Take Fountain

by Novak, Adam;

  Dollars: As a reader you were more like Caesar than a Christian: thumbs up, you got packaged, thumbs down, death.

  Mersault: I never saw what I did for a living as judge, jury, and executioner. Sometimes agents requested me to write the coverage for their client’s script because they wanted the franchise. Sometimes I was asked to help clients tweak their scripts before they turned in their assignments to the studios. Sometimes a TV writer client had a pitch for a movie idea and the agent would set me up in the Alvarez conference room like a studio executive and the client would come in at the appointed hour and pitch me cold. One time I ordered lobster rolls from the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for a working lunch with Patrick Swayze and we developed a treatment for his dream project about Arabian horses. The story department at Omniscience was not where scripts went to die, it was where movies began.

  Dollars: I had no idea this happened inside an agency. When I was with Insanely Creative, my agents would point out a typo or advise me to change the title of my werewolf comedy to Tastes Like Chicken.

  Mersault: Word got around the motion picture department that I gave great memo, so I started developing client scripts instead of writing coverage. An agent called and asked if I’d heard of a novel called Leaving Laughlin, and I said, “Of course,” thinking of driving Miss Daisy, and the agent said the author wanted a few tips about writing a screenplay and would I meet with him?

  Dollars: Did you get lobster rolls from the Beverly Wilshire?

  Mersault: John O’Brien wasn’t looking for a free meal. He wanted serious advice how to write screenplays so he could maybe make a living at it since he was always broke. Hollywood had optioned his book and he said he was worried they were going to “Pretty Woman-ize” his tragic ending. John O’Brien showed me his unpublished novel, Zipper Lessons, and then we set out to work on this idea he had for a movie called Neon Money, this really ambitious, vaguely sci-fi story about a future where fascist corporations run America and a giant food company like Beatrice has taken over the government and they carry out political assassinations via drive-by shootings. I thought the tale was wild and encouraged him to write the fuck out of it and come back to me with a finished script. A month or two later, John O’Brien greeted me in the lobby of Omniscience all excited with this two-hundred page tome called Neon Money. I read it a couple times, wrote the coverage, and called him up to say: “Okay, John. Now the real work begins. You ready to rewrite your script?” And John O’Brien was like, “They can pay me to fix it.” I couldn’t convince him to change a word. He thought what he had done was just brilliant. I promoted the script to a shameless literary agent who would throw anything at the studios only to be told there was “no money” in Neon Money. I lost touch with John O’Brien until I caught his obituary in the LA Times. I went to a reading of his posthumous novel at Book Soup and met someone who said she used to be John O’Brien’s attorney and she promised to send me a PDF of Neon Money but she never did.

  WHAT WILL BE WRITTEN ON YOUR TOMBSTONE?

  Mersault: He passed.

  NEON MONEY

  Screenplay by John O’Brien

  COMMENTS: Paranoid, ambitious, uneven conspiracy thriller that needs to build on its driving storyline and create a more satisfying climax. Five years after the mysterious death of his girlfriend, DENNIS VAIL discovers a sinister conglomerate named ROSCO has taken over the country’s public works in a capitalistic plot to overthrow the Constitution. Script starts out strongly, establishing Dennis, Rosco, and the other players who will later contribute to the story. Vaguely futuristic, the ambitious setting is one of script’s strongest suits, grounded in economic reality without fancy special effects like BLADE RUNNER. Dialogue and characters are a notch above the usual list of suspects. There’s nervy tension when people around Dennis start to die (it’s a stroke to have them perish by drive-by shootings). The resolution suggests Rosco has become so big it has started to devour itself and will ultimately be destroyed. But there’s no sense that big, bad Rosco is on the course to self-immolation. Dennis must strike the blow that, even if it’s just a chink in Rosco’s armor, will start a chain reaction of destruction (in other words, he must cut off the head of the Hydra). As written, it’s not enough when MUNSON declares the inevitable end of his company and then gives Dennis a golden parachute to walk away. The fight against Rosco needs to be bloodier, stronger, more exciting (the best the anti-Rosco forces can do is shut down the power of the headquarters tower—it’s a metaphorical victory, not visceral enough). Without being hokey or using familiar, tired action smoke and mirrors, there should be another way to pull off script’s frightening premise with an exciting, satisfying climax worthy of its ambitious concept. In short, this is special material that requires deeper thought.

  YOU WROTE HIS OBITUARY WITH THAT COVERAGE

  Dollars: What do you remember most about the Harry Hunt regime when he took over the agency in nineteen ninety-nine?

  Mersault: The Harry Hunt decade was a blur, but if I could single out one memory it would have to be after surviving Y2K, enjoying a threesome in a limo with those waitresses from House of Chan Dara, most of our clothes still on, drunk out of our minds, taking Sunset Boulevard all the way to the Pacific Coast Highway and then discovering the next day in the very first Harry Hunt Wednesday morning motion picture staff meeting a long incriminating stain on my suit pants that would have made Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress proud.

  Dollars: An auspicious beginning to the decade.

  Mersault: It was all downhill after that, as Soderbergh famously said when he won the Palme d’Or for sex, lies, and videotape. There was a brief purge, all my mentors left the company, and I got more involved with the agent training program, sharing my knowledge about the business and material with trainees desperate to get out of the mailroom during their time in the story department rotation. Sometimes I took them to staff meetings so they could get a glimpse of their future.

  Dollars: Why was it downhill after the limo ride?

  Mersault: It wasn’t downhill exactly, but internally the regime change was a momentum-killer for me. Management tasked me with the challenging assignment of supervising the creation of an integrated database that linked the coverage library with our internal studio/independent projects panels and a new template that identified branded entertainment opportunities for Omniscience corporate clients.

  Dollars: Sorry, I was texting. What do you mean, supervising an integrated database to identify branded entertainment?

  Mersault: No longer was I a packaging gladiator in the deathsport known as the movie business. The Harry Hunt regime made me a weapons designer in the IT Department overseeing the construction of the Purina Pet Chow Death Star. I needed to vent, so I wrote a novel about a script reader at a talent agency who gets radicalized and turns into a suicide bomber.

  Dollars: I self-published a sex manual called Make Him Marry You. What did your colleagues say about representing your Hollywood novel?

  Mersault: Omniscience passed. The feedback from the New York office was that no publisher would want it because they said every character in my novel was reprehensible and only women bought fiction.

  Dollars: Did you tell the New York office to sell it and not smell it?

  Mersault: I did, actually. The agent said she wasn’t a cocktail waitress and hung up on me. I decided to e-mail query letters directly to publishers. My query letters got rejection letters. The novel remained unread and unpublished until I got one request for the manuscript from this tiny mystery press in Portland, Maine. I sent off the book and went to a staff meeting where agents in the motion picture department reported on what the studios were doing and which projects were heating up when a senior agent complained about their lack of a point of view about material. “The only person in this room,” declared this well-respected literary agent, “who knows how to read a script is Larry Mersault.” The room got real quiet. On the set of The
Grey Area, Franklin Brauner told me a story about the time he passed on this hostage negotiator script that described a pause on the page as a defecating silence. Franklin said when he suggested to the writer’s manager that maybe the defecating silence be changed to something less bizarre, the lit manager became indignant and said, “I stand by my client. He’s not changing a word.” Franklin leaned back in his director’s chair and wondered out loud, “A defecating silence. How would I shoot that?”

  Dollars: So when the agent made that comment about you in that staff meeting it was met with a defecating silence?

  Mersault: Exactly. I left that staff meeting with the eyes of more than a few agents on my back. I got an e-mail from an agent who represented a financier in Amsterdam and a Dutch director whose last film was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar and they wanted to make a spaghetti western in Spain where Sergio Leone shot The Good, The Bad and The Ugly with Clint Eastwood and they were looking for a script to finance as a six-million-dollar European coproduction. I sent over my favorite unproduced Western called Lucky Trails and then another agent asked me for an available martial arts family comedy with kids. He had a client who would bring the action, the material had to bring the comedy, what did I have sitting on the shelf? I recommended an old favorite that fit the bill called My Neighbor the Weirdo by our clients who wrote the Amanda Bynes reincarnation comedy You Again? Then one of our freelance script readers walked into my office with her hair on fire and said, “I just read a great script with a terrible title about a White House chef who leads a double life as an assassin.” I closed my door and hit the couch and an hour later I was calling the unrepped writer of Abbatoir Parsley to set a meeting-slash-coffee. My reader was absolutely correct in her assessment, and when I told her I met the screenwriter and landed him an agent she insisted they change the title to Executive Orders. We did, and that script she flagged sold to Universal for three million dollars and topped The Black List.

  Dollars: So, wait. If you didn’t have an agent, how did your novel get published?

  Mersault: I went to work one morning and opened an e-mail from Sally, the acquisitions editor of a publishing house called Peach Point Press in Atlanta. According to Sally, I would never get published, no publisher cared about the sausage factory called Hollywood, and I shouldn’t be wasting people’s time with silly query letters that fill up their inboxes. I deleted the e-mail and went about my day resisting the urge to send her a polite “thank you for considering me” response. I came back from lunch and clicked open an e-mail from Scooby Press in Portland, Maine, the only publisher that ever asked to read the manuscript: “Dear Larry, I have read your novel and I would like to publish it. Please contact me so I can send you a contract. Sincerely, Tom Everett, publisher, Scooby Press.” Thinking he was working some scam where I would have to pay him for the privilege of publishing my novel, I called the number and when he answered, I said, “Mr. Everett, you’re real.” I asked him about Scooby’s editing process, and he said, “No notes.” I un-deleted the message from Peach Point Press, forwarded the Scooby Press e-mail and wrote, “Dear Sally, Life works in mysterious ways. See below.” I never got a response.

  Dollars: What did your parents say about the novel?

  Mersault: They read the four-hundred-and-eighty-nine-page rough draft. Mom was about fifty pages ahead of Dad when she put the book down and said, “Where did we go wrong?”

  WAS THERE EVER A MOMENT WHEN YOU THOUGHT YOU WOULD GET FIRED?

  Mersault: I got rid of an intern not knowing his father was best friends with the Chairman Emeritus of Omniscience. I received a phone call from the Chairman Emeritus himself, not an uncommon event since he had requested my reader reports for years, and the Chairman Emeritus went bananas: “How dare you besmirch me? I heard you fired so-and-so and now you go around besmirching my reputation?” I stood up at my desk and lost control of my bladder. I denied that I had ever besmirched his reputation, that obviously he had gotten an earful from a disgruntled employee I had just terminated. Urine was running down my leg when the Chairman Emeritus lowered his voice and said he knew I had a tough job, how termination was always difficult, General Motors had just fired three hundred thousand workers at their factories, keep up the great work running the story department, and by the way he needed me to review a musical about bag ladies due first thing in the morning. I hung up the phone, went home to change, and dropped off my pants on the way back to Beverly Hills. I had lived to fight another day.

  Dollars: Sounds like you kept your dry cleaner busy.

  WHAT WAS THE OMNISCIENCE/RAGNARÖK MERGER LIKE?

  Mersault: When the Rodney King riots broke out, the air was on fire, palm trees were burning, and I remember driving from Hollywood to Beverly Hills in my convertible with a baseball bat between the seats in case somebody tried to jack me. That’s what the merger felt like: all of the above. The rumors were flying every day. We represented the youngest director in the world who had just been slimed at the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards when his agent announced in a staff meeting that the kid auteur was looking for a family comedy. I sent over My Neighbor the Weirdo and a week later the youngest director in the world declared he wanted to make it his next picture. Then I heard the martial artist Hop Woo wanted to play the Weirdo. Omniscience attached a first-dollar gross producer client who wanted to make a movie his kids could see and the package sold to Summit as a green-lit thirty-million-dollar movie. At the height of Nikki Finke hourly updating lists of agents who were toast, pending Federal approval of the union, inside a staff meeting of motion picture agents it was business as usual, projects being promoted or dissed, clients needing to go to work, no discussion whatsoever about the agency down the street when the lights dimmed and a fake poster appeared on the screen for an upcoming Hop Woo movie called My Neighbor the Weirdo. Applause. Directed by the youngest auteur in the world. More cheers. Total writer, producer, director, Hop Woo commissions plus packaging fee: a million dollars. Then the last shout-out appeared on screen: A Larry Mersault Special. Standing ovation. The merger with Ragnarök was approved by the Obama Administration and it was time to purge.

  Dollars: When did you find out you made the cut?

  Mersault: The day of the axe was like, if you got a phone call from someone in management or human resources, the jig was up. If you didn’t get a call by six o’clock that day, you were safe. My assistant brought me the trades that morning and I noticed an article in The Hollywood Reporter announcing a spaghetti western called Lucky Trails with a Dutch director would be shooting in Almeria, Spain where Sergio Leone made his films and I thought, That’s my favorite Western script, how come nobody bothered to tell me? At the end of the article it said the project had been packaged by Omniscience/Ragnarök’s Larry Mersault. I showed my assistant the article and she still didn’t believe we were safe until it was five fifty-nine and we left the office for the day.

  WHAT’S THE WORST DATE YOU’VE EVER HAD?

  Mersault: You first. My lips are tired.

  Dollars: I went on a couple dates with a news reporter from KCAL-9 pretending to be “Nigel from Liverpool” with this bullshit cockney accent. We were fooling around at her place when I heard someone making noises upstairs. KCAL-9 said I could sleep with her roommate later but not at the same time, and I said, “Can’t we all just get along?” And she said, “I live with my mom.” And I said, in my real voice, “Oh, hell no,” and walked out.

  Mersault: I once got set up by my assistant with her friend Nancy who worked in the music department. Our date was a disaster from the moment we were driving around Thai Town looking for a parking space. All Nancy talked about was how much she hated Hollywood and compared herself to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz having to deal with cowardly lions and men with no brains. Everybody, including me, she said, was a streetwalker trolling the yellow brick road. I was holding open the door when Nancy freaked out about the B health code rating in the window
and refused to enter the Thai restaurant: “I don’t eat at B’s.” So we drove around looking for a place to eat, despising each other, but hungry enough to pretend we were still on a date so we could eat something. She was texting her friends the whole time I was driving until I found a parking spot right in front of this place called Toi on Sunset. She ignored the A rating and entered the restaurant with a bad attitude. I ordered two bottles of hot sake and asked Nancy what she was having. We got some naked shrimp, an order of Tod Mun Pla, pineapple fried rice, and Singha beer. I asked her about working in the music department. Nancy said she liked going to clubs to check out the new bands but the best part of her job was hanging out with clients. When Nancy said she seduced an infamous guitarist in an elevator, I told her, “That guy is a heroin addict.” Nancy asked me if I was religious. I said I believed in a radio god and parking angels. Nancy, a nonbelieving Jew, said she didn’t understand. I explained that whenever I needed a parking space like the one we had miraculously found tonight, I made a point of thanking my parking angels. Whenever a song came on the car radio that I loved, I always looked out the windshield and thanked the radio god for playing my favorite tune. “Let me get this straight,” she said, “you have a radio god who plays the songs you want and angels who give you parking spaces. Why don’t you pray to a money god or happiness angels?” She called me a fish-eyed fool and ended our date to meet her friends at The Viper Room. “Let me get this straight,” I said, “you sleep with junkies but you don’t eat at restaurants that get a B from the health department. Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”