Scene by scene, she finally got the story down on paper. The part about the scholarly young resident who came into the room every day to check on Allan’s well-being. A compassionate young doctor who would stop by after all the specialists and their complicated jargon were gone, a friend who could help Rose and Allan translate all the medical reports.
Patiently he would go over the information about the treatment and the side effects of the medication. Always sidestepping gently the news that Allan would never leave the hospital to go home with Rose, though she promised him and herself every hour that he would. And the most important thrust of the story, the character arc as the studios liked to call it, was the way the young wife had been forced to grow up, to step out into the world and become independent.
“So how about that for great news?” Marty asked her now. “Can you get to Howard Bergman’s office at four?”
“Sure. I can get there. But what kind of changes is he talking about, Marty? I’m not going to let them make this if they want to do a Love Story kind of death. The last producer who was interested in this asked if I couldn’t change the disease to something more attractive than cancer. I’m not going to sanitize it. The integrity of the piece has got to lie in the way the wife takes care of her dying husband under untoward circumstances. Real tubes, real hospital smells, and how she changes in the process. But inherent in that has to be the realities of a fatal illness.”
“Look how you’re already defensive,” Marty said. “Don’t do a jack story. There are so few people who can say yes in this farkaktah business that when one of them likes your work, put on a little lipstick and go say hello to the guy. And if you want my advice, I wouldn’t let a sale go down the toilet because of what they want to call the disease. If Howard Bergman wants to make the husband die of carpal tunnel syndrome, I would smile and say ‘You know, Howie, that’s a great idea.’ ”
“Well, that’s where we differ, Marty. I wouldn’t say that.”
“Rose, listen carefully. Every year there are five hundred films produced. Also every year six hundred and fifty people are killed by lightning. That means you have a better chance of being killed by a lightning bolt than of having a film produced. In fact, in your case the odds are worse, because you already did it once. That’s why you have to listen to me and go in and be nice to a guy who can make it happen for you again.”
As soon as Marty hung up, Rose dialed Ellen’s direct line.
* * *
11
Ellen Bass’s office.”
“Greenie? It’s Rose. Is she there?”
“Hi, Rose. She is, but she’s on the phone with Ron Meyer. Wait… she’s just winding down. Can you hold?”
“Yes.”
Ellen knew every studio executive in town and every producer. Either she’d worked for them or they’d worked for her at some point during her relentless scramble up the shaky showbiz ladder. She’d been a gofer, a production secretary, an agent, a producer, a network executive, a studio executive.
Once at a Girl’s Night, Marly had asked Ellen about a director who was going to be testing her for a part for a film. Ellen squinted as if to search her memory, then nodded absently. “I may have fucked him,” she said.
“Aggh.” Jan had practically spit her wine across the table at that one. “May have?”
“Hey,” Ellen said. “That was the seventies. This is the nineties. Do you remember everyone you fucked? I’ll bet one month’s salary you don’t.”
One month of Ellen’s salary was a colossal amount of money. Rose always thought the story of Ellen’s rise to power was a film in itself. Once she’d been listed in a magazine with top-earning female executives, and Rose’s father had seen it, called Rose, and asked in amazement. “Could that be our little Ellen?”
Rose had been talking for years about writing a screenplay about the friendship among the four women. The years they’d shared, the way they’d weathered dozens of losses, five weddings, a terrible death, joyous births, an unusual adoption. Career vicissitudes that were like roller coasters. But every time she mentioned it, Marly’s white hair stood on end and Ellen threatened to have her killed. Jan, naturally, loved the idea. “If you’ve forgotten any of the juicer stories about my past, call me and I’ll remind you, Rosie,” she said.
“Think of me as the Boswell to your Johnson,” Rose tried with Marly. “The chronicler of your brilliant lives. You know it’ll be a story filled with love and affection. A close look at aging in Hollywood. The three of you could all play the parts of yourselves. With a sock over the lens, of course.”
“I’ll put a sock somewhere other than over the lens, if you don’t forget the idea and burn that damned file you have where you keep scrawling notes about us. God, I’d like to do a Watergate on your office and burn every reference to me,” Marly told her.
The file in question was one Rose had kept for years, with notes in it about the ups and downs of the four of them, and by now there were tons of hilarious material in it. Which was what Marly was afraid of. “If you mention my relationship with Billy, I’ll never speak to you again, and if you write one word about the twins, it’s over between us. Think about it, Rose. Thirty years of a friendship. Are you ready to give that up?”
“Depends on who offers me more. You or Paramount,” Rose joked.
“You already used my college romance in that movie about the coed and the professor, and I forgave you. You use my parents as characters every time you have to write WASPs. You wrote that story about the stand-up comic right after I started seeing Billy. I’m starting to feel the way Neil Simon’s brother must feel. My life is used up.”
“Not at all. I have a lot more stories to tell about you,” Rose teased. “Thirty years’ worth.”
What Rose hadn’t told Marly or the others, though Ellen knew it from experience, was that they had nothing to fear, since every studio exec who heard the idea told her the same thing, “Who cares?”
“It would be brilliant with Candy Bergen as Marly, Susan Sarandon as Janny, Goldie Hawn as Ellen, and Bette Midler as me,” Rose said.
“Pass,” was one producer’s reply, accompanied by a yawn.
“Mia Farrow as Marly, Cher as Janny, Angelica Huston as Ellen, and Diana Ross as me, “ she tried, just to see if anyone in another meeting was paying attention. No one was.
“Yeah, great, we’ll call you.”
“How about a miniseries? Farah Fawcett as Jan, JoBeth Williams as Ellen…”
No imagination. These people were dunderheads. Didn’t they know anything? Who do you have to fax to get out of here, she thought, and laughed at the idea of using that question as a title. Maybe for an article about all the screenwriters she knew who were leaving crime-ridden, polluted L.A. and FEDEXing the pages of their scripts to the producers who had commissioned them. Writers who got the picture that the high-tech world of downloading computer files and sending instant fascimilies enabled them to work in Hollywood and live anywhere they liked.
Rose wouldn’t be able to fax anyone to get out of there, even though she’d had more than enough of the business and the meetings and the egos and the insanity. She would, unfortunately, have to stay in L.A. forever because Andy, her husband of eleven years, had a career in a medical field that was the most forward-looking of all in this terrible brown-aired city. He was a lung specialist.
“One more second, Rose,” Greenie said. “I hear her saying good-bye. “
Ellen didn’t say hello, she said, “Don’t tell me you’re not coming to Girl’s Night. I’m going to probably get my ass fired because I’m leaving the second meeting this week before midnight, so you’d better make it worth it for me.”
“Of course I’m coming,” Rose said. “Andy already knows he has to come home early to be with Molly. I’m calling because I have a meeting with Howard Bergman this afternoon, and I need the scoop on his personality.”
“He’s cold,” Ellen said. “I know a woman who was fucking him and who told me a story
in order to illustrate to me what a thoughtful guy he is. Bergman was having his annual Christmas party, and about an hour before the guests were due, his butler of twenty years keeled over and died. Bergman didn’t want to spoil the party, so he grabbed the butler under the armpits, dragged him into a closet, and left him there until the guests went home. And the woman actually said to me, ‘Wasn’t that sweet of him?’ ”
“Stop,” Rose said, giggling.
“That’s who he is. Frankly, knowing Bergman, I’m shocked he didn’t prop the butler up, put a tray in his hands, and make him serve a few last hors d’oeuvres.” They both chuckled. “That said, Rosie dear, keep in mind that he is a player and he only meets with a writer when he’s really serious, otherwise he hands you off to a string of interchangeable D-girls, all of whom were born post-1970. What project does he have of yours?”
“Good-bye, My Baby.”
“Your best work,” Ellen said. “I remember trying to get the putzes I work with to make that one over here. They wanted the woman to be widowed and she watched her husband die by flying out the window of the exploding World Trade Center. Listen, it’s not going to hurt you to go meet with Howard Bergman. But be prepared. It’ll be so cold in there, you could store your furs for the winter. And Rose…”
“Yes?”
“Just to put you in the mood, here’s a joke that a writer told me today. Why is writing a screenplay like making love to a porcupine?”
Rose liked this joke already. “I don’t know. Why?”
“Because it’s you against a thousand pricks! Good luck with Bergman.”
“Yeah, thanks a million, Maximilian.”
Rose’s stomach ached as she drove onto her second studio lot of the day, told the guard her name and that she was meeting with Howard Bergman, then found a parking spot. Bergman’s enormous third-floor office was carpeted in white, with white plush sofas arranged with chairs in two seating areas around coffee tables.
At least, Rose thought in relief, in this meeting she didn’t have to pitch, because they’d be talking about something she’d already finished. A script that Ellen said was her best work. Marty told her Howard Bergman loved it.
“Loved it,” Howard Bergman reiterated as his cold, manicured hand took Rose’s small, damp one. When his tall, slim frame stood near her, she had to look up to see his lined, handsome face. His smile was fawning. This was the kind of moment every seller lived on. The buyer was mad about the product.
“Did anyone get you anything to drink?” he asked her, so solicitously it occurred to her that seduction was seduction no matter what the hoped-for outcome. Howard Bergman was selling himself as a lover the way he kept holding her hand and the way he moved her to a chair by putting an arm around her. Ellen was dead wrong. He wasn’t so cold, she thought.
“Ummm… no. I mean, no thanks, I don’t want anything.” She always declined drinks at these meetings after she realized that if she drank them she couldn’t make it through a whole meeting without having to excuse herself.
“Well, why don’t we talk?” he said, and as if on cue, three young women with names Rose later remembered as Kim, Chelsea, and Heather, came in and pulled up chairs. And since she didn’t have to pitch at this meeting and could relax, Rose settled into an upholstered white armchair. Howard Bergman sat on one of the white sofas, his long arms stretched out across the back of it as he spoke.
“I see this as a piece about the struggle between the life force and the triumph death ultimately has over all of us. A study in the futility of our fight, against that over which we ultimately have no control. And I see those sides represented by the characters in the materials as you’ve written it now.”
What the hell was this pretentious speech leading to? Rose wondered. Maybe, she mused, she should have rewritten it for Ellen’s studio and let them blow the husband up at the World Trade Center.
“But what I want to do, want you to do now,” he said, “is to mine their souls, to play up the passion, really lean into the hot love story, because these people represent those forces at work.”
“You mean,” Rose asked, “you want more of the flashbacks to the love story about the couple when they first met and fell for one another and got married? Before the husband became ill?” she asked.
“No. I mean that in your story, you create a friendship between the wife and the young doctor. But what I know without question is that they should be fucking their brains out in the empty hospital bed with the curtain pulled around them and with the husband three feet away in a morphine stupor. The way I see it, she’s so sure the husband is dying, she figures it’s okay, and then the husband starts to make a remarkable comeback. And the young doctor decides he’ll have to kill him. Wants her so much he has to murder his patient.”
Rose had a cramp in her lower abdomen. The room was silent. She knew the three young underlings were watching her face carefully. Three young women watching to see how she would handle this. If she and Allan had had children together, she could have had daughters their age.
A morphine stupor. This would be one of those stories that, when she told it to her friends on Girls’ Night, would make them laugh and shake their heads in disbelief. But now she had to come up with something to say to Howard Bergman, who obviously had no idea what her script was about.
“Well… ummm… I don’t think so, Howard, “ she said, trying to stop her eyes from blinking furiously, hating her voice for sounding so timid, and trying to get a big breath so she could support it a little more to say the next as forcefully as possible. “You see, my woman character is in so much pain about losing her husband that she doesn’t even notice what that doctor looks like for months, maybe even a year, after her husband’s death.”
Howard Bergman snickered. “That would never be the case,” he said.
Rose flared indignantly. “That was the case.”
“Irrelevant,” he said evenly. “It wouldn’t happen that way even if it did. You writers have a problem when you get bogged down in the truth. I realize you know about your life. But your life isn’t a film, and I know about films. Nobody’s going to believe, if I cast Tom Cruise as the doctor and Demi Moore as the widow-to-be, that she wasn’t dying to fuck him, or fucking him already, and he wasn’t thinking of turning the croaking husband’s drugs up, high enough to take him out. That’s a story for a hot picture. Not some vague idea that maybe the doctor and the wife learned something from the experience and maybe some day down the line, blah, blah, blah. I mean, who gives a shit about that?”
All of that was said with a smile frozen on his face. Tom Cruise and Demi Moore. Hah. Allan would have loved that casting, laughed himself silly over it. Andy would love it, too, the idea that goyish, handsome Tom Cruise was going to be cast as rabbinical-looking him. But what Howard Bergman was describing wasn’t the film that Rose wrote, not the story she wanted to tell. She wanted to deal with the way the adversity of young widowhood made her into a woman, not turn it into some smarmy exploitive vehicle so two people could take their clothes off on screen.
Her agent Marty and her friend Ellen the studio V.P. would both tell her to take the money and run. Her supportive husband Andy and her idealistic friend Marly would tell her to do what was in her heart. And Jan would simply tell her to be sure that there was a great part in it for her.
Allan, she thought, wherever you are, this is our story, so tell me what to do. Look down from on high and let me know what to say to this man. Do I tell myself that screen-writing is just my business and whoever gives me the most money gets to tell me how to do it? Do I sell it to him and let him throw me off the project to bring in someone who will do what he asks? Or do I tell him to shove it, and hope some other studio will want to make it the way I do?
She almost laughed when in her head she heard Allan’s voice get back to her immediately with one word. “Run.”
She stood and extended her hand. “Howard,” she said, “thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me about thi
s, but I don’t think we want to make the same picture. “
The minute she was on the road, she dialed Ellen’s office. Greenie put her right through.
“So?” Ellen asked, picking up. “How cold was it?”
“It was so cold,” Rose said, using a punch line from a very old joke, “that flashers in Central Park were describing themselves.”
Ellen laughed. “You mean it was so cold his secretary had to put him in the micro and nuke him for three minutes before he could start the meeting?”
“I mean so cold that while we were chatting the Iditarod went crashing right through his office,” Rose tried.
“Rose, hon,” Ellen assured her, “you and I both believe that good projects never die. With everything I know about this business, I promise you that Good-bye, My Baby will happen. In spite of all the schlock there is in circulation, there is still a respect around here, in certain circles, for quality work, and I swear to you it will get done.
“Sometimes I think about the book people in Fahrenheit 451, that scene that always makes me cry, where the people have had to memorize the books to keep the stories alive. A secret coterie of folks who care about the written word. So hang in and you’ll prevail. Something will happen to set it moving and get it into the hands of just the right filmmaker. I just don’t know what that something is, but I believe it’ll happen soon.”
* * *
12
She didn’t mean to shoot the gun. She didn’t even think she knew how to shoot the gun. She just put it in her purse before she left home as an afterthought. Like everybody else, she’d watched all that stuff about the LA. riots on TV, and even all this time later, she was afraid about going someplace where there was so much violence. So it just made sense to put the gun in her purse to protect herself.
Show Business Kills Page 10