“You have to fire him …” I don’t have to record all of this conversation, which actually went on for close to ten minutes, these sentences and minor variations deftly lobbed back and forth. It ends when something explodes inside Dirk Mayhew’s jacket. He pulls out a walkie-talkie and barks into it. A huge gust of static is returned. I can hear nothing that even resembles the human voice, but apparently Dirk can, because he wheels about and charges away. There are only about ten yards to the door to my office (at least, the door to the productorial bullpen) and my sanctuary.
I launch down the narrow hallway. Michelangelo Barker stands there, a mug of tea in his hand. Michelangelo is so large that his finger can’t fit through the cup’s handle; he pinches it tightly between thumb and index. All colour has drained away from the skin. Given how pale Barker is anyway, this means that his digits virtually glow. It is my intention to ignore him—I’ll throw him a nod, flicker the edges of my mouth briefly—but he bristles as I pass by. He bristles so forcefully that I am tossed into the opposite wall.
“Is there a problem, Mr. Barker?”
“Ah, no, no. Yes.”
“And that would be…?”
“You have taken out Padre’s dialogue with the dying old woman.”
“Dialogue? It was a speech. The old woman says nothing.”
“She is too weak to enunciate. But human intercourse doesn’t always rely on words. Hmmm.”
“It does on the wonderbox, Michelangelo.”
“All right. I’ll ignore science and give the old woman some lines, even though her lungs are clogged and useless.”
“Okay, but that’s not really the problem. The problem is with what Padre says, this You were always like a mother to me.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Well, he hardly knew the woman. She’s only in this episode. She’s a fucking plot device, Michelangelo.”
“Yes, but we know that Padre’s mother was killed by desperadoes, therefore this shadow taints his relationship with women.”
“Who says Padre’s mother was killed by desperadoes?”
Michelangelo’s eyebrows knit momentarily with confusion. “You did. It’s in the Bible. He was a baby in a bodega …”
“On television,” I interrupt, “relationships can’t be tainted. The audience can’t understand a tainted relationship. The medium is not designed to convey taints.”
“Hmm. Really.” It is all there in Barker’s attitude, in the slight stirring of his body. He looks down upon me; his eyebrows ripple across the top of his tiny spectacles. And he might as well speak it aloud: It is not the medium that can’t convey taints—subtleties—it’s you.
“Besides,” I barge on, “the scene went on too long. It went on for three pages. Too much. Get to the action. Always remember that. Character is action.” I often offer up little dicta of this nature, to emphasize the fact that I am experienced, crafty and, more to the point, his boss. Barker backs away into his office, the former broom closet. I run at the door that says executive producers and hurl myself through.
“Good fucking morning.” Dora Worsley is looming over Cassie’s desk, a sheaf of contracts in her hands. Dora is the Producer. In the land of television, there are various sorts and levels of producers, and you may not care who’s who and what’s what, but just in case you do, here’s how things break down. I am the Executive Producer, having created the show. There is also a Supervising Producer. In the case of Padre, it is an earnest young man named Stevie Medjuck. There is also a Co-Producer, who often (and in this case) is simply a writer with a good agent. And there’s a plain old producer Producer, who does all the work. And that is Dora Worsley, a woman who always looks as though—if she doesn’t get something to eat damn soon—she’s going to die.
There is something in Dora’s tone that suggests all is not as it should be. (The expletive inserted between good and morning means nothing, Dora’s speech is peppered with obscenities. Dora was abandoned as an infant in a truck stop, subsequently raised to adulthood by the drivers and waitresses. At least, that’s my theory.) But I am in no mood to deal with problems. I never am, for one thing, but also there is work to do, so I simply nod a greeting at Worsley and extend my hand toward Cassie Elliot, who stuffs it with slips of paper, my telephone messages. At last I achieve my own office, and I slam the door shut behind me.
I have eleven messages; seven are from Carla Dowbiggin, who is the network executive assigned to our show. One is from my brother, Jay, because, on the day I am describing, he is still willing to talk to me. However, I am not talking to him, exactly; I crumple up the piece of paper with his name on it, toss it into the wastebasket. What else do I have here? A message from Ian George. Who the hell is Ian George? Into the trash with that one. There is a request to call from Pamela Anderson, no, not that one, this Pamela Anderson is a journalist from Canada Screen, an industry organ. The industry, as you may know, is dead, and the writers from Canada Screen are desperate for copy, so I often have a message from one of them, usually Pamela Anderson. Occasionally I call her back, but … not today. Into the bin. And the final message is from Ronnie, but there is nothing noted in the little box marked time. I don’t know if this message is fresh or stale. She may have left it yesterday, after I’d left for the day. Or she may have left it this morning, in which case there is likely some small bit of kid-related logistics to work out, which Ronnie will discuss with frosty hauteur. She is angry with me, although she has no reason to be.
Let me restate that. I mean that there is no discernible trigger for Veronica’s anger, no misdeed or hurtful incident. I don’t suppose that’s the same as having no reason for anger. Although last evening I executed my duties successfully—I took Ellis to her Scottish dancing lesson, I drove Currer to the mall and helped her buy a slide rule (did you know we still used slide rules or did you, like me, think that we’d abandoned the mysterious things as ancient technology?) and then I picked up Ellis and delivered everybody home—I did all this in a state of muted annoyance. Ronnie asked, “Everything okay at work?” and I shrugged. That wasn’t fair, in retrospect; it’s one thing to give a surly non-verbal response, it’s another to give one that doesn’t convey anything. Ronnie then tried to detail her day, which was informed by activity for the sake of activity, at least, that’s the dismissive view I took of it, because why didn’t Ronnie care about the hellish day I’d had?
You’re beginning to get a dim notion of the dynamics between my wife and me. Not very healthy, oh no. We really should have been in counselling for a long time, probably since, I don’t know, right after she laughed at the chee-chee joke. But after a few years our relationship was so twisted and gnarled that it gave the illusion of functionality; at least we both knew how each day would proceed, so we lied to ourselves and believed that everything was all right.
But, as you may gather from the vigour with which I crush the message slip, such is not the case.
I take a deep breath of air and stab in the numbers that connect me with Carla Dowbiggin. Carla is a housewife and mother of four from Aurora, Ontario, who, through some twist of fate, is in charge of fully one-half of the network’s production slate. She’s a nice enough woman, I guess, but she has no grasp of dramatic structure, no feel for characterization or dialogue, despite which, these are the things she criticizes on a daily basis. I am phoning for the non-stop note-giving, in which Carla addresses what she calls “network concerns.” Some of these concerns are grandly pitched—“The network is concerned that Padre’s decision is ethically fishy”—and some are aimed low—“The network is concerned about the usage of the word crap.”
“But Padre’s just stepped in some.”
“Some what?”
“Crap.”
“Oh …” I hear the riffling of paper as Carla checks her script. “Oh. Yes, he’s just stepped in some, I see, but maybe it could just be a take. You know. See his expression. He needn’t say crap.”
“Okay, let me just make a note
of that. Doesn’t … need … to … say …” I, of course, am making no note. I never do. For the most part I merely allow Carla to ramble on, mumbling haltingly to give the impression that it is all being recorded. Occasionally I’ll argue, and quite vociferously, just to keep her happy. “Carla, I can’t change that!”
“Phil, the network is very concerned—”
“It’s integral to the script. I can’t, I won’t, change it.”
At this point I may not have any idea what it is I won’t change, but if I don’t put my foot down every now and again it becomes difficult to do so when it’s absolutely necessary. Because sometimes Carla will convey a network concern of such numbing stupidity that it takes me a long moment to react.
“What?”
“It gives the impression that she’s actually sleeping with this man.”
“But but but… she’s a prostitute.”
“She’s a dance-hall queen. That’s the name of the episode, after all.”
“But dance-hall queen is not her job, Carla. Of course she’s a prostitute, and she has to be, I mean, that’s why the people of Boone City want to throw her out of town.”
“Couldn’t she be, um, you know, a strong-minded independent woman who has more than one steady boyfriend?”
“I suppose so. As long as she has sex with them and charges them money.”
This practice of moronic note-giving has been part of the industry since the very beginning. A story that I sometimes tell at workshops and seminars (I was a gun in Canadian television, which, I’ll grant you, would be a gun of very low calibre, maybe even just an air pistol) has to do with a wonderful episode of The Twilight Zone called “The Last Night of a Jockey,” starring Mickey Rooney, the great (I think perhaps the greatest) American actor. In it, the Mick plays a disgraced jockey who, drunk and alone in his seedy hotel room, wishes only that he were a “big man.” He wakes up and discovers his head hits the ceiling—he’s eight feet tall, way too tall to sit on a horse. Anyway, Serling employed the word “dwarf” when scripting one of the jockey’s drunken, self-pitying diatribes. Carla Dowbiggin—at least, her spiritual forebear—insisted that he use a less offensive term, like (and I quote) “shrimp” or “half-pint.”
After I get Carla off the phone, I power up my computer and get to work. I have to put out the pinks of 606. In the television business, successive drafts change colour, pink to blue to green, etc. It is possible to run through all the available hues and end up with a script printed on white paper, although, in the logic-defying parlance of the industry, this is referred to as “double white.”
And as I do so, I imagine myself in a garret somewhere, writing a big novel bulging with thematic concerns, a tome that is problematic structurally, but so vast in scope that it must be thus. That was the plan, wasn’t it? I was going to write a novel. My mother could take it to the sofa, recline, press her cheek against folded knuckles and read the day away.
Instead I am writing an hour-long television show and talking on the telephone to people who are all, to one degree or another, angry with me.
It is with this thought in my mind that, two hours later, I dash out to the makeup trailer.
Edward Milligan is in there, two hours before his first scheduled appearance before the camera. People often imagine that television stars lead fabulously glamorous lives, pausing only occasionally to work, to smile and emote on the sound stage, but Milligan has no other existence, really. He sometimes shows up at shopping malls or charity events, but only to get his photograph taken. And there is some weird corner of the night that Milligan inhabits from time to time (in the bars and down in the decadent rumpus room) which is informed by drug use and jaded sexual acts, as in, I’m going to suspend you from the ceiling and lash you with licorice twists, not because it turns me on but because I’ve never done it before and it might for a few moments dull my boredom. I know this because, as Executive Producer, I have received some letters:
Dear Mr. McQuig,
It may interest you to know that Ed Milligan, your fucking priest on your show, is really a asshole, because he hung me from a ceiling and whipped me with licorice twists, and not even real black licorice but that red stuffwhich isn’t even licorice, anyway, I was humiliated and I have talked to a lawyer and he says that I deserve some money…
But for the most part Edward Milligan is on-set, where all of his basic needs can be met. There is food there, for example, and a jesus-big trailer equipped with a state-of-the-art entertainment system and a bed. Milligan can also sate his most basic need on-set, that for adoration. The crew stop short of actually kowtowing, but they exhibit a more muted sign of veneration, lifting their hands at his approach, palms outward, the universal sign of meekness and surrender in the face of power. The studio also supplies a steady stream of bed-mates, and although I have occasionally tried to intervene (“You know, sleeping with Milligan might not be the best move, career-wise”), these affairs are usually over days, sometimes only hours, after their onset.
Milligan also spends hours in the makeup trailer, fine-tuning his appearance. He is the Aryan ideal to such an extent that I think Hitler himself would have balked—“Oh, come on, let’s not get carried avay!” Milligan’s looks are so perfect that they don’t really require any attention, but Edward likes to sit in the chair and have Bellamy work on them, dividing his attention between the mirror in front of him and the stack of magazines on his lap, which he flips through like an automaton, his eyes scanning for images of himself.
When I enter on this day, Milligan says, “This week’s script sucks.”
“Mm-hmm,” I hum as I climb into the chair next to him, after passing a hand lightly across Bellamy’s backside.
“I liked it well enough,” says Bellamy, whose diction can be a little odd. She comes from a small town in Manitoba, and I sometimes imagine a tiny hamlet inhabited by chinstrapped farmers and weeds-wearing women, the people hailing each other with phrases like “How goeth it with thou?”
“Padre is being too passive.”
This passivity thing is Milligan’s constant bugbear, something he must have picked up at, say, the Banff Television Festival. (He would have been dragged, sleepless and buzzing with pharmaceuticals, into an onstage panel, the area of discussion something like The Arc: Narrative in Long Form. He would have spent his time gazing at the audience, searching for likely fuck-friends. But someone, a writer or producer or someone, must have addressed passivity, at which point Milligan’s ears would have sharpened like a Doberman’s. He has many physical skills that he feels are underutilized. Besides the gun-handling artistry that I told you about, he can also do some fancy lariat twirling and work a bullwhip. He resents the fact that he too rarely gets to demonstrate these things, that Padre spends a lot of time simply standing in front of the congregation.)
“How about,” says Milligan, “when that guy, the bad fuck, comes into the church, here’s what I was thinking, I stop the sermon about the good samma-ritten and I jump, you know, leap, you know, dive, across people, which I can do, we won’t need a stunt double, and I take him down, grab his gun, you know, do a little flashy spin and then stick the barrel down his throat and say, um, Now laugh, asshole. Or whatever they said for asshole in the olden days.”
There are many things wrong with this idea, but I should tell you that Padre’s clearly psychopathic behaviour is not at the top of the list. Gabe Quinton does this sort of thing quite a bit. In season one, he was studious, more sedate, but over the years—in part due to Milligan’s campaigning, in part due to the network’s interventions—he has become alarmingly vigorous. More to the point, none of Milligan’s suggestions would serve the story, only the moment. This is a truth about actors, I think; they are doglike in terms of their conception of time—they exist only in the here and now. But none of this can I explain to Edward Milligan, so, being petulant and argumentative, I demand, “What the hell is a samma-ritten?”
“Someone from St. Moritz?” suggests Bellamy, wh
o has quite a good sense of humour, although I only allow myself to appreciate it in the dark belly of the night.
“I don’t know,” says Milligan. “It’s in the fucking script.”
I reach into my pocket and pull out the sides, unfold them. The actual text for the day’s shooting is at the back of a little booklet detailing the military logistics. It is set in very tiny type, demonstrating just how much weight it carries. I search for Padre’s sermon and locate the source of confusion. “Oh. Samaritan.”
“Whatever,” says Milligan. “Samma-ritten.”
“No, Ed …” (I call him Ed when I want to press a point.) “You have to say Samaritan.”
“What the fuck is a Samaritan?”
“Someone from Samaria.”
“And Samaria is exactly where?”
“Well, uh, I don’t think it exists any more.”
“So who the fuck cares? I’ll say what I want. It’s not like we’ll get letters from insulted samma-rittens.”
“But if you say samma-ritten, no one will know what you’re talking about.”
Bellamy has opened one of the drawers beneath the makeup mirror, is bending over and rooting about for some unguent. I stare at her ass, which is one of the things I like most about her, the perfect, unblemished rear end.
“No one’s going to know what I’m talking about anyway. No one’s ever heard of a Samaritan.”
“Wrong-o, Edward. It’s a famous story. The reason you haven’t heard of it is, it’s in the Bible.”
“Oh, fuck. Not that again. Bible this, Bible that. Why is Padre always going on about stuff in the fucking Bible?”
You see what I have (what I had) to deal with?
“You do know, don’t you, what the Bible is?”
“Yes, I know what the Bible is, there’s no reason to get all, all…” Milligan is at a loss for words, which is understandable; I estimate his expressive vocabulary at about eight hundred words.
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