Temptation (21 page)

The phone call was from my producer, Brad Bruce. He sounded tense – producers always do – but from the moment he started talking, I could tell that he wasn’t simply his normal edgy self; something was definitely wrong.

‘Sorry to be calling at this time,’ Brad said, ‘but we’ve got a problem.’

I sat up in bed. ‘What sort of problem, Brad?’

‘Are you familiar with a rag called
Hollywood Legit
?’ he asked, mentioning a free, alternative paper that had come on the scene in the last year, in competition with
LA Reader
– and one which prided itself on its tough investigative reporting, and its distaste for all the usual Hollywood overpaid self-importance.

‘Has the series made the pages of the
Legit
?’ I asked.

‘It’s you who’s made the pages, David.’

‘Me? But I’m just a writer.’

‘A very high profile writer . . . which makes you a target for all sorts of accusations.’

‘I’ve been accused of something?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘What exactly?’

I could hear him sucking in his breath, then accompanying the exhalation with one word: ‘Plagiarism.’

My heart missed three beats. ‘
What?
’

‘You’ve been accused of plagiarism, David.’

‘That’s insane.’

‘I’m glad to hear it.’

‘I don’t plagiarize, Brad.’

‘I’m sure you don’t . . . ’

‘So if I don’t plagiarize, why am I being called a plagiarist?’

‘Because this shitbag journalist named Theo McCall wrote something in his this week’s column, which is due to hit the streets tomorrow morning.’

I knew Theo McCall’s column. It was called ‘The Inside Dirt’ – and it certainly dished it. Week in, week out, this guy dug up all sorts of unpleasant, scandalmongering stuff about the entertainment community. It was the sort of column that I took prurient delight in reading. Because we all love gossip . . . until the moment that we ourselves become the subject matter.

‘I’m not in
that
column, am I?’ I said.

‘The very one. Want me to read you the item? It’s rather long.’

That didn’t sound promising. ‘Go on,’ I said.

‘Okay . . . here it is: “
Congrats are in order to
Selling You
writer-and-creator, David Armitage. Besides scooping up an Emmy last week for Comedy Writing, he’s now basking in a sensational set of reviews for the new series which, it must be admitted, is even better than its premiere season . . .
”’

I interrupted him.

‘“It must be admitted” . . . What a begrudging, pettyassed thing to say.’

‘It gets worse, I’m afraid. “
Without question, Armitage must be regarded as one of the great discoveries of the past few years . . . not just for his wickedly skewed comic observations, but also for the brilliant stream of one-liners mouthed by his hyper-anxious characters, week after week. But though no one questions Mr Armitage’s droll originality, one sharp-eared informant enlightened this column last week with the intriguing news that an entire exchange of dialogue from Armitage’s Emmy-award-winning episode is a near-verbatim lift from Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur’s classic journalism comedy,
The Front Page
. . .
”’

Once again I interrupted Brad.

‘This is complete bullshit,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen
The
Front Page
in . . . ’

Now Brad interrupted me. ‘But you
have
seen it?’

‘Sure – both the Billy Wilder film and the Howard Hawks version with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. I even acted in a college production of the play at Dartmouth . . . ’

‘Oh, that’s fucking wonderful . . . ’

‘We’re talking nearly twenty years ago . . . ’

‘Well, you obviously remember
something
from
it
. Because the passage you allegedly lifted . . . ’

‘Brad, I lifted
nothing . . .
’

‘Hear me out. This is what McCall writes: “
The repartee in question can be found in the
Selling You
episode – ‘Shtick Happens’ – for which Armitage won his Emmy. In it, Joey – the fast-and-loose dogsbody for Armitage’s fictitious PR agency

– runs smack into a police van while driving a big-deal client (a mega-egoistic Soul diva) across town for a taping of
The
Oprah Show
. He then comes staggering back into the office to inform Jerome – the company’s founder – that their diva is in the hospital, screaming police brutality. In Armitage’s script, there is the following exchange:

JEROME
You actually ran into a cop car?

JOEY
What can I say, boss? It was an accident.

JEROME
Were any of the cops hurt?

JOEY
I didn’t stick around to find out. But you know what happens when you hit a cop car. They all roll out like lemons.

‘“Now compare and contrast this clever banter with the following dialogue from
The Front Page
, in which Louis – the henchman of wheeling-dealing editor, Walter Burns – races into the newsroom to tell his boss that, in the course of whisking the future mother-in-law of ace reporter, Hildy Johnson, across town, he’s collided with a van filled with Chicago’s finest:

WALTER
You actually ran into a police van?

LOUIE
What can I say, boss? It was an accident.

WALTER
Were any of the cops hurt?

LOUIE
I didn’t stick around to find out. But you know what happens when you hit a cop van. They all roll out like lemons.”’

‘Oh, Jesus . . . ’ I whispered. ‘I never . . . ’

‘You better listen to McCall’s final paragraph: “
Without question, this virtual reproduction by Armitage is one of those unintentional examples of what the French call an ‘hommage’ . . . better known in plain English as being a copycat. No doubt,
this is the only example of plagiarism in the Armitage ‘oeuvre’. But it’s clear that this clever, talented writer has, in this instance, embraced that famous T.S. Eliot diktat: ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.’”
’

Long pause. I suddenly felt as if I had just walked into an empty elevator shaft.

‘I don’t know what to say, Brad.’

‘There’s not much to say. I mean, to be blunt about it, he caught you red-handed . . . ’

‘Now wait a damn minute. Are you saying that I
deliberately
lifted that dialogue from
The Front Page
?’

‘I’m saying nothing. I’m just looking at the facts. And the fact is the dialogue he quoted from your script
and
from that play are one and the same . . . ’

‘Okay, okay, maybe the dialogue is the same. But it’s not as if I sat down and opened the script of
The Front Page
and copied . . . ’

‘David, believe me, I’m not accusing you of that. But you have been caught with the smoking gun in your hand . . . ’

‘This is trivial stuff . . . ’

‘No, this is deeply serious stuff . . . ’

‘Look, what are we dealing with here? A joke from a seventy-year-old play that somehow ended up,
by osmosis
, in my script. But we’re not talking about an intentional case of literary theft. We’re talking about my inadvertent use of someone else’s joke, that’s all. Who doesn’t purloin jokes? It’s the nature of the game.’

‘True – but there’s a difference between using some guy’s “
take my wife . . .
” gag, and having four lines of dialogue from a famous play pop up in
your
script.’

Long pause. My heart was pounding, as the realization hit me:
I am in big trouble here
.

‘Brad, you’ve got to know that this was completely unpremeditated on my part . . . ’

‘And David, you’ve got to know that, as your producer, I am going to go to the wall with you on this one. Of course, I know you would never do anything so insane and self-destructive. Of course, I can fully understand how a couple of lines from someone else’s work can be unintentionally absorbed into your own work. And, of course, I know that every writer has, at one time or another, been accidentally guilty of this petty misdemeanor. The problem is – you got caught.’

‘But it’s a minor-league offense.’

‘And so say all of us. But . . . I’ve got even more bad news. You know Tracy Weiss . . . ’ he said, mentioning FRT’s head of public relations.

‘Of course I know Tracy.’

‘Well, at nine-thirty last night, she got a call from this
Variety
journalist, Craig Clark, who wanted an official comment from FRT. Thank Christ Tracy knows Clark pretty well. Because she convinced the guy to hold on the story until today . . . on the understanding that he’d get an exclusive statement from FRT
and
from you . . . ’

‘Great.’

‘Listen, we’re into damage control mode. So anything we can do to lessen the shit storm . . . ’

‘Understood, understood.’

‘So when Tracy called me last night . . . ’

‘If you knew about this last night,’ I said, ‘why did you wait to call me until now?’

‘Because Tracy and I knew that, if you’d been told last night, you wouldn’t have slept. And we both decided that, given what you’re about to face into today, you definitely needed a good night’s sleep.’

‘So what am I facing into today, Brad?’

‘You need to be at the office by eight, no later. Tracy and I will be there. Ditto Bob Robison . . . ’

‘Bob knows?’ I said, sounding edgier.

‘Bob’s the Head of Series. Of course, he knows. What Tracy’s hoping for is that we can all craft a statement in which you admit that this was an unpremeditated goof; that you regret the mistake, and that you’re simply guilty of telling a good joke twice. Anyway, after we figure out the statement, you’re meeting for ten minutes with the
Variety
hack . . . ’

‘I have to go face-to-face with this guy?’

‘If you want a sympathetic hearing, there’s no other way around it. And what Tracy’s banking on is that, if he gives you the benefit of the doubt, we can get our side of the story out there simultaneously with McCall’s turdy column, and cauterize this thing fast.’

‘And if the
Variety
guy doesn’t buy my side of the story, what then?’

Once more, I could hear my producer take a slow, steadying inhalation of breath.

‘Let’s not go there yet.’

Long pause. Then he said, ‘Look, I know this is bad . . . ’

‘Bad? It’s much ado about nothing.’

‘
Exactly
. And that’s the way we’re going to play it. Which is why I know we’ll get through this. But David, I just need to ask you one thing . . . ’

I knew what was coming. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I have never,
ever
intentionally plagiarized anything. And
no
, to the best of my knowledge there are no further unintentional paraphrases or quotes from other people’s work, in any of my
Selling You
scripts.’

‘That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. Now get your ass down here fast. It’s going to be a long day.’

In the car on the way to the office, I called Alison at home.

‘That is the slimiest thing I’ve heard in my life,’ Alison said after I paraphrased McCall’s column, ‘and I’ve encountered a lot of slimy stuff.’

‘Any way you look at it, it’s bad . . . ’

‘It’s petty bullshit, dressed up as scandal. Fucking journalists. They all have the morality of a tom cat. They’ll spray anything that moves.’

‘What am I going to do?’

‘Whatever happens, you’ll live.’

‘That’s very reassuring.’

‘What I’m saying here is: don’t panic. Get yourself safely to the office in that Hun-mobile of yours. I’ll meet you there. And believe me: I won’t let them fry you, David. I won’t even let them sauté you. Hang in there.’

As I edged my way through traffic, my mood vacillated from fear to belligerence. All right, my subconscious had possibly betrayed me . . . but I had done nothing deliberately wrong. More to the point, this creep McCall was taking a few inconsequential lines and transforming them into a burning-at-the-stake offense. As far as I was concerned, the only way to combat such malicious journalistic behavior was to come out of the corner, swinging.

‘That’s exactly what we
won’t
do,’ Tracy Weiss said when
I proposed this take-no-shit approach at the start of our meeting. We gathered in Brad’s office, sitting around the circular ‘ideas table’ where we usually brainstormed stuff for the series. But this morning, I was greeted by Brad, Tracy and Bob Robison with supportive words and edgy faces which betrayed their fear – and which also let it be known that, ultimately, this was not going to be a communal
we’ll share the guilt together
situation. On the contrary, from the moment I faced the three of them around that table, I realized that – though this was, corporately speaking, their problem – I was the defendant here. And if punishment was meted out, I’d take the brunt of it.

‘The fact is, David,’ Tracy said, ‘though McCall may be, at the best of times, a vindictive scumbag, he still has you by both
cojones
. Which means that, like it or not, we’ve got to soft-pedal this thing.’

Alison, seated next to me, lit up a Salem and said, ‘But McCall is trying to hang David for jay-walking.’

‘Cut the melodrama, Alison,’ Bob Robison said. ‘The guy’s got evidence. And – take it from an ex-member of the California bar – evidence is all you need to convict someone. Motives count for shit if you’ve been nabbed in the act.’

‘But there’s a difference here,’ I said. ‘The alleged plagiarism was subliminal . . . ’

‘Big fucking deal,’ Bob Robison said. ‘You didn’t mean to do it, but you still did it.’

‘That
is
a big fucking deal,’ Alison said, ‘because half the time, writers don’t know where their stuff comes from.’

‘Unfortunately,’ Robison said, ‘Theo McCall worked that one out for David.’

‘I didn’t mean this to happen,’ I said.

‘My sympathies,’ Robison said, ‘and I mean that. Because you know how highly I rate you. But the fact remains:
it happened
. You plagiarized. You may not have intended to plagiarize, but you still plagiarized. Do you see the point I’m trying to make here, David?’