Midnight Movie: A Novel (30 page)

Billy was cool when I called. Said I should come up to his office in the afternoon, and lunch was on him. Like the Irish say, never refuse a free lunch.

Destiny Express
was one of the defining moments of my childhood. Working with Tobe showed me that I could do something … something … something … I don’t know,
interesting
, I guess. It made me believe that I could interact with
everybody
, not just the misfits.

See, I was a misfit, the typical fat kid that you see on corny TV shows. The football players liked to knock all my books out of my hands, and the basketball players enjoyed sticking my head in the toilet and flushing it—I believe the kids these days refer to that as a whirly—and some of the teachers even liked throwing verbal barbs at me. The only person in the whole school who deigned to have anything to do with yours truly was Tobe Hooper.

Despite what Tobe might believe, I didn’t particularly care about film. I pretended to dig the medium because I figured it was the best way to keep him as a pal. I grew to appreciate it, and thanks to him, I understood the difference between good movies and bad ones. But honestly, once we drifted apart, I stopped watching them. I have Netflix now, but I use it almost exclusively for documentaries.

I wasn’t surprised he called during all this Game mess. That’s the kind of mess that’d get even a people-hater like Tobe Hooper to have significant, non-business-related interaction with the world at large.

I almost passed out when Billy walked out that door. I said, “Jesus Christ, brother, you got skinny!”

He smiled, then said, “Jesus Christ, brother, you got old!”

I said, “Billy, my man, if you’d been dealing with the Hollywood
bullshit that I’ve been dealing with for the last twenty years, you’d look old, too. How the hell did you get all slim and trim?”

He said, “Exercise, diet, and a healthy dose of gastric bypass surgery. Probably added twenty years onto my life.”

I said, “That’s cool, man, real cool. But what Erick here is going to tell you will probably take those years right back off again.”

Erick said, “I’m going to tell him?”

Tobe said, “That’s right. You’re going to tell him. Right now.”

Before we even left the lobby, I launched into the same spiel I gave Helen and Claire:
Destiny Express
, the Game, Tobe’s fault, blah blah blah. Billy listened thoughtfully, then said, “Let’s go into my office.”

While we walked down the hallway, I asked him, “Billy, do you know something? Do you have an idea?”

He said, “Do I know something? No. Am I shocked about this?” He paused for a bit, then repeated, “No.”

Billy ushered us into his office, which was much bigger, and much
much
nicer, than my apartment: three sofas, two recliners, two huge flat-screen televisions, a dining table with six high-backed chairs, and a space-age workspace that would probably be a good place from which to rule the world. Billy sat us down on one of the sofas, then his assistant brought us drinks—Diet Coke for me, Maker’s Mark for Tobe—and he started right in.

He said, “Guys, believe it or not, I think about
Destiny Express
probably once or twice a month. And I don’t mean from a perspective of
Oh, boy, I worked with Tobe Hooper before he became famous
. Being with you, being your friend, being your partner, well, I guess you could say it informed my work.”

Tobe said, “If it informed your work, brother, you need some better information.”

Billy ignored him and said, “That movie expanded my mind. It opened me up. It helped me overcome my fear of creating. It also taught me what
not
to do. Like for instance, if I were a special effects artist right now, I probably wouldn’t cover my male lead with a mixture of applesauce, fish food, chewed broccoli, and dog turds.”

Tobe said, “We didn’t actually do that. Did we?”

Billy said, “We did.”

Tobe said, “Christ, what the hell was I thinking?”

I said, “Pardon me if I’m speaking out of line, but I don’t think you
were
thinking.”

I told him, “You’re right. We weren’t thinking. We were doing. Or really,
I
was doing. Everybody else was following orders.”

Billy laughed, then said, “Following orders? Jesus, Tobe, you make it sound like you were Hitler or something.”

I said, “I was a bit of a dictator, Bill. Always have been on the set. I have a vision, and I want to bring it to life, and sometimes I get a bit … a bit … a bit …”

And then Erick came up with the perfect word: “Myopic?”

I said, “Bingo. Myopic.”

Erick asked Billy, “Is there anything out-of-the-ordinary you remember? You know, like the alligator.”

Billy cracked up and said, “Oh my God, the roadkill alligator. Wow, doesn’t that bring you back, Tobe? Good times, good times.” He thought about it for a second, then said, “Wait a sec, do you remember the car wreck scene?”

Something tickled me at the back of my head. I fished for it—fished for it pretty hard, actually—but it stayed just out of reach. Shit. I said, “Refresh me.”

He said, “You wanted to set it up so you could make a bunch of edits back and forth between the car and Gary’s face, so you did Gary’s reaction shot from I don’t know how many angles. It was weird.”

Erick said, “What was weird about it?”

Billy said, “Well, Tobe kept yelling at Darren to circle around Gary faster and faster with the camera. Hey, did you guys speak to Darren yet?”

I said, “He’s next.”

Erick said, “He’s in Houston. We saved him for last.”

Billy said, “Give him my best. There was another member in good standing of our merry band of mutants, right, Tobe?”

I said, “Yeah, you could rightly say that.”

Billy said, “So Darren was jogging with the camera, and he tripped. Gary managed to catch the camera before it hit the ground. Then Darren stood up and fell right back down. He got a concussion, remember?”

I said, “No. Unfortunately, I don’t.”

Billy said, “Yep, he got knocked out, and when he came to, you told him to rub some dirt on the bump on his head and to get back to work.”

Erick said, “Jesus, Tobe.”

I said, “What can I tell you? That’s the way us dictators work.”

Was I surprised at how little Tobe remembered? Absolutely. But I know that car wreck messed him up pretty badly, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been.

I asked Erick—who seemed to be an earthbound fellow—if their talks with me, Helen, and Claire were of any use. He said, “I don’t know. I mean, you guys did some weird shit during the filming, but I’m sure Eli Roth has done equally weird shit—if
not weirder—and so have Sam Raimi, and John Carpenter, and Wes Craven. I don’t even want to imagine what goes on during a Takashi Miike shoot. But none of those caused any problems.
Audition
was, like, the most fucked-up movie ever—
way
more fucked-up than
Destiny Express
—and it didn’t make blue stuff shoot out of people’s cocks.”

I said, “Guys, I don’t think
Destiny Express
did either.”

Tobe said, “I wish there was a way to find out, man.”

I said, “You know what? There is. Possibly.”

Erick said, “Yeah? What’s that?”

I said, “Make it again.”

My daughter Celia had just graduated from Stanford—a full year early, I should note—and she was getting ready to go to Japan to teach English for a year. I hadn’t seen her in a few weeks, but that wasn’t unusual; Celia did her own thing, and that was fine. I trusted her to do the right thing. She always had.

Celia committed suicide on July 1, 2009, right when the Game was in full swing, right in the middle of the summer of hell. She was twenty-one. Twenty-fucking-one years old, and all the potential in the world, and she ended her life.

I don’t want to discuss identifying her body.

She didn’t leave a note, and I wanted some answers,
any
answers, so I hired a private detective. He spoke to a bunch of her friends, and if you’re researching the Game, I’m sure you know more or less exactly what he found out.

My wife and I had been divorced for ten years, and our relationship was toxic, so there was no comfort there. My friends were sympathetic, but there was only so much crying on somebody’s shoulder I could do before they’d ask for their shoulder
back. I needed distraction. I needed an alternate reality, and since Hollywood is the most alternate reality our fine country has to offer, I went back to work.

The Game was quite prevalent in California, so of course it had a tangible effect on the industry. For some reason, we didn’t lose much big-name above-the-line talent—some said that Marty Scorsese had become a zombie, but it turned out he was just in Aruba without his cell phone or his laptop—but we lost a lot of below-the-line personnel and behind-the-scenes studio people. My assistant, for example, disappeared two days after I got back to the office, and I never heard from her again. One of the big muckity-mucks at Sony—I won’t say who—got a case of the Blue Spew. They caught it early enough that he was institutionalized. He was monitored 24/7. If I may be so crude—and I’m certain you’ve heard worse, so I probably won’t be creeping you out, here—he almost jerked himself off to death. It got to the point that they had to strap his hands onto his bed rails. As I’m sure you know, the doctors never found a cure for the Spew, but this man survived and managed to not infect anybody else.

So many of our employees were sick or unaccounted for that we almost closed up shop. After what seemed like thousands of meetings, we decided to keep moving forward, albeit in a pared-down fashion. At the beginning of April, we had forty-six movies in production; by July, we’d suspended shooting on thirty of them. And the sixteen we kept alive were all comedies or family movies. It wasn’t the time for us to dive into
Dawn of the Dead: The Angels of Death
, you know?

Which is why when Tobe Hooper called and asked me for a bucket of money to remake his very first movie, I laughed my ass off.

There are few things in life I hate more than begging for money from a film studio. Root canal
sans
Novocain is far more appealing. So’s a sharp stick in the eye. So’s a sharp stick up the ass.

Before I go into one of those meetings—meetings where I have to pitch a concept until I’m red in the face, then listen to those executive types tear my idea a new asshole, then discuss ways to cut the budget to the point that I can’t even feed my cast and crew anything but Domino’s pizza, generic soda pop, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—I get the sweats something awful, and my stomach gets all fucked up, and I end up in a really, really dark place. I’ve been known to lose my temper at these shindigs. I’ve been known to throw a telephone. I’ve been known to gouge the phrase “FUCK YOU” on a conference room table with the Swiss Army knife I keep on my key chain.

I guess it’s possible that’s why I haven’t gotten any
real
money from a
real
studio since, well, since
ever
. But that’s just a guess.

Tobe Hooper and I are about the same age, and we’ve been in the industry for almost the same amount of time—since the seventies—but we’d only rarely crossed paths. I respected his work, and he tolerated mine—he was never a fan of working with major studios, that Hooper—so our dealings, such as they were, were always cordial but distant. Typical Hollywood stuff, I suppose: hearty handshakes, big old smiles, effusive praise for the other person’s latest project, and subtle boasting about your own latest project. Bullshit makes the world go ’round.

On the phone, I warned Tobe that our purse strings were tight and we weren’t going to put any horror flicks into production until the world started getting slightly less horrible, but I told him that if he wanted to, just for the hell of it, he could come in and
pitch it to me. I said, “Eventually, things will get back to normal, and the machine will start right on up again, and it’ll be business as usual. And when it’s business as usual,
anything
can happen.”

Actually, there are most definitely some things that
couldn’t
happen … one of them being Warner Bros. giving Tobe Hooper a single red cent.

I told Gregson I’d be at his office in forty-eight hours. I also told him that I wouldn’t be coming alone. I was bringing my EP.

On the flight out to Houston, Tobe asked me if I wanted to be executive producer of what he was now calling
Destiny Express Redux
. How could I say no? What was the worst that could happen? It’s not like I’d have to deal with a roadkill alligator or anything.

Ah, Houston. Good old Houston. The nastiest city in the world.

Aside from Hollywood, of course.

I wasn’t surprised Tobe Hooper called me after over thirty years of silence. I knew he’d be back.

Tobe was right. Houston was the nastiest city in the world. What made it worse was that the streets were empty and rancid, because
the undead saturation level—that’s what the Net nerds started calling it, the “undead saturation level,” and it stuck—was one of the highest in the country. They claimed that at its worst point, one out of every five beings in Houston was undead. It created a whole lot of controversy when some dick on Fox News said that there was no way to tell the difference between a Houston resident and a zombie. But that’s why the dude was on Fox News. Because he was a dick.

A few months back, I saw some of the Houston footage from that June on YouTube, and it was brutal, man, just brutal. Imagine the creepiest moment from
Night of the Living Dead
, then multiply that by fifty. Their moans were loud as all get-out, and they all had these oozing sores on their faces—I guess like the ones that Tobe saw on poor old Gary Church—and most of them had a body part or two dangling by a single thread of skin, and you could practically smell them through the computer screen. Fortunately, by the time we got there, the majority of the zombies had migrated to Mexico, but nobody wanted to leave their house, thus the Magnolia City was a ghost town.