Zeroville (6 page)

The actress answers, “I wouldn’t go out for coffee with you, that’s what.”

“Well,” says the actor, “what if I wasn’t going to ask you to go out with me?”

“Well, that’s what makes you stupid.”

On the other side of the set, the director calls for a cut. The woman next to Vikar rolls her eyes. “Still think it’s like
A Place in the Sun
?” she says to Vikar.

Vikar says, “You knew George Stevens.”

“He’s still with us, you know,” the woman says. “He’s not past-tense yet.” She puts out her cigarette on the arm of a stranded chair. “Saw him about eight months ago over at Fox, as a matter of fact, making another picture with Liz. Monty,” she says, “Monty’s not still with us, of course. It’s Warren in the new one. Liz will survive all her men,” then, thinking a moment, “except maybe Warren.” She reaches her hand out to Vikar. “Dotty Langer,” she says, and as they shake hands she reaches up and gently rubs Vikar’s bald head like the little old mother she appears to be, before walking off to a nearby trailer and closing the door.

For a week Vikar watches Dotty Langer go in and out of the trailer during and after each day’s shoot. The next time they talk, an exterior street scene which Vikar helped build is being shot with the same actor and actress. The actor has so little presence it seems to Vikar as though at any moment he’ll disappear into thin air. Vikar is more captivated by the actress, whose brown eyes remind him of a faun.

Dotty stands by the door of her trailer talking to a burly black-bearded man. In red bermuda shorts and an unbuttoned white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, he smokes a cigar; his Volkswagen bug is parked in the distance with a surfboard on top. When they finally walk over, Dotty says to Vikar, “
Place in the Sun
, meet
Red River
.”

“What do you say, vicar,” the bearded man laughs, sticking out his hand. Vikar has no idea why the man calls him this; he’s never been called it before. “Viking Man,” the bearded man introduces himself.

Dotty rolls her eyes. “The ‘Viking Man’ here is writing a Western for Huston over at Warners.”

“Quiet on the set!” someone yells.

“Quiet!” someone else yells. The set goes quiet. “Action,” calls the director.

“I forgot my key,” says the actress.

“Jenny,” answers the actor, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t. Love means never having—”

“Cut,” calls the director. He consults with the A.D. in the chair next to him, who consults with the script supervisor in the chair next to him. “You’re writing a movie for John Huston?” Vikar says to the black-bearded man.

“Ali,” the director says to the actress, “the line is ‘not ever.’”

“What?” says the actress.

“You said ‘never’. The line is ‘not ever.’ ‘Love means not ever.’ Let’s try it again.”

“Quiet on the set!”

Silence, then the cameras begin rolling again. “Jenny, I’m sorry,” the actor says.

“Don’t,” she answers, “love means never—”

“Cut.”

The actress glares down the street past her leading man. She becomes less bewitching to Vikar. “I don’t believe they’re very good,” he whispers with some concern to Dotty, who’s smoking again. Viking Man next to her smiles broadly at the spectacle. “Make-up!” calls the A.D.

“He’s a TV soap-opera star,” Dotty explains, “who got the part after five other actors turned it down. She’s a fashion model who’s sucking the new head of production’s cock until his eyes roll so far back in his head they would be looking at his brains if he had any.”

“Can we get make-up on Ryan?” the A.D. calls. After a couple of minutes, filming begins again. “I forgot my key,” says the actress.

“Jenny, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t. Love means never having—”

“Cut.”

“What the fuck’s it matter!” the actress explodes. “Who cares whether it’s ‘not ever’ or ‘never’! Doesn’t ‘never’ mean ‘not ever’? It’s a shit line anyway!”

Viking Man guffaws and people turn to look.

“I don’t even understand the fucking line!” says the actress. “Where’s Bob?” looking around.

“Bob’s the new head of production,” Dotty says to Vikar.

“I want to talk to Bob!” the actress demands.

“Bob needs to fuck this broad in the ass a few times,” Viking Man chortles loudly. Now everyone turns to look.

“John has a charming perspective,” Dotty tells Vikar. “He thinks Vietnam is a good idea, too.” She says to Viking Man, “Louder, John. I’m not sure Evans can hear you on the other side of the lot.”

“Too much cowgirl for this broad,” Viking Man announces merrily, “not enough ass-fucking to put her in her place.”

“Jesus,” Dotty moans, covering her face.

“Hey, what do I care?” Viking Man shrugs happily. “I don’t work for this dinosaur,” waving his cigar at the studio. “What junk.”

“Come on,” Dotty says to the two men, turning toward the trailer.

“Pork her one in that tight little Wellesley ass,” Viking Man advises the multitude. “She’ll get the line right.”

Inside the trailer Dotty turns to Viking Man and says, “Speaking of dinosaurs, I would like to keep this job. I don’t know how many more I’m going to have.” Behind her on a worktable is a moviola.

“God love you, Dot,” snorts Viking Man, “you’ll be here when the rest of us are long gone.”

“I worked on a Vincente Minnelli movie and an Otto Preminger movie,” Vikar says.

Dotty and the Viking regard him for a moment. “Minnelli’s a fairy,” Viking Man finally answers, “and Preminger is a Nazi.”

“I would think,” Dotty says, “that puts him right in your pantheon, John, but actually Preminger’s a Jew. Can you please go away now? Go shoot someone, as long as it’s not me or someone who might hire me in the foreseeable future.” She says to Vikar, “The man has an arsenal.”

“Not a Stevens man, myself,” Viking Man indicates the tattoo on Vikar’s head, “
Shane
’s, a little rarefied for me. Dot here can tell you about that one.”

“I didn’t work on
Shane
,” Dotty says. “They thought a woman wouldn’t know anything about a picture like that. I came back for
Giant
.”

“I’m more a Huston/Hawks/Ford/Walsh/Kurosawa man,” Viking Man continues.

“If the screen grew balls and a penis, that would be John’s idea of the ultimate cinematic experience,” says Dotty.

“But I appreciate the concept,” Viking Man says, still looking at Vikar’s head.

“He senses in you untapped reserves of psychosis. It makes him all moist.”

“Dot here will give you my number. Do you surf?”

“No,” says Vikar.

“I’ve got some friends who live out at the beach. Actors, writers, directors—God love them, they’re pinkos and hippies, but they’re O.K. They’ll dig the Liz/Monty trip,” pointing at the tattoo, “if it doesn’t freak them out.”

“Do they listen to horrible music all the time like everyone else in Hollywood?”

“A couple of the girls are into music,” Viking Man says at the trailer door, “but the guys pretty much live, breathe, eat and shit movies. See ya, Dot. So long, vicar.”

Dotty and Vikar look at each other after he leaves. “At least he cares about movies,” Vikar says.

“If he didn’t,” she says, “he’d be a whack job, all surfing and guns.”

“I tell people I’ve worked for Vincente Minnelli and Otto Preminger,” Vikar exclaims, “and nobody cares.”

“Well, listen.” Dot lights a cigarette and lowers herself slowly in a chair by the moviola. Next to the moviola is a Jack Daniels bottle. “You’ve got people your age just coming into the business who will be running Paramount in five years, along with Warners and Columbia and Fox and MGM—all of which will be owned by companies that have nothing to do with pictures—who have never heard of Minnelli or Preminger, or just might be erudite enough to think of Liza when you say her father’s name. Then you’ve got people like me who have been around long enough not to have much romance about any of it anymore and are just trying to find some cover because we have no idea what’s going on. Biker pictures are winning prizes at Cannes and pictures about cowboy hustlers in New York getting sucked off in the cheap seats are winning Oscars, so the execs upstairs who are old enough to be my grandfather—which means we’re talking Dawn of Man here—feel gripped by a kind of cultural dementia. When my mother was in her last years, in her mid-eighties, she would wake at four in the morning and look out the window and wonder why it was so dark at four in the afternoon. The reasoning process by which you realize it can’t be four in the afternoon but has to be four in the morning had broken down. That’s what’s going on with these gentlemen. Minnelli musicals about past lives or whatever that thing was? Here at this studio we’ve brought in a gigolo to head production and the best we have going for us outside that door is a trite romance with two no-talents who don’t know how to say their lines, and a second-rate Mob picture written by a hoodlum and an egomaniac practically just out of film school. And in these groovy times, who’s going to see those?”

Vikar says, “I’ve missed my chance.”

“Maybe you have,” says Dotty, “or maybe this is your chance and you’re not paying attention, or your chance hasn’t come yet and you should start getting ready for it. I’m not saying forget about Vincente and Otto—you obviously know enough about pictures to know you can still learn from those guys, which is more than the punk who made that biker picture will ever figure out. I’m just saying don’t expect those names to have the magic for most people they have for you. John’s crowd,” she nods at the trailer door where Viking Man just left, “will get it—writing this thing for Huston, he’s as gaga as you are in his own way—but nobody else will. What do you want to do in pictures? I assume not build sets for the rest of your life.”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, that’s different. Did you go to school?”

“I was an architect.”

“Really.” She says, “Maybe we can get you into production design.”

“You edited
A Place in the Sun
,” Vikar says, looking at the moviola behind her.

“I worked with Billy Hornbeck who edited it. We won the Academy Award. A few years ago they kicked Billy upstairs over at Universal where they’re about to give up altogether and concentrate on television. Now he’s one of those old men who can’t figure out why it’s dark at four in the afternoon.”

“I had a television,” Vikar says. “It was stolen.”

Dotty puffs her cigarette. “Did it exactly leave a gaping hole in your life?” Vikar coughs from the smoke; Dotty puts out the cigarette and waves the smoke in the air. “I have to go back out there now,” she says, “and face the music for letting John on the set. What an asshole.” She pulls from the editing table a scrap of paper and writes on it, then rises from the chair, suddenly seeming even older. She hands the scrap to Vikar. “I don’t always hang around a picture I’m cutting, there’s not really a need unless it’s a massive production on a tight schedule and we have to cut as we go along. But when I know making anything decent of it is going to be impossible, I get this crazy idea that being on the set and seeing dailies will give me some hint how to go about it. You would think I’d be disabused of that notion by now.” She nods at the phone number in Vikar’s hand. “You might give John a call. He
is
an interesting guy and knows some interesting people.”

At the Vista Theater, Vikar sees a black-and-white Japanese gangster movie about a contract killer hired by a mysterious woman to carry out a hit. As the gunman is about to dispatch his target, a butterfly lands on the barrel of the rifle and diverts his aim, resulting in the murder of an innocent bystander. It’s also the first movie Vikar has seen that shows people having sex. “We are beasts,” the woman moans in the Japanese movie. “Beast needs beast.” Vikar leaves the theater with the most unforgiving erection he’s ever had. He waits in the shadows of the lobby for sundown and catches a bus.

On the bus, the erection doesn’t go away. A pretty girl gets on a few stops after Vikar, and then at the next stop a Latino mother with a small child, and when the bus reaches Vikar’s stop and he still has the erection, he’s too embarrassed to rise from his seat, so he goes on riding …

… into the night—

—west on Hollywood Boulevard and then cutting down La Brea to Sunset, turning right. The mother and child get off and then the pretty girl, but Vikar continues on until he’s the only one on the bus and he can see the driver watching him in the rear-view mirror. By the time the bus reaches the Strip, Vikar’s erection is finally gone. The driver still stares at him in the rear-view mirror.

The bus winds past the Continental Hyatt where rock musicians throw pianos off the top floor, toward Tower Records and the Whisky-a-Go-Go. The Strip is a corridor of glimmering broadcasts from other times, each corner set on a different channel: intergalactic geisha houses and flophouse chateaux, Persian flying saucers and supersonic English Tudors. When Vikar departs the bus, the blue-deco Sunset Tower looms above him; he looks up at it awhile because he happens to know George Stevens lives there. Vikar crosses the street and waits until a bus arrives, heading east to take him back into Hollywood. When he gets on, it’s the same bus with the same driver.

It’s only after several attempts that Vikar gets an answer. “Oh yeah, the vicar!” the voice booms on the other end of the telephone. “George Stevens man! Never was a Stevens man. A bit of a pussy Western,
Shane
, if you don’t mind my saying so.” They plan to see a foreign movie about Algiers that Viking Man already has seen four times, but on the appointed day he doesn’t show.

Two weeks later, at a minute past six in the morning, almost eighteen months to the day since arriving in Los Angeles, Vikar is thrown from his bed by a terrific jolt. He believes a bomb has gone off. The bedroom bends to a new geometry; beyond the windows is the flashing of electrical wires collapsing. Vikar can hear in the kitchen a tremendous crash of dishes flying from their cupboards, and the light he leaves on in the kitchen at night, ever since the burglar broke in, goes out.