"And, face it," Mr. Rich added, "we tolerate a little more risk. Danger sells."
"People pay money to see Evel Knievel jump his motorcycle over cars," I clarified. "You know that they wouldn't be paying if they knew for sure he was going to make it. A little risk helps us."
Swiggs nodded. "That's straight. Where's your script?"
Mr. Rich cleared his throat. "No, ah, we were going to just film it as it happens. Give it a feel of veracity."
"A documentary? Babes in the woods. Docs don't fill theaters, dude. No, we need a plot—a little danger, a little romance. Fuck, no problem, I got writers, I buy fucking writers by the dozen, we can have a script next week." He leaned back in his fake-leather chair, and stared up at his reflection in the mirrored ceiling. "Do you assholes know what you have here? Baby, Adventure: Moon has got everything in one sweet deal, spectacle, adventure, exotic locations, sex—you're selling the goddamn American dream here, we are. It's going to be so hot it will make the hula-hoop fad look like old socks. You came to the right place, baby, you came to somebody who knows how to put together a deal."
We looked at each other and smiled. He was hooked.
"If you can pull off the tech shit," he said, "I can find the funding. Are you assholes lucky, or what?"
And that was how we sold our souls for a chance to go to the moon—not even to the Devil, but to Danton Swiggs.
"He's a lizard," Mr. Rich said, when we finally left, outside in that warm Hollywood night.
"But he's a producer," I said, and we both grinned.
"Hey," said the Gecko. "Watch it. You're insulting reptiles."
You understand, we didn't have any other choice. We had cut the budget and scraped and lied and cut every corner. When we started, we'd had plans for follow-up missions, for a whole settlement—we killed those plans, they cost too much. One trip to the moon, paid for by private funds—that was all we thought about, all we talked about, all that appeared in our dreams at night.
And Danton Swiggs knew where to get the money to do it.
It wasn't his own money—Swiggs had money, but not nearly enough to put together the Project Moon expedition all by himself. But he knew people. Kids with inherited millions who liked a little risk along with their blue chips and trust funds. Oil-industry executives that needed tax-shelters to hide windfall profits from the IRS. Drug dealers who needed to put money into a legitimate business. Casino owners looking for new places to invest.
And Swiggs took his cut.
His cut, as it happened, meant a controlling interest in the project.
That was something we fought like wolverines, but it was one thing he wouldn't budge on. Swiggs might consult a personal astrologer to tell him the best hour of day to sign a contract, he might decide to trust somebody because he had a dream about the color of their shoes, but his cocaine-rotted nose was infallible about sniffing out just exactly what was good for Danton Swiggs, and the one rule he didn't break was, take care of number one: always keep control.
When Swiggs told us that this was a non-negotiable, we excused ourselves and held a hasty strategy conference.
"Deal-breaker," said the Gecko. "I say we walk."
"Walk?" Mr. Rich said. "Where the hell do you think we can go?" He laid it out for us. "We've already done everything but rob banks," he said. "And you know we'd do that too, but we need more cash than a bank robbery. It comes to this: sign the project over to Swiggs, and go to the moon, or keep control, and forget we had ever dreamed. Do you see any other choices? I don't. What do you want to do, guys? Just what do you want to do?"
We signed.
We thought we knew what we were getting into. The first thing Swiggs told us—and he told us this even before we signed—was that we could forget the silly idea that we would make the trip to the moon ourselves.
"Actors," he said. "Jeez, I thought you knew that from the start." Swiggs was wearing a purple velvet dinner jacket with a pink velour shirt. As he talked he was pulling Froot Loops out of a box, examining each one before popping it into his mouth. "We need some talent here, and that means actors, not engineers. Some hot numbers who look good on screen. The public plinks down their beer money, and they want to see beautiful people; they want drama and romance, not a couple of pasty-faced whitebread dorks wearing pocket-protectors, no offense."
This had always been the part of our plan that we'd never dared to speak aloud: we were not only going to put together a moon mission, overcoming tremendous odds, but we were going to fly it ourselves. Wouldn't the drama of the mission overshadow everything, and make the nation understand us for what we were—engineers—and like us all the better for not pretending?
"Are you jerking me off?" said Swiggs. "You, in the movie? Get real."
Gecko tried to argue this to Swiggs. He played every card in his deck: that our story was a story of a dream, it was our story, it would only be a shabby lie if they produced Project Moon with actors. Swiggs didn't budge. "So the story's about engineers—fine, the actors play engineers. No problemo, we'll write that into the script. You think that when the public sees a movie about cowboys, they hire real cowboys? Hell, no. They hire Yul Brynner to play a cowboy. Hollywood sells dreams, and that doesn't mean pudgy middle-aged guys in white shirts. Wipe-out, dudes, you sucked the big O. Pick up your boards and get with the program."
He looked at us. "Forget it, it's a done deal. Say, want some Froot Loops?"
"I figure it this way," the Gecko explained to me, later. "We do this right, it's a big hit, there's going to be a sequel." He smiled. "And then—then—who's holding the winning cards? We signed away control—but just for one film. Next time, we're in for sure—and this time we'll have a real budget, not just paperclips and old string."
"You think?" I asked.
"Sure." The Gecko smiled beatifically. "Mr. Swiggs promised me."
Then Swiggs let us know that he would shoot a porn flick.
"It's your idea, guy," he told me. "You said it: we've got to hit every market in America."
I threw up my hands and shook my head: no way. Every market? Sure, but pornography wasn't the business plan I'd had in mind.
Swiggs explained. The film would still be targeted to mainstream America. What Swiggs envisioned was a second film, shot between scenes of his film Adventure: Moon, a porn film in space.
After all, porn was what he was good at.
We didn't like it.
"How much did it cost to shoot Deep Throat?" he demanded.
I shook my head, shrugged my shoulders. "I don't know."
"Fifty grand," he said. "Fifty grand to shoot—that's pocket change. How much did it gross?"
Again, I shook my head.
He pointed his finger at me and laughed. "Bingo!" He snapped his fingers. "You got it. Nobody knows how much it grossed; they've been keeping that figure close. Half that money was under the table anyway. Now, how much have they reported, eh? Reported income only. Okay, hold on to your balls. Three hundred and fifty million smackers. A third of a billion gross for a film that cost fifty grand to produce, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
"And why is that? How come Americans, smart people who like their money, how come they paid three hundred million to see a lousy film that featured crummy lighting, amateur camera work, and actors that couldn't even say a two-line script without flubbing their lines? I tell you why. They paid for the novelty, that's why. They paid to see on-screen fucking like they've never seen on screen before, a new way to do the world's oldest trick.
"Now, you tell me: what kind of property do we have here? Don't answer, I'll tell you. We have got our little hands around a property that will show sex acts that have never even been possible on Earth. A measly third of a billion? Hell, we're going to blow that away on the video alone. We're going to be drowning in money. And we rake the straight stuff, the action-adventure stuff, right off the top. First we sell to the kiddies, make a few billion, then after we've saturated that market, we sell again to their m
ommy and daddy, let 'em watch some hot action like they've never seen. This is going to be hot, babe, and I mean bitchinghot. You guys just don't know, you don't have aclue."
Suddenly he got serious. Swiggs did that sometimes, change moods instantly. "Let me explain this so you can understand," he said. "We got no choice here. You tell me I've gotta line up a billion dollars cool to buy a seat in this poker game—" he held up a hand—"I know, I know, we'll make it back, we'll be rich. I know that, I've got the story. Now you listen. If I don't line up the bones, we don't get rich, we get the big Melvin. I need a pitch I can sell. Investors aren't going for the adventures. I'm hearing don't call me, I'll call you. You don't like porn? Fine. My daddy told me, everybody's entitled to an opinion, you got yours. I respect that. But you gotta realize, I can sell a fuck-flick. My investors understand that.
"So, get with the program, dude. Either we squirt some joy juice in orbit, or we fold right now. Got it?"
We got it. As Mr. Rich explained it, Von Braun made V-2 rockets before he made moon rockets. Was that moral? He got us to the moon. You do what you have to.
· · · · ·
The Gecko was in love. Perfect, pristine beauties, intricately tooled, bigger than houses: five F-1 engines, the most powerful rocket engines ever created by man. The last F-1 engines in the world.
They were stored in a warehouse in Canoga Park, not half an hour's drive from Hollywood. We'd driven out to see them.
The Rocketdyne facility was on a mountaintop, ugly sheet-metal buildings set in some of the most spectacularly gorgeous scenery I'd ever laid eyes on, rugged granite boulders and twisted pines. "Used to be a ranch, belonged to one of the studios," the Rocketdyne rep told us. "They filmed the old Cisco Kid serials here, you know that?"
If you've never been up close to an F-1 engine, it's an impressive sight. They are enormous. Gecko couldn't keep from touching them, running his hands over the fluted channels that circulated cooling through the nozzles, trotting up to the high-bay viewing platform to inspect the gargantuan turbopumps, and then back down to shine his flashlight up into the throats. "Flawless," he said, in awe. He put down his binoculars. "They're in perfect condition."
I nodded. "Good." The engines were critical to our plans. They were the power source that pushed the Saturn V into the air, the beast that roared down the moon. Without them, we were nowhere. I turned to the suit who was waiting patiently for us to complete our inspection in the dimly-lit warehouse. "OK, we'll take them," I said. "I'll have a check cut for you as soon as I can get the financing solid; two weeks tops."
"Two weeks won't cut it," the suit said, in the accent of a bored Alabama good-ol'-boy. "Storing these white elephants is costing us ten thousand dollars a month." He put up a hand to silence me when I was about to break in. "It doesn't matter what you say. You've been telling us you want to buy these engines for over a year now, and we still haven't seen any cash. This is it. End of the month they're going for scrap metal unless we've got a paying customer to pay the storage fees. And I mean a paying customer with cold hard cash, not promises."
The end of the month was three days away.
"Face it, ain't nobody going to the moon again," the suit said. He looked at the engines with scorn. "These puppies are nothing but old useless dinosaurs, taking up space. Time to melt them for scrap, get a little value out of them."
"I'll put it on my credit card," Gecko said.
· · · · ·
Crew selection was difficult.
We were getting californicated by now, rooms in the Beverly Wilshire, dining at La Dome or Dominicks, all on the expense account of Swiggs Productions. Mr. Rich had even taken to wearing Hawaiian shirts, the unofficial Hollywood uniform, although not even Hollywood could persuade the Gecko to switch from his white button-down.
"Four," Swiggs said. We were in his conference suite, which lacked anything resembling a conference table, but made up for it with a pool table, half a dozen pinball machines, two barber's chairs, a small trampoline, three different gum-ball machines and several hundred Pez dispensers. "We need a crew of four, that's bare bones." He ticked them off on his fingers. "Leading man, leading lady, camera, lighting."
"Leading lady?" Gecko said. We ignored him. We'd never told him about the porn part of the project, either.
"Shit, we could use a dozen more," Swiggs said. He raised more fingers. "Gaffers, make-up, best boy, fluffers—"
"Pilot, copilot," Mr. Rich added. "That's six. Gecko, if we push it to the limit, what's the max we can put on the expedition?"
"Two," Gecko said. He seemed to think for a second, and with an almost invisible smile said. "Three, if none of them need to breathe." That was about as close as the Gecko ever came to humor.
"Shit, dude, you're fucking me," Swiggs said. "Come on now, you got to play with me. We need four; that's a dead minimum. Pull your head out of outer space for a minute and get on the bus. You're playing with the big boys now. Look, you give a little on your end, I'll give a little on mine. What if the cameraman and the lighting guy are midgets? We hire dwarfs, that's what we do. Not for the leads, of course—they have to be real people."
"What, dwarves aren't real?" Mr. Rich asked.
"That's the angle, midgets for the tech," Swiggs said, ignoring Rich. He turned to Gecko. "Work with me. How many can we fly now?"
Gecko thought for a moment. "Two," he said.
Two. It came down to a question of which was more important; a camera man, or oxygen. Midgets or no, it was driven by the mass budget. They needed to breathe.
Mr. Rich designed a camera that could be remotely programmed from the ground. As long as the actors knew their places, it might just work. The spacecraft was going to be so small that they could hardly be off-camera anyway. Gecko figured that the trajectory would be preprogrammed before they launched; they weren't actually flying the ship themselves, although we wouldn't mention that in the film. The moon wasn't a very long time-lag away; problems in flight could be solved on the ground. Lighting was something the actors would have to take care of themselves. The only indispensable part of the mission was the leading man and the leading lady.
They'd have to pass a class-IV physical, Mr. Rich insisted, and Swiggs had to agree to pick actors who, at a minimum, had a pilot's license and a few hundred hours of solo time. Not that they'd fly the spacecraft themselves, but we wanted people with at least a minimum level of competence, who wouldn't panic out of idiocy when they started floating.
"And if they screw up in training, even once, they're out," the Gecko added. "No arguments: out. We want that in writing."
"Sure, of course, no problemo," said Swiggs. "What, you think all actors are stupid?"
· · · · ·
"I love films," Swiggs said. I was with him in his penthouse suite, surrounded by mirrors, mirrors on the walls, mirrors on the table. The girl he had massaging the back of his neck was nearly bursting out of her low-cut blouse; I had a mild curiosity what color her hair had been before she'd made it eye-popping yellow.
"I just love 'em. I'm not in this business for the money; I'm not in it for the blow-jobs. I'm an artist. Nobody appreciates that. Nobody knows that a producer isn't just some asshole in a suit, he has to be an artist, he's got to have vision." He pointed his cigar at me, a fat and completely illegal Cuban. "OK, maybe you appreciate it. Nobody else."
The mirror on the table had enough cocaine on it to put down a racehorse.
"You know, the first moment I met you guys, I thought, oh, no, what kind of dweebs did the cat drag in this time? Then you started talking, and I said to myself, 'Jesus, this is one motherfucking killer idea. How do I get to know you better?' "
He looked at me through bloodshot eyes. "Sure you don't need a girl? Not even a hooter?" He shook his head when I answered no. "Shit. You guys are the limit, you know that? The absolute fucking limit."
"So what's the script," I asked. This was what he'd invited me here for, to tell me about the script. He had a story, he sa
id, and it was "wicked pisser."
"Later," he said. "Hey, loosen up. Get in touch with your feelings, drop some acid. You dudes are cool, but you're just so damn uptight."
He leaned back, and the girl massaging his back moved over to start on his chest. "Hey, if I can just get the right cast, this script is going to be killer. Trust me."
· · · · ·
We still hadn't seen the script.
As it ended up, we had no role in casting: one day Swiggs just informed us he had finished casting the leading roles. "Gentlemen, I'd like you to meet the talented—" he winked "—Miss Linda Vixen, our lovely leading lady."
She was spectacularly beautiful—amber hair pruned in thick waves around her shoulders, narrow waist, wide hips, and legs that, even without the five-inch heels, would make any man with a pulse beg and grovel.
Closer up, she wasn't so beautiful. She was older than I'd thought, although artful make-up concealed her actual age. Her face was old. She stared forward, completely lacking in any interest, her eyes utterly blank of expression, as if she'd already seen everything, done everything, and none of it had been worth the bother.
"Take off your clothes, honey," Swiggs said. "Show the boys your assets."
Her bored expression didn't change, but it couldn't have taken her more than seven seconds to shrug out of her clothing. She stared at nothing, chewing gum, wearing nothing but five-inch stiletto heels.
The Gecko looked on with a puzzled expression. Rich just stared, I don't think he could have closed his mouth if he'd tried. I was less impressed. She had big breasts, sure, but that was her asset. And without her brassiere, they were seriously sagging.
"Shoot," Gecko said. "What the heck is this? We can't use some airhead—I told you, we need somebody with a pilot's license, minimum."
Vixen looked at him utterly without expression, then blew a bubble and popped it in his face.
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