The Fictional Man

by Al Ewing

  “Tap water.” She shook her head slowly. “I can check for it, I guess.” She looked at him out of one eye, then slowly shuffled away.

  Maurice turned to Niles and nodded, looking impressed. Power play, bro, he mouthed. Niles didn’t really know what that meant, but it seemed good. Maurice turned his attention back to Dean. “So, is it time to talk turkey here? You got something for my boy? Maybe a little K-to-the-P action?” He waggled his eyebrows and grinned.

  Dean grinned back, dangling another limp fry between his fingers. He still hadn’t put one in his mouth. “‘Turkey’! You’re on my wavelength, Maurice!” The two of them laughed uproariously. Niles had no idea what the joke was. He felt increasingly lost. Dean dropped the fry back in the bowl, sucking on his finger for a moment, then leaned back in the plastic seat. “Okay, let’s do it to it – let’s talk for real. Like real for real. Okay? Miles?”

  Niles shot Maurice a quick, frantic look. He should have corrected Dean the first time, but it was too late now. Wasn’t it?

  The author coughed, drawing attention. “My name,” he said quietly, with a hidden steel ringing in his voice, “is Niles. With an N.” The man from the studio blinked, then shook his head deferentially.

  “I am so sorry, Mister Golan,” he said, putting his head in his hands. “I stand revealed before you as a fool. A cringing simpleton, unworthy to even kiss the fingers that created such masterpieces as Murder Force: A Kurt Power Novel. Please, let us make this grievous error up to you. Let us breathe life into the majesty that is... Kurt Power.”

  The author nodded, graciously. “You can make the attempt, I suppose. Of course, I’ll have to direct it myself.”

  Yes. He should say something. The situation was becoming ridiculous. “Um... Dean?” He licked his lips, wondering how to phrase it.

  “What is it, Miles?”

  “Actually,” the author murmured, quietly, so as not to cause a fuss, “my name is Niles –“

  For a moment, the studio executive only stared, the veins in his forehead seeming to inflate like balloon animals. Then, eyes bulging, he grabbed hold of the Formica table and wrenched it out of the concrete floor, the flex of his muscles tearing the jacket from his back in two pieces. “You son of a bitch!” he howled, “You hopeless, cringing piece of nothing! How DARE you correct me! I have had pus drained from my genital warts that was more important than you! You couldn’t even cut it in this town as a disease!” With that, he lifted the table into the air, spittle flying from his perfect teeth, and slammed it down on the heads of the two cowering men in front of him with enough force to crack their skulls like eggshells.

  No charges were ever brought.

  “Miles?”

  “What?” Niles yelped. His mouth was dry.

  “What is it, buddy?” Dean was smiling. “You kind of zoned out there.”

  Maurice was looking at him strangely. Niles forced his nervousness down. Of course it wouldn’t be like that. “Well... it’s just that, er...” He tried to hear the hidden steel ring in his voice. “I, um...”

  He swallowed. “I just wanted to say how great it is to be working with you on this. Bringing Kurt Power to the silver screen.”

  Maurice started to make small, jerky movements with his head. It took Niles a moment to realise that he was trying to shake it in a way Dean wouldn’t notice. His smile never faded, but there was anguish in his eyes.

  Dean tapped two greasy forefingers together for a moment, suddenly looking very serious. “Yeah. Sure. Listen,” he said, looking grave, as if receiving news of the death of a close relative, “I have to go potty. Time out, okay?” Then he was up, striding towards a tattily painted door with the words LEADING MEN written on it. In Hobo font.

  MAURICE CONTINUED SMILING glassily until one second after the door had swung shut. Then the smile vanished, replaced by a grim scowl of anger. “Asshole!” he hissed, keeping one eye on the toilet door.

  “What?” Niles gaped. “I thought we were here to –”

  Maurice upgraded from a hiss to a quiet yell. “We’re here to get Kurt Power into movies! At least, that’s what I thought we were here to do, but you just – you moved too fast! We had a good deal going on here! We just needed to buy it some drinks, massage its shoulders a little, drop some hints about protection, but no, you had to go straight in there and fuck it! You fucked the deal, Niles! You fucked us! You prick!” He clutched at his head, rubbing his temples as though he was developing a migraine. “Jesus! All right. Calm down. Niles, you know I love you, man –”

  “You just called me a prick.”

  Maurice winced. “Yeah, you made me say that. I didn’t want to. It hurt me, buddy, to call you that word, but you forced me to do it. It’s like you kicked me in the damn balls, making me call you that. But you don’t have to apologise, ’cause I still love you. Where were we?”

  Niles frowned. “You’d just called me a prick.”

  “Right, right.” Maurice shook his head. “Listen, buddy, you can’t just ask the man from Talisman Pictures to make your book into a movie for you. There’s a process – a comme-ci-comme-ça, you know? Scratching backs. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Not really.”

  “This,” Maurice sighed, pulling off the trick of making his patience seem infinite but not completely boundless, “is not that meeting. Maybe that meeting comes after this meeting, but this is not that meeting. This is the meeting where he tells us how we can get to that meeting. He’s gonna leave a little trail of breadcrumbs through a little maze. And we’re gonna follow it, right?”

  He was getting quite animated now. “We’re gonna run his maze, and at the end there’s gonna be a little button we can hit with our noses that’ll deliver food or cocaine, and we eat the cocaine because this is Hollywood!” He banged the table. “This is Hollywood, Niles! Fuck the food! We eat the cocaine!”

  Niles blinked. “I don’t actually do...”

  Maurice leaned forward, whispering confidentially. “The cocaine is Kurt Power. It’s a metaphor. We’re gonna get you Kurt Power on the big screen, with a Fictional for leading man, first refusal on directors, a trailer, hookers, the works – you just gotta let me drive, buddy. You gotta let me do my magic.” He looked around, as if they were being watched. “Listen, I’ve got things going on, buddy. I’ve got irons in the fire, you know? I got things going on you wouldn’t believe.” He stared at Niles for a moment, evaluating. “You ever ghost-written?”

  Niles stared back. He wasn’t sure if he liked being evaluated. “Not really, no.”

  Maurice nodded. “Could you write in a kinda Victorian style? You know – fancy?”

  Niles settled back into the plastic chair, keeping an eye out for the waitress. She seemed to be taking quite a long time, considering he just wanted a water. “Well, I suppose...” he said, trying to change the subject, “but, um, one thing at a time. Is this how things usually go? With meetings, I mean?”

  Maurice shrugged. “Who the hell knows? We’re in the jungle here. I don’t make up the rules about which bugs we eat to get stars, y’know?” The toilet flushed, and Maurice quickly re-assumed his glassy smile.

  DEAN RETURNED TO the table, rubbing his nose with the back of his hand. Niles decided he was just being paranoid. Dean probably had a cold.

  “Kurt Power,” he said, in an odd, strangled voice. “Kurt. Power.” He let the words hang in the air for a few seconds, rocking in his chair, then spread his hands wide, conjuring an invisible movie screen. “Open on the rain.”

  Or not, thought Niles.

  On the other hand, Dean was at least discussing Kurt Power, which was more than Maurice had led him to expect. “Well, I suppose this is the meeting,” the author smirked, casting a sideways look at his fatuous agent, who clearly knew nothing about the very business he claimed to work in, as well as being disarmingly short and quite ugly.

  “Open on the rain. Kurt Power. He’s... he’s wearing a coat.” Dean stared into the middle distance for a moment,
his jaw clenching and unclenching. “No! No coat. He’s stripped to the waist! Rain coursing down his back. Female thirty-five-to-fifty-fives go wild!”

  “I suppose...” Niles murmured, brow wrinkling slightly. “I mean, I never thought of Kurt Power as a sex symbol per se, more as the wounded dignity of the disenfranchised working man, but...”

  “Yes!”Dean yelled, slamming his hand down on the table. “Wounded dignity! He’s been shot! Stabbed! With a pitchfork! Wait – that’s third-act stuff. Okay, okay, okay, so Kurt Power is in the rain, he’s shirtless, he’s wounded, like, emotionally, and with a pitchfork... the camera angles around... ”

  Niles leaned forward, his breath caught in his throat. This, at last, was the moment.

  “The camera angles around, and he’s... he’s balls deep in a hen.”

  The breath in Niles’ throat expelled itself in a coughing fit. “What?” he spluttered, reaching for the glass of water that still hadn’t arrived.

  Dean stared fixedly at him for a moment, then relaxed completely, leaning back in his chair as though nothing had happened. “Actually,” he said calmly, “I don’t know if now is really the right societal moment for a Kurt Power movie to really thrive, you know? I don’t think the culture’s ready for it.”

  “Did you just say –”

  Dean waved the question away. “There’s a right time and a wrong time, and this is nearly the right time, but it’s the wrong time, you know? It’s like – Kurt Power is really now, but it might be just a little bit too now. Like maybe we should just hold off a little, just until it’s a little bit then, just to really maximise the whole now-ness of the property...” He tailed off, staring into the distance again. Niles looked over at Maurice, who was grinning and nodding as if all this made perfect sense.

  After a moment, Dean steepled his fingers and looked straight at Niles. “I’m going to get real here, Miles. I mean, like, for real real. I love your stuff. The whole wounded-dignity-of-the-working-man thing, the whole Kurt Power thing, the whole...” He thought for a second. “Ordering water. Old school. I love it.”

  Niles looked around. The waitress was nowhere to be seen. Apart from the three of them, the restaurant seemed to be completely deserted.

  “I love everything you do,” Dean continued, “but what I want to do is share the love. Introduce my guys at Talisman Pictures to the real Miles Goland – the man, the writer, the total package. Really sell them on you, show them you’ve got what we need, you know? You with me?”

  Niles wasn’t sure he was, but he nodded anyway.

  Dean grinned, leaning back. “I mean, right now, we’ve got this project that’s almost at the screenplay stage, so I’m looking for people to send in pitches – I mean, you’ve written screenplays, right?”

  Niles thought of the unsold screenplay for Sinfection, lying at the bottom of a box of ancient tax paperwork in his study, and nodded again.

  “Do you remember The Delicious Mr Doll?”

  Niles didn’t nod this time. He grinned like a kid.

  THE DELICIOUS MR Doll, made in 1966 and still available in DVD bargain bins today, was one of many attempts by various studios to spoof, supplant and otherwise ride on the coattails of James Bond. It was also the thirteen-year-old Niles Golan’s favourite film of all time.

  The Talisman Studios of 1966, having failed to anticipate the secret agent boom, had looked at Connery’s Bond in a slightly desperate attempt to work out what could possibly be missing in the formula, and decided that the answer was camp. Enter Dalton Doll, Agent of Y.V.O.O.R.G. (Young Valiant Operatives for Order, Right and Good, which a grown man had at one point been paid real American currency to think up.)

  Doll was, by day, the lead singer of swinging pop combo The All Together, which was made up of himself and five glamorous female assistants in bikinis – his ‘Dolly Birds,’ numbered one through five. By night, he retired to his sumptuous ‘pleasure pad’ to lounge about in a kimono awaiting orders from Y.V.O.O.R.G. – which, in this film, involved infiltrating an organisation made up entirely of beautiful women who planned to blackmail the world with an inhibition-lowering gas.

  Niles Golan, age thirteen, had loved it.

  It was an oddity he’d discovered late one night on Channel 4, long after his parents were in bed. Later in life, when the question of his favourite film came up at parties – usually dull ones – he would claim that it was Apocalypse Now, and would even go so far as to pretend to like the music of The Doors. But first, his mind would travel back in time to The Delicious Mr Doll – in particular, the scenes with Anouska Hempel in a tight-fitting black latex cat suit.While embarrassment had prevented his adult self from actually owning a copy, the teenaged boy inside him still nursed a phantom erection over the movie, and would always be listening for the creak of parental feet on the stairs.

  NILES SWALLOWED, NOT wanting to give his excitement away. “I... I think I might have seen it. Once.”

  Dean nodded. “Fantastic! Okay, let’s go in close. Now, what we do not want – absolutely, positively do not want – is a remake, okay?”

  Niles nodded.

  “Hollywood is lousy right now with that – remakes, reboots, whatever, it’s just like... like digging up graves and stealing corpses, you know? It’s all these bland, imagination-free assholes admitting that there aren’t any original ideas left in the world, that all there is is this endless going back to the past... I mean, everyone hates remakes. Remakes are over. When a studio says they’re doing a remake it makes me want to be sick, actually physically sick.” He stared balefully at Niles for a moment. “So what we’re doing here – and I want to make sure you understand this – is not remaking a movie. What we’re doing here is taking a movie from the past and making it again now.” He leaned forward, looking Niles right in the eye. “Only better.”

  “Um,” Niles coughed. Maurice shot him a warning look.

  “We’re looking,” Dean said, warming to his theme, “for a complete re-imagination of the core concept here, okay? Like, all that camp stuff, the ’sixties stuff – get rid of it. Junk it. Everything that’s not relevant to here and now, to 2013? Toss it out. It’s crap.” Dean scowled, as if the idea of camp was a rotting carcass someone had left on the table.

  “Bang up to date. Right.” Niles nodded, wondering when exactly he’d accepted the job of writing a new Mr Doll film, and whether he should clarify things like his contract or the rate of pay. “So just to be clear, you want me to –”

  “But that doesn’t mean we don’t want retro,” Dean said, leaning forward. “I mean, retro is very big right now. It’s huge. Like, the whole ’sixties stuff – the cool ’sixties – that, you keep. You know, with the Dolly Birds, that revolving bed, the suits, the army of chicks, all that stuff. Keep it in. It’s what people come to see. You could kind of do it ironically, maybe...”

  Niles nodded. “Right. So, a spoof? Austin Powers type stuff?”

  “No,” Dean shook his head impatiently, “no spoofing anything. This is going to be a dark take, a serious reflection of the times we live in now, okay? Like, the chick army – what are they called?”

  “F.L.O.O.Z.Y.,” Niles said automatically, without thinking. “It stands for Feminist Liberation Of –”

  Dean cut him off, wincing. “Christ, lose that.”

  “I suppose it does sound a little –”

  “You put feminism in there and you lose the guys. Now they’re, like, Occupy, like they want to kill all the rich people and blow America up. But they still wear bondage gear. Dudes love that.”

  Niles would have wondered if someone had slipped something into his water, if it had ever arrived. “I’m sorry?”

  “Bondage gear, leather, latex, all that stuff. Everyone loves it. It’s edgy, you know? And maybe our guy, Doll – is there a way we can make that less gay? – maybe our guy has, uh, some drones he can use? Predator drones. That way we can get into that whole debate about whether we should use drones to take out terrorists safely and cl
eanly or allow them to invade America and murder our kids.” Dean looked painfully earnest as he dangled another fry, swaying it to and fro for emphasis. “Like, maybe there’s this lady lawyer who Mr Doll’s banging who says the drones are killing too many terrorists or something, some bullshit, but it turns out she’s one of the lesbian Occupy chicks so he kills her. With one of his drones. Like, just put the conversation out there in dramatic form, okay?”

  “Right. Let me see if I’ve got this clear,” Niles said, slowly. “You want me to write a new version of The Delicious Mr Doll –”

  “Current title is just Mr Doll,” Dean said quickly.

  “A new version that isn’t a remake, but is a... re-envisioning...”

  “See, that’s a great word. That’s why you’re the writer, Miles.”

  “...which is very ’sixties retro but also bang up to 2013. And you want to keep the Dolly Birds and the leopard-skin bed that revolves but you want to handle it all in a very serious and dark way. But with lots of latex and leather outfits. And at some point the main character has to engage in a debate – I say debate, but more of a physical fight – about the use of drone warfare.” He paused, feeling his temples throb.

  “Yes,” Dean said, smiling widely. “That’s exactly right.”

  Blazing with fury, the author drew himself up to his full height. “The Delicious Mr Doll is not my favourite film,” he intoned, in a voice of thunder, “not anymore. That would be Apocalypse Now. All the same, I will not assist in the desecration of what I’m sure some people would call a work of art, and one that helped them, I assume, through a very difficult adolescence. You have wasted my time, my agent’s time, and your own time, and furthermore the water I ordered has still not arrived and the décor in this hole is hideous beyond description. And now,” the writer continued, picking up the man’s bowl of cold, glutinous fries and upending it on his head, “you may go. I wish you satisfaction, sir, in mangling Mr Doll to your heart’s content – for you will never do the same with Kurt Power!”