Zeroville: A Novel

by Steve Erickson

  176.

  By the time the Sound has seeped west to all the Los Angeles clubs—the Whisky and the Roxy on the Strip, the Masque in a cellar off a sidestreet in Hollywood and Al’s Bar downtown, Madame Wong’s and the Hong Kong Café in Chinatown—it’s grown in desperation with the sunlight; having swallowed itself alive as the city in which it now lives has swallowed itself. At the Starwood on the corner of Santa Monica and Crescent Heights, Vikar hears a local band that plays songs about riding the bus in Los Angeles. They have a blond rockabilly guitarist and the lead vocalists are a married couple: A thousand kids, they sing, bury their parents; and as though he’s tracking down De Rais, child killer of the Middle Ages, Vikar wanders from room to room among the children of the Starwood, searching the Punk Ages for pedocidal monsters, hurling himself into audiences and slam-dancing to ward the monsters off, dancing so maniacally as to clear the floor. Soon he’s alone in the middle of the room, the band to one side, everyone else centrifugally compelled to the perimeters. On two occasions he’s removed by security guards, mild carnage in his wake.

  175.

  Mitch Rondell says, “That’s not half bad.” Vikar is sitting with him in an office in Culver City; it’s more than a year since Cannes, when the last thing Rondell said to him was, “You’re late,” before fleeing the press conference that followed. Vikar isn’t entirely clear whether he’s actually proposed updating Là-Bas to a punk milieu, but Rondell goes on, “It’s an interesting idea. I think we do need to nail down a screenwriter ASAP, then have a story conference and hash out the possibilities, so you can convey your vision of the picture. Of course, most America hates this punk shit.”

  Rondell strikes Vikar as less cordial than before. Vikar wishes Molly Fairbanks was here; he likes the way she talks and completely understands everything she says, except when he doesn’t, such as recently. “You’re not writing the script,” she tried to explain in their last conversation, “so although the deal memo stipulates the property belongs to you, we need to get you a story credit even if the Writers Guild squawks …” Vikar isn’t certain what this means. Molly also talks faster than she used to. “We don’t want to get into a situation where Mirron or UA can take away the project later.” There seems to be some urgency on everyone’s part to “get a star attached,” Molly says, “and they’re expecting someone in the eight-hundred-thousand range, which is why the budget is set at what it is, including your one-eighty-five K as director …” This last part Vikar finds particularly incomprehensible.

  “So it makes a difference,” Rondell says now, “if this is a contemporary or period piece. If it’s contemporary, a Richard Dreyfuss, for instance, might make sense, but not if it’s set in the nineteenth century. And, uh,” he swivels his chair away from Vikar slightly, “the role of the woman—”

  “Hyacinthe.”

  “Hyacinthe. It’s not a leading role but an important one, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe she’s a figment of the main character’s dreams, maybe not.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Comes to him in the middle of the night, an erotic presence … she needs to make the right sort of impression. Wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “An erotic presence.”

  “Yes, you said that.”

  Swiveling the chair away from Vikar further: “What would you think of Soledad Palladin?”

  174.

  “What?” says Vikar.

  “Soledad Palladin? From New Y—?”

  “I know who—”

  “I don’t think nudity or explicit sexuality would be a problem. I mean, only if you see it as an integral part of the picture, of course.”

  Cylinders click into place, like the night he found Zazi sleeping in the car on Thirty-Fourth Street. “You know where she is.”

  Rondell moves his head from side to side, in a way that’s neither a nod nor shake. “It’s an idea. But this is what casting directors are for.”

  “What about Zazi?”

  Rondell is confused. “Zazi?”

  “Do you know if she’s all right?”

  “It was just an idea.” Rondell waves it away.

  “You know where they are.”

  “They’re fine. You’re getting off track here.”

  “I’m getting off track?”

  “The picture …”

  “You said, ‘What about Soledad.’”

  “Vikar, forget it.”

  “I just want to know the little girl is all right.”

  “She’s getting to be not so little,” Rondell says irritably, “except a little too smart beyond her years. She’s with friends. She’s with her father.”

  173.

  Vikar takes the Sunset bus as far east as it will go, then walks north to Chinatown’s central plaza not far from Philippe’s where, barely an hour in Los Angeles a decade before, he swatted a hippie with a lunch tray.

  The night-black central plaza is gashed with neon, and the opium dens and gambling joints of the early twentieth century have given way to the punk clubs. In Madame Wong’s off Gin Sing Way, when she touches his arm between the Alley Cats’ set and the Germs’, he doesn’t recognize her. “It’s me,” she says.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” he finally answers.

  “That’s what you said the last time, at CBGB’s.”

  “You’re nine.”

  “I haven’t been nine in almost five years,” Zazi says. “Do I look nine? I’ve been trying to find you.”

  172.

  He says, “How did you know I would be here?”

  “I didn’t,” she says. “But word is out, and it was a matter of time before you and I wound up in the same place.”

  “What word? You shouldn’t be drinking that.”

  “The word about the freak with James Dean on his head.”

  “Nobody knows me,” he says.

  “Are you serious? Everybody knows you. I just missed you at the Masque last week.”

  “It’s not James Dean. I’ve been looking for you as well.”

  “Really?”

  “For your black Mustang.”

  “Mom doesn’t have that anymore. That never made it back from New York. Now Mom has the Jag that Mitch gave her.”

  “Rondell gave her a car?”

  “You didn’t know about Mom and Mitch?”

  After a moment Vikar says, “Is he your father?”

  Even in the dark, something of her seems to wither a bit. “God, no,” she says. Recovering her teenage poise she says, “First he completely cut her out of that movie you were working on, then offered to ‘take care’ of her when we had no place else to go. Very smooth. She’s been living with him awhile.” She adds emphatically, “I don’t live there.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “I like to think Jim Morrison is my dad. But probably not.”

  The band comes on. The last thing he says that either of them can hear is, “Do you want to go to a movie?”

  171.

  Vikar finally meets Molly Fairbanks in person for dinner at Martoni’s on Cahuenga, along with the prospective screenwriter. Molly is in her early thirties, a slightly less pretty and less pixilated Diane Keaton; in person, she’s a bit shyer than on the telephone. The screenwriter is the grandson of a famous French filmmaker who made a lost silent epic more than half a century before about the French Revolution. The young writer wears an eye patch that he moves from one eye to the other; the waiter doesn’t know whether to look at the writer’s eye patch or Vikar’s head. The writer says even less than Vikar but does seem to have read Là-Bas. Molly does most of the talking while Vikar drinks cappuccinos heavily dosed with kahlúa.

  170.

  In the car afterward, driving Vikar back to his house as he stares out the window at a Los Angeles he almost never sees from a vantage point lower than a bus, and which now seems to him less suspended in space than floating on a billowing dark sea, Molly says, �
�Mitch should have been there, I don’t know why he wasn’t but it doesn’t matter. The good thing is you don’t have to deal with the pre-production crap setting up a picture that you might if you were trying to make it independently, Mirron will work some of that out with UA though I would think you’d want to be involved in some of these decisions, your choice of D.P., for instance, there’s this guy over in Europe who’s shot some of the new pictures coming out of Germany, Kings of the Road, American Friend, you might take a look at what he’s doing, it’s lyrical while still being raw and having some intensity, what do I mean to say—?”

  “Punk,” says Vikar.

  “—well, yes, that’s one word for it I guess, it might be perfect for what we’re doing, on our end the priorities are to get a workable script, who knows at this point if this writer can pull it off but I thought it made sense for you two to meet tonight, and then to work with the casting director finding the right lead who’s willing to work with a first-time director, UA wants a star, it’s part of what they’re spending the three-point-seven-five on, Clint and Jack and Redford you can’t afford and they aren’t right for it anyway, too American, Newman is too old and it’s not widely known but McQueen is sick, Pacino is about two hundred thousand out of our price range and Dreyfuss is impossible to work with even when he’s not around the bend on coke, De Niro would be great and at the moment may even be affordable but has projects lined up for as far as the eye can see, just went into a boxing picture with Scorsese that’s really Bobby’s baby and even if we were willing to wait he won’t be affordable by the time we get to him, a Depardieu seems obvious but less so if we update the story and UA won’t think he’s bankable as far as American audiences are concerned, and it’s also probably not too soon to start thinking about the female lead,” Molly pauses for a moment as if suddenly realizing she’s wandered into dangerous territory but it’s too late so she forges ahead, “even though she’s not really a lead but there’s this one actress coming up now with a name out of a Dickens novel who’s everywhere in everything, she was in Julia and Woody’s new one and was in the Cimino and now is making this divorce picture with Dustin Hoffman where everyone says she’s phenomenal and going to win the Academy Award—though for our thing she might be a little, I don’t know, cerebral? maybe not quite, I don’t know, erotic enough? Vikar?”

  At the corner of Sunset and Clark, a throng of kids waits outside the Whisky. The marquee reads

  X

  DEVO

  BLASTERS

  and Vikar opens the car door. “I’ll get out here,” he says. “Thank you for the ride.”

  169.

  One evening Vikar meets Zazi at the Fine Arts on Wilshire Boulevard just west of La Cienega to see A Place in the Sun, which premiered at the same theater nearly thirty years before.

  The line circles the theater and up the side street. Inside, every seat is full. Vikar buys popcorn and Cokes and talks to Zazi with more excitement about the movie they’re going to see than about his own movie. He doesn’t ask about her mother or Rondell. She carries a guitar case; when someone takes the seat next to her, she holds the case between her legs. Vikar asks if she plays guitar and she says it’s a bass. He doesn’t know the difference between a guitar and a bass guitar.

  The movie begins and when Montgomery Clift says, “I’ve loved you since the first moment I saw you. I guess maybe I loved you before I saw you,” and Elizabeth Taylor answers, “Tell mama. Tell mama all,” the audience laughs, including Zazi. Since it’s not in Vikar’s DNA to feel rage toward Zazi, devastation is his only option. “I guess it’s O.K.,” Zazi says afterward, “sometimes it seemed kind of silly. And what’s with that ending? Did he mean to kill the pregnant chick or not? And if he didn’t, why does he seem so, you know, blissed out at the end, when he’s going to be executed? It sort of doesn’t make sense—not that it has to make sense, I guess. But.” She shrugs. “He seemed kind of gay, too,” she tosses it off, and then, to the crestfallen look on Vikar’s face, “sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” Vikar answers hollowly. But they don’t talk about movies anymore.

  168.

  On the radio, an English band sings about Montgomery Clift.

  I see a car smashed at night

  Cut the applause and dim the light

  Monty’s face broken on a wheel

  Is he alive? Can he still feel?

  and listening to the song, Vikar stands before the windows on the top floor of his house staring out at the night, his reflection in the glass, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift floating above the city in the golden glow of the house lamp. The city tumbles out at his feet, a grand catacomb of neurons. Vikar turns his head from side to side, from profile to profile in the reflection: which profile was it that Monty broke on the steering wheel? Was it the profile that revealed his light, or the profile that revealed his dark? If Vikar were in the editing room choosing one over the other, would he choose Monty’s beauty over his truth, if in fact it was the profile of truth that was shattered? And if the profile of truth happened in fact also to be the profile that was still beautiful, still unbroken, what did the light lose to no longer have the dark?

  167.

  Variety, June 3, 1980: “LOS ANGELES—Principal photography is set to begin this summer on God’s Worst Nightmare, it was announced today by Mirron Productions.

  “Starring Harvey Keitel and based on a 19th-century French novel that reportedly has been updated to a local punk milieu by screenwriter Michel Sarre, God’s Worst Nightmare marks the directorial debut of Academy Award-nominated editor Vikar Jerome (Your Pale Blue Eyes).

  “The Mirron announcement follows a year of delays on the project due to script and casting problems. Outsiders note that, today’s announcement aside, a more precise starting date has not been set, indicating the possibility of still unresolved issues particularly in the face of next month’s pending SAG strike. Mirron has scheduled the picture for release in May 1981 and competition at next spring’s 34th Cannes film festival, coinciding with wide domestic and overseas distribution by United Artists.”

  166.

  Vikar sees a movie about New York. The narrator talks about how it’s his city and always will be. To a crescendo of romantic music, fireworks explode above the park and the buildings that line it. Vikar doesn’t remember fireworks exploding over the park when he lived in New York, although he had a suite that overlooked the park for months. He doesn’t remember New York so gleaming or the contrasts of light and dark so beautiful. He remembers the city as shades of gray. This is a science-fiction New York, Vikar realizes, a fantasy New York of people who are not very practical about the real world, unlike Hollywood. Perhaps there’s a movie about Los Angeles where fireworks explode to a crescendo above the Hollywood Sign, but Vikar has never seen it.

  165.

  A week later, Vikar is still thinking about the New York movie at a pre-pro meeting in the Thalberg Building on the Columbia lot. Two worried-looking associate producers, a slightly pinched costume designer and several faceless production assistants, as well as a production designer with long hair who wears an open leather vest, sit around a conference table with Vikar and Molly Fairbanks. Mitch Rondell is not there. In these meetings, Vikar says nothing and Molly functions in Rondell’s place as a kind of production coordinator and translator of Vikar’s wishes, or what she supposes to be Vikar’s wishes.

  164.

  The conversation turns from one subject to the next. “The punk-club set looks great,” one of the production assistants flatters the production designer, “I don’t know if you’ve seen it,” not certain whether she should be saying this to Vikar or Molly.

  “Is our D.P. here yet?” asks the production designer.

  “Do we have a D.P. yet?” tentatively asks the other assistant.

  “Robby Müller,” says Molly.

  “Who’s Robby Müller?” the production designer says.

  “He’s the best cinematographer to come out of Germany s
ince Von Sternberg,” Molly says forcefully, “and he’s ready to fly in from Berlin when we’re ready for him. It would be nice,” she adds, “if that’s before he gets locked in on another Wim Wenders picture.”

  “Who’s Wim Wenders?”

  “Wasn’t,” asks an assistant, “Von Sternberg a director?”

  “I meant whoever shot Von Sternberg’s pictures,” says Molly.

  “We’ve got a small window in terms of Harvey’s schedule,” says the associate producer. “He’s got a Nic Roeg project on tap and Tony Richardson after that.”

  “We’re not pay-or-play with him,” someone else says, “are we?” Vikar wonders how it is he can love the movies so much and still not understand anything anyone in Hollywood says.

  “No,” Molly answers, “but that’s not to say he can’t decide to do something else if this takes too long.”

  “Well,” says the production designer, “a completed script would be nice too. As long as we’re talking about things that would be nice.”

  163.

  “Not to get too ahead of ourselves,” says the associate producer, “but as long as we’re waiting anyway, should we be thinking in terms of who’s going to score, who’s going to edit …?”

  “Vik is editing,” Molly answers, “it’s in the deal memo. As for the script, I spoke to Michel this morning. We’re almost there with the script.”