Other times, Rollins was, according to Gil, “The only one th-th-th-there wh-wh-who kn-kn-knows what h-h-h-he’s d-d-d-doing.”
More than once, Gil had brought up the fact that Chad Rollins also happened to be one of the few black people at Balloon. But even Gil wouldn’t dare bring that up in public. Milt didn’t have to worry about that hornet’s nest.
The network employee pool was and always had been filled to the brim with women, but it still wasn’t quite the diverse population that made for such a hot topic when it came to media/entertainment/tech companies over the past five or ten years.
In those rare instances when Gil would talk in this way, Milt would chalk it up to Gil’s sense of Rollins being something of a so-called “diversity hire,” someone who would make the otherwise blindingly lily-white Balloon appear more colorful in the public eye.
Milt’s phone vibrated and he pulled his phone away from his ear, checking the screen to see who it was. Jessica Chen was hitting him up with screenshots from her contact sheet of new headshots she was hoping to bring to the premiere of his Gil Gladly documentary.
He saw he apparently hadn’t felt the vibrations from the slew of texts waiting for him from Silverstein complaining about the job, nosebleeds, Shitsmelled, life.
Milt couldn’t help but scoff. How very Victorian. A thread of his ectoplasmic snot flew onto the scratched-up glovebox. Frankly turned his head to Milt, said nothing while shooting daggers with his eyes, took a drag of his joint, and turned back to the black void of spot-lit road ahead.
Milt leaned forward to wipe the glistening snail-line of snot from the black glovebox with his right sleeve before leaning back into his seat and placing the phone against his ear once more. “Gil, look, this isn’t something you should be worrying about right now. We have the LA screening and that needs to be the one thing we’re thinking about. Don’t worry about Rollins or Balloon. They do this shit to you all the time. Try to let it go. For now, okay?”
“Yeah?” Gil said, winsomely timid, almost imploring Milt to give him the security he needed so often during such calls.
“Yeah. Look, we’re about to have this huge screening at this great spot in LA, where you will be fucking surrounded by all of your fans who can’t wait to see you, meet you, get autographs from and pictures with you, see your film, and learn things about you they always wanted to know. This is a good thing. This is a good time. We all love you, Gil. Screw Rollins and Balloon. Who needs ‘em?”
“Yeah!” Gil said. “Who needs ‘em? Fuck ‘em! Piece of shit network going down the toilet anyway. Ticket sales are doing better for the other screenings?”
“Uhh,” Milt sputtered, taken aback by Gil’s car-crash timing. He turned to Frankly, who was looking right at him with that Frankly smirk, clearly having overheard this part. “Uhhh, yeah. We’ll be fine.”
“Fine? Or sold-out?”
“Uhhh,” looking back at Frankly who was somehow driving with one hand, holding his now nearly extinguished tiny joint with the other, and looking right at Milt as though expressing nonverbally, telegraphing, Just tell him the truth, you asshole. “I told you already, walk-ins should fill in the gaps. There’s still time left before the ones after LA. I gotta run, but do your best to get some sleep, okay? I know you hate when I bring it up, but you gotta take care of yourself with your heart and everything.”
“Why? If I die, the cost of the doc goes up significantly, and you and your crew will be famous.”
Frankly nodded his head, smiling.
“Shit, Gil, I didn’t think of that before!” Milt said. “Never mind. Go run a marathon and get in a fucking street fight!”
“You got it, fook-fah-shay,” Gil said. “Just make sure those sons-of-bitches at CineRanchero start doing a better job getting the word out. That one has to go big or we’ll all be dead. See you Sunday, you crazy schmuck.”
No goodbye, of course. Conversation over.
“Jesus,” Frankly said, opening his window and flinging the infinitesimal bit of paper and ash out the window before pressing the button to roll it back up. “Is he completely nuts?”
“He’s been joking that anyone who’s wondering that should watch the film,” Milt said. “I’m telling you, man, all that counts is the movie is good. We made some last-minute tweaks since the last cut I sent you. Right in time before the DCP conversion, thank God.”
“Yeah, like what?”
“Some minor tweaks here and there, some stuff none of us really liked but no one who’s seen the last version will notice. Ronnie and I flew out to Jersey to shoot a few more interviews with Gil. Wild stuff. Got that fucking dude to fucking cry.”
“Buhhhhhhht…I mean, is he nuts? Or not?” Frankly asked while Milt peered out the closed window to the passing buildings beyond the freeway, illuminated squares of offices blurring in the distance.
“Everyone is nuts,” Milt said. “You’re nuts, I’m nuts, Gil’s nuts. He’s human. He stutters. He’s got this heart shit he’s been dealing with lately. He’s getting old. He has his family stuff. He’s not a cartoon character, even if he seemed like one for all those years on KidTalk.”
“He seemed pretty normal at the comic-con in San Francisco,” Frankly noted.
Gil had been on pretty good behavior there. He had turned on the juice and became the character the crowds remembered from TV. The character who really wasn’t a “person,” who wasn’t a three-dimensional, flawed, typical, fucked-up human being like everyone else. He was Gil Gladly from KidTalk.
It had been a summer ago, the thirty-fifth anniversary of the show. Balloon had put together the whole event at the San Francisco Comic-Con that Milt, Wallace, and Ronnie had gone to in order to acquire some behind-the-scenes coverage for the documentary.
Milt had known he’d need some extra help, someone to run around getting releases from people they shot and interviewed, someone to help as a kind of all-around production assistant, and so he had enlisted Frankly, who was always up for these adventures and could take days off nearly whenever he wanted from his day job managing a Barnes & Noble that paid the bills while he continued pining over wanting to be involved in film productions.
For this particular shoot, Milt had also brought on an old friend who was working freelance in San Diego. Bobby Taylor was, like Frankly, someone who was happy to come to the San Francisco Comic-Con to be a second camera operator at what was supposed to be a kind of “comeback” for Gil Gladly. FINALLY! Gil Gladly returns to Balloon for a very special live event at one of the biggest pop culture hubs in the country!
Milt, Ronnie, Wallace, and their ad-hoc team got plenty of good stuff for the doc. In the end, however, both Gil and the reps from Balloon disallowed the boys from using all but a few seconds of their three days of full coverage. Wallace would, in fact, have one of his assistants simply cut together a montage of “best of” clips from the event, which ended up not going as originally planned.
For some reason, likely economical, Balloon had put a gaggle of goofy, green, and giggly recent college grad girls in charge of everything. After meeting the first director in charge, Ashleigh (who made sure to mention the spelling of her name every time Milt had to talk with her about anything), Milt brought up his concern privately to Gil that there might be trouble ahead. Things worsened when the more Milt talked with the gals in charge, the more he realized they were all considered “directors,” and all girls from the upper crust of their generation with nontraditionally spelled but still traditional names.
The large-scale KidTalk panel Gil took part in was scheduled for a different room than what Balloon had been promoting all around the con, so almost no one showed up, and those who had were there to get in early for the next panel with some of the minor stars of Firefly.
The man-on-the-street interviews the Balloon girls had set up for Gil to do as spontaneous, YouTube friendly bits didn’t work out because no one had bothered to get permits, and one of the restaurant owners outside of which some of this spontaneou
s footage was shot came outside screaming and yelling, threatening to sue for the foot traffic blockage the shoot was causing.
The main event itself—a small mock-up of KidTalk, hosted by Gil and featuring a handful of minor celebrities, none of whom Milt and his team recognized—had so many technical problems it was amazing more audience members didn’t complain afterwards on social media.
There had been a few complaints, but none made by anyone with any real social media clout, and as the larger media outlets didn’t seem to care the event was happening at all, there was no real coverage anyway.
Milt couldn’t believe that even at such an extremely high-profile event, there could be so many fuck-ups. Dealing with CineRanchero was one thing, but this was Balloon, at the San Francisco frickin’ Comic-Con, for goodness sakes. How could they have let this happen?
At one point at the end of the whole goddamn thing, Gil had called Milt and the guys from his hotel room.
“Are you sitting down?”
Uh, oh.
Milt’s first thought was that Gil was about to say Balloon wouldn’t let them use any of the footage, especially since a lot of what Milt and his team had been capturing was fuck-up after fuck-up.
But no, that wasn’t it. Turned out the camera guy who had been brought on to shoot everything for Balloon itself hadn’t properly initialized his camera’s memory card, and so they’d gotten nothing for the entire day. Tens of thousands of dollars, not to mention their time, had been totally lost.
Who knew why Balloon hadn’t hired more than one camera man? Who knew why the girls in charge never bothered to check with him throughout the day if everything was going all right? Who knew why he never checked himself?
None of this mattered. What mattered was: A. Balloon would have to figure out a way to pay Gil his $45,000 appearance fee for an entire day to shoot everything all over again, B. Gil would have to fly back home a day late, and C. Milt would have to convince Bobby Taylor, who loved this kind of industry fuck-up intrigue, to please please please NOT post anything on his fairly popular Facebook page about how horribly Balloon had screwed up this huge event.
If Bobby spilled the beans, Balloon would never approve anything else that Milt and his team did on the doc, something he also knew he’d need later down the road when he’d need to license KidTalk footage from them for the finished film.
It hadn’t been very easy for Milt to convince Bobby to keep his online mouth shut. Bobby was the kind of person who thought it his duty to let the world know about the problems Balloon had had at the event, something that would hopefully get them to do better next time, to see this as a “teachable moment,” blah blah blah.
Bobby Taylor was one of those people who took Yelp really seriously.
Since Bobby and Ronnie had gotten great footage of everything over the day, Gil said Balloon was interested in potentially buying their footage for a handsome fee. This could go back into the budget of the doc and then, hey, maybe everyone could be paid for the days shooting the event.
In the end, Balloon buckled down, paid Gil his fee, and shot all over again, with background extras to fill the audience this time, also paid for by Balloon. Clips from this version of the event would later be shown on Balloon, and anyone watching could see that something about the whole thing felt inauthentic and plastic. Because it was. It was still out there though, Gil Gladly having his teaser for a semi-reboot of KidTalk.
As with so many of these kinds of things, the viewers watching at home would never see the real show behind the Great Oz curtain. It certainly wouldn’t show up in Milt’s documentary.
Frankly, sitting there in the car, eyes on the road as they went under an overpass, the sci-fi green luminance from his cockpit dashboard gleaming eerily, had been right. Through it all, Gil Gladly had acted great in San Francisco. He hadn’t blown up. Except for the one or two times he'd fought with one of the young directors of the event, something else that would never make it into the doc.
Actually, how those golden moments had ended up on the digital cutting room floor made for a humorous and all too telling moment in the production history.
An executive at Balloon had seen an early cut Milt had sent to make sure everything was approved. She had called to say everyone there loved the film…but there’s that one scene where Gil was fighting with one of the Balloon directors, and could they please cut it out before screening it on the tour?
The executive had tried to explain to Milt that she had been at Balloon for over ten years and “we don’t act like that at Balloon. Everyone is nice and friendly, generous and gentle over here, and we don’t want that scene going out to people thinking that people at Balloon talk or act like that.”
Which, of course, Milt knew was total and complete bullshit. As though people at Balloon, Disney, Nickelodeon were all sweet, magical little pixies with no human emotions. As though just because they worked in children’s programming meant they weren’t all young, fiery, often frustrated, underpaid artists—often totally screwed-up and hence why they were making TV instead of being lawyers or something—who fucked and fought and did drugs and argued and did everything every other normal person, especially in Hollywood, did.
Milt had wanted to say, “Lady, I’ve written about your network for years, and mostly with folks who were there way before your fucking ten-year tenure. I know the people who made your goddamn channel and left because of how fucked up things got once all the money came in.…”
But instead Milt had said, “Sure, you got it. Thanks, and glad everyone likes the film over there!”
“You know, it’s funny,” Milt said, pondering.
“What’s that?” Frankly asked, still driving with one hand, his other relaxed at his side.
“When I look back on the San Francisco Comic-Con, I think about how there we were at one of the biggest, most popular pop culture things in the country, maybe the whole fucking world, with our backstage passes and full access, and—”
“We didn’t do shit while we were there except work and drink,” Frankly cut in.
“Yeah,” Milt said. “Exactly. It’s weird, isn’t it? So many people would have killed to have that kind of access. But we didn’t even think about it. It was just a gig. To all of us.”
“Most of us,” Frankly corrected.
Milt knew what he meant. Frankly, Bobby, Wallace, and he shot everything they could for three days straight, got all the releases and permits signed, and did everything one must do to stay afloat during all the chaotic madness of such a 24/7 event going on with hundreds of thousands of people running amuck, dressed in full cosplay regalia and handing out flyers, posters, memorabilia, and God-knows-what right in your fucking face the whole time. So loud and so crowded. One huge blaring commercial. Only in real life.
“Nothing! I want nothing!” Milt would want to shout into the faces of these clone drone trolls shoving paper garbage into his face, repeating the line from the analogous Bazooko Circus scene in Terry Gilliam’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.
Every time there was a short break, when Gil would go back to his hotel to take a nap or FaceTime with his wife and granddaughter who lived with them back home in Jersey, there was not even a question asked of where Milt and his crew would go. Inside the actual convention itself? No way! They were off to whatever bar they could find until it was time to go shooting shit again.
Then there was Ronnie Clark. Ronnie was something of what Wallace and Milton had referred to affectionately as a “daywalker.”
Ronnie, despite sometimes making a gaffe like the email he had sent to the CineRanchero people, was unmistakably a pro, and one of the best shooters Milt had ever worked with. Frankly could see it for just the few days they all worked together too. Ronnie Clark was a fantastic cameraman, a fantastic director of photography, and a fantastic crew member.
But he was also a fanboy. A geek. Or was he a nerd? Frankly asked.
To answer, Milt invoked novelist Douglas Coupland’s assertion that “a g
eek is a nerd who knows he is one,” that a geek was the new nerd in a way, that a geek was more like Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons (loud, at times abrasive, vying to “collect-em-all,” promoting his geekiness). Whereas a classical, old school nerd was more like Lisa from The Simpsons (quiet, introspective, so passionate and obsessive about her interests that she didn’t necessarily consider herself a nerd). She did what she did for the love of it, not for the connection to a larger community as with the geeks.
So, perhaps Ronnie Clark was more of a nerd than a geek. Ronnie was a nice guy. He wasn’t trying to push his nerdiness on anyone like the geeks at the San Francisco Comic-Con or elsewhere offline and on.
Whatever the case, Ronnie was something of a daywalker who, as one-part pro and one-part fanboy, kept trying to get everyone to actually go inside the mad beast of the comic-con’s stomach, churning and overflowing with geeks and advertisements and loudness and outrageousness, and all that came with being a true, live incarnation of pop culture at its best (or worst, depending on if you were a geek, nerd, or miscellaneous).
“What was with that guy, anyway?” Frankly asked.
“He’s one of the best people I’ve ever met,” Milt said without a shred of hyperbole. “One of the things I’m really grateful I got out of all this nonsense is the bond that Ronnie and Wallace and I have now by having gone through all of this together. I hardly knew those guys beforehand, but we went through so much together out there, that even at one point when Ronnie and I got in some stupid fight over whatever, the very next morning you know what he said over breakfast?”
“What?”
“He said, ‘Brothers fight.’ That’s what he said. I’ll never forget that. That’s what I think about when I think about Ronnie.”
“That sounds rrrrrrrealllllllllyy gay,” Frankly said, doing a terrible impersonation of Ed Sullivan.
“Nah, I’m serious. Ronnie, Wallace, and I are so close now. It’s strange. I’ve spent so little time with them, but the time we have spent over the past few years was going to war together. Like we were in the army.”
Selling Nostalgia Page 8
