Rafael Yglesias - Hot Properties

Garth watched him. Tony was stuck in the middle of his desire to insultingly reject their criticisms and his desire to pleasantly persude them they were wrong. The famous eyes seemed sadistically detached from the emotion in the room. Foxx, at least, looked wary of Tony, slightly scared by the vehemence of his voice. But Garth had a laughing quality in his glance, a gamesman coolly observing an opponent’s desperate attempt to escape an inevitable defeat.

“Then your character has no conflict,” Tony said after a pause, softening his tone. “You simply become someone to whom events happen and, in the end, you won’t be changed by them.”

“My conflict,” Garth said, the emphasis sounding disciplinary, “my conflict is over whether I love Meryl’s character.”

“Meryl would never play this part,” Foxx said bitterly.

Garth glanced at him. “We’ll get to that. Let’s stay—”

“What do you mean?” Tony asked. He was hurt by Foxx’s tone.

“It’s a nothing role.”

“A nothing role!”

Garth interrupted. “I want to stay on my character. My character’s conflict is whether I love her or not.”

“You’re not conflicted over whether you love her,” Tony said, now not bothering to conceal his disdain. “You love her. You’re conflicted over whether you can trust her.”

This silenced Garth. He nodded. Interested. Not at all, apparently, wounded by the way Tony had made his point. “Isn’t that, ultimately, the same thing?” Garth asked.

“No. You can love somebody you don’t trust. That’s a tragedy.”

“Oh, great,” Foxx said to the wall. “Now we’re writing a tragedy!”

“No we’re not! That’s not what I said!” Tony whined like a boy whose parents are teasing him. “If what he wants”— Tony pointed at Garth—“was done, we’d be writing a tragedy!” My God, he thought, slumping back, exhausted, into his chair, now I’ve said it: “we’d be writing.” That’s what this is, all right. A collaboration. They’re writing it with me. Two people who couldn’t compose a witty telephone message.

“It doesn’t work!” Garth said with pleasant enthusiasm. “What you say sounds fine in the abstract but it doesn’t work on paper. It’s unsympathetic.”

“It worked in The Maltese Falcon!” Tony said. Lois had advised him to come up with past movie successes. Arguing by analogy, she said, was common and respected. “The whole relationship between Bogart and Astor is about whether he can trust her. Same thing in North by Northwest. The second half of the film is about whether she is or isn’t a spy.”

Sure enough, these references entranced them. Garth nodded and then peered at his desk. Foxx’s head snapped up, his eyes studying the ceiling as though something had begun to crash through. Tony felt a surge of confidence. He sat up. Do I finish them off? Or, if I push, will they get stubborn and push back just for the hell of it? “Maybe I didn’t execute it well,” Tony said, handing them a token of self-humiliation, “but I think my concept is right. Your character has to once again make the political choice he faced in the sixties, only now it is a woman — Meryl’s character — who has become, if you will, the Vietnam war, the physical embodiment of whether he will have the courage to oppose society and defend what is right.”

“North by Northwest is fun!” Foxx said, suddenly furious. “It’s not some symbolic story about the most depressing war in American history.”

“Oh come on, Jim,” Garth said.

“Come on, what?” Foxx pleaded, his hands spread out, begging Garth. “This project is starting to sound like Apocalypse Now —without the action.”

“No!” Tony said. “It’s a gothic thriller. Like Marathon Man or Three Days of the Condor. They were hits.”

“Exactly!” Garth said to Foxx. “I’m not Cary Grant. And besides, I want to play a real character. I want this picture to have some meat to it. No one’s really done a great picture about the struggles of antiwar activists. Tony’s figured a way to do a contemporary thriller — which makes it commercial — but with a real theme.”

“Well, then, why were you so down about this draft?” Foxx asked. Garth nervously glanced at Tony. “You said—”

Garth cut Foxx off. “I was disappointed in the execution of some things. I always liked the concepts. I think there’s nice stuff here, but Tony needs to work more on the characters.”

“And the action! There’s not enough action!” Foxx almost hopped with annoyance.

“Yes, yes,” Garth said. He looked at Tony, his expression tired and bored. “The chase at the end is no good. It’s full of clichés.”

“Okay,” Tony said, swallowing hard. He felt abashed, a boy who has peed in his pants on the first day of school. He didn’t even know if they were right, but each criticism hurt more and more, as though he were being punched repeatedly in the same spot, right on the already bruised skin. The fact that Garth was actually concealing the extent of his disappointment in the script made it all the more horrifying. Tony had felt the sting of rejection as a writer before. People who felt his work was still young, limited, too cold — usually the complaint was simply that it wasn’t commercial (not Broadway), but never that he was inept, so inadequate that he had to be protected from a truthful opinion.

He listened to their dissection of his chase sequence at the end of the script. Foxx did most of the surgery, heedless of scars or of how thoroughly the patient had been anesthetized. Everything about it was bad, even down to how Tony had formatted the pages. “This reads like prose,” Foxx said with disgust. “You have to give us shots and angles, some kind of pacing, so we can picture it. It’s totally nonvisual.” Garth suggested he read some scripts they had selected for him so he could get an idea of how, as he put it, “a professional screenplay looks.”

He felt his cheeks quiver with shame. They had beaten him at last. Really finished him. He nodded passively, not as a trick, not as a social hypocrisy, but because he felt they were right. He didn’t know what he was doing. He was just a kid after all, someone who had never set foot on a movie set, who had no idea of what any of it entailed. Probably the script was bad. Worse, something that could never be done. An embarrassment.

When they finished. Tony asked, “Are you sure you want me to do this rewrite?”

They both looked startled. “Well, what the hell do you think we’re talking for?” Foxx said. “The fun of it? We expect you to make these changes.”

“No. no,” Tony said. He knew this question revealed how hurt he felt, but he had to know the answer. “Do you have confidence I can do it?”

Foxx stared at him in amazement.

Garth frowned. “Doesn’t matter whether we have confidence, Tony. It matters whether you do,” he said, but sadly, as though having to point this out with another example of Tony’s ignorance.

Later, Tony walked back across the legendary lot, only now its mythic past had dissolved in the face of his present misery. They were only ugly low buildings with an excessive amount of parking space, a McDonald’s of culture, fast food for the mind, where a decision as to whether you wanted your burger medium or rare was irrelevant since they all came out well-done. But even that thought, he realized, was a cliché, a well-worn fact of American life that looked even drabber on him, since he had volunteered to wear the uniform.

Back in the car, he drove slowly, uncertain where to go. He had planned on visiting his mother’s set (Lois would be there) and having lunch with them all. He was expected there, no doubt in triumph, to report that Garth was planning on shooting his script. To admit the truth to them, even to his mother, was beyond imagining. In New York (perhaps), little would be thought of it. He could say blithely, “Oh, the assholes want a lot of stupid changes,” and the result might even reflect well on him. Writing for the movies in New York was almost a sure thing. If you succeeded you were considered clever, if you failed you were considered too refined a talent. In LA, failure had no subtleties. It was just pitied. The answer, of course, was to lie. Behave as though the changes were minor, that Garth and Foxx had been enthusiastic. But to will himself to that deception seemed almost as staggering as to will himself to tell the truth.