by Nick Cole
They drove down the twisty Riviera-reminiscent streets of the Hollywood hills, surrounded by yet another perfect Southern California morning. Flowers in giant terracotta pots bubbled and burst forth along walkways leading toward luxurious Spanish haciendas. Occasional monoliths of glass and steel broke the monotony and defied the challenge of clearly labeled front doorways.
Kim was an early thirty-something with long brown hair and large green eyes who wore huge oval glasses that conspired to make her look bookishly sexy. She was learning to be powerful, though she was still hindered by empathy and compassion. Even though her title was Executive Personal Assistant, it was really “Kim.” If you needed an “okay” from the Great Director, you saw Kim. Why Kim? Because that was her job.
Most people hated Kim simply because she existed as a small wall between themselves and the Great Director. Thus she had few friends. The Great Director was too afraid of dying to be interested in her as a possible friend, and so he also was not a friend to her. In fact, because the Great Director had no specific person he could lash out at when his fear of death overwhelmed him, he often lashed out at Kim in lieu of Death.
“This is the script the studio wants,” she said, as they raced down a two-lane street, heedless of cars parking in the right lane and other cars using the left lane to turn. She reached behind her seat with one hand, took a sip of her Blueberry-Pineapple-Whey-Ginseng-Calcium-Red-Grapeseed-Extract-Juice shake with the other hand, and continued to steer with her knees, narrowly avoiding a bread delivery truck. She plopped down a large ream of paper bound in a baby blue binder.
“I’m not doing this movie, I won’t do it,” said the Great Director, and then frantically yelled, “Car, car, car!”
Emerging from a side street, a 1961 metallic mint green Impala had approached the stop sign without a driver, unless you counted the frosted pink hair and pillbox hat that rose to a height just below the top edge of the steering wheel as a legal driver.
“You don’t have to,” replied Kim as she yanked the wheel viciously to the left.
For a long moment he stared at her suspiciously, their impending collision a thing of the past. He knew on some level she wanted to direct. Why else would she be assisting him? Everybody wanted to direct.
“No?”
“No.” She waved her arms. “I’ll do it for you. I’ve got plenty of free time since Mark left. You just pretend it’s yours when we finish. Okay?” She snorted derisively as only certain personal assistants can and continue to assist personally.
“Well that’s just silly,” huffed the Great Director. Who’s Mark, he wondered? Then he remembered he didn’t care and launched into her with fresh venom. “I mean you’ll want to put in an excessive amount of shaky cam and those jump cuts you’re so crazy about. I know you will. All of you do. You want everything to be a music video. What happened to just leaving the camera still and letting the power of the words, the actors, and the scenery, speak for itself? I’ll tell ya. It’s because there is no great scenery, all the great actors are dead, and no one writes anything beyond catchphrases anymore. No one. I cannot stomach the state of modern filmmaking. Could you imagine if Rio Grande were shot today? Or even Taxi Driver? They’d cut out all the best parts. Too long, they’d say. It wouldn’t test well. Add more bathroom jokes.”
“I agree—” she started.
“No you don’t. You don’t agree because you don’t care. You just want to get people into the theater for opening weekend and then go straight to Blu-ray, that’s it. Forgotten. Isn’t that right?”
“No that’s not—” she started again.
“And that’s what’s killing me. It’s not what it started out to be. I was cheated. I was lied to. I thought making films would be something more. Me on the shoulders of Ford or Capra. They’d be old now, but we’d be friends. They’d give me advice, grudgingly respect my work, especially Ford. Crabby, smoking cigars. He’d call me up late at night, whiskey slurring his speech, and he’d say…”
Silence.
“What would he say?” Kim asked, because she knew it was the only way through this crisis her boss was having.
More silence.
“You done good, kid.”
The Great Director stared far away into the Never-Ending Miasma of WhatMightHaveBeen.
“But all the streetlights came on and everyone died. I’d be embarrassed to show my heroes the films I make,” whispered the Great Director.
Quiet. The noise of the road beyond the windows was a faraway thing. And another place altogether.
“What else could you do?” she asked, pulling the car over and folding her hands, listening to him.
“I don’t know.”
“Then maybe this could be the one?”
“I think all the good ones have been made,” he said to the window and then dug into his lunch for a snack.
***
Kim dropped him off in front of the production office and gave him terse, unfriendly directions to his private office. She thrust the script after him, outflanking his attempt to leave it on the floor of the vehicle. Then she drove away a little more aggressively than she’d meant to.
Holding a bag of trail mix in one hand and the script in the other, the Great Director shuffled toward the squat gray building. The only indication that this was the production office was the blue piece of paper taped to the door, on which someone had written “Production Office” in black marker. He stepped inside, planning to make his way to his personal office, lock the door behind him, and wait for Kim, but after two steps he was accosted by a strange tiny woman. Her introduction began with a high-speed burst of squealing aimed directly at the center of his brain. Then this ball of energy that screamed “Youth!” paused, took a deep breath, and performed some type of cheerleader move in which she bent one arm at the elbow, threw the other arm up in the air, and kicked one of her legs back. She said her name was “Mindy!” and did not bother to breathe or pause before launching into a series of questions about his preference in font styles.
“Font styles?” he asked dizzily.
“Well, I think Roman is so classy. It says, we’re not just a production, we’re a regime. It has sort of a neo-classical feel, y’know?”
“Why do we need a font style?”
“All the production companies are doing it now—it’s a signature thing. Over at End of the World 2 they’re using Tribal Gothic Euro-Style. At The Innocence of Babette they like Vivaldi Papyrus Script. My favorite, the one that just makes me scream,” at this point she squeaked, “is the Bloody Slash Matisse they’re using over at Unhappy Camper 3, LOL.”
“LOL?”
“I laughed out loud.”
“But you didn’t—” He decided to let it go. “Are you the office manager?” he asked cautiously.
“No I’m the office PA, I do all the word processing. I just graduated from Northwestern with a double major in English Lit and Communications. Shelley’s the office manager and I know she wants to talk to you about the office lunch schedule, in fact she’s out setting up accounts with the delivery services and restaurants. So far everyone really wants to try this new vegetarian Croatian place on Ventura and of course we want Fridays to be fun so we’re going to have themed lunches and everyone will wear a hat depending on the theme of the lunch.”
“Hats?”
“Uh-huh don’t worry you big silly I’ll make yours for you and in exchange you can read my script I wrote last summer after my BFF killed herself.”
“BFF?”
She continued to smile. “Best Friend Forever. Yeah, last summer at the end of my junior year we were so close. But it kinda grabs you like that huh, someone killing themselves? I took a three-day intensive on pitching and they said you should always try to grab your audience in the first sentence and it grabbed you didn’t it?”
He looked at her for a long moment.
<
br /> He decided to hate her.
He turned and walked away.
Upon entering his personal office he threw the script across the room, bouncing it off the couch and knocking over a lamp.
“No!” he shouted to the four walls.
Thirty minutes later found the Great Director leaning up against the wall reading the script. For a while he had tried to stare out the window into the parking lot below, and the golf course beyond, but he lacked the anger to sufficiently stew. He decided a brief sortie into the first pages of the script would surely justify some sort of ire. And sure enough, within moments the first scene of the script had infected his mind. It was a stupid scene. There was no possible way to make it interesting. He laughed inwardly, deriding the scene and criticizing whoever had come up with it. Still, the words tugged at the back of his skull. The more he chastised them, the more they taunted him. The opening line was this:
“OPENING: Autumn leaves fall across a street corner. A stop sign. Several cars approach the stop sign and turn right. Finally a beat-up 1974 orange BMW approaches, pauses, and turns left.”
It was a tough one. How to convey the defeat oozing from the sentence. That was the question.
He pulled out one of the leather-bound, gold-embossed notebooks his Perfect Robot Wife had purchased for him. In film school and his first few films after, he didn’t have a leather-bound, gold-embossed notebook. What he did have—and what he found to be perfectly adequate to the task of writing shooting scripts—was the backs of a lot of flyers advertising car washes. Handing out those flyers was a job he’d quit after two hours, but he’d never bothered to return the flyers he’d been entrusted with.
Now he smoothed the notebook so that it was flat. Every time he began to write, the expensive paper would rise up in the shape of a wave, rebellious to the movement of pen across page. He smoothed out the impediment, mashing his splayed palms into the paper, growing more frustrated with each assault. Finally, in a grand display of aggravation, he took the expensive notebook and sat down on it with a heavy thump.
He smiled in triumph.
His chair, as if angered by the force with which he had chosen to punish the notebook, snapped, dropping the Great Director to the lowest height setting with an oafish thump. It then refused to return to its normal height. Whatever had broken did not respond to tinkering, manipulating, cajoling, or threats.
The Great Director decided to live with it. He sat down in the broken chair, his shoulders coming only to the top of the desk. Sweating profusely and breathing heavily, he wrote:
FADE IN.
Now we’re rolling, he thought.
Seconds later, having just stuck his pen in his mouth to contemplate the next script direction, the phone rang.
“Wow, I got right through to you. You must not have a secretary yet. I’ll get you one.” It was the producer. A man the Great Director had never met and whom the studio had hired to babysit the production until the Great Director arrived. They had talked once before, via cell, amid a fantasy haze the Great Director had created for himself by the pool one afternoon after he’d made a pitcher of margaritas and decided to pretend he loved filmmaking again.
“Good to hear from you.”
“Listen, I’d like to go into production soon. You know what I mean. Sooner than later. The studio thinks this is going to be a big winter release, but here’s what I’m thinking. Are you ready?”
The Great Director nodded into the phone.
“Okay. I’ve been reading this script, and I think it’s an action flick. Now, I know what you’re saying. No way. This is a piano in the intro, let’s talk about our feelings, tell the world what it’s all about monologue at the end kind of flick. No way, I say. Toward the end, there’s a bridge, right?”
“Yes, it’s on the way to the funeral home.”
“Now they only drive over it on the way to the mortuary. But—what if that bridge were on fire?”
“Then it would be an action flick?” offered the Great Director, hoping to answer correctly. He secretly loved game shows.
“That’s right. That, along with a few other changes, would make this movie an event picture. I mean, if we’re willing to stretch this thing, you know really explore the bounds, I could, er… I mean, we could go AFL!”
“AFL?”
“Action Figure Level.”
“Oh… I don’t know,” protested the Great Director.
“Come on. Instead of the lead guy being a middle-aged, tired-of-life businessman, let’s make him a rogue CIA guy. Then we could justify the karate fights.”
“I didn’t think there were any karate fights in the—”
“There aren’t with the middle-aged businessman. But with the CIA guy we get hot babes, karate fights, gadgets, everything.”
“But it’s… as I understand it, a triumph of the spirit movie. You know, he’s tired of a dead end job, wants a change, embarks on a road trip to end it all or find the meaning of everything. Along the way he learns a few things and makes a difference in someone’s life.”
“Right. It’s still all that. But now he’s a retired CIA guy who’s tired of his adventurous lifestyle, and go with me here, I’m free associating, I see an opening Bond-style montage that explains this. Here we go. The Swiss Alps. Our hero is stopping the sale of a thermonuclear weapon from one of those crazy places where they’re always selling those things. We’ll figure that out later. He gets the bomb and loads it onto the latest piece of extreme sporting gear we can tie in with the movie. Okay, then the bad guys show up…”
“Which bad guys?”
“I don’t know, whoever’s bad this week. And if no one’s being bad, then we use Germans. Okay, so big chase, lots of action. He gets the bomb to safety at the bottom of the mountain, where the supermodel of your choice is waiting in a luxury yacht and they sail off into the Mediterranean.”
“I don’t think the Swiss Alps are near enough to the Mediterranean to ski down them and then jump into a yacht. I think Italy is in the way.”
“Okay, whatever. We’ll use a mountain with snow on it that’s near a tropical paradise. They have them. We can find them, and if not, we’ll blame climate chaos and work it into the plot. Maybe that’s part of the villain’s plan.”
“I don’t think there’s a villain like that in the script.”
“No. No there isn’t. But there would have to be if we go with this opening.”
“How do we say the hero is tired of life?”
“At the end. On the yacht with the supermodel. He says something like, “I’m tired,” but then a catchphrase along those lines. We’ve got writers and we’ll tie it into a fast food chain or something, you know, ‘I deserve a break!’ That’s it!” The producer paused to yell at a vehicle in the slow lane. “Listen, whatever it is, we’ll make it work. Triumph of the spirit. Ha! We’ll turn this into a triumph of the box office movie. That’s way better, know what I mean?”
“Instead of a triumph of the spirit one?”
“Listen. I don’t have to tell you where the action figure money is. You know all about that. This could be the one. Sure, you can still do your touchy-feely stuff. I think that will enrich the tapestry… you know, more colors in the palette and all that jazz. But I’m just putting this out there because we’re friends, and not just friends, we’re artists. So just do me a favor. In the movie, while the actors are saying things, ask yourself, ‘If something blew up in the background, would that make this picture better?’ I think you’ll find it will.”
The call soon ended. The Great Director sighed at the thought of working with the producer and hoped that some of his own personal doom would befall the man. Outside someone laughed, punctuating the slowly increasing office noise. More people were joining the army. Right now the sound hovered above an imperceptible hum, but within a few weeks it would increase to a steady buzz and w
ould reach, at the height of production, a cacophonic stereo of phones and cross-office shouts as printers and people screeched out a litany of progress.
Soon, he threatened himself, soon.
He checked his pulse.
Back to the first line of the script. It was simple. On the surface it said, this can be done on film. The simple answer was to get a location. A street corner, some cars, and a BMW. But it was his job to look deeper. To find the textures and the layers.
Things had once been easy for him. Filmmaking had been fun and more than fun. There had been times in his youth when he burned to be able to run out and shoot his ideas. Now he had all the money in the world, all the ability he could contain, unlimited resources, and absolutely no desire to be anywhere near a film set ever again.
He would try, he thought, one last time.
He rose up out of his chair.
I can do this. It’s a script. I’m a director. They’ll give me whatever I want. I’ll lack nothing and I’ll make this movie. It will not kill me.
He grabbed his pen, tore the top sheet of paper away with maniacal fury, and wrote Shot Exterior, Intersection. Several cars pass through an autumn afternoon. Time lapse and accelerate frequency of cars. In slow motion an Orange 1974 BMW approaches location, pauses. A leaf drifts down from above and falls onto the windshield. The car turns left.
“There!” he shouted. The Great Director stood up to move around his desk. He wanted to look out the window and prepare for the next direction he would insert into the script. Instead he caught his foot on the too-low chair. He flailed wildly, uttering a half-guttural, half-whimpering cry as he went down. He rose, cursing at the papers he had knocked off his desk onto the floor, and as he went to pick them up, he connected the top of his head with the corner of the desk.
Starburst.