In the summer of 2008, I drove my Speedster down to San Diego to attend Comic-Con, the annual geekfest that was beginning to overtake Sundance as the movie industry’s most important off-site event. The assignment should have been a blast, like having an all-access pass at nerd Woodstock. For four days every July, more than one hundred thousand fanboys and fangirls from all over the world, many wearing superhero costumes, flocked to the downtown convention center to attend panels with their favorite sci-fi stars, go to screenings of upcoming adaptations of obscure superviolent graphic novels, and purchase pewter miniatures of the USS Enterprise. Strolling through the convention floor, I spotted a Hobbit making out with a Sleestak, an Imperial Stormtrooper chatting on a cell phone, and a middle-aged bald guy squeezed into a Superman suit that was two sizes too small. What wasn’t to love?
Except I had the worst costume in San Diego. I went as an emotional zombie.
I’d never had less interest in the opposite sex. But in the back of my mind, I thought this trip might rekindle my romance with pop culture, the way bored married couples took a second honeymoon to put some zip back into the relationship. At least if I got that back it would be something recognizable in my life, something comfortable and familiar. So I booked a room at the most expensive place in town, the Hotel del Coronado, just across the bay on Coronado Island. The old Victorian beach resort creaked with age—it had a cage elevator in the lobby that was hand-operated by an attendant in a red jacket who looked like he’d been on duty since the hotel opened in 1888—but it was steeped in movie lore. This was where Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis dressed up like flappers and shot Some Like It Hot in the 1950s. This was where Peter O’Toole blew up one of the hotel’s red turrets while shooting The Stunt Man in the late 1970s. Not only was I surrounding myself with tens of thousands of hard-core pop culture enthusiasts, but I’d be staying at a genuine cinematic landmark. If this didn’t respark the love affair, nothing would.
That first afternoon at Comic-Con, I attended a panel with James Cameron, who screened footage of his upcoming $400 million 3-D remake of March of the Wooden Soldiers. I heard J. J. Abrams talk about his upcoming big-screen adaptation of Space: 1999, and Jon Favreau talk about his upcoming live-action version of The Jetsons. It all left me cold. Maybe tomorrow would be better. There was an advance screening of Less Talk, More Killing, which would be opening nationwide at the end of the summer. I was a little surprised to see the film previewing at Comic-Con. Strictly speaking, Montana movies weren’t part of the sci-fi and fantasy genre in that they didn’t have aliens or vampires in them. But action films had been making inroads at the convention. They targeted the same demographic: teenage boys of all ages and genders. In any event, I was looking forward to seeing my old friend Jack Montana on the screen again, even if he was now being played by a gay stoner with a pompadour. If anyone could snap me out of my funk, it was my special special agent.
The Hotel del Coronado was supposedly haunted. In 1892, a broken-hearted beauty named Kate Morgan committed suicide in room 305; some say she’s been flickering lights and levitating objects at the hotel ever since. I still didn’t believe in spirits, but that first night there were some seriously weird noises going on in my room. Low moaning sounds and high-pitched cackling. It could have been the couple next door—I passed them in the hallway earlier, dressed in his-and-her-Wookie outfits—but whatever it was, it was giving me the creeps. I turned on the TV, only I couldn’t get the sound to work. A talking gecko was on the screen trying to tell me something. I assumed it had to do with my car insurance. Finally, I switched the set off, put on some clothes, and headed for the cage elevator to take me downstairs to the bar.
The place was hopping, even at one in the morning. Conventioneers and other tourists were drinking and laughing on the bar’s patio overlooking the pool. I ordered a vodka on the rocks with extra olives and found a vacant booth in a dark corner. I took a little sip of my drink. Then a bigger one. And then I heard a sound coming from the booth next to mine that was even more startling than the ones in my room—the inimitable stoner baritone of Chuck Fuse. I peeked over into the neighboring booth. For a second, I wondered if it might be a conventioneer in a Chuck Fuse mask. Why else would he be wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses in the middle of the night? But no. It was Fuse.
“Dude!” he said when he saw my head poking over. “Fancy meeting you here. Last time I saw you was in the Bahamas, macking on my assistant.” His booming laugh was loud enough to deflate soufflés across a twenty-mile radius. Sitting next to Fuse was an extremely attractive blond woman in her late twenties. There were a BlackBerry and a datebook on the table in front of her. “Dude, sit down.” Fuse waved me over. “Meet my assistant, Hillary. She’s the new Eliska. How freakin’ awesome is this?” He laughed some more. Judging from how friendly he was being, I gathered he liked the story I wrote about him after our interview in the Bahamas. He had every reason to; it was a puff masterpiece. Eliska had inspired me.
“Chuck, what are you doing here?” I asked.
“I’m going to introduce Less Talk, More Killing in Hall H tomorrow,” he explained. “It’s gonna be crazy. The crowd is gonna go nuts.”
“It’s not on the schedule,” I said. “I didn’t see anything about you being at Comic-Con in any of the press materials.”
“It’s a surprise, dude, guerrilla marketing. The studio thought it would be a good idea to get some word of mouth going. Hillary, do you have those screening passes? Let’s give a couple to Max, okay?”
“They’re in my room,” Hillary answered in a boring American accent. “I’ll go up and get them. Be right back.” She was cute, for sure. Even beautiful. But she wasn’t in her predecessor’s league.
“So did you and Eliska hook up after the Bahamas?” Fuse asked, as if reading my mind. “She liked you. She was bummed when you left the island. I could tell.”
“She mentioned me to you?”
“Well, it’s not like we stayed up all night braiding each other’s hair while we talked about you, but yeah, she mentioned you. She said she didn’t meet guys like you in Prague. You should have gone for it, dude. She was into you.”
“It would have been pointless,” I said. “We live seven thousand miles apart.”
“That’s bullshit,” Fuse said. “Seven thousand miles is nothing. Miles are just a state of mind. They don’t matter. It’s a day in an airplane. If you left now, you could be there by”—he looked at his big chunky wristwatch—“four o’clock in the afternoon.”
“Actually, it’d be ten o’clock in the morning. I made that mistake once before …”
“Whatever, dude,” Fuse went on. “Sometimes you gotta say ‘What the fuck’ and make your move. ‘What the fuck’ gives you freedom. Freedom brings opportunity. Opportunity makes your future. You know what I mean?”
I knew exactly what he meant. I’d seen Risky Business, too.
Hall H was the biggest at the convention center. It sat 6,500 people and had three jumbo screens so that even those in the back rows could see a projection of Fuse’s giant head as he strolled onto the stage to introduce Less Talk, More Killing. Just as Fuse predicted, the crowd went nuts. Although, from where I was sitting, the crowd looked borderline crazy already. The girl in the seat next to me was wearing Princess Leia’s metal bikini from The Empire Strikes Back.
The film opened with the Lamborghini chase I had watched being shot in the Bahamas. I was surprised to see that the Lamborghini was neither yellow nor red but green. I wondered how many millions of dollars Gary 7even had set back the production with that color change. But then Jack Montana’s jazzy theme music began blasting on the soundtrack and something strange happened to me. The minute I heard those first zippy chords, so familiar from my childhood, I found myself having an out-of-body experience. Or maybe it was out of time. All I know is that while everybody else in Hall H was watching a green Lamborghini chase Fuse around Nassau, I was seeing a different Jack Montana in a different movie.
Johnny Mars was up on the screen, at the peak of his physical powers. He was dodging bullets and blowing away bad guys with a casual coolness that made my heart soar. Sitting next to me in the theater was sixteen-year-old Sammy, so fresh and beautiful I could barely keep my eyes on the film. As Mars climbed the Statue of Liberty, pursued by terrorists in mini-choppers, Sammy took my hand and gave it a warm squeeze. She leaned in and kissed my cheek. I was happy. I was unafraid. The future was still my friend …
“Are you okay, mister?” the girl in Princess Leia’s bikini asked me. “Are you feeling all right?”
I nodded my head yes but I wasn’t all right. I had started to cry. Actually, I had started to sob.
I’d lost everything I cared about. Everything that had made me the person I was, was gone. My love affair with pop culture and movie stars. My decade-long quest to understand fame. Sammy.
I had to get out of there. But except for the light on the screen, Hall H was pitch-black. Tiptoeing out of my row, I tripped over the leg of a guy in a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger costume (“Asshole,” he mumbled), landed in the aisle on all fours, got up, and groped my way toward the exit. I finally pushed through the double doors into the blindingly bright corridor outside Hall H. It was packed with conventioneers. A vast, teeming mob of extraterrestrials and supermutants. I tried to elbow my way toward the street exit, but I got pinned between a girl in a Wonder Woman outfit and a guy in Spock ears. I lurched my way free but toppled onto a teenager in a Hulk costume (“Hey, watch where you’re going, dickhead,” he muttered) as I squirmed through the throng, struggling to get away.
I had made so many mistakes. I had spent my entire adult life with my face pressed up against the windows of other people’s lives. I’d interviewed the famous, traveled to the most glamorous locales on Earth, but I’d never been more than an emotional tourist. Even the woman I had loved for all those years—I’d loved her only from afar, from behind the glass wall of her fame. I had devoted myself to a shadow of a girl, a figment, a memory.
I kept pushing through the hordes, my head spinning with regrets. Now that my life had collapsed, I began to see just how wobbly the construction had been all along. I’d built it out of the flimsiest materials—celebrity worship, frequent flyer miles, idealized notions of romantic love. No wonder the thing came crashing down. It was amazing I’d been able to keep it standing for as long as I had. Now I had to build a new life. But how? After being me, who else could I become? Where else could I go? What else could I do?
I finally spotted the plate-glass doors leading to the outside world. I hurled myself toward them with all my might, but it turned out they weren’t the exit. They were plate-glass windows. I banged against them headfirst and bounced backward onto the floor. When I got my wind back, I saw three aliens hovering above me. One was a scantily clad reptile woman with four breasts, another looked like a Rastafarian orangutan, and the third—I couldn’t believe it—had a furry face and large rodent ears. A conventioneer was made up like my hamsteroid character from Dark Matter. What kind of lame fans dressed up like the extras from an old sci-fi show?
“Whoa, bro!” hamster man said, looking down at me. “If you want to get out, why don’t you just use the door?” I did want to get out—out of everything I’d boxed myself into.
20
The stock market crash wreaked havoc across the entire entertainment-media world in the fall of 2008. Magazines and newspapers were folding right and left. Mass layoffs were spreading across every title at Time Inc., Condé Nast, and Hearst, and firings were rumored to be imminent at KNOW, as well. Still, in the midst of the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression, I found an excuse to jet off to Prague on the company’s dime.
The funny thing was, before the economic collapse, I’d been thinking about quitting KNOW. In fact, mentally writing my resignation letter had become one of my favorite leisure time activities. The financial apocalypse made me reconsider—it wasn’t the smartest time to be pulling out of the labor force—but I was finding it harder and harder to do my job. Every time I sat down with another celebrity and switched on my digital recorder for an interview, a little piece of my soul shriveled up and died. But then, as luck would have it, the Civil War broke out in the one place I’d been looking for an excuse to go, the Czech Republic.
Central Europe was still packed with Hollywood productions. Thanks to a weak currency and cheap labor, it was actually less expensive to fly an entire cast to Prague and build a full-scale replica of the plantation that Ulysses S. Grant used as his military headquarters during the Battle of Chattanooga than it was to shoot the scene at the actual, still-standing plantation in Tennessee. Which is how, in Ulysses S, the great Civil War general ended up invading Confederate territory in Bohemia. And how I ended up on a plane crossing the Atlantic to once again interview the great Alistair Lyon.
The only hitch in my plan was that Eliska didn’t want to see me. I finally wrote her an e-mail explaining why I had disappeared so abruptly six months earlier. She replied politely but firmly, offering her condolences for the loss of my friend and best wishes to me for the future, but making it clear she didn’t want to have anything more to do with me. I must have really hurt her feelings. Maybe not as badly as her aristo ex-boyfriend, but badly enough. Or else she had simply come to her senses. “It’s nice that you are coming to Prague again,” she wrote, “but there is no point in seeing each other. Our lives are too different. We live too far away. One of us is bound to get wounded, and I don’t want it to be me.”
She was right, of course. We did live too far away. Our lives were too different. But, as Chuck Fuse had quoted Curtis Armstrong, sometimes you have to say what the fuck. If Eliska truly was my shot at a second chance, the last train out of the war-torn Berlin that was my romantic life, then I had to make a move. I had to go back to Prague. I had no idea how it would turn out, whether anything could actually happen between us. But I knew I had to try.
So I wrote more e-mails pleading with Eliska to change her mind. I apologized for being such an insensitive clod. I promised to do better in the future. I even offered to bring her a denim catsuit with an ABBA patch—“So America!” I wrote—if she’d have just one cup of coffee with me. Eventually, I wore her down and she relented. She agreed to meet me in Old Town Square. But this time, she made clear, there would be no drinking of Becherovka. And definitely no kissing.
As with all his roles, Lyon threw himself into the part of General Grant with an intensity that would have had Robert De Niro and Russell Crowe elbowing each other and rolling their eyes. He spent seven months on the facial hair alone, growing and trimming until he got the beard and mustache precisely right. He read dozens of biographies, pored over tintype photographs taken during the Civil War, even consulted historians on what the future eighteenth president’s voice sounded like. The consensus, judging from the scratchy, whiskey-soaked snarl Alistair ultimately settled on, was a combination of the Dark Knight and a broken garbage disposal.
“My friend!” Alistair greeted me when I arrived on the field in the suburbs of Prague where the Battle of Chattanooga was about to be re-created. Alistair was outfitted in a Union officer’s dress uniform and carrying an unsheathed sword with a golden pommel. A hundred extras in sack coats and forage caps were sitting on the grass in front of the facade of a fake antebellum manse that had been erected for the scene. Horses with nineteenth-century military saddles were grazing nearby. “We really must stop meeting like this,” the star joked. Then he put his arm around my shoulder and walked me toward a couple of rocking chairs on the fake mansion’s real-enough porch, where we could conduct the interview until the shooting began.
There was a time when this sort of cozy rapport with a star would have thrilled me. I would have relished the jealous glances I was drawing from the cast and crew. I would have felt special, important, higher up on the food chain, as Suki Monroe put it. But not anymore.
Oh, I liked Alistair well enough. In a way, bumping in
to him all those times, especially at Sammy’s memorial, had made him the closest thing I had to a friend in the celebrity world. But I didn’t care about his General Grant movie, about his acting, about any of the things I was supposed to be writing about for KNOW magazine. All I wanted was to get the interview over with so that I could get back to my hotel room in time to change before meeting Eliska at the clock tower in Old Town Square at six that evening, as we had arranged in our last e-mail exchange. That was all this trip to Prague was about.
“How is your philosophical study of fame going?” Alistair asked me as I set up my voice recorder, testing the microphone the way I had a hundred times before. “Have you unlocked the secret yet?”
“I gave up caring,” I answered honestly. “The whole thing started to seem silly. I don’t think there is any big secret. As far as I can tell, people look wherever the camera is pointed. It doesn’t matter who it’s pointed at. You’re famous because it happens to be pointed at you a lot of the time. If it were pointed at me, I’d be famous too.”
Alistair tapped his nose with a finger. “Exactly,” he said. “Congratulations. You have figured out the secret. Too bad for you.”
“Why too bad?” I asked.
“Because now your job is going to be a lot less fun. Now you know the truth. The camera has all the magical powers. The people you interview aren’t special at all. They don’t have any magic. They just happen to be in front of cameras. How boring.”
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