Selling Out (15 page)

“I don't get any work done either when we do that. Shall we stop?”

“You mean altogether? Go dry?”

“I will if you will.”

Perry tensed; that seemed a little extreme.

“Maybe we should just cut down. Cut out the hard stuff. Nobody out here drinks anything but wine, anyway.”

“I guess that's more realistic. OK. Just wine with dinner. And we ought to cut back on our eating, too.”

“Great. We'll diet, then,” Perry said. “And get more exercise.”

He had begun to feel self-conscious about that extra ten or so pounds around his middle. Also, he'd begun to notice that although before he liked Jane a little fulsome and fleshy, out here, compared to these amazing women whose stomachs seemed as flat as ironing boards, she began to look by comparison a little frumpy. Some diet and exercise would do them both good.

“I'm willing,” Jane said.

They shook hands, smiling, and then embraced.

Then Perry pulled away. The fact is he didn't feel like making love. It wasn't just the thought of Jane's frumpiness compared to the sleek California women. Being on the set all day, involved in the shooting, was really exhausting. He simply didn't have a lot of energy left over for sex.

Perry was high, and about to get higher.

The feeling had nothing to do with drugs, though in fact he'd felt a real rush when he saw the tall director's chair with his own name on it in big black letters.

PERRY MOSS.

Now all he had to do was climb up onto it, as if this were a commonplace occurrence, in front of all these people whose eyes were on him. They were shooting on location at the little college up north near San Jose, and a crowd of students and faculty had gathered, as people always did around cameras, drawn to the magic of filming.

Perry felt like a star, for all the people who were watching knew he was one,
or
might be about to become one, just like the actors who also had their own director's chairs with their own names—MELINDA MARGULIES, HAL THAXTER—along with the executives, NED GURNEY and KENTON SPIRES.

All eyes were on him as he went to mount the chair that had his name on it, and suddenly it seemed a challenge. It looked storklike and flimsy on its crossed toothpick legs. Bravely, he seized the arms as if he were going to mount a wild bronco, hefted himself up and onto the canvas seat, teetering only slightly, silently saying a prayer of thanks as he opened the large notebook that held the script and pointed his nose down into it, pretending to focus on the swimming words.

When he looked up, Ned and Kenton were beside him on their own personal thrones, each looking as comfortable in his perch as if he were born to it. Perry still felt slightly dizzy, as if he might tip himself over if he leaned too far one way or other, or coughed suddenly. He got out his pipe and lit up, hoping that process would distract him from his newest phobia—fear of falling off a director's chair while shooting a TV film on location and being watched by the natives.

“This is a big scene we have coming up,” said Ned.

“Mmm,” Kenton nodded. “Our happy couple's first big fight.”

Perry smiled, proud of his drama. This was a scene where Jack thinks Laurie is flirting at a party; he leaves, she rushes after him, and they “grapple” before he runs off and she chases him.

“Kenton?” Ned asked. “Do you see this as a tag-team wrestling match—or something more subdued?”

“Frankly, I was grappling with the word
grapple
.”

“Luckily,” Ned said, looking at Perry, “we have our author here to elucidate.”

“Oh, well, I just meant the way people do—I mean, a young man and woman, recently married.”

He realized he was picturing a scene from his own first marriage and added quickly, “A couple like Jack and Laurie, I mean.”

“Naturally,” Ned said reassuringly.

“You know how people like that kind of grab each other, in an argument?” Perry asked.

“Like grabbing by the arm?” asked Kenton.

“Sure, right,” Perry said, not wanting to reveal how he and his first wife had rolled around someone's gravel driveway in such an argument.

“Good,” Ned said. “That suits our couple, I think, better than a knock-down, drag-out, roll-around kind of thing.”

“We'll get more frustration and fury by having them hold back a bit,” said Kenton.

“Exactly,” said Ned. “Keep it civilized.”

“Perfect,” echoed Perry.

When they saw the scene in dailies they agreed it was both civilized and dramatic.

It was not till the next day that they heard a dissenting opinion.

At the crucial moment of shooting the picnic love scene in an open field near the campus, a plane began circling overhead. The soundman took off his earphones and complained he was picking up the drone.

“Cut!” said Kenton.

All eyes of cast and crew turned upward. They not only saw a plane circling, they saw someone jump out. There was a gasp and several shrieks. Then a sigh of relief as a parachute opened. Perry followed Ned and Kenton as they ran toward the uninvited paratrooper, who landed at the far end of the field and was pulling in his chute.

It was Archer Mellis.

“What's going on?” Ned asked.

“That's what I want to know after looking at yesterday's dailies,” said Archer. “Doesn't anyone here know how to stage a real fight between a young married couple?”

“It was supposed to be understated,” Kenton said.

“
Civilized
,” Ned added with emphasis.

“I call it bloodless and boring,” said Archer.

Sweat popped out on Kenton's brow, and the big vein in Ned's temple began to throb as his face grew lobster red.

“What the hell do you really want, Archer?” Ned demanded. “Violence?”

Archer looked as if someone had just insulted his mother.

“I didn't hear that,” he said. “I didn't hear anyone in good conscience accuse me of resorting to something I entered this industry to oppose.”

“So what is it you want?” Kenton asked.

“I want that scene reshot.”

“I'm the executive producer here,” Ned said. “What are you trying to do, take over the picture?”

“I'm trying to save it,” said Archer, and, pulling in the last cords of his chute and balling it up, he strode toward the camera and crew.

VI

As the lights went down in the small executive screening room at Paragon, Perry could feel his pulse rising. He was about to see his dream from beginning to end. This wasn't even the final form of the film, it was only the rough cut, but it was the first time anyone except Kenton as the director and Kim as the film editor (along with her assistant) would view the work as a whole, in sequence, instead of just the disconnected pieces of the dailies. Perry was as nervous as if he were about to see a documentary of his own life on a large screen.

No matter how it came out, it would in a sense be a victory over many odds. There were times when Perry wondered if it ever would be finished, if the production would get past the conflicts and emergencies, the artistic tantrums and budget crises, the unexpected breakdowns of nerves and equipment, the acts of God, like the drenching rain that fell the day of reshooting the picnic scene (they used it to show Laurie and jack's true grit by having them kiss and fondle under umbrellas).

From the time Archer Mellis landed in the field up at Saratoga like a paratroop guerrilla, challenging Kenton and Ned (and Perry by association), he came to seem almost like their adversary rather than their leader, relentlessly prodding and pressing, yet goading them on. They were the production company while he was the studio, a higher force, a more powerful critic and judge. Yet despite its disadvantages and tensions this new situation, if anything, brought the “First Year” company even closer together, made them more determined, more dedicated to their cause, and devoted to their eventual triumph.

The staff of the “First Year” company sat bunched together in the center of the first few rows of the screening room, while Archer Mellis, who had not come in the door but materialized at the last minute from inside the projection booth, sat in lofty isolation in the top row at the back of the room, his mouth a thin straight line, his eyes unblinking and inscrutable.

As the overhead lights in the room went out, the tiny lights attached to the clipboards of the professional filmmakers came on like the scattered glow of some exotic breed of illuminated insects. Perry again wished he had thought to ask Ned where you buy these things; he had never seen one for sale in an ordinary stationery store and presumed they could only be purchased at an official insiders' supply house that sold such stuff as the black-and-white-striped slateboards, and the old-fashioned megaphones of the kind still used on the set by Roger, the crusty first assistant director on their production. Perry was far too nervous now to use a lighted clipboard for its purpose of making notes while the film was being shown; he would simply have liked to have had one as a security prop.

Better still, he had Jane beside him. He was glad now he'd overcome his apprehensions of breaking protocol by bringing his wife, and he gratefully reached over now and took her hand. He squeezed her fingers tightly as the first of the film began to flicker to life on the big screen in front of them.

A rough cut runs long by definition, but this one was longer than most, running thirty-eight minutes over. It was especially—almost scandalously—long for television, a medium which by necessity emphasizes economy of time as well as money. This two-hour movie for television would be cut to ninety-six minutes with commercials on a $2.1 million budget, with a nineteen-day shooting schedule, whereas a feature film of similar scope would probably run at least three times that in budget even without any stars, and three or four times in the length of the shooting schedule. A director of a feature might indulge himself in as many as fifty or sixty takes of one angle of one scene, while any more than five or six takes for television was considered excessive. Everyone was doing his best but there was no time for “art,” no extra hours much less days to spend in trying to get the slant of light just so across the cheek of the heroine at the moment the hero's lips brushed ever so lightly across the top of her brow. The public was waiting, switching the dials; the television tubes were like millions of hungry mouths all over America, waiting to be constantly fed: Making television was like making bread, as opposed to the gourmet cakes and tarts of the features, and in Perry's opinion, in many cases, the bread turned out better anyway.

A rough cut for a feature might run three or four
hours
over its eventual desired length, but in television anything more than ten minutes over was thought of as indulgent. Well, Kenton had wanted the luxury of this kind of indulgence and Ned had fought for him on it, and though Archer had sometimes fought back, he had himself demanded reshooting not only to get something just right by his standard but also to have what was considered in TV almost profligate—a choice.

So here it was at last in the rough and it was long and repetitious and awkward and Perry loved every minute of it. It seemed to move as slowly as syrup, yet to its author it was just as sweet. It was like the unrolling of some endless novel, endemically American in sight and speech and yet in scope seemingly created by one of those ponderous nineteenth-century Russians whose tales seemed to grow from and mimic the vastness of their land.

The pace of the work was quite like that of the foreign art films Perry found so excruciatingly tedious and boring, the hushed Bergman epics and snail-like Japanese morality tales he had hated from the start, when he first had to endure them during his twenties in order to accommodate the cultural longings of sophisticated young women so they would hopefully later satisfy his own baser appetites.

Unlike his faculty colleagues, who almost all were film buffs, Perry was frankly a movie fan, one who preferred real plots and lots of sparkling dialogue to amorphous moods and sullen stares. His taste was epitomized scandalously to his peers (and even to most of his students) by his sincere and unashamed avowal that
The Young Philadelphians
starring Paul Newman was far superior entertainment and more revealing of the human condition than Bergman's
Wild Strawberries
, and was even better with lots of buttered popcorn thrown in. He preferred to be entertained, he argued, rather than mesmerized or lulled to unconsciousness.

Now as he experienced an almost sensuous thrill from simply watching one of his own beloved characters walk across a room in the course of the film, or open a window, or pour a cup of coffee, he understood why the famous European
auteur
directors subjected their fans to such endlessly drawn-out sequences. To the “creator” (
auteur
) they were pure fascination, as the squalls and dumps of a newborn baby are completely captivating to its own parents.

When the lights came on, Jane squeezed Perry's hand. He squeezed back, and held his breath. The room was deadly silent. Slowly, heads turned back, craned up, looking toward Archer to see if any reaction could be discerned. Would he tell them to take the whole thing back to the drawing board? Would he curse them all as he had before, threatening to fire the whole damn lot of them if they couldn't produce the quality he had hired them to create? Would he stand up and read from his clipboard a series of elaborate notes that would mean everyone would have to start from scratch?

Archer sat immobile, inscrutable, his feet propped on the seat in front of him, his elbows resting on his knees, hands held together with the fingertips lightly touching in the symbolic gesture of prayer. But there was no sound or movement from him. Finally Kenton stood up in the front, and, proud but perspiring from every pore of his considerable flesh, he faced up toward Archer, his shoulders thrown back, like a man presenting himself to a firing squad. Ned got up and stood beside him. Perry was about to squirm out of his seat and go join them in the noble presentation of themselves and their work for execution, but just at that moment Archer suddenly shot up to a standing position, aimed a finger down toward Kenton and Ned and said, simply, in a clear, commanding voice: “Go for it.”