San Francisco had a Jammin’ Oldies station too. All cities did, a tidal turning of my generation’s readiness to sentimentalize the chart toppers of its youth. Old divisions had been blurred in favor of the admission that disco hadn’t sucked so bad as all that, even the pretense that we’d adored it all along. The Kool & the Gang and Gap Band dance hits we’d struggled against as teens, trying to deny their pulse in our bodies, were now staples of weddings and lunch hours in all the land; the O’Jays and Manhattans and Barry White ballads we’d loathed were now, with well-mixed martinis or a good zinfandel, foundation elements in any reasonably competent seduction. From the evidence of the radio I might have come of age in a race-blind utopia. That on the other end of the dial hip-hop stations thumped away in dire quarantine, a sort of pre-incarceration, no matter. Not today, anyway, not for one borne in the backseat of a taxicab helmed by one Nicholas M. Brawley, through sun-blanched smog, toward a meeting with a Dreamworks development executive, nope.
“You like this song?” I asked Nicholas Brawley’s fortyish gray-coiled neck.
“It’s all right.”
“You know the Subtle Distinctions?”
“Now see that’s some real fine music.”
At the guard-post gates of the Universal lot was proof I was expected, so Brawley’s cab could be waved through, to wend past the curbed Jeeps and the long windowless hangars and the brick huts which appeared to have been thrown up just that morning. Dreamworks’ building resided what felt to be a mile or so inside the compound, behind a tree-sheltered parking lot requiring a special pass for entrance. None had been issued, so Brawley dropped me at the inner gate.
“You have a card?” I asked him. “I’ll need a ride out of here in, I don’t know—maybe an hour?”
He jotted a number on the back of the company’s card. “Call my cell phone.”
As I crossed the shade-spangled lot to the entrance a well-dressed lackey was just crossing it in the other direction, moving for a break in the eucalyptus trees. He carried an Oscar. Palms cupping the statuette’s base and shoulders, he appeared to be looking for someone to bestow it on. I wondered if his whole job was to cross this lot all day with the golden prize, back and forth, reminding any visitor of the local stakes.
Inside, I was directed upstairs, where I gave my name to a pretty girl with a headset. She fetched me a bottled water before abandoning me to a flotilla of couches and magazines. There I plopped my sad little overnight bag, hitched up my pants to cross my legs and tried not to look too demoralized beneath the smirk of framed posters. Time passed, phones rang, carpets sighed, someone whispered around a corner.
“Dylan?”
“Yes?”
I dropped Men’s Journal and a boy in a sharp-creased suit took my hand. “You’re the music guy—right?”
“Right.”
“I’m Mike. Great to see you. Jared’s just ending a call.”
We moved to Mike’s little office, an intermediate space, a staging area, apparently, for encounters with Jared. You had to meet Cats-in-the-Hat-A-through-Z before you got to the One True Cat. At least we were all on a first-name basis.
“Mike?” said an intercom voice.
“Yes.”
“I’m ready for Dylan.”
Mike gave me a thumbs-up endorsement to cross Jared’s threshold, and a wink for luck.
The room had earth tones to spare. No posters here, nothing jarring—it was like a shrink’s office. Sunlight sliced through a couple of potted rubber trees, to ornament the carpet. Jared launched from behind his desk. He was jacketless, blond, thick and soft and relaxed in his body, a gym junkie, I guessed. I’d have kicked his ass at stoopball, though.
A conclave with Jared Orthman was meant to be the next best thing to an audience with Geffenberg himself. A thousand or a million writers hungered for what I had today. I hoped not to blow it, not so much on their behalf as on that of my own shriveled prospects and swollen debt.
“Here, let’s sit here.” He guided me away from the desk, to a pair of facing love seats across the room, the pitch zone. I dropped my bag, which sagged like a Claes Oldenberg sculpture, seeming to stand for an artist’s impotence in corporate surroundings. I wished I’d packed my Discman and change of underwear in something more like a briefcase. We sat, smiled, crossed legs.
Jared frowned. “Did you get water? Did they give you water?” he asked anxiously.
“I left it outside.”
“Do you want something? Water?” He looked ready to provide the vital essence if he had to wring it from stones.
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“So.” He smiled, frowned, widened his hands. We studied one another and tried to remain friendly. Jared and I were probably the same age but otherwise had traveled from opposite ends of the universe to this meeting. My black jeans were like a smudge of ash or daub of vomit in this cream-and-peach world.
“I’m a friend of Randolph’s,” I reminded him. “From the Weekly.”
“Riiight.” He nodded, considering it. “Just . . . who is Randolph?”
“Randolph Treadwell? The Weekly ?”
He nodded. “I think I know who you mean.”
“Well, he, uh, set this up.”
“Okay. Okay. So, uh, what are you doing in my office?”
“Sorry?” The question was so bald. I was astonished as if he’d asked Why do I hold this job, as opposed to, say, anyone else? Can you explain that, please?
“Just a minute,” he said, holding up one finger and springing from the love seat. He leaned over his desk and pushed a button. “Mike?”
“Yes.”
“What’s Dylan doing in my office?”
“He’s the music guy.”
“The music guy.”
“You remember. He’s got a movie.”
“Ahhhh.” Now Jared turned and smiled at me. This was all pleasure. A movie! How perfectly unexpected. “Who’s Randy Treadmill or something?” he said to the intercom.
“He’s that guy you met when you were talking about the thing.” Click, buzz. “On the boat.”
“Ahhhh. Okay. Okay.” He released the intercom. There was a hierarchy of remembering here, I understood. Mike remembered for Jared the sort of things Jared had once remembered for someone else, on his way up through the ranks. Someday Mike would have someone remembering things for him as well, and be free to abandon the skill.
Jared returned to the love seat and again pointed a finger at me, but now it was a happier finger.
“You’ve got a movie,” he said warmly.
“Yes.”
“I’ve been wanting to hear this.” He didn’t know the first thing about it, I saw now. I could have offered him a comedy about a rookie vibraphonist for the Boston Pops, or a thriller about a spy who kills by ultrasonic whistle, any of the many things a music guy would be likely to concern himself with.
“I’m closing my eyes,” said Jared. “It means I’m listening.”
I was left to consider his tanned lids, immaculate desk, twin rubber tree plants. I was the ant who had to move them, apparently.
“Your movie is about—?” This was a just-because-my-eyes-are-closed-doesn’t-mean-there’s-no-hurry situation.
“A true story,” I said.
“Okay.”
“In Tennessee—”
“Tennessee ?” Jared opened his eyes.
“Yes.”
“What happened in Tennessee?”
I started again. “In the fifties, in Tennessee, there was this singing group called the Prisonaires. Because they were in prison. But they had a career anyway. They recorded at Sun Records, where Elvis Presley was discovered. That’s the name of the movie— The Prisonaires.”
“Did you know that both my parents came here from Tennessee?” He made it sound like Crimea, or Mars. “Or is that just some kind of coincidence?”
“I didn’t know.”
“Okay. Okay. Wild. What’s it called?”
“The Prisonaires.
”
“Okay, tell me again.”
“Let me set it up,” I’d been advised to “talk in scenes.” “I’d want to start the movie inside the prison. The lead Prisonaire is a guy named Johnny Bragg. He’s the songwriter, the lead singer. He’s been in jail for years, since he was sixteen. On trumped-up charges. So he and another convict are out in the yard, walking, in the rain, literally, and one says to the other. ‘Here we are, walking in the rain, I wonder what the little girls are doing?’ And Johnny Bragg starts singing the line, a mournful little song, ‘Just Walkin’ in the Rain.’ Which became their first hit. Maybe it could be playing over the opening credits.”
“That reminds me of something else.”
“You’re probably thinking of ‘Singing in the Rain.’ ”
“Oh yeah, sure. He wrote that ?”
“Different song.”
“Okay, let me get this: he’s wrongfully imprisoned. What’s the charge?”
“Well, actually it was six convictions for rape. Six ninety-nine-year sentences, with no possibility of parole.”
“Ouch.”
“The cops set him up. He was an arrogant, good-looking kid, and they had it in for him. They pinned a bunch of unsolved rapes on him.”
“Brad Pitt, Matthew McConaughey.”
“I forgot to say black.”
“These are black people ?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” Jared waved his hands, reluctantly brushing Pitt from the room. “Start again with black people. How does he get out of jail?”
“Well, he doesn’t. I mean, he does later, but not right away. He starts a singing group in jail, prison, the Prisonaires. That’s the gimmick—they’re still in prison. They’re let out for recording sessions and live performances.”
“I don’t get it. In or out?”
“That’s the movie. The Prisonaires were so famous in Tennessee that the governor was under pressure from both sides—to free them, to keep them locked up as an example. A few got pardons, but Bragg was still locked inside. It’s a great story, full of dramatic highs and lows.”
“You’re freaking me out.”
“I am?”
“Because we don’t make movies with dramatic highs and lows.”
“Sorry?”
“Just kidding, man.”
It was becoming possible I’d pitch myself across the gap between our love seats and throttle Jared.
“Look, if I could just describe it without any interruptions I think I could make you see.”
“Dylan, that’s not nice.”
“It’s just—I’m dying to tell you this story.”
“I like you, mister.”
I waited until it was clear he had nothing to add, then said, “Thank you.”
“Five minutes.” He spread his fingers to show me five, then stretched back and closed his eyes again.
“The Prisonaires are one of the great unknown stories in pop-culture history,” I said. The language was dead on my tongue, but I blundered on. “Five black guys in prison in the 1950s, some serving hundred-year sentences, some on briefer stretches, all victims of prejudice and economic injustice in the Jim Crow South. Five jailbirds who form a singing group just for the love of the music. But they’re so good they sing themselves into an audition. The warden issues special passes just so they can visit Sun Studios—this is in 1953, the same point when a weird little kid named Elvis Presley is hanging around Sun, trying to get a session. But the star of the movie is Johnny Bragg, the lead singer, the lead Prisonaire. When Bragg was sixteen he got railroaded—a woman with a grudge, maybe jealous because he was playing the field, called the cops on him. She screamed rape. And the white cops pinned six convictions on him, just to clear their books. Six unsolved cases, wham. Johnny Bragg gets six hundred years in prison.” Nearly everything I had was cribbed out of Colin Escott’s liner notes from the Prisonaires CD, or fantasized out of my own musings on a handful of newspaper clippings I’d unearthed myself. But it was enough. I was beginning to inspire myself, to remember what I’d had in mind in the first place, the screenplay I ought to have been researching and writing for the past year. “On the early-morning bus ride to Sun Studios Bragg looks out his window and sees an empty drive-in movie theater, and he says ‘Wow, look at that crazy cemetery.’ He’s twenty-six—been in prison for ten years.”
“Bad deal,” mused Jared.
“So they record. Cut a single, two sides. Elvis Presley is there. In the studio, hanging around. Just a kid they tolerate around the place. He and Bragg make friends, this is all true, by the way. Great chance for a cameo, like when Val Kilmer plays Elvis in Mystery Train.”
“Never saw it.”
“It’s okay, not great. Anyway, Bragg and the Prisonaires cut a record, two sides, and go back to the joint. End of story, right? Except the song, ‘Just Walkin’ in the Rain,’ is a hit. A big hit, people calling in requests to radio stations. Meanwhile, the Prisonaires are back inside. They don’t have radios, they don’t know, but then they start getting letters in the prison, letters from strangers. They’re becoming stars. And the prison officials start getting involved. You’ve got the warden on the phone to the governor, everybody trying to figure out how to handle this thing, whether to encourage it, how to spin the story.”
Jared nodded and rocked slightly, seeming to approve, perhaps envisioning white actors in supporting roles, Gene Hackman, Martin Landau, Geoffrey Rush.
“The authorities decide to go the liberal route, and claim the Prisonaires as a sterling example of rehabilitation. They start letting them out to make radio appearances, do live shows, cut more sides at Sun. There’s a lot of sentiment building up, people calling for pardons. Not least the Prisonaires themselves—they cut a song extolling the governor, called “Frank Clement, He’s a Mighty Man.” Basically just a raw bid for mercy. Not everybody’s happy though. The same heavy dudes that set Bragg up in the first place haven’t forgotten him. They’re biding their time, waiting for the Prisonaires to stumble. When the governor’s up for reelection things start getting interesting. These guys are becoming a political football. You can just picture the racial politics involved.”
“I’m thinking KKK, that’s what I’m thinking.”
“Uh, yeah. Just about. The thing about Tennessee in the fifties, Jared, is that the Klan didn’t always necessarily wear a hood.” I was winging it here. But that was okay. The facts would surely have to be bent to make a movie. This was what I’d come here to do: bend these facts into Hollywood’s ear. “So the governor’s under pressure on both sides, he’s been encouraging these boys, raising their hopes. He begins making plans to release the Prisonaires, talking about them on the radio, milking it for publicity. And his Republican opponent is working the other angle, turning it into a scare story. ‘The good citizens of Tennessee better hope that not all of its convicted killers can sing’—shit like that.”
“Wow. This is good stuff.”
“Let me describe one scene for you. I see this as a real centerpiece. There are photographs of a Prisonaires show from just before the first pardons—remember, these guys have families, they’ve left women behind, and the only time they get out is onstage. They can’t mingle. There’s probably armed guards at the edge of the stage, that sort of thing. These pictures, I should have brought them along, they’ll blow your mind, Jared.” By force of will I was leveraging the Prisonaires’ reality, their sweat and pain and love, into this pallid room, into Jared’s pallid mind. I’d make it stick, here where nothing stuck. I understood now that I was born for pitching. I had only to be let into the room. “It’s like the Beatles at Shea Stadium, Jared. Or Elvis. Women weeping, breaking down. But these aren’t just a bunch of teenage girls. They’re the Prisonaires’ mothers, grand mothers, aunts, girlfriends holding babies. They’re falling apart, tearing up handkerchiefs, crawling on the floor while these guys sing. The music is so beautiful, it’s just tearing people’s hearts out. Maybe you’d even have the girl who set
Johnny Bragg up, probably she’d be there too. She’s sorry for what she did, she’s still in love. And she’s in this crowd of women, just falling to pieces.”
“Holy shit.”
“That’s just half of it. When this crying wave hits the audience, the Prisonaires lose it too. They try to go on singing but they can’t. They’re separated from these women, from their mothers, everyone, by the distance of the stage. And they start bawling too. They’re clinging to each other, clinging to microphones and chairs. Trying to reach out, but the guards push them back. It’s like, I don’t know, like Guernica, Jared. It’s a scene you don’t forget.”
“I can really see this.” Jared sounded astonished at his own powers of visualization.
“Of course you can. Okay, so, back up: the governor. He’s getting reports on this stuff. He’s riding a tiger and he’s afraid it’s going to eat him alive. So he springs a couple of the guys. His opponents are roasting him alive, but he springs them anyway. And that’s when a plan emerges. The governor’s got a crafty little aide, a Kissinger type, who suggests they leave Johnny Bragg inside. Bragg’s the one carrying the heavy sentence, and he’s the songwriter, the lead voice—the genius. Split the band away from him and maybe the story can be allowed to die out.”
“No.”
“It’s horrible, but yes. That’s how they play it. They pardon all four of the other Prisonaires, one by one. Everybody’s waiting for Bragg to come out and join them. Looks like a happy ending, but it’s too good to be true. The governor’s enemies on the right have him in a box. So he makes a show of being tough on crime by leaving Bragg inside. The warden cuts off his privileges. The hope is that without the music, this thing is destined to blow over.”
“Jee sus.”
Jesus, yes. Where was I unearthing this crap? I was pitching the Oliver Stone version.
“But Bragg doesn’t quit making music. With all his Prisonaires on the outside, he forms a new prison group, the Marigolds. Years are going by here, you understand. They’re squeezing the life out of this man. In ’56 Johnnie Ray records a cover of ‘Just Walkin’ in the Rain,’ and Bragg gets a check in prison for fourteen hundred dollars—he tells them just to put it in the commissary, he thinks it’s for fourteen dollars. He’s never seen so much money in his life. But he’s got no way to spend it. The Marigolds record a few numbers for Excello Records, but nothing really hits.”
The Fortress of Solitude Page 36