‘What’s it like?’
‘Don’t know. I only got it right before leaving the office.’
‘Well, if we’re leaving on Friday, you’d better find the time to do some serious notes on it. You are going to have to sing for our supper, after all.’
‘So you are coming?’
‘A free week on Phil Fleck’s island idyll? Damn right I am. I can dine out on this for months.’
‘And if it all turns out to be utterly tacky?’
‘It’ll still be a story worth telling around town.’
Later that night, after insomnia sprung me out of bed at two in the morning, I sat in our living room and cracked open Fleck’s screenplay. It was called Fun and Games. The opening scene read:
INT. PORNO SHOP, NIGHT
BUDDY MILES, fifty-five, lived-in face, cigarette permanently screwed into the side of his mouth, sits behind the counter of a particularly scuzzy porno shop. Though pin-ups and the lurid covers of assorted magazines bedeck the area where he sits, we quickly notice that he’s reading a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses. The opening movement of Mahler’s Symphony 1 is being played on the boom box next to the cash register. He lifts a mug of coffee, tastes it, grimaces, then reaches below the counter and brings up a bottle of Hiram Walker bourbon. He unscrews the top, pours a shot into the coffee, replaces the bottle, and sips the coffee again. This time it passes muster. But as he looks up from the mug, he notices that a man is standing in front of the counter. He is dressed in a heavy winter parka. A balaclava helmet covers his face. Instantly BUDDY notices that the hooded figure is pointing a gun at him. After a moment, the hood speaks.
LEON That Mahler you playing?
BUDDY (nonplussed by the gun) I’m impressed. Ten bucks says you can’t guess the symphony.
LEON You on. It’s Symphony Number-the-one.
BUDDY Double or nothing you can’t guess the conductor.
LEON Treble-or-nothing.
BUDDY That’s a little steep.
LEON Yeah, but I’m holding the gun.
BUDDY Can’t argue with that. Okay, treble or nothing. Who’s the guy waving the stick?
LEON pauses for a moment, listening carefully to the recording.
LEON Bernstein.
BUDDY No sale. Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony.
LEON You fucking with me?
BUDDY Check it out yourself.
LEON – still training the gun on BUDDY – opens the top of the boom box, pulls out the disc and studies its label with distaste, eventually chucking it away.
LEON Damn. I never get that Chicago sound.
BUDDY Yeah, it takes a while to adjust your ears to it. Especially all that big brass. Listen, are we going to get done whatever you want to get done?
LEON You read my fucking mind. (He moves closer to Buddy). So go on, open up the register and make me happy.
BUDDY No problem.
BUDDY opens the register. LEON leans over, using his free hand to grab the cash. As he does so, BUDDY slams the drawer on his hand and simultaneously pulls out a sawed-off shotgun from beneath the counter. Before LEON knows it, he has a shotgun at his head and his hand trapped in the cash register. He moans in pain.
BUDDY I think you should drop the gun, don’t you?
LEON does as ordered. BUDDY lets go of the drawer of the cash register, but still keeps the gun at LEON’s head as he reaches over and pulls off his balaclava helmet. LEON is now revealed to be an African-American, also in his mid fifties. BUDDY stares at LEON, wide eyed.
BUDDY Leon? Leon Wachtell?
Now it’s LEON’s turn to look wide-eyed. Suddenly the penny drops for him too.
LEON Buddy Miles?
BUDDY lowers the gun.
BUDDY Sergeant Buddy Miles to you, asshole.
LEON I don’t believe it.
BUDDY And I don’t believe you didn’t recognize me.
LEON Hey, it’s a long time since’Nam.
CUT TO:
I stopped reading. I put the script down. Immediately I was on my feet, heading towards the large closet off the entrance of our loft. After digging around assorted boxes, I found what I was looking for: a footlocker, crammed with my old scripts from all those years in Nowheresville. I opened the locker. I plunged into the deep pile of failed screenplays and never-produced television pilots and eventually I unearthed We Three Grunts – one of the first scripts I wrote after Alison took me on as a client. I returned to the sofa. I opened my script. I read page one.
INT. PORNO SHOP, NIGHT
BUDDY MILES, fifty-five, lived-in face, cigarette permanently screwed into the side of his mouth, sits behind the counter of a particularly scuzzy porno shop. Though pin-ups and the lurid covers of assorted magazines bedeck the area where he sits, we quickly notice that he’s reading a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses and the opening movement of Mahler’s Symphony 1 is being played on the boom box next to the cash register. He lifts a mug of coffee, tastes it, grimaces, then reaches below the counter and brings up a bottle of Hiram Walker bourbon. He unscrews the top, pours a shot into the coffee, replaces the bottle, and sips the coffee again. This time it passes muster. But as he looks up from the mug, he notices that a man is standing in front of the counter. He is dressed in a heavy winter parka. A balaclava helmet covers his face. Instantly BUDDY notices that the hooded figure is pointing a gun at him. After a moment, the hood speaks.
LEONThat Mahler you playing?
BUDDY(nonplussed by the gun)
I’m impressed. Ten bucks says you can’t guess the symphony.
And the scene went on exactly as it was written in Philip Fleck’s screenplay. I grabbed Fleck’s script. I balanced it on one knee, while opening my own script on the other knee. I did a page-by-page comparison. Fleck had completely copied my original screenplay, written some eight years before the one he had registered with the Screen And Television Writers Association last month. This wasn’t mere plagiarism; this was word-by-word, punctuation mark-by-punctuation mark plagiarism. In fact – given that the two scripts were printed in the same typeface – I was pretty damn certain that he simply had some minion type a new title page with his own name on it before submitting it to the Association.
I couldn’t believe it. What Fleck had done wasn’t simply outrageous; it was downright scandalous – to the point where, with SATWA backing, I could have easily exposed him publicly as a literary pirate. Surely someone as hyper-conscious of his privacy as Fleck would realize that the press would love to draw-and-quarter him on a plagiarism charge. And surely he also knew that, by sending the script to me, he was inviting (at best) my outrage. So what asshole game was he playing?
I glanced at my watch. Two forty-one. I remembered something Bobby once said to me: ‘I am here 24/7 if you need me.’ I picked up the phone. I called his cell number. He answered on the third ring. In the background, I could hear blaring techno-music and the sound of an accelerating engine. Bobby sounded buzzed out of his head: either nose candy or something from the Ritalin school of pharmacology.
‘Dave, you’re up late,’ he said.
‘Is this a good moment?’
‘If I told you I was doing ninety on the 10 with a Hawaiian babe named Heather Fong copping my joint as we speak, would you believe me?’
‘No.’
‘And you’d be right. I’m just heading home now after a long night discussing the Nasdaq with a couple of very bright Venezuelans . . . ’
‘And I’ve been up reading. What the fuck does Fleck think he’s doing, copying my script?’
‘Oh, you got that, did you?’
‘Oh, I got it all right – and Mr Fleck’s in big trouble. To begin with, I could get Alison to file a lawsuit . . . ’
‘Hey, I know it’s almost three-in-the-am, but get an irony check, huh? Fleck was paying you a compliment, asshole. A major compliment. He wants to make your script. It’s gonna be his next project. And he’s going to pay you big time for it.’
‘And is he also going to palm the
script off as his own?’
‘Dave, the dude is worth $20 billion. He ain’t no dumb cracker. He knows that your script is your script. All he was doing was telling you, in his own skewed way, that he really digs it . . . ’
‘Wouldn’t it have been just a little bit easier if he had simply called me up and told me how much he liked the script . . . or if he’d done the usual thing of having his people talk to my people?’
‘What can I say? Phil keeps everybody guessing. But hey, if I was you, I’d be pleased. Alison can now screw vast amounts of money out of him for the script.’
‘I’m going to have to think about this.’
‘Oh, bullshit. Now listen – go take a sense of humor pill and get some sleep. This will all seem pretty damn amusing in the morning.’
I hung up. I suddenly felt very tired. So tired that I didn’t want to think any more about the game that Philip Fleck was playing. But before falling into bed, I did leave the two scripts on our kitchen counter. They were both open to page one. Beside them was a note to Sally:
Darling:
Your thoughts, please, on this curious case of duplication.
Love you . . .
D xxx
Then I crept into our bedroom, got back into bed, and passed right out.
When I woke five hours later, I found Sally sitting at the end of our bed, proffering me a cappuccino. I muttered incoherent early morning words of thanks. She smiled. I noticed that she was already showered and dressed. Then I also saw that she had the two scripts under her arm.
‘So, you really want to know what I think of this?’ she asked.
I took a sip of coffee, then nodded.
‘Well, to be honest about it, the whole thing’s a bit generic, isn’t it? Quentin Tarantino meets one of those dumb caper movies of the seventies.’
‘Thanks a lot.’
‘Look, you asked for an opinion, I’m giving you one. Anyway, it’s a piece of juvenilia, right? And let’s face it, the opening scene is overwritten. I mean, maybe you find references to Mahler amusing, but face fact, they’re not going to work with the multiplex crowd.’
I took another sip of coffee, then said, ‘Ouch.’
‘Hey, I’m not saying it’s talentless. On the contrary, it’s got all the hallmarks that have made Selling You such a winner. The thing is, you’ve come on a long way since then.’
‘Right,’ I said, sounding hurt.
‘Oh, for God’s sakes, you don’t expect me to praise something which really isn’t that good, do you?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘But that wouldn’t be honest.’
‘What does honesty have to do with it? All I was asking for was your thoughts about Fleck’s attempted plagiarism.’
‘Plagiarism? Will you listen to yourself? You’re like every writer I’ve ever met. Totally humorless when it comes to their own work. So he played a little hoax on you and decided to see how you’d react to his “purloining” of your script? Don’t you get it? Don’t you see what’s he’s trying to tell you?’
‘Of course I do: he wants co-credit on my screenplay.’
She shrugged. ‘Yes – you’re right. That’s the price you’re going to pay if you let him make the script. And you should give him half-credit.’
‘Why?’
‘You know why: because that’s the way the game is played. And also because – if truth be told – it’s not the best movie ever written . . . so why not give him partial credit?’
I said nothing. Sally came over and kissed the top of my head.
‘Don’t sulk now,’ she said. ‘But I’m not going to lie to you. It’s a stale old product. And if the eighth richest man in America wants to buy it off you, take his big bucks . . . even if it means that he ends up with a co-writing credit. Believe me, Alison’s going to agree with me on this one.’
‘Well, you’ve got to hand it to the guy,’ Alison said when I called to tell her about Fleck’s little stunt. ‘It’s a perversely original way of getting your attention.’
‘And of telling me that he expects to be the co-writer.’
‘Big deal. This is Hollywood. Even the valet parking guys think they deserve co-credit on a screenplay. Anyway, it’s not your best work.’
I said nothing.
‘Oh dear, a sensitive silence,’ Alison said. ‘Is the auteur a little touchy this morning?’
‘Yeah. A little.’
‘FRT has spoiled you, David. You now think you’re Mr Creative Control. But remember: if this script gets made, we are talking about the big screen. And the big screen means the big compromises. Unless, of course, Fleck decides to turn your movie into some art house shit . . . ’
‘It’s a caper movie, Alison.’
‘Hey – in Fleck’s hands, it could still be a candidate for existential dread. You ever see The Last Chance?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Give yourself a laugh and go rent it. It’s probably the most unintentionally hilarious film ever made.’
I did just that, picking up the movie from my local Blockbuster that afternoon and watching it alone before Sally got home. I slipped the DVD into the player, opened a beer, sat back and waited to be entertained.
I didn’t have to wait long. The opening shot of The Last Chance is a close-up of a character named Prudence – a lithe, willowy babe, dressed in a long flowing cape. After a moment, the camera pulls back and we see that she’s standing on a rocky promontory of a barren island, staring out at a mushroom-cloud explosion on the distant mainland. As her eyes grow wide at the intensity of this nuclear holocaust, we hear her saying, ‘The world was ending . . . and I was watching it.’
Hell of an opening. A few minutes later, we’re introduced to Prudence’s island companion, Helene – another willowy babe (albeit with horn-rimmed glasses) who’s married to a mad artist named Herman, who paints huge abstract canvases, depicting apocalyptic scenes of urban carnage.
‘I came here to escape the material bonds of society,’ he tells Helene, ‘but now that society has totally vanished. So we’ve finally gotten our dream.’
‘Yes, my love,’ Helene says. ‘That is true. We have gotten our dream. But there is a problem: we are going to die.’
The fourth member of this jolly quartet is a Swedish recluse named Helgor, who’s doing a Walden Pond/Thoreau thing in a backward cottage on a corner of the island. Helene has the hots for Helgor, who has sworn off sex, not to mention electricity, electronically amplified sound, flush toilets, and anything that hasn’t been grown in organic soil. But, upon hearing that the world is ending, he decides to stop the fornication abstinence thing, and lets himself be seduced by Helene. As they slide to the stone floor of his hovel, he tells her:
‘I want to sup of your body. I want to drink your life force.’
Of course, it turns out that Mad Herman is schtupping Prudence, and that she is with child. In a brilliantly observational moment, she tells him, ‘I feel a life expanding within me while death envelops everything.’
Helene finds out about Herman’s adultery with Prudence, and Helgor spills the beans about screwing Helene, and there are fisticuffs between the two boys, followed by half an hour of brooding silences, followed by an eventual reconciliation, and a long-winded debate on the nature of existence, shot on a large outdoor stone patio, with the characters moving from white squares to black squares like (duh) figures in a chess game. As the post-nuclear fires rage on the mainland, and the toxic nuclear clouds begin to descend on the island, the quartet decide to meet their destiny head-on.
‘We should not end life by suffocation,’ Mad Herman argues. ‘We should embrace the flames.’
With that, they all pile into a boat and head off into the inferno, with the strains of Siegfried’s Rhine Journey escorting them into their very own Götterdämmerung.
Fade to Black. Credits.
When the movie was finished, I sat in my armchair for several minutes stupefied. Then I called my agent, and launched into
a rant about its inherent badness. Alison finally said, ‘Yeah, it’s a real doozy, isn’t it?’
‘I can’t work with this guy. I’m cancelling the trip.’
‘Hang on for a moment,’ she said. ‘There’s no reason not to meet Fleck. After all, it’s some fun in the sun, right? More to the point, why not sell him We Three Grunts . . . or Fun and Games or whatever the hell he wants to call it? I mean, if you hate what he does with it, we can get your name taken off the credits. In the meantime, I know I can fuck him out of a lot of money. I’m going pay-or-play on this one, Dave. A cool million. And I promise you he’ll pay it. Because even though we both know that registering your script under his name was a form of sweet talk, he still won’t want that made public. Without us even asking, he’ll pay big time to keep it quiet.’
‘You really have a low opinion of human nature.’
‘Hey, I’m an agent.’
After I finished talking to Alison, I called Sally. Her assistant put me on hold for around three minutes, then got back on the line, sounding tense, saying that ‘something had come up’ and Sally would call me back in ten minutes.
It was nearly an hour before she did ring me back. From the moment she got on the line, I knew that something was wrong.
‘Bill Levy’s just had a heart attack,’ she said, her voice shaky.
‘Jesus Christ,’ I said. Levy was her boss – and the man who’d brought Sally into Fox Television. He was her corpor ate father figure, and one of the few professional people she felt she could trust. ‘How bad is he?’ I asked.
‘Pretty bad. He collapsed during a planning meeting. Fortunately, there was a company nurse on the premises, and she was able to administer CPR before the ambulance came.’
‘Where’s he now?’
‘UCLA Medical. In intensive care. Listen, everything’s been thrown into chaos here by what’s happened. I’m going to be home late.’
‘Fine, fine,’ I said. ‘If there’s anything I can do . . . ’
But all she said was ‘Got to run’ and hung up.
She didn’t arrive back until after midnight, looking drawn and enervated. I put my arms around her. She gently disengaged herself from my grip, and flopped on the sofa.
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