Read Turn of the Century Online
Authors: Kurt Andersen
“Absolutely,” she says, pleased. “They can be assholes.” Not that she’s planning to turn down their $31.5 million tomorrow morning. (
Sixty-three million
. Fine Technologies is worth
sixty-three million dollars!
) But discovering a shared personal loathing is the single quickest way to forge a friendship, Lizzie has found. There’s seldom time, like there was in her teens and twenties, to construct relationships a brick at a time, by agreeing on enthusiasms—for the Talking Heads, for big gin martinis straight up, for William Carlos Williams and Saki, for onion rings, for cunnilingus, for Richard Diebenkorn and seventeenth-century Dutch painting, for the woods, for Albert Brooks, for children—all the personal-ad particulars that become embarrassing in synopsis. Besides, Harold Mose probably doesn’t know “Psycho Killer” or
Paterson
, and Lizzie doesn’t foresee much opportunity to bring them up.
“So who needs the evil empire? Come be my digital czar. Czarina.”
“Yeah, right.” Lizzie giggles. He isn’t serious. “I’m afraid I’ve got a company of my own to run.”
“So you do. And so do I. Did you know that word of your brilliant husband’s brilliant new show is leaking out and nudging our stock price down? Evidently the Wall Street herd agrees with Arnold that
committing two hours a week and fifty million dollars to his mad, untried concept is bad business.” Arnold is Arnold Vlig, the Mose Media Holdings chief operating officer.
“Is that really what happened?” Lizzie says, not knowing how to respond, not wanting to sound alarmed and wifely. Phone calls aboard airplanes are lousy under the best of circumstances. Straining to hear, shouting a little to be heard (and trying not to be overheard), it’s telephony as it must have been in Graham Bell’s day. Divining nuance is impossible, and Lizzie has no sense now of Mose’s intent—frank concern about
Real Time
and Mose Media stock, or just idle fuck-the-Wall-Street-pissants small talk in his Ted Turner manqué mode?
“Ah, well,” Mose replies, “George just has to make a hit and show the little bastards. I won’t take any more of your time. You have your company to run.”
In fact, she has a company to
sell
. Thanks again, my pleasure, great, see you, absolutely, stay in touch, bye. She starts to dial her father in the hospital, but that’s a conversation she doesn’t want to conduct in a semi-shout aboard an airplane. (I
know they just medicated you, Daddy, but I can’t hear you! Your ass feels like what?
) Seattle is two hours away, and she hasn’t looked at the pages and pages of financials Lance has prepared. The Newtish man next to her has just awakened with a noisy apneic snort, and returned to his computerized spreadsheet and empty yellow list of underlined “PURPOSES?” It’s not business class, she thinks, settling in with her own columns and rows of numbers, it’s study hall.
Lizzie stares at her numbers but cannot engage. She is too anxious. She is anxious about the prospect of selling half her company and selling it for $31.5 million and selling it to Microsoft. She is anxious on George’s behalf over what Mose said about the Wall Street reaction to
Real Time
. She is anxious about whether she should tell George or not. Even Mose’s “digital czarina” line has made her anxious, anxious that her trifling surge of interest is somehow disloyal to … her employees? Herself? But Mose wasn’t serious about the job, she decides. It was CEO auto-charm, Mose’s version of White House M&M’s with the presidential seal, a cheap bit of flirty praise that means next to nothing. Even though all well-executed flattery feels good, no matter how insincere, like a drug, or sex.
George is polite
with the MBC News producer, who wants exactly what George assumed she wants: exclusive TV access to the world’s first person to survive with a pig liver. “Your father-in-law is in
play
,” she says, sounding more terrified than terrifying, like the Wolfman just as the full moon comes over the horizon.
I am a journalist, and I am driven by forces beyond my control!
Her line would make Lizzie hang up immediately. But driving across the Verrazano Narrows one-handed, speaking into the microphone Velcroed to the roof of the car, he cannot easily hang up. Plus, he knows what she means. So he doesn’t get snippy, or tell her that
Dateline NBC
and
20/20
are both after Mike, with the implicit “fuck off, you loser” disparagement of MBC News. He doesn’t tell the lie he advised Lizzie to tell the reporter from
Time
, about how Mike’s condition is too precarious for interviews. He tells the truth, that the family doesn’t want any attention. But then he feels bad for the woman, who is desperately wheedling and pleading (just like George used to wheedle and plead with sources and subjects, despising every second of it), and promises her the TV exclusive if they decide to talk to the press. It is some kind of atavistic professional courtesy. It is also, he knows, a thrown bone that might prevent her from
telling her executive producer that George is stiffing his own network, which might prevent the executive producer from complaining to Barry Stengel, with whom George does not need another drop of bad blood before
Real Time
gets going. In other words, he’s trading Mike Zimbalist’s dignity for some hypothetical leverage on behalf of the new show. Or more like a hypothetical option on a small piece of Mike’s dignity, a dignity derivative.
Exactly as Mike himself would do
, George tells himself, and then bats the thought away as he pulls the red Land Cruiser up to the yellow
POLICE LINE
tape that real police from the department’s movie and TV unit have strung up to cordon off the fake police and make-believe federal agents in the nonexistent squad that George has invented for
NARCS
.
There are only two autograph scroungers today, both middle-aged men in ratty coats with many zippers, paparazzi without portfolio (or cameras). There is the usual ad hoc crowd of civilian bystanders, but small because the location is way out in Great Kills, which is one of the reasons the location is here. They can get by with fewer production assistants. Two teenagers in extra-huge cargo pants and extra-extra-huge T-shirts, both chewing gum and one feeding her baby daughter granola and bits of celery; a thin, plain woman in a wide-brimmed Gibson girl hat and lace-up boots, displaced Manhattanite or strenuously Manhattanesque; a pair of Hasidic men talking and gesturing with their lit cigarettes toward the Panaflex Platinum cameras; and a dozen dark, chunky neighborhood guys watching the dark, chunky Teamsters standing around doing nothing for forty-six dollars an hour on the other side of the yellow tape. Sometimes, to save money when they’re shooting a crime scene, the
NARCS
crew turns a camera around and shoots the crowd of New York pedestrians staring at makeup trailers and craft-services buffets, thus transforming them for a second or two of screen time into actors playing New York pedestrians staring over a police line at corpses and pallets of cocaine. (Whenever anyone questions some niggardly production decision, Emily Kalman says, “It’s the MBC, not NBC,” or simply, “MBC—M.”) Today’s bystanders, George thinks, wouldn’t cut it—too dressed, too art-directed, and the Hasids would look like some mysterious plot point.
Beyond the makeup RV and the wardrobe RV, he passes the day players’ RVs, each with taped-on paper signs indicating the designated
actor-occupants—
MIDDLE-CLASS BLACK GUY, SHY GUY, MULE/RETARD
, and
ORIENTAL SLUT
with
ORIENTAL
crossed out and
ASIAN
scribbled over it.
Outside Angela Janeway’s trailer, George sees Gordon Downey and Phoebe Reiss, his director and executive story editor. They are having a furious whispered conversation.
“Good morning,” George says. “Why aren’t we shooting? It’s quarter past nine. Whom do I punish?”
“Angela and Lucas both have ‘issues’ with the new pages,” Gordon tells him. “The end of the bust scene.” Lucas Winton is Angela Janeway’s costar. Their characters, Jennie O’Donnell and Horace “Cowboy” Quesada, are supposed to be mismatched teammates, the Queens-girl NYPD detective and the rich-boy DEA agent who, according to the show bible that George wrote a year ago, “love and loathe each other in equal measure.” The loathing scenes tend to be shot in one take.
“What’s Lucas’s problem? And why are we getting their notes this
morning?
” If the script changes at this point, and Angela or Lucas isn’t going to say some lines that are in the script, the first assistant director or the script supervisor will have to let all the camera people know, and the sound department, and the guy who swings and dips the boom microphone, and so on down the line.
Phoebe sighs. Gordon explains. Both are relieved that Daddy has come to make everything okay. “Lucas says ‘looking like a pussy’ isn’t going to get him film work or win him an Emmy. He wants Cowboy
standing
during that final speech, not sitting on the ground with Angela standing over him. I say fine. Let’s get to work.”
“He also objects,” Phoebe says, “to Jennie winning the argument by ignoring him,
and
getting the button. And Lucas wants to call the smuggler ‘the screwy slant-eye’ instead of ‘the screwy Asian kid.’ ”
Angela, Jennie, Lucas, Horace, Cowboy—five names for two people used interchangeably by everyone all day long. Sometimes George thinks this is the biggest difference between producing news and entertainment: in the former, the talent always play themselves, Ted Koppel is always called Ted Koppel. Not that the difference is absolute—Jerry Seinfeld played Jerry Seinfeld, and Jess Burnham has been
Jess
Burnham only a little more than a year.
“Oh, Mr. Man can stand up, I guess,” George says. “But the line is the line.” He pauses and says softly, “
Film
work?”
“On the lines,” Gordon says. “I think his note was really a reaction to
her
note.” On “her,” Gordon nods hard right, toward Angela’s trailer.
“What’s her problem?” George asks Phoebe.
“The
Hawaii Five-O
joke.”
“She doesn’t get it?”
“She thinks it’s racist.”
Phoebe shrugs as George stares at her and then Gordon for an appalled, uncomprehending moment. He breathes through his nose, in and out fully, the way his wife tells him to do. He thinks of his $16,575 a week. “Gordon,” he says, “can you go shoot the Hawaiians getting whacked
now
, so we don’t get any further behind? Thanks.” He knocks on the RV door. He thinks of Lizzie’s line about the truth of clichés. The richest child he knows
is
a brat who behaves like a ghastly little adult, his star
is
a capricious diva who considers herself the Simone de Beauvoir of show business (even though she’s under the impression that Simone de Beauvoir was Jacqueline Onassis’s mother as well as Jean-Paul Sartre’s lover).
Her hair is being combed and twisted and teased.
“George,”
she says, glancing back and forth between their reflections as he sits down beside her. On the wall behind them, also reflected in the mirror, are the posters for her best-known feature films from the eighties—
Killer
and
Killer Again
. “Thank you.”
He smiles. “You’re welcome, Angela.” Then, “Well, I guess that settles that. I’m glad we had this chance to talk things through.”
“Don’t tease. Everything is not a joke, George. But I want you to know I appreciate your collegiality.” She pronounces it “college-ality”; because he’s wearing a tweed jacket over a cardigan and carrying a spiral notebook, George thinks for an instant, maybe
college-ality
is what she means. “I just don’t think I can do it. I can’t …” As she searches for
le mot juste
, her chin jabs toward the script sitting beneath the platter of sun-dried boysenberries on the counter. (A steady dressing-room supply of sun-dried boysenberries is one of Angela’s contractual requirements, along with a production assistant to take care of Peacemaker, whom she likes to bring to the set.) “I cannot
… validate
Lucas’s racist remark. Do you know? Mary Ann,” she says to the stylist calmly, “I can still see that same fucking piece of frizz by my left ear.”
“He’s not going to say ‘slant-eye.’ ”
“No, the other one. In the script.”
George knows what she’s talking about. As the scene ends, two pot smugglers from Maui are on the floor, apprehended and bleeding. Cowboy Quesada has a speech that ends with the line, “And your little creep here isn’t the gook we want.” Jennie O’Donnell, Angela’s character, is supposed to ignore Cowboy and say to her black sergeant before she walks off-camera, “Book ’em Dan-o.” That’s the button of the scene, and the end of the act.
“I don’t think you’re validating anything with that line,” George says. “Except that Lucas is sort of a pussy and a dope.” George momentarily worries: is one not supposed to use “pussy” in this sense? “Cowboy, I mean.”
“But the
Hawaii Five-O
reference, it’s just so—it’s Jennie saying, ‘These suspects are Pacific Islanders and so I’m going to make a wisecrack referencing their race.’ It’s just bad form.” Although Angela Janeway grew up in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and on
NARCS
plays a character who grew up in Middle Village, Queens, her off-camera speaking manner is from some imaginary place out over the Atlantic due east of New Haven, where classy Americans still have nearly British accents. The verbs she favors
—validate, referencing, empower—
save her from being a straight Hepburn impersonator, the same way that in brand-new old-looking houses the skylights and cathedral ceilings and giant TV screens remind you that it isn’t
really
1903. “I wouldn’t go there, George. I never even watched that show. That isn’t me. That just isn’t Jennie.”
“That just isn’t Jennie” or “Cowboy wouldn’t do that” are the euphemisms actors and producers and directors and writers use instead of “I hate the line you wrote” or “Your acting is phony.” It’s a white-lie etiquette code meant to spare feelings, but not because show business is humane: candor would provoke arguments and name calling, which sends people stomping off sets, which delays shooting schedules, which results in overtime, which is expensive, which is impermissible, particularly in television, and particularly at MBC.