When the Stars Come Out (37 page)

Star International—were aware of the situation, and occasionally

even paid a friendly call to gently suggest that he ease up whenever incipient crew mutiny was detected. But for all his flaws and general unpleasantness, Mark R. Cassidy was delivering them a product

that was, for all its on-screen mediocrity and off-screen unpleasantness, inexplicably popular and, more importantly, profitable. So

with an eye on the bottom line and an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”

attitude, PorchStar made a conscious decision not to fix it.

The only people involved in
The Brothers-in-Law
who usually escaped his wrath and contempt were the actors. That was because

Mark R. Cassidy knew that he could drive a set designer or cos-

tumer out of the industry, but actors . . . well, sometimes they could rise above their mediocrity. The problem, as he saw it, was that in the entertainment industry one never could predict which ditzy actress in a walk-on role was going to be next year’s breakout star. For that reason—and that reason alone—he generally treated his actors with slightly more sensitivity.

Although it tried him at times. Especially when that actor was Q.

J. Scott.

Take the incident two weeks earlier, during the taping of a Very

Special Episode. In the scene, Q. J.’s character had just learned of the death of his beloved third-grade teacher, the woman who had

turned his young life around after catching him cheating on a test.

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As the camera zoomed in, framing Q. J.’s face in an extreme close-

up, MRC felt that something was wrong, but he couldn’t quite put

his finger on what that something was. Then, as Q. J.’s eyes welled, he figured it out.

“What the fuck is that?” he hissed at the cameraman.

“What? Oh . . . the brown thing?”

“Yeah, the brown thing.”

“I dunno.”

Together, they stared into the monitor, watching a small brown . . .

thing
slide slowly down Q. J.’s cheek.

“Cut!”

MRC stormed across the set as the director looked around, won-

dering who had stolen his thunder and yelled “cut.” When he was

inches from Q. J.’s face he took one finger and, very gently, he

plucked the offending brown thing off the actor’s damp cheek.

A contact lens. A brown contact lens. A
fucking brown contact lens
!

MRC looked into Q. J.’s left eye. It was the normal hazel color,

favoring green. He looked into his right eye. It was chocolate

brown.

He looked again. Left: hazel. Right: brown.

Fingertip: brown.

“When did you start wearing contact lenses?”

“The brown ones?” The actor smiled, then noticed the lens on

MRC’s fingertip. “Oh, did I cry that one out? Sorry . . . they’re new.

I’m not used to them yet.”

“They’re new?” He scowled. “How new?”

“Three days ago.”

MRC did the math in his head. If Q. J. had changed his eye color

three days earlier, that meant that it had changed only two episodes after the episode where
the fucking script was built around his fucking
hazel eyes!

Not to mention the fact that it just wouldn’t do for an actor to

change physical characteristics like that. It wasn’t done. Hair style?

Maybe. Slight weight gain or loss? Maybe. Eye color? No way. You

might as well just go out and get pregnant. Or lop off a limb.

So MRC did what any good producer would do. He flicked the

offending lens to the floor, then reached for Q. J.’s right eye.

Long story short and less painful to relate: it made for a long

night of shooting.

W H E N T H E S T A R S C O M E O U T

245

But still, MRC thought he had done an admirable job keeping

his cool. Any common crew member would have been summarily

fired—summarily
executed
, if there were any justice in the world—

but he had allowed Q. J. Scott’s idiotic contact lens gaffe pass with only expressed unhappiness and minor retinal discomfort. Mark R.

Cassidy did not have a tantrum, and he did not scream, and he

thought he had been extremely diplomatic toward the actor. Of

course, the director and the cameraman—both of whom should

have caught the problem instead of him—were out of a job before

the week was over, but that was show biz.

Yes, Q. J. deserved punishment. But MRC kept in mind three

things: (1) despite his pedestrian acting skills, Q. J. was a two-time People’s Choice Award winner; (2) he was an actor, and therefore—

given the inexplicable whims of the public—he could be the next

Brad Pitt before MRC had the chance to kick him off the sound-

stage; and, most importantly, (3) his mother was Kitty Randolph,

and it was probably unwise to threaten harm to the progeny of Kitty Randolph. Because even though they hadn’t been put to much

productive use in recent years, Mark R. Cassidy still valued his testi-cles.

“Here’s the thing, Q. J.,” he explained to the actor, when shoot-

ing on that Very Special Episode ended at 3:47 AM that night and

the cast and crew were numb with exhaustion. “I want you to under-

stand why you can’t have brown eyes.”

“But I was wearing the cream sweater,” he said. “I thought it would be a good contrast.”

MRC swallowed his sigh, and thought that color-coordinated

morons were possibly even more dangerous than regular morons.

“You know why thirteen million Americans tune in to
The Brothers-in-Law
each week? Because we give them consistency. Week in and week out, they know what to expect. Jason says this, you say something else, and we wrap it all up in twenty-two minutes. Twenty-two minutes, a few laughs, a dab of poignancy every now and then . . .

The audience is happy, I’m happy, the suits at PorchStar are happy, Proctor & Gamble is happy. End of story. So when you suddenly

have brown eyes, well, it screws up that consistency. It throws off the formula. Understand?”

Q. J. nodded, but, looking into his now-hazel eyes, MRC knew

that his words had flown right over the actor’s head. And he made

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a mental note to check Q. J. Scott’s eyes every shooting day in the future.

Actors—especially actors whose mothers were not only celluloid

icons, but also moguls in their own right—were one thing. Writers

were quite another, and MRC was not alone in that opinion within

the industry. With rare exception, he considered them expendable

and interchangeable, and on a show of the caliber of
The Brothers-in-Law
, hardly worthy of their screen credit. Teenagers could—

and, he thought, sometimes did—write this insipid crap.

Which is why MRC got a secret thrill when the call came from

Stanley Roth, the show’s almost-never-seen executive producer,

which in this case meant he was the financial lifeline to PorchStar International, not a
real
producer. The call came late on a Monday morning, shortly after a crew meeting in which he had torn several new orifices in a production assistant.

Stan Roth got straight to the point. “Directive from the top.

Mark. Episode 92 needs a major rewrite.”

MRC allowed a smile to cross his lips, and was surprised it didn’t hurt. Episode 92 was scheduled to shoot in two weeks, and a major

rewrite would infuriate the writing team. Better yet, depending on the extent of the rewrites, this “directive from the top” could have a ripple effect, requiring subsequent scripts to be rewritten.

Still, he had to ask: “Why?”

“We want to take advantage of the Quinn Scott story.”

“Who?”

“Quinn Scott. Q. J.’s father?”

MRC thought about that. Something made him uneasy. “Isn’t

that the fag?”

Stan Roth cleared his throat. “If you’re asking if Quinn Scott is

the
gay gentleman
you’ve been hearing about lately, then the answer is yes.”

“So you want me to do some stunt-casting here?”

“Think of it this way,” said Roth. “Forty years ago or so, Quinn

Scott was on the screen with John Wayne . . . Sal Mineo . . . Bette Davis, I think. This isn’t stunt-casting; it’s his comeback. So we put him in the show and publicize the hell out of it. ‘Special Guest

Appearance!’ ‘Quinn Scott’s Comeback!’ ‘Philly Cop Back on the

Small Screen!’ ”

“Whatever you want to call it, Stan.”

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247

“We can milk this for months, Mark. But make sure the writers

make the episode self-supporting, just in case the Quinn Scott phenomenon looks like it’s going to die and we have to rush it on the air out of sequence.”

“So we’re casting this guy for a Very Special Episode, all because he’s got a book out.” The idea clearly annoyed MRC, and in this

case he didn’t care if he showed that side of his personality to Stan Roth.

“And,” the executive producer added, “he’s the father of Q. J.

Scott. Don’t forget that. We already have our hook.”

“That also makes him Kitty Randolph’s ex-husband.”

“That’s for PorchStar to worry about.”

MRC was about to respond when the line went dead. And there

was only one thing to do after being so abruptly dismissed by Stan Roth of PorchStar International, so he got on the phone with head

writer Denny Levinson and told him that Episode 92 needed a total

overhaul to accommodate an appearance by Quinn Scott.

And making a twenty-seven-year-old head writer cry in frustra-

tion brought another smile to MRC’s lips. Two smiles in one day; it was almost too much to bear. It was almost—dare he think it?—better than being the center square.

Now he just had to hope that the father wasn’t as big an idiot as

the son. And Mark R. Cassidy didn’t hold out much hope for that.

Chapter 11

Television is tough. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. After

three and a half seasons in
Philly Cop
, that is one of the few things I know for certain.

Even though I was in my early thirties for most of that experi-

ence, it was probably all that running and jumping over rooftops

that ruined my hip . . .

C
hris Cason couldn’t believe his good fortune.

Only a few years earlier, he had been living in Tacoma, working

at a Barnes & Noble, and only daring to dream of the day when his name would be as well known as those thousands of authors mocking him from their perches on the bookshelves. Over the years he

had met many of the people attached to those names—Janet Evano-

vich, Glenda Vassar, Diana Gabaldon, Andrew Westlake, Margaret

Campbell, and many more—and yet, somehow, he had still not been

able to break into their league.

Life in Tacoma had been just that unfair, he thought, because,

as an avid and discerning reader, he knew that his novel-in-progress was a genre-busting diamond in the rough, and not all that rough,

at that.
Ant
—a horror/erotica hybrid with a neo-Marxist point of view about a race of mutant Ant-Women and the scientist who is

their creator, oppressor, and, yes, lover—was admittedly in need of some trimming, but Chris Cason was convinced that very few passages in its 624 pages would have to go, and even those could be re-cycled for the sequel.

The problem was, how does an aspiring writer convince a pub-

lisher to read it, when the aspiring writer lives in Tacoma? And the answer, of course, was to move to New York.

So he quit his job at Barnes & Noble, packed up his Chevy

Cavalier, and was ready to drive east—Washington State to New York State, nonstop if necessary—until fate intervened. In this case, fate came in the form of a friend of a friend, from whom he learned of

an opening as a production assistant in the entertainment industry.

Reasoning that
Ant
would make as good a movie as a book—or, better yet, a
miniseries!
—and also reasoning that the Cavalier was much more likely to make it to LA than New York, Chris Cason headed

straight south.

The Cavalier made it to northern California. Undaunted, Chris

made it the rest of the way to Los Angeles, and was soon working

for PorchStar International, an entertainment conglomerate that

produced a wide variety of mediocre television shows, all of which W H E N T H E S T A R S C O M E O U T

251

could have benefited from Chris Cason’s artistic input if he was inclined to stoop to that level.

Now, by day, he roped off streets for outdoor shoots and deliv-

ered scripts to actors and, yes, he also got yelled at. A lot. But by night, he had transformed
Ant
into a 300-page, five-hour screen-play, and that was what was important. Every small-time actor, di-

rector, writer, or crew member who had ever yelled at him—which

constituted pretty much everyone he had ever worked for—would

be sorry when
Ant
made Chris Cason the new Spielberg . . . no,
bigger
: the new
Orson Welles
.

For now, though, he would bide his time and be patient. Because,

like the Ant-Women, vengeance would eventually be his.

In the meantime, there were people to meet and contacts to make.

And little did the suits at PorchStar International know, but they had just ordered him out to LAX where he would, in the process,

make his biggest contact yet.

He stood outside the arrivals gate, straining his neck and hoping

he would recognize him. And, yes, there he was, still familiar from his younger days, and looking quite similar to the photo on his

book jacket. It was, indeed, Quinn Scott, slowly walking toward him with his entourage.