Turn of the Century (47 page)

It isn’t
you,
Angela
, George thinks,
because
you
have never intentionally said anything funny that wasn’t scripted for you by somebody else
. “It isn’t you, Angela. I appreciate that. But it is Jennie. Jennie didn’t get an MFA from Yale.”
You dog, George
. “Jennie doesn’t read books—she does watch TV, that’s her frame of reference.”
You brazen self-loathing
dog
. “And as you’ve put it so perfectly, Jennie keeps the painful parts of life at bay by making jokes.”
You pathetic brazen self-loathing corndog whore, George
. “And that’s why Angela Janeway is playing her, because she can stretch, and she
can
go there. ‘Book ’em, Dan-o’ is a witty line. ‘Book ’em Dan-o’ is the right line. Trust me, Angela.” When he’s trying to persuade actors (or his children) to do something, George exempts himself from his rule against resorting to first names. Gestures and statements he regards as inexcusably oleaginous come across to actors as menschy. What he considers tasteful adult reticence, Angela Janeway and Lucas Winton consider cold and aloof. Occasionally during the last year, George has forced himself to talk like an asshole Merry Chatterer so that his actors won’t consider him an asshole Inscrutable Hardass. “Okay?”

The stylist squirts and brushes the star’s hair one final time.

“Mary Ann likes the line,” Angela says, glancing toward the stylist. “She said it’s ‘postmodern,’ didn’t you, Mary Ann?” The young woman smiles.

“So we’re all set?” George asks.

Angela keeps him waiting for an answer, and waiting. In her pouty old-fashioned girlishness, like a lot of actresses (and so entirely unlike his wife), Angela sometimes reminds George more of a female impersonator than of an actual modern woman. For the first time since he’s been in the trailer, Angela turns to look directly at George instead of his reflection.

“I suppose.”

“I love you,” he says with an inflection that puts it somewhere between smarmy and a good-natured parody of smarm. “Let’s go to work.”

“George?” She doesn’t ask the question, she strings it out, waits to be solicited, like in a script. Talent.

“Havel’s a no, but I’m still working on getting Mandela. A guy I know ghostwrote his autobiography. If we can’t get him for a cameo here, I’ll try to book him on
Real Time
—the new show. With you, as yourself, like we talked about. I promise.”

“Actually, the new show is what I was going to ask about. About a recurring role.”

“You want to be on
Real Time?
” This could be a good idea. It is probably a terrible idea. Good or bad, the idea is now here in the trailer
with them, like a small, panicked animal. George has to deal with it—pick it up and pet it, or trap it, something. He needs to keep Angela happy but he can’t commit to anything. Enthusiastic but cautionary. Is this the definition of temporize? “That’s a really interesting idea, Angela. But
Real Time
at its core is going to be a news program. Real news.”

“Oh, I
know
, George. I’ve read your treatment. It’s really quite brilliant. That’s exactly why I’m so highly motivated. Reality is so much more exciting to me than”—she waves toward the script—“this. Sandy Flandy was going to talk to you, but I said, ‘No, I need to talk to George myself, directly, artist to artist.’ ” George has never in his life thought of himself as an artist. “ ‘So he can understand how totally serious I am about this.’ ” She tosses a handful of dried boysenberries into her mouth. “You know about my work internationally. This is not some silly actress ego trip, George,” she says, chewing, her mouth completely full. “It’s about
War and Peace
and Dostoyevsky’s selfish steam.” She swallows.

War and Peace
and Dostoyevsky’s selfish steam?
George doesn’t know the line. He’s clueless about all but the most obvious poetry references, such as “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” and “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” Typical pretentious Angela.

“You know?” she continues. “Not
my
personal self-esteem so much as American women’s, our f-ing self-esteem as a
gender
.”

Ah:
war and peace and just our f-ing self-esteem
.

“You think you could manage the work, on both shows? With all your outside commitments?”

“I’d resign from the Creative Coalition, and Friends of the Mexican Citizens Movement for Democracy, and all of them. So that I’d become objective.”

“Well, this is a big idea. We haven’t even thought about”—he hes-itates—“casting. But I’m completely flattered that you’re interested. I mean, as a vote of confidence in the show. Let me talk to Emily about it.”

“Sandy says I’m nuts, but I’ll audition. I don’t really audition.”

“I know. I know.” Since he’s already faking a placid, interested smile, he goes ahead and asks, “Angela, where’d you happen to get hold of the
Real Time
treatment? From Timothy?”

“No, from Aries, your darling assistant. She is so fantastic. So warm and
giving
. Cute name, too. You don’t mind that I talked to Sandy about it, do you?”

George shakes his head, and then, trying to move beyond his rage at
motherfucking loose-cannon Iris
, lets Angela’s mention of Sandy Flandy remind him of Sandi Bemis, Featherstone’s second-string girlfriend, the pet aromatherapist who wants to enlighten and exploit Angela’s German shepherd. “Where’s the dog?” he says, looking around the trailer. “Out exploring Great Kills?”

Angela looks at George for a long moment and then crumples back into her makeup chair, crying, sobbing, out of her mind. “Head
back!
” Mary Ann says to Angela, and begins placing cotton balls around her eyes, building a pair of tiny dams to hold back the rivulets of tears from the cosmetically perfect facial plains. “Peacemaker passed on,” Mary Ann whispers to George as he heads for the door.

She’ll perform the line as written, but now she’s a soggy, quivering wreck who wants George to make her an anchorwoman. Peacemaker may have died, but now George doesn’t have to ask her to enroll her dog in an aromatherapy class. One step forward, one half step back. As George heads to the set to let Phoebe and Gordon know that he has solved the Angela problem, he passes Lucas Winton, who is tugging down on his prop bulletproof vest, apparently trying to expose some chest hair. “George,” he says, “we are not rewriting, are we?”

“Nope. Let’s go do the scene.”

“Hey, George—when do I get my travel expenses?”

“That’s a Barbara conversation.” Barbara is the
NARCS
production accountant.

“Quote, ‘All out-of-pocket expenses incurred by talent for the purpose of promoting the program shall be reimbursed,’ unquote.” Lucas Winton flew his own plane down to Washington last month to appear at a press conference for Decent Entertainers Against Dope, a new group whose members vow to make citizens’ arrests of fellow actors and crew members if they see them using illegal drugs. This is approximately the fifth time he has asked George to reimburse him for the money he spent on aviation fuel. “My PR gal says
Access Hollywood
aired my ‘For me,
NARCS
isn’t just acting’ bite
again
last week. You can’t buy this kind of promotion, George,” he says as
George gives a big shrug and says again, “It’s a Barbara conversation,” and keeps walking.

Talent
. Such a funny noun, George still thinks, after fifteen years, the way it’s used in show business and news. On one level it’s thoroughly denatured and pliable, like Silly Putty. Anybody the camera points at is talent, whether singular (
But George, Sylvester is talent
) or plural (
But George, Angela and Lucas are talent
), with the definite article (
He’s the talent, George, not you
) or without. But for all the one-size-fits-all, the word is still
talent
, with the distinct implication that everyone except actors (and news anchors and correspondents) are just … regular people, mortals, grunts, grips. And conversely, depending on who is using the phrase under what circumstances,
talent
can also be loaded, discreetly turned into code for
pampered dumbbell
or
vainglorious martinet
or
nine-hundred-pound gorilla
.

In front of the cameras, at the center of dozens of motionless people and tons of equipment, the two actors playing the Hawaiian drug dealers are on the ground, the one who’s supposed to be shot staring at the dark red syrup drizzled around his shoulder wound. One of the three actors wearing DEA windbreakers, his MAC-10 propped against a lighting stanchion, seems to be practicing tai chi, or impersonating a cat. The silk, a giant stretched square of white fabric to make the sunlight more perfect, hangs overhead like an angel’s trampoline.

“Checking the gates!” the first assistant director announces, to everyone and no one.

Each camera’s own first assistant (or focus-puller
—focus-puller
, George’s favorite of the filmmaking Dickensianisms) crouches down and slides out a tiny metal-framed glass pane from behind each lens to examine it with a magnifying glass. He’s looking for a “hair in the gate”—by which is not meant a human hair (as George spent weeks last summer being teased for assuming) but rather any stray sliver of celluloid.

“Moving on?” the first AD asks Gordon and George, who is just back from Angela’s RV.

Gordon looks at George and says, “Happy here?”

George raises his right arm and draws a circle in the air, a hand signal meaning
Yup, move on
that he learned last year from watching Emily run the first six episodes of the show. Making the gesture still feels
phony to George, but it pleases him too, the wordless macho theatricality. (Last fall Max visited the set when Dennis Rodman was guest-starring as a crack dealer turned born-again Christian congressman. “Dad,” his son asked at the end of the day, “did you do the basketball-ref signal for traveling just because Dennis Rodman was in the show?” Since Max always seems a little upset when his father reveals some new depth of sports ignorance, George just smiled and shook his head.)

“Moving on,” the first shouts to the group. And a moment later, “Reloading camera!”

“Resetting lights!” the lighting designer announces.

“Resetting props!” the prop master announces. The show’s armorer (another delightfully premodern job title) collects his prop Glocks and MAC-10s and AR-15s.

While George was coddling Angela, Featherstone arrived, and he now sits in the canvas chair imprinted with the words
GEORGE MACTIER
in cursive script. He is, of course, talking on one of his two phones. George crouches to look at a video monitor with Gordon, watching the taped replay of the fight scene they had just shot. Behind him he hears a
snap
, and a sound like little rubber snakes slithering away. He turns to see Featherstone fiddling happily with his not-available-in-North-America Ping-Pong-hemisphere phone as if he’s giving an in-store demonstration.

“King George! Truly fantabulous work going on here this morning. They were really wailing.” He pockets the phone and walks over. “Gordy is making some mega-auteur choices, literally. Truly amazing they
pay
us to do this, isn’t it, guys?”

No
, George thinks,
they pay
me
to do this, and
I
pay
Gordon
to do this. They do pay you, and that truly is amazing—although I don’t believe it’s
this,
precisely, that you get the three million dollars a year to do
.

“So,” Featherstone says a little more quietly, “Lady Macbeth has PMS and won’t do your
Hawaii Five-O
gag? You
got
to have that. It’s such a genius blow for the act break.”

“Angela’s okay. She’ll do the line. She’s just upset because her dog is dead.”

“
Peacemaker died?
My God! Well. No wonder.”

George nods, a little humbled. Until it froze to death he didn’t know that his own children’s turtle was named Josh, and yet the second in
command at the fifth-ranked television network in America knows the name of the dog owned by one of the stars of one of his twenty-seven prime-time shows. That is executive aptitude.

Just then Angela arrives, with Mary Ann the makeup woman trailing her with a handful of dry cotton balls as a contingency.

Featherstone fixes the star with a fraternal gaze and stops her before she steps onto the set, gently grabbing her by both shoulders. “Angela?
Use
it.
Use
the grief.” Angela’s eyes open wide, as if God has spoken. “It’ll be good for the work—and you know what else, Angela? It’s what Peacemaker would want you to do.” She nods, wiser, warmed, blessed. Again George is humbled. It’s a gift Timothy has.

“And when you’re up to it?” Featherstone says, now back to his regular Featherstone FM chirp, “Xoloitzcuintili. You are definitely a xoloitzcuintili person, Angela. It’s really just the minidisk German shepherd. Better fidelity, smaller size.”

“Waiting on prop department!” the first AD says not quite peevishly, as a young woman primps a burst bale of fake marijuana.

Just behind one of the two cameras, George stands with one foot on a big silver film canister, arms folded, lips pursed, his concentration and hopefulness so intense it aches. The sixty people who stand and crouch around all work for him, and they are all (except for the Teamsters) so
wide awake
. George adores the take-one moment, revels in it, time after time. It is just like in the movies—one more cliché that happily turns out to be true. He’s been doing this for almost a year, but on the set, as shooting begins, he still feels like a lucky usurper in some exotic province where the people speak a queer English dialect that’s all gerunds, a kind of paramilitary town-crier present tense that serves mainly to tauten the mood. The show is scripted, of course, but for all practical purposes so is every bit of ritual that surrounds the shoot.

“Waiting for sound speed,” the first AD says.