Hot Properties (36 page)

“But that makes no sense!” Tony whined. Garth leaned back in his chair, staring coldly. Foxx looked in Tony’s direction as though he were a weary tourist checking off a sight he was supposed to have seen because of its great reputation, but in fact found boring. Neither spoke, despite Tony’s urgent voice. “I mean,” Tony continued quietly, hoping to bury the tone of injury in his voice, “how could he have belonged to the movement and then become right-wing without some explanation?”

“Can’t have political speeches.” Foxx said, a coffee-shop waitress informing a customer that an item on the menu was unavailable.

“You don’t want me to be right-wing,” Garth said. “I’m turned off to politics. Not right-wing.”

“That’s not enough of a conflict!” Tony complained. Again, impatience showed through the veil of modesty and reasonableness he had drawn over his true nature. Lois had told him, over and over, “Writers don’t have power in this town. They expect you to do the rewrites they want. No arguing. The only way you can get them to do what
you
want is to make it seem like it’s what
they
want.” Last night they had screwed three times and talked out this meeting. He had actually lain inside her with his sore and numbed penis while they planned strategy.

It had all been for naught. He had, at the start, mollified them by announcing he’d do what they wanted, but as they went through the script, beginning with the very first line, picking away at his stage directions, his dialogue (my dialogue! my God, I’m famous for my dialogue!), his character choices, and even, incredibly, the names he had given to one of them, rage, incredulous fury, threatened to erode his submissive mask.

Garth watched him. Tony was stuck in the middle of his desire to insultingly reject their criticisms and his desire to pleasantly persude them they were wrong. The famous eyes seemed sadistically detached from the emotion in the room. Foxx, at least, looked wary of Tony, slightly scared by the vehemence of his voice. But Garth had a laughing quality in his glance, a gamesman coolly observing an opponent’s desperate attempt to escape an inevitable defeat.

“Then your character has no conflict,” Tony said after a pause, softening his tone. “You simply become someone to whom events happen and, in the end, you won’t be changed by them.”

“My
conflict,”
Garth said, the emphasis sounding disciplinary, “my conflict is over whether I love Meryl’s character.”

“Meryl would never play this part,” Foxx said bitterly.

Garth glanced at him. “We’ll get to that. Let’s stay—”

“What do you mean?” Tony asked. He was hurt by Foxx’s tone.

“It’s a nothing role.”

“A nothing role!”

Garth interrupted. “I want to stay on my character. My character’s conflict is whether I love her or not.”

“You’re not conflicted over whether you love her,” Tony said, now not bothering to conceal his disdain. “You love her. You’re conflicted over whether you can trust her.”

This silenced Garth. He nodded. Interested. Not at all, apparently, wounded by the way Tony had made his point. “Isn’t that, ultimately, the same thing?” Garth asked.

“No. You can love somebody you don’t trust. That’s a tragedy.”

“Oh, great,” Foxx said to the wall. “Now we’re writing a tragedy!”

“No we’re not! That’s not what I said!” Tony whined like a boy whose parents are teasing him. “If what he wants”— Tony pointed at Garth—“was done, we’d be writing a tragedy!” My God, he thought, slumping back, exhausted, into his chair, now I’ve said it:
“we’d
be writing.” That’s what this is, all right. A collaboration. They’re writing it with me. Two people who couldn’t compose a witty telephone message.

“It doesn’t work!” Garth said with pleasant enthusiasm. “What you say sounds fine in the abstract but it doesn’t work on paper. It’s unsympathetic.”

“It worked in
The Maltese Falcon!”
Tony said. Lois had advised him to come up with past movie successes. Arguing by analogy, she said, was common and respected. “The whole relationship between Bogart and Astor is about whether he can trust her. Same thing in
North by Northwest.
The second half of the film is about whether she is or isn’t a spy.”

Sure enough, these references entranced them. Garth nodded and then peered at his desk. Foxx’s head snapped up, his eyes studying the ceiling as though something had begun to crash through. Tony felt a surge of confidence. He sat up. Do I finish them off? Or, if I push, will they get stubborn and push back just for the hell of it? “Maybe I didn’t execute it well,” Tony said, handing them a token of self-humiliation, “but I think my concept is right. Your character has to once again make the political choice he faced in the sixties, only now it is a woman—Meryl’s character—who has become, if you will, the Vietnam war, the physical embodiment of whether he will have the courage to oppose society and defend what is right.”

“North by Northwest
is fun!” Foxx said, suddenly furious. “It’s not some symbolic story about the most depressing war in American history.”

“Oh come on, Jim,” Garth said.

“Come on, what?” Foxx pleaded, his hands spread out, begging Garth. “This project is starting to sound like
Apocalypse Now
—without the action.”

“No!” Tony said. “It’s a gothic thriller. Like
Marathon Man
or
Three Days of the Condor.
They were hits.”

“Exactly!” Garth said to Foxx. “I’m not Cary Grant. And besides, I want to play a real character. I want this picture to have some meat to it. No one’s really done a great picture about the struggles of antiwar activists. Tony’s figured a way to do a contemporary thriller—which makes it commercial—but with a real theme.”

“Well, then, why were you so down about this draft?” Foxx asked. Garth nervously glanced at Tony. “You said—”

Garth cut Foxx off. “I was disappointed in the execution of some things. I always liked the concepts. I think there’s nice stuff here, but Tony needs to work more on the characters.”

“And the action! There’s not enough action!” Foxx almost hopped with annoyance.

“Yes, yes,” Garth said. He looked at Tony, his expression tired and bored. “The chase at the end is no good. It’s full of clichés.”

“Okay,” Tony said, swallowing hard. He felt abashed, a boy who has peed in his pants on the first day of school. He didn’t even know if they were right, but each criticism hurt more and more, as though he were being punched repeatedly in the same spot, right on the already bruised skin. The fact that Garth was actually concealing the extent of his disappointment in the script made it all the more horrifying. Tony had felt the sting of rejection as a writer before. People who felt his work was still young, limited, too cold—usually the complaint was simply that it wasn’t commercial (not Broadway), but never that he was inept, so inadequate that he had to be protected from a truthful opinion.

He listened to their dissection of his chase sequence at the end of the script. Foxx did most of the surgery, heedless of scars or of how thoroughly the patient had been anesthetized. Everything about it was bad, even down to how Tony had formatted the pages. “This reads like prose,” Foxx said with disgust. “You have to give us shots and angles, some kind of pacing, so we can picture it. It’s totally nonvisual.” Garth suggested he read some scripts they had selected for him so he could get an idea of how, as he put it, “a professional screenplay looks.”

He felt his cheeks quiver with shame. They had beaten him at last. Really finished him. He nodded passively, not as a trick, not as a social hypocrisy, but because he felt they were right. He didn’t know what he was doing. He was just a kid after all, someone who had never set foot on a movie set, who had no idea of what any of it entailed. Probably the script was bad. Worse, something that could never be done. An embarrassment.

When they finished. Tony asked, “Are you sure you want me to do this rewrite?”

They both looked startled. “Well, what the hell do you think we’re talking for?” Foxx said. “The fun of it? We expect you to make these changes.”

“No. no,” Tony said. He knew this question revealed how hurt he felt, but he had to know the answer. “Do you have confidence I can do it?”

Foxx stared at him in amazement.

Garth frowned. “Doesn’t matter whether we have confidence, Tony. It matters whether you do,” he said, but sadly, as though having to point this out with another example of Tony’s ignorance.

Later, Tony walked back across the legendary lot, only now its mythic past had dissolved in the face of his present misery. They were only ugly low buildings with an excessive amount of parking space, a McDonald’s of culture, fast food for the mind, where a decision as to whether you wanted your burger medium or rare was irrelevant since they all came out well-done. But even that thought, he realized, was a cliché, a well-worn fact of American life that looked even drabber on him, since he had volunteered to wear the uniform.

Back in the car, he drove slowly, uncertain where to go. He had planned on visiting his mother’s set (Lois would be there) and having lunch with them all. He was expected there, no doubt in triumph, to report that Garth was planning on shooting his script. To admit the truth to them, even to his mother, was beyond imagining. In New York (perhaps), little would be thought of it. He could say blithely, “Oh, the assholes want a lot of stupid changes,” and the result might even reflect well on him. Writing for the movies in New York was almost a sure thing. If you succeeded you were considered clever, if you failed you were considered too refined a talent. In LA, failure had no subtleties. It was just pitied. The answer, of course, was to lie. Behave as though the changes were minor, that Garth and Foxx had been enthusiastic. But to will himself to that deception seemed almost as staggering as to will himself to tell the truth.

He returned to his hotel. In the middle of the day, the halls occupied only by cleaning women and their carts, the choice felt lonely. His room had been straightened. It looked anonymous, his presence erased. He stared at the phone. For a moment his mind (always talking at him, never resting) went blank, relaxed. He felt tired. He wished he could move out of his life, like a hotel, out of his elegant but standard room, and find an eccentric villa, or even a dreary cave, but leave certainly. He picked up the phone and dialed Betty in New York. He had made no decision to, his hand seemed to have developed the desire.

When he got her, her voice happy, pleased to hear from him, he had nothing to say.

“Did you have your meeting?” she asked.

“Yes.” And he had no energy to continue.

“What happened?” she asked, fear creeping into her tone.

“They didn’t like it.” He couldn’t say more, and thinking about it, he really didn’t have to, That’s what it amounted to. pure and simple: they didn’t like it.

“So they don’t want to go on?” Betty asked, gently, very gently, testing a hair-trigger spring.

“Oh yeah.” Tony was surprised that she would think— even for a second—that it might be that bad. “No. they’re not firing me. They just want a total rewrite.”

“Oh.” she said with relief. “Oh, I’m sorry,” but with pleasure returning to her voice.

“Well, it’s kind of insulting.” Tony said, angry she found this situation relatively comforting. “I’m a …” for a second, he was going to say: I’m a genius. He caught himself with that monumental word of self-praise (and delusion!) right in his mouth, ready to sing out uncensored. Like his mad mother, capable of the most outrageous statements of egomania. I’m a genius? he asked himself. Since when?

Am I losing my mind? Like her, when she met defeat? But that wasn’t defeat. That was political oppression.
He
had met defeat. And his mother
was
a genius.

“What?” Betty asked into his uncompleted sentence.

“They wouldn’t fire me, Betty,” Tony said darkly, furious at her, angrier at her than he felt toward Garth and Foxx. That was nuts too. He was falling apart.

“All right,” she said. “Okay. Calm down. I didn’t say anything.”

Now there was a silence. A silence he could fill with a thousand speeches. All of them words of regret. What had happened to him? To his youth of sheer promise, of bold confidence? Who or what had blocked off his clear view of the horizon? He had failed. As a playwright. As a screenwriter. And as a husband. The image of himself that he carried like an icon, that he was a handsome, happily married, brilliant young playwright in the early stages of a long, glamorous career, had been revealed as a stupid object of worship, a childish understanding of life. He was none of those things. He was an unsuccessful writer with a fucked-up marriage in the midst of a tacky affair. How he had become that was a mystery still, but the truth of it was no longer a revelation.

“I love you,” he said in a low, cracked, despairing voice.

“I love you,” Betty said back.

“I’m tired. I’ll call you later, okay?” He thought of Lois. “Or maybe tomorrow morning. All right?”

“Sure. Don’t feel bad!”

“I won’t,” he said, hanging up, and feeling the weight of his sorrow crush him down onto the bedspread, forcing his legs up to a fetal position. He lay there, still, afraid to move, watching the afternoon California sun light up the curtains into a white neon glow, while he passed into a sleep of numb despair.

Patty couldn’t say why, but once she gave her pages to Betty, joy flooded her being. She went home, put an old Stones album on the stereo—loud—and danced wildly to it, using the cast-iron columns as her partners and the long smooth wood floors as a vast stage for a solo that could rival Mick Jagger’s for exuberance. She was alone. Late at night. And happy. There was no longing for someone to be there, creating a personality for her. She didn’t miss David—still working late at the office—as she had in the first months of living with him. She could bear to be there without watching television. Without calling a friend. Without going to sleep. To be awake and alone had become possible.

She exhausted herself dancing, and sat sweating, on the couch thinking all this. But soon she was drawn to the new manuscipt, to read the pages—she hoped—along with Betty. They were good. They excited her. She found herself mentally writing more when she reached the end, and soon she was drawn back to the typewriter. Concentration, always hard for her, had become automatic. She could break into the surface of her book as easily as diving into clear calm water and there was no effort in staying below, no need to come up for air. Nothing had ever been so completely her own.