Emerald City

by David Williamson

  The trouble with this scene is that there’s nothing at stake. Unless something’s at stake you have no emotional undercurrent and all you’re left with is two people chatting. What’s at stake?

  MIKE: [dutifully repeating the magic litany] What’s at stake?

  COLIN: Hold it a minute while I think this one through.

  COLIN returns to his armchair and to deep thought. MIKE looks to the heavens as if to say, ‘How much more of this do I have to put up with?’

  MIKE: [to the audience] I began to think I wasn’t going to last the distance. My stomach was giving me hell. Every morning it’d flicker from yesterday’s embers and by the end of the day I’d have your full fireball. I was taking three times as many tablets a day as I should’ve been but it had as much effect as pissing on a bushfire. [To COLIN] Just make a quick call.

  He picks up the phone and dials.

  [Into the phone] Bob? How about a drink? Six-thirty at the Admiral’s Cup bar. Heard about Terry’s film? Disaster. Absolute disaster. Only took three thousand over the long weekend. [He nods.] Disaster. See you at six-thirty.

  COLIN: Terry’s film not doing well?

  MIKE: Disaster.

  COLIN: Do you know what really amazes me about this industry, Mike? I’ve got the best track record on script in the country and that phone never rings. Terry could’ve asked me to write that script and I could’ve made it work. But he didn’t. They never do.

  MIKE: [to the audience] If I’d’ve heard him whinge once more about why producers weren’t lining up to plead for his services, I’d’ve perforated. The thing that amazed me about him was that he knew nothing about how the real world operated. The reason producers weren’t flocking to him was that they had egos almost as big as his, and who would enjoy crawling on their bellies like I had to do? [To COLIN] I’ll get some coffee.

  MIKE leaves.

  COLIN: [to the audience] I watched Mike with the fascination of a zoologist who’s found a new species. Port Jackson huckster. He kept ringing around an endless list of contacts, all male, and arranged meetings. The currency being exchanged at the meetings was failure. Other people’s. It seemed crucial to Mike that everything failed. If there was a film due for release that seemed in any danger of being declared a success, Mike and his drinking mates would expend enormous amounts of mental energy cracking its pretentions like a walnut. I had an image of Mike as a kind of filmic gridiron player, waiting with the ball until all of his opponents were lying bloody and prostrate so that he could wend his way through them to the touchline. I found this behaviour amusing and reassuring. Other people’s failures are always reassuring, but the frantic energy and effort he put into his networking of failure was worrying.

  KATE comes home looking upset.

  [To KATE] What’s wrong?

  KATE: I’m so angry I can’t even talk about it. The children are all screaming for food, I suppose?

  COLIN: Don’t worry about that. We’ll phone up for some pizzas. He’s not going to publish?

  KATE: I just wanted to grab that hollow little man by his collar and hurl him down into that sparkling blue harbour he’s paid seventy thousand dollars a year to gaze at. I know you can’t understand my passion about that book—

  COLIN: [interrupting] I can. I’m not totally insensitive.

  KATE: I was nearly in tears today. I’m going to have to resign.

  COLIN: Don’t do that. He’ll change his mind.

  KATE: No, he won’t. He’s gutless. And he just doesn’t care.

  She moves across and flops into a chair. There’s a pause.

  I didn’t mean to hurt you about your work. You write beautifully. You can’t be expected to write with her power and passion when you’ve led such a cosseted life.

  She sees COLIN’s look.

  What’s wrong?

  COLIN: That’s a bit like saying, ‘I’m sorry I said you were indescribably ugly. I’ve just seen your parents and I understand why.’

  MIKE returns with the coffee. KATE sees him, gives a frozen smile, and leaves.

  MIKE: What’s wrong with Kate?

  COLIN: Her boss won’t let her publish a book she thinks is crucial.

  MIKE: Making things a bit difficult domestically?

  COLIN: I agree with her. I think it should be published too.

  MIKE: What’s it about?

  COLIN: A black girl trying to break out of the urban poverty cycle.

  COLIN picks up some pages MIKE has typed and walks away from the desk as he scrutinises them.

  MIKE: What’s the name of Kate’s boss?

  COLIN: Ian Wall. He reckons, ‘Blacks don’t sell books’.

  MIKE searches through the teledex and locates the name. COLIN, engrossed in the script, doesn’t notice.

  MIKE: What’s the writer’s name?

  COLIN: Kathy Mitchell.

  MIKE starts dialling. COLIN barely notices.

  MIKE: Ian?

  COLIN looks up, frowning, but still isn’t sure what MIKE’s doing.

  Ian, there’s a rumour going around that you won’t publish Kathy’s book? [Pause.] Kathy Mitchell. [Pause.] Don’t worry about who’s speaking, mate, just listen to what I’m telling you. A lot of people reckon it’s one of the most important books ever written on the black people’s problems and they’re bloody mad. They’ve heard the reason you won’t print it is that you said, ‘Blacks don’t sell books’—and they reckon that’s a pretty racist statement. [Pause.] Well, that’s how they feel it comes across, and they’re so bloody mad that they’re going to give you twenty-four hours and then they’re going to start putting up tents around your building and calling the media in.

  MIKE hangs up.

  COLIN: [frowning] Jesus, Mike! What in the hell do you think you’re doing?

  MIKE: [reassuringly] Blowtorch to the belly.

  COLIN looks anything but reassured. He sits there wondering how in the hell he is going to explain this to KATE. MIKE exits.

  Later: COLIN still sits in an armchair. KATE enters, smiling and excited.

  KATE: You won’t believe what happened.

  COLIN: [tensely] What?

  KATE: Ian got a call from some black guerrilla group who threatened to bomb the building unless he published. Should have seen the panic. It was wonderful.

  COLIN: [worriedly] Did he call the police?

  KATE: God, no. He’s terrified of bad publicity.

  COLIN: He’s going to publish?

  KATE: [nodding] Three thousand copies. What’s your news?

  COLIN: I forgot the dishwashing powder and the broccoli.

  KATE: I’m sorry I’ve been so rotten lately. I just started feeling that nothing was ever going to go right again.

  COLIN: And the dried apricots. They were on the list, but I made that fatal mistake of going straight to the breakfast foods. Even when I was doing it I kept saying to myself, ‘Remember the apricots, remember the apricots’, but I didn’t.

  KATE: Stop it. Sorry I’ve been so down on the kids. When you’re having a bad time at work everything can seem pretty black.

  COLIN: No, you’re quite right. The kids are appalling. I tried to talk to Penny about her disco going and the like, but the look of pity and contempt on her face at my presumption that I might have any wisdom to offer her stopped me right in my tracks.

  KATE: Depressing, isn’t it?

  COLIN: I spend most of my time taking messages from girls with names like Manon, Melissa and Foxglove. They chat on for hours with each other about which boys are likely to be at what bars when, who’s been ‘dumped’ by who and who’s therefore available, who got with who at which party and who doesn’t know about it yet, and won’t there be hell to pay when they do. What does ‘getting with’ mean?

  KATE: Why?

  COLIN: Our daughter seems to be one of the most frequent ‘getters with’ in town.

  KATE: It’s just petting. Surprising as it may seem, they’re all still virgins.

  COLIN: They’re the most sophis
ticated bunch of virgins I’ve ever heard.

  KATE: It’s all very innocent. Don’t get depressed.

  COLIN: The only thing I’m depressed about is that it all sounds so bloody interesting. When’s the last time we leapt to the phone to hear who had just got with what? We’re totally irrelevant to our daughter’s life because as far as she’s concerned we’re middle-aged stodges whose life is effectively over. And maybe she’s right. Maybe all the excitement happens upfront.

  KATE: You’re morbid tonight.

  COLIN: Well, don’t you ever get struck with a sense of unfairness? We’re supposed to be professionals at the peak of our powers leading highly interesting lives and our daughter is having all the fun!

  KATE: [wistfully] Yes. We can have sex every night, but she gets ten times the excitement we do thinking about a session of heavy petting with some spotted adolescent.

  COLIN: [hurt] I didn’t realise it was that bad.

  KATE: It happens in every marriage.

  COLIN: [defensively] It’s not exactly cosmic for me either. I watched a re-run of Ryan’s Daughter the other night and had to search my memory to work out what was happening when Sarah Miles got under the stiff-legged Englishman and started making those plaintive little yelps.

  KATE: She was acting. I can’t.

  KATE exits. MIKE enters and they have a strategy session.

  COLIN: He’s a typical merchant banker. On the one hand he’s urbane, arrogant, cynical, vain and ruthlessly determined to screw you for the last quarter of one percent…

  MIKE: And on the other hand?

  COLIN: [thinking] I don’t think there is another hand.

  MIKE: Can’t wait to meet him.

  COLIN: Are you okay?

  MIKE: [swallowing pills] Stomach’s playing up a bit.

  COLIN: Don’t worry. It’s a good project and he’ll go for it. Don’t show him you’re nervous. Speak to him as if he’s a drinking mate.

  As he enters, COLIN and MIKE confront MALCOLM, an impeccably dressed, urbane, arrogant, cynical and vain merchant banker. MIKE is nervous and out of his class.

  Congratulations on your election.

  MALCOLM: You read that embarrassing little item, did you? I’ve no idea how the press picked it up. [He turns to MIKE.] For my sins I was elected President of the Friends of the Opera.

  MIKE: Needs all the friends it can get.

  MALCOLM: [generously trying to cover for MIKE’s gaffe] Don’t be too harsh. At its best moments it can be sublime.

  MIKE: I could bore people for a fraction of the cost, but every man to his poison.

  COLIN: [trying to recover the situation] Have you had time to read the script, Malcolm?

  MALCOLM: I read the synopsis. Colin, I’ve got to be honest with you. I don’t think it’s our sort of project.

  COLIN: [stunned] How can you say that when you’ve only read the synopsis?

  MALCOLM: Colin, how do you expect me to get my investors excited about men who sat and watched coasts?

  COLIN: [coldly] If you read the script, I think you’ll find they did a lot more than that.

  MALCOLM: Colin, I need a concept that’s exciting. Exciting enough to hook investors and convince them that the project will sell here and overseas.

  COLIN: This is exciting. How a handful of men saved Australia!

  MALCOLM: Colin, no-one under fifty knows Australia was even threatened, and the rest of the world hardly knows Australia exists. Believe me, after spending half my life boarding and leaving international flights I’ve come to the conclusion that the only thing the nations of the world have in common is a profound indifference to anything that’s ever happened here.

  COLIN: So you’re saying you’ll only underwrite projects that have nothing to do with this country or its history?

  MALCOLM: I’ve got to be absolutely honest. I can’t even think the word ‘coastwatchers’ without yawning.

  COLIN: [angrily, passionately] This is a real story about real people who risked their necks for years at a time so that you and I could be here in this room today! You can’t dismiss it without reading the script.

  MALCOLM: Look, Colin, it could be the best-written script in the world, but unless it smells exciting it’s no use to us.

  COLIN: Malcolm, all my scripts have made money for you in the past. You owe it to me to read it.

  MALCOLM: Alright, I’ll read it.

  COLIN: Sit down and read it now.

  MALCOLM: Colin, I’ve got appointments all afternoon.

  COLIN: Malcolm, I spent six months of my life writing this. The least you can do is spend two hours reading it!

  MALCOLM: I’ll read it. I’ll read it tonight and phone you in the morning.

  MALCOLM exits.

  MIKE: [to the audience] Malcolm was right. The only people who would ever find the concept wildly exciting were the surviving coastwatchers, which gave us a guaranteed audience of three, but we finally got the money. It was the only way Malcolm could get Colin off his back.

  COLIN: [to the audience] The production and shoot were hellish. Mike was useless. He talked big but knew nothing. In a single day we lost our director, art director and cinematographer when he insisted that the opening sequence feature a slow-motion close-up of a Caucasian head being severed by a Samurai sword, leaving newly exposed arteries to pump red blood into white titles. We had to get a line producer in to pick up the pieces two days before the cameras rolled. I turned grey, Mike threw up a lot, but finally, miraculously, it was in the can.

  MIKE: [to the audience] The shoot went well. Our director walked out on us, but it was just as well. He had no visual flair. Colin panicked every time there was the slightest hiccup but I held things together and we finished right on schedule.

  COLIN: [to the audience] We finished the mix and sent out the tapes to the critics.

  MIKE: [to the audience] The critics loved it. I knew we had a disaster on our hands. When critics say ‘sensitive’ and ‘lyrical’, the public reads ‘slow’ and ‘arty’. Colin ran around with the crits in his hands beaming at everyone. I nodded politely and waited for the ratings.

  KATE enters and they wait for the ratings at Mike’s place. It’s evening and there’s been some drinking. KATE, in particular, is showing the effects.

  COLIN: [tensely] Ring them again.

  MIKE: They said they’d ring as soon as the figures came through.

  KATE: I don’t know what you’re worried about. It was wonderful. Everyone in the country would’ve been watching. I cried.

  COLIN: You always cry.

  KATE: When that young boy—that beautiful young boy— What was his name?

  COLIN: Gary Denton.

  KATE: Gary Denton. Beautiful golden hair. I would like a very deep conversation with that young man.

  COLIN: He can barely talk.

  KATE: When he died, the tears just flowed. [She looks around.] How long have you had this place, Mike?

  MIKE: Too long.

  KATE: [condescending] It’s charming. Little stairways here and little alcoves there. It’s remarkable how little space you really need. When we were in China we saw whole families of peasants living in a place half the size of this, didn’t we, Colin? [Looking up] I don’t know whether khaki’s right for the ceiling though.

  MIKE: It used to be white, but we left the window open.

  KATE laughs loudly.

  KATE: You’re very funny, Mike.

  COLIN: Helen says I’m a walking joke.

  KATE laughs loudly. The phone rings. MIKE darts across to it. He listens. He nods. His face shows no emotion. He puts down the phone.

  MIKE: Thirteen.

  COLIN: [alarmed] That can’t be right. Are you sure they didn’t say thirty?

  MIKE: Thirteen. Fourteen in Melbourne.

  KATE: Thirteen?

  COLIN: [tersely, to KATE] Thirteen percent of sets tuned to us.

  MIKE: Disaster.

  COLIN: It has to be wrong. They only sample a few hundred.

 
MIKE: A few thousand.

  COLIN: The promotion was hopeless.

  KATE: To hell with the ratings. We all know what gets ratings. Trash.

  COLIN: [irritated] Kate, in this business if you don’t get ratings you’re dead. You can’t sell your next project.

  MIKE: We’ll sell it.

  KATE: [to COLIN] What next project?

  COLIN: I don’t want to talk about it.

  KATE: You said you were going to do the Sanzari film with Elaine.

  COLIN: Kate, I’ve started producing my own work and I’m not about to take three steps back!

  KATE: What’s this next project?

  COLIN: [gesticulating] For Christ’s sake, we’ve just had a catastrophic failure. I’m not in the mood to talk about what I might or might not be doing next!

  KATE: It’s not a failure. It was excellent.

  COLIN: Nobody watched!

  KATE: What’s this next project?

  COLIN: Kate, we’ve just scored a thirteen! I don’t want to talk about it.

  He turns away. KATE glares at him. MIKE tries to defuse the tension.

  MIKE: [to KATE] Colin and I have been knocking around some pretty exciting ideas.

  KATE: Such as?

  COLIN: [agitated] I don’t want to discuss it. I don’t even know if I’ll be doing anything at all after this. I might pack the whole game in and go back to teaching!

  KATE: [to MIKE] Ideas for what? More mini-series?

  MIKE: Long-running series.

  KATE: [frowning] What do you mean? Something like ‘Dallas’?

  MIKE: Field’s wide open for a big international hit. Could make millions.

  KATE: Television series are trash!

  COLIN: It’s barely got to discussion stage!

  KATE: You’re going to spend the rest of your life writing soap opera?

  COLIN: Not writing, producing! And it wouldn’t be trash!

  KATE: Name me the series that isn’t.

  MIKE: If we get a US sale we could make millions.

  KATE: [to COLIN] Since when have you been interested in making millions?

  COLIN: What’s wrong with making money?

  KATE: I think it’s very sad.