Turn of the Century (79 page)

Featherstone gave George the go-ahead to ignore the lawyer’s concern. “I did love Sonny,” he said, “but this is a matter of national principle, isn’t it?” On the other hand, Featherstone badly wants
Real Time
to air Jude McAllister’s Deep Throat exposé. “It tested through the roof,” he said on the phone from L.A. “It’s a very fly segment.” “I know,” George replied, “and I really want to run it, maybe Week Four”—the twenty-sixth anniversary of Nixon’s resignation—“but right now, we don’t have it nailed.” He felt good telling Timothy no. Spending any more time and money to get the story also worries George, however. He’s over budget, even the revised 112 percent budget. All day he’s thought about scrapping the location in Sacramento, which would save seven thousand dollars in crew and satellite time, since a Board of Prison Terms ruling against Charles Manson seems like an exceptionally safe bet. But
Real Time
isn’t just a news show. As a dramatic matter, having set up the Manson story on location Tuesday, they need to resolve it properly in tonight’s show: the arc, the arc, the arc. “And once again,” Cole Granger can say very soberly in the studio an hour from now, after the news comes through, “California state prisoner number B-33920 has been denied parole. Jess?”

Gordon Downey has arrived and taken Daisy’s seat beside George. He has nothing to do in tonight’s show (although he’s nominally “directing” the ax/reax shots of the staff and crew).

“George,” Daisy says from a phone at the other side of the control room, “it’s Michael Milken’s office calling.”

“We trashing Milken in the show, George?” Oz says, looking at the monitors, always the monitors.

“Uh-uh.
No
, Daisy,” George says, “tell him we’re shooting.”

“I’m still seeing the hickey on Francesca’s neck,” Oz says, which sends a makeup woman a hundred feet away running onto the set.

“Four minutes,” says Gretchen, the assistant director.

“Oz?”

“What is it, George?”

“We never decided what to do about that little gap between the logo and the video wall.”

“I don’t mind the gap if you don’t,” Oz replies coolly. “Bernie, you’re wobbling,” he says in a different voice to a cameraman.

“I’m a complete and utter amateur, needless to say,” says a voice from the darkness behind and to the right, “but couldn’t you just shmoosh your logo and your video wall together?” George turns to look. It is Harold Mose. He’s grinning. As is Hank Saddler, holding the heavy metal door open. Standing just behind them in the dark, her face bathed in red from the exit sign, is Lizzie.

“Hi,” George says. “Hi.” Should he stand up? Should he go shake Mose’s hand? Should he kiss his wife? Gordon offers his chair. For the first time in the last hour, Oz actually turns around. George decides to remain seated. Lizzie gives him a nervous wave.

For a few long seconds, no one moves or speaks. Mose takes a deep breath, in and out. “Everyone breathe!” he commands, still grinning. “My new executive vice president says it’s the great tension antidote.”

Everyone relaxes. Except George and Lizzie.

“We’ll get out of your hair,” Mose says, turning more solemn than George has ever seen him, “but I did want to pop in and let everyone here know that all your hard work has been appreciated. I wish—well, I thank you all for having been part of this adventure. The world will little note nor long remember what I say here, but it can never forget what you did.”

“Thirty seconds,” Gretchen says.

“Are we leaving the building?” Oz asks. He means: is the signal being piped out correctly to Burbank.

“We’re leaving the building,” she confirms.

“As are we,” Mose says. He salutes, and Lizzie waves at George again as Saddler lets the control room door close with a vacuum-sealed
whoosh
.

“Stay where you are, camera two!” Oz shouts. “Roll tape.”

“We have speed?” the AD asks.

“Speed!” a voice from the squawk box tells her.

“Everyone’s speeding,” the AD says. “Twenty seconds.”

“Oz,” George says, Saddler on his mind, “I don’t want this going out on the in-house system.”

The director pushes a button and speaks. “Master control, this is TV one, please take us off the router.” He lets the button up. “You’re running silent and running deep, George,” and to his AD, “Put camera one online.” After a pause he says, “Up in ten. Nine—

The AD takes over the countdown: “Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two …”

And Oz
snaps
his fingers on the unspoken one.

Up comes the
Real Time
theme music, which the composer calls “a Radiohead—Aaron Copland hybrid,” playing over a quick-cut montage of the week’s events—Hurricane Candy’s devastation of Miami Beach, Hillary hugging Al Gore, an oil refinery exploding in Venezuela, Prince William’s last home video of the Queen Mother, the Aspen forest fires, the oar’s-length victory moment of Paul Allen’s galley ship in the Brunei harbor, Quentin Tarantino’s acquittal, a swarm of Black Hawk helicopters firing into the Mexican rain forest, Senator Paul Wellstone on his barefoot “Venceremos” walk through southern Mexico, on and on, sixty-two separate shots, each an average of a half second long. (This cold open is George’s bow of obeisance to Saddler’s Seamlessness Initiative, although it’s the way he wanted to start the show anyway. “I want it like a trailer for a Jerry Bruckheimer movie,” he told his producer. Thus the explosions.) Then the fast sequence of aerial shots of eight skylines (New York, L.A., San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., London, Moscow, and Beijing, shrinking and morphing into the letters
R, E, A, L, T, I, M
, and
E
, followed by the fiction/nonfiction boilerplate and then highlights from the Tuesday and Thursday shows—Francesca with an editor at a computer pointing at an explosion on the monitor, Jess arguing with a cop, Francesca watching a grenade explode in Chiapas, correspondents and
nameless staff talking, writing, laughing, hefting video cameras, catching taxis, yelling into phones, running in backward media stampedes down courthouse steps. It is by far the most expensive forty seconds of the show.

Then the picture freezes.

“What the
fuck!
” George screams.

“Stop tape,” Oz and Gordon both say.

“That’s a bust,” Oz says. “Stop all tape. Stop everything.”

“What happened?” George asks.

No one says a thing. Then—
whoosh
—a skinny older man, one of the videotape operators, pokes his head in and says, “Tape machine broke down. We’ll be switched over in thirty seconds.”
Whoosh
.

“Restarting at 7:02,” Oz says.

George pushes his IFB button and leans into his gooseneck microphone. “Jess and Francesca, tape problem. It’ll be a couple of minutes. And have a great show.”

Whoosh
. One of the associate producers rushes in, thrilled and panicky.

“George!” she shouts. “They’re letting Manson
out!
I’m on the phone with Sacramento! They gave him a parole date!”

Oz pushes a button and says over loudspeakers, “Hold on, everybody. Change of plans.”

“Holy shit,” George says.

“My Lord,” Gordon says.

“So we’ll put Manson at the top,” George says. “Kill Farley Lyman. Holy Christ.” He turns to the associate producer as she whips back toward the door. “Are you
sure?
”

“Yeah,” she turns to tell him and
whooshes
out.

“Get Cole over to the correspondent position,” Oz says. “Well. I guess hell froze over.”

Television control rooms exist to contain bursts of pandemonium like this. Oz and his technical directors shout into microphones to change lights, change the ‘Prompter, ready tape, wire up Cole Granger. George
whoosh
es out and onto the set to tell Jess, Francesca, and Cole what’s going on.

“Get the bird from Sacramento up,” Oz says. “I need it
now
.”

“Open’s ready.”

“Tape is rolling?” the AD asks. “We have speed?”

“Speed!” a voice from the squawk box tells her.

“All tape is rolling; we’re speeding.”

“Everyone’s speeding,” the AD says. “We have velocity. Thirty seconds.”

George feels lucky, blessed: he has a camera in Sacramento, he has an uplink, and he has the satellite.
Thank God
, George thinks,
thank God for the demands of the almighty dramatic arc
.

“Put one online. Up in ten again,” Oz says. “Nine—

“Eight,” says the AD, “seven, six, five, four, three, two …” And the opening bars of Radiohead-meets-Copland swell again, followed by the opening montage and title sequence. This time, through, all the hokey prepackaged urgency is honestly thrilling.

“Make your move, Bobby,” Oz says, “and … cut back to two!” he says, snapping his fingers each time he says a number, on the cuts from camera to camera. The music and title animation end. “And, take”—
snap!
—“three. And, take”—
snap!
—“one, take two, ready three … and”—
snap!
—“take two.”

Gordon, overcome with excitement, is pantomiming camera numbers and finger snaps in unison with Oz.

“And …” Gordon says too loudly,
“acting.”

“Cue them,” Oz tells his stage manager over the IFB.

In the studio, the stage manager, standing in Jess’s and Francesca’s lines of sight, has formed his right hand into a pistol, like a child, and squeezes off an imaginary shot at the camera next to him.

“Good evening, I’m Francesca Mahoney.”

“And I’m Jess Burnham. It’s July fourteenth, 2000. And this is
Real Time
.”

At last. Saturday
morning he woke up thinking he was in a dream, a dream about waking up, because he felt fine. Sunday morning, after another eleven hours of sleep, it was the same—
is
this
real? is this
real?—and he wanted to yelp and skip like a man released from some underground cell, like a quadriplegic who can suddenly walk. He kissed Lizzie on Sunday afternoon before she left for the airport. He really kissed her, even though she’s heading for California, and then ten days in Asia with Harold Mose and the goblins from Fifty-nine. And today he feels fine again, the third morning in a row. It’s Monday; he’s slept late, and he feels just
fine
.

The first week of shows was imperfect, like the first of anything. He has a notebook full of notes. There were a hundred blemishes and glitches and clunky patches. Gordon Downey has to go. His instinct for schmaltz and act-break cliff-hanging made the pure documentary scenes seem bogus. The digital video trick with Manson on Tuesday was a mistake, George will now admit, despite his public apologias last week. The writing in the Tuesday and Thursday shows wasn’t great, but what’s clear is how much less writing they’ll need. Instead of half documentary and half script, as he was guessing, they’ll be able to get away with more
like seventy-five—twenty-five. Simply dropping the camera crews into Jess’s and Francesca’s and the correspondents’ lives—crawling out of bed, badgering a producer on the phone, cutting a story, snapping at each other over at dinner, chartering a plane, watching
NewsNight 2000
from the makeup chair—is generating some of the best scenes. Francesca needs practice at live interviewing. (Her unscripted question to the Wise Weapon guy, “But
why
are you in the business of making
any
kinds of guns?” provoked an entire Molly Cramer column yesterday.) Jess is superb, especially in her Tuesday-Thursday acting scenes, though she has to work on the ad-libbed profanity; one of the reviewers thought her bleeps were a scriptwriter’s running gag.

But the show will get there. It can become great. “Innovation and boundary pushing are always to be encouraged in the TV wasteland,” the
Washington Post
critic wrote, “and it is certainly true that there is nothing else like
Real Time
on television. The troubling question remains, however, whether all innovation, like human cloning or last spring’s ‘mental-modem’ scare, is necessarily a good thing. Just because we have the ability to do something doesn’t always mean we should.”
Is it a good thing or a bad thing, Daddy?
George reminds himself to have Daisy dig out the 1913 reviews of
The Rite of Spring
.

And Manson!
Manson!
Such orgasmic fortuity, such a once-in-a-lifetime bull’s-eye! The Board of Prison Terms vote is in dispute now that a majority of the nine commissioners claim it was all some terrible procedural mix-up—but who cares? Manson has been the story on every network and cable-news channel all weekend—he’s on the cover of all the newsweeklies today—and George was there, with a live camera, exclusively!
Real Time
in real time! Talk about launching a brand.

When the phone rings he jumps out of bed,
jumps
, making himself smile. It’s eight-sixteen. He wonders if it’s the ReadyAim school-bus system screwing up again, or another reporter with more awestruck questions about his Charles Manson prescience.

“Hello?”

“God.”

“Emily?”
She must be calling to congratulate him, mend fences, act nice. Fine! “Thank you. Pretty cool, huh?”

There’s a pause. “You didn’t hear.”

He kicks open the trapdoor and peers down into his worst-case netherworld. Mose Media is being sold. Jess Burnham quit. They canceled
Real Time
. Then he imagines Emily’s worst cases. Her boyfriend Buddy Ramo was trampled to death by a stallion he was Rolfing. A right-to-life Democratic vice-presidential nominee. MBC canceled
NARCS
.

“No,” he says, “what?”

“Timothy killed himself.”

“Oh, my God.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, my God.… Jesus, Emily.”

“Weird, huh?”

Timothy Featherstone?
“If I had to rank everyone I know according to probability of suicide,” George says, “Timothy would have been at the absolute bottom. Way below me.”

“Mmm.”

“When?”

“Last night.”

“How?”

“Gun. In the Hummer. In Burbank.”

“Jesus. That’s
so
depressing.”