Sparky had not really planned it that way. One of the things that drove his staff to distraction was Sparky's way of letting a temporary arrangement become permanent. He had simply started coming to Studio 88 to find a little solitude, spread out his papers and projects on the big table that had been so important at the beginning of his career, and the end of Gideon Peppy's. The solitude was soon lost when people realized it was a good place to find the sometimes elusive star and studio head. Sparky had simply moved his retreat space back to his "real" office, and let Studio 88 grow. It was an odd arrangement, but Sparky had understood since he was in diapers that no one in the picture business had ever suffered because of eccentricity. Ever since Elwood told him about Sam Goldwyn, he had been a student of the unpredictable ways of the legendary moguls of Hollywood's Golden Age, men like Harry Cohn, Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer, Cecil B. DeMille, and Darryl Zanuck. When he didn't want to be part of a deal, he said, "Include me out." To turn down a proposal or project he would say, "I can answer you in two words. Im possible." If he was in favor of something the most he would say was "I'll give you a definite maybe." When he was ready to give the green light it would be "It's time to take the bull by the teeth." Referring an old idea or waxing nostalgic, his comment would be "We've all passed a lot of water since then." All remarks openly stolen from Sam Goldwyn.
Most meetings in Studio 88 involved three or four people, sometimes as many as six or seven. Once a month lower department heads and top assistants were summoned, and the table was full. Rarely, chairs were brought in for larger numbers, but Sparky was usually not present for these.
Today, Studio 88 was as full as it had been since the long-ago day when Sparky had bumbled in for his first audition. Exhibits and old props and stacks of paper had been shoved aside by half a dozen grips, scores of folding chairs had been set up on one side of the conference table, and some lights arranged to highlight the presentation being given on the other side, while leaving the rest of the room in comfortable obscurity. People on the lighted side of the table had moved their chairs back and turned them around to face John Valentine, who stood before three metal easels bearing big posters. Valentine moved and spoke with assurance. As usual, he was dazzling to look at under the lights. If he had lived in the 1920s, Valentino would have had some serious competition.
Sparky was at his usual place at the power end of the table, leaning back comfortably in his elevated chair, watching, listening, and slowly turning the hard chocolate lollipop in his mouth. This was the kind with a raspberry center and a picture of himself on the outside. His saliva had already melted away the candy intaglio and he figured he'd be down to the raspberry filling in another ten or fifteen minutes, a delicious anticipation. Sometimes reaching the raspberry filling was the high point of his day. This looked like one of those days.
Sparky thought there might be a joke in there, the sort of wry, but telling utterance Sparky had become known for in recent years as his original audience aged. The demographics had revealed that many parents were still closet Sparky fans, watching with their own children or simply for their own pleasure and nostalgic gratification, letting the Sparky show take them back to their own youth. So now the writing reflected that, working on one level for the target audience but with sophisticated puns and observations delivered innocently, slipped in edgewise.
Hard chocolate on the outside, with a raspberry core. Something about if you sucked long enough...
He couldn't make it work yet. Using the tip of his lollipop stick as a stylus, he scribbled a quick note to what he thought of as the shadow writing team, the adult gagsters who supplemented the story lines and scripts generated by the story department, much of which was now being developed in play sessions with preteens and brainstorming adults. He faxed it off, then returned his attention to his father, who was winding up the main part of his presentation and about to get to the big news. It was big news he viewed with distinctly mixed feelings, and he was as curious as anyone else to see how he reacted to it once it was out in the open.
"So these are just preliminary ideas," John Valentine was saying. "We haven't decided yet whether to renovate an existing space or start from scratch, but that will be determined in the coming week." He lifted the last of his big posterboard displays from the easel and set it on the floor. This one showed an interior proposal for his new live theater, virtually all he had talked about since getting off the ship from Neptune. It was a grand palace, harking back to the days of the big tri-D palaces of the mid-twenty-first century, but remarkably low-tech, for all of that. Sitting on the floor beside it were other renderings, all in that glitzy spotlit stretched perspective Sparky thought of as Nevada Moderne. One of the posters was of the grandest conception of alclass="underline" a freestanding building sitting like a gaudy jewel in the middle of a ten-cubic-story city park.
On the wall behind Valentine was a twenty-foot-square telestrator, a state-of-the-art gewgaw usually employed for this type of presentation; some of Valentine's exhibits were leaning against it. The posters and easels were more John Valentine's style.
Valentine paused for a moment, looked at the floor, then back up at his audience with a faint smile on his face. He was good at this. Half of this group had barely heard of him; some of the rest had been hearing whispered stories for twenty years, few of them flattering. The reaction to his proposed temple of the acting arts ranged from dubious to bored. While the theater would be large and lavish, on the scale of Thimble Theater projects it was strictly small potatoes. Yet they were listening. There was a magnetism about him, an undeniable charisma that cannot be borrowed or faked, but can be honed. "You've gotta be born with it, Dodger," Valentine had often told his son. "I've got it; you've got it. But what you do with it, that's what takes the work." Valentine had spent most of his life mastering it, making it his tool. An actor begins with his body and his voice, but where he goes from there, how he understands and uses the intangible and mysterious powers that lie beyond simple recitation and gesticulation, is what makes the difference between a bit player and a star. John Valentine was a star, and always had been. Even his enemies, who were legion, conceded that.
"But we didn't pull you away from your important work just to show you the theater project," Valentine said, with a self-deprecating chuckle. "Though I'm sure most departments here at the studio will have a hand in it when all is said and done. No, Dodg—Kenneth and I have been thinking and talking, talking and thinking, practically since I got back from my recent directorship in the outer planets. Now, don't let this make you nervous, but we've decided some changes should be made."
He was moving along the row of people at the table, looking at them one by one, sometimes resting a hand familiarly on a shoulder. When he finally reached Sparky, he put his hand on the leather back of the chair and stood there easily, gazing down with affection. Sparky smiled back up at him.
"I know my presence comes as a shock to some of you," he said. "It hasn't been well known that Kenneth and I have had extensive conversations all through my leave of absence from the studio. I think he'd agree with me that my role has been primarily one of consultation. He bounces ideas off me, I send him my first reaction, that sort of thing. Sometimes we'd go through a dozen messages before we'd come to a decision... and decide to do it Sparky's way." Valentine joined in the appreciative laughter, then stood beaming proudly at his son until it died down.