Smoke and Mirrors (13 page)

“He wrote that down? That’s not this film.”

She nodded. “Now, I have to say that some of your treatment

is kind of . . .
contentious.
The Manson thing . . .well, we’re not sure it’s going to fly. Could we take him out?”

“But that’s the whole point of the thing. I mean, the book is called
Sons of Man;
it’s about Manson’s children. If you take him out, you don’t have very much, do you? I mean, this is the book you bought.” I held it up for her to see: my talisman. “Throwing out Manson is like, I don’t know, it’s like ordering a pizza and then complaining when it arrives because it’s flat, round, and covered in tomato sauce and cheese.”

She gave no indication of having heard anything I had said. She asked, “What do you think about
When We Were Badd
as a title? Two
d
’s in Badd.”

“I don’t know. For this?”

“We don’t want people to think that it’s religious.
Sons of Man.
It sounds like it might be kind of anti-Christian.”

“Well, I do kind of imply that the power that possesses the Manson children is in some way a kind of demonic power.”

“You do?”

“In the book.”

She managed a pitying look, of the kind that only people who know that books are, at best, properties on which films can be loosely based, can bestow on the rest of us.

“Well, I don’t think the studio would see that as appropriate,” she said.

“Do you know who June Lincoln was?” I asked her.

She shook her head.

“David Gambol? Jacob Klein?”

She shook her head once more, a little impatiently. Then she gave me a typed list of things she felt needed fixing, which amounted to pretty much everything. The list was
TO
: me and a number of other people, whose names I didn’t recognize, and it was
FROM
: Donna Leary.

I said Thank you, Donna, and went back to the hotel.

I was gloomy for a day. And then I thought of a way to redo the treatment that would, I thought, deal with all of Donna’s list of complaints.

Another day’s thinking, a few days’ writing, and I faxed the third treatment off to the studio.

Pious Dundas brought his scrapbook over for me to look at, once he felt certain that I was genuinely interested in June Lincoln—named, I discovered, after the month and the President, born Ruth Baumgarten in 1903. It was a leatherbound old scrapbook, the size and weight of a family Bible.

She was twenty-four when she died.

“I wish you could’ve seen her,” said Pious Dundas. “I wish some of her films had survived. She was so big. She was the greatest star of all of them.”

“Was she a good actress?”

He shook his head decisively. “Nope.”

“Was she a great beauty? If she was, I just don’t see it.”

He shook his head again. “The camera liked her, that’s for sure. But that wasn’t it. Back row of the chorus had a dozen girls prettier’n her.”

“Then what was it?”

“She was a star.” He shrugged. “That’s what it means to be a star.”

I turned the pages: cuttings, reviewing films I’d never heard of—films for which the only negatives and prints had long ago been lost, mislaid, or destroyed by the fire department, nitrate negatives being a notorious fire hazard; other cuttings from film magazines: June Lincoln at play, June Lincoln at rest, June Lincoln on the set of
The Pawnbroker’s Shirt,
June Lincoln wearing a huge fur coat—which somehow dated the photograph more than the strange bobbed hair or the ubiquitous cigarettes.

“Did you love her?”

He shook his head. “Not like you would love a woman . . .” he said.

There was a pause. He reached down and turned the pages.

“And my wife would have killed me if she’d heard me say this . . .”

Another pause.

“But yeah. Skinny dead white woman. I suppose I loved her.” He closed the book.

“But she’s not dead to you, is she?”

He shook his head. Then he went away. But he left me the book to look at.

The secret of the illusion of “The Artist’s Dream” was this: It was done by carrying the girl in, holding tight on to the back of the canvas. The canvas was supported by hidden wires, so, while the artist casually, easily, carried in the canvas and placed it on the easel, he was also carrying in the girl. The painting of the girl on the easel was arranged like a roller blind, and it rolled up or down.

“The Enchanted Casement,” on the other hand, was, literally, done with mirrors: an angled mirror which reflected the faces of people standing out of sight in the wings.

Even today many magicians use mirrors in their acts to make you think you are seeing something you are not.

It was easy, when you knew how it was done.

“Before we start,” he said, “I should tell you I don’t read treatments. I tend to feel it inhibits my creativity. Don’t worry, I had a secretary do a précis, so I’m up to speed.”

He had a beard and long hair and looked a little like Jesus, although I doubted that Jesus had such perfect teeth. He was, it appeared, the most important person I’d spoken to so far. His name was John Ray, and even I had heard of him, although I was not entirely sure what he did: his name tended to appear at the beginning of films, next to words like
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
. The voice from the studio that had set up the meeting told me that they, the studio, were most excited about the fact that he had ‘ attached himself to the project.’

“Doesn’t the précis inhibit your creativity, too?”

He grinned. “Now, we all think you’ve done an amazing job. Quite stunning. There are just a few things that we have a problem with.”

“Such as?”

“Well, the Manson thing. And the idea about these kids growing up. So we’ve been tossing around a few scenarios in the office: try this for size. There’s a guy called, say, Jack Badd—two
d
’s, that was Donna’s idea—” Donna bowed her head modestly.

“They put him away for satanic abuse, fried him in the chair, and as he dies he swears he’ll come back and destroy them all.

“Now, it’s today, and we see these young boys getting hooked on a video arcade game called
Be Badd.
His face on it. And as they play the game he like, starts to possess them. Maybe there could be something strange about his face, a Jason or Freddy thing.” He stopped, as if he were seeking approval.

So I said, “So who’s making these video games?”

He pointed a finger at me and said, “You’re the writer, sweetheart. You want us to do all your work for you?”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say.

Think movies,
I thought.
They understand movies.
I said, “But surely, what you’re proposing is like doing
The Boys from Brazil
without Hitler.” He looked puzzled.

“It was a film by Ira Levin,” I said. No flicker of recognition in his eyes.
“Rosemary’s Baby.”
He continued to look blank.
“Sliver.”

He nodded; somewhere a penny had dropped. “Point taken,” he said. “You write the Sharon Stone part, we’ll move heaven and earth to get her for you. I have an in to her people.”

So I went out.

That night it was cold, and it shouldn’t have been cold in L.A., and the air smelled more of cough drops than ever.

An old girlfriend lived in the L.A. area and I resolved to get hold of her. I phoned the number I had for her and began a quest that took most of the rest of the evening. People gave me numbers, and I rang them, and other people gave me numbers, and I rang them, too.

Eventually I phoned a number, and I recognized her voice.

“Do you know where I am?” she said.

“No,” I said. “I was given this number.”

“This is a hospital room,” she said. “My mother’s. She had a brain hemorrhage.”

“I’m sorry. Is she all right?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry.”

There was an awkward silence.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Pretty bad,” I said.

I told her everything that had happened to me so far. I told her how I felt.

“Why is it like this?” I asked her.

“Because they’re scared.”

“Why are they scared? What are they scared of?”

“Because you’re only as good as the last hits you can attach your name to.”

“Huh?”

“If you say yes to something, the studio may make a film, and it will cost twenty or thirty million dollars, and if it’s a failure, you will have your name attached to it and will lose status. If you say no, you don’t risk losing status.”

“Really?”

“Kind of.”

“How do you know so much about all this? You’re a musician, you’re not in films.”

She laughed wearily: “I live out here. Everybody who lives out here knows this stuff. Have you tried asking people about their screenplays?”

“No.”

“Try it sometime. Ask anyone. The guy in the gas station. Anyone. They’ve all got them.” Then someone said something to her, and she said something back, and she said, “Look, I’ve got to go,” and she put down the phone.

I couldn’t find the heater, if the room had a heater, and I was freezing in my little chalet room, like the one Belushi died in, same uninspired framed print on the wall, I had no doubt, same chilly dampness in the air.

I ran a hot bath to warm myself up, but I was even chillier when I got out.

White goldfish sliding to and fro in the water, dodging and darting through the lily pads. One of the goldfish had a crimson mark on its back that might, conceivably, have been perfectly lip-shaped: the miraculous stigmata of an almost-forgotten goddess. The gray early-morning sky was reflected in the pool.

I stared at it gloomily.

“You okay?”

I turned. Pious Dundas was standing next to me.

“You’re up early.”

“I slept badly. Too cold.”

“You should have called the front desk. They’d’ve sent you down a heater and extra blankets.”

“It never occurred to me.”

His breathing sounded awkward, labored.

“You okay?”

“Heck no. I’m old. You get to my age, boy, you won’t be okay either. But I’ll be here when you’ve gone. How’s work going?”

“I don’t know. I’ve stopped working on the treatment, and I’m stuck on ‘The Artist’s Dream’—this story I’m doing about Victorian stage magic. It’s set in an English seaside resort in the rain. With the magician performing magic on the stage, which somehow changes the audience. It touches their hearts.”

He nodded, slowly. “ ‘The Artist’s Dream’ . . . ” he said. “So. You see yourself as the artist or the magician?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I’m either of them.”

I turned to go and then something occurred to me.

“Mister Dundas,” I said. “Have you got a screenplay? One you wrote?” He shook his head.

“You
never
wrote a screenplay?”

“Not me,” he said.

“Promise?”

He grinned. “I promise,” he said.

I went back to my room. I thumbed through my U.K. hardback of
Sons of Man
and wondered that anything so clumsily written had even been published, wondered why Hollywood had bought it in the first place, why they didn’t want it, now that they had bought it.

I tried to write “The Artist’s Dream” some more, and failed miserably. The characters were frozen. They seemed unable to breathe, or move, or talk.

I went into the toilet, pissed a vivid yellow stream against the porcelain. A cockroach ran across the silver of the mirror.

I went back into the sitting room, opened a new document, and wrote:

I’m thinking about England in the rain,

a strange theatre on the pier: a trail

of fear and magic, memory and pain.

The fear should be of going bleak insane,

the magic should be like a fairytale.

I’m thinking about England in the rain.

The loneliness is harder to explain—

an empty place inside me where I fail,

of fear and magic, memory and pain.

I think of a magician and a skein

of truth disguised as lies. You wear a veil.

I’m thinking about England in the rain . . .

The shapes repeat like some bizarre refrain

and here’s a sword, a hand, and there’s a grail

of fear and magic, memory and pain.

The wizard waves his wand and we turn pale,

tells us sad truths, but all to no avail.

I’m thinking about England, in the rain

of fear and magic, memory and pain.

I didn’t know if it was any good or not, but that didn’t matter. I had written something new and fresh I hadn’t written before, and it felt wonderful.

I ordered breakfast from room service and requested a heater and a couple of extra blankets.

The next day I wrote a six-page treatment for a film called
When We Were Badd,
in which Jack Badd, a serial killer with a huge cross carved into his forehead, was killed in the electric chair and came back in a video game and took over four young men. The fifth young man defeated Badd by burning the original electric chair, which was now on display, I decided, in the wax museum where the fifth young man’s girlfriend worked during the day. By night she was an exotic dancer.

The hotel desk faxed it off to the studio, and I went to bed.

I went to sleep, hoping that the studio would formally reject it and that I could go home.

In the theater of my dreams, a man with a beard and a baseball cap carried on a movie screen, and then he walked off-stage. The silver screen hung in the air, unsupported.

A flickery silent film began to play upon it: a woman who came out and stared down at me. It was June Lincoln who flickered on the screen, and it was June Lincoln who walked down from the screen and sat on the edge of my bed.

“Are you going to tell me not to give up?” I asked her.

On some level I knew it was a dream. I remember, dimly, understanding why this woman was a star, remember regretting that none of her films had survived.

She was indeed beautiful in my dream, despite the livid mark which went all the way around her neck.