by Ben Elton
Some agencies who represented both genuine stars and crazy stars (and of course crazy stars who had become genuine stars) even discussed the possibilities of mutually profitable deals between both parties, whereby a star who was in big financial trouble might do a deal with a crazie, whereby the crazie only wounded the star and they split all revenues that ensued. These deals never really took off. For one thing, there was a distinct whiff of insider trading about the whole thing. Besides which, in the midst of all the wheeling and dealing, it was easy to forget that the crazies involved were, by the very nature of their profession, crazy, and could rarely bring themselves merely to wound a target.
All in all, the Beverly Hills security guys had reason to be nervy. Being a mad gunman was one of the best paid jobs a talentless nobody would ever get and fame is universally recognised as the spur. Certainly, in order to get the fame, you had to be caught and imprisoned, but then the objects of your murderous careerism were also forced into prison, living as they did behind wire and guns and leather-clad security men. Yes, their prisons were more comfortable, but they were prisons none the less.
The market force.
Nathan could see that the private cops thought he was a crazie.
‘I’m not a crazie,’ he said, ‘I’m a British writer named Nathan Hoddy.’
The cops’ demeanour stiffened noticeably. They fingered their armaments conspicuously. If crazies were a little crazy, writers were dangerous lunatics; embittered socially dysfunctional grudge-carriers who had spent so long in development that they had come to believe that they and their scripts were the only real things in the world and that everything else was irrelevant fantasy. The private cops had lost count of the number of writers who had come their way, armed to the teeth, having decided that the only way to get their projects through development was to shoot any reader, editor or producer who stood between them and a green light.
‘A writer, huh?’ the first guard sneered. ‘Ain’t no casual labour hired here, son. I believe they’re hiring pump attendants at the gas station ‘bout a mile back.’
The guards sniggered at the joke. It is a curious facet of the Hollywood obsession with success and pecking orders that literally everybody in the town, from studio head to studio cleaner, harbours the same snobberies and prejudices.
‘I hear Hank Wank’s new picture didn’t open,’ one tramp will remark to another. ‘Overspent and overblown, the studio lost its shirt.’
‘What a schmuck,’ the other tramp will reply. ‘Always had that guy picked for a loser.’
Nathan hastened to establish his legitimacy.
‘Yes, all right, I’m a bloody writer, but I am a writer who has an appointment with Plastic Tolstoy.’
Nathan could not help but be pleased as the guards’ manner changed yet again. A crazie was just a crazie and a writer was of course something which you scraped off your shoes, but Plastic Tolstoy was a man of stratospheric importance. If, as is said, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, Plastic Tolstoy could have teased an erection out of a concrete monk. The man was an industry legend. Not only did he own a large percentage of the global media, but his company held the Claustrosphere account and had done since almost the very beginning. Claustrosphere was the world’s biggest industry, and it was Plastic Tolstoy who had made it so. Through ruthless, attrition marketing, he had made hermetically sealed BioSphere environments the biggest single consumer durable of all time. Bigger than cars, bigger than hamburgers, bigger even than wars. Because every time Plastic Tolstoy made a sale, he sold a whole world — only a little one — but a world none the less. A world that some lucky group or individual could forever call their own.
Plastic Tolstoy marketed the future, which, of course made him the enemy of the present. He was PR man for history’s most irresponsible idea. The idea that it was possible to survive the end of the world.
Chapter Four
The life of a salesman
Communication breakdown.
The stricken tanker story was on the news. Nathan had heard it on his car radio as he drove up towards Beverly Hills. Plastic Tolstoy saw it fifteen times all at once, standing before the vast fibre-optically fed information wall that he had had built in his kitchen.
First the news, then the adverts. Plastic sipped his coffee and watched.
The first ad was for snack-food: ‘You know that feeling when you’re hungry as a horse but you’re also fat as a pig? Donut Heaven understands, which is why we’re now offering free, on the spot liposuction to any customer who eats twenty Donuts or more, plus extra frostings! So if you’re feeling hungry and fat, why not get down to Donut Heaven… You fill your face, we’ll suck your butt.’
Plastic Tolstoy was watching one of the channels on his own Plastic Tolstoy Communications System. Despite this, his grim, angry expression suggested that the thing which he had hoped to see had not materialised. Long before the Donut advert was over, Plastic Tolstoy had patched a multi-call through to his media co-ordinators and programme controllers.
‘What, in the name of my mother is happening, excuse me!’ he barked. ‘An oil tanker has sunk and what do I see first up on the break? On one of my own damn networks, no less! Donut ads and liposuction! After an oil tanker has sunk! You’re supposed to be ready for this kind of thing!’
What Tolstoy was upset about was the failure of a classic piece of cross-promotion. Tolstoy marketed Claustrosphere and he had a policy that, whenever there was an environmental disaster, the news would instantly trigger a buying programme within his own media mainframe. The theory behind this shameless abuse of influence was this: whenever planet death lurched a small step closer, the vast Tolstoy worldwide audience would be instantly hit with Claustrosphere adverts playing in heavy rotation. That was the theory; it appeared not to have worked.
‘We’re up next break, Plastic,’ an anguished employee spluttered over the line. ‘The Donut people had the space booked and threatened to sue if we shifted them. They think the end of the world will make people reach for comfort food.’
Plastic Tolstoy looked back at the screens. Sure enough, the current Claustrosphere campaign was now showing. A gorgeous sun rising over a geodesic dome and the simple slogan: ‘Claustrosphere. Who are you to deny your kids a future?’
‘You see, Chief! You see,’ the anguished employee pleaded. ‘Right there, second slot. Personally, I think that’s a better placing. More impact.’
‘Listen, man with no brain, shortly to become man with no job,’ Plastic shouted, ‘when there’s a disaster we take first slot, OK! Not second, not third, ever. First. Donuts, for chrissakes! I’m selling people the future here!’
Tommorow’s man.
It wasn’t a new idea, the Rat Run mentality with which the human race ushered in the third millennium and which Plastic Tolstoy marketed with such enthusiasm. It was not the first time people had taken a good square look at Armageddon and decided that they would prefer it to happen to somebody else. Ever since Noah built the Ark, the seductive notion that it is possible to opt out, to stand on the sidelines whilst global cataclysm passes you by, has exercised a strong pull. Prior to the First Great Green Scare of the 1980s, it had been nuclear war which seemed most likely to carry off the human race. Then, people had built fallout shelters, as they now built Claustrospheres. Although admittedly, not on quite the same scale.
It was Jurgen Thor, the man whom many people considered to be the last sane person on Earth, who had coined the phrase the ‘Rat Run’ to describe that hypothetical time when people would take refuge in their Claustrospheres. He had appeared on numerous TV chat-shows, condemning the very idea of Armageddon survival. Sitting on couches wedged between pop singers and popular authors flogging their books, he would thunder that Claustrosphere was a terrifyingly dangerous illusion, a kind of global death-wish madness. He, in his capacity as head of Natura, the World Environmental Party, had taken a civil action against Claustrosphere all the way to the US Supreme Court, attempting to question the v
ery legality of marketing a product which, he claimed, encouraged planet death. It was then that Plastic Tolstoy and Jurgen Thor had first crossed swords. Jurgen Thor had called Plastic Tolstoy a salesman of doom. Plastic Tolstoy had told Jurgen Thor to lighten up.
‘Hey, survival is a commodity,’ Tolstoy had said. ‘People should be allowed to buy it just like anything else.’
Claustrosphere won the case.
Plastic’s mother.
Plastic Tolstoy was named Plastic by his mother, who thought that plastic was the most beautiful material on Earth.
‘Wood will always be wood and stone will always be stone,’ she would say. ‘But plastic can be anything, anytime, anywhere.’
‘It’s cheap and it’s common,’ grumbled her husband.
‘So am I,’ Mrs Tolstoy would reply. ‘So is rock’n’roll.’ Then she would peer down at her son, asleep in his cot, and say again, as she always did, ‘Plastic can be anything, anytime, anywhere, my darling. And so can you.’
Mrs Tolstoy was Professor of Popular Culture at the University of Disney World in Florida. It was there that she had developed the thesis for her best-selling book The King is Not Dead, which demonstrated conclusively that Elvis did not die. He could not have died, Mrs Tolstoy asserted, because he had in fact never existed. The meticulous detail with which she documented and then disproved every single sighting of the King between the years 1935 and 1977 (the period of his supposed ‘life’) obsessed the nation for nearly a whole morning.
Mrs Tolstoy used the revenue from her book to set up a school of modern art, dedicated to the principle that the Barbie Doll was greater sculpture than the Venus de Milo, and that a reproduction of a great painting was of more value than the original. As she explained, with an original all you got was a painting, whereas a reproduction could also be a tablecloth, an apron, indeed, anything one cared to print it on.
Don’t judge a book by its contents.
Plastic was his mother’s son, but his eye was better than hers. Whilst she worshipped populism via its products, he saw that the real beauty lay in that which surrounds the products, the marketing. It was a lesson he learnt early on, as he often explained to the numerous documentary film-makers who were endlessly doing documentary films about his life.
‘I was at this kid’s party, you know? With the clown and cakes and the abuse therapist and stuff. Anyway, we all got a present of a toy gun. Brand new, still in the box, right? Well, let me tell you, those boxes were big! And the picture on them? Wow! A marine blasting away with an M16! We were in heaven. So we open the boxes, right? And of course there’s this tiny, shitty little toy inside and all the other kids think they’ve been ripped off. But not me, I didn’t think so. All I could think of was how beautiful that box was! It looked so big and exciting, it had fooled us all. I lost the toy that same day, but I kept the box a long time.’
Plastic had realised the great truth. A truth he would later embody in his First Law of Attrition Marketing. That law said that almost everything anybody ever buys is crap: instant noodles, four-wheel drive-trucks with huge wheels, vaginal deodorants. Anyone can produce any amount of crap, Tolstoy would later explain, in his famous educational video entitled Selling: My Soul, the clever part is to get someone to buy it.
‘Listen,’ the video explained, ‘the world is one big marketplace full of people buying and selling useless, shitty stuff that nobody ever dreamt they wanted. So why do they buy it? Because, while the product may be ugly, the marketing is beautiful. You don’t believe me? Turn it round, consider trying to sell a truly great product but with useless, shitty marketing. You couldn’t do it, right? The message is the only thing that counts.’
At the age of twelve Plastic Tolstoy made his first million. He had been pondering the delight with which his friends searched for the little snap-together toys hidden in their cereal boxes.
‘Toys in cereals, that’s great,’ the boy Plastic thought, ‘but timid.’
So he wrote to the manufacturers, suggesting that they reverse the ratio and market boxes full of snap-together plastic toys with a free cornflake hidden amongst them. Kids went crazy for it.
Plastic always considered himself fortunate to have been young and impressionable when the great Cola wars of the 1990s erupted on screens and in shopping malls. He watched with childlike wonder as two nearly identical drinks made of carbonised water and flavoured with vegetable extracts indulged in a worldwide orgy of aggressive saturation marketing which became in itself a multi-billion dollar industry. The name was sold, the image was sold, the history was sold. Eventually, people actually began to forget about the drink because the marketing had become the product. Young Plastic watched in starstruck awe as Pepsi and Coke actually marketed their own marketing. It was beautiful.
The only thing that could be more beautiful, the boy Plastic thought, was if both companies were owned by the same people.
It would be well into the twenty-first century before the truth about that emerged.
Advertainment.
All kids love TV, but it irritated young Plastic intensely. Years later, in Selling: My Soul, he would recall his youthful anger.
‘I kept wondering why there had to be commercial breaks. You know? Insulting little ghettos where the marketing got crammed in any old how? As if the adverts were some kind of embarrassing necessity, instead of the very thing that was paying everybody’s damn wages! And I’m thinking, one day I’m going to change all that. But I knew even then that, to do it, I’d have to control not just the imagery but also the means of communication. I vowed then on my mother’s memory, except, of course, at the time she wasn’t dead, that one day I would own a network and on that network the insulting division between entertainment and adverts would be banished for ever. The shows, the ads, even the news would all be mutually complementary. Sure, everybody knows that now, but one time I was a pioneer! I conquered an American frontier, I’m the guy who invented Advertainment.’
Often when Selling: My Soul was being screened at marketing seminars, the eager young salesmen and women would burst into spontaneous applause at this point, such was the passion and conviction of Tolstoy’s message.
‘Let me remind you of something incredible,’ the video Plastic would pontificate with evangelical zeal. ‘There was a time when they made films just so that people might watch and enjoy them. You hear what I’m saying! Then gape in awe, why don’t you? Let your jaws drop in disbelief. For decades, Hollywood created entertainment from which the only source of revenue was the price people paid to see it! You got millions of people sitting silently in cinemas, their attention completely focused and not being sold anything! A hundred million Americans went to the cinema every week, and what did they see? A stupid movie! A story, nothing else! No subliminals, no product identification, nothing! People actually went to all the trouble of telling a story simply in order to tell a story! It makes me sick to my stomach.’
Even the most committed students of marketing were sometimes a little surprised at the passion with which Tolstoy spoke of his contempt for the likes of Gone With the Wind, The Grapes of Wrath and Casablanca. To Plastic these were not classic works of art, they were sterile self-indulgences. Pointless, egotistical displays of imaginative power and technical skill, nothing more.
‘It’s like a tennis player without a sponsor,’ he would say. ‘Take the name plugs off the guy’s shirt and what have you got? Some rich brat hitting a ball around with a bat, and that’s all you’ve got. Which is nothing.’
Of course, even in Plastic’s childhood, things were changing. He well remembered and spoke glowingly of seeing Batman as a tiny child, and noting with great satisfaction the extent to which the film was in fact a colossal advert for the spin-off paraphernalia which accompanied it. But the product still followed the story: the film came first and the marketing developed out of that. It was Plastic who finally put things in their proper order.
‘The Second Law, boys and girls, is that the marketing is the
product, and vice versa.’
Selling the future.
Some people say that the hour produces the man.
‘That’s bullshit,’ Plastic Tolstoy would answer. ‘You have to make your own history in this world, ain’t nobody going to make it for you.’
Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Certainly Tolstoy was no scientist and he never designed a Claustrosphere. On the other hand, by his late twenties be had built up a communications empire which put him in a position to pitch for what would become the biggest sales campaign in history. When it began to dawn on people that the Earth was dying, Plastic Tolstoy was perfectly placed to take up the portfolio.
The Second Great Green Scare was sparked off when it was revealed that the governments of the world were using BioSphere technology (i.e., the research into self-contained, self-supporting environments) to construct bolt-holes to be used in the event of the Earth becoming unable to support life. The powers that be had recognised that planet death was a possibility and they had begun to sink bunkers from which they might administer the world’s death-throes. The argument was the same as had been used during the Cold War. The responsibilities of the civil authorities remain unaffected by global catastrophe. Though the public might be dead, their interests would not go unrepresented.
Concerned individuals the world over reacted in horror to this revelation. If those in power were actively anticipating and preparing for life after Eco-death, then the situation was clearly horribly serious. Even the most complacent began to realise that the Earth was in terrible danger, and a vast and furious groundswell of public opinion grew up. The immorality of those in power, preparing to survive Eco-death rather than prevent it, was clear to all. The fact that BioSpheres cost millions of dollars to construct, hence placing them beyond the reach of all but governments and the most stupidly rich, fuelled righteous indignation.