“Line producer, my ass. How many days do I have?”
“You have a few days.”
“Because you have no idea —”
“I don’t care what’s been going on.”
“Okay, okay. Judy Davis for Brigham Young’s wife . . .”
“Are you crazy? Can you say the word? The word is
Australian.
”
“She’s
not
Australian.”
“She’s Australian as puddles of beer vomit.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Gotta go!”
The intern appears with the dumplings. She pulls her chair up right next to Vanessa’s desk and she spreads wide the plastic trays. She arranges the little pools of dunking sauces. She makes her preparations with a minimum of conversation. She holds up chopsticks in one hand and in the other she holds a plastic fork. Vanessa wants the plastic fork but takes the chopsticks.
The intern says, “I told them we were in discussions about a reality show called
Take-Out.
Who can deliver the items the fastest, that kind of thing. They knew all about reality television. They kept repeating Regis Philbin’s name in the form of a question.”
The intern has one expression and the expression is boredom. And the question is, in this time of unprecedented prosperity and budget surplus, why all the boredom? The intern eats a dumpling. And then, in a ruminative spirit, she offers the following: “My father is ready to give you the green light, but you have to tell him that I’m here. And you have to tell him that I’m going to do the location scouting. That’s what I want to do first. My career trajectory is up the production side. In this case, I want to be able to drive around the Southwest for a few weeks, looking for the right locations.”
Never once does a flicker of interest pass across her vampirically pale features.
“How do you know that he’s ready to give us the green light?”
“He’s embarrassed by my mom. By the divorce settlement. By his stupid girlfriend. He’s looking for a place where he can make a stand. And he’s embarrassed about the news division. He’s going to have staff reductions in the news division, and he’s going to have to do more tabloid television type of stuff, and he doesn’t want to, because the news guys are the only guys he likes. He’d rather do anything than have more reality programs, but he has to do it. And when he has to do stuff like that he’s always looking for something else. What’s the thing he can do that’s completely different from whatever everyone else is doing? A miniseries. Why would he want to do that? It’s stupid. A miniseries is just a bad idea. Who actually watches these things? Nobody watches them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Some Civil War thing with Robert Duvall in a hairpiece? Nobody watches that except your grandparents and the Civil War reenacters. Get drunk and eat a lot of fried chicken out of buckets and then pretend to fire your musket at your neighbor the muffler repairman. Then you pretend to have your leg cut off by the Walt Whitman character. That’s who watches the miniseries. Nobody wants to do them, and that’s exactly why my father will want to. He’s going to want to look like he’s a man of principle.”
“You think I should call him?” Vanessa nervously wipes off her lips with a take-out napkin for the fifth time.
“He’s going to call you. But you have to be completely ready. If you don’t have a writer, lie about having a writer. If you don’t have directors lined up, lie about having directors. And when he says to fly out there, don’t take any meetings with anyone from the network where he’s not present. By the way, my scouting ticket has to be business class.”
Then they go back to the dumplings. After that, a couple more doughnuts. The intern gives Vanessa a disquisition on her interests. The intern likes Antonioni, the intern likes Tarkovsky, the intern likes Fassbinder, the intern likes Sirk, the intern likes Kurosawa, the intern likes Ozu, the intern likes Wenders, the intern likes Herzog, especially the Kinski films. She wrote her senior thesis on Kinski. And Vanessa makes up a list of movies that the intern should watch that she hasn’t yet seen, and she does it with zest, even if her stomach suddenly feels as if something is inside her, intent on gnawing its way out. When the intern finally goes back out to her desk to chew on her hangnail some more, Ranjeet and Jeanine peer into the office as if they’ve been waiting.
“Got a second?” Jeanine says.
Vanessa looks for her pen and her list of problems.
Jeanine wears an expression of forced joviality. Ranjeet is dressed in an expensive suit, and he wears a matching tie and pocket square, and he has removed his turban and shaved his beard. Ranjeet is beaming. He has been living in the office, Vanessa knows, because the kitchenette has become a chaotic scene. It smells like vindaloo in there. Vanessa should feel concerned. She’s sure he once mentioned a family. Maybe he’s not in close contact with his family this week. What she likes is that she has an employee who stays long after she has left for the night and who is there before she gets into the office in the morning. If he has to shave in the kitchenette, fine. He’s out there trying to meet with the big agents, and he’s talking to casting directors about the miniseries, and he’s going over the treatment, sentence by sentence. He’s a postcolonial onslaught.
“I am here,” he says, “to make a presentation. My assistant, Jeanine, has helped me in the matter of this presentation.”
What he does is stretch wide his arms, as though he’s doing some kind of special Sikh dance or something, and he says that the prologue to the miniseries must begin with the four fundamental elements, these elements being earth, air, fire, and water. Remember, he says, that when the Hun sweeps down from the plains, what the Hun brings is fire. Remember that the dawn of civilization is a moment of much fire. The hunters and gatherers, Ranjeet says, shiver in the dark on the plains until they remember that the fire can be
fed.
The fire can be fed with sticks and branches and it will continue to warm them. Turn toward the fire! This is how it is with the Hun, sweeping down from the plains, bringing conflagration to the decadent civilization of the Romans and the Saxons and the Gauls. So the miniseries itself, Ranjeet says, begins with fire, and the first image is of fire, and the camera sweeps through the forest at the moment when three separate fires are about to converge on a fourth, a moment of pure immolation, the kind that firefighters dread more than all else. And, yes, this fire could be anywhere, this fire could be in forests of the United States or it could be in Siberia; the audience doesn’t know at first, Ranjeet says. We know only that it is fire. And what feeds the fire? What feeds the fire is wind. And so in the midst of these fires, we feel the gusts blowing, we feel the flaming trees swaying in the gales, and then there is a shot from a helicopter, sweeping along the treetops as they burst into spectacular combustion, as if the conflagration is gobbling up trees by the hectare. And now we come to the edge of the wood, and the camera is actually dollying backward, down a hillside, a hillside already scorched, left with nothing but blackened stumps, as a cavalry of Huns flees out of the forest before the massing of the three fires, north, east, and west, before the windswept conflagration, Ranjeet says. They sweep down the hillside, and now the camera pivots as the cavalry of Huns goes past, and it gallops with them farther down, where, ahead, we can see a village of farmers and traders, and we can see now that the Huns are intent on descending into the village, and once the marauders have rushed past the camera, we see a last straggling pair of Huns, one with a crutch, and his companion, a Moor. Clots of dirt are flung up by the hooves of horses, Ranjeet says, fouling the surface of the lens, and into this hillside of ash and dirt plunges the man on crutches, falling to his knees and then onto his side. When he rises up slowly, he looks at the dirt in his hands. The fire is behind him and around him. The wind has changed direction, violently, and now the fire is flanking the little town of farmers and traders of the Silk Road, and the man knows, the man on crutches knows this, and he looks at his companion, the Moor. No words are exchanged between these devoted friends, but the sentiment is clear.
Only the pure of heart, only the humble of intent, the look seems to say, only the faithful, only the believers, can rise to a moment so fraught with peril. And then the man, Ranjeet says, lifts up his crutch, and what the camera sees, Ranjeet says, is the crutch against the flaming sky, here are the flames, and here are the black clouds and flames so hot that you would throw yourself on poison-tipped pikes to escape them, the flames on all sides, and I promise you this part could all be done with models and with found footage of American fires, but against all this is the crutch, and suddenly we find our hero, because that’s who he is, a hero, seizing the crutch in the forked V where he has placed his arm all these many years that he has been lame, and it’s like he has been healed in this moment of peril, healed by his need to do the thing that must be done, and he is holding the crutch aloft and he is saying these words, with all the anguish and grandiosity of a man who is saving an entire civilization from itself: “The innocents of this town shall not perish for want of rain!”
The Moor raises up his cloak over his head against another gust of the wind that is controlling the events of this storied day, and above him we see the great black clouds that have been gathering, the clouds that we have not been able to make out because of the smoke from the forests, but now we can see, because the camera is level with the clouds scudding over the scenery; yes, there are great black clouds that are heavy with rain, that are pregnant with the possibility of rain. And this is the moment, the moment of the pronouncement of our hero, when the rains begin. In a tempest. Again, Ranjeet observes, this could all be done with models and digital enhancements. There will be no need to actually film these storms.
“I tell you these things,” Ranjeet says, “because I want to say to you that I am the man who must direct the miniseries. At the very least I must direct the first episode, and also the episode which concerns the founding of Las Vegas. I am the man because I have the vision. I must direct.”
Behold, a portrait of the family, in the year 2000, as preserved on the digital video camera of aspiring filmmaker Annabel Duffy. The family assembled in the living room. Duffy residence, Newton, Massachusetts. First, the Reverend Russell Hunt Duffy, in casual clothes, a pair of easy-fit jeans ordered from the L.L. Bean catalogue, a turtleneck in brown, cardigan sweater with cables. He’s wearing slippers, too, but they’re not in the shot. The camera captures the Reverend Duffy’s discomfort. The vacant smile, as if pasted into his salt-and-pepper beard, is the indicator that the Reverend Duffy doesn’t know what to think. He squints. He gives nothing away. The Reverend Duffy, depicted as a man of strident routines. A man who has made sure that the used books in the bookshelf behind him are rigorously alphabetized, though many of the books are unread now for decades.
Beside him on the couch is his wife, Deborah Weller, PhD, who has her arm around the reverend, not vice versa. She’s the one who’s laughing about the whole thing, laughing about the slow pan, about the idea that Annabel should film the five of them while they are all there, because it’s what she can do, because it’s her gift. Annabel promises not to do anything with the film, not if they are unhappy with the results. It’s what she can give them, a portrait, when they are doing the one thing they can do, which, she says, is loving one another. Her mother is the one with the surfeit of love. Her mother on the couch, her mother laughing as if nothing in years has been as good as having the five of them here for this unscheduled time, even if it is a gathering that has an unfortunate premise, Tyrone. But that’s forgotten during the duration of this slow pan from right to left. Her mother is wearing navy blue corduroys and a paint-stained chamois-cloth shirt, cream colored, and her long brown-and-gray hair is shaggy around her shoulders, and her expression is both exhausted and joyous. If she had to lift a Volkswagen off any of them, she could do it. And yet is her mother anything else
besides
a force for selflessness and love? Where is that other woman, libertine, the hidden lover of sensuality, the drinker of too much wine, and why is she never in the shot? Why always laughing, selfless, and full of joy?
Next, her older brother. Her brother, the last few days, has remained in bed until the early afternoon. At midday he skulks down into the kitchen to look at the newspapers, with his glasses on, in whatever outgrown formal clothes remain here in the house, a pair of khaki pants that he had to wear for his confirmation however many years ago, and a button-down oxford that isn’t tucked in. He still looks like the smartest guy Annabel has ever met. If only there weren’t his difficulties, the weeks where he doesn’t sleep and calls her at all hours with ideas about the interconnectedness of banking, drug cartels, and descendants of the
Mayflower
families. Followed by the months of muteness and retreat. If only. Here on the couch, you can see him trying on three different ways not to stare, and then staring just the same. Staring into the camera as if this is to be the mug shot they might have taken of him at central booking.
Even as she looks at his face in the monitor of the camera, she can see something else happening, slowly at first, the hand of her older brother, reaching toward the free hand of his mother, the black fingers of her brother’s hand walking across the couch toward his mother’s white hand, and the filmmaker is observing a rigorous cinematic detachment while this little thing happens, the black fingers of the son interlacing themselves with the white fingers of the mother. Nothing is said; it’s just a moment worth studying. Her brother’s face never changes, and her mother’s face never changes, and the camera pauses, and then it continues its journey.
The younger brother is wearing whatever it is that he thinks he has to be wearing these days, because he’s still in this moment when he has to be wearing something that indicates dissent. Some protest is always being implied. He has on the baggy jeans, and he has on his so-called wife-beater, and he has donned the jewelry, the jewelry that will have the maximum impact in the right-to-left movement of the camera across the text of the Duffys. Her younger brother. He has so quickly assumed the mantle of the Duffy who has to call the revolutionary police down on the rest of them, her younger brother with his pierced face and his multiple tattoos. Her brother who won’t even talk about the sinister group of teenagers he was associating with, and who won’t say anything about whether they were involved with the arson at that franchise restaurant in Concord. Nevertheless, here he is flush against his older brother, though there’s another three feet remaining on the couch, crushed up against his older brother as if it’s his older brother who’s going to solve the problems of the world. The younger brother looks as if he’s about to lean his head on his brother’s shoulder, and now the camera retreats to a wider angle, until they are all in the frame, and then the filmmaker herself jogs past the coffee table and past the stack of art books, past the decorative fern on the side table. There’s the sound, from off screen, of the dishwasher in the kitchen changing cycles.