William Gibson - Distrust That Particular Flavor

Not to say that I wasn’t happier at the Marmont, once I discovered the place. My home away from home. Glitz-free. Patient to a fault, the Marmont. A place proud of its Bohemian heritage.

A place to sit up late at night, rereading whatever current draft, so curiously indistinguishable from the last, while pondering what it might be, exactly, that one does in order to make this strange thing, a movie, happen? And they do happen, movies, because through the window, past the palms and the shadow of the Marlboro Man, you can see the billboards down Sunset, the ones announcing all the new films. Yes, but movies are quite impossible to make. Utterly. It cannot be done. And yet. And yet…. So that life, or anyway the segments of it concerned with trying to make this movie, becomes a sort of Kafka loop, but Kafka as done by the Fox Network, say. So that you go away. Go home. Back to the world. But eventually it tugs you back yet again, as if on a bungee made of prepaid first-class air tickets and something that starts to feel, well, fairly deeply compulsive — yes, even a mania of sorts…. To cut the Kafka-loop bits short, what initially sounds like yes, but — no no no no no begins to sound like yes, of course, but no no no no, and, well, yes — except of course when we mean no.

When it’s virtually all yes, you find several million dollars at your project’s disposal (though quite amazingly useless, you discover, and which, anyway, under no circumstances whatever, including any eventual making of the film, will ever belong to you) but the rare no really means it, and while that no is there, some eldritch entity in Dimension Zed, be it a faceless Bahamian banker, her cousin the Parisian tax lawyer, an Alaskan accountant, or Herr Virek in his designer cancer-vat in Neo Zurich (and believe me, you’ll never know) will not sign the check you need to secure “the talent”—i.e., “name” actors — without whom you cannot make this movie. And it goes on like that. And, well, on.

So that, sadly, when at last you are flushed through that very final membrane, you scarcely even know it. You are, in some odd and I suppose merciful way, past caring. It’s all very odd. You’re kind of like one of those hapless yet endearingly tough-talking personality-constructs in a William Gibson novel. The part of you that is most nearly human has come to inhabit certain interstices in a piece of software called “scriptor.” You have started to experience everything in terms of Scriptor’s “Work” menu. When you enter a room, you feel a momentary anxiety: Should this be under “scene” heading, or “action”? You aren’t sure, so you say something, really anything, to the first person you see, because that will definitely be under “dialog.” You have been working fourteen-hour days, six-day weeks, for the past two months. Your family, when they see you, look at you oddly. You dream of having a personal assistant. Someone to handle all the little things, like relating to your children and brushing your teeth. You experience moments of terrible lucidity, in which you see how deeply and cosmically silly this whole experience has gotten to be. Meanwhile, your friend who wants to be a director has relocated to Toronto, where the “film”—you’ve taken to thinking of it in quotation marks — is supposedly to be shot. He has taken his pregnant wife, their two children from a previous marriage, into the bitterest, most nightmarish winter in Canadian history. And he has already spent literally millions of somebody’s dollars on…. something. You aren’t quite sure what. And the check has not been signed. Not quite. No.

And then they sign it. And the director — and now he is the director — begins to shoot. Things begin to move at a really frantic pace. Because now there is the relentless logic of fitting a hundred and five suddenly very intricate pages of story into only fifty-six days of shooting. Meanwhile the talent has been signed as well. Actors have arrived to inhabit these creatures of your imagination. It’s all very strange. Deeply strange. People with walkie-talkies. Cars and drivers. Catering vans. The leading lady is off behind the Beijing Hotel set, teaching herself to peg ninja-spikes into a sheet of Styrofoam. People from the Smoke-Wafters Union are wafting prop smoke into the back room of the Drome bar. Things are beginning to move. It’s happening.

The actor who plays Yomomma, the transsexual bodyguard, asks you if his character has a penis. You tell him quite frankly that nobody knows except Pretty, his girlfriend. Who else, after all, would dare to ask? He seems to like that.

Then you go away, and you talk about all this too much, boring your family, your friends, with your monotonous obsession. You show them the photographs you’ve taken. They shrug. You make an effort to behave normally. It doesn’t work. You’re not sure what to do. So you go back to Toronto to look at the Beijing Hotel suite again — and it’s gone forever, dismantled. As is the back room of the Drome bar.

You find all that’s left of the hotel suite — a filthy stretch of carpeting and a shredded fake Philippe Starck chair — in an even bigger building out in the suburban industrial belt. An address on Industry Street, a disused transformer factory. Someone’s painted “pcb’s ‘r’ us” over the door to the soundstage. Here the director and the production designer have caused to be constructed the mother of all garbage constructs, something really huge, big gomi , like a section of the bridge in Virtual Light , a demented, heartbreakingly lyrical, 3D collage of cargo containers, dumpsters, an Airstream trailer, a cabin cruiser, a school bus. And you walk out on it, into it, as strange winds of time and art and possibility blow through you, and you remember reading the City of Interzone section in Naked Lunch when you were fourteen years old, for the very first time. And this is it. And you aren’t crying, but you know that it’s very possible you might….

And then, then suddenly, it all reverses itself, swings around, back into the real world and you know that it will never be that for you again, be real or almost, but that’s okay. You were there, finally, if only for a very fleeting instant, and now you can actually go back to the real world and talk to your own children and maybe even brush your own teeth.

You don’t have to do this anymore.

(Except that there’s something called “post production,” and they haven’t really told you about that yet.)

My innocence, at the time writing the above, ignorant not only of post-production but of many other things, was actually quite complete. I had, mercifully, absolutely no idea. I’m very glad of having written this, though, as it serves today to remind me that the process was not without its own very peculiar pleasures.

THE FIRST INTIMATIONS of the cyborg, for me, were the robots in a 1940 Republic serial called The Mysterious Dr. Satan . These robots had been recycled from the earlier Undersea Kingdom , 1936, and would appear again in the brilliantly titled Zombies of the Stratosphere , 1952. I have those dates and titles not because I’m any sort of expert on Republic serials, or even on science fiction in general, but because I’ve bookmarked Google. But we’ll get back to Google later.