Show Business Kills

by Iris Rainer Dart

  “Mom’s so nervous about her big meeting today, she can’t see straight,” Rose heard Molly tell Andy as they got into the car. And she was right. Poor old mom had a pitch meeting at a studio today, and she hated pitch meetings. As soon as she heard the garage door close, she topped off her mug with hot coffee and made her way to her bathroom to take a shower, practicing the key words of the pitch out loud as she did.

  “Contemporary woman, high-tech arena, imagine Glenn Close or Meryl Streep.” She felt nauseous, knowing what was ahead of her today. If only she could phone it in, mail it in, anything but get dressed in presentable clothes and sit in the overdone office of some interchangeable studio executive trying to sell an idea.

  Selling her heart out, just like the vacuum cleaner salesman who once came to her family’s little home in Cleveland, when Rose was seven, right after her mother died. It was a desperately sad time for them, Rose trying not to fall apart when her distracted father forgot to pick her up at school. And he was trying so hard to run his hardware store and the household at the same time.

  “Maybe we need this newfangled gizmo,” he said, shrugging to Rose while he let the salesman in the door. Rose sat in the same chair, smashed in next to her father, watching the mustached salesman present his product. Giving his overrehearsed spiel, his presentation, his pitch.

  “Getta load of this,” Rose remembered the man saying as he threw a bag of dirt on the floor, then showed Rose’s father how his product so scrupulously sucked it up, and “Hold on to your hat for this…” he said.

  Little Rose, the glasses she’d worn since age five sitting on the tip of her nose, noticed the little beads of moisture forming on the salesman’s bald head. Later she learned there was a name for the way the vacuum cleaner salesman had perspired that day. It was the reason she’d stopped wearing silk blouses to pitch meetings so no one could see her exude it herself. “Flop sweat.” The reaction the body had when it knew there was no taker at the end of the sales pitch. The same reaction she had when she knew before she finished telling her story idea that the studio executive was going to say what her father told the disappointed vacuum cleaner salesman. “Thanks anyway.”

  At best the pitch meetings were uncomfortable and frustrating, but a necessary evil, so Rose forged ahead with them with the same get-it-over-with attitude she had about the dentist. It wasn’t that she didn’t know her material and believe in its worth, it was just that she was painfully shy. Most of the time she hid behind large tinted glasses and too-long black bangs and straight, shoulder-length hair in a style about which she said, “I’m trying for Dorothy Parker. Unfortunately, it’s coming out Prince Valiant.”

  The lack of a mother in her life had made Rose Morris’s shyness even worse. There was no one to reassure her that she was pretty or funny or smart, or to speak to about bras and tampons and boys. No one to tell her about the niceties of life that hard-working fathers didn’t know about.

  Once, a distant aunt who didn’t care enough to take her under her wing, at least took the time to make a suggestion to Rose’s father that he ought to sign the child up for ballet and tap classes to help rid her of her timidity.

  But the idea of being looked at by even a small audience made Rose throw up in terror before every recital. So after two years she was allowed to give away the shoes and the tutu and come home after school and sit in her room and dream and make up stories.

  The epiphany happened in high school when a play she’d written as a lark was a huge success, and it dawned on her that there was a way to be in show business, which she loved, and not have to perform, which she hated. Writing. A profession that provided simultaneous celebrity and anonymity for greats like J. D. Salinger could do the same for her. She declared it her major in college.

  “It’s the perfect career for my little mousekin,” her father said excitedly when she told him one evening after school while they dined at the deli near his hardware store. Harry Morris had a childhood friend who’d become a well-known writer, so why not his daughter, too?

  Carnegie Tech was heaven for her. In college she could sit in the back of a dark theater, listening to her friends alternately mutilating and glorifying the lines she’d written. Hearing words she could never say herself come from women she perceived as dynamic and outgoing and brave. Women she idolized not just for their beauty, which was radiant, but for their ability to stand in front of a group and emote.

  “A great actor,” one of their professors announced, “would shit on the stage if you asked him to.”

  That one made them laugh like loons back at the dorm.

  “Be sure to include my bathroom scene,” Jan hollered into Rose’s room one day while Rose was typing away on her little Smith-Corona portable. “I need to prove how great I am!”

  Right after college she moved to southern California, where her college boyfriend followed her and they were married. Now she was one of the small percentage of Hollywood women screenwriters who were constantly employed.

  How ironic for her to find that the way most screenwriting assignments were won was by writers “pitching” their ideas to the producers or the studio executives. Selling, performing, turning on the potential buyer with a dazzling presentation of the story they wanted to sell. Just like the vacuum cleaner salesman who had thrown the dirt on the floor, then proved to her father that the handy-dandy machine could suck up the scattered debris, Rose had to throw her ideas out and demonstrate the way she would weave them together into an intriguing story.

  Bookish Rose, who had long ago rejected being on stage because it frightened her so much, was now in a profession where it was mandatory to put on a show for some stone-faced studio person who held in his or her hands the fate of her next writing project. Working too hard, like the mustached vacuum cleaner salesman, to get the buyer hooked into the project.

  Even after all the times she’d done it, she would still find herself taking a flustered beat to blink at her notes, trying to decipher them, knowing in a frenzy how easy it was to lose the interest of the people who had the right to say yes or no to whether her idea was worth the investment of their development funds.

  Years ago an uncharacteristically kind studio executive said to her, after she’d presented the first sentence of her idea, then looked in a moment of panic down at her notes, “Let me stop you. I can tell you already, I love this idea, and I love your work. I want this, so don’t be nervous, and don’t think you have to make eye contact with me. This isn’t speech class, you can look at your notes all you want. I’m buying your act.”

  She’d burst into tears of relief, continued the pitch in a choked voice without looking up, and when she was finished, he said, “I’ll take it,” and she walked out of his office knowing she had a deal. That project had become her big hit film. The one people still rented repeatedly from the video store. The credit that was her ticket to subsequent meetings because she’d been nominated for both an Oscar and a Writers’ Guild award for it.

  The producers all remembered her film Faces and the way it made everyone laugh and cry. Since Faces, four years ago, Rose had five or six projects in various stages of happening all over town. “Development hell” it was called by the writers who made a living from it. Scripts she wrote, scripts she rewrote, scripts an agent tried to “package” by sending it to a star or a director who might be interested, but there had been no real action in a long time.

  The idea she was pitching today had to be a winner. She loved it. The minute it crossed her mind, she knew it was exactly what the studios called “high concept.” That was a term that meant the minute you told the idea to someone in one sentence, they could see its wonderful possibilities.

  This one was about a love affair that started when two people met and fell in love via letters they exchanged on an electronic bulletin board. A kind of Cyrano for the nineties. It would have a great role in it for a grown-up woman. Someone who had been initiated into life, with older children and career success. There were doz
ens of actresses in the business who were longing for a part like this one. Every studio executive in town would know that, Rose told herself, so she was certain she could sell it.

  “Oh, hi, Mrs. Schiffman,” a pretty young receptionist said and immediately picked up a phone and buzzed a warning to someone somewhere in the heavily decorated suite of offices. Another pretty young woman hurried out of an adjacent office with a hand extended and said to Rose, “Mrs. Schiffman? Hi, I’m Stacy Craig, the director of John Pine’s development? John really apologizes but he’s been totally decked by the flu, and he asked if I could meet with you?” She spoke in that California-girl cadence in which every sentence goes up at the end, making it sound as if it’s a question.

  Rose wanted to leave. She looked at Stacey Craig and her first thought was, “I have dresses in my closet older than she is.” Why didn’t someone call her to postpone the meeting if John Pine was sick?

  “Is that okay?” Stacy asked.

  Rose was uncomfortable. She knew that going in and telling the idea to this person was a mistake. In fact, she probably shouldn’t be bringing this particular idea to John Pine at all. It was a project she should try to sell to someone who would get it. A woman, who would understand the woman in the story. Like Dawn Steel or Sherry Lansing.

  “I am such a fan,” pretty Stacy said, shaking Rose’s hand. “I’ve seen Faces ten times. It was so sad, and so fun?”

  “Thank you,” Rose said. So fun. The words made her cringe inside. It was an expression she’d cautioned her daughter not to use. An expression, she told Molly, that made the user sound stupid. “So much fun,” she wanted to say. Maybe she should leave. Not take the chance that this child would understand her story, part of which was about the way a woman in her forties can’t relate to any of the high-tech phenomena and ironically finds that a computer is running her life.

  “So can we go into John’s office and talk?” Stacy asked. Rose looked at the receptionist, who was also in her early twenties, and had an awful rush of realizing she and her project had been passed down to the D-girl, the nickname for the young women executives who work in development at the studios. John Pine had handed her off to Stacy, who would screen her ideas so that he didn’t waste his precious time until he heard from Stacy whether the idea had any viability.

  Rose was sure that this young woman, whose frame of reference was so unlike her own, had almost no chance of understanding the point of the story. Yet Stacy was going to be the one who’d be the decision maker about whether the project lived or died at this company.

  “Maybe I’ll come back when John’s feeling better,” Rose offered, and Stacy’s jaw tightened. The young woman had obviously been told to handle this, and she was not going to let it get out of her control.

  “Um… well, it could be a really long time,” she said. “So since you’re already here and all… I mean, I could get the ball rolling?”

  Rose felt shaky, but she wanted to turn this situation around. Hell, she thought, chances were John Pine wouldn’t get this idea anyway, so she’d pitch it to the kid, think of it as a rehearsal, and try to get a meeting to pitch it to someone else next week.

  In John Pine’s enormous art deco office, she sat on a black hardback chair, and after Stacy efficiently opened a little notebook, Rose went through her idea, while Stacy took notes. After a while she felt the way she sometimes did when she improvised a bedtime story for her daughter and then watched the ten-year-old tap her feet with boredom.

  Stacy didn’t tap her feet. She nodded affably as she jotted things in the notebook, and now and then she laughed and smiled and said “Great, great,” about some of the beats of the story, but Rose could tell she wasn’t really getting through to her.

  When she finished the pitch, she wasn’t surprised when Stacy looked over her notes, then let out a long ominous sigh and said, “Well… great pitch. I like the arena, I like the journey the character takes, her arc is really well executed? And I’ll run it past John when he’s feeling better? And maybe he’ll see it, but… honestly? And I have to be honest with you because I’m such a fan of yours? But without elements, hot elements, I don’t see how this idea can work? And there’s no way to get the kind of elements we need. Because here are the stats? The average age of women protagonists in 1992 roles was thirty-three? I mean this woman in your piece? She’s way too old.”

  There it was. What was it Marly said last month? “I used to think the O word was orgasm. Now I found out it’s ‘old.’ ” The kiss of death.

  Rose sighed and leaned back in the chair she’d chosen specifically because sofas were too cushy and cozy and made her too comfortable to stay focused on her pitch.

  “You’d think that after Thelma and Louise something would have changed,” Rose said, but she knew she was wasting her words. She put away her notes and rummaged around looking for her car keys in an outside pocket of the big leather bag she always carried with her.

  “Thelma and Louise was a one-in-a-million shot,” Stacy said, obviously parroting something she’d heard someone else say. She was trying too hard to sound like a seasoned pro. In fact, she sounded a lot like Ellen. “A freak thing?” She went on, “And, believe it or not, in spite of all the publicity it got, it didn’t make any real money? So a script with a female over forty as the lead just ain’t gonna happen,” she said, shrugging. She probably thought using the word “ain’t” made her sound folksy. “At least not at this studio. But we love you. And we want to be in the Rose Morris business? So come back, okay?”

  Rose stood and managed a smile.

  “Sorreee,” Stacy said in the same little-girl way Molly answered when Rose scolded her about leaving her “My Little Ponies” out where someone could trip on them. She had an odd look on her face of regret combined with triumph, as if she wished the project from Rose could have been something she was eager to take to her boss. But it was combined with the satisfaction that she’d saved John Pine from wasting any part of his valuable day on some story that no one would want to see as a film.

  “Thanks for your time,” Rose said. She nodded to the receptionist on her way out and hurried down the steps and out of the building. In the parking lot, just as she was about to get in her car, she saw a group of executives on their way toward the building she’d just left, and one of them, surprise surprise, was the dramatically recovered from being “totally decked by the flu” John Pine.

  At home, she warmed up some soup left over from last night’s dinner, and while she ate, she looked again at the notes she’d used for today’s meeting, wondering for a fleeting instant if the computer story could be adapted to accommodate a younger actress. Then she hated herself for even considering it. The whole point of the story, the part of the idea that had interested her in the first place, was the difficulty that people of a certain age had adjusting to the new technologies. A certain age. What if she was that age and couldn’t get work ever again because of it?

  She was putting on some comfortable clothes to get back to work on the spec screenplay she was writing, when the phone rang. “Well, kiddo, cream rises to the top.” It was her agent, Marty.

  “It also clogs your arteries and kills you,” Rose said, “but please go on.”

  “Howard Bergman loves Good-bye, My Baby.”

  “Really?” A giddy sweep of hope danced through Rose’s chest. Howard Bergman was a very senior studio executive who could get a movie made. Ah, you fickle business, she thought. Only seconds ago she was sure she should forget the whole thing and spend her days answering the phones at Andy’s medical office, and now she was back in the running.

  “He just called me himself,” Marty said, as dazzled as if it had been Moses who called him.

  Good-bye, My Baby was a speculative script Rose had written and rewritten more times than she remembered. It was a story she’d worked on without an assignment, because it was something she needed to get out of her system. Putting it on the page had been a painstaking process, with the emphasis on
the pain, because it was so personal, a tragedy from her own life relived each day she worked on it, cutting into her soul and letting her blood fall all over the script.

  “He wants you to come in late this afternoon, if you can, and talk about a few changes, and he has some great ideas for casting.”

  Casting! Not just fix it, not just change it, not just punch it up. But Howard Bergman wanted her to come to a meeting where they had real actors in mind. Then maybe he’d give her a green light, make a movie, not just talk about it.

  Good-bye, My Baby took her years to finish. But finally, with Andy’s encouragement, she decided if she could get it down, even a little bit at a time, it would help her heal. Maybe it would give her some kind of closure about the death of her first husband, a man she had loved so powerfully, still missed so much, that her dreams were full of reunion with him in some other world.

  Closure, a pop psych word that meant you finally came to terms with something difficult in your life, and the coming to terms would set you free. But before she even got to the death-bed scenes, she wrote about their powerful bond, their recognition from the first day that they were meant to love another from past lives.

  The way he’d nurtured her, adored her, brought her out of hiding and helped her to feel womanly and wise. She would sob as she wrote about their love. And then, telling the truth about the nightmare of Allan’s last days, it was too much. She knew there would never be any such thing for her as closure on that subject. Andy knew it, too, and he accepted it.

  Some mornings while she’d worked on the script, she’d find herself curled up on the sofa with an afghan around her, sobbing quietly, remembering Allan’s frail hand holding hers. His last good-byes and words of love. The way that two days before he died, he looked at her with as much of a smile as he could produce and said, “I wish we’d had a child together, so you could look at him and remember me.”

  “I’ll always remember you,” she protested, holding on to him. “I’ll never stop loving you, dreaming of you, waiting to be with you.” She remembered those last days, saying those words again and again, and the torment of losing her great love.