Ear to the Ground (6 page)

RECOMMENDATION: PASS

DRIPPING PICTURES

Title: Ear to the Ground

Writer: Ian Marcus

Recommendation:
Pass

Writer:
Maybe

Log Line:
A journalist, unable to sleep for fear of earthquakes, finds out the Big One is coming to Los Angeles and that seismologists know about it. What they don't know is how to alert the city without plunging the populace into turmoil.

Comment Summary:
This story alternates between gentle earnestness and biting sarcasm.
Earthquake
meets
Network.
There's more science than there needs to be, and I'm not sure audiences will buy the paranoid theory behind it.

Synopsis:
BILL MARTIN is a razor-stubbled reporter at the
Los Angeles Sun.
He's frequently at odds with his editor,
GERARD CONSINO, a small, wiry man with little vision. Bill can't sleep nights, what with recurring nightmares of the earth opening up and swallowing his Silver Lake apartment building whole. At an editorial meeting one morning, he proposes the idea that earthquakes can be predicted, but the techies are holding out. “Another one of your conspiracy theories?” Gerard asks him.

This angers Bill. He imagines his colleagues talking behind his back and begins to worry that the slightest vibration—a refrigerator's hum or the passing of a bus—is an earthquake. His bad dreams become more frequent, and one night he is compelled to walk through the streets of Los Angeles. He has never done this before, and he finds the sensation thrilling. At 3 a.m., he lies down in the middle of Wilshire Boulevard and puts his ear to the ground. Underneath him is a fault line, and he hears a rumbling from the center of the earth, which he understands like a language. (
Doctor Doolittle
?) The cops pick him up and keep him briefly under observation.

A few nights later, while roaming the Hollywood Hills, Bill encounters two seismologists discussing a field experiment they're conducting in a canyon. One of them keeps saying, “My God, I don't believe it.” The other says, “Relax.” They've predicted the Big One.

The seismologists find it uncanny that Bill understands the ins and outs of earthquake prediction. They tell him about their experiments, describing how their soil samples yielded an abnormally high alkaline content, and how it was possible to predict patterns once they considered all the factors involved. (Science gets a little thin here.)

Bill becomes the seismologists' shadow, following their experiments as best he can. Eventually, the data points in one direction: In exactly five months and five days, at five minutes after five in the morning, an earthquake of between 8.9 and 9.1 will hit near San Bernardino.

Bill writes up the story and turns in a preliminary draft, stressing that it shouldn't be printed until an agreement can
be reached about how best to inform the public. But Gerard publishes the story immediately.

Los Angeles is understandably shocked. People talk (seriously) about leaving. The real estate market bottoms out. Religious fanatics take their prayers to the street corners. Each day, dogs bark more loudly.

The
Sun
is catapulted to fame, and Bill is nominated for a Pulitzer. But his work suffers. He stops bathing and becomes uninterested in sex. When he begins to live like an animal, his girl friend leaves him. He goes into the hills, burrowing with the coyotes and living off nuts and berries.

As droves of Angelenos leave the city, the mayor announces that the whole thing is a hoax. The populace is divided between believers and skeptics. Earthquake drills become commonplace in schools. The Dodgers move back to Brooklyn.

The clock is ticking. When summer passes into fall, and winter's rains begin, Bill decides to lead the remaining citizens away from L.A. Like Christ, or the Pied Piper, he summons them on the eve of the earthquake, and they follow him north. Riding in his car is SHEILA, the beautiful wife of one of the original seismologists—although her husband has stayed behind to observe the quake.

Right on schedule, the earth shakes. Buildings tumble. Hollywood is completely destroyed. Burbank is busted, and Venice goes up in flames. Century Park East collapses onto Avenue of the Stars.

In San Luis Obispo, Bill takes the news hard. Half the remaining populace is thought to be dead. Bill and his group make their way south to do what they can, but with the freeways destroyed, travel is slow. Eventually, they arrive on foot and contribute to the rescue effort.

While ABC looks for Bill, hoping to put him on
Nightline,
he is off with Sheila, searching for her husband. They find him just as he utters his dying words: “Take good care of my wife.”

Bill and Sheila bury the seismologist by the beach and walk quietly as the waves lap at their feet. They kiss.

Comments:
This kind of sensationalist trash preys on human fear and paranoia. As such, it could become a blockbuster. Still, the writing is uneven; the writer unproven. I'd make the protagonist a seismologist, not a journalist. The reporter should be the corrupt one. Johnny Depp passed, as did directors Andrew Davis, James Cameron, and Wolfgang Petersen.

Although there hasn't been a really good natural disaster picture in two decades, people have already pretty much forgotten about Northridge. With the ground silent and still, this just isn't topical.

PASS.

HITTING THE FAN

“LISTEN,” IAN WAS SAYING, “I DON'T MEAN TO BE PUSHY …”

“But?”

“Come on, Grace. You know what I mean.”

Ian glared across the table. It was late Sunday morning, and he was sitting with Grace on the sidewalk outside Quality, traffic racing past on Third Street as they waited for their food. Inside the restaurant, Ian could see Elliott Gould and, slouched over coffee and toast at another table, Drew Barrymore and Eric Erlandson. Ah, Hollywood, where celebrity was a spectator sport, and just going out for brunch was like being on TV.

Ian ran a hand across his face. Two tables away, a redheaded woman and a guy with a gray ponytail sat facing a stroller, chattering at a brown-haired baby with two tiny teeth. All of a sudden, the kid caught Ian's eye and grinned. Ian tried to imagine what it would be like to be so young, so open to the world. Then he looked up, and Grace gave him such a tired stare he felt he'd never be young again.

“What?” he asked her.

“It's not my fault your life's falling apart.”

“My life's
not
falling apart.”

“Whatever you say.”

“It's a good script, Grace.”

“That's not the point.”

“That's the
whole
point.”

“Tracy lost her job going out on that limb.”

“You're not going out on any
limb
.” Ian leaned across the table and smiled. “Trust me.”

“You keep saying that.”

Charlie was on his way out when he heard voices in the hall. He waited until the noise receded before he emerged into the white summer heat. These last few days, he'd felt a little off, as if the unsteady earth were transferring some of its shakiness to the marrow of his bones, leaving him unsure how to behave. Now that the entryway was deserted, he breathed a silent prayer of thanks.

No sooner had Charlie stepped outside than he heard someone call his name from above. On the second-floor landing, Ian stood at the rail.

“Hey.” Ian waved. “You got a minute?”

Charlie nodded.

“I wanna ask you something.”

A shape flickered behind Ian like a ghost. At first, Charlie thought it was a shadow, but then he noticed a sweep of blonde hair, and recognized Grace. Her lips were pinched white. They've been fighting, Charlie thought, and for some reason, this gave him a jolt of glee.

“The other night?” Ian leaned closer. “When you went to the desert?”

Charlie nodded again.

“You knew it was coming, didn't you?”

Grace stepped out of the shadows. “Jesus, Ian. Give it a rest.”

“Tell me the truth,” Ian continued.

“Maybe a hunch,” Charlie said.

Ian broke into a toothy grin and turned to Grace. “You see? Now you gonna give it to Ethan?”

“You don't give up, do you?” Grace hissed. She glared at Ian for a second, then stormed away, footsteps like gunshots from inside.

Half an hour later, Charlie drove down Culver Boulevard, trying to clear his head. He had wanted today to be quiet; he
had wanted to look at numbers, at the newest projections of activity on the Pacific Plate. That was what the San Andreas was telling him: Kobe's shocks were moving east.

The Center for Earthquake Studies was empty, sunlight falling in dusty shafts across the floor. In the lab, Charlie checked the wall map out of habit and looked again for a pattern in the pushpins. An hour later, he had reduced a sixty-four-bit matrix to a sixteen-bit matrix but had learned nothing.

Charlie was in the middle of an elaborate simulation program when he heard a noise from beyond the door. He waited, head cocked like a hunting dog's. A softer sound came, and Charlie left his computer and went to investigate.

At first, Charlie didn't notice anything unusual. Then he saw that the door to Caruthers's office was open, and he caught a glimpse of an unfurled sleeping bag on the couch. In the room, a backpack lay half empty on the floor. Charlie was about to examine its contents when he heard a cough and turned to find Kenwood standing in the door.

“What's going on?” Charlie said. “Are you …?”

“I can't go home. I get in the car, and I can't go home. I just sit there. Since Tuesday.”

“You've been here since Tuesday?”

“It's the only place I feel safe.”

Kenwood rocked back and forth in the doorway, as if doing some kind of dance.

“Have you been looking at her picture?” Charlie asked.

“No. But I'm scared.”

“Scared of what?”

“It's just this feeling I have.” Kenwood leaned against the doorjamb and took a long breath. “Everything's about to hit the fan.”

SAN ANDREAS, D–55–8.9–DECEMBER 29, 1995

ACTORS SAY THEY FEEL AT HOME IN A THEATER, ANY theater, anywhere. Chefs love kitchens, and taxi drivers live for green lights strung to the horizon. But Charlie Richter loved numbers. He lived with them, found meaning in them. Like a jigsaw puzzle, he could fit the pieces together by applying correct persistence.

Charlie printed hard copies of his numerical tables after the computer monitor began to make his eyes twitch. He lay on the Prediction Lab floor, the carpet digging into his elbows, looking at numbers. Eight-digit prime numbers, nine-digit prime numbers, ten-digit ones. He was tired, and had been considering taking a nap on the floor when he saw it. The number first appeared at the beginning of his tables, and popped up again nearly thirty pages later. A layman would never have recognized the repeated value because he would have ascribed no meaning to it. But Charlie noticed that the two numbers, expressed logarithmically, were identical—the way a guitarist finds different ways to play the same chord.

The double incidence was nothing in itself, Charlie knew, but when he applied this particular integer as a static coefficient, he arrived at a value equidistant from the perimetary, or “bookend,” members of the matrix. Charlie was suddenly able to ascertain the epicenter of a major seismic event. He felt flush then, and began to sweat. Soon the massive logarithm was entirely solvable, like a crossword puzzle, when one
nagging four-letter word leads to ten others: Moments after he'd locked down the epicenter (E), Charlie had solved for the quake's occurrence date (OD) and magnitude (M).

Months and months of struggle and discontinuity came together in a matter of seconds. He had suspected a sizable earthquake was coming, but now he knew
exactly
what to expect. He took a deep breath and looked over at the map of Southern California. Then, on the back of a tattered envelope, he wrote carefully:

San Andreas, D-55 8.9 December 29
^th
, 1995

Sterling Caruthers arrived at the Center for Earthquake Studies and went to his office to pick up some e-mail from his newest mistress. When he found none, he got up and ambled through the empty building, having learned to stay atop of his underlings by rifling through their drawers at night. Much to his surprise, he discovered Charlie Richter still tinkering away at this late hour. Noticing the envelope propped against Charlie's monitor, he picked it up, and looked at it closely. “What's this?” Caruthers wanted to know.

“Sterling, I …”

It dawned on him. “Eight-point-nine?! My
God
!” Caruthers was suddenly buoyant.

“Listen,” Charlie implored, “before we do anything, I need to double-check every single value in this enormous matrix. That'll take time, okay?”

“How much time?”

“A week, at least. Maybe ten days …”

“Of course,” Sterling said gently.

“Thank you,” Charlie said.

There was a pause. Charlie hadn't expected Caruthers to be so understanding, and it disarmed him. “I'm scared,” Charlie blurted out. “I don't know what's worse: the quake, or what's gonna happen …” He didn't finish. He meant, of course, what might happen after the announcement was made. When the people found out, and panicked. When they considered that
the city they'd been building on the edges of mountainsides would tumble into the sea.

When we're slow and our minds are slow, we wallow in a pool of time, and tread the stagnant water. I am a lily, Ian thought, browning at the edges. What about law school? There's still time. Thirty-one isn't
old.
He closed his eyes with disgust, and decided he would trade his life for virtually anyone's. Then he felt almost cheerful, having lost all hope, because hope was the drug that had driven him down. Ian picked up Alan Watts's
The Way of Zen
and flung it across the room.

An hour later he lay in bed, alone in his Silver Lake apartment, but he couldn't fall asleep. He picked up the phone, woke his parents in Philadelphia, and told his father he'd decided to go to law school. The sleepy response was: “We'll talk tomorrow.” Ian came to the sad conclusion that he couldn't confide in anyone about the sorry state of his life. To call a friend in the industry would be admitting defeat. By morning it would be all over town that Ian Marcus's career was in the toilet.
What
career? he thought. Who
cares
?

Charlie tried unsuccessfully to reach Kenwood by phone. Then he got in his car, drove east on Olympic, and took La Brea north toward the hills. He'd passed the Lava Lounge dozens of times—seen it plunked unceremoniously in that mini-mall—and in a detached sort of way was curious to see it from inside. Anyway, he needed a drink. It was ten o'clock, the place was packed, and some Sinatra imitator was crooning. With scientific exactitude, Charlie sat at the bar, consuming a brandy sidecar every twenty minutes. At 1:15, when there was no way he could drive, he called for a taxi.

Grace was getting ready for bed when she heard a car come down Spaulding and stop in front of the building. The night
was woolly and otherwise silent, but for the drone of air conditioners. Grace heard the car door open and slam, and then the clack of footsteps coming up the path. “Please don't let it be Ian,” she whispered to herself, and crept to the front window to see. Outside, a taxi pulled away from the curb, and Charlie walked drunkenly toward the building's entryway, his steps exaggerated and overly precise. A low droning sound accompanied his passage; as she listened, Grace realized he was talking to himself. My God, she thought, and without a second's hesitation she headed downstairs.

She got to the bottom of the stairwell just as Charlie began trying to fit his key into the lock. His eyes were red and bleary, and Grace could smell booze on him from ten feet away. He was still mumbling and was oblivious to her presence. “Hey,” she said as quietly as she could manage. When he turned, she smiled. “Are you all right?” “Yeah,” he said. “Fine.” He kept trying to work the lock, but no matter what he did, the cylinder's logic eluded him.

Grace was on the verge of opening the door for him, when all of a sudden he hurled the keys to the ground. “Goddammit!” he yelled. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.” Across the street a light switched on, and Grace could see a curtain drawn back to make room for a pair of eyes. From Navaro's apartment came the creak of floorboards. “Maybe we should get you inside.” She tried to work her hand under Charlie's elbow but he twisted away. He seemed about to protest further, but then his shoulders deflated and his head sunk down on his neck, and it was all he could do to remain upright. “I just …” he mumbled, his voice softer than a whisper, his body limp at Grace's touch. “Shhh,” she said. “Don't worry.” His keys glittered where he had thrown them, and Grace picked them up as they started up the stairs.

Grace sat Charlie on her couch and went into the kitchen, where she started brewing coffee and spread some store-bought cookies on a plate. With Ian spending less time here,
the place was neater and better stocked; she'd grown used to finding things where she'd left them, of being able to enjoy what she'd bought. There were nights, of course, when her empty living room seemed as expansive and lonely as Siberia. But on this night, all that seemed part of someone else's life.

Grace set the coffee and cookies on a tray, and carried the whole arrangement into the living room. She couldn't help laughing at herself. All her life, she'd strived for distance from her mother's domesticity. Yet here she was,
entertaining.
Still, Charlie needed something, and this was all she could think to do. He was sitting in the center of the sofa, head tilted all the way back, brow furrowed like a freshly plowed field. “Coffee?” Grace asked, and Charlie lowered his head slowly.

“Sorry,” he said. Then, by way of explanation: “My grandfather. Grandfather.”

“What are you talking about?”

“D'y'know my grandfather was a seismologist? D'veloped the Richter Scale. Pasadena. Pasadena. Said the earth could tell us things, if we knew how to listen.”

Grace didn't know how to respond. “My grandfather's a doctor,” she said. “He lives in New York.”

“They have fault lines in New York.”

Five minutes later he was heaving into her toilet, as she stroked his back self-consciously.

Grace awoke to the chatter of birds, and stripes of sunlight fell across the living room floor. She wasn't sure where she was. Her legs felt heavy and her neck was stiff, and she had difficulty moving. Then she realized she was still on the couch, and that Charlie was snoring lightly, with his head nuzzled into her lap. Looking at him, she felt a pleasant tingle in her loins, and wiggled a little deeper into the cushions. Soon her pleasure turned to apprehension, though, and she quickly inched out from underneath him. Way to go, Grace, she thought. Way to keep complicating your life.

Out of habit, she clicked on
Good Day L.A.,
but seconds later it was interrupted by a live newscast carrying some kind of breaking story. We finally bombed Bosnia, she thought, or maybe the president got shot. Grace rubbed her eyes, and on the screen she could make out a graphic: two numerals and a decimal point, carved out of stone: “8.9.” She looked more closely. Dan Rather looked rather grim. “… cannot say whether California will be declared an
a priori
emergency zone. Dr. Richter is the grandson of the man responsible for the scale with which we measure the force …”

Grace looked over at Charlie, and called his name. When he didn't stir, she looked back at the TV and stood motionless. Suddenly aware of her surroundings, she heard a sound from the street like bees buzzing, and went over to the window. There, Grace saw about a dozen reporters—some on the landing, others standing along the stairway and on the lawn. The one closest to her front window talked on a cellular phone and scribbled something onto a back-pocket pad. From the television Grace heard the name “Richter” come twice in succession and she turned to find Charlie's picture emblazoned on the screen. “Charlie!” she yelled, and he stirred. The first thing her next-door neighbor saw that morning was himself, on television. He looked up at her like a child, eyes wide and red. “What's going on?” he asked.

At 8:45 that morning, Michael Lipman called Ian's Silver Lake apartment and screamed into his ear. “
Seven calls
I've had in a half-an-hour, buddy boy. Seven
calls.
You better get fucking ready to be
rich
.”

“What?”

“
Earthquake,
baby, earthquake! Got the newspaper?”

“Hold on.” Ian pulled his blanket around him, opened the front door, checked to his left and his right, and stole the
Los Angeles Times
from the lady across the hall. “EARTHQUAKE COMING, SOURCES SAY” read the headline. Ian ran back to the phone. “Jesus.”

“Is that fucking awesome?”

Ian experienced the nausea of happiness as he scanned the article.

“Charlie Richter …” he mumbled.

“Is that fucking incredible? That fucking script'll be sold by the end of the
day
.”

All Ian could muster was, “My
God
.”

“Don't answer the phone, and I want you to get the fuck out of your house. Do you
understand
me? …”

“But … why?”

“Because if Jeffrey
Kat
zenberg comes to your doorstep and offers you a hundred grand in
cash
and says, “Welcome to
Dreamworks
,” you're gonna take his money. And you
shouldn't. That's
why.”

When Grace and Charlie had recovered their senses, Grace began to plan. “Stay here till you're ready,” she told him. “Stay all day if you like.” Charlie seemed thoroughly upset, and phenomenally hungover. Still, he smiled his thanks to Grace, and, for an instant, he seemed to forget the tremendous pounding in his head.

Ian stood for a long time in his room, looking at the tattered Van Gogh print on his wall. His heart pounded so quickly that at first he thought it would seize. He was without a thought in his head, but never had he felt so
alive.
When his vital signs approached normal, he made coffee from yesterday's grounds and spread some peanut butter over stale bread. Sometime later he called Philadelphia, to McClintock & Marcus, attorneys, and told his father's secretary to pass along word that he wouldn't be going to law school after all.