Passing Through the Flame (32 page)

“You know Beck better than anyone does. I don’t know whether he was really trying to help me and screwed up, in which case maybe he’ll help me out of it, or if he set the whole thing up, in which case, he’s a pig, and all I can do is try to fight him.” Barry Stein looked at her as he said this, and she could hear the whine of defeat in his soul. His head was twisted in three directions at once, and he didn’t know which way to come down. He was trapped in a web whose nature he couldn’t even begin to resolve, a web of Jango’s making.

“No question about Beck being a pig,” Bill said. “You’d really be stupid to ask him to get you out of a mess he put you into in the first place. If he thinks he can make money saving your ass, you’re in luck. If he thinks he can make money pushing you further in, tough shit. If I were you and I had a choice, I’d stay away from Jango Beck.”

Bills voice insinuated itself into the cracks in Stein’s schizoid head space, widening them like the roots of a tree crumbling the feet of a stone wall. Stein pulsed with black paranoia.

“Look beyond,” she said. She could see a glow behind her eyes reflected in the expression on Stein’s face as he turned and looked into them. And basked in them. And did not look away. Bill glanced at her, then seemed to shrink back into his chair, became absorbed in the eating of his steak.

“What do you mean, look beyond?”

Energy swept around her and through her, and she felt herself riding the power, shakily, but riding it, and not washed over by it. And it felt good, it felt good!

“Look beyond Jango Beck,” She said. “Look beyond your paper. Look at the worst thing that can happen and then look beyond that.”

“Are you trying to bum me out?” Stein said.

“Try it,” she said. “It’ll take your head to a better place.”

“The worst thing that can happen is I lose the paper and it gets taken over by a thug and becomes a rip-off of the Movement and the culture and I get blamed for it, I go broke, lose all my friends, and my reason for being alive. Is that bad enough for you?”

“Now look beyond.”

“Beyond what? Beyond the end of everything?”

“Beyond the destruction of the persona you’ve built up for yourself. Beyond Barry Stein, editor and publisher of the
Flash.
Beyond to the real you inside. Beyond to what you don’t lose Beyond to what you can’t lose.”

Stein stared at her. A wave front of subtle change within flashed up at her from behind his eyes. She could feel many of his tensions resolve. He had reexperienced a flash of his own center.

“You’d still be there,” she said. “You’d still be you. You’d still be able to be what you are. You wouldn’t die inside, now, would you?”

Stein smiled at her, not a very happy smile, but a real one. “So?” he said with a shrug of his head.

“So why not be there now? Stop playing guessing games with how it’s going to come out and just be the best you you can.”

He continued to stare at her, and she could sense more internal rearrangements. He was riding back on center. It wasn’t the best place in the world to be, but it was the best place his head could be in the circumstances, and being there, he knew it.

“Yeah, I see what you mean,” Stein said. “I’ve been sweating like a petty capitalist, not thinking like a revolutionary. I really
do
feel better.” He grinned, stood up. Bill looked up from his steak. They regarded each other awkwardly.

“I really want to thank—”

“Thank who you really want to thank,” Bill said, his eyes pained and proud. “Thank... Star.”

Stein looked at her, nodded, couldn’t find anything to say. Bill shook his head, lost in his own confusion. She smiled, releasing Stein from his frozen posture He nodded again, turned, stopped, looked at her. “Lady, you are the real thing,” he said, and walked away.

Maybe I am, she thought. Just maybe I am.

“Would you like some more coffee, Paul?” Cindy said, popping into the inner office with the percolator in her hand. Pause for a beat as she glanced at the gray vinyl-covered couch. “Or anything else?”

Paul Conrad looked up at her. She was a nice kid, with her red hair, her button nose, and her full body demurely hidden in a blue skirt suit. She had made herself available in a businesslike way his very first day at Eden Pictures. “I type ninety words a minute, take dictation at one hundred words a minute, I’m a good ball, and I give great head.” All very matter-of-fact, and two days later, when he took her up on it, she proved to be athletic, cheerful, and quite truthful. The third time it started getting dull.

“No thanks, I’ve had too much as it is.” Paul pointedly flipped the switch of his IBM Selectric on again and sat there staring at the paper in the roller and listening to the typewriter hum, like the Great Artist Deep in Thought. Cindy shrugged and took herself and the percolator back into the outer office.

I wonder if she’s reporting back to Beck, Paul thought. I wonder if that’s why she keeps popping in and out of here on one excuse or another all the time—so she can tell Jango how much script I haven’t written.

Boy, am I getting paranoid!

She comes in here because she’s got nothing to do, which is probably why she’s always offering to ball me—sheer boredom. I sit here trying to put together a step outline, and all she does all day is sit around waiting for me to finish it so she can type a final draft at ninety words per minute.

Maybe
that’s
what Beck’s doing: giving me a secretary I don’t need so I’ll feel eyes staring over my shoulder. But don’t get me wrong, I love Hollywood.

Paul’s eyes wandered from the blank paper in the typewriter across the beige walls and Japanese prints of the little office, and out the single window which looked out across a studio street on the yellow stucco exterior of Sound Stage Four and
his
car in
his
studio parking space. There it was, a bright-red MG-TD, parked between a Mercedes and a Cadillac, its wire wheels snug up against a whitewashed curbstone with his own name lettered on it in black. Another little mind game Jango Beck was running on him....

Beck had been there to greet him his first day at the studio and was appalled at the sight of his grungy old Rambler. “I can’t have someone I employ as a writer and director drive a moldy heap like that onto the lot,” he said.

The next morning Paul found a car in his parking space: a red MG-TD, a classic English sports car of the fifties, all square lines, external headlights, side curtains, wire wheels, and British funk. The car was beautifully and perfectly restored, with shining brightwork, well-waxed new paint, and soft new leather. Paul couldn’t help feeling an adolescent thrill when Beck handed him the keys. “On the house,” Beck had said. “I’ll write it up as part of the transportation costs. I hope it transports you.”

A few days later, Paul’s curiosity got the best of his glowing gratitude, and he priced the car. It probably cost a little less than three-thousand dollars. A true classic, yes, but not a particularly expensive one. A generous gift, but not outlandishly lavish. At the same time, an object of genuine beauty and worth, hence priceless.

He could sense that Beck was conveying some convoluted message with this gift, but what it was eluded him. Perhaps it was designed to elude him.

But then I’m starting to see meanings I can’t quite catch in everything around me. Beck had surrounded this whole project with obscure hidden overtones to everything, and he’s set up parameters that make the damn script almost impossible to write.

All I have to do is conceive a film around Beck’s schlocky idea that can be shot around a no-talent like Velva, and God-only-knows-who as the male lead, that won’t be utterly destroyed by the footage of rock group performances that Beck has the power to drop into the final film more or less where he pleases, like so many television commercials. And a film that’s good enough to establish me as a filmmaker, something I can claim credit for without having to apologize.

It was horribly like his three brushes with writing episodic television scripts. He had managed to get assignments for a doctor show, a spy show, and a thing about a suburban family and its pet chimpanzee, but he had always been cut off at treatment money. He just couldn’t turn his mind far enough off to churn out stuff like that to order for producers who had no idea what was dramatically possible or not. “Gimme a story about two kids and their pet chimpanzee that’s got gentle family humor but is basically serious with a moral but not preachy and you can’t show a black man on camera with the kids without a white adult being present and it shouldn’t be anything like the thirty-seven other episodes of
Monkey Business
we’ve already made.” To write shit like that, you needed pigeons in Skinner boxes conditioned to peck randomly at typewriters.

And the
Carnival of Life
was shaping up like one huge widescreen high-budget TV show rather than a feature, an awful piece of schlock with the same sort of impossible creative parameters as a thing like
Monkey Business.

Even the working title was awful. Maybe we should retitle it
Monkey Business.
Or
Carnival of Grease.
In fact, the project was beginning to look like not much more than a giant commercial in feature film form for the record albums that Eden planned to record at the Carnival of Life. Worse than an honest schlock TV show, it was turning into one of those horrid promo specials that were done on the new car models every year or some smarmy documentary on Disneyland or Knott’s Berry Farm.

But you knew that going in, kid, he reminded himself, forcing his eyes back to the torment of the blank paper in the typewriter. For want of anything better to do, he typed:

Given:

Velva

Carnival of Life Unknown male lead $300,000 budget

Umpteen recorded groups dropped into film by Beck

Result:

boy meets girl boy loses girl boy gets damnitthell &¢%$#!

Which is about as far as I’ve gotten in eight days of this! Somehow, I’m going about this all the wrong way.

Paul turned off the typewriter and began pacing the small room. He thought about going to lunch early. He thought about balling Cindy. He walked over to the window and looked out on a small corner of the Eden lot: Sound Stage Four, a row of matching yellow stucco office buildings on this side of the studio street, a bit of the gray concrete wall surrounding the studio, a uniformed messenger pedaling by, a pretty girl, two extras dressed as cowboys. The lot was half-deserted, probably working at even less than half capacity, and a lot of that was television. Hollywood studios were dying dinosaurs.

And here I am one hundred and twenty blank pages away from the break of a lifetime, trapped in the schlockiest aspects of the Hollywood system. I guess I’m just going to have to think more cynically.
Carnival of Life
isn’t going to be a film; it’s going to be a damned jigsaw puzzle. Beck’s handed me the pieces, and I’d better figure out some damn way of putting them together.

He forced himself to sit down at the typewriter again. He turned it on and typed:

Strong points:

...???

...???

If only there were something to build around. It can’t be Velva because she won’t be able to play any unusual part at all, and it can’t be the character of the male lead because I have to trust Beck to cast him.

It has to be the Carnival of Life itself.

As soon as the thought popped into Paul’s mind, it was so brutally obvious that he cursed himself for not seeing it immediately.

My mistake has been trying to conceive the film as a love story with the Carnival of Life in the background. With Velva as the leading lady that has to be pure bullshit, and besides the whole deal is set up to push the festival itself into the foreground. So why not turn it around and use the love story simply as a vehicle for doing a disguised documentary oh Beck’s rock festival? Why not try to transcend the format I’m stuck with instead of trying to fight it?

It’s what Beck really wants, and if I play it right, I can shoot around Velva and make the Carnival of Life the real star. A quarter of a million people reacting en masse—there’s bound to be a film in that!

Yeah, and it was called
Woodstock
, a dirty bird whispered in his ear. Or
Gimme Shelter
if you’re not so lucky.

But why does this rock festival have to turn out like either Woodstock or Altamont? Why can’t we set up a unique environment that will generate a rock festival unlike any other rock festival, footage unlike any other rock festival footage?

For the first time since he came to the Eden lot, Paul felt creative energy humming beneath the surface of his psyche waiting to be tapped. He didn’t quite have the handle yet; but he knew it was there, and he knew he was about to grab it. Because now he had reduced the problem to something he could deal with: how to turn the Carnival of Life into a unique event that would make a unique film. In a curious way, the creative situation was analogous to that of
Down Under the Ground.
There the New York subway system had been the real star and his “story” a way of leading his camera through this fascinating reality. Here there was the further challenge (and potential advantage!) of creating a fascinating reality from scratch.

And Beck is an expert in creating unusual environments.

Picking up his phone and pressing the button for his own outer office, he said, “Cindy, set me up a story conference with Jango Beck.”

“A
writer
asking a
producer
for a story conference? Next thing you know, people will be balling
me
for parts. What’s this town coming to?”

“We live in interesting times, Cindy, we live in interesting times.”

“Sit down, Paul, I’ll be right with you as soon as I take care of this asshole,” Jango Beck said, picking up one of the phones on his strange desk. “Look, if you’re going to be too difficult, we can locate elsewhere. Right. I didn’t say that. Of course you’re entitled to something. An arm and a leg is one thing, but you’re asking for both ears and the tail....”