How I Became a Famous Novelist (19 page)

She continued looking at my book as though it were a catalog for clothes she didn’t like.

“You know, I wrote that book.”

She looked up at me, and then down at the cover, maybe checking to see if the name matched the face.

“Hey, when the police think Silas killed his boss, why doesn’t he just wait and explain what happened?”

“Well . . . Silas is confused, and he’s a timid soul, of course—”

“I mean, I’m sure if he explained himself they’d figure it out. Wouldn’t that make more sense than running all over the country? Because then he really seems guilty.”

Angry blood rushed about my body. But I kept my cool, turned on my writer voice: patient, pedantic.

“These characters take shape on the page. All I do is observe, and record. I wait for the story to tell itself to me.”

“Mmm,” she said.

“I excavate,” I said. “I’m like a paleontologist. I get in the dirt, and I dig. This book, really, is just a dinosaur bone I uncovered.”

She put my book back on the stack. “Maybe it just, you know, wasn’t for me.” She gave me a schoolteachery smile.
Super
condescending.

“Do you know Pamela McLaughlin?”

“Pamela McLaughlin—she writes those mystery books? Yeah I’ve heard of her.”

“Well I had sex with her last night.”

“Um, that’s great.” She backed away, looking for exits.

“And I talked about boats with Nick Boyle. Higgins boats. Ike said those boats won the war.”

“That’s great. Congratulations.”

“So I think I know a thing or two about writing.”

I’d won the exchange. That dumb-ass woman with her master’s thesis. “Race in
The Sound and the Fury
”? Real original theme. I would’ve pointed that out if I didn’t have to catch a flight.

She wouldn’t have been so cocky if she’d known I was flying to Los Angeles to talk about
The Tornado Ashes Club
movie.

14

INT. POE’S APARTMENT - THAT NIGHT

The place looks like Ted Kaczynski’s cabin, transplanted to the basement of a Brooklyn brownstone. Strewn sweatshirts, old towels, Chinese food boxes that have been there since the Clinton Administration. Rush
Chronicles
plays on a beat-up stereo. Dead center, on fruit crates, is the chessboard.

CLOSE ON POE, crouched over the board—black side, pieces unmoved.

POE

How’d you do it, you bastard?

A POUND comes on the door. Poe doesn’t move.

ANGLE ON the door. Another POUND, and the door bursts open. SERGEI enters. He’s followed by YEGOR—built like a brick shithouse, two-fifty, easy, and with arms that could crush a skull like a Fuji apple.

SERGEI

You shouldn’t leave door unlocked. Not
such a safe neighborhood.

He smiles. A smile you don’t want to see. Only then does Poe look up.

POE

I don’t have it.

SERGEI

You don’t have what?

POE

The money.

SERGEI

Money, money, Americans always
rushing to the money. “Show me the
money,” ah? Maybe we just come by to
see you practice.

POE

It’s gone.

SERGEI

Maybe we come by, I show my friend how you play your game.

Yegor crosses, and looms over Poe from the opposite side of the board.

SERGEI (CONT’D)

Maybe we play social call.

POE

Well then, I’m sorry I don’t have any
chardonnay and brie.

Suddenly Sergei reaches out and smacks Poe across the face. Poe reels, then jerks back, nose bloodied. Sergei takes a gun out of his pocket. He puts it in the middle of the chessboard.

SERGEI

Or maybe we play this game.

Sergei crouches in front of Poe.

SERGEI (CONT’D)

You are not so smart.

Sergei picks up a pawn from the board, and stands up.

SERGEI (CONT’D)

This one is called in English, pawn, yes?
Pawn is very easy to give up. To give up a
pawn is nothing.

POE

(Nursing his nose) You know a lot about chess.

SERGEI

I played chess, when I was boy.

POE

Ever hear of Garry Kasparov?

Sergei stands.

POE (CONT’D)

Once Kasparov played Bela Nadosy, the
Hungarian champion. Nadosy was
white, Kasparov was black. The first
three moves went like this.

Rapid-fire, Poe makes six moves—pawns, knights, rooks. None of the moves touch the gun. One of the pawns lands in the trigger hole.

POE (CONT’D)

Three moves. That’s it. And Nadosy said,
“You’ve beaten me.” These aren’t very
dramatic moves—nothing a good amateur
would’ve thought of. But Nadosy knew
he was beaten. Do you know why?

SERGEI

Tell me why.

POE

Because he could feel Kasparov’s confidence. He could see it in the way he played. And he knew he could never beat a man that confident.

SERGEI

And Kasparov became world champion.
Wonderful story.

POE

And Nadosy—

Poe reaches across the board—right under Yegor’s chin—and tips over the white king.

POE (CONT’D)

Nadosy drowned himself in the Black Sea.

Poe stands up.

POE (CONT’D)

You’re white. You just made your first move.

Suddenly Poe pulls a Tec-9 out from under the chessboard. Before the Russians can react, he has it on Sergei’s forehead.

POE (CONT’D)

Do I seem confident to you?

—excerpt from the unproduced screenplay “Black/White” by Miller Westly

I’ll tell you
the
Marlon Brando story. Actually, more of an Elia Kazan story. They’re filming
On the Waterfront,
the scene in the hold of the ship, where the squealer’s just had a crate dropped on him, and Karl Malden shows up, and all the longshoremen are looking at him. So Kazan sets up the shot, gets everybody in place. And then he goes around, starting with the extras first, and gives them backstory: motivation, fleshing out every man there into a full character. ‘You’re a Czech. You don’t speak English that well. You know these guys resent you, but you’re lucky to be on this crew, and you’re saving money to bring your wife over.’ ‘You were a smart kid, teachers told you to apply to college. Your dad encouraged you, said he’d figure out a way to pay for it. But then he busted his leg. Nobody helped him, and you had to start working.’ Stuff like that. Kazan goes through every actor, fifty, sixty guys, and gives them each something. Starting with guys who don’t have lines, extras. He finally gets through all of them, and the minor characters. Then he talks to Karl Malden for twenty minutes, walking him through everything: how he should be thinking, how he’s never seen a body this bad before, what he
ate
that day, everything.

“Then, when he’s finally done with Karl Malden, Kazan says, ‘Okay, we’re ready, shoot it.’

“And Brando, who’s been standing there watching this for three hours, says, ‘Hey, Elia, you never said anything to me.’

“And Kazan wheels on him. Points at him. In front of everybody.

“And says, ‘You just stand there and say your fucking lines.’”

Miller Westly has only one level of intensity. The whole time he was telling me this, he chopped his hands through the air as though he were smashing a series of invisible boxes that flew at his face.

“That’s how you make a movie!”

The Standard Hotel in Hollywood seems like a joke. The upside-down sign seems like a joke, the shag carpeting seems like a joke, the 2001-style pod chairs that hang from the ceiling seem like a joke, and the constant thumping Euro-infused trip-house seems like a joke. The pool looks like a retro-cool ’70s über-designer’s joke of a pool. But everybody acts like it’s totally serious: the Swedish-haircut guy behind the desk acts like it’s serious, and so does the model dressed as a mermaid posing in a giant fluorescent fish tank.

Miller Westly certainly seemed to take it seriously. At 3:13
P.M.
he swooped in, and from a black ceramic bowl on the lobby table, he scooped up some wasabi peas. Without apology he told me he might smell a little bad because he’d been with his trainer that morning, “An Israeli guy who will kick your ass and make you like it.”

We sat down poolside, and he told me he’d been drinking a lot of mojitos lately with Appleton rum, asked a waitress if she had Appleton rum, made her promise that the mint was fresh, and ordered two mojitos and a Negro Modelo. As the
waitress walked away, he made a study of her ass, the way a botanist might look at a rare orchid.

“That is exquisite. It is primal. Primal reaction. One of the core principles I’m always keeping in mind in my writing is that men are primal, visceral animals. Wrap it up in all the bows and fifteen-hundred dollar Savile Row suits with silk pocket squares from Milan, but there is a
primal
animal at the core. Given the chance he will act and behave like an animal. If you keep coming back to that basic fact you will never run out of stories.”

This was all said with incredible velocity. Miller talked as though he were reading off ideas that were racing past his brain on an electric ticker. Only hours later, replaying the tape in my head at half speed, could I reconstruct it.

“Look at Brando,” he said. “For my money, the best actor, period. Just on a pure, raw, visceral level. No one touches him. I would give both my nuts and three inches of cock length to have him for one scene. I’ve written entire screenplays just as an exercise, just so I could think about how Brando would say it. And I’ve spent months working out problems in screenplays that Brando could solve just by standing there. He
seizes
the screen. Eats it.
Fucks
it. The screen
begs
Brando to fuck it. And here’s why. He’s always playing that tension, the exact line between a man in society and just a raw animal. You can feel it. You can feel him restraining himself. You’ve seen
Streetcar
?”

“Yeah.”

“The first time Brando met Tennessee Williams, he took off his fucking
shirt
and fixed Tennessee’s
toilet
. And Williams called Kazan, who was directing, and said, ‘This is the guy. This
is Stanley Kowalski. The guy’s got grease on his hands and he’s fixing my toilet.’ Primal.”

Then the mojitos came and Miller told me
the
Brando story.

I’d been sent to Los Angeles to meet Miller Westly because he was interested in writing and directing the movie version of
The Tornado Ashes Club.
I’d read up on him to prepare and concluded he was a great man for the job. In the men’s bathroom at the 2000 Oscars, Miller Westly allegedly tried to stab Russell Crowe. Westly had just lost the Best Adapted Screenplay award; he wrote that biopic of Ethel Merman that Renee Zellwegger won the Oscar for.

Then he and Russell Crowe got into an argument— apparently, if the Internet is to be trusted—about Crowe backing out of Westly’s next project. It was an updated version of
The Merchant of Venice
set over a Super Bowl weekend in Las Vegas. Crowe allegedly called the screenplay “a hundred pages of coke-addled bullshit,” and Westly took a swing at him with a Bowie knife he had in his cumberbund. Westly was wrestled to the ground by Harvey Weinstein, Ian McKellen, or Kathy Bates, depending on which story you believe. After that, Westly disappeared for two years and went to live in Japan.

But the way I figured, you have to be a certain level of famous to get into an argument in the bathroom with Russell Crowe. And coke-addled or not, you must take your scripts seriously if you’re willing to stab for them.

The Ethel Merman movie was good. Or at least, what was wrong with it wasn’t Miller Westly’s fault. I’d seen it in college with Polly. For many weeks afterward, when we were bored in my room, I would demand that she do the scene where Renee
Zellweger tells the producers that she won’t change how she sings,
“Not for nobody!”
Polly would frump out her chin the way Renee did.