Rewrite

by Gregory Benford

  It goes on forever. Dick was easy, with few sets and standard shots. On the dark days when studio execs come by for a look and leave stony faced, everybody upstairs wants to make out that this is Charlie’s baby. Bob’s way of conveying this is to say, offhand, “If you can’t figure out who’s going to be the scapegoat when things go south, it’s going to be you.”

  At first he doesn’t like this, waiting for a vice president to come take off his head, but then he sees that it plays to his hand. He knows what they cannot. So he makes impassioned speeches about sticking to the vision, and it gets them through to a final cut.

  Charlie learns from it all. He has never bought into the auteur theory, that everybody is there to “serve the director’s vision.” Not that the screenwriters are king either. After exposure to the reality of Hollywood, he sees that producers call many of the shots and make most of the money. Being below the public radar has advantages. You can live well as a producer without being famous to the larger public, without having people turn green or livid at the mention of your name. Plus, no autographs.

  At the Godfather opening, the Action Pictures gang clusters around Charlie at the postviewing party. Bob is now a trusted lieutenant, but he’s visibly unsure whether the film is going to pay off. He eyes the crowd around them at the rented room in the Beverly Wilshire and nervously whispers to Charlie, “You ready to do this?”

  No, thinks Charlie.

  “Yes,” he says.

  * * *

  Godfather opens to good reviews, but nobody else sees what is coming. Except Rog Ebert, who calls it a classic. Charlie takes him out to dinner next time he’s in town, tells him lots of insider stories about making the film. Swears him to secrecy, which is the sure way of getting the story spread. The crowds outside the theaters grow fast. The wave of ’70s American cinema is growing, and Charlie is among the first out there to greet it, riding his second-life surfboard.

  He circulates, adds to the backstreet buzz. Always, Charlie One rides in the back of his mind. He knows that his dual lives give him a telling advantage. Everyone in Hollywood talks too much, as if they’re trying to convince one another that they’re really the hottest thing in town. He cultivates affectations just ahead of the style that will come, and so helps define it. He wears baseball caps in meetings before Spielberg does, shows up at parties in big-kahuna Maui sunglasses, plays soulful Edith Piaf softly for background office music, sports an authentic beat-up leather bomber jacket when everybody else is still big on antiwar bumper stickers.

  As the first wave of 1970s films breaks, he acquires a reputation for being a quick study through endless pitch sessions, script reviews, and on-set revisions. Sixteen-hour days too, of course. He can glance through a script, then go into a meeting and command the room with insights into the backstory, subtext, foreshadowing, carry-through, the whole three-act litany. This comes from sheer experience with life, from Charlie One’s knowing how people saw the world through narratives, and of course from Charlie Two’s voracious pursuit of his new life. Working with a new brain, too. He thinks about mind versus brain—experienced software imposed on a young, sharp operating system. That helps a lot. He can feel it—quick, sure jumps of intuition and logic, like running hard, sweat stinging his eyes, and seeing a creek ahead, and then just gliding over the frothing churn below.

  Everybody attributes his expertise to talent. But he knows that experience is a lot more reliable. Still, it is gratifying when a cameraman tells him a saying going around: “If Moment gets in a revolving door behind you, when you exit, he’ll be ahead of you.” He laughs and takes the cameraman to lunch. That’s rare enough in itself to make the story take off.

  He carefully mines his last-life memories of the final thirty years of the twentieth century, and from those sepia images he fashions his strategy. Bet on the smart horses. Charlie One was a stone-cold movie fan and Charlie Two remembers a lot, but it’s not like he can quote dialogue and reproduce the plot moves in the films he saw. No, he has to find the real talents and attach them to himself. Sometimes he’ll suddenly recall a sharp scene, a camera move, and get it done—but Charlie knows his limitations.

  He picks up on gossip about a Spielberg TV movie, quick and deadly and done on a fingernail budget—and of course it is Duel. A mere TV knockoff from some unknown, a Paramount flak tells him, but weeks later he catches it a few minutes into a rerun, and it is very tight, exciting.

  The Godfather shoot got Spielberg some good word of mouth, but then Charlie became busy and lost track of him. Now the kid is back on the track he will follow. Charlie makes plans to snap him up.

  Charlie wangles an invitation to a party put on by some backers, after he finds out that Spielberg will be there, looking for start-up money to do real movies. The party is in one of the big houses up in the Hills. Charlie arrives early, gets the meet and greet done, nods all around. Then he spies his target and moves in. He ropes Spielberg in with a movie idea he has, invoking the day when they met in Laguna Beach. Charlie uses ocean memories, outlines a plot. He can see Spielberg’s eyes light up, then get canny. The film is going to be an adaptation of the Benchley novel that’s been making the rounds for months without success. The book is only in bound galley, awaiting hardcover success, but Charlie takes up its cause. It has a good title, but the conventional wisdom is that the crowds don’t turn out to see animal movies. Charlie knows better; the title is Jaws.

  * * *

  One morning in Michelle’s bed, before her first class but after her roommates have left, Charlie confesses. Lying naked on his side, his long hair flung back and his eyes soft, he says, “I love you, Michelle.”

  She doesn’t look at him, staring up at the ceiling, her hands on her naked abdomen, just above her untamed pubic hair. “I guess I love you also.”

  Charlie is stung. He gets up on his hands, a four-legged beast peering into her eyes. “What does ‘also’ mean?”

  Michelle hesitates. “So . . . what would we do? I don’t want to get married.”

  Charlie knows that line full well, with its left-off “. . . right now.” What should he say next?

  Michelle has an agenda and Charlie’s silence gives her the opportunity. “Charlie, I have some questions about . . . you know, your life. Screenwriting—all that. There are some things about you that don’t really add up. You say your mother is, like, forty-two—”

  “She’s forty-four.”

  “—so how can you be twenty-eight?”

  Charlie frowns. He has been sloppy with his offhand self-history, yes. He could invent a story about his mother getting pregnant in high school, but it just wouldn’t fit with his overall narrative about life in Chicago, his father running a car-parts business, his sister. . . .

  “How can I trust you if your life doesn’t make any sense to me?”

  Charlie sits on the edge of the bed and hangs his head, his long hair touching his thighs. He feels tired of it all, tired of bearing the burden of two lives on his own, sharing none of it.

  “Okay, okay. I’m really twenty-one. My mother had me when she was twenty-three, after she married my dad.”

  “No way! No way you’re twenty-one.” Michelle gets out of the bed and walks around to confront him, her small breasts bouncing as she thrusts her finger at him. “I know twenty-one. I know the frat boys here at UCLA. They’re twenty-one. You’re not.”

  “I’m not a frat boy.”

  “All right, all right! I know freaks and hippies, too. I know guys who worship Frank Zappa and Jack Kerouac, and they still seem like callow kids to me. Why do you think I’m not fucking them?”

  Charlie begs her to stop with his eyes. How to explain . . . ?

  But she shows him no mercy. “And furthermore, how does a kid with no college know so much—so much about everything? You have comments about all my classes, you’ve read all my goddamn assigned books, for Chrissake!”

  “Not true. I hadn’t read Eliot’s Four Quartets until you showed it to me.” Charlie feel
s a small sense of pedantic victory. He didn’t like T. S. Eliot in his past life, only coming to appreciate him after being . . . reborn, as he has come to think of it.

  “Eliot, Eliot! Who gives a fuck about one English—”

  “American, really.”

  “There you go again. You even know that.”

  Michelle kneels down in front of him and their heads bend down together, touching at the hairline. Charlie tries not to see the irresistible curves of her long torso before him. Then he realizes that she is crying, and lust flies from his mind.

  “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so very sorry.”

  “Talk to me, Charlie.” Her sob tears at him. “Tell me what it is. Why can’t I make sense of you?”

  “If I told you something really crazy, something absolutely insane, would you stay with me? Could we make a life together? Could we be open and honest with each other from then on?”

  Michelle smiles at Charlie like sunshine between rain clouds, tears still on her face. “Of course, honey.” Her glowing face takes Charlie’s breath away. “You are the only man I have ever truly loved.”

  “Okay, then.” Charlie takes a breath from far below his lungs and starts to talk quickly, dispassionately. “I was born in 1952. I grew up in Chicago. I went to the University of Chicago for a bachelor’s, then to the University of Minnesota for graduate studies. When I received my doctorate, I took a temporary faculty job in Massachusetts, before I went to GWU in DC. I got tenure there. I’ve been married twice.”

  “None of this makes any sense, Charlie.” Michelle’s mouth is tight, unreadable.

  “I died in 2000, when a truck ran over my Volvo.” He shrugs, trying to lighten the impact. “I woke up in 1968. In my head I’m in my fifties.”

  Michelle gets up and walks over to her chest of drawers, her long, beautiful back turned to him. “So this is how you explain knowing everything.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Michelle quickly turns to face him, her long, straight hair swirling like a honeyed liquid. “So! I have my choice. Either you are the world’s greatest liar, or you’re insane.” A high laugh.

  Charlie stands up slowly, like he’s about to be shot.

  Michelle’s face darkens with flitting anger, desperation, confusion. Despite her youth and beauty, Charlie finds it the most terrifying countenance he has ever seen. Michelle starts to back away slowly, facing him. “Charlie Moment, if that’s even your real name, I’m going to go into the bathroom and lock the door. I’m going to stay there until you leave. If you are still here when I come out, I’m going to call the police. Do you understand me?”

  “Michelle, I can prove it all to you.” He will make some predictions, she’ll see them come true. . . . Torment tears at his chest. He cannot breathe.

  “I don’t want your proof. I don’t want any of this, do you understand?”

  Michelle reaches the bathroom door, her mouth knotted up in a frenzy, and then in a blur of motion slams and locks the door with a sharp snap.

  Charlie crumples back onto the bed, staring at the ceiling. The room around him begins to flicker. He hears a roaring sound. The light above the bed becomes two. Then the room splits, doubles, and spins. Rumbles. Bangs. He hears Elspeth’s harsh laughter, a gunshot. Then the truck runs over him again. Trudy’s lips smile down on him.

  Not even dressing, he runs out of the building down the two flights to the street, and out into the blinding sunlight of Westwood. Within an hour he is in police custody.

  * * *

  Part III

  * * *

  A Bifurcating Cusp

  17 The last seven years have worn hard on Charlie, hard but profitable. While not every film has been a success, he has been by far the most successful writer-producer, now just producer, in the pantheon of Action Pictures. Merrill, now CEO, clings to him like a sailor on the raft of the Medusa. While the other producers have had some success, they have also come up with too many duds. Charlie is the undisputed king of family entertainment at Action, so much so that Disney, Buena Vista in particular, has started to sniff around him for head of filmmaking. He is famous for his unerring nose, thanks to his dimming memory of what worked in the world of Charlie One. But Charlie has no interest in taking up the family values banner of the Disney operation.

  Time. More time . . . and drugs.

  In his case it was epilepsy drugs supplied by Dr. Habib that really changed his life. After the police picked him up that day he ran through Westwood skyclad, he was taken to Cedars-Sinai and placed on a hold.

  That time there was no warning. After the Haldol and benzos had stabilized him, he spent some grim days in a locked ward going over his symptoms with the burly Lebanese physician. The man was smart enough to realize that schizophrenia and mania weren’t the problem.

  What Charlie and the shrink agreed on was a diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy. Charlie was given a prescription of valproate, a series of blood serum tests, and eventually a discharge. Naturally, Merrill had to pay off several Hollywood gossip reporters to prevent the news from leaking out. It was just a normal cost of business for the studio.

  Charlie was pleasantly surprised to find that the flickering stopped completely once he went on medication. His past life became faint to him, though he could still retrieve the outlines of the movies of that life well. After years of psychotherapy he put Charlie One into cold storage. The story that Charlie developed in therapy with Habib was that his teenage self had developed a delusional past life in order to make sense of his epileptic moments. Even his young life in Chicago became a distant thing. Southern California plus medication made it easy to live in a state of oblivion.

  But there was fallout from chronic medication. He found that he couldn’t write well anymore. On the positive side, Charlie had more patience for movie production machinations. As he had already started working as a producer, dropping screenwriting from his brief was no difficult progression. People expected you to move up the pyramid.

  * * *

  As usual, Bob is the first to arrive to the evening’s party. The studio keeps him as a vice president in charge of project development. Charlie looks at Bob’s scripts from time to time, when Merrill wants a break from swatting down Bob. Finally quitting smoking hasn’t done much for Greenway—drawn, wrinkled, and pale in the neck, he looks even thinner.

  “Welcome, my man,” says Charlie. Bob looks confused.

  “My old friend,” amends Charlie. Bob seems content with that.

  “So how’s the boy wonder?”

  “Fine. Haven’t changed since our eleven o’clock meeting.”

  “Right.” Bob nods knowingly, his eyes somehow filmy, those of an old snake now harmless without its fangs.

  Charlie knows the word is that he and Robert Evans are Hollywood wunderkinder, one pretty and the other just intuitive. But Evans is the real thing, of course. . . . Sighing, he asks, “What’ll you have?”

  “Any pineapple juice? All my stomach can manage these days.” Bob’s eyes darken with distracted worry.

  “Heartburn?” asks Charlie politely.

  “Something like that.” Bob takes the juice and walks over to the picture window’s sharp, broad view. Bob is slow and a bit shaky. Charlie suspects some type of cancer, perhaps with chemotherapy, but he knows better than to ask.

  Bob has an undercurrent of anger toward Charlie, or perhaps just Charlie’s success, or Charlie’s success combined with his youth. Charlie has occasionally set Bob off and regrets the tirades that have followed. In years of experience Charlie is older than Bob, which only makes Charlie feel more residual unease about having used Bob to get to Hollywood, to become a mogul by the time he turned thirty, even though the rest of the world thinks he is now about forty. The swollen face, slower movement, and weight gain from his medication have helped solidify that impression. Only Bob knows that Charlie is still a comparatively young man. Except for Michelle—if she can be counted. If she ever believed him.

  He feels now that
he can see through the authorized version of whatever’s passing by in the daily news. He can reliably affect an elegant unsurprise at the grossest crimes and follies, especially those of the world’s anointed. He can put on parties like this one with a distracted air, something the medication only helps.

  Merrill also arrives fairly early, trailing his wife, Debbie. Merrill obviously doesn’t worry about Debbie getting fed up with their life together. Not a pretty woman in middle age, but strong and reliable, more than strong enough to weather the babe eruptions that come with her husband’s exalted position. Merrill is only a man, after all, and Hollywood is the succubus. Experience has taught Charlie that every marriage is a secret known to at most two people, sometimes only one, or no one at all.

  The room fills up quickly now with noisy displays of joy unfelt. The glittering women, the men in thousand-dollar jackets that artfully hide their middle-aged spread, the catering people in waistcoats and dress shirts, all milling together in an odd dance. Charlie is playing the Vangelis soundtrack from Chariots of Fire, one of his recent successes for Action Pictures. “You’ve got to know how to choose the right people” is his latest saying when people praise him. The music soothes him, helping him enough to work the room better, even though medication has dulled the energy that his physical youth should provide.

  The party fills with the clammy odor of people working hard at having fun. Charlie is drinking scotch, the sharp slug of it burning, and yet it hardly has any effect on him. He retires to the fun room, where he is pleased to find Sid, a former actor who now lives on the fringes of Hollywood, his main commerce being to supply the elite with pure cocaine. Sid has the sleek gray look of a retired greyhound—too thin and ineffably nervous, flicks of tongue around the lips, the nose slightly runny. Sid leaves the upper buttons of his shirt open to show an abundance of chest hair that he thinks attracts the ladies, when all he needs is the vials of white powder that he is known for.