Paul Kolsby - Ear to the Ground

Everything Ethan had picked up at Harvard he took the wrong way. He became a prick where he might have been an authority, a cutthroat instead of a competitor, snobbish rather than stylish. He’d worked hard and done well, but even his mother didn’t like him. Once she’d brushed the hair from his boyish face and told him she loved him. “What does that mean?” Ethan had queried. “You have to.”

The first time he masturbated he’d used the image of his eighth-grade English teacher, Miss Templeton. But what appealed to him wasn’t the deep curve of her breast underneath those silky Qiana shirts, nor her long legs, which bloomed into a perfect skirt-clad ass. No, his first orgasm was accompanied by the quiet repetition of what he wanted from the deal: “ A ’s and recommendations, A ’s and recommendations …” He derived no pleasure from the present, and had little respect for the past. After college he’d changed his name from Cohen to Carson, because he preferred how it rolled off the tongue.

Grace picked up the telephone at her desk and dialed the writer of the screenplay she had lost. She did her best to woo him to Tailspin Pictures, stating the company’s successes, omitting its failures — raising her skirt verbally, so to speak. The conversation lasted only about ten minutes, but before she hung up, she’d managed to wrangle the script away from Paramount. She then called the writer’s agent, a cold man with a lisp. When he found out she’d spoken directly to his client, he gave her a hard time, but Grace persisted. “I’d lay down on train tracks for this script. The fact is we love it. Ethan just got finished reading it and came in here, crying.”

“Ethan Carson crying? Don’t make me laugh .”

But the agent came around when Grace went ahead and offered another ten thousand. As she hung up, they were even laughing about the latest O. J. Simpson joke.

She took a short stroll on the Warner lot. A feature was shooting in the soundstage around the corner, and she peeked inside a makeup trailer where she watched a young woman suddenly grow old. Grace loved movies because, like life, when you added up all the artifice, you ended up with a kind of reality. Ian could rewrite this particular script, she thought, and might not do a bad job of it. If she brought it up to Ethan at the right moment, he’d be sure to listen.

The worst thing about assholes concerns the vain hope their victims unceasingly maintain, that someday the asshole will smile. In a town of bullshitters and ass-kissers, of fair-weather fans and fly-by-night friends, only the assholes provide a true read. You expect the worst from them because the worst is the standard. And yet, thought Grace, once every blue moon when you do something right, what a reward it is to hear “Good job,” or “Nicely done,” or even “Not bad.”

Such wasn’t the case, today. When Grace peered into Ethan’s office, and told him about her two telephone calls, her boss said to come in and close the door.

“Paramount’s bid kicked out,” he hissed. “Nobody wants that stupid script.” Grace couldn’t even muster the energy to blink. That explains why the writer listened so attentively, she thought, and why the agent was cordial. She decided not to tell him about the extra ten thousand.

“But, Ethan, I bought it! We bought it!”

There was a pause.

“Well, go back to your office, pick up the phone, and un buy it.”

IAN DIDN’T HAVE AN AGENT EXACTLY, BUT HE DID HAVE a go-getter with a lot of energy and a car phone. Michael Lipman was his name, but sometimes he called himself “CC” (for Chutzpah-Chutzpah), and, though he had few legitimate industry concerns, the air of intrigue seemed to surround him.

When they met for the first time at his closet on Hollywood Boulevard, Michael attempted, straight away, to reach Quentin Tarantino over the speaker phone. He got as far as a personal assistant, jabbering with the woman about Pulp and how it saved the cinema, and what characters, what situations, what vision. What an idiot, Ian thought. What an exercise in humiliation. Tarantino? You don’t just call Tarantino.

But then a man’s screechy voice rose from the speaker. “Hiya, Michael,” it said.

“Quentin. You don’t write. You don’t call.” Then he sang: “You don’t send me faxes anymore …”

The conversation lasted a couple of minutes, during which time Ian thought how easy it is to misjudge a guy in this town. When Michael hung up, they both smiled.

Through the wall in an adjacent closet, a young man and woman, aspiring actors both, sat close together at a Salvation Army desk. They laughed heartily when the man hung up the phone, and for a moment it seemed he would kiss her full on the mouth. True, it was only voice work, but they were good mimics, and each time Michael Lipman met with a new client, he provided them with employment. Besides, he paid in cash.

Ian had sent Michael a first draft of his new screenplay, Ear to the Ground. And though CC hadn’t read it, he did look it over for elements ; he liked the earthquake angle, and had begun to work out a wish list of actors, including Sharon Stone and Johnny Depp. The plan was to go wide with it — that is, all over town. Michael was sure this would incite a bidding war. Ian had no problem with that, but he did explain he wanted rewrite work, and that he wasn’t afraid to start at the bottom.

The following Saturday Michael called Ian at Grace’s, which annoyed her a little. What annoyed her a lot was the agent’s desperate attempt to excite Tailspin Pictures about Ear to the Ground. She looked away from Ian when she passed him the phone. “Get to the Café Med on Sunset, five o’clock,” Michael told him.

There Ian met a skinny woman with dirty fingernails, around forty-five, who wore black, chain-smoked, and spoke Italian into a cellular phone. When he approached the table she folded up the apparatus, took his hand, and kissed both his cheeks. “I read your screenplay,” she told him. “And I like very much, earthquakes.”

Penniless, Ian ordered coffee. Who is this lady? Does she have any money? Michael had said she was maybe good for a treatment — a grand, tops. But as the sun set, Ian thought he might charm her into something more. A screenplay, perhaps. Things were pretty tight now; his father had finally cut him off. “Get a job,” he’d said.

“But I’m a writer .”

“And I’m a father, but nobody pays me for it.”

It was hard for the literary artist in the twentieth century, Ian thought. Especially in this town, where screenplays came in waist-high stacks, and bus drivers along Santa Monica Boulevard pitched whole stories between Highland and La Brea. Any night of the week, if you sat at the bar at Chaya or Jones and closed your eyes, you’d hear the word script rolling back and forth across the room, like an auditory lava lamp. Be patient, Ian remembered, always patient. Keep the faith. In Hollywood, anything can happen.

And happen it did. After a couple of hours, a friend of the woman’s arrived and she was breathtaking — a young Italian actress, quite on fire. She claimed she would have been the star of Fellini’s last film, if Fellini had lived, but Ian didn’t believe a word of it. He didn’t have to, though. The waiters hovered and freshened her drinks, offering warm rolls at the flutter of an eyelash. She told a story to the skinny woman in breakneck Italian, and then, full of energy, translated it for Ian.

“I just had my fortune told by a gypsy lady.”