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But now that his ex-wife was financially colostomizing him, Marty was motivated.

Alan watched, startled by the effect.

The white faces, slightly plumped by death, were exactly what he’d imagined when he’d written the scene. The crashed tomb with bottom-of-the-ocean lighting, filled with vacant, executed faces was stunning. More upsetting than he’d imagined it would be.

It was working and he was relieved. He’d been afraid Hector was going to take it his own way, if not outright fuck it up the ass with some bullshit approach, heavy on
unmotivated zooms, bombast angles. He’d even considered firing him when he finally, actually realized how difficult Hector really could be; with or without coke.

When he’d told Hector in their first conceptual meeting about “The Mercenary” pilot that he wanted Corea to look cut-off and let it all play in the eyes, Hector, the ever-defensive child, had taken a long pause and Alan sensed the legendary wrecking ball of peevishness swinging. Hector fell silent and merely glared for two or three minutes as Alan explained his original vision, as creator.

Hector, rather obviously, couldn’t’ve cared less.

They’d argued for a long time, and though Alan never directly threatened to let Hector go, the implication was there. Especially when Hector told Alan about how he’d been tinkering with the script to get it “up to speed” and Alan smothered that fast.

When you boiled it right down, the more Alan got to know him, the less he wanted to. He was, true to all accounts, a lunatic. He was also a potentially grave liability and Alan had to watch him every step of the way for fear he’d go amuck and jackhammer the whole project into ego-rubble.

The underwater footage was over and the reels changed to a scene where A. E. Barek first meets his Army contact and old friend, General Jack Garris. In the pilot script, as written, the two had served together, as Black Berets, lived in trenches filled with corpses, and belly-crawled over their own dead men to slaughter enemies all over the globe. They’d hidden in treetops, killed together with bare hands. Garris was one of Alan’s favorite characters in the series.

Garris had become a general after escaping from a
POW camp they’d both been held in while Barek wasted away in a hanging bamboo cage, after being captured, trying to make sure Garris made it. Thanks to Barek, Garris got away and he didn’t.

In the POW camp, where Alan had written graphic scenes of pain and degradation, Barek was tortured daily until Garris, working from the outside, helped him to escape.

The two-hundred-thousand-dollar escape scene included a helicopter armada and a shocking massacre at the guerilla guard village near the POW camp. Several teenage village girls would be filmed naked, bathing in a river, as Garris’s soldiers snaked through jungle, near shore, slitting throats.

The scene on screen, right now, was set in a red-light bar in Saigon, where two girls danced topless, and the actor playing Garris, Simon Buss, looked nonplussed about the reunion, drinking a Sapporo. It was the wrong performance and Alan hated it. Corea, face scarred by years of deadly missions, was animated and happy to see Garris and it couldn’t have been more wrong. Barek should’ve been weak and scathed by what he’d been through. Smiling was completely off. Things were emotionally backwards.

Alan was about to try and get Hector on his carphone when the door opened and light plunged in; a yellow King Kong arm. Hector entered, mumbled apology for being late, slumped into a chair in the front row, hair belted by a bandana. He sniffed like a Dristan commerical and Alan wondered if he was fucked-up.

“Hey, Hector …” said Bo.

Hector lifted his arm straight up, then dropped it.
Greg Gunnar turned in his seat and whispered something to Scot who nodded. Scot faced Alan, spoke low.

“Alan, isn’t Barek a little big here?”

Alan tried to decide if he wanted to take the rap or just bust Hector in front of everybody.

“I don’t agree …” said Hector, loudly, overhearing. “I think the man is emotionally moved to be out of the camp and a bit joyous at this—” he waved fingers around, searching, “momentous re-bonding with his old pal.”

No one said anything and the scene continued to play, all wrong; false and strained. Simon, though he’d won two Emmys and stewed with fierce presence, wasn’t coming across. And Corea’s performance was dissonant; smiles and grimaces in search of a focus.

Hector had missed the point.

Marty discreetly bent his mouth to Alan’s ear. “What do you want to do? We can’t use any of this bar stuff. All needs to be re-shot.”

Alan whispered back. “I’ll have to get him to do it over. We’re already overbudget … we’re only into our third day. We’re all over the road if Hector doesn’t get our act together …”

Gunnar and Bloom had fallen conspicuously silent and the room went dense with wordless disapproval. Fear. Hector chuckled to himself at the scene and at one point called out with a confident, bemused voice.

“So, Alan … do you love it?”

Bloom, unable to miss the terrible awkwardness, tried to save the moment. He’d even planned for something like this, having told Alan confidentially, that morning, that if things got unworkable with Hector, the network would play bad guy and beat him up. Alan said he
thought Hector would do a great job but listened appreciatively, wanting network support, especially if re-shooting was required.

“Hector … wasn’t the tone supposed to be more restrained in Barek’s performance?” Bloom sounded reasonable. Gunnar backed him up, saying that was how he’d read it, too. They both said the network, and particularly Andy Singer, had been “looking forward to that.”

Hector said nothing.

The room didn’t move. Alan and Bo exchanged looks.

Bloom took another stab. “Look, Hector, this isn’t … really the feeling we want with this guy.”

“Right. Or with Garris, either,” added Gunnar, to underline.

Hector didn’t turn his head. Just continued watching the dailies. “I see,” was all he said.

Alan cleared his throat, not anxious for an argument that would Jim Jones the whole production. Hector had done this too many times to too many other films. Alan wasn’t going to let him blow his first big pilot.

“Hector, we’re just talking about a readjustment. Not a new show.”

“Absolutely,” added Marty, looking right at Alan, trying to help.

Bloom picked up on the thought. “Look, maybe later in the year we can do an episode where Barek shows some bigger emotions. But for now, we wanna shoot for a certain feel.”

Silence.

“… so what are you saying?” asked Hector, staring dead-ahead, hair suffocated by the bandana.

“We’ll need to re-shoot,” said Bloom.

Hector said nothing. No amuck threats. No steaming tantrum. After several seconds of coffin-still, he simply stood, blocking the projection beam. Then, as his silhouette clung to the screen, he withdrew the .38 from his shoulder holster, turned to face them all, and shot Scot Bloom. The bullet went into Scot’s boyish chest and blood geysered from his monogrammed pocket.

Gunnar was in shock but managed to comfort the young programmer’s slumped form, like Jackie, when she held Jack in the limo, in Dallas.

Bo tried to lunge for Hector and was shot in the thigh, as all looked on in horror. Bo fell to the floor, hissing in pain, bleeding on carpet.

Then, as if he hadn’t planned it at all, and was being forced into the decision by some outside force, Hector turned the pistol’s barrel to his own open mouth. He looked puzzled and made a stunned sound as he pulled the trigger and his troubled mind exploded, flocking walls, chairs, and Armani blends.

Bits of his tormented head even sprayed the screen and the nearly hysterical Greg Gunnar, who’d just joined the network, after graduating from Yale. This was the closest Greg had ever come to being touched by original thought and he screamed, face covered with Hector’s schizophrenic pulp.

Alan quickly moved everyone out of the projection room and called studio security. Marty went to the bathroom to throw up. Both editors were pale. One passed out. As they waited for an ambulance, Bo tourniqueted his own leg and talked about a “fag costume guy” he’d worked with on a huge feature who’d become depressed
and completely severed his penis on location with a knife. The anecdote only made things worse. Alan went into the screening room to help Greg comfort Scot Bloom who was dying, losing blood, calling out for his mother.

When Jordan heard what had happened, an hour later, he called from his XJS and expressed shock. Then, just as he was about to enter a tunnel, he told Alan there was another guy he represented who’d become available and made Hector’s directing look hackneyed.

He said Hector was a moody guy and things like this happened sometimes. Alan was moved by the insight and as Jordan went into a tunnel, he broke up and vanished.

Alan went home early that afternoon and stared out at the Pacific. The bluish water looked like blood in a body and when it struck the sand, it was a wound that went up the coastline; a vast, never healing cut. He tried to comprehend how many things had gone wrong in a few hours. His director had shot lousy footage, a network liaison, a second unit director, and himself.

Alan smoked a joint, stared into space, and pet Bart until the sun went down.

W
hen Alan was asked who should direct the remainder of “The Mercenary” pilot, which by now was eliciting unhappy attention from the network’s Zeus fleet, his mind stalled.

Then, the words left his head and pulled in front of an idea he’d never seen. “I wanna do it,” he told Jordan. “I know what I want. I can bring in the look and the budget. The network loves the dialogue and the attitudes and the whole approach. Tell Andy I wanna take a crack.”

He didn’t know where the words were coming from. He’d never wanted to direct before. Why now? All he knew was he wanted to protect his creation, as a mother would her unborn child; to keep the pilot away from the meddlesome Xeroxes most pilot directors called “style.”

Even Jordan, in his usual esthetic trough, had warned that for-hire, “astigmatic hack” types would make “The
Mercenary” look dreary and narcotic. And the new breed of film-school poseurs was as bad. Pimply auteurs with their wet streets and sultry colors, fiberglassing every frame; drowning the pilot in narcissistic gem-shades.

It was just shinier crap.

Either way, Alan figured critics kicked you in the balls and no one watched. He knew it needed more.

But knowing all that and being able to explain why he’d thought to direct were different. The words felt like foreign places; ideas you needed shots to get to. Yet something was pushing him to demand his chance behind the camera.

To everyone’s surprise, when Andy heard Alan wouldn’t stay with the show unless he directed the pilot, he agreed. He viewed the work Hector finished, felt all the underwater footage was usable, and that some of the wide shots of the red-light bar could be cut into a new sequence between Barek and Garris.

He also felt Alan should get a single credit, in order to keep Hector’s suicide a nontainting presence on the pilot. The press would eat it up if they got hold of the whole blood-soaked mess. He told Alan he’d pull some strings with Hector’s attorney who owed Andy “favors.”

“What kind of favors?” Alan had asked and Andy’s dimples darkened.

“And don’t worry. Hector messed with every film he ever directed. It just caught up with him.” Andy played with the words, deluded into thinking he’d coined a new idea. “Or … maybe he caught up with him.”

Alan thanked him and wondered aloud why Hector had committed suicide in such a horrible, public way.

Andy thought it over. Yawned a little and nibbled on
fresh, office popcorn. “Well,” he said, loving to speculate on the macabre, “if you know his work, Hector never could stage a scene without going over the top. Good news is public will eat this up. Whole perverse aura about the show now. Can’t buy P.R. this strong. Guess Hector finally did us a favor.”

And then he had to take a call from Judd Hirsch.

Alan hung up and closed his eyes, not able to forget the look on Hector’s face when the gun garaged in his mouth. The second or two before he fired, he’d looked right at Alan. At that exact moment, Alan had instantly seen Hector’s wounding of Bloom as coming from rage, and the wounding of Bo Bixby from a simple desire to protect himself. But firing a bullet into his own brain …

The way Hector had looked at Alan as he squeezed the trigger for the final time … something about it was very weird.

Like it hadn’t been his idea.

A
lan watched orchestrated explosions below, match-heading on Mexican jungle. As he peered through the camera lens, the fictive Viet Nam burned prebudgeted, perfectly arranged annihilation and palm trees went up like bombs. Smoke ballooned into sky, and rented choppers dropped movie napalm as Alan had his director of photography zoom in, slowly, on flaming huts and frightened oxen.

He stared down at earth, aflame, day-scale villagers scattering and screaming, his helicopter vista craning higher. Then, he gestured for the pilot to swoop lower and yelled into his own walkie-talkie, telling his assistant director, on the ground, to tell the extras what to do.

As they did exactly what he said, delayed in their response time by mere seconds, Alan was aware of becoming calm. He was in the helicopter, photographing
A. E. Barek’s P.O.V. shots of jungle assault and strangely, all memories and sensations of mortal limit were gone.

Lifted.

He felt peace; transcendence. Putting together a life for Barek calmed him. Getting the authentic contours just right. The textured history. Experiences. Scarred emotions; triumphs and traumas. Details of a life that didn’t even exist. Yet, as he filmed, committing it all to emulsion, he realized it was almost no different from the real thing.

Except for genuine danger, lurking near, everything at this moment looked and felt identical. The shame and glory were living things. Though he was on location, just south of Puerto Vallarta, and the whole cast and crew were staying at a beachfront Hilton, he felt he was in a helicopter, over Viet Nam, on a search-and-destroy, the enemy burning and screaming below.