American Dream Machine (46 page)

“Are you challenging me?”

Yes, it was a civil rights drama set at a New Orleans radio station in the sixties, but the station could be Sirius, the issue could be gay marriage, or alien suffrage. There wasn’t anything you couldn’t drag, given enough energy, into the present. Nothing was so dead you couldn’t resurrect it. He stood up, followed her back into the main kitchen. Spoiling for a fight, but she wouldn’t give it to him.

“No.” She circled the island in the middle of the room, laying out preparations for pasta. Her heels rang out on the terra-cotta. “I’m just saying.”

“What? What are you saying?”
Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow
.

She didn’t need to explain, merely went to the fridge and got goat cheese. Began quartering an heirloom tomato.

“I like this book,” my father said. “I like to read.”

Unafraid of sounding like an idiot. Patricia just looked at him, her gaze deep and shining.
Why professionalize it?
this meant. Like her cooking. Why not just enjoy a pleasure for what it is?

“I’m glad.”

How he hated it when she was like this, too. Knowing things, understanding him better than he understood himself.

“You’ll see,” he murmured. A little more darkly than he’d intended. “You will.”

He only half meant it, though. Beau was retired. He liked being around the house when she was, liked playing with their brand-new chocolate lab puppy, who napped in a crate over by the French doors to the courtyard. He came up behind her, wrapped his arms around her waist, standing by the eight-burner stove where for so many years he’d never even made it past reheating expensive restaurant food. Never cooked so much as a can of soup.

He nuzzled her neck. Happiness, yes. Like all such, it carried the seed of its own dissipation inside it. It just wasn’t made to last.

“
ROBERT STONE?
”
Emily squinted across the table, staring at Beau’s flushed face in the sun. Waiters in arctic black-and-whites swam through the shadowed patio behind him. “That’s not really your style, is it?”

“You know my style,” Beau said. He chuckled. “My style is everybody’s style.”

God love him. Even in his age, he spoke with the original force, the same old persuasion. Like whatever he had was
the
thing you needed: a script, an article, a scrap of belly button lint.

“I don’t know,” Emily said. Under present conditions, a scrap of lint might be more plausible than this, a drama set in a radio station. Eric Bogosian had done that, ages ago.
Play Misty for Me
—itself hardly feasible—this was not. “It’s a little esoteric.”

“Your mine-shaft movie was esoteric,” Beau said, “and look what happened there.”

“That was a long time ago.”

Why didn’t she just flat-out say no? Because studio heads never had to. She sat on the terrace of the Ivy on Robertson—Beau really did like to rock it old school—and ate with him, watched him eat, for pity’s sake. Lime chicken, rock shrimp. Three weeks after the Markhamson event (even that sounded like what the movies had become, something calendared years in advance), the most astonishing thing had happened to her.

“So what’s it like,” Beau said. “Being in charge of everything?”

Emily sighed.
It’s like being in charge of nothing
, she could’ve said, because her time, also, was too valuable to spend chitchatting with
a former producer whose presence in the industry was nonexistent. The more authority you accreted, the less you could actually exercise. Or maybe the old man already knew that. He could’ve discovered it, long ago.

“I’m glad it happened,” she said.

“Me too. I’m not big on the misfortunes of others, but Lucinda should’ve been canned long ago.”

Em nodded. She swallowed the last of her iced tea. Lucinda had just slept with one skinny European too many. Nothing Beau was qualified to pass judgment on, surely.

“Why do you want to do this Robert Stone thing?” she said finally. “Is this a respectability trip?”

“Trip”? Even talking about Stone made her feel old. It wasn’t as if Beau was Scott Rudin, bringing her
Damascus Gate
.

“It’s not 1970 anymore,” she said. “This isn’t a good idea. Frankly, even remaking
The Dog’s Tail
makes more sense than this.”

To her surprise, Beau began to laugh. A rich old chuckle, substantive in its dimensions. He set his espresso cup down on its saucer and leaned back.

“What is it?”

“You want to know the worst thing, Em, about getting old?”

Emily cocked her head.
Not really
, this meant, but it didn’t matter, because he was going to go ahead and tell her anyway.

“It’s not that things aren’t any fun anymore. It’s not that you have to get up three times a night to pee, or any of the things you’d expect.” He took off his sunglasses and polished them with his napkin. “It’s that you know all this torture’s going to end.”

“Excuse me?”

He stared for a moment across Robertson, his eyes gone dead, glassy.

“When you’re young, you think your misery’s going to last forever. The awful part is when you find out it won’t.”

Maybe he saw things, in that moment. Maybe he was dreaming, as he still did all the time, of his former partner. The man with whom he’d reinvented a business, so they could leave it, apparently, to a youngster like this. Emily White was the rich, ripe age of thirty-four at the time she was boosted to run a studio. She’d scarcely been born back when Sam Smiligan had leaned over to Beau and told him,
There are worse things than being antiquated
. But
she knew there were, too. And as they left she took his arm, while they walked down the granite steps to the valet stand.

“It’s Paramount, you said? They own the remake rights?”

Beau had described a meeting there that was painful for Emily to imagine, pitching to an executive barely a third his age. It hurt to consider him, bumbling around that lot.

“No promises,” she kissed his cheek.
One last favor this time, just one
. “But I’ll see what I can do.”

Why did he want it, though? Why, really? Didn’t he know to leave well enough alone?
Is it a respectability trip, Beau?
A prestige thing? Well, sort of. I suppose he operated the way we all do, one part convenience to another pure coincidence. Add a dose of idiocy, or ill luck, and you get a man confronting what he believes is his unique destiny. If he’d never read
A Hall of Mirrors
, or if he hadn’t run into Emily at that thing, that accursed benefit; if his wife had never teased him, or if she’d shown better judgment than to encourage Beau to call his former intern for lunch, that very week after he found the book, even if it was just to shut him up about it. If, if, if, if, if, if, if. If only something—anything—had prevented him from getting back in the game.

“Hampton Fancher.”

“Excuse me?”

Indeed, Emily wished as much, herself. She did what she could, got him the rights to the book. Now he clung to her leg like a humping puppy, clogged up her phone sheet day after day after day.

“Hampton’s gonna write the script.” My father cackled in her ear as she whisked along Sunset, leaving a meeting at the Chateau.

“Who on earth is Hampton Fancher?”

How quickly they forget. Hampton, who cowrote
Blade Runner
, and was a friend of Severin’s, was a left-field choice to be sure—farther out than that even, he was way back beyond the bleachers—but he was also, once upon a time, a genius. Maybe he was still. And here again, she decided to let Beau have his way. She called up Byron Lawrence, who had to be reminded he even represented Hampton Fancher, and hired the writer for much less than what would once have been his magisterial quote. Not only was Hampton cheap, relatively speaking,
but it got Beau off her phone sheet for a bit, while they were awaiting a script. It was easy, done in the time it would’ve taken her to get from her appointment back to the office This was the kind of minor deal she could do without Markhamson lifting his eyebrows. Development costs. There were seventy-five projects on her division’s slate alone.

“It’s good.” The script came in and Emily read it. She called Beau up on a Monday morning, first thing. “It’s—well, intriguing.”

October 2004. Beau heard this and began laughing.

“You’ve got the coverage right there, don’t you? Hampton’s script is fantastic.”

“It’s very good.” Emily sipped green tea. “Very smart.” What the reader’s report actually said was that while Fancher’s script had many of the same problems the novel did—it was too psychedelic, a bit fraught with religious crises and a deranged mysticism—it was also forceful and compelling. A visionary director, like David Fincher or Katheryn Bigelow—both favorites of Markhamson’s, she knew—would be perfect.

“Smart!” Beau clapped his hands, on the other end of the phone. “You of all people calling my project smart.”

“In the old days, you wouldn’t have even thought that was a compliment.”

He guffawed. Yes, yes, he was being a kiss-ass, but there was life in the old guy yet.

“Helen Mirren.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Beau.”

“It’s not getting ahead,” my father said. “She wants to do it. I saw her the other night, and I gave her the script. We’d have to make Geraldine a little older, but so what?”

Emily rocked back in her chair. David Markhamson prowled by her office at that very moment. Strange to see him wandering around on her floor. He seemed as if he were looking for something, misplaced glasses or wallet. Money, probably. Columbia Vita wasn’t exactly having a great year.

“I like Helen.”

Indeed, neither this division nor Sony Classics was doing what was wanted. Markhamson might love Emily’s ideas, but Vita had produced no
Godzillas
, no
Full Montys
. Why did studios have specialty arms, again?

“I like her too,” my father barked. “Let’s go win an Oscar. Let’s get a bunch of them.”

Emily stared at David’s back. He hunched his shoulders like the weight of the world sat upon them, a posture at odds with his dry, nimble, English manner. He dressed like a play-by-play man, blue blazer and a rep tie.

“I’ll call you later,” Emily said. She wasn’t really in the mood for Beau’s motivational speaking. “I think we might have something here, Beau, I honestly do.”

“David.” Unfortunately for Beau, he took Emily’s optimism at face value. At a restaurant at the bottom of Santa Monica Canyon, not so very long after this, he spotted David Markhamson and his wife having dinner with another couple. He came over and placed his hand upon the magnate’s shoulder. “I’m so excited about our baby.”

“B—” David Markhamson had met the fat man repeatedly, but could never remember his name “Hello.”

“
B
hello, yourself,” Beau said. He was drunk, weaving a little on his feet. Spielberg, Kidman, Q-Tip. All were there, enjoying their public privacy in the candle-studded darkness of Giorgio Baldi, a small room not fifty yards from the sand. “How are things?”

Markhamson smiled tautly. Beau winked. He just wanted to be seen seeing Markhamson, and be greeted in return. A bit of public performance that was all it would take to confirm his status, after which he could go back to his dinner in peace.

“Natalya.” Beau reached over and squeezed David’s wife’s fingertips, briefly. She moued at him, the way she would have at any other Horrible Man. “Nice to see you, too.”

This should’ve been the end of it. Everything good that might come of this, which wasn’t much, had already been accomplished. He’d reminded David that he existed, broken the surface of the mogul’s consciousness, and that was enough. The owner fluttered by and dropped off a plate of airy, sugar-dusted, Italianate cookies. Beau, in his tipsiness, reached out and took one.

“I’m so excited about this picture,” he said, “I can hardly sleep at night.”

“Which picture?”

“A
Hall of Mirrors.”

“Ah.” Markhamson dabbed his lips with a napkin. He did this reflexively: Beau had white sugar mussing the corner of his mouth. “Right.”

He turned back to his companions. Beau shambled over to his own table, where Patricia was waiting. He hadn’t really expected Markhamson to know the script. It was almost, not quite, in preproduction yet, listed on Emily’s development memos as Untitled Helen Mirren Project. Solid enough. But this was the first Markhamson had heard of any
Hall of Mirrors
.

“How’d that go?” Patricia smiled as Beau sat, turning her wineglass between her palms. He plopped down in front of his langoustines and nebbiolo and grunted.

“Great,” he said. Exactly like an animal peeing on a tree: just a little reminder, so David would know the movie was out there. “Perfect, in fact.”

Of course, sometimes it’s much better for the other guy to forget. David called Emily White up the next morning.

“What the hell is
A Hall of Mirrors?”

“It’s Helen Mirren and Johnny Depp,” Emily said. It was 9:15
AM
, and she was just getting in. Since when did he call this early? “Probably Johnny Depp—”

“I mean where did it come from?”

She took a deep breath and told him. Fingers splaying along the glassy black edge of her desk.

“I’d like to read it,” he said. “Send it up.”

She did. The script wasn’t an embarrassment—a bad movie could be, but a good script, however handicapped by its own highbrow intelligence, humiliated no one. Hampton’s new draft might be a little abstruse, but with that cast? It was at the very least defensible, she told herself.

“I hate it.”

“What?” She was back on the phone with Markhamson so soon she had to remember, in fact, what he was talking about. She’d just messengered it upstairs three hours ago. He’d never read anything this fast. “You hate what?”

“
A Hall of Mirrors
, Em. It’s impenetrable.”

“It’s—”

The script might’ve been defensible, but it was funny how a powerful man’s hatred of Beau Rosenwald could trump everything. Maybe he reminded them too much of who they were, that they could be everything except beautiful. It was funny, also, how “impenetrable” the movie business could be, Emily reckoned. You were always on the phone, always dealing in your head with people who weren’t
there
, whose force was often illusory. David Markhamson was two floors, and absolute worlds, away from her. He operated according to a different system of morality and intention, answered to an alternate hierarchy of need.