Easy to Like
Page 12
“Yes?”
“We would have to program it with prime-time shows,” said Hazel.
“Expensive.”
“Very. You haven’t solicited my view, but I think moving the news is exactly what has to be done if we are going to program the shows we should.”
“Karek said he’d heard that the rumour came from my interview . . . but I’m sure the scheduling of the news never came up. They hardly seemed like gossips, the panel.”
“Rumours defy physical principles of the universe, they can come from nothing.”
“The universe did come from nothing,” said Elliot. “That’s the conceptual leap that people have such a hard time making. That’s why they invented God.”
“Existence is a rumour?” Hazel laughed. It was a high-rolling, convulsive, and entirely winning whinny.
“Mine, anyway,” said Elliot.
“Not a believer?” Hazel asked. She seemed genuinely interested.
“No. Yourself?”
“I’ve heard rumours of stuff you said in the interview. Men in suits, in my experience, gossip as much as schoolgirls.”
“What have you heard?” asked Elliot.
“You made a tremendous impression. Perhaps they couldn’t keep their tongues because they were so excited.”
“Specifically, what am I supposed to have said?”
“That the CBC could serve everyone, every way.”
“I think I did say that. It’s . . . inclusive.”
“You’ve set the bar high.”
“We’ve got audience research people, yes?” said Elliot. “They profile the viewer?”
“So they allege.” Hazel was amused by this, and Elliot wasn’t sure he liked that.
“Then I’d like to get a picture of everyone,” he said, before thinking.
“Sure you don’t want to start with a list of ‘every way’?”
“You’re right.”
“Every way as it relates to broadcasting, right? Not a list of every way anything can happen in the rumoured universe.”
“No.”
“And in terms of ‘everyone,’ you meant, I presume, all people who comprise a potential audience. Not all people.”
“Of course, I mean the people who watch television, otherwise, fuck ’em.”
Hazel made a performance of taking down the directive in a notebook.
“The scheduling of the news is germane to the discussions of the coming weeks,” she said.
“Why?”
“Almost your entire calendar for the next two weeks consists of meetings regarding the next season.”
“Shit. I was hoping to take a brief trip home.”
“Home?”
“My vineyard in California. It’s been so hot this year they’re harvesting early, some stuff is already in vats fermenting. I really need to be there.”
“Is it nice?”
“It’s the land.”
“I don’t follow.”
“As opposed to the office.”
“I see.”
“The earth and seasons in a glass, and it makes you feel good, it’s great stuff.”
“Unless you can manage to get back and forth in a day, you’re probably not going to be able to go.”
“We’ll see.”
“You’ll have to take me sometime.”
“I’m sorry?”
“To your vineyard.”
“I would love to.”
From: wstuckel@locuracanyon.com
To: matou@aol.com
Subject: Counoise
I think maybe no cunny in the blend this time round.
From: matou@aol.com
To: wstuckel@locuracanyon.com
Subject: Re. Counoise
No. Must. Why??
From: wstuckel@locuracanyon.com
To: matou@aol.com
Subject: Re. Re. Counoise
Weird barnyard notes.
From: matou@aol.com
To: wstuckel@locuracanyon.com
Subject: Re. Re. Re. Counoise
I like some of those.
From: wstuckel@locuracanyon.com
To: matou@aol.com
Subject: Re. Re. Re. Re. Counoise
Not these.
From: matou@aol.com
To: wstuckel@locuracanyon.com
Subject: Re. Re. Re. Re. Re. Counoise
Horsey?
From: wstuckel@locuracanyon.com
To: matou@aol.com
Subject: Re. Re. Re. Re. Re. Re. Counoise
Miguel says donkey.
From: matou@aol.com
To: wstuckel@locuracanyon.com
Subject: Re. Re. Re. Re. Re. Re. Re. Counoise
Bad yeasts in the mix? Like Brett?
From: wstuckel@locuracanyon.com
To: matou@aol.com
Subject: Re. Re. Re. Re. Re. Re. Re. Re. Counoise
No. But microflora under the scope. Someone at Davis?
From: matou@aol.com
To: wstuckel@locuracanyon.com
Subject: Re. Re. Re. Re. Re. Re. Re. Re. Counoise
NO! Nobody at Davis. I’m going to see if there is any way I can get down there.
Even as he clicked “Send” Elliot knew the trip could not happen. His predecessor’s television season was now being born with such horrible deficits and defects that it would be left to die without intervention. As the attending physician, Elliot couldn’t leave until he’d broken the news to the weary and teary mothers and signed the certificates. Hazel was filling his schedule with discussions about the coming year as a way of changing the subject and moving on. A Daytimer, Elliot saw, was a shackle.
Three
MEETINGS AND MORE meetings, meetings always concluding with the assembled consulting agendas to determine when they should next meet. Elliot was no stranger to the drill: Hollywood loved its meetings. The majority of those Elliot had been obliged to “take” were to receive notes on scripts. These would come from the many disparate parties participating in the making of the film or television project. In recent years, this meant the additional contribution of multiple middle managers from the media conglomerates consuming the trade like flesh-eating disease. Often — no, always — notes from different sources prescribed mutually exclusive or contradictory actions. Thus Elliot was often sent away from a meeting with the command to make it shorter and longer, funnier and more serious, with characters who were at once older and younger than they’d been in the preceding draft. There was only ever one universal note from all chiming in, none of whom had a clue about storytelling: the entreaty to make the protagonist more sympathetic. If screenwriters did what they were told, the lead in every flick and program would be a puppy dog.
Now, barely three months into his post at the CBC, he found himself slogging through meetings, called on his behalf, of exactly the sort from which bad ideas originated. The hydra of Creative Heads brought forward proposals for new shows but, lest they be blamed for their failure down the line, did what they could to find fault with them. This was not a demanding task: the shows had been worked over by so many notes and hands by the time they got this far that they were indistinct enough to have no possible chance of exciting an audience. Frustrated, Elliot wondered about the hundreds of pitches that were not reaching him. If the ones he was seeing were so poor, then . . .? “Only worse,” was the response.
There was a fatalism informing every presentation. The CBC, Elliot was informed, was doomed — as was, in fact, all of television, art, and entertainment in the Canadian context. The CBC had it worst, naturally, because its audience was so old as to be resistant to change. The hope of attracting new, younger viewers was futile; they were abandoning the medium. The Corporation could not yet deliver them material made specifically for the Internet — it had limited staff and infrastructure for doing so, no agreements with content providers over fair compensation, and no effective commercial model. (Content, they said, was king. But Elliot discovered there were only six writers among the entire staff
of the CBC.) It was all so discouraging and confusing that Elliot decided to use one of his cards and fired the Creative Head, Movies and Miniseries. The poor bastard cried at the news, claiming a mentally ill wife at home and limited prospects in the ageist job market of showtainment. Alas, his unit’s recent output, mostly clunky historical dramas, while costing many millions, had attracted audiences of many thousands. A subhead from the documentary division took a message on his BlackBerry while Elliot was speaking. Elliot sent the guy to a leadership seminar at the Niagara Institute in the hope they taught manners.
A yet more lachyrmose display was offered by Jill MacDonald, the in-house girlfriend of Elliot’s predecessor. She claimed she was now a pariah at headquarters for her collaboration horizontale with the tyrant Heydrich. Elliot gave her safe passage to the supper-hour news in Calgary, a sort of internal exile. Someone, whether they liked it or not, was getting a co-host.
On top of these meetings, Elliot learned, he was expected to fly all over the country to meet with his soldiers in the provinces and with the whiny, threadbare independent producers living in the huts outside the battlements. Everyone wanted money — every region, every city within every region, every genre, every department, everyone. The government support for television production was balkanized, Hazel explained, so regions continually argued their cases against the others. The CBC was favouring the Prairies, with three shows (all terrible) on the network, at the expense of the West Coast. The depopulated East Coast was overrepresented compared to the expanding Centre. Stuff proposed by Newfoundland was too scat for the national palate. There was nothing from the North, and everybody on air was too white. The process sounded too wearying to endure, so Elliot excused himself from the first, eastern leg of the tour and sent Hazel in his place.
Quite improbably, she departed for Moncton, Halifax, and St. John’s with enthusiasm.
From: hazel.osler@cbc.ca
To: el.jonson@cbc.ca
Subject: Terra Nova
Good series of meetings Hfx and NB, even if prod. community feeling hard done by. Staying on in St. John’s extra day.
From: el.jonson@cbc.ca
To: hazel.osler@cbc.ca
Subject: Re. Terra Nova
And pray do what?
From: hazel.osler@cbc.ca
To: el.jonson@cbc.ca
Subject: Re. re. Terra Nova
Hike Signal Hill AM, play I want to see at LSPU Hall, late supper bar at Raymonds
The trails around Signal Hill could be treacherous in December, gales whipping up spray and polishing the ice it left. Was it his place to warn her? Would that be presumptuous? Paternal? Patronizing? And, more important, with whom was she dining?
Before leaving, Hazel had answered his call for a portrait of everyone in Canada and all their “ways,” leaving him to study a voluminous document, in a three-ring binder, of statistics and analysis. Elliot, who’d hoped his impulsive request had been forgotten, failed to open the thing. He was learning that as an executive it was all too easy to set whimsical notions, embryonic ideas, into motion, and all too difficult to whistle them back. Hazel also left Elliot with notes in preparation for a pending meeting of the Board and the Executive Committee. Elliot did begin these but, finding himself in disagreement with many of the points Hazel was making, put them aside. It wasn’t Hazel’s job to direct policy; most likely she’d created such a provocative document only to stimulate some thought.
His condo was equipped with a pool and a gym, which Elliot tried but soon gave up using. At first he appreciated that the facilities were undersubscribed by the building’s other inhabitants, but quickly began to feel, whenever he went in there, like Dave Bowman at the end of 2001. Alone in his private white Louis XVI digs, beyond the end of time.
Force-fed processed air in his office (the entire Broadcast Centre shared one consumptive artificial lung) and the condo, he pined to draw a breath in his vineyard. “The air is wine,” Jack London once said of his plot up in Sonoma. In Elliot’s free time, which was being consumed by ever more of less and less discernable significance, he availed himself of the only alternative — he took to the hoof on the chilly streets of Toronto, telling himself that he was discovering the Volk, and so the CBC’s audience.
The nearby lakeshore should have been appealing, but the tainted slush on the beaches was not borne by tide and seemed, to a man born by the sea, lifeless. The vistas there were not of openness but of emptiness. The vicinity of his condo was by day a characterless concrete canyon and by night a sewer into which drained the waste of the street-level nightclubs. The city was essentially without pedestrian malls or warrens of narrow alleys. It was a car town, evidence that its European settlers had been determined to make a clean break, to leave the good ideas behind with the bad when they crossed the pond. Protestant Toronto clearly understood renewal to be a culling process and was self-loathing in its compulsion to smash its material history, as idols, to dust. There were fewer old buildings than in any other city Elliot had visited.
For no particular reason Elliot enjoyed perambulating the tiny Vietnamese neighbourhood around Broadview Avenue. This street lead him to the Danforth, which, while only a mixed commercial strip, was rooted in something older than its years. Had Elliot any intention of staying in Toronto, he would much prefer to buy something off Danforth Avenue and not, as the grand social plan would have of a man of his station, in swish Rosedale or the Annex. But each day he was more and more resolved not to remain. The level of dysfunction at the CBC was such that leaving would be a mark of achievement, the right move by an executive not afraid to do the brave thing. It would also be a demonstration that Elliot Jonson was a man with options. No one would admire his courage at deserting so early in his tenure so much as those left behind.
Initially chuffed at having pulled off the job interview, he’d briefly thought he could stick it out for three or four years — by which time the winery would be profitable. But now that he’d seen the situation up close, he was thinking a couple of years, max. And two years wasn’t enough time for his incapacity to perform the job to become evident to the people who had hired him.
There was no one keeping him in Toronto, no woman. Not Hazel. Yet Elliot realized that even after the short time they had known one another, he would miss Hazel’s company. If she could be coaxed to come down to Los Angeles she would do well — though there was something hopelessly Canadian about her, attachments to antiquated ideals about the country that would probably keep her forever bound to Fort York.
He wondered again — with whom was she gallivanting around St. John’s? There was never any mention of a partner or a lover in Toronto; maybe she kept one out there, some enchanting pirate. Maybe she occasionally indulged in a little sex tourism in the colonies. They said she was married to the CBC. Someone in such a relationship would have unmet needs.
Owing to his chronic labyrinthitis, Victor Rainblatt, the president of the CBC, had, for Elliot’s first two months on the job, communicated only by phone. Rainblatt was confined to bed and couch; if he stood up, the room spun and he fell. What was more, it was impossible for him to watch television without becoming nauseous, so he deferred to Elliot’s opinion of existing or piloted projects. He was “a manager of people, not a programmer,” Rainblatt said. In this way, Elliot and Victor had become almost friendly.
Now, under a new pharmaceutical regime — something called Nelfex — and therapy, Victor Rainblatt’s condition had improved. His coming out, his return to the helm, was a series of meetings: first, an all-day affair with the Executive Committee of the CBC, on which Elliot sat, and then, the next day, a shorter, half-hour session with the Board of Directors followed by an informal mixer for the two bodies. Elliot guessed it would be not unlike an intersessional meeting between the Presidium and the (symbolic) Supreme Soviet.
All the executives were towing their attendant seconds. Owing to her extended stay in Newfoundland, Hazel was coming straight from the airport. But at 9:45, fifteen minute
s before the powwow was to begin, there was no sign of her. Elliot called Hazel’s EA, a bright young man named Troy.
“I’ve called Ms. Osler’s cellphone, Mr. Jonson, but I’m getting that message saying the phone is off or out of range.”
“Was the flight delayed?”
“I have the arrivals board on the screen in front of me, sir. It says the flight arrived early . . . at 9:09.”
Hazel was mad! Even assuming that morning traffic would be ebbing, this was cutting it too close. It was at least thirty minutes from the airport. Add the wait for the luggage. Elliot dashed to the elevators and went downstairs.
He was about to quit pacing the sidewalk of Front Street and try the John Street entrance when a Crown Vic pulled up. A back door opened. It was Hazel. Her complexion was transformed by salt air and wind, and even behind her specs Elliot could detect a cold sea’s clarity in her eyes. For all its deficiencies, for all its torments, the atmosphere in Newfoundland was a cure. Either that or she had indeed enjoyed the comforts of some rogue.
Hazel had put one heel on the pavement when Elliot, forgetting himself, took her hand and pulled her up and out of the car and toward him and kissed her cheek.
“Oh my,” she said. “I shall go away more often.”
Elliot looked to see if any staff were about. His inexplicable indiscretion would surely be reported in one of the poxy blogs hosted by his disgruntled employees. No one was staring, at least. A couple of shivering yobs smoking by the entrance seemed scarcely conscious.
“Just glad you made it in time for the meeting.”
“I left you notes. You would have been fine.”
“Actually, I’d wish we’d had time to go over them together. The direction they take, in terms of programming, it’s not what anybody at that meeting wants to hear.”
The smile went from Hazel’s face and much of the colour in her skin with it. Just out of the car, fresh from a restorative and brief break, just the other side of a surprising and, Elliot saw too late, welcome kiss, and he pushed her nose into her work. He showed her who was boss.
“Some of it was bold,” Hazel said. “I was getting the impression that you were . . . Well, we will have to talk about it, won’t we. And it was wrong of me not to have anticipated your needing time in advance of the meeting. Let me put my bags in my office.”