Bruce Wagner - I’m Losing You

Troy acted in college but his real joy was directing. The first thing he did professionally was three Feiffer sketches at a tiny stage on Wilcox. Then, Kopit and krapp’s Last Tape, The Sandbox and Oh Dad, Poor Dad , Murray Schisgal and Small Craft Warnings . Did that almost ten years. While Troy churned them out in Hollywood’s Little Theater ghetto, Richard was busy making a comeback in Down and Out in Beverly Hills .

It was nineteen eighty-eight and Troy was getting bupkus for a community-funded production of Guys and Dolls . Toward the end of the run, one of the male dancers told him a “film” he was acting in on the weekend had lost its director — would he be interested? What kind of film? A student thing? Not exactly. There was nudity. Oh. I see. Troy knew a bit about cameras — and there was a thousand dollars in it. He needed the money. But more than that, Troy reasoned, he needed experience , to know what it felt like to “carve up space” with a camera. What difference did it make what he was shooting? He’d been trying to break into film directing for years; if this was how it was going to be, he’d just let it ride. Everyone had different points of entry, pardon the pun — that Troy Capra’s was X-rated would become a famous factoid, a talk show anecdote and nothing more.

At curtain, they went backstage to find the producer, an old friend. Troy used a pseudonym in the adult world; none of his former colleagues really knew what he’d been up to all these years. When he did run into them, he painted a vague, glamorous portrait of himself as diehard vanguardist, peripatetic artist-in-and-out-of-residence, the kind who directed Uncle Vanya in a Bronx crack house or accompanied Susan Sontag to Bosnia to “put on a show.” Kiv drew in excited drafts of backstage musk, at home with the gypsies. As the couple rubbed past players from tonight’s drama, Troy nodded to each like a priest to his flock. The actors — needy, optimistic children that they were — could only hope he truly was a Higher Power.

Familiar laughter emanated from one of the dressing rooms. Poking a head in, Troy discovered his old acquaintance — and the paroxysmal Richard Dreyfuss himself, gulping with psychotic hilarity. The visitor was embraced, and introductions, including the radiant Kiv Giraux’s, made all around. Richard had an open, vibrant charm, unlike other celebrities Troy had met. He was very much there , genuine and unguarded, charismatically earnest; one got the sense he’d bare his soul to a stranger, particularly one met in the homey ministry of Theater. He made eye contact with everyone — maybe that was a seduction, a trick of largesse learned long ago — but Troy chose not to be cynical. At least part of Richard was “performing” for Kiv, and that was only natural since she was the only woman in the room, and stunning. Even so, the actor always struck him as the sort who needed to seduce the men and win them over before polishing off assorted wives and lovers.

When the producer was called from the room, Troy and Kiv had the actor to themselves. Richard talked shop and generally effused in his high-voltage way while Troy’s heart pounded, waiting for the best moment to insert the business of their alumnihood. He finally ventured how they’d almost been classmates and the two men bandied old teachers’ names, resurrecting a few campus scandals. Kiv asked what he was working on, “currently.” Richard said he was preparing for Medea , in La Jolla—“Des” was coming back to mount the six-week run, which they might do as a film, with “Des” directing. When Richard asked what he did, Troy said he directed too. The star nodded respectfully, without further inquiry — no need. Backstage, all were brethren.

At Planet Hollywood, Troy was solemn. Kiv talked about Close Encounters being her favorite film and how blown away she was to have met him. How funny he was. She fantasized Richard would become their new best friend, that he was the sort of person who’d be eager to help their careers — help Troy direct a movie, anyway — especially since they went to school together. How he was someone who was naturally simpatico because he’d had so many highs and lows himself. Troy let her talk while David Caruso posed for pictures with the tourists. What a hellhole.

On the drive back to Studio City, her hands were all over him but Troy felt far away. When they got home, Kiv pulled him to the bedroom but he was like a stone. He watched her with the dildo, then wandered out the sliding glass door to the redwood balcony. It was drizzling and the Valley glistened and blinked like a rhinestone cape, from the black MCA building to the Sepulveda Dam. In five years, he would be fifty. He had sixteen thousand in savings and was around forty in debt. No filmography to speak of, no fans, critics, flack, manager, agent or life. There was only one option and it came to him like a pop epiphany: he would write and star in a one-man show. The piece would be called Adventures in the Skin Trade (he was sure Dylan Thomas wouldn’t mind) and Troy would lay it bare — the obscenity of his failed ambitions, the dead end that had become his life — filming the whole carefully scripted catharsis onstage. Then he’d arrange a meeting with Richard to tell him the truth, what kind of director he really was, a bona fide pornographer, before handing the startled movie star the fresh, revelatory cassette. Who knew what might happen? Troy had the feeling this was just the kind of dark thing the actor sparked to. Maybe Richard’s production company would climb aboard for distribution. Troy could remember Swimming to Cambodia , so threadbare, so nothing , made on less than a shoestring. Ditto Bogosian.

A sense of fate and purpose invigorated him. The smell of wood burning in the crisp air shook him down deep: an old, arcane melancholia. He thought to himself, I will get out alive .

Troy wandered back to the bedroom and stood in the door, watching Kiv’s frenetic hands ride the humming thing that snaked inside her — for an instant, she seemed like a crazed Great Mother assiduously following the devil’s pronouncement: for each thousand thrusts, a child will be saved . He slid the door shut behind him.

Bernie Ribkin

Bernie sat in his weensy Hollywood office, staring idly at the latest Range Rover repair printout.

The bungalows were filled with kids (music-video production companies) but the rent was cheap. The girls had tattoos and rings through their tummies — through their friggin eyebrows —and Jabba said you-know-where else. Maybe he should get one, Bernie thought, right through the nose, like a fuhcocktuh bull. Why not? At seventy, he felt like a gangbanger. He still wanted to mix it up, leave his mark, make people notice. Do not go gentile into that good night.

But Jesus H, if you weren’t in the Club, you could forget about it. The studios were spending eighty, ninety, a hundred million a picture like nothing, and that was before P & A. He remembered a story in People : “The shoot was agonizing. Though he was earning fourteen million dollars and living in an eighteen-hundred-a-night oceanside bungalow, Costner looked, says one extra, ‘like he needed a hug.’” Somebody give me a friggin hug like that. But these men weren’t dumb. They had their formulas. They had their New World Order MBAs with their scorched-earth policies — a show that did fifty million in the States could do another hundred and fifty in Europe. He saw the full-page ads in the trades, trumpeting unimaginable grosses for movies he’d never even heard of. Europe! Europe! Europe! Were they talking about the same Europe? Because his Europe, the Ribkin Europe, was dry as a zombie’s ass. All he wanted was three — three million lousy dollars — but how the hell could he step up to the plate? He’d have better luck pinning a murder on O.J. If only he knew somebody…with his son a honcho at ICM, no less! A Senior Veepee who hated his guts! That made him crazy. But that’s life, like Sinatra said.