or did not authorize you to do, we have his contemporaneous notes dated May thirty in which he describes requesting that you delay the broadcast of the alternative medicine story. Are you challenging the accuracy of those notes?”

  “Timothy said he would rather we held off. But so? So what?”

  “According to the Content Arbitration provision in your contract,” Snyder explains, “when Mose Media Holdings requests a ‘cooling-off’ period on a story—as you stipulated just now that Timothy Featherstone in fact did—you are obliged to submit the story in question, unless it has a ‘deadline news urgency,’ to the ombudsman’s office. As you know.” George agreed to the provision, but never thought much about it, because of the “deadline news” loophole and because he assumed if Content Arbitration ever came up, the ombudsman, Dan Flood, would be on his side. It never came up. “Was there any deadline urgency to your story on the National Institutes of Health and its Offices of Alternative Medicine and Dietary Supplements?”

  George folds his arms, breathes deeply, and does not answer. He feels himself reddening.

  “Speaking of medicine, George, and as long as we’re clearing the air totally,” Saddler says, “no one here was exactly thrilled when you refused to give MBC News the exclusive on your late father-in-law’s liver transplant.”

  “He didn’t have a transplant,” George says. “It was fake. It was a placebo procedure.”

  Laura Welles looks shocked. At George. “I’m shooting our major MOW for November sweeps as we speak, and you’re telling me that the animal theme is out, the scenes on the pig farm with the rabbis are garbage?” She shakes her head, openmouthed. “When were you planning to tell us about this?”

  Snyder makes a note.

  “Calm!” Saddler says. “Calmness. And let’s stay on point.”

  “George, I don’t know if this helps in your spinning of all this later,” Vlig says, waving a hand, “but we aren’t canceling Real Time in a vacuum. We’re reevaluating the network’s non-comedy nonfiction programming commitments across the board. Including News. Frankly? I’m not entirely comfortable with this company getting too much press, and I’m even less comfortable being the press. And audience and costs aside, on both counts, your program would just keep …” He waves again.

  “Festering,” Saddler says. “Your MPI, George …” He shakes his head.

  Vlig nods. “We just have to lance the boil. Sooner rather than later. Before it gets bigger. Before it becomes infected.”

  Still in midair, still sick and disoriented, but the wild pitching and yawing has stopped. He can make out shapes and shadow. How quickly one adjusts to terrifying new physics.

  “Canceling?” George says. “As a matter of fact, I’m afraid you cannot cancel. We have a contract. The contract obliges you to buy at least two shows a week from me for thirty-nine weeks, or through next April, whichever comes first.” He looks at Snyder. “As you know.”

  Vlig puts an index finger to his lips and leans back.

  Snyder speaks. “Section nine, subsection B, Roman numeral four, paragraph a,” he says from memory, looking straight at George. “ ‘The Company shall be released from all such obligations to the Producer, however, at any time that the Production Budget of the Show, under the definitions in section six, subsection D, above, shall exceed by more than ten percent the Production Budget authorized by the Company, for more than half of the Shows broadcast in the current season.’ You were nineteen percent over budget in preproduction.”

  “Which was authorized,” George says.

  “And you were twelve percent over your revised budget for last week’s three shows. Three out of three for this season is, by any definition, ‘more than half.’ ”

  Saddler is nodding again, slowly and sadly.

  George vaguely recalls the provision. The lawyering and negotiating part of the business was Emily’s, not his. And he can’t believe they’re trying to fuck him on the basis of a one-week budget overrun. (“Whenever you say ‘I can’t believe nightmare X or violation Y’ about this business,” Emily has told him more than once, “I feel like shaking you, George.”)

  “Well,” he says. “I guess I should go talk to my lawyer.”

  “Lawyer, lawyer, lawyer,” Saddler says. “Don’t go there. Do not go there, my friend. You are part of our MMH family—we’re—we’ll be in business forever, you and us, with our NARCS bonds! And Elizabeth is our family. Why, just the other day on this very floor, someone said, ‘You know, George Mactier’s only problem is that he has too high a signal-to-noise ratio.’ Which is a compliment! We need you at the MBC, George. You are the future.”

  George stares at Saddler, unable to speak.

  “As Arnold alluded, we may downsize News significantly, but that doesn’t mean every News program will go poof. I know Laura agrees that Finale is a definite keeper. And we’re depending on you to produce Finale for us, Mr. Show-Runner. Wait! Wait! We also want you to launch The Supreme Court for us this fall. You attended law school, didn’t you?”

  “Architecture school,” he says, forced into a humiliating moment of civility by the demands of accuracy, “for a month.”

  George only knows about The Supreme Court because of a dispute between MBC and the federal judiciary over the name of the show. The government has apparently failed to prevent Mose Media Holdings from registering The Supreme Court® as a trademark for entertainment programming and products in all media, including toys. The Supreme Court will be the first network fake-trial show in which celebrity lawyers will try celebrities’ “cases.” Sometimes the celebrity plaintiffs and defendants will appear in person (Wayne Newton has agreed to retry his overturned libel case), and sometimes (Mrs. Phil Hartman, President Clinton) the celebrities will be tried in absentia. There is already a 9,700-person waiting list for jurors. Robert Bork has agreed to play the judge.

  “Do we have an understanding, Mr. Mactier?” Snyder says, pushing a document across the table. Scanning the first page, George sees they want him to forfeit all Real Time claims in return for a one-year contract as producer of two embarrassing infotainment pieces of shit. On the second page, he sees they want him also specifically to disclaim any right to sue under the Americans With Disabilities Act.

  Is this a solid surface? Is he upright? Has he landed? He is alive.

  George says, “No, we don’t have an understanding. What we have is a deal to produce thirty-eight more weeks of Real Time. If you don’t want
to air those shows, I guess you won’t. But I expect to be paid for them.”

  Saddler stands and shakes his head more energetically. He touches Welles’s shoulder, who jumps out of her chair. Both of them leave the room.

  “Mr. Mactier,” Snyder says, “in addition to your other contractual breaches that I’ve outlined, there is in your contract a standard ‘termination for cause’ clause. Conviction of a crime, moral turpitude, gross violation of MBC policy, et cetera.” He pulls out a document, points it in George’s direction and recites it. “Intermittently from January seventeenth to June third of this year, a Ms. Sandra Cushman Bemis, variously doing business as Wow-Wow Partners, Heavy Petting Seminars, and Sniff! Incorporated, occupied a suite at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. That suite, as well as a rented Mazda Miata, were charged to the travel and entertainment budget of NARCS, a program in which Mose Media Holdings owns fifty percent and of which you were then executive producer.”

  “Sandi Bemis is Timothy Featherstone’s girlfriend! She was. I didn’t know she’d kept on staying in that room on our dime.” He pulls over the photocopied hotel bills. “Timothy asked me to put that first January weekend on our T-and-E, it was NATPE, but—this is his problem. This is the network’s problem. I had no idea.”

  “You signed the original credit authorization, Mr. Mactier, not Mr. Featherstone. We have an affidavit from your former assistant stating that you instructed her to persuade Angela Janeway to accept a Wow-Wow animal therapy class worth eleven hundred dollars. And we have a copy of your e-mail to Barry Stengel strongly suggesting that he, quote, ‘somehow plug Sandi Bemis’s pet-therapy bullshit,’ unquote, on one or more MBC News programs. I assume you’re aware of the MBC’s regulations governing so-called plugola? And I assume you would agree with me that promoting a commercial venture on the news in exchange for an eleven-hundred-dollar gift, even if that eleven hundred dollars is ‘laundered’ through two separate network divisions, would violate the spirit and possibly the letter of those regulations? Not to mention the appearance issues.”