Paul Kolsby - Ear to the Ground

“Five hundred. With three stages of rewrites.”

“Come on, Ethan, that’s an assistant’s job.”

“Oh?” Ethan countered. “So it’s an ego thing.”

Ever since Bridge Bridges had been cast in Ear to the Ground, she’d looked forward to meeting him. He was a star, a real movie star, and she loved the way, in films like The First TV Show and Hairless, his sleepy grin and piercing blue eyes lit up the screen. Grace’s anticipation had increased considerably when a friend at New Line confided that Bridge was as nice as he looked. It was for moments like these, Grace thought, that she’d gotten into the movies.

But no, Grace would be collating scripts instead. And not just any script; Ian’s script, the script he had written in this very living room while she was at Tailspin Pictures all day. I’m surrounded by assholes, she thought. The air around her thinned, and she almost couldn’t breathe. She had a vision of a porch swing, a place where the wind rippled the leaves of trees. But the vision had no face. She was watching the scene from here, from this apartment, from this job, from this life. She answered to Ethan, always answered to Ethan, instead of telling him to take his sorry job and shove it up his ass.

That was the last thought Grace had before she went to sleep, and the first thing she thought about when the alarm went off at six-thirty. At seven-oh-five, the phone rang. She decided to let the machine pick it up.

“Hey, Grace,” came Ian’s voice. “Sorry so early, but my e-mail’s down, and these pages need to go in. I’m faxing them over. Could you please input them for me?”

Grace stared gape-mouthed as the phone rang again. A moment later, a monumental length of fax paper spewed onto her floor.

Charlie got up and made coffee, then sat down at his computer and accessed the CES network. Reporters had been around the office like a swarm of bees, so he had begun to spend a lot of time at home. As he’d explained to Caruthers, it didn’t matter where he did his work. And, besides, he had a new idea that, until it was better formed, he wanted to keep out of the public eye.

Charlie had begun to think about epicenters. After China Lake, he studied points of impact, tracing the ways they appeared up and down a fault. He knew there was a pattern to epicenters, and that the location of each temblor would affect other local temblors.

Charlie had tried to explain this to Caruthers at their weekly meeting. “I have an idea about epicenters that might enable us to head this thing off,” he’d said.

“Head it off?” Caruthers looked confused. “You mean so the earthquake wouldn’t happen?”

“It would still happen, but we might be able to deflect the shock, and the city could be spared.”

Caruthers knitted his brow and folded his hands in front of his face. “How?”

Charlie explained his notion of a retro shock, a kind of counter-quake, explosively induced, that could neutralize the Big One.

“You want to create an explosion of nine-point magnitude?”

“Maybe.”

“Are you crazy? Stop wasting your time.”

Charlie knew it wasn’t a waste of time. It was just that bureaucrats like Caruthers never had an ounce of vision. But with only fifty-six days left …

His thoughts were interrupted by the chiming of his doorbell. Who would bother him so early in the day? When he opened the door, he discovered Grace, her eyes sparkling like two diamonds in a pool. She carried orange juice, champagne, and a bag of pastries.

“On your way to work?” Charlie asked.

“I was,” she said, walking inside as the screen slammed shut behind her. “But then I quit my fucking job.”

MOVIES ARE LIKE RAILROAD TRAINS: HEAVY, BULKY, AND difficult to get started. Their locomotives are powered by hundred-dollar bills shoveled into furnaces by worsted-wool work a days at business affairs. A switchmaster sits at every junction, a production executive waiting to pull a lever, to affect the train’s course.

Like the worst cinematic catastrophes, train wrecks are the result of missed communication. Switchmaster error can cause two trains to collide, or send one of them over a cliff. Sometimes the only way to avoid this is to apply the emergency brakes, scraping steel against steel, rods against cylinders, sending sparks into the air. Hence the expression “grinding to a halt.”

Grace Gonglewski quit her job at seven-fifteen on Friday morning, and by seven-thirty, Ear to the Ground had begun to shut down. The process started with Ian, whose pages could not be input, and thus were not turned in. It moved from him to Henny who, without the pages, could not run his actors through the new scenes. Ethan heard about the problem early but, unable to reach Grace, could do nothing about it. Instead, he spent much of the day reassuring Bob Semel, chairman of Warner Brothers, that everything was fine.

There were other difficulties as well: When it came to the train called Ear to the Ground, Grace, more than anyone, had been the driver. Among the engineers, she alone understood the machine. She knew the chain of command because she had created it. And by leaving, she threatened to destroy it.

Ehrich Weiss came from Mannheim to Hollywood in 1977, freshly Ph.D’d in psychology. He was handsome and blond, and possessed a raucous but genuine laugh. Soon, wealthy humorists were diving onto his couch, trying out new material as they investigated their pasts. In front of Ehrich they fell hilariously to pieces, so they invited him to their parties. They gave him small roles in their films. He dated actresses. By 1981, Weiss was known as a hack.

Then he fell ill with cancer, a rare form that targeted his blood without localizing its attack. His chances were slim, the doctors said. “It would be wise,” they advised, “if you’d let us experiment.” So he submitted to a painful process called hydrative therapy. His blood was thickened and thinned, its volume reduced and increased. Chemicals were injected. Readings taken, smears smeared.

From his hospital bed, Ehrich wrote a book entitled Relationships: A Collaboration. And after a month his condition improved. A simple diet and serious work restored him. He went home with his strength and, perhaps more miraculously, his dignity.

He married Hillary Semel, sister of Bob Semel. Soon he became a close friend of the entire Warner Brothers family, and when Martin Long had his legendary tiff with director Jon Lansid, Ehrich was brought in to smooth things over. The men were hugging in less than an hour. Ehrich became Warner’s vice president for psychology in 1991.

Four years later, Grace Gonglewski, Ethan Carson, Ian Marcus, and Henny Rarlin were in Dr. Weiss’s office on the Warner lot, waiting to begin Collaboration Therapy. There was little conversation among them. Instead, there was that element of negotiation where no party wished to spill before another did. It had taken some doing to get them together, and no one wanted to be the first to play his hand. With Ear to the Ground scheduled to begin shooting in twenty-four hours, confusion abounded.

Ethan sat in the first chair by the door, checking his watch every few seconds. He could hardly bring himself to look at Grace. He would have fired her if she hadn’t already quit, and he would never have asked her back if Bob Semel hadn’t demanded her presence on the set. She was a D-girl, for Christ’s sake, and now he had to kowtow to her? We’ll see about that, Ethan thought, and examined his watch again.

Next to him, Ian wondered whether he’d have time to keep his rendezvous with the blonde from the Craft Services truck. There were advantages to being the writer of a blockbuster script, but he’d been working too hard to enjoy them. Now he had to deal with this. He looked over at Henny, but the director just seemed bored.