“And the Monitors … ?” Weller asked. “I keep hearing about these Monitors.”
Lazio waved his cigar, as if brushing away the importance of the Monitors. “Auditors,” he said. “Boys from the home office. They just keep an eye out to see that everyone is doing things John’s way. You know, like the guys from network continuity. ”
“But they have to clear everyone you hire …”
“Yeah, yeah, it can get to be a pain in the ass sometimes,” Lazio said. “Like you, for instance. Now I know damn well you’re probably a better director than anyone we’ve got now, but the directive is that nobody works as a director until they’ve completed meditative deconditioning and passed a Monitor life analysis. So all I can offer you is a provisional appointment as a cameraman at two hundred a week.”
“Cameraman?” Weller exclaimed. “A lousy two hundred dollars a week? Now you are insulting me. That’s not even scale.” If this son of a bitch thinks he’s going to hire me as a cameraman for a stinking two hundred a week. …
“Take it easy, take it easy!” Lazio said. “Believe me, once you complete your meditative deconditioning and pass the life analysis, you’ll get a permanent appointment as a director. Absolutely. My word of honor. As for the salary—when you figure in the free unlimited processing, that doesn’t look so bad either.”
“I don’t know …” Weller said uncertainly. But, of course, he did know. Two hundred a week was two hundred dollars a week more than nothing, and the unlimited free processing made it come out to more than he had been netting off Monkey Business at the end. But cameraman on some schlocky amateur commercial unit? Jesus… .
Lazio stuck his cigar in his mouth and looked squarely at Weller as he bit off his words around it. “Look, it depends on what you think of yourself,” he said. “I’ve told you what we’ve got, and I’ve told you the kind of people we’ve got working for us now. If you don’t think you can rise to the top in a setup like this faster than hot shit through a tin horn, then I don’t want you working for us either. You’re not the man I thought I was looking for.”
“When you put it that way. …” Weller said. They did have money, and Lazio did seem like a man who really was determined to have his production company move on to bigger and better things, and he certainly was right about the situation. If I can’t become the main man in an operation like this, I ought to look for another fine of work.
“How long will it take me to stop being a cameraman and start being a director?” he asked.
“A few weeks at most,” Lazio said. “You think I want to waste a real talent longer than I have to, things being what they are?”
“Okay,” Weller said, “you’ve got yourself a cameraman.” Lazio grinned. He stood up and once again shook Weller’s hand. “Welcome to the family,” he said. “You’re not going to regret it. Couple of years, and we’ll both be up there collecting our Oscars together.”
Lazio sat down. “Okay,” he said, “now I’ve got to get back to work. My secretary will call you tomorrow and give you the details. Your producer will be Sara English, pretty okay, all things considered. Good luck.”
And that was it. Weller left Lazio’s office bouncing on the balls of his feet. Hot damn! he thought. I’ve got a job! A job with a future! I’ll be the best damn cameraman they ever saw. And once they let me direct, I’ll show them who’s going to do their first feature! Energy flowed through him, he was riding the wavefront of destiny, he could hardly wait to begin.
Only when he had reached the garage and realized that the other thing he could hardly wait to do was go home and celebrate his good fortune with Annie, did he remember that there was no Annie waiting for him. That he had not even thought of her once during the whole interview with Lazio. That even the features of her face were becoming slightly hazy in his mind’s eye.
What changes I’ve gone through, he thought uneasily as he climbed into the familiar Triumph. And what changes are yet to come?
Eight
Changes Productions turned out to be an old, converted pom-printing plant in the nether reaches of the San Fernando Valley, an area of trailer camps, small industry, junkyards, and used-car lots steaming in saturation smog. Weller parked his car with a certain sinking sensation in his stomach and walked in through the street entrance. He found himself in a tiny reception area facing a glassed-in booth containing a switchboard operator and a heavy, hard-faced man wearing a white shirt and black trousers. He gave his name to this bozo, who checked it against a list, and handed him an ID card sealed in plastic.
“Keep this with you at all times,” he was told. “You need it to get in. I’ll get someone to take you inside.”
Weller waited uncomfortably in the unfurnished reception area which had all the inviting charm of a prison cell. This was already not quite what he had expected. There was something not merely tacky but greasy about the face that Changes Productions showed to the world, a strange combination of pom factory and cut-rate military-industrial complex, light-years from the Hollywood veneer of Harry Lazio’s office.
With a loud buzz the steel door at the other end of the cubicle opened, and a short fat woman in her twenties stood there, holding the door open for him. “I’m Arlene Harris,” she said, “Sara English’s assistant. Come with me, and I’ll take you to the set.”
Weller followed her inside, directly into a large hangarlike space divided up into offices, storerooms, and cubicles by raw plywood partitions. At the other end of this maze a series of six large, totally enclosed boxlike rooms had been constructed under the high factory ceiling, like outsized dressing rooms in a real studio sound stage. “These are our sound stages,” Arlene Harris said proudly. “We have six of them—three for video and three for film. We also have two editing rooms and two sound-mixing stages.” Weller was not impressed; the whole operation looked amateurish, and the waste of space seemed tremendous.
Arlene Harris opened the door to one of the sound stages and led him inside. Weller groaned inwardly, for the shooting lights were on, and the crew inside was in the middle of a take. He would have crucified anyone who barged into a shoot like that.
A young man and woman costumed in army-surplus hippie gear and caked with scrounge makeup were lying on a messy bed. The girl was nodding out, and the boy was in the process of shooting himself up with a dirty-looking needle. Behind them was a flat of a dingy bedroom wall filthied with miscellaneous graffiti. A single video camera was shooting the scene under harsh rudimentary lighting that gave no dramatic shadows or undertones. A red-bearded young man in his thirties stood by the camera, apparently directing. A script girl and two male grips stood nearby, all young, all wearing jeans and work shirts.
Against one wall stood a striking redheaded woman in a tight tan pants suit that tantalizingly displayed her superb upright breasts and erect dancer’s carriage. Across the room a dark-haired balding man in black pants and a black turtleneck stood with arms folded, watching with a lidded, self-contained detachment.
“Okay,” the director said, “cut. Let’s get ready for the close-up.” The actors sat up, and the cameraman began to reposition for the next shot, but no one bothered to kill the shooting lights. Kill those damn lights! Weller wanted to shout.
Arlene led Weller up to the redhead. “Sara, this is Jack Weller.”
The redhead turned to regard Weller with big green eyes that went straight to his groin. She was in her early thirties, and quite beautiful, though there was something strangely cold even in the sexual vibrations that seemed to surround her. “Welcome aboard,” she said. “I’m Sara English.” Their eyes met and something flashed between them; Weller felt the stirrings of long-surpressed treasonous desires. She smiled at him. “Let’s go outside and talk while they’re setting up. Arlene, you keep an eye on things here.”
She led him out of the sound stage, with the man in the black turtleneck tracking them all the way with cold eyes like radar antennae. Once outside she leaned up against the wall of the sound sta
ge, thrusting the nipples of her unfettered breasts against the fabric of her jacket, a posture that seemed both deliberately enticing and coldly commanding.
“We’re shooting a spot for Narcon in there,” she said. “That’s our narcotics-rehabilitation program, pretty important to the movement. It gets us a lot of state and federal funding. ” She paused and flipped through some papers on her clipboard. “I generally oversee all the shooting,” she said. “All our kids are dedicated, high-consciousness people, but we’re kind of short of technical expertise.” She gave him a smile that would melt glass. “I’m looking forward to working with you,” she said. “Someone like you will have an opportunity to provide a great service to the movement. I’ll show you around first, and then we’ll pick a spot for you. You might as well get into it right away.”
Weller followed at her heels as she took him on the quickie tour of the various sound stages, saying little, trying to ignore her powerful physical presence, trying to soak up and evaluate the situation. What he saw was pretty impressive on an activity level but quite appalling on a professional level. In addition to the Narcon spot, they were presently shooting commercials for Sunrise Books and a housing subdivision being put up by Carmel Properties, outfits which he recognized as being owned by Transformationalism through Utopia Industries. But they were also doing stuff for a savings and loan in East Los Angeles, a line of vegetable choppers, and a health-food company all of which seemed to have nothing to do with Transformationalism.
This struck Weller as odd, because the level of what was being done was the pits, from what he could see. No one seemed to have the faintest idea of how to really use lighting effectively. The actors were stiffs. He saw three blown takes in the space of ten minutes, one because the damn camera ran out of film in the middle of the take. A boom mike nearly beaned one of the actors. A director tried to take the same sequence three times before he realized that a line of dialogue was missing from the script.
Why would anyone hire these jerks unless they had to, unless they were owned by Transformationalism?
“Well, what do you think?” Sara asked him as they stood outside the health-foods-commercial set. Should I tell her? Weller wondered. Should I really tell her? But she was looking at him so warmly, and her eyes were so bright and confident, that telling the truth seemed like a stupid, pointless cruelty.
“Uh … you certainly seem very busy,” he said.
Sara nodded. “We’ve got more work than we can handle,” she said. “It comes in from everywhere. Our advertising agency uses us exclusively, and of course there’s Narcon and Sunrise and all the other movement businesses, not to mention Transformationalists in outside companies who are under life directive to give us their business. TV commercials hit the public in a particularly open state, so we don’t like to turn anything down. Every commercial is another chance to get the message through to hundreds of thousands of people.”
“The message?”
Sara looked at him peculiarly. “The Transformational message,” she said. “You don’t think we’re doing this just for the money do you?”
“Uh … of course not.”
“Well now, let’s see, where can we fit you in?” Sara said, thumbing through the papers on her clipboard. “Hmmra … We could use a new cameraman on the Sunrise commercial. Harrison just isn’t working out. How does that sound?”
“Good as anything,” Weller said. “But I don’t want to come in with bad vibes …”
”Bad vibes?”
“Taking someone’s job.”
Again Sara gave him that peculiar look. “Harrison won’t object,” she said. “Why should he? If you can optimize the shooting over him, he’ll be glad to see you take over. He’s as dedicated to the movement as you or I.”
“If you say so,” Weller said. I’ve got a lot to learn about this setup, he thought. Maybe almost as much as these nerds have to learn about getting decent footage in the can.
“Come on people, get in sync, eptify yourselves, let’s feel that wavefront moving through us all together now, and get this right.”
Georgie Prinz, the so-called director, was hunched over in front of the set, trying to inspire the author of Land of Milk and Honey with Transformationalist jargon while Weller peered blearily through the viewfinder on the camera, waiting irritably for them to try to get their shit together one more time. The shooting day had been an infinity of contemptuous boredom, and Weller had spent most of his endless waiting time praying for it to be over.
As a Transformational lesson in humility, starting him as a cameraman was a dismal failure. Compared to this mess, Monkey Business was Citizen Kane, and he was Orson Welles. The best that could be said about the crew was that they knew their equipment well enough to turn it on and off and more or less point it in the right direction. The author, Deke Clayton, was an ex-junkie who had been cured by Narcon and written a book about it which was published by Sunrise Books, just to keep it all in the Transformationalist family. He had a wooden nervous, uptight bearing, and spoke with a bug-brained manic fervor.
Georgie Prinz’s idea of camera direction was to tell Weller “close-up” or “medium shot” as if he knew what he was talking about and then give him a lecture about the “energy dynamics” of the shot in gobbledygook about “wave forms” and “rhythms” and “transformations” like some kind of Junior Steinhardt on speed.
What should’ve taken an hour or two to shoot was taking all day, and to compound the agony, all these turkeys were so intensely sincere that it made his teeth ache.
“Roll ’em!”
“Sound okay … I mean speed!”
“Milk and Honey, scene two, take five.”
“Action, people, sync those vibes!”
Weller focused a medium shot on Clayton; a somewhat skeletal figure in a blue suit, with short-cropped hair, steel-rimmed glasses, a burned-out complexion, and eyes that glowed with such unnatural health that they seemed to be in the wrong face. Clayton had his left palm planted on his book as he spoke, as if he were swearing on the Bible.
“I was … the lowest junkie in creation,” he stammered loudly, straining his memory to recall every other word in the script. “But a miracle called Narcon … restored … saved me from the … pit, and I lived to tell the world about it… .”
Weller found it difficult to imagine what idiot had conceived this commcercial. An author talking about his own book was pure death, even if it were Norman Mailer or Gore Vidal, and this character could hardly remember the stupid script.
This thing wouldn’t sell any books, and Sunrise Books was a Transformationalist company. Why were they screwing themselves this way? Just to put a testimonial to Narcon on the air? But they were already shooting an up-front Narcon commercial. It didn’t make sense.
“… to find out how a junkie like … I was … could be standing here holding a book … he was able to write himself … and how anyone can find … his own Land of Milk and Honey.”
“Cut!” said Georgie Prinz. “Okay, I think we’ve used up whatever positive forces we had in us today, so we’ll call it a wrap.”
Weller turned off the camera, got it ready for storage, and slunk toward the exit, hoping to escape without having to talk to anyone. What was there to say?
But Prinz caught up to him before he made it to the door. “Hey, how about it?” he said enthusiastically. “You could really feel the energy, couldn’t you?” He was a thin, slightly round-shouldered guy in his late twenties, with stringy hair, intense eyes, and a frantic conversational tone; yet somehow there was also something of the puppy dog in him which aroused in Weller a certain gentle hypocrisy.
“Yeah, there’s really … uh … spirit here,” Weller said, and kept walking.
“Bet you don’t see so many eptified consciousnesses working together on network shows, huh?”
“Different kind of scene …”
Prinz grinned at him. “And you haven’t really synced in yet,” he said. “Wait till you really
get behind the second-level stuff. We’re not just making commercials, we’re really transforming, we’re really getting into it.”
“Uh-huh,” Weller said wearily. “It seems that way to me already.”
He reached the sound-stage door and stepped through, with Prinz still yipping at his heels like an earnest puppy. The balding man in the black turtleneck was waiting outside, eyes like ball bearings in a bloodless face.
“A word with Mr. Weller, Georgie,” he said in a firm, flat voice.
“Sure Owen,” Prinz said, his voice instantly subdued, and without another word he loped off toward the front of the building, disappearing into the warren of plywood partitions.
“I’m Owen Karel,” the creepy character said, staring at Weller as if that were supposed to mean something to him. Weller cocked an inquisitive eyebrow.
“I’m the Monitor representative.”
“Oh.” So this was one of the Monitors. What did he want? It didn’t figure to be anything pleasant.
“I’ve made an appointment for you to begin life analysis,” Karel said. “Saturday at the Center. ”
“Is that an order?”
Karel grimaced slightly. “You may consider it a life directive, yes,” he said. “I hope it will go smoothly. We’ve been requested to expedite matters by Harry Lazio’s office, but that doesn’t mean we’ll be any less thorough.”
“Of course not, ” Weller said. There was something positively reptilian about this guy, and he had the kind of face you instinctively wanted to punch.
“I’m glad we understand each other,” Karel said. “Lazio is very enthusiastic about you, but I want it understood that the Monitors have the last word on permanent appointments. There are some rather questionable items in your dossier, so rest assured, we’ll be monitoring you closely.”
“I’m sure you’re just doing your job,” Weller said, inching away from him.
The Mind Game Page 15