The Fourth Wall

by Williams, Walter Jon

  “Who were you just speaking to, by the way?”

  “Morris Galway. He’s a producer.”

  I’m mildly surprised. “Of this picture?”

  She looks up at me, amused eyes beneath her dark brows. “You don’t get to meet them all,” she says.

  “I guess not.”

  Then the Psy-Ops Division arrives in the form of Carter-Ann and two of her associates: Dr. Li, whom I met at Joey’s party, and a young, pale blond man with a tablet computer. They sit opposite me. Ismet and Helmuth arrive and sit on either side of Dagmar. Then Joey and Clarke enter together, along with their assistants, and lastly Sawicki, carrying the tablet with a red plastic frame, the one he uses for scheduling and budgeting. They sit at the foot of the table opposite Dagmar.

  “What’s happening?” Joey says. “We’ve got a full shooting schedule this afternoon.”

  “We’ve got a problem,” Dagmar says. “Fixing it is going to take a certain amount of logistical dexterity, so I hope you’ll all bear with me when I try to deal with the situation.”

  Joey gives Carter-Ann a baleful look. It’s clear he has no doubt where news of this problem originated.

  Carter-Ann folds her hands on the table in front of her. She’s wearing a dark gray suit and a lace collar and has had her hair done, and she looks like the teacher’s pet in catechism class.

  “A problem has developed with regard to the banquet scene,” she says. “The test audiences aren’t giving us the reactions we’d hoped for.”

  I feel my heart sink. The banquet scene was big and complex and a lot of work.

  “Which test audiences?” Clarke asks.

  “The bad marks are coming from Asia generally, but specifically from China.”

  My heart, already submerged, plunges through a frigid thermocline into the lightless depths. Asia’s our biggest potential audience, and if it’s got a problem, we’ve got a massive one.

  “The banquet scene’s great,” Joey says. “It’s light, it’s funny, it’s…”

  Dr. Li clears her throat. She’s dressed in a sober gray suit, with no jewelry save the gleaming gold fountain pen she has in her hand. “I liked that scene myself,” she says. “But then I was raised in the States, and though I’ve spent years in China, I don’t quite have their mind-set.”

  Joey eyes her. “So it’s you who screwed up here?” Li looks down the table. Her gold pen jiggles nervously in her fingers. Joey turns to Dagmar. “Shooting that scene took four days. For six and a half minutes of screen time.”

  Carter-Ann takes the tablet computer from her blond assistant. “Let me show you the data.” She taps the touch-sensitive screen with her thumbnail. “I’m sending you the URL where you can watch the scene along with the audience reaction data. You’ll need a password—it’s ‘dimsum,’ one word, all lower case.”

  My handheld chirps. I take it out of the holster, check email, click the URL.

  The banquet scene takes place after Roheen arrives in China, in search of a Tellurian Gate somewhere in the wilds of Sichuan. He’s had to walk and hitchhike across the Himalayas to get from India, and by the time he arrives he’s half-starved. In Chongqing he meets with Lihua, one of Amir’s Internet buddies, who helps him hide out and sneaks him some table scraps that don’t quite make up for the lack of a real meal. With the help of a pack of mischievous school friends she disguises Roheen as a North American industrialist, someone attractive to her businessman father. Lihua’s father invites the visitor to a restaurant, and the famished Roheen falls on the food like a wolf on the fold, and gobbles everything in sight while the locals watch in astonishment.

  It’s a finely tuned comic scene, and I’m pleased with my performance. I’d hate to have to throw all that in the crapper, though of course I’m used to it. The performances in my last three films all ended up on the cutting-room floor, though at least I was able to console myself with the paychecks.

  Carter-Ann explains how she monitored the test audience. It turns out that Psy-Ops wired the hell out of them: one of the displays concerns galvanic skin response, another heart rate, another respiration. The fourth shows data from slide potentiometers the audience members were given—they could slide the potentiometers up or down depending on how they felt about what they were watching.

  I watch my performance, and I wince as my ratings plummet. Given the statistics for heart rate and respiration, the audience hates me not only with all their hearts, but with their lungs as well.

  “What’s happening,” Li says, “is that the audience perceived Roheen as grasping and boorish. They’re just not approving of this behavior.”

  “Is Roheen breaking the rules for Chinese table etiquette?” I ask.

  “Yes,” Li says, “but that’s not the problem. The Chinese are perfectly capable of making allowances for foreigners who don’t know their customs. It’s just that Roheen is greedy, and he’s not giving face to the other people at the table. The audience is embarrassed for the host and the other guests, because they’re being disrespected. It makes the viewers feel uncomfortable.”

  Dagmar frowns, taps fingers on the tabletop. “If Sean just tones down his performance…?” she asks.

  “I think that would work,” Li says. “And we could add some moments where Roheen gives respect to others, like having him offer some of the food to his neighbors.”

  “How did the stateside audiences like the scene?” Joey asks.

  Dr. Lee looks up at him. “Everywhere but Asia liked it. In West Africa they thought it was particularly funny.”

  “So we have a choice,” Joey says, “of pleasing Asia, or pleasing everywhere else.”

  “Ideally,” Dagmar says, “we please everybody.”

  “It’s funny,” Joey says. “In comedy, funny trumps anything else. Sean’s really great in it, and so is everyone else.”

  I sense a dangerous vibe coming off of Joey, and I decide to step into the scene.

  “You’ll just be reshooting me, right?” I say to Dagmar. “I’m playing too broad, so I can make it quieter. You don’t need to redo the whole scene, just the bits where the camera’s on me. The other actors’ reaction shots are fine, right? You might not even need to call them back, you can just use stand-ins.” I look at Joey. “It’s a piece of cake,” I say.

  “It’s possible,” Dagmar ventures, “that we could do it entirely in editing, using alternate takes.”

  “Listen,” Joey says. He taps his fingers deliberately on the scarred surface of the table. “I’ve got Nataliya and a whole crew waiting for me, so let me explain the process as quick as I can.”

  Everyone watches him.

  “It’s organic,” he says. “What I do is organic.” He taps his fingers again. “A vision appears in the mind of the creators, and the cast and crew put in their part, and I facilitate everything.” He stirs the air with his hands. “I facilitate. It’s magic when it comes together. It’s magic when it goes right. And there’s one thing I’ve learned.” He thrusts out his forefinger at Dagmar. “Don’t fuck with the magic. When it’s funny, don’t fuck with the funny. When it’s sad, don’t fuck with the sad.” He looks up in appeal. “The banquet scene is great. You wire up some people in Shanghai or whatever, they don’t like what they see, maybe it’s because they’re all wired up to machines. Maybe the machines are getting in the way of the laughter.”

  “Everyone who liked the scene was also wired—” Li begins.

  “Or maybe the Chinese all got fed a box lunch that gave them gas,” Joey says. “What the hell do I know? The point is that the scene is magic and as far as I am concerned we shouldn’t even be having this discussion.” He rises from the table and puts his handheld in its holster.

  “I have a crazy superstar to nursemaid through two days of shooting,” he says. “So if you’ll excuse me, I’ll get to where I’m needed.”

  “Just a minute,” says Dagmar. “This meeting isn’t over.”

  Joey looks at her. “You can go on talking if you want. I
t doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

  Dagmar regards him through narrowed eyes. “Are you doing the reshoots or not?” she asks.

  Joey lifts his head. “Of course not. The scene is great as it stands.”

  I’m watching Joey in growing trepidation. He’s cutting his own throat.

  She’s a terrorist, I tell him mentally. Don’t fuck with this woman.

  “Joey,” I say, in hopes of returning sanity to the room. “They’re just reshoots. You do reshoots all the time.” If Joey is going to torpedo himself over a cause, the cause of reshoots is about the lamest one imaginable.

  Joey looks back at me. There’s this weird saintly glow in his eyes. It’s like he’s going to his martyrdom.

  “You were great, champ,” he says to me, and thumps a big hand on my shoulder. “You’ll be great in the reshoots, too.” He turns to Dagmar. “Look,” he says. “I’m just not hip enough for you.” He throws his arms wide. “I’m just a filmmaker. I don’t have to wire my audiences to machines in fifty countries to know whether I’m any good. I don’t have to hire a bunch of shrinks to tell me whether my script is worth shooting. It’s—” He clenches his fists. “It’s organic. That’s how I work.” He laughs. “You know what the preview comments on One Tin Soldier were like? A fucking catastrophe! They hated it! But that was my biggest hit.”

  He sweeps a hand out to the room, toward Dagmar and Carter-Ann and the others. “You guys had a great script—that’s why I signed on in the first place, to work with a great script. And I’m making the script that you wrote. But now with all your data and your focus groups and your—” He makes the Buddhist wanking sign. “You’re screwing it up. You’re so bent on interfering with the process that you’re stumbling over each other.” He walks past me toward the door. “Look,” he tells Dagmar. “You’ve got a choice between me and all your…” He waves a hand. “Your apparatus. And I know what the choice is going to be, so—”

  “Oh no, you don’t,” says Dagmar. Her eyes glitter beneath her dark brows. She clamps her hands on the arms of her chair and heaves herself upright, her pregnant stomach lunging upward as her body bows backward. She straightens with an effort and approaches Joey.

  “You don’t get to just…walk…out,” she says. “You don’t get to do that to me.” She stands in front of him, her hands on her hips. “You think you can fuck with me just because I’m pregnant? Because I’m a girl?”

  Joey makes a noise with his lips and flips a hand as if to brush off an insect.

  “Don’t call me a sexist,” he says. “My wife and I were partners. We were brilliant. We—”

  “That,” Dagmar says flatly, “was long ago.” She points a finger at him. “They warned me about you. They said that you were out of control, that you were undisciplined, that you’d lost your timing.” She snarls. “And because of all that you were flat on your fucking ass. No one wanted to work with you.”

  Joey makes a little contemptuous twist of his lips. Dagmar cocks her head and looks at him.

  “See, I’d seen your movies,” she says. “Especially the early ones, the ones that still had soul. I figured that if I shackled you to a good story and made you film that story, you’d be brilliant. And I haven’t been disappointed.” Her eyes flash. “Till now.”

  She takes a step toward him. “What I realize now is that you’ve got some kind of damn death wish. You don’t want to make good movies, you want to fuck up. You’re just using your director’s ego in the same way a drunk uses alcohol—it’s an excuse to keep on screwing up. An excuse not to care. Because if you actually gave a damn, you wouldn’t be doing this.”

  Joey draws himself up and gives her a cold look.

  “You’ve been spending way too much time with your shrink buddy,” he says. “Just let me out the damn door.”

  Dagmar looks at him, then turns and reaches across the table to snatch Helmuth’s netbook from between his hands. Helmuth looks up in surprise as Dagmar spins, the netbook at full extension on the end of her arm, the computer swinging right for Joey’s head…

  I don’t know how Ismet does it, but he lunges from his seat and grabs the laptop and falls on it like a football player diving on a fumble. There’s a clatter as he sprawls half across the table, the laptop under him.

  Joey’s eyes widen as he realizes that Dagmar was aiming the computer for his head. Dagmar takes a step toward him.

  “I can fuck you up, Joey,” she says.

  “What are you going to do?” he asks. “Bomb my car?”

  She turns white with rage and looks on the table for another weapon, but by that point Helmuth is on his feet. He grabs Joey by the arm and steers him toward the door.

  “I will escort Mr. da Nova out of the building,” he says.

  He and Joey disappear through the door. Dagmar glares after him, jaw clenched in rage. Then she takes a breath and turns to see Ismet rising slowly from the table, the laptop still clenched to his chest. She pats him on the shoulder.

  “Good save,” she says.

  Ismet adjusts his spectacles and offers a slight smile. “It’s what I do,” he says.

  I look across the table at the Psy-Ops Division. Carter-Ann is sitting straight in her chair, watching the event with bright eyes. Whatever expression I see on her face is the one she painted on that morning. Dr. Li looks away, her hand jittering with her gold pen. The male assistant is paler than usual.

  Dagmar wrenches free of Ismet’s arms, then steps back to her chair. She lowers herself into it carefully.

  “Right,” she says. “We have Nataliya Hogan for two more days, and we have no director.” She looks at Clarke. “You’ll have to step in.”

  Clarke looks uneasy. His title is first assistant director, sure, but that doesn’t guarantee he knows how to direct, or wants to. In the old days ADs moved up to the director’s chair often enough, but now they’re mostly trainee producers.

  When he speaks, his big voice is unusually subdued. “I don’t have a lot of confidence that I’m—ah—right for this.”

  “We’ll manage,” I say. The fact that I speak at all catches me by surprise. When I offer the next sentence it feels as if I’m not following my own comment, but answering a stranger.

  “The scenes are straightforward,” I say. “Jean-Marc will be there. Everyone knows their job.” I look at Clarke. “And the whole thing is storyboarded, right?”

  In a technique now become standard in the industry, Joey animated the whole film, shot for shot, on his computer, with little stick figures moving around inside a virtual camera frame. The system makes things very easy on the crew, because they always know what setup is coming next.

  Clarke nods. “Yeah. It’s storyboarded.”

  “You have a copy of the file?”

  “Yeah.”

  I turn to Dagmar. “There,” I say. “We’ll be all right.”

  I find myself wanting to please her. I badly want not to die in a crossfire between Dagmar and whoever she’s mad at that day.

  Fifteen minutes with the woman, I think, and I’m coming down with Stockholm syndrome.

  Helmuth returns. His hands brush his tan Hickey Freeman blazer, as if he were scraping Joey off himself. Dagmar’s still standing, leaning heavily with one hand on the back of her chair. Ismet stands protectively next to her. She looks up at us, and her voice is weary.

  “I want to apologize for that.” She lowers herself into the chair. I look at Helmuth’s protective expression as he helps guide her to her seat, and I see his expression, and I think, Holy shit, he’s in love with her too. And then, I wonder if she knows.

  “That was the sort of behavior I hate,” Dagmar goes on. “I was completely out of control. I’m sorry you had to witness it.”

  I have no idea what to say. No problem, boss? Maybe Joey deserved it? I decide not to say anything.

  Instead, it’s Carter-Ann who pipes up. “We can’t afford any more scenes, Miss Shaw,” she says. “With Joey it seems to be the way he works, but
—but really, this is all too important to lose track of ourselves this way.”

  I look up in surprise. The film is important, yes, because it’s my chance at a career again. And it’s important to Dagmar, I assume, because it’s her company that’s making the picture; and it’s important to Carter-Ann, because no other film company would ever allow her the sort of power she has.

  But I get the impression that’s not what Carter-Ann is talking about. It’s not the movie that’s important, it’s something bigger than the movie.

  What would that be? I wonder. The merchandising? The Roheen action figures and the online games?

  What was worth taking a loss in Waziristan for?

  Dagmar gives a sigh and looks at me.

  “It’s a difference in cultures,” she says. “I wasn’t quite ready for it. I’m used to running a small company with a small group of dedicated people all pulling in the same direction.” She shrugs. “The movies are too big. I keep expecting the same sort of spirit of collaboration and I don’t always find it.”

  Yeah, I think. Maybe there actually are industries out there where your colleagues aren’t ready to stab you in the back or cut your throat the minute you show weakness. But unfortunately you’ve entered a business where, if your profile gets too high—if, for example, you crash the party with armloads of new technologies and unlimited funding from an Indian IT billionaire—champagne corks start popping the second you fall on your ass. Because it serves you right for not having to kiss up to get your funding, and for thinking you’re smarter than everyone else.

  But I’m not going to pop champagne if Escape to Earth flops. Because I have no choice but to hope that you’ll succeed, and succeed big.

  “We’re going to need a new director,” Dagmar says.

  “Tessa Brettel was very good at my audition,” I point out.

  “We’ll want someone more experienced.” She turns to Ismet. “But call Tessa and see if she’s available. She might be able to bridge between one director and another.” Then she looks at me and Clarke.

  “Go to the set,” she says, “and see if you can save the afternoon.”