King Maybe (11 page)

“Thirty-eight. Okay, so I assume Granger—King Maybe—has his hands on this movie you want to make.”

“Exclusive option. One year for starters. He's had it seven months already. Means I can't show it to anyone else. He paid me twenty K for it, and nobody else can even look at it.”

“So that's the maybe. Why can't you take it back?”

“He's got a unilateral—that means I get no say—option to extend it for a second year. And a third, which should show you how desperate I was. Problem is, even if he gives it back to me, there's nowhere else I can shop it. I told you, there's really only two places you can take a big movie without having to go lick the shareholders' shoes, and one of them is Jeremy and the other one is closed to me.”

“So in the best-case situation, what happens?”

“He likes the script, check: in fact, he says he
loves
it. He develops what's called
coverage
, which is Hollywood talk for a short overview with a few assessments of its commercial appeal or lack of it, check: he says he's done that and it's
fabulous
—that was his word. He won't let me read the coverage, but it's
fabulous
.” He kisses his fingertips and releases the kiss to the air like a waiter selling the special in a bad restaurant. “He takes it to a bankable director and a couple of top-money-club actors, check: he says he's done it and that you'd know the names of everyone who's supposed to be interested. He puts together a package: stars, director, rewrite screenwriter, the whole
mishegoss
, and then he tells the studio they're doing the movie, and hi there, Jake Whelan is back in business.”

“Not check?”

“Not. And now he's not taking my calls.”

“And the worst he can do?”

“He can put the fucking thing in a drawer without ever showing it to anybody and keep saying
maybe
until I die of old age, which won't be that long, the way I'm going. He can commission really disastrous coverage that says it's a flop, it's
Ishtar
, it's
The Lone Ranger
, it's a black hole, it'll bankrupt any studio that makes it, on and on and on. Then he can circulate that coverage really aggressively to everyone in town who might conceivably want to make the picture in the future. Or—and here's the big one—he can take the central idea, put it through a centrifuge, and hire bigfoot writers to kick it out of shape until it's deniable if I sue for plagiarism, and then he can make the fucking thing himself and either earn another billion on it while I slowly lose everything and end up living in a box somewhere, or he could go the prestige route and use it to win his Best Picture Oscar. And then return the treatment to me, with a valentine saying, ‘Sorry. Couldn't move it
.
' That's called putting the project in
turnaround
. Son of a bitch can put my whole life in turnaround. So all of the above. Oh, and he can
enjoy
it.”

“Why would he? Why would anybody?”

“He got where he is by eating shit, is why. He worked for the worst people in this town, and that's saying a lot. This is an industry that enjoys the sight of failure and likes to make it just a
little
worse, so all the people whose shit Granger was eating introduced him to their so-called friends, and they, or I should say we, all fed him some more shit. While
he
grinned and nodded and kept his ears open, read people's email, rifled through file drawers, and made notes. By the time he aced Barry Zipken with that teenage fluff, he had stuff, lethal stuff, on everyone at Farscope. They had a choice: either they defended him in court or they got the rug pulled out from under them. These guys had mortgages the size of Manhattan, and they had big, fat, expensive asses, which they didn't want to land on, so the lawyers appeared in a shower of glitter, Barry got fired, Jeremy skated, and—informally at first—he used all that info to take over. The ghost with all the power. And now he does just two things with his life: he makes movies that earn trainloads of money, and he gets even. With everyone. Guy's probably saying maybe right now to twenty, thirty movies, just tying knots in people's lives. Twenty-four hours a day, he gets even.”

“Turnaround.”

“Sorta benign sounding, isn't it? Like a dance step. Like if they named leprosy
lacyface
.”

“But, Jake. Even if the movie never gets made, in the end you can sell paintings, one at a time, and sooner or later you'll get paid for the streaming rights and you'll wind up okay. I mean, come on, this is just another movie. Out of how many? Fourteen? Fifteen?”

“
Seventeen.
Total grosses more than two billion.” he said. “Nearly three billion, and those are the
official
figures, so God knows what the real ones are. But see, King Maybe, he's operating in a new universe, a
global
universe, where the grosses are . . . well, it's like there's no gravity, okay? He's been at it less than a
decade
, and he's already pushing eight billion. There's not as many movies now as there used to be, not so much competition, and there's bigger audiences with Asia standing in line over there waving their yuan around, but that's all just excuses. Makes me look like a
pisher
, is what it does.”

“Seventeen movies. What makes this one life-and-death?”

He got to his feet, and for a moment I thought he was heading back upstairs for a little elevation, but instead he went to the fireplace, grabbed a couple of wrist-thick branches, and tossed them in. “It's an
apology
,” he said to the fire. “It's my way to make up for all the zap-zap, kiss-kiss, boys-being-boys crapola I passed off as art all those years. It's a movie that's actually
about
something, something more important than The Rock's pectoral muscles or the physics of warp speed when you're wearing a tight sweater in outer space. Those movies were about
movies
, Junior. The world in them was pieces of other movies. This one is about life.” He turned to face me, ragged at the edges but still as imperially slim as Richard Cory just before he went home and put the bullet through his head. “It's the last thing I want to do before I die.”

Okay, Jake was a huckster with decades of experience. He'd been making exorbitant claims for negligible movies ever since some of his early ones thrilled my little-boy pants off. I'd grown up with him giving ponderous interviews and making mythic claims in publications that should have known better—the
New York Times
, for example—about films that turned out, upon arrival, to be lighter than air and a lot smellier. High-concept, low-IQ. Zap-zap, kiss-kiss, like the man said. This was what he
did
, repackage shit as shea butter. It was part of his job description.

Except that I believed him.

Sort of.

I said, “What's it called?”

He focused on a spot over my head, drew a couple of deep breaths, licked his lips, and said, “
Ambient Violet.
”

“
Ambient—”

“
Violet.
” It was almost a snap.

“Not
Stone and Steel
, not
Nickel and Dime
not
Scratch and Sniff
?”

“That was a
formula
,” he said, as though that had never occurred to anyone. “I'm telling you, this one is different.” He raised a hand in a way that suggested I'd been poised to interrupt. “Just give me two minutes, okay? You can time me, I don't give a fuck.”

“I'm listening.”

“I need a second.” He picked up the fire iron and messed around with the logs. It was a little stagey, but then I'm a cynic. “I've done it all,” he said. “I've
had
it all. However you measure it, there are wide lives—
big
lives—and there are small lives. And I think maybe I've—maybe we've all—been chasing the wrong one.”

He leaned the iron against the fireplace. “So I went for the big life, and I got it, bigger than almost anyone. Probably looked great from outside, and you know, Junior, for a long time I lived my life so it
would
look good from outside. For example, books. I never read shit, and when I did, it was junk, you know, the heartrending romance of the week and real-life crime and even those condensed books like they used to have—you know,
‘All the story in half the words'? But my bookshelves, they were all Tolstoy and the Greeks, poetry and Shakespeare, biographies of people I never heard of, but the guy I had buy my books for me, he said they were important. And the other thing he did, he wrote a couple paragraphs about each of them so I could talk about them and not sound like an idiot. ‘The theme of redemption in Tolstoy,' you know what I'm saying?”

“I suppose. But I don't have any idea where you're taking it.”

“See, that's why the
movie
is so important.” He pushed himself away from the fireplace and started to pace. “What I can say right now, just you and me in this room, is that I fell for it myself. The bigness was what I thought I wanted, and so I made it, I claimed all that space and then I filled it up with junk, and I
believed
it. Those books, this house, the Ferraris, my name on those theater marquees, me standing around at parties shooting the shit with Harrison Ford. Saying yes and no to the world. I bought it.”

By now he'd gotten far enough to my left that I was going to have to shift to keep him in my field of vision, and he turned, so it was pretty clear he was aware of his audience's sight lines. “See, what happens in life, you try this and that, and if you're lucky, you find something that pleases you, that satisfies you, makes you feel good about yourself. If you're not lucky, you find things that hurt less than the other things do. So either way, what you do, you use that information to build a sort of house out of your life, does that make sense? As long as you stay inside those walls, in that floor plan, chances are you won't get creamed.” He stretched out an arm, index finger extended, and indicated the rectangle of the room we were in. “Same rooms over and over again, but they're
safe
. You're trapped, but you're safe. And, of course, the joke is that you have to get as old as I am to understand that I could have walked through those walls anytime. That I
should
have. Into someplace small and quiet. Someplace I could get my arms around.”

“The unexamined life,” I said.

He snapped his fingers and pointed a finger at me, pistol style. “That's it, that's exactly it. And listen, I know this isn't the first time anybody ever thought about this, but now I look back at all that time I was given, that time I spent returning calls and jumping on planes and crossing oceans and getting hair implants and
shtupping
starlets, and you know what I see? I see that every day of my life I've been getting up in the morning and next to my bed there's this, like, chalice, whatever a chalice is, and it's full of these golden, glowing seeds. And every day I've reached in without a second's thought and grabbed one at random and then never thought about it again, and
that was my day
. And it's not until you get
old
,” he said, coming back to his chair and sitting on the arm closer to me, only a few feet away, “that you realize that the level of golden seeds in the chalice drops every time you take one out. Gets lower. And one day you look in and you realize you can almost count them, and what did you do with the ones you pulled out? Did you breathe on them, roll them between your hands, try to feed that teeny golden fire just a little bit? Did you say thank you, did you explore them, or did you just pop the seed like an aspirin and forget about it, go make another million, schmooze some actor, buy another yard of books you won't read?” He leaned back and slid the rest of the way into the chair. “Maybe, in your case, steal something that someone loved?”

“And what would have happened,” I said, “if you'd tried to feed the fire?”

“Who the fuck knows?” he said. He slapped his thighs with his open hands, the sound surprisingly loud. “That's why it matters:
you don't know.
Whatever
kind of life it was, big and shiny like mine or tiny and awful like some street beggar's in New Delhi, sooner or later it's gone, and you didn't
explore
it, you never went all the way to the borders, much less through them.
I
know, I know this sounds like white people's problems, sounds like every old fart who ever lived, but maybe there's some room in the world for something that
suggests
to people that they owe it to themselves to realize that the walls that they built yesterday, they can go through them today. If you built big, you can go small, if you built small . . . well, you know. You don't have to be the person you started out to be. You can walk away from that person the way you'd blow off the bore at a party. Be something different. You can look at each of those little seeds and make the most of it. In my case, center in and go for something small.”

“Why small?”

He leaned back and regarded his lap for a moment. “Well, first, obviously, I've had big. But more than that, beyond that, there's a kind of
density
to some small lives, you know? A kind of concentration. Emily Dickinson left a pretty deep scratch on the world for someone who hardly ever went outdoors, Jane Austen in her . . . what, her drawing room? I don't know. How big was Jesus's world? A couple hundred square miles?” He lifted his feet one at a time and brought them down onto the floor, making footsteps like a sound effect. “Covered mostly on foot? I still have a lot of energy, Junior. It's
wisdom
I don't have. Maybe looking very closely at one thing at a time for a while, learning every square inch of a small room, figuring out how to play the first six notes of ‘Clair de Lune' on a violin
perfectly
is how you get to wisdom. Maybe I've got enough time left to make a start on that.”