Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  She’s grateful for the curling analogy. It makes it easier to resist any show of assent.

  “I have another question,” she says. Do I personally bear any blame at all? “What about—well—I know it was under my purview, and—”

  “Charles Prieve,” Mose says. “I know the Fifty-nine scuttlebutt you must’ve heard about Charles Prieve’s blackmail gambit …”

  “I, no, I—”

  “And in fact, yes, one of his letters did mention you and George and Real Time in extremely ugly terms. But that threat, I assure you, had no bearing whatsoever on the cancellation. None.”

  “I was actually wondering about the Manson digital-insert trick—did that play a big part in the decision about the show? In the end?”

  Mose sits back, relaxing visibly.

  “Oh, good heavens, no. No. Quite the contrary. In fact, I meant to tell you how pleased I was to discover you’d given George the go-ahead on that. Laura was astonished at how beautifully the effect worked! After we got burned on using it in News, she and Timothy were a little nervous about trying it out on the entertainment side. But George proved it can be a fantastic weapon in our arsenal.” He pauses. “If there’s ever the opportunity, please thank him for me.”

  The flight attendant has reappeared.

  “May I clear the table?”

  Anxiety drains from Lizzie. The cancellation was not her fault, not even a little. Quite the contrary. She finds herself not guilty.

  “Are we finished?” Mose says. “Can we get back to our businesses?”

  She asks him if what she read in Variety was true, about the Winter Channel becoming some kind of New Age channel, and he looks at her a little oddly and says yes, possibly, what does she think of the idea? She says she thinks it could be huge, that she’s in the lunatic demo herself, that literally half the people in America now inhabit shiatsu, herbal, acupuncture, yoga households, and he asks if “Reality Channel” is better than “The Healing Channel.”

  “Reality Channel,” she says.

  “And you know this fellow Edward Ingram, correct?”

  “Sure. I adore Zip. He’s one of our closest friends. Why?”

  “Timothy and I talked with Zip about running News after Barry Stengel. But now it looks as if there’ll be no more News to run. So we’re talking with him about Reality Channel. He’s going to be in Sydney next week, as it happens. We’ll have a bite.”

  Since the other job is moot, and she adores Zip, she does not say that Zip Ingram running a network news division, even MBC’s, would have been ludicrous, dangerous, an outrage. Mose asks what is finally to be done with “our FCC boondoggle,” the new free digital channels. They discuss the pros and cons of acceding to the wishes of the Microsoft lobby and turning the channels into twenty-megabit PC connections, versus Timothy Featherstone’s “extreme entertainment” plan—Feath-ervision, Timothy had called it, in which each channel would become a serially obsessive, hypermarketed, microniche medium—nothing but old Burt Reynolds movies and TV shows for a month, then all Flipper, then all Monkees, then Jacqueline Onassis for a couple of months, and so on and on. Mose wonders if there’s “some way to play around digitally with our existing brands,” and Lizzie laughingly mentions two of her son’s fevered and repulsive ideas—R-rated versions of regular TV series distributed in DVD format (Ally McBeal with nude scenes, Homicide with viscera) and 3D celebrity-transformation software, with which a computer user could do anything imaginable with a famous person, living or dead, on screen—have sex with them, assassinate them, surgically transform them. “This is a ten-year-old?” Mose says. “Maybe your son should run the entertainment division.” He frets about his backward local stations that aren’t broadcasting digital pictures, but she says it doesn’t matter, since only one in a hundred homes has a digital TV. He reminds Lizzie of her hypoglossal canal analogy. She replies that MBC may not have the capital resources to become the first ape to turn himself into a talking human. Smile, sip, smile, smile, and sip.

  “Time for the seat belts, Mr. Mose, Ms. Zimbalist. We’re starting our descent into Haneda.”

  “Well, in fact,” he says to Lizzie, finishing up, “before too very long we may be climbing up a different limb of the evolutionary tree altogether. Did you know the broadcast networks’ share of the TV audience, all seven of us combined, just dipped below fifty?” He looks down at Japan. “I enjoy being a contrarian, but only when it works. The network television business may be Neanderthal after all. A dead end.” He turns back to her. “They are the ones who died off, correct?”

  “Uh-huh,” she says, waiting for Mose to follow up. He doesn’t. “What business are we in?” she finally asks.

  “Ah, I wish I knew,” he says. “Ask me tomorrow.” He smiles. “No business strategy lasts forever. In fact, you’re lucky if it lasts four quarters. Welcome to the twenty-first century.”

  Hank Saddler takes the seat next to Lizzie for the landing at Haneda Airport in Tokyo. He looks for a full, simpy second at her, then at Mose.

  “Did you discuss?” he asks, looking back and forth between them again.

  He means Real Time and George.

  “Everything’s fine,” Mose says.

  40

  He has opened the big front door for her, which in L.A. never triggers any trace of late-feminist awkwardness. “You’re George Mactier?” repeats the stylish woman in pencil-leg khaki pants, silk T-shirt, and Gucci loafers as soon as he’s introduced himself and asks if she knows where he can find Ned Wisdom. “I think your screenplay grooves!”

  She is the first Hollywood executive with whom he’s had a professional encounter as a would-be filmmaker, and she has complimented him on sight, preemptively, gratuitously. He wonders if she’s Ned Wisdom’s number two. Emily has said he has a brilliant woman who does all his development. (Emily also said that every big producer has a brilliant woman who does all his development.)

  “Thank you. Thanks very much.” He knows he should leave it there. “It’s—unfortunately, it’s not written yet.”

  “That’s cool,” she says as he follows her in.

  She steps smartly into the cavernous main space, slate gray but California bright, swings left just past the unmanned receptionist’s desk, then stops abruptly, standing to look at a fax that tallies, hour by hour, from Friday afternoon through last night, the weekend grosses of every movie in release in North America. “Whoa,” she says, “the Adam Sandler Koyaanisqatsi remake really did open.”

  “Can you tell me where Ned Wisdom’s office is?”

  “Sure!” she says, “just a sec.” She walks around the yellow metal reception cube and pulls a translucent yellow circle over her head like a halo. It’s a telephone headset. “Let me tell them you’re here.”

  She is the receptionist. George can practically hear the quick farting sound of deflation as her compliment shrinks to a useless, flaccid scrap. The receptionist at Ned Wisdom Productions thinks George’s unwritten screenplay grooves.

  “He’ll be one sec,” she says, “but you can go right on back to his zone. Around those river pebbles over there, left over the bridge thing, then left again. His reception zone is a patio. You can’t miss it.”

  He gets lost somewhere between the industrial-medieval bridge-breezeway and the patio. He runs into a guy wearing Converse hightops and an ANTICHRIST! baseball cap coming out of a digital-editing bay. The exquisitely lit and furnished room looks like the main cabin of the Space Shuttle TriBeCa. The kid looks like a very clean messenger. George figures he’s probably a $170,000-a-year film editor.

  “Can you tell me where Ned Wisdom’s office is?” George asks him.

  “I can,” he says. “I’ll take you to him.”

  George sees that his left turn after the bridge was more of a veer. Wisdom’s office, set just beyond the red sandstone patio, is a separate white building (the adobe smells fresh) apparently built as a scale model of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

  “Come on in,” the kid s
ays. “You’re George, right?” He puts out his hand and smirks. “I’m him.” The kid, of course, is Ned Wisdom, the producer of three surprise hits in a row during the last two years—the violent animated comedy Ammo Blammo, the Dennis Quaid/Kurt Russell/Patrick Swayze buddy picture Comeback, and last spring’s Who’s a Pussy?, the so-called “MTV Candide” that starred Bruce Willis as a present-day L.A. detective and, at seventy-three minutes, was said to be the shortest major motion picture ever released. Wisdom’s action-adventure new-millennium comedy Antichrist! will be released at Christmas on sixty-five hundred screens. George sees now that Wisdom has some gray hair. He is not technically a kid.

  Inside his office—which has a Guggenheimian ramp winding along the inside walls, all the way up to what looks like a bungee-jump platform near the ceiling—Wisdom sits on a stainless-steel stool. His desk is an antique Bauhaus drafting table. George sits in a BarcaLounger covered in lush, ocher leather—an ironic BarcaLounger, no doubt, although the impeccable upholstery muddles the irony.

  “You don’t really want to become a screenwriter, do you?” he says to George. He’s not smiling.

  “Well, yeah, I do, among other things.”

  “But you’re a producer.”

  “But TV is—”

  “Yeah, I know. I know.”

  George has no idea what critique of television Wisdom has just affirmed.

  “Emily said you have an idea for a picture about hippie murderers? Emily is good people.”

  “Well, not exactly hippie murderers.”

  “Wait, aren’t you the Charlie Manson guy?”

  “That was just a story we happened to break on my show.” George leans forward. “This movie is about three boys and a girl, normal suburban kids in Westchester. In the first act, it’s 1962 and 1963, they’re thirteen—”

  “What’s Westchester?”

  “It’s a suburb. Of New York?”

  Wisdom shakes his head and gives an unembarrassed shrug.

  “Anyhow,” George continues, “the boys are totally into 007; they play these outlandish, elaborate secret-agent games all the time, and—”

  Wisdom is shaking his head more emphatically now. “I don’t know 1962. I don’t really feel 1962. I mean, are we talking Happy Days?”

  “No, no, not like that at all. These kids sneak into Manhattan for weekends and pretend they’re James Bond, they go all over the city, wearing suits and ties. It’s funny and poignant, but with an edge. They sneak into strip clubs, they take taxis, they have toy guns, and so—”

  “You know, if Sony can’t get their Bond picture made, how the Bob Evans am I going to get MGM to let me rip off the franchise? Just a note.”

  “No, these boys are just Bond fans, fanatics, you know?”

  “What thirteen-year-old is a James Bond fanatic? Is this like Austin Powers with kids?”

  “No, no, not now, maybe, but in the early sixties—”

  “So these are like my parents as teenagers?”

  “I suppose. Sure. Anyhow, the second and third acts are set in 1967 and 1968, during the Vietnam War, and two of these three boys and their other friend, a girl, are at college together. One of them is a serious radical—”

  Wisdom puts up his hand. “Pause. Rewind. ‘Serious radical’ meaning he what, like, eats some mushrooms and skateboards through his father’s stuffy law firm and ends up becoming a U.S. senator? Because we’re doing that. Sandler. Summer 2001. But that’s good, because it means we’re in the same sensibility domain, which is rare out here. It’s special.” He leans forward. “You do crime, noir kinds of pieces, right? NARCS? Let me try one of my indie-type stories out, see if it resonates for you. This movie star finishes a picture, goes home to his beautiful ranch in Montana, ten million acres with buffalo and eagles and all that, to fight the mining company that’s about to destroy his environment. And when he walks in—beautiful log-cabin mansion, like Eisner’s in Aspen—when he gets there, somebody grabs him, and he sees they have his girlfriend, or wife, whatever. And she’s about to be fucked up the ass by seven giant black dudes.”

  Ned Wisdom pauses. He smiles like Bill Clinton smiles when he’s proud of something. Then George realizes that it’s not a pause, but a full stop.

  “What do you think?” Wisdom asks.

  “Did you mean the hero is a movie star in the movie—that the character is an actor? Or that it’s a big-star role?”

  “Whichever. Both. But does the story work for you?”

  “It’s not, it’s—what happens then?”

  “Hey, I’m producing. That’s just the story. I let storytellers tell their stories. I don’t prescribe to writers. I’m known for not doing that.”

  George shakes his head. “That doesn’t actually sound like my kind of thing.”

  “Okay,” says Wisdom, “cool.” He leans farther forward, so only the very edge of his little behind is still touching steel. “Another project. Indie style, but a Michelle/Julia-type vehicle, prestige thriller. She’s a doctor, or an executive, whatever, a single mother going to visit her mom and dad in her hometown for Christmas. Maybe the father’s a professor, like a computer genius who made a billion, and the mother’s an old but beautiful former chorus girl. Christmas morning, Michelle comes downstairs. Dad’s dead. Red Christmas stockings stuffed in his mouth. And two guys dressed like Santa’s elves, maybe actual dwarves, depends how edgy we want to go, have Mom tied up with tinsel in front of the fireplace. And like five huge black guys are about to fuck her up the ass. Mom,” he adds quickly, as if to head off some horrible misunderstanding, “not Michelle, or Julia.” Then he oozes back into his contented Clintonesque smirk. “Yes? Thumbs-up?”

  After the meeting, George has promptly gotten lost again, on his way from Santa Monica to Timothy Featherstone’s memorial service at Mortons. To get his mind off Ned Wisdom, he tried to remember every funeral he’s ever attended, to see if he has ever been to three in one six-month period before, and ended up driving all the way into Hollywood. At the service, the canapé platters (“A warm Tunisian-style mussel? Or endive hash with soy-milk crème fraîche?”) are rimmed with black satin. He knows he won’t run into Mose or Saddler (their Asia trip), and Daisy found out for him that Arnold Vlig wasn’t going (the cold prick), but he wants to run into Laura Welles. He knows his presence will make her squirm. And it does, although his pleasure in her discomfort is exceeded, he realizes the instant he spots her, by the sting.

  Ng is treated as the primary widow, although they were not actually married, with the legal Mrs. Featherstone relegated to her own small, ancillary circle of grief near the bar. (The first Mrs. Featherstone is taking photographs.)

  It has not occurred to George that he might run into the virtual Mrs. Featherstone once removed. He watches her, especially her tight, tight chignon, not recognizing her when she approaches him. (He always finds that mourning outfits make attractive women more attractive. He wonders if Louisa gets her morbidity from him.)

  “Hello, George. It’s Sandra Bemis.”

  Hi! Hey, funny story—true story—it was your fraudulent expense-account living that helped get me canceled! Yours and Timothy’s, God rest his soul. “Hello, Sandi,” he says.

  “Thank you so much for your quote in the paper. Timmy would have been so pleased.” When the obituary writer phoned Monday morning, before the meeting on Fifty-nine, George told him, “Timothy Featherstone was a singular human being and, for me, the embodiment of everything amazing about the entertainment business.”

  “It was really a shock to me. Horrible.”

  “You know, the sad thing is, I blame Harold Mose. And all of them there. I do.”

  Yes, yes … that is very sad … but interesting! “Why?”

  “I think he made Timmy work too hard, for one thing. And I think Harold never really understood Timmy, what he was saying. You know?”

  Yes, I do, since I literally didn’t understand what Timothy was saying half the time. “Mmm,” George says, nodding. “Sandi,”
he finally says, “were you aware that Timothy was charging off your suite in Las Vegas to my show?”

  She has a faraway, innocent look, sincerely stupid. “Within my consciousness, I’ve heard about it, but, like, I don’t know about it. Was it a lot of money? Did you have to pay for it personally? Because I could pay it back out of the money Timmy left for me in his will.”

  George feels like he’s stepped into The Maltese Falcon or Chinatown—or, more precisely, Who’s a Pussy? He shakes his head but doesn’t say no.

  “Because he left fifty-seven thousand dollars for me to go to grad school, but I only need like about thirty-five for that.”

  She tells him it has been her dream for a decade to get a master’s degree in the history of consciousness from the University of California at Santa Cruz. He says no, keep Timothy’s bequest for herself, but if she wouldn’t mind, his lawyer did say he’d love to have an affidavit in the file affirming that George Mactier was not part of your, the Vegas, you know, scheme to bilk MBC. And she said thanks so much, since she needs the cash “to grow” the Wow-Wow Partners animal-healing business and ante up capital along with her two new partners.

  “You know them. Emily Kalman? And Jeremy?”

  “Emily Kalman is going into the pet-therapy business with you?”

  “She’s sort of a silent partner. I’m chairman and CEO, and my COO is this magic, magic man. He used to act? I think on Petticoat Estates, where one of the Petticoat Junction daughters has triplets and moves to a snobby suburb? Jeremy Ramo? He used to be Buddy Ramo?”

  “I didn’t know Buddy’s name was Jeremy.” He doesn’t bother telling her it was Li’l Gilligan, not Petticoat Estates.

  41

  After four days in Tokyo, Lizzie is more than ever convinced of what she has always suspected: the higher you go, the more you make, the easier the job gets. Sure, there are those tough, hard, gut-wrenching moments every so often (firing, downsizing, closing, canceling), but mainly it’s easy—listening, lunching, taking planes, giving opinions, forcing babblers to get to the point.