Daniel Price - Slick

“You’re still an ass,” she said, getting out. “Get your car fixed.”

“Have fun exploiting the carnage.”

With a half-smile, she entered the hotel. It was 11:30. Over the past two days, I’d gotten a total of five hours sleep. And yet I felt fine. I was content.

________________

At 12:15, I reached Marina del Rey, where Ira greeted me from the dock of his floating home and sanctum. He looked like a proud slob in his untucked button-down shirt and black jeans. He carried a huge binder filled with data. He wasn’t big on self-maintenance, but he always kept his numbers pretty.

“Don’t even tell me to change,” he said without greeting me. “If this guy’s going to write me off just because he doesn’t like my wardrobe—”

“Relax. He wont care. He’ll just think you’re too brilliant to be stylish.”

“I don’t even know why I have to go.”

“Because it’s your project. I’m just helping you sell it.”

He locked up the yacht. The Ishtar was a 1984 Gibson Executive, fifty feet long. Fiberglass hull. Flush-mounted exterior deck and 385 square feet of living space, including full galley, salon, and two tiny state rooms. He had bought it two years before, for seventy five thousand dollars. The seller claimed to have purchased it straight from Warren Beatty, who apparently had a sense of humor about his previous flops.

I checked the story. It was crap. Warren may have a self-effacing wit, but he was never a yachtsman. Ira didn’t care. He just wanted respite from loud neighbors and evil landlords. He went through apartments like he went through jobs.

Half an hour later, we arrived at Lulu’s, a casual eatery on Beverly Boulevard. We had a lunch date with Keith Ullman. He was extremely late, of course. In Los Angeles, tardiness was treated as a sign of status and chic. Not only was it standard not to offer an explanation, it was considered rude to ask. I reminded Ira several times to hold his tongue when Keith finally did arrive.

“So what’s the name of this thing again?” he asked after fifteen minutes of idle banter.

“Move My Cheese,” I replied, sending Keith into a fit of puzzled laughter. He was a stylish, silver-haired player, part of Hollywood’s old guard. He held a diploma from the Robert Evans school of name-dropping. His favorite story, told ad nauseam, was how he had personally led Universal’s effort to make Jaws the first summer blockbuster to premiere nationwide. Oh, he met resistance from every one, especially Dick Zanuck, blah blah blah. There was simply no way to turn off his audio commentary.

As a silent partner in this burgeoning venture, I had advised Ira to act interested and to never ever disparage Spielberg in front of Keith. They were landsmen and (according to Keith) good friends. Ira, however, had harbored a mad-on for Spielberg ever since Jeff Goldblum’s offensively simplistic and incorrect portrayal of a chaotician in Jurassic Park . Whatever. All I cared about was selling Keith on Move My Cheese, a virtual paradigm that could revolutionize the movie industry. And that wasn’t just hype.

“Explain to me again how it works,” said Keith, through a mouthful of Chinese chicken salad.

Ira looked to me. His explanation usually caused massive bleeding from the ears.

“It’s simple data-fusion software,” I told him. “You plug all your movies in to a calendar. All your competitor’s movies. You add the number of screens, and presto. The Cheese chews it up and spits out the projected box-office totals for everything.”

Of course, it wasn’t really that simple. Keith was understandably skeptical. “Come on…”

“We’ve been testing it for fifteen months now. It has eighty-two percent accuracy in predicting first-weekend grosses, and seventy one percent accuracy for final domestic.”

“But not international,” said Keith.

“No,” said Ira, annoyed. “It doesn’t give you a blow job either.”

Keith laughed, assuming the joke was inclusive. “Then what the hell am I doing here?”

I opened Ira’s binder to an earmarked page. “Look, while everyone predicted that X-Men would open between twenty-eight and thirty-one million, our forecast said fifty-four-point-five. It opened at fifty-five point-one. Was it exact? No. But compared to everyone else, that’s like throwing a key in the keyhole.”

“But how can you be sure?”

“We’re only eighty-two percent sure,” I stressed. “But that’s still more than the NRG can give you.”

The National Research Group, the child of a Dutch media conglomerate, was the current prognosticator of choice for all the major studios. Their methods were ridiculously archaic. Three times a week they phoned a sample of four hundred people and bothered them with intrusive questions: How old are you? What’s your skin color? What’s your income? Have you heard of Battlefield: Earth ? Okay. Do you think you’re, um, planning on seeing it in theaters? Why not?

What the pollsters who steer this country don’t want you to know is that phone surveys, by their very nature, suck. They rely on the feedback of two kinds of people: those who enjoy talking to telemarketers and those who enjoy lying to telemarketers. Neither group speaks well for the rest of us. To give the NRG credit, their system was created solely to measure audience awareness of upcoming films. But the studio suits, nervous about where to blow their last-minute ad budget, began using those four hundred participants/liars to project box-office numbers. The results were usually in the ballpark, if you include the parking lot, but the methods were piss poor when it came to predicting the tastes of kids, genre nerds, and African Americans.

For each future release, Move My Cheese employed over two hundred different variables, everything from box-office grosses of all the actors previous works to the number of cleavage shots used in trailers. But the real genius was in the calendar program, which factored in considerations like holiday trends, TV schedules, even local weather patterns. It retrieved much of this information off the Internet, automatically adjusting its math to fit vicissitudes. The NRG was a crude Magic 8-ball. The Cheese was just magic.

Of course it wasn’t without problems. For starters, there was an extraordinary amount of data entry involved, not to mention educational guesswork. In the hands of Ira, it was a precise instrument. In the hands of a sloppy marketing intern, it would be no better than tea leaves. It would require at least two weeks for Ira to train the MGM staff to properly use his Ouija. That part worried me the most. The software, like Ira, was user-hostile.

Still, the numbers were hard to ignore. Keith was so impressed that he was willing to pay seventy-five hundred dollars for a trial run. Our meeting was officially a success, and my part in the project was over for now.

We threw in fifteen more minutes of obligatory shop talk, then I paid for lunch. As the three of us left the restaurant, Keith took my arm.

“Listen, Scott, do you have time to take a ride with me?”

“Sure. You want to drop me off in Marina del Rey?”

“No problem.”

I gave Ira the keys to my car and told him I’d meet him at the Ishtar . Although I didn’t show it, I was excited. Keith wouldn’t have taken me aside like this if he didn’t have PR work for me. And since his wife, Hayley, was a vice president at my old firm, Tate & Associates, that meant the work was too covert for them. I loved covert projects. They always paid big, always under the table. And as ominous as they sounded, most of them were actually nice and simple. Drama-free.

________________

“This goddamn school shooting,” he muttered, tapping his cigarette out the window of his BMW Z8. “I thank my lucky stars that it’s more rap-related than film-related. But it’s still gonna hurt Hannibal when it opens next Friday. The movie’s not exactly an after-school special. If you read the book, you know.”