Turn of the Century (67 page)

“And I’ve stopped beating my wife, too.”

“You what? This is Boris Faber, Mr. Mactier, calling from
Time
.”

“Look, our Friday program is going to be hard news by any definition. We’re not going to run naked interviews with Jim Carrey to promote a movie, like Barry Stengel did on
MBCWeek
. We’re not going to have service pieces about … celebrity
yoga
or, you know … the medical benefits of
rock climbing
.”

“Mr. Stengel broadcast stories about rock climbing and yoga when he was running the news division?”

Barry Stengel “resigned” last week.

“I don’t know. All the shows put on stories like that. Those are hypothetical examples. Here’s my quote: our Friday
Real Time
news segments will be the hardest news in prime time. Bar none. Okay?”

“And one more question? How do you feel about ABC moving
Right/Left
to go up directly against you on Fridays at nine?”

How do I feel? I feel personally assaulted on several fronts. I’d like them to fail. Right/Left
is the new ABC News show now on Saturday night, hosted by George Stephanopoulos and one of the skinny, blond conservative
women. It consists of half an hour each week of newsmagazine stories produced with an unabashed right-wing bias, interlarded with half an hour of stories produced with an unabashed left-wing bias. At the beginning of the show, the cohosts flip a silver dollar, on air, to see whose team of investigative ideologues gets to go first.

“We welcome it.
That
is soft news.
That
is agenda mongering. So now viewers will have a stark choice. Between the real news on
Real Time
—interspersed with a little entertainment that’s honest enough to call itself entertainment—and stories on ABC about … video games or something.”

“Thanks for your assistance, Mr. Mactier.”

Such an earnest little dick
, George thinks.
At least this time he didn’t go for the existentialist questions
.

Daisy is back. “George?”

“What
is
it?” he snaps as he scrolls through the dozen e-mails that have arrived since that call began, answering one from his codirector (“No music at all on Friday shows”). He’s a fast one-handed typist, and the speedy leanness of e-mail—no parsing, loose punctuation, type and shoot—has come just in time for George, but the phone is still easier. He’s never said that to a colleague, because then he’d seem doubly pathetic, both gimpy and old-fashioned. He intends to get a speech-recognition setup so that he can dictate his e-mails, but not until it’s a little more commonplace so it won’t look like some special Americans With Disabilities Act accommodation for him, software as prosthesis. He looks up and sees Daisy in the doorway, smiling and frowning, as simmeringly ironic as ever. “Sorry, Daisy. Yes?” Well,
yes
, he thinks; he’d definitely have sex with Daisy Moore, hypothetically, in the sidewalk census sense. Maybe the sidewalk censuses have been preparatory exercises, a form of contingency planning, and he just hasn’t realized it.

Between the one-handed speed typing and the one-second sex fantasy, he remembers: Francesca, the recut and revoiced Mexico package. He’s so late.

“Mr. Derek Dreen is calling from England. Mr. Dreen’s assistant says that Mr. Dreen would like ‘a personal word’ with you. Do you want to take it?”

He’s never met or spoken to Derek Dreen. He knows who he is, of course. Dreen created
Down With It
, Fox’s urban crossover hit with an
almost all black cast and a 72 percent white audience (and 100 percent white creator), and he’s developing a second show called
Dope Sick
that sounds like a cooler, younger
NARCS
, and another,
The Illionaire
, which is a younger, blacker remake of the old show
The Millionaire. Down With It
, or
Down
, as it’s usually called, is filled with gunplay and nakedness but of a highly stylized, almost arty kind, with plots, Dreen says in interviews, “largely adapted from Shakespeare.” The show broke three number-one hits in its first season, a fact George used to convince Featherstone to let him use bits of rap on
NARCS
. George has theorized that Derek Dreen’s name, which sounds black, helps him get away with being the white producer of such a show. Dreen is now directing a feature film about two chimps taking over a space shuttle mission after all but one of the human astronauts are accidentally ejected into space. The script was written as a comedy for Eddie Murphy and Charlton Heston, but Dreen is filming it as an inspiring millennial drama starring Daniel Day-Lewis. It has been described in the trades as “
2001
meets
Forrest Gump
meets
King Kong
.”

Of course he’ll take the call.

“Hi,” George says.

“Hello, Mr. Mactier, I’ll patch you through to Derek at Pinewood.”

No
, he thinks about saying,
this isn’t Mr. Mactier, this is Mr. Mactier’s senior executive assistant—and as soon as you put Mr. Dreen on, I’ll patch him through to Mr. Mactier
.

“Hello, George. Great to finally speak with you. Big fan of your work, what you’ve been able to do over there.”

“Thanks.” He’s supposed to reciprocate, of course. “Coming from you that really means something.”

“Tough for Emily to keep that edge, I think.”

He’s never really enjoyed this kind of sneaky, backhanded praise.
Tough for George to keep that edge
, Dreen would be telling Emily, George assumes, if the partnership dissolution had divvied up
NARCS
and
Real Time
differently.

“New show’s causing a tremendous buzz,” Dreen says.

“Excessive.”

“Listen, George, the segment you’re preparing on Sir Farley Lyman, you really ought to reconsider. I’m telling you this as your friend.”

As a friend with whom George has never had any contact whatsoever
—that
kind of friend. Farley Lyman is a British hero of the Falklands War who now runs an international entertainment distribution business. One of the
Real Time
producers is working on a story alleging that Sir Farley secretly uses his military contacts in Asian and Middle Eastern countries as a means of getting government-run TV channels to buy his educational children’s cartoon shows. He funneled antiaircraft weapons to North Korea, for instance, in return for broadcasting 110 dubbed episodes of his show
Planet of the Kidz
. To George, the story still seems unbelievable, literally unbelievable; the ironies, as Zip would say, just too “chocolaty”—too sweet and rich and dark.

“I don’t know what you mean. Reconsider? Why?”

“Sir Farley is a military hero in England, you know. And I’ll be honest—yes, we’re in business together. He assembled some of the financing for
Giant Leap
.”
Giant Leap
(formerly
Monkey Do
, previously
Houston, We Have a Banana
) is the movie Dreen’s directing. “But this call isn’t about business. I’ve known Farley for years and years—almost seven. He’s the godfather to my wife’s stepson. Your story about Farley is going to be totally inaccurate. I’m asking you to walk away from it. As a personal favor to me.”

A “personal favor,” because he’s a “friend.” George is speechless. He finally hems and haws something about keeping close tabs, making sure any story that airs is absolutely fair and accurate. He stands, but stops to mow through the three fresh e-mails (Hank Saddler is desperate for MBC News to name the new epoch: “like the seventies were the Me Decade and the eighties were the Greed Decade—but this is a brand we can own and leverage for a hundred years.” With Barry Stengel gone, Saddler wants George’s help in preemptively branding the entire twenty-first century.)

He’s got to go. He’s got to go. It’s like the invisible quicksand nightmare, where you struggle to run but can’t.

Featherstone appears just as George makes it as far as Daisy’s desk.

“I know you’re crashing twenty-four/seven here, and I’m late for an oh-one up-front brunch, but do you have a second?”

George retreats to his office, and Featherstone closes the door. It’s not the slow-motion frustration dream, it’s an
I Love Lucy
episode where Lucy and Ethel improvise endless stupid diversions to prevent
Ricky from going into the kitchen. Featherstone is in New York for next year’s prime-time schedule announcements and the up-front advertising sales season.

George remembers Daisy telling him that he has sent flowers and blue cashmere pajamas to Timothy—Ng gave birth last week, becoming the third mother of the third Featherstone child. “Hey,” George says, sitting back down, “congratulations, Timothy.”

“Yeah. Thanks. But it was only for daytime.”
The Naked and the Damned
, MBC’s handheld, partly black-and-white, two-hour-long afternoon soap opera won three Daytime Emmy Awards last week.

“The baby, I mean. Oliver?”

“Olivier. Oh,
thanks
. George, my sources tell me you’re working on a negative story about the National Institutes of Health?”

“It’s not really negative. It’s funny. About their Offices of Alternative Medicine and Dietary Supplements. Why?”

“Well, this Reality Channel project, the New Age channel? It’s fast-tracking, it’s sensitive, and Harold got a call from Washington. We need their cooperation on this deal. You know? Planting the Mose Media flag on the anti-alternative-health side of things, right now, would be a drag.”

“It’s not some tough investigative thing, Timothy.”

“Now, you know that if this were a
news
show, for the news
division
, I wouldn’t be here at all. I am Mr. Mad Props for the whole Chinese Wall church-and-state deal. But you’re state, right? This is an entertainment program. So we’re talking state to state. Grownup to grownup. When were you planning to schedule the NIH piece?”

“Maybe the third week.”

“Ouch.”

“What?”

“
Not
great timing for us, in terms of hoop jumping and deal doing.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about it.”

“Yeah?”

“No.”

Featherstone is acting somber for Featherstone. He has not high-fived, or power-clasped, or fake-boxed, or said “Yessss!” while pumping his arm, or called George by a nickname.

“I trust you on this, George. Be careful.” He leans back and crosses
his legs. In encounters with subordinates, men never cross their legs. “Keep me looped in. Choppy times right now.”

“What?”

“Oh, Sandi is threatening to sue me for palimony in Vegas, and she refuses to give up the suite there. And I think horrid little Hank is poisoning the well with the boss. Just between you and me, okay? I mean, six months later I’m still
acting
president.”

He doesn’t dislike Featherstone, but he doesn’t really like him, either. And as much as he might want to hear someone with power over him confess weakness, he does not have the time right now to play pal and listen to Featherstone open up.

“It’s the business we have chosen, Timothy.”

“Ain’t that the God’s honest. By the way, the boss says he had a fab lunch up in the boondocks with Lizzie and her Chinese friend this weekend.”

“Right,” George says, feigning knowledge, mustering calm. “I guess they took a drive over to his place in Vermont. Great.”

They both head for the door.

“Hey, you want to shoot up to Five-Nine with me to screen the short-list pilots?
Give
notes to some poor schmucks instead of just taking them? We got some true shit this season.” For a moment George is startled, thinking Timothy has frankly disparaged the entire slate of MBC pilots. But then he realizes it’s his rap lingo.

“I really don’t have the time, Timothy. But thanks.”

Also, watching almost any television show projected in a theater tends to embarrass George. The overeager mediocrity of TV is too apparent at that physical scale. (Movie screens make TV seem worse; watching movies on TV screens makes movies seem worse. This symmetry first occurred to him during lunch with a Cap Cities executive when he was at ABC. When he called it the “first law of degradation conversity,” the Cap Cities guy looked at George like he was insane, and asked for the check.)

He starts to follow Featherstone to the elevators. “George?” Daisy says.

“I really have to get down to editing, Daisy,” he says, zooming past her. “What?”

“A big wadge of questions from the lighting girl. She needs to order
more lights and filters for the crews, and she wants to know if you’ve a preference. She thinks Frezzi Mini-Arcs bring out ‘eye sparkle’ the best. And for the silks, she likes Chimera—”

But George has already turned his back on Daisy and thrown his arms up and out in an exaggerated shrug, walking away. The day is evaporating. He’s done nothing. Rushing full-speed downstairs to the editing rooms, going to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his demographic, George is still pissed at the brat from
Time
, earnest young Boris, even though it’s possible, he realizes now, that his question might not have been as adversarial as George took it. “I guess the first thing I want to ask you, Mr. Mactier, is pretty basic: Why are you doing this show?”

“The explosions, especially
the Civil War explosions but also Vietnam, are totally realistic. Hiroshima is awesome, the way you can toggle back and forth between aerial view and street-level, and the way the shock waves and heat ripple out and catch buildings and individual stuff on fire, plus the way you can
see
the people from like a block away. There were almost no bad graphic twitches, even when you force like four really quick time-warp jumps. The sound and the force-feedback effects are like dope sick—especially the meteors hitting the dinosaurs and wooly mammoths, and the guillotine, oh, and the Triangle Shit-waste factory fire. The music was okay, except it’d be cooler if some of the old, like,
waltz
music were more electronic or fast or something. The Paris and Switzerland part with the crazy artists is kind of boring until World War I starts. To me.”