The Best New Horror 2 (46 page)

Jonathan hoped his smile was encouraging. “I’ve always shrugged them off as TV news, or CIA, or cable-service trucks. Always unmarked. No panel windows, and what glass there is is heavily reflectorized.” Two words nattered in his brain, and they were
conspiracy paranoia
.

“And sometimes with no external gear at all. Just another faceless white van. But in your gut you know they’re all kin.”

“Right.” Jonathan remained casual. It would not do for Haskell to think he was being humored.

“Ever see the film
Gimme Shelter
?” Haskell was deadpan.

Non sequitur
? Jonathan raced to make identification while he kept his face relaxed and friendly. “Yes. A long while ago. The Rolling Stones documentary of the Altamont Speedway concert. Lots of narrative by Melvin Belli, the attorney. Raw, spontaneous footage of a man getting knifed right in front of the stage.”

“You remember the story they used to tell about
Ben-Hur
, the industry story for stuntmen?”

“That’s one I’m not familiar with.”

“Rumor had it that during the film’s climactic chariot race a stuntman was run over by his own chariot after a muffed fall. Killed. For years, people insisted that if you looked closely enough at the finished footage, you’d actually see the poor son of a bitch getting crushed in living color.”

“Just like the stabbing at Altamont.”

“Or the riot footage from the Chicago Democratic Convention in Wexler’s
Medium Cool
. Real head bashings; blood you
knew
wasn’t Karo Syrup and food dye. When a truncheon bounces off a head in that film, you
feel
it pulverizing bone and tissue.” He was rolling now, albeit with queasy uncertainty, the kind that treads softly in the psyche. He did not want Jonathan to dismiss him before he reached the crux. His job had always been to make such stories palatable, whether they were true or not, to live creatively through a typewriter. It would be an absurd shame if he botched it with the truth. “Let’s escalate now, shall we?
Snuff
. You’ve heard of it, I’m sure. Purports to be an actual filmed record of torture and murder. The people you see being killed actually
were
killed—or so the myth goes. Tell me, Jon, just offhand, what’s the current moneymaker playing all over Hollywood and Westwood?”

“Having not made it out to the movies in about three weeks, I’d say that movie
The Nam
, because it’s been on the news so much.”

“Uh-huh. Why?”

“Well, because—” Jonathan stopped and sought Haskell’s eyes, his glass hesitating midway to his mouth. “Because of that TV actor who was killed during filming. Supposedly you can see him getting blown to smithereens. It got a lot of media. Three-ring coverage.”

“Supposedly you can also see the guy’s blood on the camera lens. But the only reality you can be sure of is that because of that scene, the film is now minting money fist over asshole, as my little brother used to say.” He finished his drink.

“But did that actor—did he . . .?”

“His name was Pepperdine,” said Haskell.

“Did he really die, or not?”

“There you go, Jon, off down the slide. In your eyes, right now, I can see the thing that’s making
The Nam
such a hit. The lust to know, coupled with the proximity of death, the most undeniable thing there is. Yes, Pepperdine died. What you see in the movies is real. But no accident.”

“You’re suggesting that this man’s death was arranged, premeditated in order that a motion picture could pull in more bucks at the box office?” He was flustered and incredulous. “For god’s sake . . .”

“Not only was it arranged,” said Haskell, motioning for more cognac. “But it’s a perfect example of how I’ve been making my living for going on five years now.”

The Grand Marnier bottle sat on the table between them like an obscenely large salad cruet. The cognac’s pleasant orange taste went flat and tacky in Jonathan’s mouth.

He rediscovered his voice. “You can’t be serious,” he said to the curtains as lightning flared outside. Dramatic sting.

“Now
you
sound like one of those bad B-movie characters.” For the first time, a phantom smile wisped past Haskell’s lips.

“Backtrack, Haskell. You’re going to confess to me that spectacular fluke deaths connected to the movie industry are being engineered for the sole purpose of profit?” He tried to juggle the concept in his head and chanced across a good example. “That, say, the disaster at Three Mile Island was
set up
so that
The China Syndrome
would be a hit film?!”

“Wait, Jon, just a second. I never asked you to believe me, or anything I’m about to tell you. I’ve got one reason for coming here.”

“Shoot.” Ha-ha, another cinematic pun.

Haskell seemed anything but crazy now. Ragged, and harried, and on the brink of some inner breakdown of spirit, yes, but not bereft of sanity. “You predate my involvement with the Conclave by years,” he said, fingers laced, contemplating the floor. “We were friends back in our idealistic youth. This whole Conclave thing weighs on my brain; I want to get it out of my head and push it away from me. Because I might not have a whole lot of time left, and like a character in a shabby B-movie—one with simple, easily encapsulated motives—I want to clear my conscience in whatever cheap, shabby way I can. I lucked across your name. I’ll get to that later. But I lucked across it, and remembered you’d made a go of your aspiration to psychiatry—shrink to the stars’ kids, remember?—so I decided to despoil your doorstep in the dead of night.”

“No problem for a friend. And I
am
a professional ear. It would look like you chose correctly. So let’s have it.”

“Thank god. I’d hoped you’d cut around the bullshit and deal with the core.” He rose, refilled his snifter, and drank down another thunderbolt of liquor. “Cigarettes anywhere?”

Jonathan lit Haskell’s and decided against one for himself. Haskell inhaled strength and urgency; expelled psychic cinders and decay. Another guarded glance at the window, and he spoke.

“They propositioned me right after Maureen died. I was ripe with ideas for films, stories, articles, projects . . . all with no takers. Maureen had a stroke. I blamed it on the hours her own career hustling imposed
on her—the tryouts, the auditions, the commercial shoots. When she died, I was reactionary and bitter—cannon fodder for any good scheme. The Conclave recognized a good vengeance motive and exploited mine. I wanted to make ‘the Industry’ pay for my loss of Maureen. After nine months I began to wonder if the Conclave had somehow set up her death in the first place, just because they had a slot on the table of Scripters that needed filling. But by then it didn’t matter—that was how my thinking had changed.”

“Scripters?”

“That was what they called us. Seven of us. It turned out they had read every unfilmed script I’d ever written, and every page of every story I’d ever submitted anywhere. They said my kind of story logic was what they needed. I wound up helping them to blueprint formulae whereby events are programmed to yield maximum profit. Simply stated, that was our sole aim. Scripters, as opposed to writers. You won’t find the vocation on an IRS form anywhere.”

“Nor any mention of the Conclave, I gather.”

Haskell coughed, and with the attitude of a true nicotine addict, puffed his cigarette for relief. “We were tax immune anyway. The money we got paid never existed. Do you recall the legal flap several years ago concerning the profit breakdown on that space monster film—the one that cost ten million to make, grossed fifteen times that much, and didn’t show a profit?”

“I remember. Lawsuits flew like chaff in a typhoon.” The
Variety
rule of thumb stated that a film had to gross two and a half times its cost to break even. The estimate had recently been revised upward to 2.7, but either way it meant that in this particular case there was a boatload of cash that needed to be answered for.

“Conclave smoke,” said Haskell. “Haven’t you ever stopped to wonder why Hollywood continues to bash its head against the impenetrable brick wall of movie musicals? They
never
make money—
Grease
was a fluke—and yet every year we get two or three bombs like
Song of Norway
or
Lost Horizon
or
Annie
. Why? Same reason the alien monster movie didn’t make any cash until it got too big to hide.”

“Sounds like a whopper of a petty-cash till.”

“
Studio Advisory Overhead
covers a lot of yardage in contractese.” He shrugged. “Scripters have to be well paid.”

Jonathan tilted his head solemnly. Any elite profession that had only seven experts would
have
to pay by the shovelful.

“It was a minor vogue among the Scripters themselves to be paid in gold bullion, direct to Swiss accounts. None of us would touch American dollars with a cattleprod. And payment of that sort suited the Conclave just peachy. It gave them both secrecy and control.”

“It was enough money to compensate for all the Hollywood ego tripping the job itself denied you?” Jonathan paused a beat, and then said, “Dumb question, I’ll wager.”

“Their leverage exceeds monetary power,” said Haskell. “That’s why I’m sitting here spilling this to you, instead of to the law enforcement agencies of our fair state. The Conclave
likes
fascist governors, and I suppose you’ve noticed that our own current chief executive is just another creation of the media.” He cut loose a harsh, jagged laugh. “Metro cops that go for thirty large per year don’t even provide nuisance value.”

“Money and power,” mused Jonathan. “It’s almost impossible for me to conceive of that much . . .”

“Incentive? It’s easy.” Bitterness flushed Haskell’s face as he overrode his friend. “Is there anyone you know whose life is worth ten million to you? Or the six, nine, twelve million spent on prints and publicity? Nope. It gets easy to say it: he, she, or it dies . . . if that’s what you need to make money, to keep everyone employed and grinning.”

The operational clarity of the Conclave was classically pragmatic. Chilling. It demanded utter ruthlessness up front, a petcock shutoff of human emotions.

Said the siren song:
Do us a trick and we’ll make you a star. But then you have to do us a bigger trick
.

“All sorts of ideas fell from the creative hats of the Scripters. When I left, things were turning evil. Let me run some ideas past you, to give you a bigger picture.” His tone was now maddeningly reasonable. He might have been discussing market futures. In a way, he was. “Posited: a romanticized gang movie. We set up shootings and knifings at selected theatres with high news visibility. Grownup news commentators frowned, and word of mouth made the film a blockbuster. Remember the first manufactured controversy over gory horror films, that whole riff that they were misogynistic, sexist? A Scripter I worked with, a woman, thought that one up over lunch one afternoon. The more simplistic pop critics ate it whole and regurgitated it to their audiences. It’s been more than a decade now, and those goddamn movies are still minting cash!

“Occasionally, the Conclave votes that a chosen actor should
expire
—never say die. They graph boxoffice draw over a span of years and pull a final jolt of income by killing off the actor. Funny how John Wayne died of cancer right after making a film about a cowboy who dies of cancer . . . See Blah-Blah’s
final film
! They—we—called it the Rockstar Formula.”

“Death equals increased album sales,” Jonathan said. “Like with Jim Morrison, or—”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know about John Lennon or Henry Fonda. Some recent occurrences—look at the Natalie Wood thing—have the earmarks of Conclave jobs but I sure as hell couldn’t tell you if they were bona fide or not. You gain an eye for the techniques after a while, but the Conclave is always refining and modifying their approach, in case some outsider starts adding up facts. And sometimes fate intercedes—I think that was the case with Lennon. Random acts still happen, even in the 1980s. But Lennon’s death was a profit setup from square one whether it was programmed that way or not.”

Jonathan said nothing.

“You have that expression on your face again, Jon. What you’re thinking is what I’ve mulled over a billion times. It is cold. You have to turn yourself off, function only on the medulla level. You consider a problem dispassionately, the way a mathematician faces down an equation.”

“You did all this for money?” Suddenly Jonathan was rudely aware of his stained-glass windows, and expensive desk, and sybaritic carpeting, and the things he had done to get them. His eyes picked out his thousand-dollar copy of
Moby Dick
on the costly oak and peg shelf.

“Not just for money. I’m not sure I can explain why the opportunity appealed to me—explain in any sane way, I mean.” He let his open hands fall into his lap.

“I’m not as dumb as you may think,” Jonathan said colorlessly. “I’ve got a pretty fair idea of why you or any other creative mind would go for it: Hollywood doesn’t break ground anymore. It’s a creative dry well. Screenplays are infinitely rewritable so that studio middle management can stay employed. Directors find their final cuts being edited by the PR department and their endings being dictated by know-nothing preview audiences. The studios have all co-opted each other, and the whole circus has been inside the tight fists of the accountants for at least the past thirty years. People don’t watch films today, they watch corporate deal-making in action. Once, filmmakers made their films and then sold them. Now it’s the other way around—money isn’t to make movies, movies are to make money. The screenplay, as manipulable as hamburger, is just a formality amid formulaic, simpleminded formats, ‘name’ stars, ‘name’ directors, and ‘hot properties.’ The accountants add these raw materials together exactly like mathematicians—and label the result their ‘product.’ It’s borne a system in which any film that doesn’t gross a hundred million dollars is deemed a failure. In such a system, the last bastion of true creativity is the guy who can figure out how to present such tired garbage in such a way that it is a success, thanks to millions of moviegoers
being conned into believing it is something fresh and original and moving.”