“So? That’s one out of two.”
“No it’s not. They were counting the divorces from all married couples, not just the ones who got married in 1987. Look, let’s say there are ten million married couples in those counties. One hundred thousand of them got married in 1987. Fifty thousand of them got divorced in 1987. Guess what? That’s fifty thousand out of ten million, not a hundred thousand. It was totally faulty reasoning, but the Christian group went all Chicken Little to the press anyway. Nobody ever stopped to question it.”
Miranda rolled over and eyed me in full skeptical journalist mode. “Scott, are you trying to tell me that the divorce rate is actually one half of one percent?”
“No. That’s just the same mistake reversed. My point is that you cant compare one year’s results to the whole pool. You have to take it year by year.”
“But in 1987 it was fifty percent.”
“In 1987 there were half as many divorces as there were weddings. In those counties.”
“But if that statistic matches up every year, then the divorce rate will still be fifty percent!”
“Yes, but that’s a very big if for such a small sample. Look at the stock market in 1987. One bad day turned it into a very abnormal year. Hell, if l only used this week as a sample, I could say that I have sex with a married woman at least once a week.”
She stared at me, stunned, and then turned the other way. I looked over her shoulder.
“Oh no. Did I upset you again?”
“I’m not upset,” she said. “I’m just… I’ll put it this way, Scott. You know just what to say to make a girl feel numb. Is it okay if I check my messages?”
She reached over me to use my phone, resting on top of my chest. I felt like apologizing, but I didn’t know why. I thought I was showing her respect by not subjecting her to any romantic clichés. I knew Miranda was strictly anti-sentiment. Then again, so was Gracie, until the day it suddenly occurred to her that if she stayed with me, she’d be numbed out of existence.
Later in the morning, outside the hotel, Miranda and I sat in awkward silence. She kissed me goodbye from the passenger seat. Not an eternal goodbye, of course, but it told me what I wanted to hear. The show was over. Brigadoon officially went back to being a grass field.
“You’re still an ass,” she said, getting out. “Get your car fixed.”
“Have fun exploiting the carnage.”
With a half-smile, she entered the hotel. It was 11:30. Over the past two days, I’d gotten a total of five hours sleep. And yet I felt fine. I was content.
________________
At 12:15, I reached Marina del Rey, where Ira greeted me from the dock of his floating home and sanctum. He looked like a proud slob in his untucked button-down shirt and black jeans. He carried a huge binder filled with data. He wasn’t big on self-maintenance, but he always kept his numbers pretty.
“Don’t even tell me to change,” he said without greeting me. “If this guy’s going to write me off just because he doesn’t like my wardrobe—”
“Relax. He wont care. He’ll just think you’re too brilliant to be stylish.”
“I don’t even know why I have to go.”
“Because it’s your project. I’m just helping you sell it.”
He locked up the yacht. The Ishtar was a 1984 Gibson Executive, fifty feet long. Fiberglass hull. Flush-mounted exterior deck and 385 square feet of living space, including full galley, salon, and two tiny state rooms. He had bought it two years before, for seventy five thousand dollars. The seller claimed to have purchased it straight from Warren Beatty, who apparently had a sense of humor about his previous flops.
I checked the story. It was crap. Warren may have a self-effacing wit, but he was never a yachtsman. Ira didn’t care. He just wanted respite from loud neighbors and evil landlords. He went through apartments like he went through jobs.
Half an hour later, we arrived at Lulu’s, a casual eatery on Beverly Boulevard. We had a lunch date with Keith Ullman. He was extremely late, of course. In Los Angeles, tardiness was treated as a sign of status and chic. Not only was it standard not to offer an explanation, it was considered rude to ask. I reminded Ira several times to hold his tongue when Keith finally did arrive.
“So what’s the name of this thing again?” he asked after fifteen minutes of idle banter.
“Move My Cheese,” I replied, sending Keith into a fit of puzzled laughter. He was a stylish, silver-haired player, part of Hollywood’s old guard. He held a diploma from the Robert Evans school of name-dropping. His favorite story, told ad nauseam, was how he had personally led Universal’s effort to make Jaws the first summer blockbuster to premiere nationwide. Oh, he met resistance from every one, especially Dick Zanuck, blah blah blah. There was simply no way to turn off his audio commentary.
As a silent partner in this burgeoning venture, I had advised Ira to act interested and to never ever disparage Spielberg in front of Keith. They were landsmen and (according to Keith) good friends. Ira, however, had harbored a mad-on for Spielberg ever since Jeff Goldblum’s offensively simplistic and incorrect portrayal of a chaotician in Jurassic Park. Whatever. All I cared about was selling Keith on Move My Cheese, a virtual paradigm that could revolutionize the movie industry. And that wasn’t just hype.
“Explain to me again how it works,” said Keith, through a mouthful of Chinese chicken salad.
Ira looked to me. His explanation usually caused massive bleeding from the ears.
“It’s simple data-fusion software,” I told him. “You plug all your movies in to a calendar. All your competitor’s movies. You add the number of screens, and presto. The Cheese chews it up and spits out the projected box-office totals for everything.”
Of course, it wasn’t really that simple. Keith was understandably skeptical. “Come on…”
“We’ve been testing it for fifteen months now. It has eighty-two percent accuracy in predicting first-weekend grosses, and seventy one percent accuracy for final domestic.”
“But not international,” said Keith.
“No,” said Ira, annoyed. “It doesn’t give you a blow job either.”
Keith laughed, assuming the joke was inclusive. “Then what the hell am I doing here?”
I opened Ira’s binder to an earmarked page. “Look, while everyone predicted that X-Men would open between twenty-eight and thirty-one million, our forecast said fifty-four-point-five. It opened at fifty-five point-one. Was it exact? No. But compared to everyone else, that’s like throwing a key in the keyhole.”
“But how can you be sure?”
“We’re only eighty-two percent sure,” I stressed. “But that’s still more than the NRG can give you.”
The National Research Group, the child of a Dutch media conglomerate, was the current prognosticator of choice for all the major studios. Their methods were ridiculously archaic. Three times a week they phoned a sample of four hundred people and bothered them with intrusive questions: How old are you? What’s your skin color? What’s your income? Have you heard of Battlefield: Earth? Okay. Do you think you’re, um, planning on seeing it in theaters? Why not?
What the pollsters who steer this country don’t want you to know is that phone surveys, by their very nature, suck. They rely on the feedback of two kinds of people: those who enjoy talking to telemarketers and those who enjoy lying to telemarketers. Neither group speaks well for the rest of us. To give the NRG credit, their system was created solely to measure audience awareness of upcoming films. But the studio suits, nervous about where to blow their last-minute ad budget, began using those four hundred participants/liars to project box-office numbers. The results were usually in the ballpark, if you include the parking lot, but the methods were piss poor when it came to predicting the tastes of kids, genre nerds, and African Americans.