‘Maybe, but they kinda slurp it back down.’
The baboons were settling back down as well, their muzzles dropped to their arugula. We sat in silence for a while.
‘I dunno,’ he resumed eventually. ‘I’m not sure I want to take this one on — we’ve got troubles of our own down at the Times.’
‘Your man Zell?’
‘The word is we’re looking down the barrel of a gun.’
‘And people are going to get fired?’
‘Absolutely — and you wanna know why? It’s the same as your movie case: the readership can’t suspend disbelief in newsprint any more, it’s just dead meaning swatted on the page to them. They want something that lights up, scrolls down, they want inset full-motion videos and pop-up—’
‘Idents.’
‘Right.’
Dusk was fingering along Culver Boulevard, together with the traffic and the No. 11 Nocturne played with a jazz twist. There was a lazy intimacy to the scene — they didn’t call Mac the happy detective for no reason; whatever his own problems — and he had them — he always succeeded in infusing any scene with a comfortable tannin vibe, ironic considering that when:
‘You turn up people get dead — now don’t they?’
He wasn’t taken aback. ‘So that’s how it is, is it, you’ve got a third act problem.’
‘I guess.’
‘So you think: bring in Mac and the body count’ll rise.’
‘Something like that had occurred to me.’ I took out a miniature Effie Perrine and she took out a miniature bag of Bull Durham and fiddled a cigarette into tubular existence. ‘Anyway,’ I resumed, ‘what’s your scruple? You say people’re gonna get dead anyway, leastways in my scenario they get dead in the service of a decent cause — finding out who clipped the most beautifulest narrative medium the goddamn world has ever seen!’
He stood up and, pulling a rawhide wallet from his pocket, dealt a couple of twenties on to the table. ‘You’re fucked up, Will,’ he said conversationally. ‘I don’t believe you give a damn who killed the movies.’
‘Frankly?’
‘Yeah, frankly. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out you’d killed them yourself in some guarana-fuelled blackout.’
‘That’s harsh.’
‘You think so? Well, try this on: you were a spotty brat jerking off over Ornella Mutti in the London burbs. Then you grew up and began writing your dismal fucking tales — a depressive’s exercise in wish fulfilment: slash your wrists and the world slashes with you. Against all the odds you got successful enough to come out here — and whaddya find? An industry that doesn’t give a damn about you, ‘cause you’re a cheapie, a peanut grafter, you’re so goddamn small no one could even focus on you—’
‘OK, OK.’
‘That’s not all, man, ’cause after all there’s thousands like you in this town but you’re different: you’ve got the motivation. The movies may’ve rejected you, but then you go and fall in love with Angel herself.’
‘You believe this?’
‘I’ve read your stuff, man, it’s a fucking love letter to LA, all about how she’s been betrayed by the movies, how they eyed her up, used her, then cut her up into so many pieces nobody can put her back together again — no one, that is, except you. That’s what this walking tour is really about — you aren’t looking for who killed the movies, you’re trying to get your skinny shanks inside LA’s hot haunches!’
As parting shots go it was a good one, and although he wasn’t a fellow given to melodrama Mac made his exit, strolling off the Filling Station’s apron and sauntering away along the boulevard.
I called after him: ‘But you’ll still do my legwork for me, won’t you?’
He turned back. ‘Oh, I dunno, man, I dunno.’
‘Just check a few things out, be a friend to the cause.’ He ambled back, and I whispered, ‘But don’t call me, it’s not safe.’
‘What, then?’
‘Ellen DeGeneres is throwing a little party for me tomorrow evening at the Bar Marmont.’
‘For you?’
‘It’s a very little party — more of a gathering, really. Anyway, if you show up we can talk after.’
‘You better have some cash for me. Two hundred — plus whatever expenses I’ve incurred.’
‘Naturally.’
‘But don’t get your hopes up, my friend, and remember: client privilege don’t buy you no protection — this is a helluva tough town.’
‘I know that.’
But did I, really? The elevator gate closed in a monogamous marriage of old metal, and the Culver Hotel seemed quiet enough — yet was there perhaps a trill of dwarfish laughter from the end of the corridor? What eerie visions would trouble me as I turned and turned again in my rental four-poster? Judy Garland going down on the Tin Man, her carmine lips sliding lubriciously over his steely rod, then rearing up, green oil dripping from her sharp little chin? The money shot — again.
When I eventually made it into my room the message light was winking: Busner had rung while I was at dinner. ‘I do hope you’re having a good time.’ His recorded voice was far more immediate that his spoken one. ‘And that you’ve remembered what I said… about avoiding the noirish.’
To my surprise I slept soundly and blankly, awakening to the Dolby hiss of another day. I ate bacon and eggs in the foyer, then, after returning to my room, expeditiously shat. I was a man with an appointment.
*This may be the purest form of the jump cut, the eye’s saccade involuntarily following the gun barrel’s pan, so seeing the same wound in metal, then flesh, then metal again.
9. The Pitch
Way back in the beeswax-scented past, Arnold Schoenberg had woken one fine morning, and, in the last heady rush of his Romanticism, decided that it would be a good idea to pen some music for exactly these sorts of comings and goings, small swoops and glissandos of strings that with uncanny prescience suggested the yaw of Escalades as they swung off the boulevard, the reeling down of tinted windows, the reeling up of tinted windows, the red-and-white-striped baton flung high to conduct them on to the Sony Pictures lot.
I dogged along behind, then picked my way between acacias and eucalyptuses towards a Palladian façade, the pediment of which was lettered IRVING THALBERG BUILDING in Art Deco bronze. There was a copper stoup bolted to the wall beside the doors. Assuming that the liquid in this must be the tears of stars delivering Oscar acceptance speeches, carefully captured in vials by their personal assistants, then deposited here at the behest of the studio, I dipped my fingers, genuflected, then went inside.
In the foyer there was a reception module womaned by central casting, and mirror-backed cabinets lined with Oscar statuettes, the tragic masks of BAFTAs, and some other awards I didn’t recognize but that were symbolized by figurines of Pan sporting what looked like Stetsons.
Having been announced, I travelled along a sunlit corridor, my nape hairs erect in anticipation of the smack of a bullet. To either side open doors revealed sets of offices expertly arrayed with exactly the kind of desks, framed movie posters, filing cabinets and waggle-on-their-springs desk mascots that you would’ve expected. In front of the desks, tipped back in their swivel chairs, were minor players played by minor actors. Discreetly, quietly, they made marks in the margins of scripts, or else, ear-muffed by surround sound, watched product on their computer screens.
Upstairs, unity of production design, which in the movies makes of the entire world an opulent suburban home, was spectacularly in evidence. On Michael Lynton’s set high, narrow windows leaked daylight between drapes of taupe crushed satin; the floor was rough-adzed boards; a Columbia icon hefted a torch on the wall; a white orchid sat on a glass table surrounded by steel-framed chairs. There were two conversation areas: one had sofas, covered in creamy fabric patterned with black coral polyps, grouped around a hardwood coffee table; the other involved mushroom leatherette club chairs menacing a discoid of white-veined marble. Somewhere in the beeswax-scented present Lynton was on a call. Nearer, in the antechamber, his secretary was finishing one. ‘Love you guys,’ floated through.