Temptation (8 page)

I hung up. I suddenly felt very tired. So tired that I didn’t want to think any more about the game that Philip Fleck was playing. But before falling into bed, I did leave the two
scripts on our kitchen counter. They were both open to page one. Beside them was a note to Sally:

Darling:

Your thoughts, please, on this curious case of duplication.

Love you . . .

D xxx

Then I crept into our bedroom, got back into bed, and passed right out.

When I woke five hours later, I found Sally sitting at the end of our bed, proffering me a cappuccino. I muttered incoherent early morning words of thanks. She smiled. I noticed that she was already showered and dressed. Then I also saw that she had the two scripts under her arm.

‘So, you really want to know what I think of this?’ she asked.

I took a sip of coffee, then nodded.

‘Well, to be honest about it, the whole thing’s a bit generic, isn’t it? Quentin Tarantino meets one of those dumb caper movies of the seventies.’

‘Thanks a lot.’

‘Look, you asked for an opinion, I’m giving you one. Anyway, it’s a piece of juvenilia, right? And let’s face it, the opening scene is overwritten. I mean, maybe you find references to Mahler amusing, but face fact, they’re not going to work with the multiplex crowd.’

I took another sip of coffee, then said, ‘Ouch.’

‘Hey, I’m not saying it’s talentless. On the contrary, it’s got all the hallmarks that have made
Selling You
such a
winner. The thing is, you’ve come on a long way since then.’

‘Right,’ I said, sounding hurt.

‘Oh, for God’s sakes, you don’t expect me to praise something which really isn’t that good, do you?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘But that wouldn’t be honest.’

‘What does honesty have to do with it? All I was asking for was your thoughts about Fleck’s attempted plagiarism.’

‘Plagiarism? Will you listen to yourself? You’re like every writer I’ve ever met. Totally humorless when it comes to their own work. So he played a little hoax on you and decided to see how you’d react to his “purloining” of your script? Don’t you get it? Don’t you see what’s he’s trying to tell you?’

‘Of course I do: he wants co-credit on my screenplay.’

She shrugged. ‘Yes – you’re right. That’s the price you’re going to pay if you let him make the script. And you should give him half-credit.’

‘Why?’

‘You know why: because that’s the way the game is played. And also because – if truth be told – it’s not the best movie ever written . . . so why not give him partial credit?’

I said nothing. Sally came over and kissed the top of my head.

‘Don’t sulk now,’ she said. ‘But I’m not going to lie to you. It’s a stale old product. And if the eighth richest man in America wants to buy it off you, take his big bucks . . . even if it means that he ends up with a co-writing credit. Believe me, Alison’s going to agree with me on this one.’

‘Well, you’ve got to hand it to the guy,’ Alison said when
I called to tell her about Fleck’s little stunt. ‘It’s a perversely original way of getting your attention.’

‘And of telling me that he expects to be the co-writer.’

‘Big deal. This is Hollywood. Even the valet parking guys think they deserve co-credit on a screenplay. Anyway, it’s not your best work.’

I said nothing.

‘Oh dear, a
sensitive
silence,’ Alison said. ‘Is the
auteur
a little touchy this morning?’

‘Yeah. A little.’

‘FRT has spoiled you, David. You now think you’re Mr Creative Control. But remember: if this script gets made, we are talking about the big screen. And the big screen means the big compromises. Unless, of course, Fleck decides to turn your movie into some art house shit . . . ’

‘It’s a caper movie, Alison.’

‘Hey – in Fleck’s hands, it could still be a candidate for existential dread. You ever see
The Last Chance
?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Give yourself a laugh and go rent it. It’s probably the most unintentionally hilarious film ever made.’

I did just that, picking up the movie from my local Blockbuster that afternoon and watching it alone before Sally got home. I slipped the DVD into the player, opened a beer, sat back and waited to be entertained.

I didn’t have to wait long. The opening shot of
The Last Chance
is a close-up of a character named Prudence – a lithe, willowy babe, dressed in a long flowing cape. After a moment, the camera pulls back and we see that she’s standing on a rocky promontory of a barren island, staring out at a mushroom-cloud explosion on the distant mainland. As her
eyes grow wide at the intensity of this nuclear holocaust, we hear her saying, ‘The world was ending . . . and I was watching it.’

Hell of an opening. A few minutes later, we’re introduced to Prudence’s island companion, Helene – another willowy babe (albeit with horn-rimmed glasses) who’s married to a mad artist named Herman, who paints huge abstract canvases, depicting apocalyptic scenes of urban carnage.

‘I came here to escape the material bonds of society,’ he tells Helene, ‘but now that society has totally vanished. So we’ve finally gotten our dream.’

‘Yes, my love,’ Helene says. ‘That is true. We have gotten our dream. But there is a problem: we are going to die.’

The fourth member of this jolly quartet is a Swedish recluse named Helgor, who’s doing a Walden Pond/Thoreau thing in a backward cottage on a corner of the island. Helene has the hots for Helgor, who has sworn off sex, not to mention electricity, electronically amplified sound, flush toilets, and anything that hasn’t been grown in organic soil. But, upon hearing that the world is ending, he decides to stop the fornication abstinence thing, and lets himself be seduced by Helene. As they slide to the stone floor of his hovel, he tells her:

‘I want to sup of your body. I want to drink your life force.’

Of course, it turns out that Mad Herman is schtupping Prudence, and that she is with child. In a brilliantly observational moment, she tells him, ‘I feel a life expanding within me while death envelops everything.’

Helene finds out about Herman’s adultery with Prudence,
and Helgor spills the beans about screwing Helene, and there are fisticuffs between the two boys, followed by half an hour of brooding silences, followed by an eventual reconciliation, and a long-winded debate on the nature of existence, shot on a large outdoor stone patio, with the characters moving from white squares to black squares like (
duh
) figures in a chess game. As the post-nuclear fires rage on the mainland, and the toxic nuclear clouds begin to descend on the island, the quartet decide to meet their destiny head-on.

‘We should not end life by suffocation,’ Mad Herman argues. ‘We should embrace the flames.’

With that, they all pile into a boat and head off into the inferno, with the strains of
Siegfried’s Rhine Journey
escorting them into their very own
Götterdämmerung
.

Fade to Black. Credits.

When the movie was finished, I sat in my armchair for several minutes stupefied. Then I called my agent, and launched into a rant about its inherent badness. Alison finally said, ‘Yeah, it’s a real doozy, isn’t it?’

‘I can’t work with this guy. I’m cancelling the trip.’

‘Hang on for a moment,’ she said. ‘There’s no reason
not
to meet Fleck. After all, it’s some fun in the sun, right? More to the point, why not sell him
We Three Grunts
 . . . or
Fun and Games
or whatever the hell he wants to call it? I mean, if you hate what he does with it, we can get your name taken off the credits. In the meantime, I know I can fuck him out of a lot of money. I’m going pay-or-play on this one, Dave. A cool million. And I promise you he’ll pay it. Because even though we both know that registering your script under his name was a form of sweet talk, he
still won’t want that made public. Without us even asking,
he’ll pay big time to keep it quiet.’

‘You really have a low opinion of human nature.’

‘Hey, I’m an agent.’

After I finished talking to Alison, I called Sally. Her assistant put me on hold for around three minutes, then got back on the line, sounding tense, saying that ‘something had come up’ and Sally would call me back in ten minutes.

It was nearly an hour before she did ring me back. From the moment she got on the line, I knew that something was wrong.

‘Bill Levy’s just had a heart attack,’ she said, her voice shaky.

‘Jesus Christ,’ I said. Levy was her boss – and the man who’d brought Sally into Fox Television. He was her corpor ate father figure, and one of the few professional people she felt she could trust. ‘How bad is he?’ I asked.

‘Pretty bad. He collapsed during a planning meeting. Fortunately, there was a company nurse on the premises, and she was able to administer CPR before the ambulance came.’

‘Where’s he now?’

‘UCLA Medical. In intensive care. Listen, everything’s been thrown into chaos here by what’s happened. I’m going to be home late.’

‘Fine, fine,’ I said. ‘If there’s anything I can do . . . ’

But all she said was ‘Got to run’ and hung up.

She didn’t arrive back until after midnight, looking drawn and enervated. I put my arms around her. She gently disengaged herself from my grip, and flopped on the sofa.

‘He made it – just,’ she said. ‘But he’s still in a coma, and they are worried about brain damage.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, offering her something strong and alcoholic. But she only wanted Perrier.

‘What makes this situation even shittier,’ she said, ‘is the fact that Stu Barker has been put in charge of Bill’s division for the time being.’

This was bad news – Stu Barker was an ultra-ambitious asshole who had been gunning for Levy’s job for the past year. He also didn’t think much of Sally, because she was such a Levy partisan.

‘So, what are you going to do?’ I asked.

‘What I have to do in a situation like this – draw my forces around me and keep that bastard Barker from undermining everything I’ve built up at Fox. And, I’m afraid, this also means that the week at Chez Fleck is definitely out for me.’

‘I thought as much. I’ll call Bobby now and say we can’t make it.’

‘But you should go.’

‘With you facing a crisis like this one? No way.’

‘Listen, I’m going to be working flat out for the next week. I mean, with Barker in charge of the division, the only way I’m going to keep things together is by being at the office fifteen hours a day.’

‘Fine. But at least I’ll be waiting home for you at night, with tea, sympathy and a martini.’

She reached over and squeezed my hand.

‘That’s very sweet of you. But I want you to take this trip.’

‘Sally . . . ’

‘Listen to me. I really am better off on my own. It means I don’t have to be focusing on anything else – and I can
put all my energy into keeping my job. More to the point, you can’t turn this opportunity down. Because, at worst, it will be a laugh . . . and a very luxurious one at that. At best, the paycheck will be huge. Given that Stu Barker would like nothing better than to push me out of the company, the money might come in handy for us, right?’

I knew that Sally was talking garbage. She was one of the most employable television executives in town. But though I tried to argue her into letting me stay, she was adamant.

‘Please don’t take this the wrong way,’ she said.

‘I’m not,’ I said, trying to sound sanguine about her need to get me out of the house. ‘If you want me to go to Planet Fleck, so be it.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, kissing me lightly on the lips. ‘Listen, sorry to do this, but I’ve set up a late-night conference call with Lois and Peter,’ she said, mentioning two of her closest Fox associates.

‘No problem,’ I said, getting up from the sofa. ‘I’ll be waiting for you in the bedroom.’

‘I shouldn’t be too long,’ she said, picking up the phone.

But when I fell asleep two hours later, she still hadn’t come to bed.

I woke at seven the next morning. She was already gone.

There was a note on the pillow beside me: ‘Off to an early strategy meeting with my team. I’ll call later.’

And she had scrawled an ‘S’ at the bottom. No term of endearment. Just her initial.

An hour or so later, Bobby Barra phoned to arrange for one of Fleck’s chauffeurs to pick us up tomorrow morning and bring us to Burbank Airport.

‘Phil took the 767 when he left for the island on Sunday,’ he said. ‘So I’m afraid it’s just the Gulfstream.’

‘I’ll live. But it looks like I’m coming alone.’ And I explained Sally’s career crisis at Fox.

‘Hey, fine by me,’ Bobby said. ‘I mean, no offence, but if she has to stay behind, I’m not exactly going to be crying into my Margarita.’

Then he told me to expect the chauffeur to arrive at my door by eight tomorrow morning.

‘Party, party, guy,’ he said, hanging up.

I packed a small bag. Then I went to the
Selling You
production office and looked at the early assembly of the first and second episodes. Sally never called once. When I got home that night, there were no messages from her on our voice mail. I spent the evening re-reading
We Three Grunts
. I scribbled some notes about ways I would like to improve its structure, its narrative pacing – and make it a little more up to date. Using a red felt-tip pen, I started excising some of its bulkier dialogue. In screenwriting, the less you say the better you say it. Keep it economic, keep it simple, let the pictures do the talking – because the medium you’re writing for is
the pictures
. And when you have pictures, who needs a lot of words?

By eleven that night, I had worked my way through half the script. Still no call from Sally. I considered ringing her cellphone. I dismissed the idea. She might interpret the call as either clingy, needy, or paternalistic (in a
why aren’t you home?
sort of way). So I simply went to bed.

When the alarm went off at seven the next morning, I found another note on the pillow beside me.