“Thanks for your assistance, Mr. Mactier.”
Such an earnest little dick, George thinks. At least this time he didn’t go for the existentialist questions.
Daisy is back. “George?”
“What is it?” he snaps as he scrolls through the dozen e-mails that have arrived since that call began, answering one from his codirector (“No music at all on Friday shows”). He’s a fast one-handed typist, and the speedy leanness of e-mail—no parsing, loose punctuation, type and shoot—has come just in time for George, but the phone is still easier. He’s never said that to a colleague, because then he’d seem doubly pathetic, both gimpy and old-fashioned. He intends to get a speech-recognition setup so that he can dictate his e-mails, but not until it’s a little more commonplace so it won’t look like some special Americans With Disabilities Act accommodation for him, software as prosthesis. He looks up and sees Daisy in the doorway, smiling and frowning, as simmeringly ironic as ever. “Sorry, Daisy. Yes?” Well, yes, he thinks; he’d definitely have sex with Daisy Moore, hypothetically, in the sidewalk census sense. Maybe the sidewalk censuses have been preparatory exercises, a form of contingency planning, and he just hasn’t realized it.
Between the one-handed speed typing and the one-second sex fantasy, he remembers: Francesca, the recut and revoiced Mexico package. He’s so late.
“Mr. Derek Dreen is calling from England. Mr. Dreen’s assistant says that Mr. Dreen would like ‘a personal word’ with you. Do you want to take it?”
He’s never met or spoken to Derek Dreen. He knows who he is, of course. Dreen created Down With It, Fox’s urban crossover hit with an almost all black cast and a 72 percent white audience (and 100 percent white creator), and he’s developing a second show called Dope Sick that sounds like a cooler, younger NARCS, and another, The Illionaire, which is a younger, blacker remake of the old show The Millionaire. Down With It, or Down, as it’s usually called, is filled with gunplay and nakedness but of a highly stylized, almost arty kind, with plots, Dreen says in interviews, “largely adapted from Shakespeare.” The show broke three number-one hits in its first season, a fact George used to convince Featherstone to let him use bits of rap on NARCS. George has theorized that Derek Dreen’s name, which sounds black, helps him get away with being the white producer of such a show. Dreen is now directing a feature film about two chimps taking over a space shuttle mission after all but one of the human astronauts are accidentally ejected into space. The script was written as a comedy for Eddie Murphy and Charlton Heston, but Dreen is filming it as an inspiring millennial drama starring Daniel Day-Lewis. It has been described in the trades as “2001 meets Forrest Gump meets King Kong.”
Of course he’ll take the call.
“Hi,” George says.
“Hello, Mr. Mactier, I’ll patch you through to Derek at Pinewood.”
No, he thinks about saying, this isn’t Mr. Mactier, this is Mr. Mactier’s senior executive assistant—and as soon as you put Mr. Dreen on, I’ll patch him through to Mr. Mactier.
“Hello, George. Great to finally speak with you. Big fan of your work, what you’ve been able to do over there.”
“Thanks.” He’s supposed to reciprocate, of course. “Coming from you that really means something.”
“Tough for Emily to keep that edge, I think.”
He’s never really enjoyed this kind of sneaky, backhanded praise. Tough for George to keep that edge, Dreen would be telling Emily, George assumes, if the partnership dissolution had divvied up NARCS and Real Time differently.
“New show’s causing a tremendous buzz,” Dreen says.
“Excessive.”
“Listen, George, the segment you’re preparing on Sir Farley Lyman, you really ought to reconsider. I’m telling you this as your friend.”
As a friend with whom George has never had any contact whatsoever—that kind of friend. Farley Lyman is a British hero of the Falklands War who now runs an international entertainment distribution business. One of the Real Time producers is working on a story alleging that Sir Farley secretly uses his military contacts in Asian and Middle Eastern countries as a means of getting government-run TV channels to buy his educational children’s cartoon shows. He funneled antiaircraft weapons to North Korea, for instance, in return for broadcasting 110 dubbed episodes of his show Planet of the Kidz. To George, the story still seems unbelievable, literally unbelievable; the ironies, as Zip would say, just too “chocolaty”—too sweet and rich and dark.
“I don’t know what you mean. Reconsider? Why?”
“Sir Farley is a military hero in England, you know. And I’ll be honest—yes, we’re in business together. He assembled some of the financing for Giant Leap.” Giant Leap (formerly Monkey Do, previously Houston, We Have a Banana) is the movie Dreen’s directing. “But this call isn’t about business. I’ve known Farley for years and years—almost seven. He’s the godfather to my wife’s stepson. Your story about Farley is going to be totally inaccurate. I’m asking you to walk away from it. As a personal favor to me.”
A “personal favor,” because he’s a “friend.” George is speechless. He finally hems and haws something about keeping close tabs, making sure any story that airs is absolutely fair and accurate. He stands, but stops to mow through the three fresh e-mails (Hank Saddler is desperate for MBC News to name the new epoch: “like the seventies were the Me Decade and the eighties were the Greed Decade—but this is a brand we can own and leverage for a hundred years.” With Barry Stengel gone, Saddler wants George’s help in preemptively branding the entire twenty-first century.)
He’s got to go. He’s got to go. It’s like the invisible quicksand nightmare, where you struggle to run but can’t.
Featherstone appears just as George makes it as far as Daisy’s desk.
“I know you’re crashing twenty-four/seven here, and I’m late for an oh-one up-front brunch, but do you have a second?”
George retreats to his office, and Featherstone closes the door. It’s not the slow-motion frustration dream, it’s an I Love Lucy episode where Lucy and Ethel improvise endless stupid diversions to prevent Ricky from going into the kitchen. Featherstone is in New York for next year’s prime-time schedule announcements and the up-front advertising sales season.
George remembers Daisy telling him that he has sent flowers and blue cashmere pajamas to Timothy—Ng gave birth last week, becoming the third mother of the third Featherstone child. “Hey,” George says, sitting back down, “congratulations, Timothy.”
“Yeah. Thanks. But it was only for daytime.” The Naked and the Damned, MBC’s handheld, partly black-and-white, two-hour-long afternoon soap opera won three Daytime Emmy Awards last week.
“The baby, I mean. Oliver?”
“Olivier. Oh, thanks. George, my sources tell me you’re working on a negative story about the National Institutes of Health?”
“It’s not really negative. It’s funny. About their Offices of Alternative Medicine and Dietary Supplements. Why?”
“Well, this Reality Channel project, the New Age channel? It’s fast-tracking, it’s sensitive, and Harold got a call from Washington. We need their cooperation on this deal. You know? Planting the Mose Media flag on the anti-alternative-health side of things, right now, would be a drag.”
“It’s not some tough investigative thing, Timothy.”
“Now, you know that if this were a news show, for the news division, I wouldn’t be here at all. I am Mr. Mad Props for the whole Chinese Wall church-and-state deal. But you’re state, right? This is an entertainment program. So we’re talking state to state. Grownup to grownup. When were you planning to schedule the NIH piece?”
“Maybe the third week.”
“Ouch.”
“What?”
“Not great timing for us, in terms of hoop jumping and deal doing.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about it.”
“Yeah?”
“No.”
Featherstone is acting somb
er for Featherstone. He has not high-fived, or power-clasped, or fake-boxed, or said “Yessss!” while pumping his arm, or called George by a nickname.
“I trust you on this, George. Be careful.” He leans back and crosses his legs. In encounters with subordinates, men never cross their legs. “Keep me looped in. Choppy times right now.”
“What?”
“Oh, Sandi is threatening to sue me for palimony in Vegas, and she refuses to give up the suite there. And I think horrid little Hank is poisoning the well with the boss. Just between you and me, okay? I mean, six months later I’m still acting president.”
He doesn’t dislike Featherstone, but he doesn’t really like him, either. And as much as he might want to hear someone with power over him confess weakness, he does not have the time right now to play pal and listen to Featherstone open up.
“It’s the business we have chosen, Timothy.”
“Ain’t that the God’s honest. By the way, the boss says he had a fab lunch up in the boondocks with Lizzie and her Chinese friend this weekend.”
“Right,” George says, feigning knowledge, mustering calm. “I guess they took a drive over to his place in Vermont. Great.”
They both head for the door.
“Hey, you want to shoot up to Five-Nine with me to screen the short-list pilots? Give notes to some poor schmucks instead of just taking them? We got some true shit this season.” For a moment George is startled, thinking Timothy has frankly disparaged the entire slate of MBC pilots. But then he realizes it’s his rap lingo.
“I really don’t have the time, Timothy. But thanks.”
Also, watching almost any television show projected in a theater tends to embarrass George. The overeager mediocrity of TV is too apparent at that physical scale. (Movie screens make TV seem worse; watching movies on TV screens makes movies seem worse. This symmetry first occurred to him during lunch with a Cap Cities executive when he was at ABC. When he called it the “first law of degradation conversity,” the Cap Cities guy looked at George like he was insane, and asked for the check.)
He starts to follow Featherstone to the elevators. “George?” Daisy says.
“I really have to get down to editing, Daisy,” he says, zooming past her. “What?”
“A big wadge of questions from the lighting girl. She needs to order more lights and filters for the crews, and she wants to know if you’ve a preference. She thinks Frezzi Mini-Arcs bring out ‘eye sparkle’ the best. And for the silks, she likes Chimera—”
But George has already turned his back on Daisy and thrown his arms up and out in an exaggerated shrug, walking away. The day is evaporating. He’s done nothing. Rushing full-speed downstairs to the editing rooms, going to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his demographic, George is still pissed at the brat from Time, earnest young Boris, even though it’s possible, he realizes now, that his question might not have been as adversarial as George took it. “I guess the first thing I want to ask you, Mr. Mactier, is pretty basic: Why are you doing this show?”
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“The explosions, especially the Civil War explosions but also Vietnam, are totally realistic. Hiroshima is awesome, the way you can toggle back and forth between aerial view and street-level, and the way the shock waves and heat ripple out and catch buildings and individual stuff on fire, plus the way you can see the people from like a block away. There were almost no bad graphic twitches, even when you force like four really quick time-warp jumps. The sound and the force-feedback effects are like dope sick—especially the meteors hitting the dinosaurs and wooly mammoths, and the guillotine, oh, and the Triangle Shit-waste factory fire. The music was okay, except it’d be cooler if some of the old, like, waltz music were more electronic or fast or something. The Paris and Switzerland part with the crazy artists is kind of boring until World War I starts. To me.”
For the last two hours, Lizzie, her boy-genius Boogie Boffin, and Bruce have been watching videotaped bits of Warps focus group testimony annotated by the marketing consultant Lizzie hired. Madeline, the Fine Technologies sales-and-marketing vice president, should be here, but she quit last week; Lizzie thinks her politician husband pressured her to get out because of the Brouhaha.
“So that’s the plus-or-minus gamut,” the consultant says, standing to shut off the VCR, “with both your Typical Typicals and Typical Outliers represented proportionately. FYI, we found a great deal of player interest—like that older fellow in the suit—for future-time-travel capability.”
Boogie looks at Bruce, and Bruce and Lizzie exchange a look. This had been the major debate from the beginning. Lizzie ruled that they would stick to historical events. “We can do the future in Warps 2: To the End of Time,” she tells Bruce and Boogie.
“In all eleven focus groups,” the consultant says, “the music negatives are the only issues with any predictably impactful consumer salience. Which I understand you’re already dealing with.”
“The ‘authentic’ versus the ‘twenty-first-century’ player choice for the music track,” Boogie reminds Lizzie. “Toggled.”
“And after our third retesting,” adds the consultant, sotto voce, sounding as dumbstruck as if he were leading the archaeological team unearthing the hull of Noah’s ark, “the f-gender scores remain simply unprecedented.” In other words, girls and women enjoy playing Warps.
“Great. Speaking as a member of the f-gender.” She turns to Bruce. “ ‘Dope sick’ means that kid liked the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, right?”
“Yes, Mom,” he replies.
“And the focus groups’ reported game-play excitement levels,” the consultant says, “correspond beat for beat to your new London dopamine and serotonin data.” Lizzie gave Bruce the okay to commission the English neurobiology lab to perform a second battery of tests on people playing the latest version of Warps. Based on those results (the 1348 Black Death excitement level was too intense, the Cuban missile crisis simulation was not frightening enough), Bruce and his people have been tweaking the game, trying to get the balance of simulated fear and actual pleasure just right. Optimized, not maximized.
Lizzie is pleased, so pleased to be finishing with Warps at last. But now that they’re nearly done (Friday is Bruce’s last day), she is permitting herself to see squarely that she’s not ecstatic, she’s relieved. She’s proud of having done her job, not of being the auteur responsible for “a groundbreaking multiplatform game that for the first time in gaming history straddles and synthesizes four major genres—role playing, action, strategy, and journey/enlightenment,” as her web site puts it. True enough, that blather. But it’s just a video game. She has happened into a fun, youthful, exciting, challenging, cutting-edge business, she realizes, about which she doesn’t really give a flying fuck.
Unlike George, who always loves what he’s doing at some deeper level than she does, even when it’s hellish. Lizzie assumes it’s hellish for him now, inferring from the pallor, the tight, frightened look, and the metallic, skunky odor when he gets home after midnight and slips into bed, not quite waking her. Finishing Warps will deprive her of the excuse she’s had for putting off the “George, we need to talk” talk. Except for bare-bones logistics—the kids and the car and her father’s estate (her stepsister-in-law, Gennifer, wants to turn the Palm Springs house into a day spa)—they haven’t had a conversation in weeks. Or sex. On the other hand, they haven’t had a fight in weeks. After George’s show premieres, she figures, he’ll be normal again, and they can try to move from peaceful coexistence toward détente. LuLu asks every few days if “Daddy is going to suicide himself.” (The question that follows is “Then will he murder us?”) But the kids seem otherwise engaged, and oblivious. Lizzie is pleased that Sarah is pleased by her user-support job two afternoons a week at C. Girls, Felipe’s brother’s hair-and-makeup-information web site. Max is even more eerily self-contained than usual, on the computer all the time. She was both relieved and a little sad when he announced that he doesn’t wan
t anyone to call him Sir anymore (too many kids at school thought it was some Knights of the Round Table fantasy, a misconception he found intolerable). She still figures Max is the one who swiped her last pack of cigarettes from the closet, particularly after he announced one night out of the blue that he was “studying” carcinomas, but she replaced the pack, found a new hiding place, and has never mentioned the disappearing Marlboro Lights.
Lance Haft stands in front of her desk holding budget printouts, trembling.
“I was already planning to get rid of Chas,” she tells him, “but I certainly did not fucking ‘lie’ to you.” Lance! Accusing her of lying! The postadolescent anarchosyndicalist spirit of the Fine Technologies staff has finally infected the controller. “I was being optimistic,” she says. Lizzie has temporarily brought in extra programmers and designers to meet the June deadline for Warps. And now there is the Chas Prieve debacle. She hired him to set up an office out in Woodside, California (“Two minutes from the old Buck’s,” he bragged, which meant nothing to her), and he booked $400,000 in revenues the first week, selling ShowNet software and hardware to equip a movie studio in Bombay. But then it turned out the Indians thought the deal was for 400,000 rupees, or $9,457, and Chas has done nothing but spend money and annoy Lizzie in the six weeks since. Fine Technologies’ costs, Lance says, are running $420,000 over budget for the quarter, with a month still left to go.
“Okay,” he says, pulling nervously at the bottom of the gray cotton crewneck, his spring uniform, which seems newly pinkish. “All right. Okay.”
The first act of self-assertiveness in his life, and she’s stifled it already, quashed him, cut off his tiny Massapequa balls. He’ll probably go home and shave the new goatee. Poor little Lance. “In any case,” she says in quasi-conciliation, “if we do the IPO, the market is not going to care that we have negative earnings from operations. In fact they’ll probably like it.”
“Okay. All right.” He disappears.
Turn of the Century Page 49