Wag the Dog (32 page)

It was, in his mind's eye, incredibly cinematic. Real David Lean wide-screen stuff.
Dr. Zhivago
and
Reds.
The sweeping movement of massed armies across the flat, stark-white steppes. Tanks, rockets, the sky filled with combat aircraft, the firing of guns, vivid bursts of color on a palette of snow. If Coppola was Italian opera as cinema, this would be Russian opera. Grander, vaster, and infinitely more profound.

It was also very problematical. However disorganized the Russians were, they still had nukes. Beagle's wife and all their friends were incredibly concerned about ecology and nuclear proliferation. Beagle did not want to turn out to be Dr. Strangelove, a madman willing to bring on the first nuclear winter or set off the doomsday machine.

He turned to the screens. Black on black.

Maybe terrorists were the way to go. If the librarians had done their job, and they were pretty good, he could access material by subject matter. He began with news footage. Just tossing
it up on whatever screen was open, viewing randomly, getting a sense. The terrorists were mostly Arabs. Beagle watched CBS graphics of the bombing of the Pan Am jet over Lockerbie.
Achille Lauro
footage. A plane on the ground in Egypt, terrorists and hostages inside. Innocent bystanders dead at an airport.

Movies: Counterattack by the Delta Force, by Navy Seals, by Commandos, by the FBI, by Chuck Norris, Interpol, Vietnam vets, by Bruce Willis, by bionic bimbos.
⁶⁴

Teddy Brody, in the back room, wondered what the hell Linc was up to. It had been war movies, war movies, and war footage. Now this. Teddy had been making notes and charting the films. And he started reading about them. Of the fifty-odd books that he'd read, the one that most intrigued him was
The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre,
by Jeanine Basinger, because it had a formula for such films. Maybe, if he followed the formula, he could write a script. Maybe that script would be the one that Beagle was searching for. That was the whole point of this damn job. To find a way up and out.

But now, terrorists?

That could work with the Basinger formula. The combat film was always the story of a small squad of diverse people—reflecting the dictates of political correctness of the period—who manage to overcome their differences to work together to achieve a common—patriotic, obviously—objective.
⁶⁵
Of course, that could work with a Commando team against the terrorists. That was obvious. He didn't know why he'd even hesitated over it.

Beagle wrote a note on a yellow pad:
Scenario: “The president is kidnapped by terrorists.”
⁶⁶

This had a certain appeal. Beagle had learned not to let his imagination be incarcerated by cost or practicality. Still, it seemed to him that with this reality shit, getting the cooperation of a foreign country prepared to enter into a war with the United States, with the United States scripted to win, might be difficult. But having the president participate in, or fake, his own kidnapping would be a piece of cake. How could he refuse? It was all being done for the benefit of his reelection.

Then the waiting. The drama of not knowing. Whip the country into hysteria. Then the ransom demands. Do we bow to ransom? Do we stand on principle?
Millions for defense, not one cent for tribute!
The negotiations. Deliberately dragged out. While, secretly, the Delta Force (or Navy Seals, or Vegas Bimbos or even the FBI) is maneuvering to burst in on them and they rescue Bush in a perfectly timed and executed . . .

What a thought! Have the terrorists execute Bush! Then Dan Quayle becomes president, declares War on Terrorism. Not like the War-on-Drugs war. But real war where we go in and obliterate entire cities. Search and destroy. If they want to hide in Libya, invade Libya. Syria. Anywhere they tried to hide!

Obviously, the client was not going to go for that. Bush had to stay alive. But that's what he needed—an incident that would kick the whole affair into higher gear. If the Delta Force rescued the president, then what? Then it became a police matter. Measured force. Investigations, waiting, arrests, and years later—long after Bush won or lost his reelection—a trial. Probably in Italy, where the terrorists would only get ten years anyway and then be traded to Libya after eighteen months for a boatload of oil and support for the lira. Or would the American public be outraged enough—that is to say, could the American public be whipped up to a sufficient frenzy—that they would be willing to go to war?

What if they took Bush and Quayle? Delta Force rescues Bush, but the terrorists kill Quayle.

That
was a happening concept.

Bush, in anger and grief, leads the nation—the nations, plural, of the West—in a Holy Crusade against terrorism. So that no wife need grieve like Madilyn? (Marilyn? he made a note to check). So that no child (he was sure Quayle had children) would be left fatherless, ever again. Image: orphan, little, fending for himself, looking for help. No. Try: little girl, curly hair, sweet face, crying herself to sleep at night—waiting for a Daddy who would never return. Nice, nice.

The terrorists would be Muslims. The Backward forces of Superstition and Repression of the East against the Rational, Ethical, Forward-looking West. It tapped into atavistic hatred. Christians against Moslems! There it was—the project title—
The Crusades.

Excited, he called Kitty on the intercom. He used the speakerphone. He hated holding regular telephones against his ear. It made him feel like a nerd with half an earmuff.

“Kitty,” he cried.

“I'm not Kitty,” a female voice answered.

Then he remembered. Kitty had quit. This was a new one. Did she have a name?

“Yes, Mr. Beagle?” she said into the silence.

Did she have a name? Why was he calling her? He remembered. “We got a kid here . . . smart kid. Uhhh, Yalie. Gay kid. What's his name?”

“I could look in the personnel files.”

Dimwit. Or were the personnel files listed by sexual preference? “Are they filed that way?”

“What way?”

Beagle hung up.

And there was something else he'd wanted Kitty to do. He dialed the new person back.

“Would you get my wife a dress,” he said.

“Huh?”

“A dress. You know, like women wear. On their bodies.”

“I know what a dress is.”

“Good.”

“But what kind of dress . . .”

“How the hell should I know?”

“What size?”

“Kitty knows all that,” Beagle said. He didn't know his wife's sizes. Of course, he realized that buying things was
no substitute for being with your family.
But at least it proved that he was thinking of them. And in spite of what his wife said, she was in fact easier to deal with when he bought her something.

“You have kids?” he asked the faux Kitty.

“No.”

“Know anything about them?”

“Some. I have nephews and nieces.”

“Good. Get a present for a twenty-month-old.”

“What should I get?”

“Never mind,” he said as politely as he could.

If he remembered correctly, the Yale kid was a librarian. There was a button on his phone that said
LIBRARY
. He pushed it.

Teddy heard the phone ring. An actual call. A human voice was going to speak to him. It was a rare event at work and Teddy, savoring the potential—certain, however, that whatever the call was, it would somehow be less than what he hoped—let the phone ring three times before he answered it with a cheery “Hello, library.”

“Hey, Beagle here.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you the Yalie?”

Teddy wondered what might be wrong with that, but he said, “Yes.” He added, “UCLA film school too.”

“You must be very bright. Glad that you're working here. Wish we had more time to spend together . . .”

Oh God, what does he want? He's speaking to me. Opportunity calling.

“Here's what I want. I want one page on propaganda.”

“What about propaganda? History of? Ours? Theirs? Definitions? Controversy over? Great examples? Hot war? Cold War?”

“I want one page on the essence of propaganda. The guts of it. The whatever, if I had it, I would be a genius at propaganda. The Zen of Propaganda. Then you can give me more on the rest of the crap later. Get it?”

“Got it,” Teddy said, though he didn't

“Good. End of the day tomorrow. No, take your time. Two days, OK?”

“Sure.” Of course, it wasn't. What was he doing? Shouldn't he speak up and say a job like that just to find the references will take two days, then two weeks or a month to do the reading, going round the clock, then if you want something really astute and well written—especially if it's short, short is harder than long—I would like at least a week for that. People hate people who promise more than they can deliver. Bosses like employees who advise them honestly what can and cannot be done and when. That was ridiculous. Bosses hate that. They want people who can do the impossible for them without argument. That's what impresses them. Better not speak up. Just do what you can. And fail. Or not.

“You don't have to do your regular job too, at the same time. Tell Kitty to get someone to cover for you.”

“Uh, Kitty's gone.”

“Right,” Beagle said.

“Uh, thanks, Mr. Beagle.”

But Beagle was already off the line. He was onto something and he knew it.
The Crusades
was exciting because it at least postulated an answer to the problem of who would be willing to go to war. Supposedly, that was not his problem. His job was to come up with the script, with any enemy he wanted, as long as it did the job. Then it was up to Hartman, the packager, or George Bush, technically the producer, to make an enemy deal. If they couldn't get the enemy he wanted, then he would readjust. Shit like that happened all the time. Hadn't
48 Hours
originally been a buddy picture designed for Stallone? Then it got switched to Eddie
Murphy and adjustments were made. A good director shaped his material to his stars. And in a war the number-one enemy has got to be considered a star.

Still, since he would be dealing with so much reality, it would be good to let reality help shape the concept. He would have to, in essence, get into a dialogue with reality because that was the raw material that he would have to manipulate. So dealing with questions like who would fight, who would be willing to die to get George Bush reelected, was important to the process.

The Arabs had a whole tradition of holy war, jihad. If they truly believed that those who died as sacred martyrs would go to some holy hashish, hookah, and houri heaven, then they might be willing—even pleased—to fight a war they were contracted to lose.

The image of Paradise, the Persian garden promised as the Islamic afterlife, intrigued him, and he made a note of it as a possible subject—maybe setting—for a film. It was a lot like what people dreamed L.A. would be. Large, brightly colored intoxicating drinks, hot tubs, exotic foliage, lots of drugs, especially love and sex drugs, a variety of beautiful and subservient women. What if, once you got there, the reality of Paradise turned out to be the reality of L.A.—pollution, hatred, crime, too much time spent in automobiles breathing fumes, eternally irascible, demanding women, in the end, the hero escapes, gets another chance at life, rushes back to the battlefield and says, “Don't be a martyr, Paradise is just like home.”

Beagle was not in some never-never land. He understood that this was a real war he'd been asked to create. People were going to die. The idea filled him with a sense of power like he'd never felt before. Not even on set with a full crew and thousands of extras and special effects and helicopters all waiting on his command. This was deeper. Richer.

Beagle faced that black wall. He punched up terrorist films.
Black Sunday. Python Wolf. Terror Squad, Commando, Death Before Dishonor, Viper, Omega Syndrome, Invasion Force.
The language of film was clear. Arabs were terrorists. Terrorists were bad. There
was no other side of the story.
⁶⁷
That was useful and important. It made for economy of exposition. Just like with Nazis, give a guy a monocle and a bit of leather, a straight-arm salute and that sneer, and the audience knows that this is an unmitigated villain, and the director can cut right to the chase.

But watching the clips, Beagle was disappointed. In spite of the black and white simplicity, terrorism did not make for good movies. Not like World War II or even Vietnam. It was 98 percent sub-Chuck Norris shit.
Patriot Games
was top-of-the-line. It did not speak well for the genre's potential.

 

 

 

⁶⁴
Programmed to Kill:
a beautiful terrorist is captured by the CIA and transformed into a buxom bionic assassin.
Hell Squad:
Unable to release his son from the Middle Eastern terrorists who kidnapped him, a U.S. ambassador turns to the services of nine Las Vegas showgirls. These gals moonlight as vicious commandos. (Summaries by
Video Hound, Golden Movie Retriever)