Passing Through the Flame (33 page)

Beck continued to talk into the phone, giving Paul a chance to acclimate himself to the strange office, with its big picture window overlooking the lowland smog, huge circular water bed in the center of attention dozens of small lamps, and walls and carpeting of bright primary red, blue, and yellow. It didn’t look or feel like an office or anything else Paul could name. The only item that seemed even remotely like office furniture was the free-form black marble desk behind which Beck sat in his chromed half-egg chair. But the control console and phones made it seem more like a space pilot’s seat out of a science-fiction movie than an executive’s desk.

In fact, that was what the whole room reminded him of—a set from a science-fiction movie. The red-and-gold high-collared tunic that Beck wore, and the rich orangish, almost Martian light of the waning sun that poured in through the picture window completed the other-worldly effect.

“...next week, but from here on in, you’d better deal with Mike Taub. That’s right. Okay. So long.”

Paul sat down on a pale-lemon couch in front of the desk as Beck put down his phone. “Now let me just make sure I’ve got this right.” Beck said. “You, the writer and director, have asked me, the producer, for a story conference?”

“You could say that,” Paul said. “Or you could say that I, the director, have asked you, the set designer, for a conference.”

“Set designer? Who said I was a set designer? Besides, you don’t have a script yet. Isn’t it awfully early to be talking about sets?” Paul took a deep breath and decided to come up-front with it; it was stupid to try to play elaborate games with Jango Beck. “It’s about the Carnival of Life,” he said. “The festival. I’d like to discuss what it’s going to be like.”

Beck’s face hardened. “I don’t interfere with your set, and you don’t interfere with my rock festival,” he said. “I was under the impression you understood that.”

“But your rock festival
is
my major set.”

Paul had expected some protest from Beck at this point, a hassle. But Beck’s expression became totally neutral, his dark eyes putting out nothing but hard vacuum. Paul suddenly felt that he wasn’t confronting a producer whose turf he was attempting to intrude upon but some opaque unknown.

“I’m listening,” Beck said neutrally. There was power in the very noncommittal tone of his voice, the power of a hole card being held tight to the vest. At the same time, Paul felt a genuine interest emanating from him, a craftsmanlike willingness to learn something. At this strangest of moments, he found himself actually
liking
Jango Beck, and that very affection filled him with a sense of his own power and confidence.

“Look, Jango,” he said. “I’m not arguing about your right to control casting. But I’ve got to work with what you give me. And what you’ve given me is a leading lady who couldn’t act her way out of a parking ticket, a basic love story, the Carnival of Life, and... have you got a leading man yet?”

Beck shook his head. “I’m mulling over a few possibilities,” he said. “I want to see the script first.”

Then why did you cast
Velva
before you saw a script? Paul wondered. But opening
that can
of worms would sidetrack the issue and probably lead nowhere. “Then I can’t count on a leading man strong enough to carry the film either,” he said. “That leaves the festival itself as the only possible star of the film. It’s got—”

Beck held up the palm of his right hand, picked up a phone with his left. “Yeah. Don’t be uptight. Eden isn’t going to call the pigs. Sure. Don’t worry about Taub. Got the new stuff picked out? Good A new van? No, better get an old one and rebuild the inside, we don’t want something conspicuous. Right. Later.”

Beck hung up the phone. “Go on, Paul,” he said. The sunlight was beginning to fade; Beck diddled with some switches on the console before him, and four soft white lamps came on, shedding just enough light to dispel the shadows.

“I’m having a little trouble with the script,” Paul said. “Obviously, the story has to be some basic variation on boy meets girl, but I’m hung up because that can’t be the core of the movie, it has to be the festival itself. And obviously we can’t do the usual rock festival film even with the love story thrown in, because that’s been done to death. We’ve got to turn the Carnival of Life itself into something unique.”

Jango Beck seemed to snap to full alertness. His black eyes were suddenly glowering with red overtones, and he seemed to loom toward Paul. A rosy haze seemed to descend on Paul’s consciousness as the moment expanded into a nexus of significance. “Suppose you tell me exactly what you had in mind,” Beck said in a tone of ominous neutrality.

Paul panicked for a moment because he didn’t know exactly what he had in mind, didn’t know how to make the festival a unique event. His eyes shifted nervously from focus to focus, and all at once he realized that the red glow in Beck’s eyes, the rosy haze of cosmic significance that had seeped into his consciousness, were the results of three lamps that were glowing dull red. Beck has this damn place lit like a set, and he’s playing with my mind! He’s as full of shit as I am!

Paul suppressed a laugh and began to rap, letting it pour out of him, feeling his own words enlarge his being with a marvelous sense of power. “The festival has to be more than a rock festival. It’s got to be some kind of Aquarian World’s Fair. Exotic, but most of all, it’s got to be visual. If we have that, then a simple love story will work. Velva playing a simple American girl, herself, which is all she’s really capable of, and a male lead who is some kind of exotic, a foreigner or something. And they meet in this phantasmagorical environment for a few days of love that could happen nowhere else, that dies when the transitory reality that spawned it disappears.”

“Not bad,” Beck said.” Love Story crossed with Woodstock out of
Brigadoon.
Real archetypal. But I don’t like the idea of making the male lead a foreigner.”

“Okay, so make him an East Coast intellectual type, and her an All-American girl from the Midwest.”

“A
ballsy
East Coast intellectual type. Norman Mailer, not Truman Capote.”

“He’s a writer for something like
Esquire and
she... she won a trip to the festival in some dumb contest.”

“The intersection of three realities—Midwest Corn, Easter Jade, and Counterculture. Yeah, I like it.”

Jango Beck stared off into space for a moment, playing with some switches on his console. The red lamps dimmed, and blue and yellow ones came on, banishing the heavy atmosphere and making the office seem breezy and cheerful.

“Yeah, yeah, sure it’ll work,” Beck said, smiling at Paul. “I like the way your head works. As usual, my instincts were right. But what about the Carnival of Life? For this to work, it’s really got to dominate the picture, as you say. What’s your concept there?”

“For one thing, I hate the name. It sounds like every other dumb rock festival.”

“Well, it looks like we’re going to use something called the Sunset Ridge Ranch,” Beck said. “We could rename it Sunset something-or-other—depending on just what your concept for the festival is.”

Paul smiled wanly. “I thought you said that was
your
thing, Jango,” he said.

Beck laughed with everything but his eyes. “If there’s one thing I like, it’s a smart-ass,” he said. “Sure, as producer I’m going to handle everything concerned with putting the festival on. But now, you may consider me Jango Beck, set designer, talking to his director. I want to hear your fantasies about this thing, Paul.” Paul leaned back for the first time, feeling cool and easy, riding the crest of surging success. More than that, he felt he was talking to a kindred spirit, a man he could talk freely to as one creator to another. Why is everyone always misjudging Jango? Why am
I
always misjudging him?

“Okay, Jango, the fantasy is basically an Aquarian World’s Fair. The usual round-the-clock performances by rock groups, but also a midway, troops of traveling clowns and entertainers, exhibits, art and craft displays, stunts, maybe circus acts. Tepees and geodesic domes! Body painting! Planes doing aerobatics overhead! Dozens of visual things going on all the time. Of course I’m not too clear on specifics....”

“Don’t worry about specifics,” Beck said. “I told you, I’ll handle all the details. Now that I’ve got the concept, I’ll run with it. I’ve even got a new name. How does Sunset City grab you?”

“An improvement, anyway,” Paul said distractedly, as he began to realize that what he had outlined could cost just about as much as anyone cared to make it cost. “Uh... I realize this is going to make the project a little more expensive....”

“A little more expensive?
Hell, it’ll add at least a million to the budget if we do it right.”

Paul’s heart sank. He’s right, it would run up tremendous costs to do that kind of festival right. “Well, maybe we could think of some other way to—”

“What are you talking about?” Beck exclaimed. “I love it! It’s perfect! You’re a genius!”

“Huh? What? The budget, I mean—”

“The budget? Screw the budget! That kind of crap is for John Horst. I don’t want you cutting corners, Paul. I want you to feel free to do anything you want without having to bother yourself about pinching pennies. I don’t like a mingy attitude. An artist’s creative freedom shouldn’t be fettered by having to think about
cost.
It’s only money, after all, right?”

He gave Paul a conspiratorial smile. “And it’s not even
our
money,” he said.

He picked up a phone. “Yeah, Bruce. I don’t care what the contract says. Look, I have other contracts that—Well I can play dirty, too, as you well know.” Beck put his hand over the mouthpiece for a moment, smiled at Paul, nodded, gave him a good-bye wave. “Bruce, Bruce, don’t force me to dig out old garbage...”

Paul found himself walking out of Jango Beck’s office in possession of an enormous victory, a fantastic prize. I’ve sold him my concept of the festival and the film, and he’s given me the unlimited budget every director drools for. I’ve done it! Or he’s done it...

But what? And why? It all sounds great, but it doesn’t make any sense at all. What’s going on? What’s this project really all about? What’s Jango Beck up to?

Or am I just being a paranoid ingrate, looking a gift horse like this in the mouth?

As he closed the office door behind him, he remembered what Sandra Bayne had said to him out in the reception jungle: “Around here, gift horses have a way of turning into crocodiles.”

Did she know something?

She
had
to know something.

Here he comes, and doesn’t he look strange? Sandra Bayne thought as she stood in the doorway of her office watching Paul Conrad emerge from Jango’s den and walk slowly up the hall toward her. He was wearing green pants, a black turtleneck, and a brown suede jacket, all with the spanking sharpness and rakish cut of a sudden surge of new money. He moved with the confident ease a man could get when Jango’s let him think he’s got the best of him, but there was no smugness on his face, no illusions. I wonder what Jango’s face looks like now. Has this kid—no, this isn’t any kid—actually fought Jango to some kind of real draw?

He saw her standing in the doorway, and he smiled at her. Lots of energy in that smile, and it drew her to it. Not that I’m fighting it, she thought, smiling back with heightened awareness of her body in relation to his. He
does
turn me on.

“Hi,” he said as he reached her doorway.

“Hi. How was your session with Jango?”

He stopped, leaned against the doorframe, and looked at her with his big gray eyes. “I was hoping you could tell me that,” he said. “Come again?”

“Aren’t we getting a little ahead of things?”

“Some of us are slow learners,” Sandra said. It was as good an answer as any to his oblique little pass. Let’s see what the real game is first.

“I think maybe that’s my problem,” Paul said. “I’m finding it a little difficult to figure out what’s really going on around here. I can’t even figure out what just happened.”

“Jango put the screws on you about the script?”

He laughed—a warm, genuine laugh as opposed to a pickup cute Hollywood laugh. “Hell, no, I came here to try to get him to spring for more money to turn the Carnival of Life into a DeMille version of a rock festival, and instead of putting up a fight, he not only agreed to spend a million on the festival, but he
loved the
idea. Not only that, he told me that for all practical purposes, I had an unlimited budget. He told me not to think about cost. Do I have some mysterious power over producers, or is something fishy going on around here?”

By the time he finished he was looking deep into her eyes, almost taking for granted that she would consider truthfulness with him as a higher imperative than loyalty to Jango. “Something fishy’s always going on around here,” she said.

He just doesn’t understand how Jango operates, that Jango doesn’t tell
anyone
more than he considers it useful for us to know. And how much of what we know is true, only Jango knows. Do I tell him that and scare the shit out of him? Or do I play a little game of my own?

“Could I bribe you to rat on your boss somehow?” he said, making it a joke between them with his smile, making it an ambiguous sexual signal, too, and also meaning it quite seriously. This guy is more of a heavyweight than I thought, he really is
directing
, isn’t he? Of course we’re both just taking different paths to the same place. You’re going to spend tonight in my bed, Paul Conrad. Not that you’re coming on like you don’t know it.

“You could take me to dinner tonight, and we could talk about the moon and the stars, and conceivably the subject of Jango Beck might come up.”

He smiled more widely, moved his face into more intimate airspace nearer her eyes. “You talked me into it,” he said. “Miss Bayne, will you have dinner with me tonight?”

“Mr. Conrad, I thought you’d never ask.”

After a little uninspired thought, Paul decided on Cyrano’s for dinner. California restaurants were a mystery to him. In his recent incarnation as a down-and-out porn hack, his budget had limited him to Kalifornia Koffee Shop versions of what in New York were greasy Greek hamburger joints, like Bob’s Big Boy or the Sizzler. Obviously, a $1.99 Sizzler New York Steak Special was not what was called for here. On the other hand, all the accepted “good” restaurants on La Cienega’s “Restaurant Row” were overpriced production numbers, epitomized by the giant Polynesian joint that had its own indoor waterfall and served bad Chinese food made “Polynesian” by the addition of maraschino cherries and canned pineapple. Even now that he could afford places like this, he didn’t feel like taking Sandy Bayne to dinner in a surplus studio set.