Who Stole the Funny? : A Novel of Hollywood (28 page)

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Mick looked away. Kevin whispered into Skip’s ear, “I’m gonna

knock the shit outta that punk. He keeps messin’ with J.T., you mark my words, I’ll take him out.”

“Calm down,” Skip said, still engrossed in his log cabin maga-

zine.

Marcus limped up to J.T. “Oh, will you service me, Great and

Powerful Director?”

J.T. put his hands to his head. “Let’s get one thing straight—”

“Oh, straighten me, Great One.”

“That’s it!” J.T. threw up his hands. “You will no longer treat me, or anyone on this set for that matter, like you’re a bored millionaire and we are here to entertain you. Enough. Do you get it?

Enough.”

“You tell him, J.T.,” Kevin added, and stood up, all six feet six of him, to emphasize his point.

Marcus was unbowed. “So here we are. What to do?” he

sneered. “No stunt people and no special effects man? This is what you give me when I write
the best ever explosion
? That is how you
help
me?
Service
me?”

“Sir, you are the showrunner. You are the executive producer—”

“You finally got something right!”

“What I was getting at, Mr. Pooley, is that
you
and
only you
—

forgive me—or your wife—can
approve
stunt people and a special effects person. You did
not
. You even went so far as to instruct me
not
to use explo
sives
for the explo
sion
. So our burden is to tell your story while staying within the limitations you have placed upon us all. Sir—I believe that we are about to accomplish what you have requested
and
more.”

J.T. was trying not to sigh again. He’d known he was going to

have to go through this dog and pony show to sell how they shot the scene to the Pooleys, but like a woman who forgets how much childbirth hurts and has another kid, he’d forgotten how draining it would be—more exhausting than actually shooting the scene.

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“Mr. Pooley,” he went on, “I have learned a few valuable lessons over the years that I can apply to your scene in order to give you the best ever explosion. I have learned that if you don’t have the money to blow something sky-high, don’t film the event, film
the
result
of the event and how it impacts the characters. Sometimes, doing it that way can be more powerful, more effective than seeing the usual big kaboom we’re all used to. We can add sounds in postproduction to make what we shoot today into an extremely

chilling moment.”

“Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” Marcus mocked.

“Indulge me,” J.T. said, trying to control his temper. “One . . .

once upon a time, on a warm and balmy summer night in Sau-

gatuck, Michigan, when I was just a kid—”

“Oh, spare me. What’s next, home movies?”

J.T. kept his cool by constantly looking down at the marks on

the set floor, which reminded him of the abundance of work yet

to come.

“As I was saying: when I was a kid and sitting out on our porch, on a very dark night—no streetlamps on this road . . .” J.T. closed his eyes for a beat and traveled back in time. “Now, I remember this vividly. A cop pulled a couple over and I couldn’t see anything except the blue and red flashing lights from the police car through the limbs of a tall pecan tree. When the couple was asked to get out of their car, the husband became belligerent.”

Marcus spun in a bad Michael Jackson move. “Ooooh, big

word for such a wittle kid.”

“Are you gonna hear me out? Because there is a great filmic lesson to be learned.”

“Teach me, O Great Orson Welles of Sitcom!” Marcus wan-

dered over to a cart of goodies and grabbed a cookie. “Do contin-ue. I love bedtime stories.”

Even my darling Natasha would rearrange your face,
J.T.

thought. He tried to wet his lips, but either the caffeine from the R o b b y

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tea he’d been drinking all day, or the Excedrin from the bottle he was downing with the tea, or the stress that made him drink too much caffeine and down Excedrin had dried out his mouth.

“I’d like to hear the story, J.T.,” Kevin said with genuine interest.

“Okay. So there I was, alone on the porch late at night, the

night sky absorbing—no,
sucking
the flashing lights of the cop car into the black hole of infinity. And the trees . . . the trees took on different shapes every time the strobing police lights revealed new limbs that looked wicked, foreboding.”

“Damn, you’re a good storyteller, J.T.” Kevin walked closer.

Marcus let out a precious exhalation. “Please, spare me. You

stick to your day job. Let the writers write.”

“I’m almost finished.”

“Yes. You are.”

“Let him finish,” Kevin said in a menacing baritone.

“Right,” J.T. said, batting his eyes. “Then the husband bolt-

ed from the car and he started to run. Mind you, I couldn’t
see
anything—I just
heard
his shoes as he ran on the gravel road. I
heard
the wife scream, ‘Please, honey—don’t run!’ I
heard
the cop yell, ‘Stop or I’ll shoot!’ ”

“Then what happened?” Kevin asked, leaning in closer to J.T.

“Then, Kevin, I
heard
a bang.”

“A bang? Like a gun bang?” Kevin asked.

“No, not like a real gun bang . . . like a gun bang in a
Scorsese
movie
.”

“Oh. Small-caliber, or—”

“Just finish the fucking story!” Marcus grabbed a tin of Al-

toids from the cart and emptied several into his mouth. He started crunching loudly and his eyes started to tear from the menthol.

“Now look what you made me do. I’m gonna OD on Altoids I’m

so bored.”

Kevin was wiggling his hands like an excited kid. “So there was a bang but we don’t know the kind of gun, but I’d suspect it was a 2 0 2

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standard-issue—”

Even Skip was getting restless. He tore his eyes away from the

centerfold of his magazine—a full-color shot of his dream cabin—

and pleaded, “Kevin, let J.T. finish.”

“Right, Skip. Sorry, J.T.”

“No prob, Kev. Okay. Then,
after
the bang, I heard a kind of animal sound. Then I realized that this horrible wailing, this frightening howl was coming from the wife. Those sounds . . .

they were noises I didn’t think could come from a human. I

never actually saw a single image other than a pecan tree and

bushes lit with random primary colors from a police car. But to this day, I swear I saw it. All of it. My mind filled in every terri-fying detail. Those phantom graphic visuals that were inspired

by what I
didn’t
see have stayed with me for over forty years. In other words,” J.T. turned and looked into Marcus’s eyes,
“the
mystery is sometimes more powerful than in-your-face storytell-ing.”

“Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Very sweet story. You’re a kid.

You’ve got a porch. Pecan tree. Limbs, lights, dead guy. Bingo: wife howls. Try an’ pitch that to Warner Brothers. Shit, you could put a roomful of ADD kids to sleep with that one.” Marcus rooted

around on the cart for something to ease his mint problem and

found a supersized pack of Tango Mango gum. He ripped it open

and shoved two pieces in his mouth. “What next? Family vacation slideshow with a Ken Burns effect?” He yawned.

“Well, I liked that story, J.T.,” Kevin said. “Got any more?”

“No!” Marcus interjected. Unfortunately, so did Skip.

Marcus wandered back onto the set. “Lose the ‘Once upon a

time’ and just tell me what’s gonna happen.”

J.T. inhaled and began: “As soon as Janice is out of makeup,

we’ll run it as a dry rehearsal once, and you can watch on the monitor if you wish, and then we’ll do it. And the beauty of it is that we R o b b y

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can’t dick around. It has to work on take one.”

“Take one! You’re not giving me choices?” Marcus Pooley

stomped again.

J.T stabbed his script with his index finger. “Mr. Pooley,
you
actually gave us no choices. You are very lucky that you have a crew who can pull this off and make it look like a real stunt without paying for stunts or effects,” he spewed. “You’re one
fortunate
mother. You fired the best cameraman working in sitcoms this

morning, but Mick managed to get you the best camerawoman to

take his place.”

“You did what?! A woman? A woman cameraman? I’ve heard

of women stunt coordinators. They call them cuntordinators.

What the fuck do they call a woman cameraman?”

“Your worst fucking nightmare, if you don’t can it, buddy.”

Sheila, the camerawoman in question, stepped from behind her

camera and leveled a searing glare at Marcus. This time he did

cower slightly.

J.T. looked at the two of them and said, “Well, I’ll skip the introductions. Now, back to shooting this in one take—”

“I don’t like that,” Marcus said petulantly.

“I don’t care. I’m doing you a favor, even if you’re too—”

“If I don’t like what you shoot,
I’ll
direct take two,” Marcus stated recklessly. “I can aim four cameras on the action and get just as good of footage as you. None of that ‘one camera’ shit. That way, I’ll have leeway to cut the scene the way I see it!”

Kevin was picking up J.T.’s body language. He left his post next to the Panavision camera and moved to J.T.’s side like a comrade-in-arms, ready to come to his defense. “You okay, buddy?”

J.T. gestured that he was okay. He then tried very hard to con-

tinue to state his case without letting his family down and getting fired on the spot, which meant using his
very calm voice
. “When the credit reads ‘Directed by J.T. Baker,’ that is precisely what it is 2 0 4

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going to mean,” he said.

That was the one speaking line that calm got. It knew what

was coming next, and got the hell off the stage. Ash knew too, and followed.

“And P. fucking S.: If you point all four cameras at the same

thing, then basically you’re just shooting one camera and one take!

In other words, they’re all going to give you the same shot, four times, during the same performance! What the fuck good is that?”

J.T. was furious. Obviously.

Ash came out of nowhere and brought J.T. another cup of tea.

“Hot tea, big guy. Two sugars. Just the way you and
Natasha
like it,” he said.

J.T. inhaled the aroma of the tea and it immediately worked

as sense memory: it was as if he were at home with Natasha. It

was an ingenious move on Asher’s part. J.T. took a sip, then leveled his gaze at Marcus. “I am your fucking director. This is how I choose to shoot your ridiculous
best ever
explosion
.
End of conversation.”

Crap!
Ash thought. The tea bit didn’t work.

Then a magical thing happened. One crew member started

clapping, then another, and then more until J.T. was surrounded by applause and thoroughly embarrassed.
Note to self,
J.T. thought:
This hand-clapping one by one is corny. Figure out another way to
show group camaraderie
.

Marcus Pooley, of course, was incensed. He marched straight

up to J.T. until they were inches apart, his eyes narrowed, his body rigid and shaking. “You’re gonna be gone soon. Take my word on

that! Make plane reservations for next week, because I’ll be goddamned if a twerp
has-been
fucking
ex
-pinup boy like you will tell me how to shoot my own creation!”

Calm suddenly returned to J.T., but not the calm that had fled.

He took a step forward, forcing Marcus to back away. “Do what

you’ve got to do, my friend. Do what you’ve got to do.”

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Ash was scared. Again.

Marcus planted his feet in his new, safer spot and sputtered,

“I’m not your friend, and I most certainly will not do what I’ve got to do! I mean—I will do what I
want
to do!”

It struck J.T. that all that was missing was the Daffy Duck costume, which is what saved him from continuing to stalk Marcus

around the stage. “In the meantime,” he said, “as soon as Janice is ready, we will shoot Marcus Pooley’s great creation:
the best ever
explosion
.” Then he walked away to cool off.

“Where are you going? What are you doing?!” Marcus screamed

at J.T.’s back.

“I’m picking blueberries, Mr. Pooley. Just pickin’ blueberries.”

Ash followed J.T. outside the cave and walked with him stride for stride. “Just some info that may make you wanna wear your flak

jacket: Marcus has been snorting more cocaine in the last hour

alone than I’ve seen in my entire lifetime.”

“Man, how do you find these things out?” J.T. just stopped and

stared at his friend.

Ash shrugged. “Hey, man, I got your back,” he said.

The two men hugged—a little too long, just to fuck with any-

one who might be watching.

Ash pulled away and scratched his forehead. “J.T., it’s amazing.

Maybe it’s even revealing. I seem to have absolutely no stage presence. I don’t lurk in the shadows—I don’t have to. People just have a way of . . . not seeing me.”

J.T. smiled. “Whatever you’ve always done, please, keep it up.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way. And speaking of having no

stage presence, you didn’t notice, by chance, that I was late this morning, did you?”

“Ah, you didn’t miss much. Just a pedophile blowing his brains

out.”

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