American Dream Machine (13 page)

Failure had made Bryce reckless. He hadn’t worked at all in nearly a year. Now he lolled contemptuously, having kicked off his shoes to show bare, bunioned feet. He wore running shorts and a sweat-soaked Fighting Illini T-shirt.

“How am I supposed to help you fellas?” Jeremy laced his hands behind his head. “Seriously.”

Beneath that boxy, almost Lincolnian beard lived an interesting man. His blue stare was dully attentive, the look of someone who invested too much time in the brackish, illogical process of studio filmmaking.

Beau stood up. Like an orator without an argument. “You can make this fucking movie, Jeremy.”

“No can do.” He’d worked with Beau before and so was equal to the usual tactics, wasn’t about to be snookered by that gentle badgering that was like being cuffed, relentlessly, with damp towels.

“Why not?”

Jeremy sighed. There were so many reasons. This studio had teetered on the lip of bankruptcy a year ago, and a picture like this wasn’t going to help. They’d been here before, and Jeremy was about to resort to chucking them out of his office once more.

“What’s that?” Bryce leapt up. Yippy and irrational, so like his onscreen persona, he pointed and stalked toward Vana. “Whaddya got on your face, Jer?”

Jeremy had pushed up out of his chair but now froze. “Huh?”

“There.” Bryce approached. “Right”—he jabbed just below Vana’s left eye—“there.”

Jeremy flinched. “That’s just my freckle.”

“No sir.” Bryce shook his head. “Too big. That’s a melanoma, my friend.”

“A melawhich?”

“A melanoma. That Coppertone’s no good for you. You need a dermatologist.”

A dermatologist! Bryce was into some weird shit, but at least he now bothered to wear clothes once in a while. The mark was black as a fly, just above the cheekbone. It mightn’t have been noticed by anyone who wasn’t accustomed to hunting for such things.

“Tell you what. You get that checked out and it’s nothing, we’ll never set foot in here again.”

“And if it isn’t?”

“You’ll push this movie,” Bryce said. “Whether it shit-cans you or not.”

Jeremy laid his hand on that old-fashioned globe. He spun it. On the coffee table beside it were a backgammon board and two sweating glasses of iced tea. On the walls were one-sheets for
The Way We Were
,
I Never Sang for My Father, 1776
. Through the window, beyond
Jeremy’s desk, they could see where an elaborate castle had been built for
Lost Horizon
.

“All right.” Mortality trumped common sense. “All right.”

Beau had been through enough. It was late 1973, and if he didn’t get this movie made soon he’d go back to New York. Or wade into the Pacific. Severin and Kate were five. He’d given up being a part of the best and most innocent years of their lives to chase these meaningless hopes and fugitive elations. He could feel the helplessness rising in his chest, the desperate knowledge that he could only, once more, be disappointed.

“Jeremy,” he said, “I love you. But I hope you’re fucking dying.”

PRODUCTION BEGAN THE
following spring.
The Dog’s Tail
would shoot in New Mexico and a few days in Georgia, for the modest budget of $850,000. Davis and Bryce were the two brothers, and Udo Kier, of all people, was their mute pursuer. For a brief, delirious instant John Schlesinger had agreed to direct it, but left to do
The Day of the Locust
instead. The director they had ended up with was a relative unknown, a young German named Morrison Groom. Mitchell Gibson was on the set, and Davis’s girlfriend, and Beau. Everyone’s expectations were low. They waded into the desert with too much script and too little story and a director whose experience amounted to a few episodes of
Laugh-In
and a documentary feature on Aboriginal songlines, with all the audience that implies. The weight of the movie, such as it was, sat on Davis’s shoulders. Jeremy Vana climbed the steps of the star’s Airstream trailer, the only one on the set.

“What the fuck is going on here?”

He squinted into the trailer’s humid darkness. The windows were all taped up and the shades drawn. There were dim intimations of nudity, the smell of enclosed human sweat.

“Shut the door, Jer.”

“Why in God’s name?” It took him this long to see they were only meditating, the actors and Davis’s eighteen-year-old girlfriend, who was also in the film. “Why are you just sitting here in your trailer?”

“Shhh.” Bryce spoke. “Throw that cigarette away.”

“Where’s Morrison?” They were all shirtless. Even the girl, Li, who had a child’s bony shoulders, her profile pert and pubescent-looking in the dark.

“How should we know? Cocksucker’s crazy.”

“He doesn’t speak much English,” Davis murmured.

“Your director
abandoned
you?”

“I wouldn’t say abandoned. He’ll be back.”

“Where’s Beau?” As he stooped in the doorway, Jeremy’s eyes adjusted until he could see Li’s face. She was Asian? Indian? In any case she was perfect, with skin so smooth it seemed like igneous rock, giving off neither heat nor moisture.

“He’s with Mo,” she said. “Both of them just went into town for groceries.”

Mitchell squatted in the dirt outside. Supposedly “working on the script.” Vana might as well have trusted a monkey with a typewriter, since all he ever seemed to do was write things up and then throw them away, barely stopping to read anything between. Fuck all these people. Jeremy turned. Li stuck out her tongue at his retreating back.

“We saved your life, Jerry! Never forget it!” Bryce called.

A spring-weight gray jacket was slung over his hand; he clutched a briefcase. He looked like a disappointed salesman. His tie dangled, fat as a parched animal’s tongue. “It was fucking benign.”

He left them alone after that. What was to be said? In the rocking calm, the roaring quiet of the desert, he’d let them sink their careers. And his, if need be.

“I got it!”

Beau sat up. He’d kidnapped the writer in hopes of forcing a little “inspiration,” and here it was the eve of the scheduled first day of shooting. They were bunking at a wan motel in Flagstaff, Arizona—the
L
on the neon sign was out, delighting Mitchell to no end—and it was three o’clock in the morning. “What is it?”

A tap dripped. Beau’s yellow bedspread was psychedelic Dacron hell. A wrecked crate of champagne, a congratulatory gift from Williams, lay underneath the writer’s table. Mitchell sat by the window, gazing out at the buzzing pink sign.

“Come look.” In front of him were an Olivetti and a bottle of Kahlúa. An array of index cards fanned across the table. “Just look at this.”

Beau came over, in his underwear. A week was enough to grow used to Mitchell’s midnight fancies. The writer was skinny and blond, with long hair and round glasses. He looked like a distaff John Lennon, feminized by twittering mannerisms.

“What if Udo steps up his pursuit at the beginning?”

“Huh?”

“We turn it around in the middle here. Look.” Not gay, sexless. Mitchell was a strange cat. He pointed limply at one of the cards. “What if they meet Udo there, instead of where we had it? We’ll put that other sequence up front.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It would. It could. If. If—”

He had these incredibly long fingers, which he used now to shuffle the cards into an unfamiliar order. There were fifty-six of them, whittled down from ninety-four.

“See? See, Beau?” His voice was high and excitable. “If we do that, Udo suddenly has motive.”

“Because the boys have kidnapped his sister.”

“Right. Right!”

April ’74. It had taken them two years to figure this out, and at 4:00
AM
in this misbegotten motel opposite a Texaco station Mitchell began to type like a fiend. Beau stood beside him. He’d grown a beard, taken to smoking a pipe. He looked like a hobbit. Mitchell wore a white kurta with an embroidered neckline, bell-bottoms, and sandals. Their problems had no solutions, even if the movie cohered. Beau’s hole of debt was so deep his fee could only allow him to break even. He went to the kitchenette and kissed the two pictures taped to the freezer’s pebbly door.

“Ha!” Mitchell barked, keys rattling. “Fagstaff! Falstaff!”

Was it a sin to love the girl child better? Both Kate and Sev would be six in April. “You finally figured it out, huh Mitchell? Why not two years ago!”

A cockroach hurried across the floor by Beau’s feet, monstrous, blurry. He’d last seen the kids three months ago, at a hearing held to reestablish his partial custody. Rachel had looked drawn and
exhausted. Something was going on with her. She’d dropped a bunch of her clients, stopped returning his calls, was mute when Beau harassed her in the hall.
Why are you doing this, Rach? Why?

Nothing would ever put things right.

“And—action!”

These words always sounded tinnier to Beau than expected, the clapper barely louder than a clipped fingernail. That they initiated his movie meant nothing. The studio paid him, as they were obligated to do upon commencement of principal photography. Beau stood with his hands in his pockets and watched. He wore an ascot and no shirt, mirrored sunglasses. Indeed, Beau Rosenwald had gotten weird. Udo Kier stood beside him, not needed for this scene in which the boys pulled up in their
GTO
. The first shot was a long view of the highway while the car, no bigger than a distant bird at first, arrived at last at a gas station that was the film’s only “set.” The brothers’ names were Hector (Beller) and Hal (Davis). Li staffed the station’s diner. She played the disputed sister, originally the boys’ but now, according to Mitchell’s rewrite, Udo’s, a dusky sphinx whose silence mirrored that of the desert. The inside of the diner, which had been built in the gas station’s former garage, looked like a Western saloon, its apparatuses all dating back to the end of the last century.

Beau watched. Beside him Udo sucked in his breath. Even when he wasn’t playing a vampire he resembled one, with his puffy
cheeks and pouty lips. His looming presence intimidated everyone on the set.

On it went. Mitchell’s script was fathomless, yet apart from the shuddersome beginning and the end, not much happened. Morrison wanted to shoot the thing chronologically and then reshuffle the deck again—and again—in the editing room. He talked about releasing radically different cuts.

“That girl, she is ruining everything.” Udo folded his arms across his chest. His
S
’s and digraphs hissed,
G
’s clinked like a true German’s. “Beau—”

“Shh.” The producer lifted his hand. Li walked out of the diner, dressed in her denim short shorts and gingham shirt. “We’ve waited for this long enough, Udo. Let’s not screw it up ourselves.”

Principal photography was done before Memorial Day. They shot altogether too much, as Morrison’s melancholy Teutonic style met Mitchell’s overlong script. The director called it an “Existential Road Western.” Inside the movie’s diner/saloon, people wore pocket watches and talked with rugged civility. It was Western like
Heaven’s Gate
would be, not like Peckinpah. Outside, the gas station itself was a platform for violence. The two worlds didn’t overlap. The rest of the material consisted of footage shot on the highway, and was mostly speed, solitude, pebble-kicking, and wind. Davis pissing against a cactus in silhouette. You could see his cock. Years later, Severin and I would watch it and find the film not transgressive but inscrutable. Too thoughtful to be awful, too drab to be anything else.

In June, Morrison Groom returned to Los Angeles and began his own process of assembling the rushes. So few people had been involved in the film’s making, and fewer still had seen even a frame. From dailies, Beau could determine nearly nothing. Davis and Bryce had chemistry; there was that. The psychopath (Davis) comforted the shy brother (Bryce), which was another of Mitchell’s sly reversals: that Davis played the killer instead of Bryce was a stroke of the unexpected. But what would happen was anybody’s guess. The director took up residence in a post house in the Valley, a brown building on Ventura Boulevard that looked like a fifties apartment complex. It was half a mile from the Burbank gates and fully worlds away. Peter Konrad, Morrison’s editor, was there too. Beau spent his afternoons on the couch, catnapping, and his evenings scrubbing his eye sockets with his fists while Morrison and Peter examined take after take after nearly identical take. Occasionally Beau would venture forth to give an ignored opinion, or would stagger across the wide, hissing stream of Ventura Boulevard to eat steak in an ancient chophouse. The two rooms were equally dark, the restaurant and the editing booth, and the one was distinguished by decrepit waitresses and shitty food while the other was lit by Udo Kier repeating, in variant Teutonic ways, the film’s climactic line:
Not this head! This is the wrong fucking head!
After which the frame would appear to burn through and Morrison hoped to create a Möbius loop with sound, the word blurring with Bryce’s pronouncement of the same during the first scene. Beau was tired. Sitting inside the Coach House with his martini, or in the editing booth, which was the only one occupied of the facility’s three, he wasn’t sure what kind of movie he’d made: good, bad, or—
and
, he supposed—indifferent, since it could’ve been all of these at once.