Thank You and Good Night

by Ray Succre

  Emery found himself having to push away such thoughts with frequency now. He was a good man, but being this would require that he struggle against himself. He wanted out of most things for which he found himself involved, now. His eagerness to prove himself had him taking on every project offered to him. He was burying himself alive. While the best moments only surfaced from the worst, he found himself in a panic over when these would arrive. He had packed more chocolate into his mouth, professing its sweetness, hoping for satiety, to the point he could no longer swallow. He now stood choking, his mind full of regret for things that had not been, at their outset, problematic. Things had spoiled en route. His smile was seldom genuine anymore. The people around him watched as he performed in his suit. The people wanted the smile, wink, and the same story they had grown to consider over time. Again and once more. Emery laid himself prostrate before these people and begged like a beast to be allowed more, to continue succeeding into failure. He might have been losing his mind.

  “I mean only that you, the public, should be given this award, and not me,” Emery concluded, “You’ve made the show what it is. All of you. And I can only offer my thanks and gratitude.”

  He stepped from the stage in a daze, past Claude and Alfred, the actors and unwitting tools of an industry. Band saws and landing gear. Models and tapestry. For every Frank Gill and shark radio-vangelist, there was an Alfred Tuehler and Claude Bernoulli. These figures stood before the most madding of buyers, being the good faces that were worn over the bug instinct. They were the walking awards that served as grand, self-inspired, televised publicity. They were the yes-men of the moment and the princes of pigs.

  It was not so long ago that this life began for him. Emery was fifteen years out of the war, removed from those terrible moments of running expiry and dug-in, heinous execution. He was but eleven years out of college. Twelve years married. He was a young man of thirty-eight. He had won five Emmys. Two Radio and Television Writer’s Annual Achievement Awards. The Roderick MacGuffin Award. A Farnsworth Achievement Award. The Purple Heart. A Binghamton Alumni Award for Achievement given to him by his high school. The Groundbreaker Award by CBS. Two Scriptwriter’s Pen Awards from the Television Writers League. He had two beautiful children. He had two heavy cancellations. There were nearly a hundred bad reviews. There was a lawsuit from a great writer. His parents were dead. Two working friends were dead, one of them a suicide. These were all now interned in his thoughts and memory like mussels attached to crumbly stone. This had all happened in a matter of years that felt forty across, years with the import to give him their face, yet not so many as would seem proper. He could not process it all with the sort of mind he had been given, and his focus was falling dim. It was the elevator effect.

  He felt to be a jumper in a plane that was now lost to dive, spiraling down with its nose headed for the dust below, irresolvable and approaching the unavoidable end, yet everyone applauded as if the plane were doing a grand trick to amuse them. It was business-as-usual all around, but his mind did not flow into business so much, and never had. He was quickly becoming a large stone in a river, rushed with water that was picking up speed, and all he cared for had more buoyancy than he. They were passing as he sat. He could feel it. He wanted everyone to like him, perhaps his neediest flaw, but when they did, it seemed for the wrong reason. And then they were gone, passed, and so he tried to address the new, the present. They looked on him and decided things. He both craved and felt trapped by the attention, and he needed to get control of himself. He was making too much of things.

  Emery walked on his arachnid legs, mucous drizzling from his mouth as he made his way back to the seat beside Beth and the girls. Belmont gave him a great slap on the back and offered congratulations, in a good cheer and impressed with the moment. Emery’s wings druzzed and he turned to face the young writer. A smile separated Emery’s hard-shelled lips and his antennae quivered with the narrowing of his iridescent, penetrating eyes.

  “Give it a year, Larry. You’ll see. You’re next.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “It’s not that they’re bad scripts, Mr. Asher. Not by any stretch. I don’t want you to get that idea. It’s that we have so many stories regarding the war that we’re never gonna run dry. That’s the only trouble we have with Den Mother. It’s not the story, it’s the genre.”

  “Well, I understand that, Mr. Singer. And I can rewrite to match what you prefer, somewhat. Allegory’s a powerful tool and... I’ll rework the script into a different movie, which I think I could do, so just give me a deadline and I’ll have it to you.”

  “We’re glad to hear you’re willing to do that. Uh, but still we’re not really looking for any more war stories.”

  “I’ll make it a different war, first off. I could do that. Same themes, same dilemma, same idea; a group of men in serious trouble and having to make some awful decisions. Civil War, or even the Mexican-American War; that might be good. If we go back that far, though, I’d need to figure out how to transpose the air-drops. I’d need a different sort of setup.”

  “Mr. Asher, if you can do that, we’d be interested. That’s— we’re forced to require it, and it’s great that you’re on board to do so. Right now, we’re buried in scripts about the Second World War. Now, on to your other story.”

  “The Passing of the Hand.”

  “Sure. I’ll just go straight into this one: For one, we’re not too keen about the title, but that’s small stuff. See, the problem we’re having, and it’s no comment on your writing, because the script has some real moments, and it does, but the problem we’re having is more like there’s a lot of… the thing is, we’re not sure we can get away with something that opposed to God. I mean, this is a huge majority of Americans that… well, they’re not gonna go for it. It’s kind of a slap in the face, really.”

  “Mr. Singer, let me tell you that it’s not against God at all. With that in mind, just pass through a second time. Read it again. The Passing of the Hand is nothing more than a science fiction tale with a radical idea about an implausible sort of future. It’s no more anti-religious than any book based on scientific fantasy. The book itself did well. I think the movie would easily do just as well, if not better.”

  “Yeah, but you’re talking about evolution, right?”

  “The story does presuppose evolution, yes.”

  “There you go. Last time I checked, evolution is sort of the ‘away team’ for just about everybody who owns a Bible.”

  “Here’s the thing with that story: I CAN rewrite it a bit, there’s room, but not too much because I put it together pretty carefully and I want it to follow the book as closely as we can get away with. What I can do is rewrite to never use the actual term ‘evolution’, for instance, using words like ‘change’ and ‘transformed’ instead of ‘evolved’. Or ‘metamorphosis’. Changing it like that. Honestly, I don’t think the word ‘evolution’ even appears in the script, at least not that I can remember. But if so, I’ll swivel it a different way. What’s more, I could easily give the apes their own religion. Making that happen would create kinship between the ape culture and our own. That much I can certainly do. The apes could believe in god. I think I like that idea, too. It wouldn’t be too difficult so long as I’m careful. But that’s about all I can change with regards the premise of the story, the major part of which is that apes are populating an entire world, and our future, it turns out.”

  “Eh… well, we do appreciate your eagerness to go forward with this, uh, but let’s get back to those ideas another time. I do have some writers that might want to take a swing at it on this end. Just paint it a bit, that’s all. We’re gonna pass it around a little more, see what can be done.”

  “Uh no, Mr. Singer. That’s out of the question. I do the rewrites.”

  “Sure, okay. It’s your work; I get that. We’ll work something out.”

  People handled one another like Emery handled scripts. A change here and there, a forced opinion, sweet talk
with a poison-spur beneath the tongue. A stern foot could be stamped down quickly upon discovering trouble, though that same foot could also become a sudden friend. Allegiance and opposition changed to the day, working things out, killing momentum to change direction with little notice. These people lived by a wondrous sort of code that, were one to decipher it clearly in the moment, could relay the true intent of a conversation with more relevancy.

  The producers offered responses that masked intention. It was the dim and lanky stuff of bureaucracy, of mediocrity, the itching, red runs that seeped from the scratching of backs. Coming from Mr. Singer, “We’ll work something out” meant “We won’t make the mistake of bringing this up with you again.” Being told there were others that wanted to be involved was worse, however, and had an entirely different meaning when one knew where the gears turned and by what. Singer’s mention of passing the script around to the studio writers, who Emery knew functioned as little more than bootlickers, was insulting, though the problem was likely much worse. For Singer to have even mentioned this indicated that some low-grade, work-for-hire grunt was already working over Emery’s script, slapping his own name on it, and getting paid. “We’ll see what can be done” meant “Never mind, you’re out.”

  And he was. In the weeks to come, The Passing of the Hand was taken over, contractually, and given to several other writers, that they might raise their pikes and begin goring each scene into the proper elevation and protocol for a regular flick. The time-weathered occupations of reduction and contractual trespass were in their blood. Emery knew the nature of a rewrite artist well, and knew those particular designs better than most, as Emery had once been that person, in radio, and now used the rewriter’s pen in his own work, with his own, peculiar organization. Every writer needed skill with both drafting and revision, but there were those who possessed neither. There was an especial breed of writer often hired by large companies for the simple task of cutting things to bits and ham-fistedly inserting the ideals of a particular phase of cinema into the story at hand.

  There were writers who could not revise a story, but instead murder it, and these were writers that did not create. How could one accept the re-construction of a story if it was performed by a man who could not write? This was as if trusting the opinion of a food critic who had been born without a tongue. Characters, scenes, themes, plot, conceits… all of them on the chopping table. It was as if a Hemingway or Steinbeck being picked over and altered by the writers of newsletters. Emery’s script was to be taken from him, looked over and judged by people who scanned for a product, not an art, and whose code of writing fell under the scrutiny of those memorized, bulleted rules that so many ascertained to be the safe gospel of the motion picture.

  Art, with her eye on the public, was not capitalism’s quiet lover so much as his prostitute, and there were those who considered her quite raggedy. Television was following Hollywood’s lead. Everything seemed to be joining into this odd workfare of maintenance and construction. Never in a writer’s life had it been so important to know a specific demographic and tickle it accordingly. This drained blood from the author and then dimmed the lights over the pallid thing left over.

  Emery uttered his sighs and lit his cigarettes. Smoking hard, these cigarettes were but filters in less than a minute. The stress had rickety bones and these rattled within him, jittering over petty trials and daily assertions. He was tired of representing himself, of defending his show, and his writing. The better span of this time should have been spent at home with his family. The Other Side, and its head writer, needed constant protection, as if each gray soul he encountered could not understand the obviousness of his decisions. He found himself receiving fan mail that asked for explanations regarding episodes: What did Joe mean when he said, “She’s always been here, in some way or another,” at the end of The Girl from Hatterburg? Why didn’t the alien agents in Bravo, Mr. Whitley, just send Whitley back and take a different person? How come we don’t ever see the poet’s face in I Contain Multitudes?

  FADE TO:

  Submerging. Emery was dissilient in projects, but weak with questions and defenses, favors and requests. He was exhausted with trying to get the show an hour-long format, something it was supposed to have had from the beginning. He was mentally depleted from working behind all the scenes in industry just to keep his name clear of that nasty plagiarism rumor and (finally dropped) copyright infringement lawsuit. The fatigue grew as if a mold over his brain and across his musculature, to the point that sitting still for even a moment seemed a sort of odd sin. He kept moving, smoking, pouring the coffee down his throat and typing away the evenings near his family, scattering his mind over the facets of his television show, trying to square up who he might sick on what job, just so he would not have to do it himself. He was played out from hopping on that ever-present edge of being outplayed. He paddled his hands well and reached the surface, tread and went under; this occurred to the day, and at times, to the very minute. Fill the ashtray. Fill the coffee cup.

  The three pictures for Pacific had been summarily picked at, and the studio wanted heavy reworking on two of them, something he was trying to fulfill with a short deadline. The complete renovation for The Passing of the Hand, the third script, was an overhaul he was not invited to take part in, however. The fourth season of The Other Side was underway, with three episodes filmed and the next slated to begin. Emery had taken a step backward from the show, as he no longer found he could give it his constant care. The maintenance he performed was disregarded anyway, and he had begun to feel as if he were an obstacle to the crew, at times, rather than a provider of guidance. He felt to be more an employer now, and less a creative influence. Perhaps this was due to familiarity, as the crewmembers were as if siblings to him now. The family was functional, but they had ceased inviting Emery out for drinks, and they did not often call but for problems requiring his attention. This may have been intuitive on their part; he only rarely allowed himself to accept recreation anymore. In the solving of various problems, Emery often inadvertently created new ones for himself. Sometimes a trouble could not be solved outright, and a person simply had to take the hit.

  He now wrote his scripts and appeared for the monologues, did various things on set when needed, exercising his creative control less than he once did. Emery had grown into the habit of passing jobs to others as quickly as he could. The fourth season was overwhelming. He was thankful that the show had managed to pass the network’s constraints and not be cancelled, but the work was piling up. When a scene regarding the newspaper office in the second episode needed rewriting, he had set Moffat to it: “It has to be done this week, and I can’t possibly get to it. Do what you can. Thanks, Cal.” This was becoming routine.

  Emery kept to his guns as much as he could. When a script’s ending was judged too dark for the network to approve, he would give it to Belmont: “Change it to your liking, Larry, and make it even darker. Have fun with it, but make sure it doesn’t seem dark or dismal until the audience has really thought about it. Hide it in there. We’ll get the story across that way. Screw ‘em.”

  He could no longer tackle each trouble to arise and Rowe was nonexistent. Emery simply could not do it all. He had written eighty-four episodes over a three year period and felt arid. His best works were voted out by the group, and his mediocre works were taken with pats on the back. He was confused and studying the accepted scripts hard, trying to find a general nucleus between them that he could take apart and adopt as a mainstay.

  ZOOM TO:

  Belmont. Belmont was writing some of the best scripts the show had yet seen, but unlike Emery, his were being accepted. Larry was not as good at hiding moral in his stories, but his tales had their own sort of conceits, and good ones. They could often be mistaken for real shockers, when in reality the stories conveyed more. That was the beauty of Belmont’s style, and Emery could spot it with ease. People thought Larry was writing surreal tales that possessed an other-worldly bent, but they had
it backward. Larry Belmont wrote other-worldly stories with a surrealist bent, and his other worlds were quite closely related to our own world. His structure was not as strong as Emery’s, and his dialogue was not as real as Moffat’s, but his overall force was undeniable, and he possessed one of the most important writer traits to a greater degree than Emery or Calvin: Improvisation. Larry could work from the top of his head, without outline, structure, reason, or any plan at all. He could sit down, utterly blank, and simply make things up without forethought, word after word, line after line, and he could do it at will. Writing was easier for Larry than it was for the other two writers. It was not, nor had it ever been, hard work for him.

  There was a bit of competition that had arisen in the fourth season, between Emery and Belmont. Moffat was smart to stay out of it. The two writers, friends, had been comparing rejections, accepted scripts, and rewrites. They were battling in a somewhat genial way, to see who the true Other Side workhorse was. This had begun in simple fun, stemming from a conversation over drinks in the Asher house one night early in the season, but over time that fun had begun to glare a bit. Belmont did not have the drive Emery had, but this was perhaps a benefit, and not a failing. Also, in the unofficial contest, Belmont did not have the monologues on his side. Those belonged to the host, and only the host wrote them. In this way, the younger writer could never fully win, though the work he brought to Emery was threateningly good. The glare in this fun competition was aimed at Larry. He served as both willing playmate and mild butt of the joke, and this friendly (though rigged) competition was one of the only aspects of the season that made Emery smile.