by Rona Jaffe
When she finished the script her agent said he couldn’t believe she’d never written a screenplay before because it was so professional. Of course he knew she’d never written a screenplay—she would have tried to make him sell it if she had—but she was very pleased and flattered. Dana, the only other person to whom she showed it, said she’d seen final draft scripts that were not as good.
“I don’t know why I have to stay out there for six weeks,” Susan said.
“Don’t knock it,” Dana said, “They’re paying your expenses.”
Ergil Feather phoned and sent letters, and then a plane ticket. They were on their way.
Ergil’s assistant, a young man Susan’s age named Stephen, who was pink, blond, and twitchy, like an overlarge rabbit, met them at the airport and took them to their hotel. The weather was unbelieveably hot. This is Hollywood, Susan told herself, and remembered the movie magazines she had read when she was in high school. Here were the movie stars’ mansions, the palm trees, the magic land she had dreamed of when she was a little kid. Those stars she had worshiped would be in the restaurants, perhaps sitting at the next table. But now she was an adult, and all she kept thinking was that this was a chance to expand her career, and that she was scared, and inspired, and very happy.
“I tried to get you a bungalow near the pool,” Stephen said. “But a rock group had been staying in the one I wanted and they broke all the mirrors. The whole wall was a mirror and they had parties and smashed it. They also made holes in the furniture. Everything has to be replaced, so I got you a very nice bungalow in the back.”
“They sound like the kind of people I interview,” Susan said.
“You must have an interesting life.”
“Sometimes.”
The hotel was set back just off the Sunset Strip, which was a sort of mini highway featuring a lot of billboards advertising movies, records, celebrities, cars, liquor, trips to Las Vegas, and other fantasies. Below the billboards were restaurants, head shops, and flower children sitting on the sidewalk. This might have been where Faulkner would have stayed, but it looked like a pretty seedy neighborhood. Susan couldn’t have cared less. Their bungalow had two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room, a kitchen with a dining bar, and there was a baby blue Cadillac convertible in the driveway. Stephen gave her the keys.
“Ergil wants to have dinner with you tonight,” he said. “If you’re not too tired.”
“I’m not too tired,” Susan said.
“He’s going to call, but I think he made reservations at Don the Beachcomber.”
“Thank you.”
He went away and she and Dana unpacked. In ten minutes Dana’s bathroom had been transformed into wall-to-wall makeup, soaps, perfumes, and beauty items, and Dana had been making phone calls to her various friends.
“We have a party tomorrow night,” Dana said. “Unless you start dating Ergil.”
“He’s not going to date me,” Susan said, but she wondered. It was a nice daydream.
“Actually,” Dana said, “I couldn’t go to bed with someone whose name sounds like he’s gargling.”
Susan laughed. “I’ll call him Honey.”
“Too domestic.”
“Darling?”
“Too threatening.”
“I won’t call him anything.”
“A good move. Be aloof. Men like that.”
“You’ve been to L.A. before,” Susan said. “How far away is my office at the studio?”
“Forty-five minutes in traffic.”
“Why didn’t they put us someplace closer?”
“You wouldn’t like what’s closer. Besides, this is a good neighborhood for us; my friends live all around here in their tiny hovels. And we can walk to the supermarket.”
“I hope he didn’t put us here because he thinks I’m a hippie,” Susan said.
“Producers don’t take hippies to dinner,” Dana said. “He thinks you’re a smart New York writer.”
“I am,” Susan said. She felt suffused with warmth. “Dana, can you believe this is happening? A movie—I’m only twenty-eight.”
“Bite your tongue. We’re twenty-two.”
Don the Beachcomber was on the beach. Inside was fake Polynesian, outside was the ocean. She had a drink in a ceramic man with an umbrella in the ice. Ergil Feather leaned forward over their table and looked into her eyes. “I want the actor who plays Gabe Gideon to have that same kind of manic energy he had,” he said. “Do you think he was sexy to women? Should he be sexy?”
Susan thought for a moment. “No … he was more of an experience. You never knew if he was going to cross the line and destroy himself right there onstage. But that wasn’t sexual, it was more, well, scary. I think women felt protective about him.”
“You never said if he had groupies,” Ergil said.
“Oh, I suppose he could uh … get laid any time he wanted to. They all can, can’t they? But I wanted to show him as sort of Artist as Outcast. I was fascinated by the idea of these funny guys being so sad underneath. Well, I put it in the script, which I brought for you.” She handed him the manila envelope with the script in it.
“Ah,” said Ergil. “What a nice surprise.” He put it under his chair. “I can’t wait to read it.” They smiled at each other. “There will be an envelope for you at your hotel when you get back,” he said. “A map, directions to the studio and your office. You should go there tomorrow morning. There will be a typewriter and anything else you need. If you want a secretary to do anything call Stephen at my office and he’ll arrange it.”
“But what am I to do?” Susan asked.
“Think,” he said calmly.
“Think?”
“And write. Polish your draft. I’ll have some comments for you tomorrow. More subsequently. Scripts are rewritten, not written. You’ll see.”
“All right,” she said. Maybe he’ll like my script better than he thought he would, she thought. He didn’t expect me to bring a professional first draft, and maybe he thinks it’s going to be a mess. I guess he doesn’t want that office to go to waste. Well, I won’t let it. I’ll work hard and make him proud of me. I shouldn’t have brought out my first draft; he’ll think it was too easy. I’m used to working alone, doing assignments and handing them in. My agent always said to hand things in just before deadline so the editors would think I was working really hard. He said things that are written quickly are undervalued. I know Ergil’s going to hate it—oh, God.
“Would you like another drink?”
“Thank you,” she said. Maybe he won’t hate it. My agent and Dana have read hundreds of scripts. They raved about it. The second drink made her feel a little fuzzy and she began to believe that everything would be all right.
“I think he should have a love interest,” Ergil said. “Perhaps the girl reporter.”
“But I wasn’t,” Susan said. “We were friends.” She certainly wasn’t going to tell him the rest of it.
“We can imply,” he said. “Do you think friendship precludes sex?”
“No …” Susan said. She wondered if he was talking about himself, but then, they weren’t even friends yet, and even though she had a crush on him, her joking with Dana about having an affair with Ergil Feather had been just that: jokes. She didn’t feel comfortable with him at all. He was an Older Man, her boss, the commander of her destiny, and from a different world altogether than she was. “I couldn’t say I had an affair with Gabe,” she said. “It would be self-serving and untrue. He’s dead, he can’t defend himself.”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t want to defend himself,” Ergil said with a big smile. “He’d be flattered.”
“This is really not fiction, you know,” Susan said, ignoring the compliment.
“Perhaps you’re right,” Ergil said. “The ex-wife would be a nice touch. He could still be in love with her.”
“I think he was in love with his work,” Susan said. “He used to say it was the only thing that made him happy. And his daughter
. He really loved her. He told me to be sure to put that in, how much he loved Maisie.”
“Mmm,” Ergil said. “The poor little kid. Innocent victim.”
“But he tried,” Susan said.
“They always try, don’t they? Remember a movie called The Champ? Oh, you’re too young. But maybe you saw it at the Museum of Modern Art. A real tearjerker. Good film.”
“I sort of thought I’d tell the story the way you liked it,” Susan said timidly. “The way it was in the article you bought. Straightforward. It was very sad.”
“I remember,” he said. “Brilliant social commentary. Excellent. I loved that article.”
“I guess we agree?”
“Let’s see if we agree on what to have for dinner,” he said. He handed her a menu.
He doesn’t agree, she thought. “Chicken curry, and maybe there should be a groupie,” she said. “Just a small part, a girl who means nothing. To show that sex is available but intimacy is not.”
Ergil nodded. “Two chicken curries,” he said to the waiter, and put his menu down. “See, now we’re beginning to work along the same wavelength. You have to understand that we’re making a movie here. It’s a different medium. It’s collaborative.”
“Yes,” Susan said. “But I think when you read my script you’ll find some things you like.”
“Oh, I’m sure I will. And I’m sure we’ll work very well together.”
“I’m sure we will too,” Susan said. He’s a pro, she thought. Maybe he’ll have some good ideas and I can talk him out of the really bad ones. I wonder if they treat all writers that way or only me because I’m a beginner. At least I know why I’m here.
Her office at the studio was small and dismal, without even a window to gaze out of for inspiration. The walls were bumpy and painted ochre. The only good thing about it was that her name was on the door. It was in a dreary building full of many offices, with names on their doors too. Susan got there promptly at nine o’clock and spent some time arranging her office supplies, making trips to the coffee maker, and waiting for Ergil to call. At noon her phone rang. It was Stephen.
“Ergil said to tender his apologies,” Stephen said. “He didn’t have a chance to read your script yet because he’s been in meetings, and he doesn’t want to rush through it. He said you should think about what you discussed last night.”
“Okay.”
“Is there anything you need?”
“A window.”
He laughed.
She found her way to the commissary and ate lunch alone, looking at the people. Everyone else seemed to have friends. Tomorrow she would invite Dana, who had already rented her own car. Men always talked to Dana, or tried to. And this afternoon she would write the small scene about the groupie. On the way out, as she paid her bill, she bought the trades to read.
She was finishing the groupie scene when a man poked his head around her doorway. She had kept her door open to fend off claustrophobia. He was a beige-looking man with a droopy moustache and granny glasses, in his early thirties and already going bald. He had on a hideous tropical shirt. She was, however, very glad to see him—perhaps her first friend.
“Hi,” he said. “Are you Susan Josephs?”
“Yes,” she said.
“I’m David Enwin.”
“Hi,” she said. “I’m glad to meet you. Are you a writer?”
“Yep.”
“Is your office around here?”
“I’m not working at the moment,” he said. “Between pictures. I came by to see a few friends.”
“Come on in,” Susan said. “I was just going to take a break.”
“Nope, gotta go. I wanted to meet you.”
“Meet me? Why?”
He shrugged, and disappeared as quickly as he had come. Meet me? she thought. Now what the hell was that about? Why would he want to meet me?
When she got back to the hotel she told Dana. “He was probably looking for new flesh,” Dana said. “Or nosy. You’re the new kid on the block. Those writers always want to know who has a job, same as actors do.”
“Well, he gave me the creeps,” Susan said.
That night Dana took her to a party. There were people Susan remembered from New York, and some new faces, mostly actors and actresses and now the addition of a few screenwriters and would-be producers. It seemed that movies and television were a waiting game out here, as theatre had been in New York. And they were all still snobs about television—it wasn’t real acting, it was just a way to make a lot of money, if you ever got a series, or enough money to survive, if you did small parts, while you waited for the real thing: a film. They auditioned and they waited. The writers wrote movie scripts and waited. The producers tried to raise money. Everyone kept getting rejected, and then finally noticed, in some intermediate, tantalizing way: an option, a screen test, a promise: just enough to keep them going. But there was an air of optimism, maybe because living wasn’t as expensive as it had been in New York, or because Los Angeles was cleaner and the weather was better. They were young and hopeful, they were going to make it. Susan thought she might have an even better summer than she’d planned.
The next day Ergil Feather called. “I’ve read your script. Can you come to my office at eleven o’clock to talk about it?”
Her heart was pounding. “I’ll be there!” He gave her directions to find her way.
She called Dana. “He didn’t say lunch, so come anyway.”
“Leave my name at the door,” Dana said. “I’ll just sit in the commissary and make contacts. Eye contacts.”
It had always been a given in their friendship that neither of them would ever resent or begrudge anything the other did. Susan wondered if she would ever have a friendship like that with a man. It seemed highly unlikely.
Ergil Feather’s office was certainly a far cry from hers. Glass and chrome and black leather, not a sign of ochre anywhere, and windows all around. Two walls of them. The mountains were gauzy in the smog.
“A very nice first draft,” he said, patting her script. She breathed a sigh of relief. “Now, you remember I told you the old axiom here: movies are rewritten, not written.”
“Yes. I’m used to that from writing articles. They tell you how long they want it and then they call you up and say they have to cut twenty-four lines. Or four pages, or whatever. It can be heartbreaking.” She was trying to sound like a good sport.
“Did they cut any of your material on Gabe Gideon?” Ergil asked.
“No. I was lucky.” She smiled.
“A shame. I was hoping there was more we could draw from. Well, we’ll have to develop it. Did you think about the groupie scene?”
She handed it to him. “I did, and here it is.”
He read it quickly and nodded. “Fine, fine. It works, as I knew it would.” He looked at some notes on his desk. “I think you should have more about the way the pleasures of the world make him betray his child. He can’t help it. Anyone would be the same way. I know you said he didn’t seem very sexual, but we don’t want a hero who isn’t sexual. Every public performer has star fuckers, let’s face it. Look at those rock groups. Look at The Beatles. Groupies hide in their cars, they hide in air-conditioning ducts. Those guys can sleep with ten girls a day if they want to. Now, as I see it, you should have a scene where Gabe gets sidetracked with two girls …”
“Two!”
“… And he doesn’t come home to his little daughter—uh, what’s her name—Maisie. Great name. And she’s scared and all alone. Crying. Then he shows up in the morning and he’s so guilty. He gets down on his knees and hugs her and cries, and then they’re both crying together and he promises he’ll never leave her alone all night again. But he knows, and we know, that he will.”
“I don’t know if that ever happened,” Susan said indignantly. “Maisie’s still alive; it’s bad enough that she’ll know her father was a drug addict.”
“It doesn’t matter that you don’t know if it happened,” Ergil said
. “I’m sure it did. Nobody knows but those two girls.”
“What two girls?”
“The ones you’re going to write into the script.”
Susan began to feel nauseous. She tried to be objective. What had passed between her and Gabe could have been merely an isolated incident. Probably he did have lots of full-fledged affairs. Maybe he hadn’t been attracted to her, or maybe he had seen her as a friend, not just a lay. Maybe he was used to girls making passes at him, and she hadn’t. Everybody slept with everybody. Still, she didn’t feel comfortable turning her article into fiction—if fiction it was.…
“I wrote a few lines for you to put in,” Ergil said. “A few good character lines for him.” He handed her a page.
“Can we do that?” Susan asked, reading over the soap opera lines she couldn’t imagine ever coming out of Gabe Gideon’s mouth.
“Of course we can do it,” Ergil said.
“I don’t want to lose my theme of laughter on the dark side of the moon,” Susan said. “He was really a very funny man.”
“That title’s too long for a marquee,” Ergil said calmly. “The working title on this script is now ‘Dark Side of the Moon.’ ”
“It’s not quite what I had in mind,” Susan said.
“You have nothing to do with titles,” Ergil said. He stood up behind his massive glass and chrome desk and handed her a sealed manila envelope. “All our notes from this meeting are here,” he said. “Including a clean copy of my page of lines. You’re a New York writer, an enthusiastic amateur. I’m going to help you, teach you. That’s my function. We’ll do a terrific picture together.” He looked at his watch and ushered her out. “I’ll call you in a few days to see how you’re doing.”