by Don Lee
“I mean, why is it,” Dalton said, chewing on his omelet, “that when Ang Lee does Jane Austen or gay cowboys, it’s showing his range as a director, but if I were to do it, it’d be race betrayal? Because I’m from Menlo Park and he’s from Taiwan? Look, I’m not naïve. Nothing happens in this country without the involutions of race. But if we let it dictate what we can and cannot do and start limiting ourselves as artists, then we’re no longer free. We’re oppressed. We’re slaves.”
Woody nodded, bored, not even bothering to disparage Ang Lee’s gay cowboy movie, which was scheduled to open in December and was sure to bomb. Woody knew he was being played. Dalton was engaging in this grand disquisition not because he believed anything he was saying, but because he wanted something. Evangelists of all stripes—political, religious—were always motivated by a hidden agenda. Dalton was positioning himself for a negotiation. So Woody finished his gooey potato salad, wiped his mouth, and came right out and asked, “What is it that you want?”
“What do I want?” Dalton said. He raised his arms and gestured to the posters on the walls of the restaurant. “Look around you. The Passenger. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Five Easy Pieces. Chinatown. Carnal Knowledge. The King of Marvin Gardens. The Last Detail. Fuck, that was a good movie. They all were. I want to make movies like that—great movies. That’s what I want. Simple as that.”
“We could make this movie great,” Woody said. “You could make it great.”
“Oh, come on, let’s not kid ourselves,” Dalton said. “It’s a shame. The original screenplay had a lot of potential. I really thought I could do a sort of dystopian, post-apocalyptic, neonoir send-up of martial arts movies.”
“That’s precisely what I envisioned,” Woody said.
“But with a lot of dark humor, something playfully absurd, almost a kind of metaphysical Feydeanesque farce, a burlesque mixed in with a little magic realism.”
“Exactly!” Woody said. It sounded so much better, the way Dalton was describing it.
“With coincidence as a motif,” he said, “so we’d have all these crisscrossing destinies, these intertwined story lines, all the characters searching for ascendancy from their daily lives.”
“Yes!” Woody said. What a fantastic pitch. He had to memorize this. This movie could be good. It could be something to be proud of—a moneymaker and a critical darling, a cult classic. It could rack up a bunch of awards at film festivals and be Woody’s calling card to much bigger projects. People would be clamoring to work with him. Studios would bid to sign him up to a long-term, multiple-film production deal.
“But there’s no way I’ll ever be able to make that movie,” Dalton said.
“No?”
“No.”
“Why not?” Woody asked.
“Because of you.”
Woody felt the blood in his face drain. “Me?”
“You,” Dalton said. “You’ve let these investors and distributors and God knows who else water down the script to the point where it’s now unrecognizable. You let them put Yi Ling Ling—she’s not even B-list, she’s, like, never-listed—in the lead, and you stripped the production budget to the barest possible bones. You’ve ensured that this thing will never have a chance. There’s not a shot in hell it could ever be any good. You sucked the life out of it. You killed it.”
“All of those things can be changed,” Woody said. “This is what the business is all about—it’s push-pull, give-and-take. Everything’s negotiable, nothing’s irrevocable. It’s an equation with an attainable solution. We can still make this work.”
“No, I don’t think we can,” Dalton said.
“Why do you say that?”
“Look me in the eyes, Woody. Look me in the eyes and tell me, honestly, that this movie won’t be a stinker. Tell me you don’t know that already.”
Woody looked Dalton in the eyes and, despite not quite believing it, not really, not if he truly had to be honest about it, said, “This movie won’t be a stinker.”
Dalton smiled wryly. “Then you’re not as smart as I thought.”
“You want more money, don’t you?” Woody said.
“That’s not it.”
“More control.”
“That’s not it, either.”
What else was there? Woody thought. “Just tell me,” he said. “Tell me what you want.”
Dalton swallowed the last of his coffee. “I want out.”
Woody slid his plastic basket away. He’d eaten too much, his belly straining against his belt. He wondered if the YMCA in town would be open today. “I know you’re new to all of this,” Woody said to Dalton calmly. “You’re—how should we put it?—you’re a bit idealistic about the transactional nature of the movie business. What you don’t know yet is that we all start out with the best of intentions, we really do, but we have to accept that compromises will be made. The truth is, no one gets exactly what they want. No one. With the constraints given, we do the best we can, we hope to deliver a decent product and make a decent return on our investment. Once in a while it all comes together and you hit it out of the park, but most of the time it doesn’t. You end up making something that’s respectable but not high art, just a modest entertainment. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. You do it, and you move on. You see, Dalton, you can’t get out. Contractually you’re bound to this project. If you try to renege, we’ll sue you. We’ll make it very expensive and nasty for you, and it’ll be protracted, and we’ll file injunctions so you won’t be able to work on anything else in the meantime, and your reputation will end up in shit. You don’t want that. I don’t want that. No one wants that. So let’s just do the best we can. We’ll work together and do the best we can. What do you say to that?”
“I changed agents,” Dalton said.
“Yeah?”
“I’m with CCC now.”
A little shudder traveled down Woody’s intestines, the mere mention of CCC making him pucker. CCC was the most powerful agency in Hollywood, the most feared collection of sharks among a sea of sharks, evil, ruthless ball-crushers, the holy mothers of shit-your-nicky-na-nas scary motherfuckers.
“They’re the ones who told me to delay our meeting. They’re talking to their attorneys. They think losing Vivienne Cheung and all the other changes makes my contract null and void.”
His movie was dead. It was as good as dead. “They have something else they want you to do, don’t they?” Woody said. “Something from a major studio.”
“No,” Dalton said. “I found something on my own. I ran across a book. Have you ever read any Richard Yates?”
Yates. He dimly recalled reading Yates for AP English in high school. “Sure,” he said. “‘The Second Coming,’ the spiral gyre.”
“You’re thinking of William Butler Yeats, the poet. Richard Yates was a novelist, a contemporary of Styron and Vonnegut. Brilliant, pitiless, heartbreaking stuff, unremittingly bleak. His first novel, Revolutionary Road, was a National Book Award finalist, but then he faded out of the picture, even though he continued to write, and write well. Eight more books. Eight and a half. When he died in 1992, he was pretty much out of print. A really tragic figure, an alcoholic. He smoked four packs a day and had emphysema. He died alone, living in a crappy little apartment in Alabama hooked up to a portable oxygen tank with tubes in his nose. They found the unfinished manuscript of his last novel in his refrigerator. It was based on his experience working as a speechwriter for Bobby Kennedy. I got to read it. I bought the rights to it.”
“That’s what you want to do?” Woody asked.
“Yes.”
Bleak, tragic, and pitiless were not adjectives you wanted attached to any film. He was insane. Woody couldn’t believe CCC was even letting him consider this.
The waitress dropped off the check, looking at Dalton meaningfully. He turned it over and smiled. The girl had written her name and phone number on the check. “I think she wants to ‘interview’ me,” Dalton said to Woody.
What a s
leazebag, Woody thought. What a hypocrite. He was perfectly happy to be Asian American if it was advantageous for him, if it might get him laid. He was just like Lyndon—everything had always just fallen in his lap, a golden boy, gifted, lucky, blessed—and Woody hated him for it.
“I already started the screenplay,” Dalton said, “and a couple of people have expressed interest.”
“What people?”
He mentioned three A-list stars, all Academy Award nominees, all CCC clients who would never deign to give Woody the time of day, much less a meeting.
“I’m sorry,” Dalton said. “It’s nothing personal. It’s just, you know—”
And here he crossed the line. He could have let it go at that and been done with it, but he had to take it one more step and humiliate Woody, put him in his place.
“It’s just,” he said to Woody with a veneer of vindictive glee, “the way the business works.”
IT WAS A PIECE OF SHIT. Dalton was right. His movie would be a piece of shit. But it was all Woody had, and he had too much riding on it to abandon it now. He had ignored the first rule when entering any negotiation: always retain the option to walk away. He couldn’t walk away. It was possible he might lose his production company. He might lose his house, his car. He might end up peddling bootleg DVDs on the street again. He might have to take the Glock 17 from his nightstand drawer and stick it in his right ear and pull the trigger, just as Kyle had done.
What was he going to do? Unquestionably, his investors, once they heard the news of Dalton’s defection, would quickly drop out, one after another, the first of which would be his German distributor, for whom he had done nothing to persuade Lyndon to sell his farm—did he, in fact, tell him last night not to sell it?—in service to the conglomerate SBK. How could he let himself get in this position, Woodrow Wilson Song, power broker extraordinaire, éminence grise of Machiavellian persuasion? He was on the verge of failure and destitution, while Lyndon, his idiot slacker brother, was thumbing his nose at fifteen million dollars. It infuriated Woody. That sort of money bought independence. It bought security. It bought immunity from the perils and vagaries and injustices of fate and luck.
He went back to the farm, which was deserted, everyone presumably at the chili and chowder festival, and he took a long hot shower. He reapplied the calamine lotion and swallowed two more antihistamines. He replaced his bandages and changed into another set of clothes, throwing the hoodie, cargo pants, and uggs in the trash. Grabbing his PDA and Bluetooth headset, he went outside and wandered around the yard in search of a better signal. The PDA was an older model, its phone capabilities rather weak.
“Hello?”
“Dan, it’s Woody.”
“Oh,” his therapist said, disappointment bleaching his voice. “Woody, it’s Sunday. Can’t this wait until our regular time?”
“I don’t know what I’m doing here, Dan. It’s all falling apart. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Okay, slow down, slow down,” Dan said. “Take a deep breath. Can you do that for me?”
“Yeah,” Woody said, and he breathed in, breathed out.
“One more,” Dan said. “Feel the tension dissipate.”
He breathed in, breathed out, and the tension did dissipate a little, although the scalene muscles in his neck remained cramped and stiff.
“All right, then,” Dan said. “Where are you? Are you at your brother’s?”
“Yeah,” Woody said.
“How’s that going?”
“Okay, I guess. There are moments we don’t hate each other.”
“Well, that’s good. Don’t you think that’s good?”
“Though I hate the idea of him, still. He’s not going to sell his farm, which means my financing is in jeopardy, which means I might be homeless soon.”
“Woody,” Dan told him, “particalize what you’ve just said. This is exactly what I mean. You always look at things in extremes. Is it really that bad? If your movie fails, will you really become homeless? What’s really the worst that can happen?”
“What did you say?” Woody asked. He couldn’t hear Dan well. Besides the spotty connection, a bunch of white-crowned sparrows and scrub jays were making a racket in the trees, raucous and shrill, shreep-shreep, quay-quay-quay, jree-reee, check-check-check. Fucking birds. He picked up a rock and chucked it into the closest tree.
“What’s the worst that can happen?” Dan repeated, louder.
“I’ll have to kill myself.”
“Come, now.”
“I’ve never told you this, Dan,” Woody said. “I have a gun.”
Dan waited a second before responding. “Right now?” he asked quietly.
“What?”
“You have a gun right now, Woody? You have one with you, at this very moment?”
“No. It’s at home, in L.A.”
“Oh,” Dan said. “Well, that’s a relief.”
“It’s all falling apart, Dan. I’m hanging by a thread. I don’t know what to do.”
“Let me put on my headset, then you can tell me what’s happening.”
He told Dan everything, about Kyle and Trudy and Lyndon, about Dalton Lee and Ling Ling, about Ed Kitchell and the German financier and the SBK conglomerate, babbling in rapid non sequiturs as he paced in front of Lyndon’s house, hands gesticulating wildly in the air to no one. It did seem like no one at times, talking to Dan. Woody often wondered if he was really listening. On the other end of the line, he could be doing anything—his bills, flipping through a magazine, watching TV on mute while reading the captions—and Woody always felt compelled to stop now and then and ask, “Are you there?”
Today, he wasn’t mindful of needing any conversational assurance, preoccupied with the crisis at hand, blathering heedlessly, until he heard something very distinctly over the phone, a trickling of water, a soft, continuous, languid stream that was viscerally familiar.
“Dan,” he said, “what are you doing? Are you taking a piss?”
“Of course not,” Dan said, but Woody caught the tincture of embarrassment in the denial. He surmised that Dan, trying to be clandestine, had sat on the toilet seat and aimed for the side of the bowl.
“I forgot what I was saying,” Woody said to test him.
“Never mind,” Dan said. “Look, this is not your life, Woody.”
“What?” What sort of ridiculous statement was that? This was not his life?
“This is not your life,” Dan said again. “This does not own you. This is not who you are.”
Woody thought of all the hours he had spent with Dan, all the money he had paid him. Had a single thing he ever said made a difference? Had anything ever struck Woody as truly profound, or had all of it been merely trite, touchy-feely, clichéd psychobabble—empty bromides and insipid, quasi-Eastern dictums, Let it go, This is not your life—straight out of some self-help book you could get off the shelf? Any shelf. Dan was the sole person in L.A. Woody could really confide in, and the sad, incontrovertible fact was, Dan only talked to him because every minute he spent with him was billable. “I have to go,” Woody told him.
It was late in the afternoon, the sun low in the sky. He drove to town. He had missed most of the festival, many of the vendors already breaking down their booths, though there were still plenty of stragglers left on Main Street, parents holding hands with children who had their faces painted, carrying balloons.
Wandering past the art exhibits, he noticed a man and a woman behind the booths in an alleyway between buildings. It was the boy and girl from the ice-cream store, the ones who’d been on horseback on the beach. She was standing with her back against the wall, one knee bent, foot flat on the brick. He was leaning against her, both arms raised overhead, hands on the wall, pinning her there with his hips, and they were staring at each other, giggling, the girl’s head twisted slightly to the side, as if she were affronted with what he was suggesting, but the way she held her mouth open and askew—something about it looked so wanton—gave it all a
way. She would, eventually, comply.
“Woody! Woody!”
Trudy Nguyen jumped on Woody, wrapping her arms around his neck and hugging him. He had promised to visit her and Margot at the Bidwell Marsh Preserve again today, but it had slipped his mind entirely.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. “I was afraid I wouldn’t see you before we left.”
“Where are you going?” Woody asked.
“What happened to your face?” she said.
“Nothing. You’re leaving? What about AY:BO and WY:GO and their chicks?”
“They’re gone. The chicks didn’t make it.”
The news, surprisingly, distressed Woody. “What happened?”
“They were taken by ravens. It was awful. I saw them coming, and there was nothing we could do. By the time we got down there, it was too late. But you know, I’m okay with it. I can accept it. It’s part of the natural cycle of things, not something caused by people, so we did our job. Now we’re going to another project, in Hawaii.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow. We’re going to try to lure the Laysan albatross into nesting on Kaohikaipu Island, off Oahu, instead of on the airstrips.”
She led Woody down the street and around the corner, where Margot was standing before—of all things—an elephant named Esther. Next month during the pumpkin festival, a local farm would be offering rides on Esther and another Asian elephant named Louise, and Esther was here today, corralled in a sandy vacant lot, for advance promotion, an exploitation that didn’t sit well with the girls. Margot and Trudy had been harassing the elephant’s keeper, Roger.
“We know all about your training methods, the way you abuse them,” Margot said. “Blowtorches, bullhooks, electric prods. It’s cruel and unusual punishment. We’ve seen the videos.”
Roger, a stocky man in his thirties with a mullet haircut, rolled his eyes. “What are you guys?” he asked. “CEASE? PETA? Why don’t you take your clothes off, then? Isn’t that what you do at protests? Why don’t you get naked and have a lie-down? I wouldn’t mind seeing that. I might even join you.”