"Very new," she agreed. "Just in town from the dinosaur farm with a new job as cub reporter."
"You worked on a dinosaur farm?" Sparky had been thinking of dinosaurs for the new story arc scheduled to start in six months. "What was that like?"
"I got tired of shoveling brontosaur turds. Sparky, my editor did tell me that places like this are off-limits. Truce zones, he called them. And I'm not here to interview you."
"You're not?"
"Well, not right now. I just thought it wouldn't hurt to approach you and ask for an interview at a later date. I wanted to show you I could get in here, if I tried. I've been told you admire initiative."
Sparky was beginning to be more amused than annoyed.
"I admire chutzpah," he said. "It's how I got started in this business myself. But what if you made me angry? Then I might never give you an interview."
"You seldom do, anyway. I thought it was worth a shot. If you turn me down, I haven't lost anything, and I go looking for my big story somewhere else." She smiled, and shrugged her shoulders.
"Call my secretary tomorrow morning," he said. "He'll set something up. Now get out of here, you sneaky person." He watched her hurry away toward a door he assumed led to the kitchen.
"Rocko," he said, and across the room the big man stood up quickly and hurried to Sparky's side.
"Did you see that girl who was just here?"
"Yeah?"
"She was a reporter."
Rocko looked surprised, twisted to look at the door Johnson had used for her exit, as if his eyes could bore right through it.
"Find out how she got in here, and tell airport security. Have them plug the hole."
"You got it, Spark-man," Rocko said, and started away.
"And Rocko?"
He turned, eyebrows raised.
"If this happens again, you're fired."
"Naturally."
Sparky smiled, and went back to his Scrawlpad. In one sense, the mistake wasn't Rocko's fault. Airport security should have kept Hildy Johnson at bay. But in a larger sense, it was his fault. Rocko was in charge of all studio security, and especially the person of Sparky Valentine, the studio's most valuable asset. It was up to him to see anyplace Sparky visited was safe, and if it wasn't, either advise Sparky not to go there or make it safe with his own people.
Still, Sparky knew no security was perfect, and Rocko knew Sparky was unlikely to fire him unless incidents like this became commonplace. Rocko was very good at what he did. There had been three stalkers at various times in Sparky's career deemed dangerous enough to warrant more than a restraining order. Two of them were serving long jail terms, and the third had not been seen or heard from in over three years. Sparky never asked.
He put the production-cost numbers back in their file and called up the story department. The analysis of the next seven proposed episodes was supposed to be delivered today, and he wanted to see what his staff of geniuses thought of the proposals. He was just in time; the Scrawlpad was downloading the moment he called up the file. He began to read.
Sparky had originally been designed as an endless (one hoped) series of one-offs. Each episode was to stand on its own as a story, watchable by anyone who had never visited the Sparky universe before. There was continuity, in that each character had a history created through his adventures in previous episodes, and to a lesser degree, a back story. These tidbits were all written down by the series historian, and maintained in a small document known as a bible. All television series had bibles. They enabled new writers to come into the fold and read up on each character, know where he or she had been in life, know his limits and strengths and personality. For the first several years that was just about all that was in the bible. Episodes did not connect with each other. There was no "continued next Saturday!" This seemed to satisfy everybody. For the first few years.
When ratings begin to slip, new approaches are called for. The prevailing wisdom was that Sparky's target audience was too young to participate in complicated multiepisode plots. Too confusing, the pollsters said.
Sparky paid for another survey. This one found that estimates of the target audience were skewed by the fact that large numbers of viewers were staying loyal to Sparky even when they passed out of the targeted demographic: four-to-ten-year-olds. The show scored well all the way up to thirteen, when hormonal pressures led most Sparksters toward more sexual shows. And even then, kids who had grown up with Sparky still showed an interest in product tie-ins and in collecting memorabilia and old episodes. Sparky had filed that away for future consideration: surely there was a way to profit from this almost instant nostalgia when the teens grew into adults and had more money to spend. To that end, not much was ever thrown away from a Sparky production. It was all labeled, filed, and stored. "Taking a page from Walt Disney's book," Sparky called it. "If you can make money on it once, why not make money on it five or six times?"
"Retain the ephemera" became the watchword at Thimble Theater.
Then Sparky commissioned another study, and it was here that his feel for the audience transcended the dry pronouncements of focus groups and play-therapy sessions, measurements of eye movements and pupil contractions and palm sweat and heart rate, all so scientific and so lacking in the most important ingredient, to Sparky: magic.
He did the new study himself. He disguised himself and went out among the children. He hung around them and he listened to them, and he watched their eyes. He wasn't looking for pupil dilation, either. He was searching for that gleam of wonder as a child stammered out his recollections of a story that moved him. He found it, many times, and he found out something else. These kids remembered shows from two years ago.
So the show was revamped, gradually, to become a longer, continuing saga. Armageddon Angry was built up as the arch villain. Each episode might be seen as a skirmish, and each season as a war. There was a term in the industry for this kind of plotting, known as the "story arc." A problem would be posed in one episode, dealt with to a greater or lesser degree in three or four more episodes, and brought to a climax in the sixth installment. Meantime another arc had begun around episode three.
Keeping it all straight was a formidable task. The series bible grew from a dozen stapled sheets to a massive volume tended by a staff of three. There was another department whose mission in life was to steal. Steal from dead people, it's true, but steal nonetheless. Sparky had long ago given up coming up with plots and, except for the occasional inspiration, characters. Anything in the public domain was fair game. Old comic books were a fertile source. Almost anyone who had had his or her own comic book in the twentieth or twenty-first century had made a guest appearance on Sparky by now. Sparky had visited locations from Gotham City to Surf City. Old movie and television serials had been plundered for plotlines and cliffhangers. Sparky had entered alternate universes, places where classic private eyes, singing cowboys, half-breed aliens with pointy ears, and giant radioactive ants actually existed.
The show also had to keep up with trends. One fairly recent innovation in the marketplace was the introduction of gene-reconstructed dinosaurs raised as meat animals. Sparky had done shows with dinosaurs in them, but had never gone to a dinosaur ranch. What were the possibilities in such a setting? He had posed the question to his staff, and their first thoughts on the subject were in a new report he had not had time to read yet. Hildy Johnson's intrusion had jogged his memory on the subject, so he refiled the story-arc analysis and brought up the brainstorming-session minutes, a series of memos ranging from the humdrum to the impractical, with the solid ideas usually buried somewhere in the middle. Sparky encouraged his writers to put everything down, no matter how wild. No one was ever upbraided for having a dumb idea. Sometimes the real nuggets were mined from the extremes, not the comfortable middle.