by Eric Idle
Ding. Of course. Now I remember. I came up with a “concept” provisionally titled Sitcom dot com about a group of young cappuccino drinking twenty year olds trying to create a sitcom on the Internet.
“It’s very new and very hip,” says Mercy.
“It’ll be positioned for the new young,” says Champion.
“Did the old young die already?” I say before I even think.
They stare at me.
“Sorry,” I say. “Joke.”
Oh. They begin to laugh immoderately. Like Woody Allen just said something. It’s embarrassing. But they need to believe I’m funny so I look suitably modest as they roll around the couches reassuring themselves I am really hilarious.
“You are so in tune with us,” says Mercy.
“So today,” says Champion.
Mercy nods enthusiastically. “Sitcom is about young people exchanging smart one-liners.”
Actually they and I know full well it’s about advertising; keeping the suckers tuned in between commercials. That’s all. Dousing them with nice girls with nice tits saying nice lines to dumb guys in tight jeans.
They show me pictures of some girls they have lined up to test for the Pilot they are anxious for me to write, the minute we have a deal. They might as well call it a Titcom. Or Thanks for the Mammaries. They assure me that all the girls, as well as being drop-dead gorgeous, are also very funny. They tell me how keen they are on this project, how much they are looking forward to working with me, how we are all going to make an incredible amount of money, and how it’s going to be “a lot of fun.” This is my cue to leave, so I rise and shake hands and thank them as sincerely as I can. I’m hoping to God someone will steal the idea before I have to write it. Not an unrealistic hope by the way, Hollywood being as leaky as a cheap tent. It’s the agents, and the lawyers. They lunch, they talk, they swap tales of concepts in development. Next thing you know some other schmuck announces it as his idea. It doesn’t matter. They only steal shit.
It’s while I’m driving off the lot that it suddenly hits me. My brilliant idea.
Ellen should be in my book.
And not just Ellen.
Lots of celebrities. Real people.
My novel is going to have stars.
After my super good really brilliant idea I’m feeling so happy I’m singing in my car. I’m driving straight home to start work on my book, the first novel with Stars.
I live in a tiny house wedged on a hill at the back of Sunset and I’m coming down Laurel Canyon singing Joni Mitchell when Sam calls. I’m feeling so pleased with myself I forget I was supposed to be at the dentist and tell him I just had a very successful pitch meeting with Mercy Champion.
He’s not happy.
“You can’t even lie well,” he says.
“I got the gig” I say. “That’s incontrovertible evidence I can lie well.”
“You told me you were in pain.”
“I was. You should have seen the receptionist.”
“This isn’t funny, Stanley. Micky Mikado is furious. He’s going ballistic. He’s threatening not to pay for the rewrite!”
That’s low. Not paying for the rewrite we haven’t done yet. I offer to bring Sam into the Mercy Champion deal but I can tell he’s not happy with that.
I can tell he’s not happy with that because he hangs up.
Unfortunate. But I have a book to write and nothing will stand in my way. Not even a nice glass of Chablis at Dominick’s, which I am very tempted to sample as a reward for a successful pitch. Dominick’s is my spiritual home. It’s a private bar opposite Cedars-Sinai, the gigantic Hospital where the stars get their scars. It’s a low structure with two rooms, the main room wooden with lots of retro booths and a bar, and across the yard a Games room where people take cocaine, solicit blowjobs and get totally hammered.
The house signature gag is: What’s the difference between Dominick’s and the Titanic? More people went down in Dominick’s …
It’s been a legendary center of bad behavior since the Forties. It was a favorite watering hole of Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack. Only friends of friends can drink and dine at this exclusive Hollywood hideout. A lot of Rotters hang out there. That’s what they call themselves. Bad boys all. And of course they attract the sort of girls who like Bad Boys. Surely a quick drink with Giler or Tiny Naylor won’t hurt. But no, I must be disciplined. Tolstoy didn’t get where he was by popping off for a glass of Chablis instead of writing. Nothing good was ever done without discipline, so home is the hero, and on with the writing.
I’m half way along Sunset when Morty calls.
“So what did you do, blow them?”
“What?”
“Mercy Champion love you. You made them hot. Did you slip Viagra in their coffee? Stanley they are so hot for you it was like phone sex.”
Did I blush? No. Hollywood is a shame free zone.
“They want to make a deal for a pilot. And by the way, kiddo, Pangloss are interested in your book.”
“My book? You’re kidding.”
“I made a couple of calls. Pangloss are very interested. A little bird told me they’re in trouble. They have a big hole in their summer list. Some asshole writer failed to deliver and they’re desperately looking for a Beach book.”
“What’s that?”
“You know … a Beach book. The book that everyone in the Hamptons is seen reading in the summer. A vacation read. It is ready, right?”
“Absolutely. Do you want to read it?”
“Fuck no. I already told them I have Sonny Mehta desperate to buy it. But I said they could have first shot if they move quickly.”
Wow.
“Richard Hume will meet you for lunch tomorrow at Le Dome. He’s in from New York for a screening. They think you’re the answer to their prayers. Better clinch this now, Stanley.”
Dear God. I’m going to be a novelist.
*
I’m driving along Sunset when a perfect parking slot opens up in front of Book Soup. I’m still intending to go home and start work immediately on my novel, but I’m high from the conversation with Morty and you should never look a gift parking slot in the mouth. So I decide to give myself a reward. I make a U turn and take it.
I’m an inkoholic you see.
I love books. And I really love bookshops. I find them sexy places. Warm. Comfortable. Filled with intimate thoughts. I love the way everyone tilts their heads as they scan the shelves. That’s how I think of us book readers: we’re head tilters. Magazine readers don’t do that. They tilt the magazine, or flick through them backwards. You don’t do that with a book. Book Soup is my closest, but Dutton’s in Brentwood is very good, and there’s another Dutton’s in the Valley which has second hand books as well.
One book, and then I’m home all night writing. I’ve got to be prepared for tomorrow.
I’m feeding the meter when I see her.
It’s Joanie Collins.
I can see her clearly through the window. She’s by the counter. In those dark glasses I could tell her anywhere.
It is a sign from God.
My novel is meant to be.
And she is meant to be in it.
I mean Joan Collins for heaven sake. She’s legendary.
I am standing on the pavement outside Book Soup staring through the window, and I want to go in and say “Hi Joanie” because you can do that with celebrities and they will assume they have met you and forgotten who you are, so it’s a great way to meet them. You just say something like “Hey Joanie, Stanley Hay, remember we met at Morty’s thing for Goldie at CAA?” and they go “Oh yes, how are you?”
But I can’t bring myself to move.
This moment is too good.
I want to remember it forever.
Somewhere I can hear a heavenly choir. It’s coming from inside her limo. The chauffeur has opened the door and Joanie walks out of the bookshop with her dark glasses on and slides into the waiting limo and I’m still rooted to the spot as
she pulls away with a slight wave.
Did I imagine that wave?
Never mind, there’ll be a slight wave when I write it.
I turn back. The window of Book Soup is filled with copies of a new book. Floor to ceiling, hundreds of copies of a brand new book.
It’s mine.
My new novel. Starring Joan Collins.
My face is all over the window on the back jacket.
The front cover is clear and simple. A pair of scissors, open, cutting through the words
The Writer’s Cut.
Underneath Kiss and Sell, by Stanley Hay.
OMG. It’s meant to be.
I’m hyperventilating.
I go straight home and work very hard all evening.
Well I go straight home and start to work very hard all evening but of course I have to stop and watch American Idol. I’m rooting for Clay Aiken. He’s adorable. My girlfriend Tish prefers Reuben, but I like Clay. Tish is Chinese-American, her grandparents from Singapore, which means she has great genes, jet black hair, long legs and a terrific body. She’s an actress waitress.
“I’m waiting to act,” she says.
It’s her little joke, but she is always busy with auditions and taking yoga classes, Pilates, acting classes and modern dance and whatever else those classes are that take all her time. She occasionally writes coverage for the studios too. It means she is absent a lot and works nights waitressing at Little Dom’s, which means she comes home very late. This suits me fine as I write my book at night. Or I will. And I shall dedicate it to Tish.
Probably.
Tish or Philip Roth.
Tish changed her name from Trish, but I think that’s Philip Roth’s real name. We’ve been going out for six months now – me and Tish obviously, not Philip Roth.
Six months is a little scary. In this town it is some kind of big deal. I think it might even be a legal thing, six months. Nobody I know is married. There’s a whole generation of men approaching forty who are not gay, who have never been married and who are not even in a serious relationship. No kids, no alimony, no commitment. Oddly enough most of my gay friends are married and have kids. I think we’ve all swapped roles. Anyway six months is a kind of crucial date in a Hollywood relationship and I think I am becoming anxious about the whole commitment thing. Hell, I’m only 26, well 29 if you go by birthdays, but nobody in this town does, and I already know you have to lie about your age to survive, even as a writer.
I want my book to be very modern, and I’m wondering just how many sex scenes to include. After American Idol I contemplate the Smut question for a while. We all assume the modern novel is smutty, and yet the sexually obsessed modern novel is only fifty years old, born in 1959 with the publication in Britain of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It was considered the most scandalous book of all time. It was supposed to deprave and corrupt servants and expose the working classes to irreversible moral danger. Have you read it? I was shocked. It’s a virginal tract compared to most books today. There’s hardly an epithet out of place. No bestseller can hope to get by without more pages of smut in the first few chapters than Lawrence’s book has in its entirety. It’s hard to know what all the fuss was about. The original publishers were sued in the British courts. I forget what for, precisely. Offending the Eyeballs of the Queen or Frightening the Middle Classes or some such stupid British law. Personally I quite like Brits. As individuals. And writers too, of course. But the rest of them seem to have a stick up their ass.
This is the lawyer Mervyn Griffith-Jones in his opening address to the jury in London, 20 Oct. 1961, during the prosecution of Penguin Books.
“Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters — because girls can read as well as boys — reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?”
I love that. Don’t let the servants read it. Particularly your gamekeeper. They may try to screw your wife.
So my book will have smut. And lots of it.
I have some good stories from the front line. My friend H actually fell asleep on top of a major actress. He compounded his mistake by sending her flowers the next day and apologizing for not turning up.
“But you were here,” she said.
She was almost more insulted he forgot he was there than that he fell asleep on top of her.
Rotters. They have great tales.
I get distracted from my smut thoughts by a documentary on Frontline about Iraq, which is quite interesting. Apparently they have tons of weapons of mass destruction. Cheney says the evidence is completely convincing. I switch it off and dig out a piece called The Perfumed Vagina which I wrote for Roley Esmic, the king of soft porn and owner of Stroke Magazine. Roley, whose dick is in his brain, and who has hair implants to encourage his cock to grow, has a corporate motto which, I kid you not, says “The penis: mightier than the sword.”
I like Roley but he always looks like he just got up, which is probably true, since he’s always in his fucking pajamas. I mean, that went out with Heff. I suspect Roley’s mainlining Viagra. He has weird hair and a comb-over to cover his incipient baldness and he pretends he’s a regular guy who just happens to have a private jet while living with three or four young women. Still he is paying me well enough to write high class porn. My problem is I can’t show it to Tish. She may think I’ve done some of this stuff. Which is Post Ironic because I have.
Occasionally I’m asked to do punch ups, touch ups, polishes, what Producers like to call “inserting humor.” Sounds vaguely sexual. And as a matter of fact, it is. For instance a few years ago, when I was a new boy in town working as an AD on a yucky comedy Paramount were making, I was given a ride home to the Chateau Marmont by the female star of the movie. She saw me hanging around by the Paramount gate, pulled up and offered me a ride. How could I turn it down? This gorgeous girl in a tiny red sports car. You’d recognize her name, no question. She’s blonde with trademark lips you could carve a sofa out of. She had just appeared stark naked with a cigarette between those fabulous pillow lips in an award winning European film. Now she is in my hotel room. Instead of dropping me off she insisted on coming up to see where I live. Just for nostalgia, she says. She lived here for five years, before husband number one. That’s long before current husband, number two, who is an above the title action star who is rumored to be more than a little fond of his fellow actors.
I dodge around between her and the bed in the narrow space of my tiny room, trying not to bump into her. She is the most gorgeous creature I have ever seen. I swear that not even in my most erotic dreams would I dare jump her, she is so far out of my league. Not to mention that heavily buffed husband of hers. She is looking out of the window now and sighs. Her mind is far away.
“I was so young,” she says, “and I had so much fun here.”
She turns suddenly.
“How old are you, Jake?”
“That’s Stanley,” I say. “And I’m 21.”
I’m old enough at least to lie about my age in Hollywood.
“Twenty-one and never been kissed,” she says, pouting.
There is simply no answer to that, so I gawk at her. I find her closeness extraordinarily arousing. She notices of course.
“Uhm look at you,” she says. “Is that for me? How flattering. Perhaps I can do something about that.” And I swear to God she pushes me backwards on to the bed. I sit up and try and kiss her but she impatiently pushes me back, undoes my belt and begins tugging at my jeans. I raise my hips and she slides off my pants.
She smiles, gives my dick a little look of appreciation, says “Well hello there,” flicks her hair behind her ears and suddenly that famous mouth, those fabulous lips that I have watched 80 feet wide across my local screen, are wrapped firmly around me, and with deft fingers, this multi-million dollar screen goddess is pleasuring me, her red-nailed fingers expertly drawing me into her. I’m being mouthed
by a Hollywood legend. Her golden head is bobbing in my mirror and I can see her fabulous ass moving up and down reflected in the dark gray of the TV screen. And with that I explode.
“Welcome to Hollywood,” she says.
That actually happened.
I’m definitely going to use it in my novel. I might hint at her name but frankly I’m a little scared of the husband. He looks a vindictive shit to me.
As I say I wrote that piece originally for Roley Esmic the owner of Stroke Magazine, but it turned out to be an unfortunate name, because that’s what Roley died from. A stroke. Having a hand job from one of his “assistants.” Stone dead in his ivy covered mansion in Bel Air. One of the top members of the Pornocracy, keeled over on the imported marble and gasping like a fish. Another victim of Viagra. When Sam heard what happened to Roley he said “If symptoms persist for more than four hours call a mortician.”
I was never paid for the piece.
I got so horny re-reading it I had to call Tish at the restaurant and ask her to come over. It was tricky because I had to tell her it was all pure fiction and of course she didn’t believe me. She wouldn’t come straight back because it was a busy night and they were shorthanded. She ended up giving me phone sex, and it took me a while and she said she was getting strange looks at Little Dom’s, which put me off my stroke.
I mean good grief that’s not the first phone sex at Little Dom’s.
The Writer’s Cut
by Stanley Hay
A blow by blowjob exposé of what goes on behind the scenes and between the sheets in tinsel town.
A Reality Novel.
I’m very good at bullshit.
It’s what I do best.
And that’s not just me speaking, that’s what Tish says, and Sam says I have dropped more bull than a Spanish matador. That’s not insulting here by the way. Bullshit is the art of Hollywood. I’m really good at it. If you can’t pitch you’re dead. That’s what they do all day, all night, on the phone, in their cars, at the office, in the bedroom. After you’ve been to a hundred Hollywood pitches you can do it in your sleep. It's akin to advertising. Or stripping. I call it laptop dancing. You have to tease the customer into paying something without showing anything. You lure. You tempt. You paint a dream they can’t possibly imagine living without, which they need to own right now. It’s a hooker’s art, but Richard Hume is a New Yorker and a publisher and they’re very smart and not so easily sold. So you have to play on their weaknesses. New Yorkers hate LA. They pride themselves on it. But they can never resist a bit of slumming. They’re tempted by all that flesh and all that power. And of course the weather, which they pretend to hate. So out they come to stay in friends’ beach houses, to drive around getting lost and hating it all.