From atop his hill, the television writer watched the bilious Paramount parade: Orca, the Killer Whale; Bad News Bears Go to Japan; Players; The One and Only; Little Darlings; Going Ape!; Some Kind of Hero. No wonder they’d been too busy to respond! It was like the marathon dance in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? — yet the band played on. He was rankled in some deep, unapproachable place. When his wife delicately suggested he might “talk to someone,” Severin reacted so harshly that Diantha half thought he’d try fingering her as a Paramount spy.
Then one day in nineteen eighty-one, a Morris secretary called to say “there was movement.” In measured tones, cryptic and grave, she told him Charles G. Bluhdorn himself was in possession of Souls. “Mr. Bluhdorn wished to give the script his personal attention,” her words went. A senior agent at Morris who dealt exclusively with the chairman would be calling Severin with a follow-up. In the excitement, he didn’t write down the name. He waited by the phone until six, finally calling Dee’s office. No one was in. After a fitful night, he left messages with the switchboard “regarding Charlie Bluhdorn.” He was on his way down to the agency when Dee Bruchner called back. It had been a few months since they spoke; work had been drying up.
“Severin, what the hell is going on?”
“I want to know what’s happening with Bluhdorn.”
“I don’t have time for this crazy shit!”
“Someone called from the agency—”
“Nothing’s fucking happening with Bluhdorn! Okay? Why don’t you go see a fucking shrink, Severin? All right? How many years have we been doing this?”
“A secretary called, from the agency,” said the client, undeterred. “She said Charlie Bluhdorn was reading my script.”
That night, Dee phoned from La Scala. He sounded drunk and vaguely repentant. The whole thing was a practical joke, he said. When Severin asked what he meant, Dee said, “It must have been a joke.” He reiterated his desire for Severin to seek medical help. “You really should,” he said. “For Diantha. It’s not fair to put her through this. You know, people love you, they really do. They really care.” What the hell was he talking about? In the morning, the disbeliever reached Bluhdorn’s office in New York but was rebuffed. He kept calling, and when Dee found out, he sent a telegram saying the agency no longer represented him and that Severin Welch should “cease and desist” contact or run the risk of becoming a “nuisance.”
Came a gentle temblor in his head, a shifting of plates, and so it was decreed: the matter would be resolved by the definitive telephonic intervention of that high-flying commander, that Mike Todd of ceos, Charles G. Bluhdorn, whose imminent call was not open to conjecture. Severin withheld this magical revelation from world and wife; he wanted to live with it a spell, try it on for size, test its sea-legs. Fear of missing the Call soon tethered him to the house. He might have laughed about such an arrangement — how could he have not, particularly after Bluhdorn’s subsequent death? — but there it was, unreal yet present as the HOLLYWOOD sign. The occasional women’s magazine had been perused, Redbook and Reader’s Digest, but these were the pioneer years of phobic disorder: no clubby Internet or national network of like confederates, mystically moored by zip code demarcation and sundry voodoo Maginot lines. Diantha indulged his epic call-waiting best she could. When she died, swept away by the flash flood of cerebral hemorrhage, Severin could not leave the front yard, so missed the procession. Lavinia poignantly misunderstood, thinking her father unhinged, which he was, though not entirely by grief.
That the Call didn’t come never disheartened, for its presentiment rang in his ears, an astral tintinnabulation like the warm, flirty scent of a holiday roast; Severin, wrapped in a comforter of acoustical yearning. Pink Dot delivered groceries and laundry, and daughter Lavinia picked up the slack — thus ensconced, the old fossil roamed the low-tech shagscape of his Beachwood Canyon home, listening to his precious scanner, reading aloud from Thurber and Wodehouse, Gogol and Graham Greene, anchored by his powerful Uniden cordless and the entropy of the years. Did he really expect a call from a dead man? No: after all, he wasn’t crazy.
There was a piece in the Times about John Calley that he’d read with great interest. The United Artists head had returned to the business after years of lying fallow and was now in the methodical process of sifting through studio archives — the idea being to discover old projects, then revise, update and order to production. They had stuff going all the way back to Faulkner and Fitzgerald.
“It’s very much of an archeological expedition,” says Creative Artists Agency’s Jon Levin, who has researched everything from old production logs to the memoirs of Hollywood legends. “There are only so many movies that were made every year, and a number of more scripts that were developed. So chances are there are good [unproduced] works.”
It went on to say that because of rights issues and liability concerns, boxes of unproduced scripts — some of which had been donated to the AMPAS Margaret Herrick Library — now resided at a remote storage facility for “things that are not supposed to be seen…a no-man’s land.” Severin Welch’s Dead Souls had to be out there somewhere, waiting. If you write it, they will come! And when they did (perhaps Bluhdorn progeny, that would be a nice, a fine irony), Severin would have a surprise: the work of the last five years, gratis. For the busy shut-in had been revising all along, retrofitting for these hard, fast times. The money boys would like that — it would save the expense of hiring a pricey rewrite man. Severin wasn’t too worried about ageism. Charles Bennett (the initials alone were auspicious) had sold a pitch right before he died. Bennett wrote for Hitchcock and had to have been in his nineties. No, the tide was turning. Everything old was new again.
He sat by the pool with the scanner, monitoring car phone transmissions. That was illegal now, but Severin had no fear. He used it as a tool, plucking characters from the vapor, finessing dialogue, shoring up unsafe sections of his work. Writers were mercenary — had to use whatever they could. Originally, the old man’s presciently “virtual” adaptation of the Gogol book submitted Chichikov wandering an antiseptic city buying memories of the dead. Now, as if in sly homage to Mr. Bluhdorn, it would be voices the man coveted instead.
Voices on the phone.
Rachel Krohn
On the first night of Passover, Rachel had a dilemma. She was supposed to go with Tovah to an Orthodox seder but now the agent was in bed with a fever, insisting Rachel go alone.
“But three hundred people!”
“It’ll be easier. Less intimate.”
“Tovah, I won’t know anyone—”
“No one knows anyone, that’s the point. It’s skewed toward singles.”
“I haven’t been to a seder since I was a kid.”