The investors sitting along the outside rim, in chairs, not couches, have been watching this byplay intently. Now they come chiming in, eagerly endorsing the idea. Charlie knows he is years ahead of the coming nostalgia, but Spielberg gets it. He has a gift for being ahead of the curve.
That’s what Charlie is counting on. The Spielberg momentum. Then the session turns into a free-for-all, with the assistant-this and associate-that types earnestly getting in their ideas.
As momentum builds, the room gets into character logic—who is this McFly kid, anyway?—and people chip in revealing moments that could illuminate character while driving the plot forward. The kid’s father has to be a loser, starting out, check. Charlie puts in the idea that the father could be a science fiction writer who can’t get published. “Since after all, this is a science fiction film.”
That stops the assistants. One says, “This is all about high school. The audience thinks science fiction is about outer space, rockets, monsters. . . .”
The idea dribbles away. They all look to Spielberg.
“Time to domesticate science fiction, then,” Spielberg says. “Make it part of life.” And the juniors go back to tossing in ideas.
Some of these Charlie recognizes from the original movie, so he chimes in, giving those ideas some momentum in the room. But in a few minutes these fade and people start trying to top one another.
They do riffs on the Doc Brown character. Everybody nods. If you must use scientists as characters, make them odd, nerdy, obsessed, self-important, or, even better, quite mad. The law always overwhelms the niceties that real people—businessmen, scientists, cops—would like in movie depictions of themselves, especially those niggling details, logic or truth. Charlie learned that long ago.
He and Albert watch as everybody in the room maneuvers for position in the new film, a project that is now obviously going to get made. It’s the feeding stage; each gets his turn at the fresh prey. In Charlie One’s academic world, the rule was, Everybody has a right to their own opinion, but they don’t have a right to their own facts. In Hollywood, he has learned, the part after the comma does not apply.
With a nod from Charlie, Albert speaks up, as Charlie coached him. “Let’s be clear on character logic,” Albert says. “As revealed by action, of course.”
Quickly he runs through some clever plot turns Charlie recalled from the original film in the Charlie One universe—the fight with Biff outside the senior prom that’s seen from two different points of view. The heart of the movie. Albert peals this out crisply, well rehearsed. It works. Charlie can see the expression of surprise and then delight on Spielberg’s face. So do all the lessers.
“Those are my thoughts,” Albert concludes modestly.
Spielberg nods, purses his lips. “You’re a . . .”
“Screenwriter,” Charlie puts in. “European. He works with me.”
Spielberg glances at Sid Sheinberg, who is now cowed and just nods. “You’ll do the first take on the script, then,” Spielberg says. It is the cusp moment.
The meeting breaks up, though everyone is pumped. Even Albert. Charlie reminds him that this is a collaborative biz. “Even though the whole thing gets started by a writer having an idea”—or just stealing one, he reminds himself—“writers aren’t primary.”
“Never?” Albert seems bemused, eyebrows rising.
“Never.”
“I remember,” Albert says, “from that comic strip Peanuts, one in which Snoopy wears a T-shirt saying ‘What I really want to do is direct.’ ”
“Right, that’s where I stand—between the directors, actors, and writers. Mr. Middleman.” He shrugs. “Wanting to be a screenwriter is like wanting to be a copilot.”
He fills Albert in as they walk out of the studio-lot streets, avoiding the crews shooting background takes for various films. In the ’90s, Charlie explains, the biz evolved until style became content. “Any schmuck with a viewfinder was an auteur—or will be, in the Hollywood of the 1990s. I still get tangled up with tenses in this reincarnation thing.”
“I too.”
Charlie nods, somehow happy that even the inventor of relativity has problems with all of this. They reach the end of the phony street-scene block, and there is the limo and driver, ready to whisk them from wonderland to gritty LA reality. Albert is impressed with the ease and opulence of Hollywood. He stops and looks around, as if searching for something profound.
Charlie gently ushers Albert into the Lincoln, the ferocious air-conditioning fluffing Albert’s hair. He is starting to have an idea.
“See, Albert”—he slams the door and reaches into the limo refrigerator for a bottle of gin and another of tonic, to celebrate—“only a few directors got final cut back in the sixties. In the 1970s they got some artistic autonomy, sure. The auteur theory, they called it. But fewer got that than you’d think. The young-buck guys like me got into the early creative track, lots of meetings, and then by actually writing the script. Or maybe just an outline—good dialogue is hard.”
Albert shakes his head. “In physics, is much easier. You write the paper, send it in. But in films, has no writer ever had what you call this final draft?”
“Not often. There was a time—say, for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—when they just shot the script written by one guy. That was in the late sixties, when Hollywood broke open. I was there! Not now. Not unless the director writes the script—which by the 1990s was common. It’s all about the quest for power.”
“That explains much,” Albert says.
“Making good, big movies depends often on one strong, creative person big enough to defy the grinding media locomotive that wants to run on old, familiar rails.” Charlie shrugs; this is ancient news to him, and he sees now how little the audience—which Einstein the outsider represents—knows about how the biz works. “That strong guy may be a star, a director, or even a producer. But it’s for damn sure never a writer.”
Albert rolls down the window of the limo and leans out to enjoy the wind in his face. His glad grin strikes Charlie hard, a ghost of a memory of his childhood dog catching the breeze out the window of a Chevy. Charlie’s mind reels with the sheer dizzying whirl of the timescape he now traverses. Time slides back and forth, logic seems like a mere memory. Life is a crazy mirror in which he lives with reflections.
Charlie offers Albert a gin and tonic from the shaker he has just rattled. “We’ll do this together. And we’re not going to use many special effects in Back to the Future. I don’t like them. They’re often just ways to cover script problems, by distracting the audience with spectacle.”
Albert nods. “Yeats I think called this—I read him while I was learning English, as Einstein—‘asking the will to do the work of the imagination.’ I liked that; it occurs in physics, too.” Suddenly Albert laughs. “But then, Yeats never got a script into production, eh?”
Charlie feels the twists of time back away now, easing up. Albert has it right; they have a movie to make.
Albert leans forward as if he understands Charlie’s mood. “Auf Deutsch—I mean, in German—there is an old saying: You can teach technique, but you can’t teach talent.”
“Damn right.” I’m no Einstein, but—we know that we have talents. He takes a long pull of the gin and tonic, mostly gin. “Hey, this is Hollywood, remember. Logic and facts don’t matter if you can keep the viewer’s eyes moving. That Law of Thermodramatics. Plot momentum trumps all other suits.”
Albert gazes at him steadily. “You have an idea.”
“May be wrong, of course . . .”
“My calculations, I must work on them. About how universes, linked by quantum phenomena, can slip minds across, at the cusp moments in a life. It is about entangled states, I see that—though the mathematics is thick, clogged. Not logical.” Al leans back, sighs. “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
Charlie laughs, nods, takes a breath.
“We’re drawing flies to honey
with Back to the Future, right? It’s another way of going at this splitting-time thing, combing the world for ideas. Drawing the reincarnates out. Trying to understand. Laying open the whole, well, the whole goddamn space-time of it.” Charlie realizes that the gin has hit him hard.
“All physics is metaphor,” Albert says, smiling.
31 Bonny Doon Road turns out to be a labyrinth that feels less like a street than an adventure in navigation. Below a sky the color of washed-out jeans, Charlie and Albert maneuver the curves north of Santa Cruz.
“You truly think bringing in this man is necessary?”
Charlie shrugs at Albert’s question, because he has entertained it often enough. “He’s written a lot about alternate lives in several novels—Job, The Door into Summer, some others that involve enough hints of cross leaping through timescapes to maybe be useful. He knows how to plot. I can use his name for clout in Hollywood on this next movie. And we can learn from him.”
He doesn’t say Heinlein might be a reincarnate himself, but he suspects that Albert sees that.
The Robert Heinlein circular house is already something of a legend, a property built by the man himself, with a redwood cathedral shrouding it. The tawny land itself is clear because redwood litter is highly acidic, shutting out all but other redwoods. As he and Albert cruise by, they see rings of smaller trees rising up where a giant redwood recently stood.
There is a fence and gate. Charlie presses an audio button, and a dry, flat voice asks, “Yes?” Charlie gives his name and refers to the letter and phone call they’ve had. “Ah, yes, sir.”
The gate clicks open and they drive in, then park just short of the front and porte cochere of a circular house. A dahlia perfumes the front entranceway. Charlie notes a pump house between the frontage and the steep part of the hill leading to the house. Heinlein was an engineer and likes to do things for himself, so it fits that he has his own water on the property.
“That’s the Commie Shed, gentlemen,” the midwestern voice says behind them. Heinlein is a dapper man in gray slacks and a crisp white shirt, smiling as he beckons them into the house. Charlie can hear the tall corn in his voice.
“When we bought the property, the agent said that shed was used during the 1950s to conduct surveillance on a communist cell nearby.” Heinlein chuckles. “We use it for garden tools.”
Charlie introduces himself and “Albert, my screenwriter,” though of course Heinlein knows perfectly well who Charles Moment from Action Pictures is, from their earlier correspondence. As they go through the wide entrance, Charlie feels a draft coming out, ruffling his hair. Responding to his puzzled look, Heinlein says, “We keep the house overpressured. Keeps down dust and helps the sinuses.”
“Like an air lock,” Charlie says as Albert stares at their host. Heinlein nods, pleased. “I built this place to be practical, tight as a ship—and as a spaceship.”
A Swedish fireplace dominates the room, and along the curved outer wall and broad window is a built-in banquette. Above it is a shelf of books by many authors, and atop the books, dust jacket face out, is The Number of the Beast. Exactly the novel that made Charlie suspect its author might be a reincarnate, and here it is. In the book’s universe, people can travel to instantly accessible universes from the present one, using hand-waving physics. Its dense structure puzzled Charlie One, and his Charlie Two layered memory was vague. But the book snagged Charlie’s attention.
“Wow,” Charlie says, turning to a wall that displays a painting of a man near a network of Martian canals, eyes covered because he is blind. “This is the illustration Fred Ludekens did for ‘The Green Hills of Earth’ in 1947, yes?”
“You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar.” Heinlein beams.
Charlie has decided to treat this meeting as a pitch session and so has done his homework. It helps that Heinlein’s early novels nailed themselves in his teenage imagination. His work is best approached when young, Charlie now sees with hindsight, because it asks the basic young man’s question: How should you live, growing up into a culture you didn’t make? Maybe Heinlein can help Charlie regardless. The movie project he has in mind is right down Heinlein’s alley.
Everything in the house is built in and trim, efficient. A work table before the banquette holds a working globe of the earth and a brass cannon that figures in Heinlein’s best novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Charlie recalls.
Heinlein notices Charlie’s gaze and says, “That was the original working title for my Harsh Mistress novel—a symbol of freedom, The Brass Cannon.”
Albert asks what the cannon means and Heinlein chuckles. “Once there was a man who held a political make-work job, shining brass cannons around a courthouse. He did this for years but noticed he was not getting ahead in the world. So one day he quit his job, drew out his savings, bought a brass cannon—and went into business for himself.” Albert smiles.
Charlie takes it all in: a Mars globe and autographed pictures of astronauts. Charlie recalls that during the first moon landing Heinlein shocked Walter Cronkite on national television by saying that inevitably women would become astronauts. He was always far ahead of his time. This guy has the future in his bones. Beside these artifacts of a real working writer—and not just a script technician like Charlie—is a woman’s nude photo. As Charlie studies it, Heinlein says, with a sweeping hand, “Gentlemen, my wife.”
Charlie turns. She is as compact as her husband, a head shorter, with graying hair and an impish grin. She catches Charlie eyeing the nude photo and says, “Nope, not me. Wish it was!” She waves aside his apology with a hand holding a hardcover novel, Job. He read it while Charlie One, a jaunt among alternate realities—perfect for their emerging project. This past keeps surprising me, somehow. Albert says, “I have just finished this. Your heaven is ruled by snotty angels, and in hell everyone has a fine time. I wonder if you have lived such lives.”
“In the 1940s,” Heinlein says, “I belonged to photo clubs in Los Angeles. We hired models, and this was my favorite, Sunrise Lee. She could not fall into an ungraceful pose. But I, of course, fell for this lady.” Another broad pivot to his wife.
“Your photo?” asks Charlie.
“Indeed—the only one of my photos that I hang in my home. Don’t want to provoke Ginny, y’know.”
“I wouldn’t be provoked—only envious,” Ginny says.
With a wink Heinlein says, “Whenever you realize you’re winning an argument with your wife, apologize immediately.” Turning to her, he says, “I apologize for dragging business into the house. This is movie stuff.”
They file past Ginny’s piano and along built-in bookcases to Heinlein’s working room. Charlie stands beside an electric typewriter that Heinlein offhandedly calls the “coffin.” He bought it from a funeral home, he says. “They didn’t want their typing up bills to disturb the mourners or the dead. For my part, I didn’t want to keep Ginny awake when I’m on one of my marathon writing sessions. But now”—he waves at a Zenith computer on another table—“I use one of those, too.”
“You came here to not be a target, yes?” Albert asks quietly.
Heinlein nods. “Yes sir. I originally chose to build a house in Colorado, away from nuclear targets and out of the fallout drift patterns.” He slaps his knee ruefully. “So then, in 1957, the North American Air Defense Command followed my same reasoning. They set up headquarters there to correlate data from the Distant Early Warning Line. Then the US Air Force Academy set up shop nearby! To grind my face in it, NORAD built the biggest possible target, their operations center, into Cheyenne Mountain—my backyard! Colorado Springs was the biggest nuclear target in the US.”
Albert laughs along with Heinlein. Charlie has noticed that Albert often finds a way to work nuclear issues into his conversation. Perhaps the burden of beginning the US nuclear weapons program with a letter to President Roosevelt weighs on him, down through his lives.
“So I took my revenge,” Heinlein says. “I hammered Cheyenne Mountain flat i
n The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, bombarded from an attack platform the Air Force hasn’t thought of—the moon.”
“Then let me bombard you with our idea, Mr. Heinlein,” Charlie says. Charlie decides it would be a good idea to follow the man’s formal, military manner. They are all still standing, Heinlein ramrod straight. With a courtly gesture he tells them to sit on a long couch. They do. Then, so fast Charlie sees it only as a flicker of motion, there is a small silver automatic pistol in his hand.
“Welcome to reality, gentlemen,” Heinlein says casually. “Mr. Moment, you hesitated just long enough when looking at my relevant books to suggest that you are one of the reincarnates.”
Charlie freezes, realizing they have been overconfident.
Albert says slowly, “Quite right. We are here to ask your assistance in a project to gather others, using Hollywood.”
Heinlein nods but the gun never wavers. “We are of you, but we do not play games with history.” Ginny nods too.
“Good,” Charlie manages, recovering his self-possession. “Neither do we. I apologize for not announcing ourselves properly.”
“Then I am certain you will not mind standing again, turning, leaning forward onto the back of that couch.”
They do so, and Ginny frisks them expertly, patting them down, running hands down their pant legs. “Nice and safe,” she announces. “Robert, be seated. I’ll hold the gun at a distance.” Crisply, as though rehearsed, they take their positions.
Charlie is startled at their casual certainty. They must have done this before. He says slowly, “We want to make your novel The Door into Summer as a feature film.” Charlie’s hopes that this line will have impact dwindle away. Heinlein looks unsurprised. “Um. But change it around a lot.”
“To make the time paradoxes work out somewhat better, yes, we think so,” Albert offers.
Charlie speaks carefully. “The idea is to pull together reincarnates, to make us a constructive force in the world. Our film could be a kind of rallying call.” A sigh. “Some aspects of your novel are unfilmable—for example, the extensive work on robots. But we’ll keep the basic idea, your ideas, of a man going back in time to change events.”
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