The Book of the Film of the Story of My Life

by William Brandt

  By now you are wrestling with negative feelings toward this guy. A leaden weight settles on your soul. You realize the truth. He has no idea whatsoever and his script is going to be terrible and when you’ve read it you’re going to have to say you don’t like it and when you do he’s going to get all defensive and blame you and force you to explain why you don’t like it and no matter what you say it just won’t help because the more you explain the less he will understand and the more hostile he will get and the more you will realize that you yourself don’t have any idea what’s wrong with it, beyond the fact that it’s crap and you never want to see this guy again and you will have one more person who hates you in this world.

  And all of this for nothing. There is no money in it for you. There never was. There is no possible reason for doing this except that you’re doing him a favor because you felt sorry for him and now you don’t even like him anymore. At least with Biscrobus you can read a better class of crap—and get paid for it too.

  And then, just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, you remember also what you were saying last night at the party to this very same person and you realize just what an arsehole you are. You’re just like all the others, maybe even worse, you’ve been spouting utter steaming bullshit, you don’t have any contacts at all beyond an ex-wife who doesn’t talk to you anymore and through whom you met a lot of famous people who don’t want to know you and you don’t have any money or energy or drive or even really any idea how to get a film made beyond how to write a bullshit letter to the European Film Commission and the only substantive difference between you and the person sitting on your bed waiting to drink the first cup of coffee, is that he has no dress sense.

  By now you’ve finished making the coffee. The ill-bred lumpen prol is sitting behind you waiting arrogantly for his coffee. The first cup, the cup that was meant for you. You give him the coffee. You look at the script, which is sitting on the bed. Sitting on top of the script is a little piece of paper.

  “What’s that?” you ask, innocently.

  “Oh,” he says, “that’s a confidentiality agreement. I mean, let’s face it, we don’t really know each other that well.”

  Now, you hate him. So you roll up your sleeves, you sharpen your pencil, and you sit down and get started on not-getting-around to reading that script. And he starts phoning. And you start coming up with excuses. And it goes on and on. And there is really no way that you can get out of it. Eventually, sooner or later, you will read it. You will have that conversation. You will take your rightful place in the pantheon of arseholes, and only then will it be all over. Until the next time.

  That’s my life.

  Oh well, time to face the music. Time to skim it at least fully enough to be able to sound like I’ve read it. “I’m sorry but I’ll be out after that. I won’t be home till eleven at the earliest.”

  There’s the slightest pause. “All right. Eleven.” He hangs up and I pocket the phone. By now I’m outside the sports bar and there’s that sickening smell of chips in stale oil, and a racing car in the window. BEEP BEEP BEEP. I put the phone away and lean my hand on the plate glass. The hostess at the desk stares at me, like she knows I’m shit but she can’t quite figure out what flavor. POCKETA POCKETA POCKETA.

  I walk another half block and turn in at the automated double-glass doors of the net-curtain nightmare, the giant licorice all-sort that is New Zealand House. I wave to the security guards and cross the marble floor. I take the lift to the third floor. I walk down the long narrow avocado-green corridor. At the end of the corridor is a door. Beside the door is a brass plaque: GODZONE INTERNATIONAL, LTD. I unlock the door, cross several thousand square feet of empty open-plan office space and sit at a tiny desk in the far corner. I am the sole occupant of the entire floor. I won’t be here much longer—the rent holiday runs out in August. I did my company tax return last week. The biggest item of expenditure for the year was the accountant’s fee, and the biggest item of income was the tax refund on last year’s loss carried forward. I like that—carried forward. Sounds so professional. I am in fact very professional in the way I run my business. I have an excellent accountant, I keep up to date on all the paperwork, which I find kind of soothing. I have a registered office, a business card—three colors, exquisite print job, cost a fortune—I have letterhead, I have a fax machine, e-mail, a network hub (no network as yet, but I’m future proofed). I even have my own website. Only problem is I have no employees and I’m losing money hand over fist. Not my money, obviously, I have no money. My parents’ money. Last week was the AGM. I met myself in the lobby, adjourned upstairs and sat and stared at the beige carpet for an hour. I decided that Godzone would have to go. Then I accepted the minutes, elected a new secretary, resigned as chairman, re-elected myself, jerked off on the carpet, had a little weep and went out for a hamburger. Kinda sad, huh?

  I fire up the PC, check there’s enough paper in the printer and start to type.

  TITLE: BLOOD COUNT

  GENRE: HORROR

  PERIOD: PRESENT DAY.

  LOCATION: NEW YORK-PRAGUE

  DIRECTOR: Klaus Smith.

  DRAFT: 2

  READER: F.C.

  SYNOPSIS: JACK BORMAN, a jaded New York cop, haunted by the serial murder of his wife and young child (revealed in minute detail in a series of flashbacks), is on the trail of their killer. He meets and falls in love with a young East European prostitute, who, he has reason to believe, will lead him to the killer. He also fears she could be the next victim, and therefore trails her to her place of employment.

  However what he is at first given ample reason to believe a brothel, turns out in fact to be a Manson-like sect, led by the killer of BORMAN’s wife and child. The sect members are all vampiresses posing as prostitutes and drinking the blood of their clients. At first BORMAN thinks it’s just another New York thing, but when he is himself attacked by his erstwhile girlfriend (in the course of lovemaking), he quickly realizes that she possesses supernatural powers. He is forced to eviscerate her with a wooden stake. When he reports his findings however, BORMAN is suspended and booked for psychological evaluation. Taking the law into his own hands, he lays in a large supply of own-build nine-millimeter soft-nose silver tips and goes vampire hunting. After a series of indescribably bloody encounters he has almost rid the city of the vampire menace, but is now himself pursued by half the NYPD. He tracks the leader of the sect—Dracula himself—to a seedy tenement block, only to be confronted by his own wife and child who are both vampires. He hesitates, and the Prince of Darkness escapes, taking BORMAN’s wife and child with him.

  BORMAN tracks DRACULA to Prague, where he finds and is forced to terminate his erstwhile family. At last they have been laid to rest. However his last silver bullet has his name on it. Bitten by the prostitute-vampiress, he knows that the suppurating wound on his shoulder will inevitably claim him. He lies down beside the peacefully resting corpses of his family and blows his own brains out.

  COMMENTS: A blood-spattered orgy of overtly sexualized violence, with cardboard characters and a no-brand storyline. Director Klaus Smith already has a solid box-office success under his belt (Eviscerator) and there seems to be no reason why Blood Count, which is more or less indistinguishable, should not follow suit.

  Structurally, first and second act turning points are clear and strongly marked, and the action rises steadily to an action-packed climax. Unencumbered by considerations of motivation, credibility or taste, the action is relentlessly paced throughout, and remains both unremittingly violent and ceaselessly inventive.

  Looking toward another draft, a disorientating third act relocation to Prague could perhaps be substituted, in the interests of budget if nothing else (and what else matters with stuff like this?), for Lower East Side or similar. Also, central character BORMAN needs to be more sympathetic. A subsequent draft should look to inserting more wisecracks and lighter moments. A Mickey Mouse tie? A pet hamster? Dopey sidekick?

  READER’S
RECOMMENDATION: PLEASE, GOD, DON’T MAKE IT.

  I move on to The Eternal Round and Jacko. By early afternoon I’m finished. I decide to walk around to Biscrobus to drop them off. Hopefully they’ll have some more for me, and if I’m feeling especially bold I can hit Tamintha up for a full-time job. Plus maybe I’ll think of a subtle way of mentioning it’s my birthday. I go out again, wave to the security guards, who smile and nod. God I love the smile of a security guard. It’s like water to a drowning man.

  I cross Haymarket. The day has turned grayer, a light drizzle falling, a fitful wind blowing fragments of dead leaves up my nose. I withdraw fifty quid from the hole-in-the-wall across the road, cut through to Leicester Square then on up to Soho and so to the hallowed precincts of Biscrobus Film, behind Oxford Street. I say hi to Tracy at the desk, which is not really a desk but a giant fish tank with a slab of granite across the top.

  While Tracy phones through to see if Tamintha’s free, I pick up a copy of Empire and flick through. The Irish Brothers are being interviewed about their latest. I glance through but don’t read the article. Reading the articles is never worth it. They never actually capture the inner essence of the person. I’m telling you, I know. There’s a nice picture, big toothy grins, arms around each other’s skinny-kid shoulders, stripy T-shirts and crazy hair. Seamus and Sean. Indistinguishable. They do it on purpose. They could easily get contrasting clothes, color-coded haircuts, something. Sophie says she can always tell them apart but I never can. I’ve met them plenty of times—they hang out with Sophie when they’re in London. I’ve met them all, at one time or another.

  I turn the page. There’s Sophie with the Irish Brothers. She’s laughing. You can see all her teeth. The Irish Brothers are laughing. That’s nice. Everyone looks happy. According to the caption, Sophie may be starring in the Irish Brothers’ next movie. That’s nice. That’s really nice. I put the magazine down. I look around the room. Tracy smiles at me. She’s very nice too. This room is nice. Everything, everyone here, is so nice. The phone rings, Tracy picks it up. “Tamintha says to go on through.”

  I stand.

  “Hey, like your boots.”

  “Thanks. They’re German.”

  I thread my way through the bustling open-plan office: computers and photocopiers and people on phones, all busy, all needed, useful, employed, getting something done. Reach out. Touch a wall. You can feel it. Everything here is real. A real film company with real money, real films, real employees and a real tax situation. I get to a glass-block wall and a door, which is ajar. I tap on it and push.

  Tamintha has the phone cradled on her shoulder, laptop open on an enormous game of Minesweeper. She raises an eyebrow and jerks her chin at me and I sit. I’m happy. I like this office. I think I could sit here forever watching Tamintha on the phone. She seems to be talking to LA about New York. New York is trying to close London and open in Berlin. London is trying to close New York and open in Paris. LA is either trying to stay right out of it or planning to close them both and open in Brussels. No one’s sure. I was talking to Tamintha about it the other day. I thought New York and London should close LA and open in Auckland. She laughed. I like Tamintha. For a start, she’s slightly older than me. People who are younger than me seem to be taking over entirely. Not that I have anything against younger people. I just think they should wait until they’re older. Also, Tamintha is a New Zealander. “Always hire a New Zealander”—that’s her motto.

  She hangs up, smiles, lights a cigarette. I push the assessments across and she puts her feet up on the desk and tilts her reading glasses on her nose, squinting through the smoke. Her hair falls forward and she has to stop to hook it behind her ears, which is extremely cute in a killer exec. She is perhaps a little on the dumpy side, I suppose, technically, but people in glass houses and who cares anyway? The older I get the more attractive women get. Soon I’m going to be walking down the street in a haze of constant but generalized physical attraction. Then I’ll probably start on the men. In fact maybe I already have. Mind you, this is all strictly on-paper attraction. When it comes to the actual hands-on, forget it. I’m just not interested. I am a cloud in pants.

  Tamintha is skimming my assessments. She grunts and turns a page. I hope it was a good grunt. She pulls a face. “Yuck.” She makes it all seem so easy. Sometimes I complain to her that I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. “Just say what you think,” she always says. That’s fine for her, she obviously knows what she thinks. I’ve been reading scripts for her for several years now and the more I do it the less of a clue I have. It was supposed to be temporary, just until Godzone really took off. It’s that sort of job. A foot-in-the-door job, for people who want to be film execs or producers or script doctors or film execs or screenwriters or film execs or directors. And did I mention film execs? But for me, it’s become something else. Not so much a foot-in-the-door as a fingernail-on-the-cliff. The bottom rung of the slippery pole.

  I have to say I do worry about the quality of my assessments. I started to worry when I noticed that the ones I trashed were always the ones that ended up winning prizes at film festivals around the world, whereas the ones I praised to the skies were never heard of again. I tried adjusting my style. I tried trashing the ones I liked and praising the ones I hated—it didn’t seem to make any difference at all to my hit rate. Recently one of my assessments came back from LA. The big boss had scrawled something in the margin: “What’s this guy on?” I thought they were going to tell Tamintha to fire me but she said not to worry. The guy’s just an arsehole. He’s been sleeping with New York and now he’s trying to destabilize London. She said the scripts she was giving me they pretty much knew about, anyway. They were all bottom-of-the-barrel stuff and it was mainly just a question of creating a paper trail.

  But I do suspect my criteria are all out of whack. I can’t see the films as films. I keep judging them. I keep forgetting they’re not real and it doesn’t matter. I want to punish them for having bad things in them, for having villains and violence and infidelity and short-changers and unhappiness and unfairness and undernourishment. I want to expunge evil from the face of filmmaking. I want to impose strict rules of cinematic hygiene, high standards of moral behavior and messages of goodness and truth. Let’s face it, I’m a Stalinist.

  It’s ridiculous. I’m in the wrong line of work. I suspect that Tamintha only gave me the job as a favor to Sophie. She’s Sophie’s friend, really. We met her because Biscrobus put money into Bonza, Mate. Sophie and Tamintha really hit it off—Kiwi girls together, etc. Hanging out in The Sanctuary, stuff like that. Apparently it’s really amazing in there. Steam rooms and steam baths and naked Amazons wandering around getting massages and sitting on swings over the pool. Sophie was telling me all about it.

  If it isn’t because of Sophie then Tamintha probably only keeps me on because she’s sorry for me. Don’t believe what they say about film execs, it’s just not true, they’re people too. Tamintha has a very soft spot. Once she made friends with this mad panhandling junkie who used to hang out on Old Compton Street. She started inviting him around to use the office shower and have a croissant and coffee with the girls. The staff put around a petition and she got really mad at them, called them uptight Pommie wankers and fascists. Then Tracy noticed the goldfish were going missing. When challenged he said fish oil is good for the skin. But she’s like that, Tamintha. Tenderhearted, natural, unconstrained by convention. A collector of strays. So naturally enough when I moved out of the flat, Tamintha put me up for a couple of weeks while I “looked for somewhere else.”

  Probably that was a favor to Sophie too, although I actually suspect sometimes that she is secretly hot for me. It’s not so unreasonable. It’s hard for women at her level to get a guy. Apparently the guys are intimidated by the status. I sure as hell am. But then for me that’s just the beginning. I’m intimidated by women at any level. I have no desire ever to be inside a woman again—and that includes the Statue of Liberty. Sure, I find women
attractive, but I find trees attractive too. Doesn’t mean I want to go rubbing myself all over one.

  Even back in the old days, before my mojo headed West, I was always very selective. It was only ever actresses who did it for me. I don’t know what it was exactly but that’s just the way it’s always been. Maybe it was the mercurial, elusive, ineffable quality of their personalities, the mystery within a mystery, the riddle within the riddle. Maybe it was the leotards.

  Tamintha has finished skimming. She slings the assessments in a pile. “Want some more?”

  “Sure.”

  “Anything in particular?”

  “Got any romantic comedies?” Romantic comedies are really all I’m good for. God I love a good romantic comedy. Not that I’ve actually found one yet. Even the bad ones, I weep buckets. Tamintha reaches across to a huge stack of scripts piled four feet high beside the desk, pulls off the top ten and fans them. “There you go: couple in there, I think.”

  “Ta.” I stash them in my satchel.

  Tamintha looks at me, slightly askew. “You’re not looking for a job are you?”

  “At Biscrobus?”

  “I mean I know you probably won’t be interested, you’ve got your own business and everything, but we’ve got a full-time vacancy coming up, so I just thought I’d mention it.” She’s very tactful, Tamintha. She knows perfectly well what the score is with Godzone.

  “What, er, sort of vacancy?”

  “Assistant Vice Director of Acquisitions. Basically full-time on script-reading, and there’d be some liaison work too. We might even send you to Cannes next year. Also you’d open the mail.” She pulls out a great stack of papers. I realize with a lurch that it’s all my past assessments. It makes a hefty pile. “I’ve been looking over your stuff. It’s all fine,” she says, leafing through.