Screenscam

by Michael Bowen

  That tore it. This was definitely not your typical, sturdy, four-square Midwestern copyright case. Things were moving very fast. Rep wasn’t ready to spill the whole story to Arundel yet, but Finneman needed to see the hold-your-tongue package. Rep hurried down to the lounge to retrieve it from the freezer.

  It was gone.

  Chapter 7

  “Admit it, this isn’t what you expected,” Aaron Eastman said.

  “This isn’t what I expected,” Rep yelled.

  He yelled because he was overcompensating for the roar of four throbbing engines that spun propellers outside windows to his left and right. He agreed because Eastman was right.

  To start with, Eastman himself wasn’t what Rep had expected. Thoughtlessly swallowing sitcom stereotypes, Rep had pictured the producer as short, bald, equipped with a cigar, and sporting a Rodeo Drive silk shirt open to the navel to show a gold medallion against graying chest hair. Instead, the man he’d met at the airport nudged six feet, wore his ample, light brown hair in an unpretentious but (Rep suspected) very expensive brush cut, and was dressed like a young CEO on casual day.

  More to Eastman’s point, Rep had expected to find Eastman waiting beside a Lear Jet or some equivalent aeronautic symbol of coastal opulence. The craft that Eastman had actually invited Rep to board was much older and much slower: a fully functional, World War II-era B-24 four-engine bomber, straight out of Twelve O’Clock High. The plane took off, to Rep’s unconcealed consternation, with Eastman himself at the controls.

  The vintage warbird showed every sign of loving restoration, but no concessions to spoiled modernity compromised its authenticity. Though Rep and Eastman were seated less than six feet from each other, for example, they were talking over throat mikes, because the cabin wasn’t pressurized and they’d donned oxygen masks around two miles up. Even the pilot—the real one, who’d taken over at ten thousand feet—looked as if he’d just stepped out of a ready room. Rep felt that he ought to be seeing the man in black-and-white, the way he remembered World War II pilots before Ted Turner colorized their exploits.

  The doughy-faced twenty-something sitting in the navigator’s seat, on the other hand, struck Rep as stereo-typically left coast and post-war. Eastman had introduced him as “Jerry Selding, production assistant and entourage du jour.”

  “That takeoff was impressive,” Rep said.

  “Just showing off,” Eastman said. “Bad habit. I had thirty hours logged on this boat before I even started thinking about Every Sixteen Minutes. And remember, these babies were designed to be flown through flak by ninety-day wonders, so it’s not that big a trick.”

  “That’s reassuring,” Rep said. “But about six hundred feet down the runway I thought we might test Hemingway’s theory about courage being grace under pressure.”

  “I’ll tell you something no one ever mentions when they quote that line,” Eastman said. “Our boy Ernie had a major thing about his mother—and guess what mom’s name was? Grace. How’s that for a creepy mental image?”

  “Interesting,” Rep said—albeit, not quite as interesting as being thirty thousand feet over Lake Michigan in a plane pushing sixty years old.

  “I brought something for you,” Eastman said, reaching awkwardly behind his back to tender a clutch of photocopied pages. “That’s the product placement deal with Philip Morris for In Contemplation of Death. Signed it three months before principal photography started. Fifty thousand dollars, on the condition that the female lead spend at least twenty-four on-screen seconds smoking Marlboro Lights, with the pack ‘conspicuously displayed.’”

  “Good advertising for them and easy money for you,” Rep commented.

  “Not so easy as all that. You should’ve seen the attitude Shevaun Waltrip copped about it. Brat had her own condo at the Betty Ford Clinic before she was eighteen, but from the way she whined you would’ve thought puffing a cigarette was the next thing to mainlining horse. Anyway, that’s why the lead character in that movie smokes. It was the fifty thousand bucks, not because we stole the idea of having a heroine with bad habits from your client.”

  “That doesn’t come as a complete surprise,” Rep said.

  He knew this comment was tactically obtuse, but he couldn’t stop himself from saying it. He suddenly wanted to seem worldly and with it. He was trying hard not to be blown away by Eastman and the B-24 and the Hollywood-confidential stuff. He suspected that bowling him over with this kind of just-between-us-insiders routine was exactly what Eastman was up to, and knew he had to resist it. The thing was, he couldn’t help liking Eastman, who came across as less phony and more down-to-earth than half the partners at Rep’s firm, and who could talk knowledgeably about flying four-propeller bombers in one breath and offer articulate literary banter in the next. And dammit, the B-24 was impressive.

  “I’m not going to tell you your claim is a crock,” Eastman said. “I gave you that product placement agreement to show you I’m on the level. I know Point West could be liable for what a lot of other people did, but I want you to start with at least the possibility that I personally am playing straight with you. Because we have some things to talk about.”

  “What do we have to talk about?” Rep asked.

  “First thing you have to understand is, and I think you probably know this, I can’t just throw a hundred thousand at your client to make this thing go away. Even if it would cost me six times that to defend it. One nuisance-value settlement and I’ll have frustrated writers coming out of the woodwork, accusing me of ripping off every unsuccessful novel, short story, poem, and grocery list written in the last twenty years.”

  “Well,” Rep said judiciously, “I don’t think nuisance value is what Charlotte Buchanan has in mind.”

  “I believe you,” Eastman said. “But suppose you weren’t a solid, steady IP lawyer with a good firm—which I dug up from Martindale-Hubbel myself instead of paying a lawyer four hundred bucks an hour to dig it up for me. Suppose instead you were a typical plaintiff’s lawyer, a bottom-feeding legal gunslinger taking your client for a ride on the cheap and planning down the road to sell her a settlement based on something out of Point West’s petty cash box. Wouldn’t you have said exactly the same thing?”

  “I suppose so,” Rep admitted. “But I probably would have said it with biting indignation and in a highly mortified tone, instead of dryly and concisely.”

  “Which brings me to the second reason we’re having this meeting. Namely, to see if we can find a way to stop this trainwreck before it happens.”

  “I’m game,” Rep said.

  Swiveling in his co-pilot’s seat, Eastman looked steadily at Rep. For two or three seconds, Rep felt the cool, gray eyes visible over Eastman’s oxygen mask appraising him. Then, Eastman snapped his head toward the starboard window. Rep’s eyes followed the gesture. Through thick glass designed to stop chunks of metal flying at lethal speeds, he saw a section of olive drab wing bouncing gingerly as if an unseen high diver were poised on its far end; saw the humps of the starboard engines; saw the wing and engines gilded by brilliant sunshine above, set off against blindingly white clouds below them; and sensed, rather than saw, the whir of two propellers whose mind-numbing lacerations of air almost six miles from earth was the only thing keeping them alive.

  “Look at the visual there,” Eastman instructed him.

  “I see the power,” Rep said in a good-student-trying-to-be-helpful voice.

  “That’s exactly right, you see the power,” Eastman said. “People think movies are stories on film. Baloney. Mediocre Trollope is a better story than any movie ever made, including Citizen Kane. Stories in Hollywood are like cameras. You have to have them to make a movie, but they’re not the point. Do you know what movies are?”

  Rep figured by now that he didn’t have the first idea, and if he had he wouldn’t have dared express it until they were safely on the ground. He responded with a dignified negative.

  “Movies are what painti
ngs were before jet lag. Representational painting turned to dreck in nineteen-oh-three, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Painting is about passion, passion is about people, and something standing still can’t capture the passion of people who experience life at hundreds of miles an hour. Movies are passion dynamically captured. Movies aren’t about telling, they’re about feeling.”

  “Okay,” Rep said. It occurred to him that this response lacked a little something, so he took refuge in what he hoped was an intelligent question. “What’s the passion you’re going to capture with those propellers?”

  “The territorial imperative,” Eastman answered. “Berlin airlift. Real beginning of the Cold War. Nineteen forty-seven. Russians blockade the city. Truman says, one, we stay in Berlin. Two, we will supply Berlin by air, like a besieged garrison.”

  “I saw a movie about that on television once,” Rep offered brightly. “The Big Lift.”

  “You know what was wrong with that movie?”

  “No,” Rep said—superfluously, because Eastman was already answering his own question.

  “They made the story the point. American airman in love with a fraulein but bitter because the Nazis were mean to him while he was a POW. Please.”

  “I see your point,” said Rep, who didn’t.

  “The Berlin airlift was B-24s landing at Templehof Airport every sixteen minutes around the clock for months,” Eastman said. “That had nothing to do with loving your enemies. That was about an ape four hundred thousand years ago pissing on sixty trees so all the other apes would know where not to come if they didn’t want to fight. It wasn’t some chick-flick muck about two women crying in a dark room. It was about defining territory, which is real important, because only the apes that defined their territory and made it stick lived long enough to have little apes—namely, us.”

  “Uh huh,” Rep said.

  “So I don’t steal stories,” Eastman said. “I don’t care enough about stories to steal them. I probably paid the guy who did the first script for In Contemplation of Death twenty thousand more than I had to just because I couldn’t be bothered to call his agent and string the negotiations out for two more days. Stories are just a detail to me, some guy punching keys.”

  Rep’s response to this would have fallen short even of “uh huh” on the banality scale, but he didn’t have to give one. The plane had started its descent somewhere around “we stay in Berlin,” and a city had appeared on the lakeshore below them.

  “Milwaukee,” Eastman said, pointing at the modest industrial city. “Flying into General Billy Mitchell Field. Has to be the only airport in the country named after a military pilot who was court-martialed.”

  “Is Milwaukee the home front setting for Every Sixteen Minutes?” Rep asked.

  “No. We’re not scouting Milwaukee today, we’re scouting Berlin. I’ll explain while we’re driving around. You have to see it while we talk or it won’t make any sense. Meanwhile, tell me what your client needs. Not what your client wants. What your client needs. Then we’ll see what we can do.”

  Rep had to think about the question for a few seconds. Without phrasing it quite the way Eastman had, Rep himself had been struggling with that issue ever since he’d gotten Charlotte Buchanan’s case.

  “What my client really needs is respect,” Rep said finally. “She wrote a novel all by herself. She got it published. She woke up every morning wondering if she was famous yet. She wasn’t. Her book sold fewer copies than The Economic Report of the President—even though it was slightly better written.”

  “I know it had to be a decent book,” Eastman said. “More than decent, pretty darn good. Because otherwise she wouldn’t have gotten an agent like Julia Deltrediche to rep it. But what you’re really saying is that life ripped her off, and she can’t sue life so she’s using me instead.”

  “We’re talking about what she needs,” Rep said. “What she needs is to know that she isn’t the only one in the world who thinks that what she did is worthwhile.”

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Eastman said thoughtfully as the B-24 jolted onto a runway in a remote corner of General Mitchell Field, “but I know exactly how she feels.”

  “I do believe it,” Rep said. “Last night I rented Red Guard! on video and watched it with my wife. That was your Titanic, and people today should be talking about it in the same breath as Spartacus and Ben Hur. But when it came out it just seemed to slip under the radar somehow. It didn’t make anything like the splash it should have.”

  “They should have called the video version Aaron Gets the Shaft,” Eastman said. “Not that I’m bitter. Not much. First, Galaxy Entertainment Group spread rumors that I’d lost control of expenses and this was going to make people forget Heaven’s Gate and Waterworld, even though Red Guard! was the first film that studio had released in ten years that was on time and on budget. Then they bumped the release from Thanksgiving weekend in ninety-five to Valentine’s weekend in ninety-six, so that it not only came out with no holiday-weekend bounce, but it hit screens in a year with the strongest Oscar competition anyone can remember instead of the mediocrities that were up the year before. And on top of that the release date change meant Red Guard! was already old news by the time the ninety-six nomination ballots went out. There’s more, but we’ll have to let it go at that, which believe me is good news for you. It looks like the mayor’s office has some fancy wheels waiting for us.”

  Before Rep had his oxygen mask off, Selding was out of his seat, helping Rep with his briefcase and laptop. A scant quarter-hour later Eastman was driving Rep in a jade green Dodge Viper west on Wisconsin Avenue in downtown Milwaukee. After schlepping Rep’s bags and making sure that the Viper had come equipped with the sackful of Sausage McMuffins he’d ordered for Eastman, Selding had driven off in a Taurus with an aide to the mayor of Milwaukee to chat about the details of major film shoots in a city where that isn’t an everyday occurrence. The jump from General Mitchell Field to Milwaukee’s central business district isn’t long, but Rep figured it probably took most people more than the eight minutes Eastman and the Viper required for the task.

  “Don’t let me hog the McCalories,” Eastman said as he disposed of his third Sausage McMuffin. “It’s been breakfast time on my biological clock for half an hour, but some of those are for you.”

  “No thanks,” Rep said. The greasy thumbprint that Eastman had left on the rear-view mirror when he adjusted it looked like a week’s supply of cholesterol all by itself.

  “Look at that!” Eastman shouted suddenly. He wrenched the car into an improvised parking space on a side street and jumped out with a digital camera.

  Rep looked. He’d been on a case in Milwaukee his first year with the firm, so he knew he was seeing the federal courthouse. Gray stone, elegant arches sheltering the porch, round towers framing the front, gothic spires along the sides. It struck Rep as lightyears better than the steel-and-glass box approach to federal courthouses that prevailed these days. It also looked pretty German. But it didn’t exactly set Rep’s pulse racing.

  Eastman had shots of the building from four different angles before Rep managed to climb out of the car and catch up to him.

  “Now I know how Emma Thompson felt the first time she saw Chatsworth while she was planning Pride and Prejudice,” Eastman said when Rep panted into his general vicinity. “And look at that!”

  He wheeled and pointed to a red brick building on the north side of Wisconsin Avenue. Rep would learn later that it housed the Milwaukee Club. Like the courthouse, it was noticeably Teutonic, though in a less monumental sort of way. The realization of what Eastman was up to crept slowly into Rep’s brain, which was hard-wired to interpret undertakings that weren’t quite so insane as Eastman’s apparently was.

  “Were you being literal up there on the plane? Are you seriously planning on having Milwaukee, Wisconsin stand in for late forties Berlin?” Rep asked this on the run, scurrying to keep up with Eastman, who was off t
o photograph the Milwaukee Club.

  “Milwaukee, plus two days of second-unit shooting in Berlin itself, plus Industrial Light and Magic,” Eastman said. “I can have six guys in Ike jackets and campaign hats walk down the steps of that courthouse, zoom in for a close-up that’ll make you think you could reach out and touch the stone, and then when the camera pulls back for a long shot you’ll see the building surrounded by bombed out rubble. I’m going to make an epic with a bankable cast, and I’m going to do it for under fifty million dollars. Because if Hollywood has a future, that’s it. We can’t go on making movies with nothing but bright orange fireballs and flying cows and famous buildings blowing up so that people who don’t speak English will pay to see them. Guys in India and Italy and Canada can do that as well as we can, and for a lot less money. And we can’t spend a hundred fifty million dollars making classic Hollywood productions when four out of five of them flop. We have to make fifty-million-dollar movies that look like they cost three times as much, and I’m going to show them how it’s done.”

  Eastman led Rep back to the Viper only long enough to stow it in the parking ramp of the Pfister Hotel, down a block and across the street from the federal courthouse. Then they started walking.

  Rep would estimate later that they walked six miles in the next three hours. When they finally got back to the Pfister, Eastman had snapshots of the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company’s headquarters, with its row of Ionic columns that would have dwarfed the Parthenon; the east façade of the Milwaukee County Courthouse, which could have stood in for some of the sets in Triumph of the Will; the Bockl Building; the Germania Building; Turner Hall; the Mackie Building, all white stone and improbable cupolas; the Mitchell Building, which wouldn’t have looked out of place a hundred yards from the Brandenburg Gate; Mader’s Restaurant, with acres of beer-hall gingerbread; and Milwaukee City Hall, which looked as if it had been transplanted brick by brick from Munich.