Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall (31 page)

‘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.

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.

I sat waiting on the polyps – yet felt no discomfort. This was the Zoloft of interiors. Lynton made an entrance at the back of the open plan: he was wearing plain black shoes, grey trousers with a light check, a subdued and striped blue shirt. He had the lean, dark expressive good looks of the younger De Niro. His hand, when it shook my paw, was cool and beautifully manicured.

‘So,’ he said, ‘you walked here, is that right?’

I admitted this was the case.

‘Any particular reason?’

We sat down behind our palisades of sharp knees and the tea arrived. I gave him my spiel: how walking was the least filmic possible way of travelling, while Los Angeles was the most filmed location. I told him that I suspected that the movies were waning as the dominant cultural discourse of our era, and that this seemed the easiest way of gaining entrance to such a labyrinthine subject ... I left out the stuff about the murder, the fugues I experienced after drinking Powerade, and the fact that he himself was in the frame. Despite these cuts Lynton still seemed engaged and when I finished – as if to season his shoulders – he shook his lightly pepper-and-salted coif and said:

‘Oh, I thought you’d come to make a pitch.’

I was momentarily dumfounded, and my mind laboured through the possible permutations: I was Thewlis, I was Postlethwaite – he was De Niro, and had done the decent thing with the mole.

‘No, really,’ I said, recovering myself, ‘I was simply interested in your take on all this; after all, here we are in the Thalberg Building, while you, I suppose, are the closest thing to a contemporary mogul.’

He smiled self-deprecatingly. ‘Maybe, but in many ways I agree with you: the wow effect
has
gone from the movies – the wow effect and a certain degree of social relevance. By the way,’ he said abruptly, ‘I heard you were on the set at Pinewood.’ I sat looking bemused, and he pressed: ‘
Quantum of Solace
?’

‘Well, uh, yeah – I did stop by.’

The masterful brushwork of exploding petrol, the Wagnerian curtain of roaring flame, the koi for sale from the bungalow ... How much did he know about Scoobert?

‘A difficult shoot,’ he continued conversationally. ‘I heard Dan Craig sliced his fingertip off on the last day.’

This must be some kind of code
. ‘Um, yup, I heard there’d been a couple of ... accidents.’

‘Well,’ De Niro said, ‘this is this.’ Then he continued his discursive remarks on the state of the industry, animadverting on counter-programming,
Made of Honor
, budgetary constraints, spring-versus-fall release dates, the threat of SAG industrial action – I mimed taking notes. What seemed to exercise him the most was the advent of PVRs: ‘In the seventies there were maybe sixty or seventy movies released a year – now it’s four hundred. If we want to get people into the multiplexes we have to focus our big TV advertising on the weekend before release, but now, well, if they skip the ads ...’

His hand tensing, De Niro pinched the insinuation between his thumb and forefinger: this infinitesimal wilfulness had killed the movies; like participants in a perverse psychological experiment, encouraged to administer electric shocks to actors playing guinea pigs, the public had demonstrated that their empathy went no further than their own fingertips.

I must have been making the right kind of grunts – good enough for him to keep talking. Yes, he himself admired most the era of
The Deer Hunter, Platoon
and
The China Syndrome
– movies that minded the gap between social relevance and commercial success; but, while times may’ve changed, the movies still had a role. What about motion-capture and CGI? Well, the bar kept getting raised; Bob Zemeckis’s
Beowulf
had showed the way: a new generation of 3-D was coming, I’d soon find out about
that
.

He stood, and I rose up into that lovely hand-job: his was firm and dry, mine limp and clammy.

‘Relevance,’ Lynton said, ‘that’s the key word.’

‘Listen.’ I hung on to his fingered thing long beyond the socially prescribed time. ‘I do want to make a pitch: one of my therapists back in London – a guy called Shiva Mukti – he’s making these films of his schizophrenic and bipolar patients during their flamboyant phases – you know the kind of thing, whirling their arms like copter blades, trying to claw the transmitters from their foreheads – then when they’ve calmed down he shows them what it looked like. You see, the biggest problem with these guys is that they can’t accept how crazy they get if they don’t take their medication – obviously the whole thing is done with their consent.’ I laughed, in such a way, I hoped, as to imply that anything else would be deeply unethical – unfortunately all that emerged was a horsey lip-fart. ‘But the thing is you here in Hollywood are doing the same thing on a massive scale and without anyone’s consent. I mean, tell me I’m wrong, but what are these car-crushing beasts, these shape-shifting chimeras, these liquid buildings and this solid air, if not the death-ray projections of our own unfettered Ids?’ Tiny beads of my spittle jewelled the luxuriant chest hair in the V of his open-necked shirt. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ I cantered on, ‘I
approve
of this, I think humanity needs to be told to take its medication – I just think it should be done with more conviction and greater artistry. I think everyone leaving the theatre – whether in Des Moines or Dubai – should understand the magical significance of the number of footsteps it takes them to cross the foyer, should believe the voiceover telling them what to do with the knives when ... they get home ...’

‘Great.’ He released my hand. ‘It’s been great talking with you, and I’m glad we understand each other so well.’

I had reached the outer office when Lynton called after me: ‘By the way, if you’d like to take a walk around the studio while you’re here that’ll be fine. I’m afraid we aren’t actually shooting anything today but it’s still worth a look.’

We did indeed understand each other – he had blown my cover and granted me temporary sanctuary at the same time: I would be safe at Sony. I thanked him and turned to leave.

‘Bye, Pete,’ Lynton called.

‘Goodbye, Mr Postlethwaite,’ his secretary echoed. ‘And, by the way’ – she made the usual moue – ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying it, but I loved you in
Dinotopia
.’