“I have a shitload of work to do, Ezra. Quit wasting our morning,” she said. “Let’s get back to the lunch menus.”
“The menus don’t matter,” said Ezra. “It’s been ten years. We’ve accomplished everything we intended. By any standard, we’re an all-time top twenty cult. I’d stack our body of work against anyone. But we’ve all had enough. It’s time to reset.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What do you mean, what am I talking about? It’s time for the suicides.”
“Ezra,” said Taffy, “I’m not going to pretend like this is interesting. Let’s move on.”
“Don’t act like this is some kind of unexpected twist,” said Ezra. “We’ve always known this was a suicide cult, from the very beginning. Do you really think I would have started a cult that wasn’t a suicide cult? What would be the point of that?”
“This was never on the table,” I said. “I’m not killing myself.”
“Well, of course not,” said Ezra. “Neither am I. Neither is Taffy. We’re not going to die. Are you fucking crazy? The suicides are only for the others. Taffy can organize the methodology. We’ll let the kids live, of course. We won’t kill the little Ezras.”
“So this is your brilliant vision,” said Taffy. “This whole time, all this work. The endgame was—what? Force everyone to kill themselves, leave a bunch of orphans, and spend the rest of our lives as fugitives? For no reason.”
“We’ll go back to Duluth,” said Ezra. “We’ll start something different. Another family business. We’re clearly a good team. I was thinking maybe a marijuana dispensary.”
“You think they’re just going to let us leave town?” asked Taffy, still unsure if she was actually having the conversation she was actually having. “You think they’re going to find four hundred corpses in an old church basement and not wonder what happened? You think they won’t want to maybe ask you what the fuck went down?”
“They’ll think I’m dead,” said Ezra. “I’ve been sending Retro Rodney to the dentist.”
Retro Rodney was the nickname for Rodney Brewhouse. He’d been a member from the very beginning.
“You’ve been sending Rodney to the dentist,” Taffy said flatly.
“I’ve been sending Rodney to the dentist as me. I told him it was part of the misinformation campaign. Every time he goes in, I tell him to demand that the dentist take some X-rays. So those are my dental records now. Once Rodney is dead, I’ll drag him up here and burn off his face and cut off his hands and put my wallet in his tracksuit. His teeth will do the rest.”
“Ezra,” I said. “That’s not cool. Rodney is a good dude.”
“You know we have to do this,” said Ezra. “Both of you. You both understand. You can’t create a cult and then decide you’re just going to become a commune. That’s not how it works. I know you both love telling me that I don’t understand how the world works, but now I’m telling you. This is a cult. It’s a textbook cult. I’m a deranged cult leader. My actions can’t be explained. We’re going to tell all those morons to kill themselves, and they’re going to do it. Don’t worry about the little kids. The kids will be fine. It will be all over the news when they find the bodies, and some philanthropist will swoop in and adopt every Ezra. Who knows? It might even be Angelina Jolie or something. I’ll be the villain, except to the kind of people who love reading books about cult leaders. They’ll just think I’m complicated.”
“Why do you always do this?” asked Taffy. “Why do you always ruin my shit?”
“I’m not ruining any shit. I’m only doing what we all agreed to do,” said Ezra. “Now go plan our genocide and give me a chance to nap. The meeting is adjourned.”
* * *
• • •
What can I say? I love my brother. I want him to succeed. There’s nobody else like him. His enthusiasm is contagious. He goes for the jugular. But Taffy is going to the police, and she says I have to go with her, and I always do what Taffy wants. Her contention is that Ezra wants to watch people die as proof of their misplaced loyalty in a persona he created for his own arbitrary amusement. My counter is that, even though that’s probably true, he could never get it together enough to actually impose the suicides unless we helped him. Ezra lives in a bubble. He has no idea what stores even sell poison. It seems like we could just stall for time and he’d eventually move on to something else. Six months from now, I could see him scrapping the whole suicide plan and trying to start a goat farm instead. But Taffy thinks otherwise, and I have to trust her on this. Different people can be smart in different ways, but not really.
Taffy says we probably won’t even go to jail for that long. There will be a tax evasion issue, there will be a bunch of minor racketeering charges, and maybe an accusation of fraud. But we’re not getting raided, so she can burn all the paperwork and I can clear the hard drives. The members don’t know anything about the theoretical suicides and are still psychologically on our side. They won’t want to testify. They’ll say whatever we tell them to say. Ezra might get six years, at the most. Taffy and I should be out in eighteen months. I’m not looking forward to jail, but it’s not the end of the world. One underrated upside to living in a cult is that life inside a prison isn’t that different.
That said, it really bums me out. Our parents would be disappointed. I always felt like they trusted me to make sure Taffy and Ezra understood that their relationship had to be unconditional. They both had so much potential, which I never had, outside of my aptitude for getting along with people who are hard to get along with. That was big for my mom. I remember eavesdropping on one of her telephone conversations, and she was telling the woman on the other end of the line, “It would be so easy if all the kids were like Thad. Everybody likes him. He always sees the good in everybody.” That made me feel so goddamn happy. But now I have to ruin Ezra’s life, and Ezra is going to hate Taffy forever, and nobody will blame me, but I know it’s my fault.
(An Excerpt from) A Life That Wasn’t Mine
Autumn was identical to summer, just as summer had been indistinguishable from spring. The Santa Ana winds ripped catawampus across the 405 as we drove to work, a twenty-two-minute trip that sometimes took two hours. Sarah studied her phone in the passenger seat while politically aware rap music we both pretended to understand pummeled us from the Audi’s factory speakers. These were good times for us. We were finally working at the same studio, so this commute had become the crux of our marriage. Sarah had shoehorned her way into a job well suited for her skill set: She was responsible for excavating the oceanic floor of unexploited action-comedy scripts from the 1980s and repurposing them for use in the present day, a task primarily requiring her to manufacture scenarios where a character either (a) lost his cell phone or (b) inexplicably forgot to replenish its battery. It was as repetitive as it was essential, since pretty much every fictional crisis conceived during the Reagan administration could have been averted if the protagonist had access to a mobile phone. This was all Sarah did, all day. Her crowning achievement was a retooling of a lost Shane Black script later transformed into the sleeper hit Boom Time. In the original 1985 screenplay, the heroine misreads a street sign on her way to a dinner party and mistakenly enters an abandoned warehouse filled with C-4 plastic explosive and rapist ninjas. Sarah circumvented the problem by making the character a devout Orthodox Jew, scheduling the fictional dinner party on a Shabbat Saturday, and deleting most of the rapes. She was also lauded for her edit on the profitable remake of Home Alone, a narrative resuscitated by her addition of a subplot involving a black bear that enters the family residence and eats all the phone chargers.
My job was less creative, albeit more lucrative. I’d been promoted into a leadership role within the Life Rights Division, a high-stress, low-profile, mid-prestige management position. Life rights (which I assume almost any reader of this memoir already understands) involve the legal acquisition of a
given individual’s life story for use in film or television. The process isn’t necessary if the subject of the film is already dead, and—technically—you don’t need to own someone’s life rights in order to insert them into a movie, assuming they’re a public figure. But it always helps. By purchasing a person’s life rights, you’re essentially purchasing the individual’s full cooperation with the project. You’re also protected from the risk of a defamation suit, if you accidentally or intentionally denigrate the person in question. Which, I cannot deny, was almost always the studio’s unspoken objective.
I was good at my job. I was competent and dependable, and I had one immediate success, unexpectedly acquiring the life rights to novelist Jonathan Franzen (the box-office failure of the subsequent biopic, Typewriter Birdwatcher, was not held against me). But that acquisition was something of an anomaly. The vast majority of my work involved noncelebrities whose lives nonetheless warranted potential transfer to the silver screen: a coal miner who had been trapped in a hot air balloon, a blind Alabama neurosurgeon, a suburban mother who’d purchased a Chewbacca mask at Kohl’s. On slow days, I’d search for teenagers with unusually large Instagram followings and acquire their life rights in perpetuity, usually for less than $7,500. Why not? It was like buying pull-tabs. Low risk, high reward. But then, as is so often the case in this knife-fucking Astroturf shittown, everything I’d built collapsed into sulfur. And that was entirely due to Untitled Nessie Project.
Had the studio followed the initial high-concept vision for Untitled Nessie Project, my involvement would have been completely unnecessary: The original script was about the Loch Ness Monster attacking tourists. That was the whole story. The script was then redrafted so that the monster was saving tourists, and then rewritten a third time, with the monster now saving tourists from a shore-dwelling Sasquatch. It was not expected to be a theatrical release. Syfy seemed like a best-case scenario. But then something preposterous occurred: Untitled Nessie Project was inadvertently messengered to the office of Inception director Christopher Nolan, who left it in the car of his brother (Westworld creator Jonathan Nolan), who loaned that car to his twenty-two-year-old personal assistant, a woman who happened to go on a series of dates with a then twenty-nine-year-old Parker Troglovich. Now, I realize Troglovich has become something of a dark joke in the industry, and justifiably so—he treated people horribly, his final three films were abysmal, and his death was both suspicious and formulaic. But at that particular moment in time, he was the hottest director in the hemisphere. Critics had loved his unsentimental debut Dead Antelope, and it had become trendy to suggest his sophomore effort, Kiki Vandeweghe, should have won the Oscar for Best Picture. His power was unlimited, at least temporarily. So when “Trog” (as we all called him) discovered a script on the floorboard of a car he was using for oral sex, there was no doubt that script would become a major motion picture. Every light he encountered would glow neon green.
But Trog, of course, had ideas.
Trog was impossible to work with. It was a reputation he cultivated. While shooting Kiki, he made the entire cast transcribe recipes from out-of-print East German cookbooks in between takes, never explaining the purpose for doing so. An outspoken vegan, he did not allow the presence of leather on any filming location, except for his own pants (which he never washed). He allegedly lied to a well-respected character actress minutes before shooting a scene, claiming that her father had just been hospitalized with a stroke, solely to get the desired performance (which, somewhat paradoxically, was framed as comedic). He was hyperkinetically capricious, once firing and rehiring the same key grip three times in a single morning, despite the fact that it was Easter Sunday and the whole crew was on holiday. But mostly he was stubborn, particularly about his conception for what Untitled Nessie Project was supposed to be. For the entirety of the ill-fated production, up until the very day the money was gone and the plug was pulled, he repeatedly voiced the same refrain: “The beast is an illusion.” Which was his way of explaining why this Loch Ness Monster movie would not involve the Loch Ness Monster in any context whatsoever.
How (or why) Trog arrived at this actuality remains opaque. In the script found in the car, the monster appears on-screen in nineteen of the fifty-four outlined scenes. Trog went in a different direction. “The monster will be present,” he explained to the cast, “but not literally.” The word monster was deleted entirely and the dialogue never referenced any kind of aquatic creature. The monster would not be represented visually. The monster would not be used as a metaphor and the monster would not be used as a MacGuffin. Yet we would still shoot on location in Scotland, with 3-D cameras (an equally perplexing decision, as this would now be a costume drama). The film would be set on the shores of Loch Ness in 1972, in and around a palatial manor once owned by occultist Aleister Crowley that had been purchased by Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page. This residence, locally referred to as Boleskine House, overlooked the loch from the adjacent Scottish Highlands. The bulk of Trog’s reimagined screenplay fixated on a heroin-addicted Page, sitting on the floor of a dank room in the lotus position, attempting to conjure Crowley’s spirit in hopes of using mind bullets to murder Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. The story was now told from the perspective of a nosy neighbor with a biracial love interest. A decomposing woodchuck played a key narrative role. The new script was only eleven pages long, but projected to transmute into a 150-minute movie. I recall numerous dream sequences and one seamless stedicam shot of the Page character wordlessly skulking about his residence for more than nine minutes, set against the seventeenth-century composition “Sonata per Chitarra, Violino e Basso Continuo,” an Italian classical piece some believe to be the sonic inspiration for “Stairway to Heaven.” Further complicating matters was the realization that Boleskine House had burned to the ground in 2015, prompting Trog to demand a full-scale replica be rebuilt from scratch over the remnants of the ashes and rubble. I was first introduced to Trog two weeks into preproduction. The project was already twenty months behind schedule.
My appointed mission in all this was, seemingly, quite simple. There was no way the location of the film could be changed, since there is only one lake widely known for housing a mythical creature (the fact that there was no monster in the script did not matter, as Trog insisted the monster was still “the essential cog”). We could not create a fictional, composite rock musician to take the place of Jimmy Page, as he is the only rock musician who ever purchased a haunted mansion on the shores of Loch Ness; any unspecific composite character would still be viewed as Page himself, regardless of the character’s appearance or behavior. Page was a public figure, so we could have made the picture without his consent or assistance. However, the script was exceedingly false and deeply defamatory, and we almost certainly would have been hammered for a variety of justifiable reasons (one of which being that Page and Richards were pretty good friends). For this movie to succeed, I had to procure Jimmy Page’s life rights. It was the only way to make this work. Knowing nothing about him (or his music), I was surprised by how many people told me this might be challenging. These skeptics proved correct. I reached out to him twenty-five times. His representatives declined the first three offers and ignored the following twenty-two. I flew to London and knocked on the door of his home in Kensington, unannounced. I was informed that I needed to schedule a meeting, and that the meeting could not take place for four days. I sat in my hotel room, watching the rain and the BBC. Just before I was about to take a taxi back to his residence, I was couriered a polite note from Page, which I still have in my archives. The letter stated that he was not remotely interested in the film and would use all his resources to legally stop its release. The rejection was followed by an additional three handwritten pages detailing the data storage capability of pre-WWII German magnetic tape and the sublime dynamic range of the Telefunken 251 microphone.
I returned to Los Angeles to explain this to Troglovich (now recasting the film for a thir
d time, having decided to make the Page character transgender). At first, he appeared to ignore me, almost as if the news I’d just delivered would have no impact on the production. He declined to read Page’s note, except for the section about the microphone. The following Sunday, he showed up at my house in Silver Lake, stood on my porch, and pedantically explained how I needed to lock down the Page life rights within the next forty-eight hours. I told him I’d already invested months working on nothing else, and that he needed to either move in a different direction or make the film against Page’s wishes and risk the lawsuit. He did not agree, even though I’d said nothing that could be logically disagreed with.
“Page will comply,” said Trog. “If he refuses to grant us his life rights, we will take them by force. Do what thou wilt.”
Unsure how to respond, I asked what this meant.
“Who is to say who owns a life?” Trog asked rhetorically. For a man so small in stature, intimidation came easy. “The whole concept of life rights is a sad joke, and you are the sad jester who makes it. A person’s story belongs to whoever has the testicles to make that story exist. I will take Page’s life. I will take it! I will use it for my own creative purpose, which is the highest purpose there is. We all share the same reality. Correct? And if we all share the same reality, all lives are connected within that reality. Correct? Which means all lives are possessed collectively. He can’t sell me his life rights, because he does not own them. No one does. They are available to everyone.”
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