The Fourth Wall

by Williams, Walter Jon

  Someone in Dagmar’s organization sold her a fake script—in fact a fake script from one of Dagmar’s ARGs with the names changed.

  I don’t know who handled the trade-off, but I suspect Richard the Assassin. It seems like his style.

  I mean to ask him what he did with the money, but I never do.

  INT. BRUCE BENNETT BUILDING—DAY

  Having a dressing room in the office building instead of the trailer puts me in a completely different scene. Instead of being surrounded by people in the picture business, I’m surrounded by geeks. Richard and Helmuth have staffs. Dagmar has assistants. There are producers I’ve never met, and this enormously obese man named Mike who slouches around staring at the floor and mumbling—apparently he designs puzzles for the online games, and the mumbling is part of his process. The people from Wardrobe and Makeup who come to tend to me look as if they’re ambassadors from a foreign country.

  The Bennett Building is full of people rushing off to meetings about hardware and online games and things that have nothing to do with the motion picture. Just walking around, I hear arguments and discussions that are so technical I have no idea what anyone is saying.

  I’m reasonably comfortable in my new digs, and my only real problem is that my dressing room doesn’t have a shower. There was one once, but it’s been converted to storage. But there’s a kind of health club downstairs, where the geeks can run on treadmills while arguing over the control to the flat-screen TV, and there’s a shower down there. So at the end of the day, when I’m finally out of makeup, I can get a shower and clean up before heading home.

  Reshooting the banquet scene changed my schedule, so I’ve got Friday off, and then will be working all day Saturday. I’ve also got Thursday afternoon off, because Escape to Earth’s popularity has gotten me installed as a guest on a taping of The Tonight Show.

  Trying out a few witticisms for Tonight, I go downstairs on Thursday afternoon, take my shower, and am trudging back up the stairs with my towel over my shoulder when Helmuth overtakes me, turns the corner, and vanishes from sight. All without saying hello.

  I feel a warning flutter in my stomach. Maybe there’s another emergency. Or another death. I slip up the stairs and turn, and there’s the door to Dagmar’s office. The scent from her coffeemaker wafts into the corridor.

  “Goddamn it!” Dagmar is shouting. “Goddamn it, the tanks are rolling!”

  I don’t hear Helmuth’s reply.

  “We weren’t in place yet,” Dagmar says. “Damn it to hell.”

  I don’t know that I’m supposed to be hearing this, or thinking about what Dagmar has to do with anyone’s tanks, but I’m standing right there, and Helmuth passed me on the stairs, and I can hardly pretend I don’t exist. So I turn into the office door, and I see Helmuth’s back, and Dagmar standing behind her desk. Her face is tight with rage and frustration. Tears glimmer in her eyes.

  “What’s happened?” I ask.

  Helmuth turns to face me.

  “War between Thailand and Burma.”

  “Thailand and Burma?” I don’t know why I’m surprised by what foreigners get up to, but I always am. “Why?”

  “Stupidity!” Dagmar blurts. “Stupid insecure military men on either side of the border who bluster for the cameras but who won’t even talk to each other. And now—” She threatens to smash one of her monitors with a white-knuckled fist, but apparently thinks better of it.

  “And what…” I approach the subject cautiously. “What do we have to do with this?”

  “Nothing,” Dagmar says. She falls heavily into her chair and gropes blindly for a tissue. “Not a damn thing.” She dabs her eyes and sniffles. “Sorry,” she says. Her face is partly hidden by her hand and by the tissue. “Pregnant ladies get mood swings.”

  I don’t know why the mood swings should be triggered by a war between strangers on another continent, but then I’ve never been pregnant, have I?

  “We have another problem,” Helmuth says. He’s speaking very carefully, as aware as I am that we’re dealing with a hormone-crazed expecting woman. “We’ve got server problems.”

  Dagmar’s head snaps up. “Have servers gone down?”

  “Eight hundred sixty-six of them,” Helmuth is saying. “And they’ve all crashed.”

  I relax. We’re off the subject of war.

  When Dagmar answers, her voice is thoughtful. “Is it any of our old friends with the High Zap?” she asks.

  “No. Otherwise we’d have lost whole server farms.”

  Dagmar blows her nose, and when she speaks her voice is denasal. “Have we been hacked?”

  Helmuth shakes his head. “I doubt it. It’s only the Top Kick servers made in Korea that have been affected. I think it’s an unknown design issue, because the Top Kicks made in the Malaysia factory are doing fine. I’ve got Hossein and Charlotte on a conference call with the Top Kick people in Seoul, and I’ve got the Oulu managers listening in.”

  The scent of coffee is making my mouth water. I turn to the coffee machine, pour coffee into a disposable cardboard cup, and add some white gunk from a packet.

  “Where are they?” Dagmar asks.

  “Finland, Alaska, and New Zealand.”

  “And,” Dagmar says, “we’ve got the world premiere of Part II of Escape to Earth in something like twenty-nine hours, and now we may not have the bandwidth to put on the show.”

  Anxiety takes a little nip at my nerves. By the time Part II is broadcast, viewers won’t have got into the habit of viewing the episodes regularly—if there’s a problem with the downloads, they may just give up.

  “Why do you put the servers in places like Finland and Alaska?” I ask. It seems to me that you’d want them somewhere a bit more centrally located.

  “Because it’s cold in Finland and Alaska,” Dagmar says. “And also in the mountains of New Zealand. Anywhere there’s glaciers, your server farm can save a bundle on cooling.” She turns to Helmuth.

  “I’ll get on the line to Sri and see if any of his companies can let us have some servers,” she says. “In the meantime…” She raises her hands and wiggles her fingers, as if summoning something from the ether. “You’ll have to go into the cloud. Get us backup routers and servers wherever you can find them.”

  “It’s not in the budget,” Helmuth says.

  “Take the money from the other budget,” Dagmar says.

  He nods. His eyes give a little twitch in my direction, trying to gauge whether I understand what just happened, and then he leaves. I sip my coffee.

  The other budget. Dagmar’s office may look like that of a computer science grad student, but she’s clearly wise in the ways of producers. Keeping the real money hidden, where no one—not her backers, not the government, maybe not even Sri—can find it.

  This isn’t exactly earthshaking news. I am proud to say that Hollywood leads the world in fraudulent bookkeeping. We’ve been making movies here for over a hundred years, and not a single film has ever made a profit or required the producers to share that profit with anyone else.

  When it comes to bookkeeping, the Mafia has nothing on us.

  * * *

  INT. IMPALA—EVENING

  “So who’s representing you now?”

  It’s a question I’ve been expecting ever since my caller identified himself.

  “Cleve Baker, of Baker and Baker.”

  “Who?” The man is either genuinely baffled or a pretty good actor. His name is Gregg, Gregg with three g’s, and he’s an agent at Talent Representation International, which is one of the top half-dozen agencies in town.

  “Cleve is very exclusive,” I say.

  “He must be,” Gregg mutters. There’s a moment’s silence. “I was wondering,” he says, “if I could buy you lunch and talk to you about what we could do for you at TRI.”

  I consider making Gregg take me and my entourage—Simon and Wild Bill/Albert—to someplace like Lester’s on the Beach, where we could set TRI back a couple grand for a vastly
expensive meal, but then I decide I’m too tired and too busy.

  “Why don’t you pitch me now?” I say. “I figure I’ve got at least half an hour.”

  I’m in the backseat of Simon’s Impala on Thursday night, stuck on Burbank Boulevard trying to get back to NoHo Plaza, from where I’ve been taping the great-grandfather of all talk shows. There must be construction or an accident ahead or something. We’re boxed in by trucks, buses, and large pickups, and the air conditioning isn’t quite efficient enough to keep out the scent of diesel exhaust.

  “It might take me more than half an hour,” Gregg says. “We’re a pretty all-encompassing big agency.”

  “Just go ahead and pitch,” I tell him. “I’m stuck in traffic on the way back from taping The Tonight Show.”

  “Tonight? That’s great!” he says. “How’d it go?”

  “Gregg,” I say, “I killed.” Which, for the record, I did. Roheen is a fucking icon. Roheen is big enough to get me on Tonight on something like three days’ notice.

  The younger people screamed. The older crowd remembered Luggage Boy and liked me. I was witty and self-effacing and praised Dagmar to the skies, which can’t have hurt me with my bosses.

  As with reality television, the audience thinks that talk shows are more spontaneous than they actually are. There’s a rehearsal. The host goes over the questions he wants to ask you. You have time to think about amusing ways to answer him, and provided you stay away from the free booze in the greenroom you won’t embarrass yourself.

  Gregg goes into his pitch. He goes on about how TRI is a creative, forward-thinking entertainment powerhouse with an elite roster of talent and the ability to offer personal attention to each and every client. TRI has worldwide awesome all-encompassing might in the fields of motion pictures, television, music, artist marketing, motion picture financing, book publishing, literary rights, theater, stand-up comedy, commercials, personal appearances, and corporate events.

  This last could be a major income producer, I hear. “As big as you are in the online and interactive community right now,” he says. “We could book you into gaming and media conventions and get you good money. And—uh—I don’t know about martial arts events, but I could look into it.”

  “Sounds great, Gregg!” I say with great cheer.

  “Shall we have lunch?” he asks. “We can go into more detail—”

  “One problem, Gregg,” I say.

  “Yes?”

  “Your agency fired me ten years ago. That cocksucker Alan Franz told me I had no career left and that I should find something else to do with my life, like, I don’t know, sell vacuum cleaners door-to-door maybe.”

  “Ah,” he says. “Well.”

  “So has Alan changed his mind?”

  I can almost hear his brain gears spinning over the phone. “I haven’t, ah, talked to Mr. Franz about you specifically.”

  “So the aforesaid cocksucker Alan Franz is still at TRI, then?”

  Gregg clears his throat. “Mr. Franz is, um…”

  “He’s executive vice president and chairman of the Management Division—in other words, your boss. Is that right, Gregg?”

  “Uh. Yes.”

  “Well, Gregg,” I say, “I’ll tell you what we’ll do. If Franz comes down to my digs and kisses my ass—and I mean literally licks my anus—then I will consider being represented by your company.”

  “Sean,” Gregg says. “Can I call you Sean?”

  “You absolutely can,” I say.

  “Because I want to assure you—”

  “Here’s what I think, Gregg,” I say. “I think that if you leave TRI and get a job with a genuinely forward-thinking and creative agency, you should give me a call.”

  “I—”

  “Thanks for thinking of me. I really appreciate it.” I hang up.

  Simon looks at me in the rearview mirror. “That sounded like fun,” he says.

  “It whiles away my empty hours,” I say.

  “Wish I could say that to some of the folks that fired me over the years.”

  I’m just sorry that I had to have that conversation with some mid-level agent, and not with Alan Franz. What makes the chat all the more sweet is that I know that ten days ago I would have willingly licked Franz’s back passage if it had meant getting TRI representation.

  Power. It’s not just for other people any more. It’s for Luggage Boy.

  “You know what?” I tell Simon. “I’ve just finished taping Tonight. Why the hell should I go back to the hotel and spend the night playing video games?”

  “ ’Cuz that’s the smart course of action,” Simon says, “and you have work tomorrow morning.”

  “You didn’t check the latest call sheets,” I say. Because the reshoot of the banquet scene shuffled everything around, and I’m not on call Friday, but will have to come in on Saturday instead, working amid a happy crew delighting in its overtime.

  “Take a left and get us to the One-oh-one,” I say. “We’re getting the fuck out of the Valley and going to the Strip.”

  “If you say so,” Simon says. “But I should maybe call for some backup if you’re going out in public.”

  “Simon,” I say. “Nobody’s going to be able to follow us in this traffic. And if someone is after us, you’ll spot them right away.”

  Wild Bill turns around to look at me. “There could be drones overhead,” he says. “Someone could be chasing you that way.”

  “Can’t the two of you deal?” I ask. “There’ll be club security as well. And nobody can hit me with an SUV if I’m indoors.”

  Simon is reluctant, but concedes. I get on the phone and call Helmuth, Dagmar’s programming chief, who has these completely false memories of the two of us partying at the Got Real?, and who I gather from Dagmar is quite the party animal. He answers, and I ask if he wants to join me at the clubs tonight.

  “I’m already at Panikk.”

  “Why don’t I join you there?”

  I also call Julian, but all I get is voice mail. I tell him we’re starting at Panikk and I’ll let him know if I move anywhere from there.

  The doorkeeper at Panikk lets me and my guards in without a blink. He looks like some kind of fashion refugee from 2002, with dental grills and diamond rings on every finger, but his social antennae are very much up-to-the-second.

  Panikk has a classic Los Angeles look, with recessed pink lighting, chrome stripes on the bar, and cages for go-go dancers. There isn’t much action, and no go-go dancers, but it’s early. Helmuth is in a booth behind a couple empty highball glasses, talking with a tall, thin, google-eyed man whose name I can’t quite recall, but who I know is a stand-up comic. He recognizes me and calls me Sean, so I respond as if I’ve known him all my life.

  Simon gets a table of his own where he can watch us. I order a burger and a Coke off the bar menu.

  Nothing much happens. Helmuth and I leave Panikk after an hour or so and head for Club Kali. The comic stays behind, and I never remember his name. Club Kali features a statue of a big-breasted, multi-armed goddess standing by the entrance, and the interior looks like some kind of Calcutta cult temple, complete with a frieze of gods and goddesses reenacting the Kama Sutra. Everyone seems to know Helmuth—and, very encouragingly, everyone knows me.

  There’s more going on at Club Kali, and a DJ with an extremely deep knowledge of Hindi hip-hop, and we stay for a couple hours. By then I’ve collected an entourage.

  You can see it at the clubs. Every successful actor acquires a little crew of less successful actors. It doesn’t matter how successful they are—big stars will attract lesser stars, and actors who have just had a walk-on in a sitcom will attract actors who haven’t had a walk-on in a long time.

  I and my entourage go on to Dove Bar. There’s some kind of nuevo-surf band playing and the Dove Bar is jumping. We dance for a while, then chill in one of the VIP rooms.

  There is liquor as well as mysterious pills and powders. Aware that I’m with one of Dagmar’s employees
who would likely rat on me if I did anything against the rules, I indulge in nothing stronger than cranberry juice, but I get high anyway. It’s just being in the scene again.

  I sink into the club life like a warm bath. I did this for years, when I was younger.

  I learned about sex when I was thirteen. I’d finished my scenes for the day and was hanging around my dressing room, waiting for my ride home, and I met a frizzy-haired girl who was actually there for Floyd Steneri, who played my older brother. He’d hooked up with someone else, so the girl took me to my dressing room and showed me some things that up till then I’d only dreamed about.

  Within a few weeks I was an experienced player. I was a teen idol, remember, and girls already mobbed the studio gates to catch a glimpse of me driving in or out. I’d get out of the car when I felt like it and sign autographs. If I knew I’d have time to myself at some point in the day, I’d pick the fan I liked and ask if she’d like to take a tour of the studio. (They always said yes.) I’d show her around, then have her wait in my trailer till I had enough free time for a sexual encounter. (They always said yes.)

  The delights of amateurs sufficed for a little more than a year, after which I discovered the merit of professionals. Groupies used to be fans or amateurs back in the Stone Age, I gather, but now they’re usually placed somewhere in the sex industry—strippers, nude models, actresses who do hardcore, call girls. They had experience, ability, enthusiasm, and giant breasts as artificial and delightful as ice cream sundaes. Since they were over twenty-one, they could get me into the clubs, and my celebrity assured that they were treated well and had access to the VIP rooms.

  My parents were busy spending my money, and I’m not sure if they noticed. My father loved peeling hundred-dollar bills off his roll and handing them to me, because it made him look like a tycoon. He never asked what I spent the money on.

  My morals might be questioned, but what couldn’t be questioned was that I was living the life that every priapic teenage boy in America drooled over. All the sex I wanted, with practically anyone I wanted. Everyone else involved got what they wanted, too. No one got hurt.