Dan Wakefield - Selling Out - A Novel

To live?

“Two hours to what?” Perry asked, using all his powers of concentration to frame the question.

“To get to Larman Kling’s office.”

“Who’s he?”

“ Sweetheart . Larman Kling did Planet Zero , and his latest is Schtick , which happens to be outgrossing everything this week at the box office. He’s hot right now.”

No wonder the urgency. No wonder Perry had to get to this guy’s office by five o’clock. He was hot right now . By nightfall he might be cold again. The only question was why anyone who was hot was interested in seeing him .

“What’s it about?” Perry asked suspiciously.

“A project he thinks is ideal for you! He was gaga about ‘First Year.’ Went bananas when I told him I represented you.”

“What’s the project?”

“Darling, go find out! And hurry, I don’t want you turning up a minute late to this meeting and you’ve got to get to Century City. Ciao .”

Perry hung up the phone and started taking off his clothes, dropping them on the floor, leaving a trail as he headed for the shower. He switched on the cold water and made the mistake then of going to take a look at himself in the mirror.

He was old.

Maybe the shower would make him new. That and a handful of aspirins were his principal hope.

Larman Kling was not like the cool, sophisticated brand of independent producer whom Perry had so much admired in his initial round of meetings. Nor was he one of the meatball-chomping Neanderthal types. In fact he was not like anyone or anything Perry had encountered before, in Hollywood or elsewhere.

“Sha- boom , sha- boom , sha- boom , sha- boom ,” Kling chanted as he clapped his hands in rhythm to his words while he stalked (frenetically) back and forth through his office.

“It’s the pace , the pace , the pace; that’s the key to this story,” Kling explained, rubbing his scalp with his knuckles so hard it made him squint. Perhaps that was the source of some interior electric body current that caused his reddish hair to frizz out as that of a cartoon character who has just stuck his finger in a live socket. He was wearing basketball shorts, sandals, and a T-shirt with a large red bug stenciled on it that served as the symbol of one of his hit horror movies. He suddenly wheeled and pointed a finger at Perry.

“Can you get it? Can you hear it? Can you do it?”

“The story, you mean?” Perry asked.

“The pace!”

“Well, I think so, sure.”

“Let’s hear it, then!”

He beckoned to Perry, motioning his head as if trying to coax the right answer out of a thickheaded student.

“Sha-boom?” Perry said, hesitantly.

“Let’s hear it!”

Perry cleared his throat.

“Sha- boom , sha- boom , sha- boom , sha- boom ,” he chanted, as Larman cocked an ear and listened, tapping his foot and nodding. Soon he began to smile and join in, pacing and clapping and chanting his “sha-booms” along with Perry’s, stepping over and around the water beds and mattresses that composed the only furniture of his spacious office. The place looked like a wholesale bedding showroom, but instead of being located in an old warehouse, it was here in this long glass-walled penthouse at the top of one of the towering futuristic office buildings of Century City, on, appropriately enough, the Avenue of the Stars.

Perry’s head was still pounding from his excesses of the night before; fighting the effects of booze and cocaine with aspirins was like trying to defend against ICBMs with blasts from a BB gun. Each “sha-boom” he uttered was like a nail driven into his brain; still, he pressed on, wanting to please the eccentric producer, wanting to have a shot at the job. He didn’t even know what the story was yet, only what the “pace” was supposed to be, yet that was not the most important factor.

The most important factor was that Perry was broke. This assignment, if he got it, could save the day. The going rate for a feature was a hundred grand. That would bail him out and give him enough to get through the next six months, after taxes—at least he hoped so, he wasn’t sure any more. At any rate it was the best hope he had of saving his dire financial situation. Of course, he still had his integrity, and he wasn’t going to take on the job if it was something about giant bugs terrorizing a small town in Oklahoma. He knew it was no such thing, of course, or Kling would never have sought him out for the work. Perry was known as a “people writer,” that is, a writer who only did stories about ordinary, law-abiding citizens, plagued by the familiar problems of daily life in the 1980s, rather than by invasions from outer space, or the Brontosaurus That Ate the Bronx.

Thankfully, Kling stopped chanting, nodded his approval, began scratching his head again, and, locking his hands behind his back, began to pace the room while he recounted the plot of the movie he wanted to make. He reminded Perry of Harpo Marx with a voice.

“The power is the power is the power,” he said, launching into his story. Kling seemed to suffer from some sort of compulsion to repeat almost everything he said at least three times, a practice that, instead of making things more clear, made them incredibly more difficult to follow. As best Perry could tell, the story was about an ordinary American family who discovers its seemingly ordinary pet possesses psychic powers, and, when the six-year-old son teams to interpret the dog’s insights, discovers that the next-door neighbors are part of an international narcotics ring. The story was an original idea of Kling himself, and he had already commissioned a script by a veteran Hollywood screenwriter, but was disappointed. In other words, this potential job was a rewrite.

“I don’t even know if I can rewrite someone else’s material,” Perry said.

“The point, the point, the point,” said Kling, wagging his head with enthusiasm, “is I don’t want a literal rewrite, I want you to read this script and then put it out of your mind, throw it away, stow it, shove it, and create your own powerful interpretation of the story.”

“I’ve never done anything on that—uh, well, on psychic subjects,” Perry said. “Why would you ask me to try? I mean, I appreciate it, but I would think you’d prefer someone who knows the genre.”

“You’re fresh, fresh, fresh, so fresh!” said Kling. “That’s what I want, the fresh I saw in your TV show, and out of that will come the power.”

“Well, I’ll certainly think it over,” Perry said.

Kling pressed a copy of the script on him, and then, evidently exhausted, went to lie down on a mattress in a corner of the room. Perry took that as his cue and left, hurrying out to the first bar he spotted in the big Century City complex.

After he had a Mexican beer he called Ravenna.

“Not only is the story crazy,” Perry complained, “this Larman Kling is some kind of madman. I mean, I’m talking goofball .”

“Darling,” Ravenna said, “he gets pictures made. Now read the script and think it over. If you do this, it will not only solve your cash flow problem, it will mean you’ve broken into features.”

It was true. It didn’t matter if you wrote a script of the worst movie ever made, it only counted that you’d written a feature that got produced, released, and distributed. Perry had found out that this was the secret of Cyril Heathrow’s success. He had once had one script produced, and since then was consistently paid sums in the $250,000 range for turning out other scripts, even though no others had been filmed.