Who Stole the Funny? : A Novel of Hollywood (30 page)

work standards and practic-

es. It’s very common.”

“No! My Urban character that Jan-

ice is portraying—beautifully, might I add—

comes into the city and, shops at
Saks
! It’s a character trait. Saks!

Saks,
goddammit!”

So now there was a stoppage over the bag Janice was carrying.

It was a convenient excuse for Stephanie to make a scene; she didn’t appreciate that she’d missed all the fun of the suicide and had generally been left out of the loop all day. And, of course, Stephanie
did
have an arrangement with Saks. In return for product recognition, Stephanie had been promised . . . products.

2 1 4

W H O S T O L E T H E F U N N Y ?

J.T. tried to explain for Janice’s benefit. “Conrad from the network told us to Greek out the product association. Saks is very recognizable, and we do not want any conflict with your show’s

sponsors who may be competing with Saks. In other words, the

Saks truck will not be backing up to your garage leaving you all kinds of goodies for promoting their brand.”

Janice looked from J.T. to Stephanie. “You know, if Saks wasn’t going to be part of my character, someone should have told me.”

“Saks might not want to be associated with the best ever ex-

plosion, Janice,” J.T. said. He

turned to Stephanie. “Ms.

Pooley,” he said, enjoying

The Hollywood Dictionary

himself, “I sincerely hope you

PRODUCT PLACEMENT:
“Back

and Janice don’t have some

the truck up to my garage. Look

kind of backdoor product-

kids! Daddy’s got hundreds of

placement deal with Saks to

cases of Pepsi and Nike shoes

get freebies.”

for everyone . . . on the block!”

Stephanie’s face became

so taut that the stitch marks

under her earlobes looked vulnerable to the laws of physics. “Fuck it,” she spat, “just shoot the goddamn scene. But next time I want things like this to be cleared through me! Everyone understand?!”

The crew members looked at one another, not really knowing

which one of them she was targeting. J.T. figured it was probably better that way. Now they could shoot.

“I still don’t get the whole Greek thang,” said Janice. “What

happened to English?”

No one was listening.

“Roll camera!” William yelled. Then he mumbled, “After sex.”

“Speed!” Larry from Sound called out; Sound was ready.

Darla, the camera utility clapper, shouted, “Pickup, Scene K,

R o b b y

B e n s o n

2 1 5

‘The Best Ever Christmas,’
I Love My Urban Buddies,
take one! One camera, Super 16, variable-speed!” and then she clapped the board in front of the lens so that the sound could be synchronized with the picture in editing, and all was ready.

J.T. was so into the filmmaking that he didn’t realize that he

was biting his lower lip, which started to bleed. “Action!” he yelled.

“Cue Janice.” Janice walked to her spot, listened to the (two) carolers, and then remembered to go back to the car to get her
Fifth
Avenue
bag.

“Cue projection!” J.T. yelled. The projection on the windshield of the public-domain explosion footage was reflected perfectly on the glass of the car.

“Look up, Janice! Rack focus, Skip! Cue the candy-glass deto-

nation!” J.T. walked behind the Steadicam, popping up and down

and screaming out the cues over the roar of the variable-speed

motor.

The shot was working perfectly. The candy glass shattered on

cue as if the concussive power of the phantom-reflected explosion had blown out the surrounding windows.

“Ramp up to a hundred and twenty frames per second, Kevin!”

J.T. yelled, jumping again. The motor revved to increase the uptake of film. “Start the E-fans! E-fans! E-fans! And cue the debris!” The fans hummed and pieces of the “explosion” began to fly. “Smoke!”

J.T. screamed over the din. “And Janice, look up—LOOK UP—you

can’t believe you’re safe! “LOOK TO YOUR LEFT! YOUR
OTHER

LEFT! GOOD! LOOK STRAIGHT OUT, INTO THE LIGHT

OF THE PROJECTOR! GOOD!”

Janice took the direction perfectly. Through the lens, which

was all that really mattered, it looked like Janice was looking through the windshield at the huge explosion that was being projected onto it. You could see the flicker of the action in her glassy eyes. Everything was smooth. The shot had actually worked. “And

. . . end sticks, Darla! Ramp back down to twenty-four frames;

2 1 6

W H O S T O L E T H E F U N N Y ?

CUT!” J.T. yelled.

As soon as the shot was over, J.T. released an immense breath.

It made his body go limp in a good way. What had been keeping

him upright, apparently, was pure stress. He suddenly felt giddily proud of his cast and crew. He jumped straight up and kept patting Skip on the back. “Beautiful job!
Everyone
. Well done!” He shook hands with Kevin and hugged Mick. Then he walked through the

candy glass debris and thanked the (two) carolers. Then he stuck his hand out to Janice.

“Well done, Janice.”

“Your lip. Your lip is bleeding, J.T.”

“Ah, no complaints. You’ll be proud of your work and this

shot. Thank you.”

He left Janice and her befuddled stare to go around shaking

hands, beaming at his crew members, who were actually . . . smiling. The pride was back.
What a great feeling
, he thought.

J.T. was flushed with pure adrenaline. “Call down the . . . whatever and . . . Good work, everyone!”

All the while, he’d been wiping his bloody lip on the shoulder

of his shirt every few seconds. He was completely unaware of how potent, and how ambiguous, that visual of him was. If you thought of J.T. as humble and proud of his crew, then the visual was one of a warrior wounded for the good of the cause. If, however, you perceived him as a megalomaniac, control-freak director, the visual then became one of a mad scientist. The wide eyes, the frenzied gesticulations, the agitation in the lip-biting, the bloody spittle, the crimson-stained shirt—let’s just say that a sane person would not want to get him pissed off.

“EVERYONE STOP WHERE YOU ARE!” Stephanie Pooley

yelled, storming onto the set with Marcus right behind her. Everyone stopped. “It wasn’t
on TV,
” she declared flatly.

J.T. froze mid-celebration. “Huh?” he asked, truly thrown.

“It was
not on the television
!” Marcus Pooley repeated for his R o b b y

B e n s o n

2 1 7

wife.

J.T. wiped his lip again and tried to process what he was being told. He was still breathing a little heavily. “I don’t really understand what you two are saying. Honestly. I’m not being disingenuous—

or anything else that might offend you both. I just don’t understand what you mean when you say it’s not on TV.”

“What the fuck is there
not to understand
? The shot! The scene!

The best ever explosion!
It was not on the TV!” Marcus Pooley said as condescendingly as possible.

“Oh—you mean—you didn’t see it on the quad split?” J.T.

asked.

“That’s exactly what we mean!” Stephanie Pooley barked, look-

ing at a birthmark on J.T.’s neck.

“Are you sure you were watching the correct camera on the

quad split? Because we were only using one camera, and the oth-

ers were just aimed off of the set, to be out of the way. It could be as simple as that,” J.T. said, unwilling, for the moment, to let them get to him.

“It wasn’t on TV!”
Marcus Pooley said again, stamping his feet as if he liked to repeat words over and over.

“Look, maybe the feed to the monitor was disconnected, or the

wrong camera was punched up on your monitor, but I guarantee

you it was
on TV,
” J.T. said, now defending the shot that just seconds earlier he’d been celebrating.

“How do you know you’ve got the shot if it wasn’t on the mon-

itor?” Stephanie Pooley challenged.

The moment was over. J.T.’s blood pressure began rising as fast as the decibels of his voice. “Because, you see that camera operator over there? His name is Skip. He was the fucking camera operator on a little movie you might’ve seen called
Raging fucking Bull
! Mar-tin Scorsese wanted Skip! Michael Chapman wanted Skip! What

do you think people did before there were video feeds that went back to gawking producers and executives on a goddamn moni-2 1 8

W H O S T O L E T H E F U N N Y ?

tor? They trusted the skills and respected the word of their fucking camera operator! And now, because the business is so fucking cruel to its own, an artist like Skip is forced to shoot shit like your sitcom! You see, Skip is the
best ever
fucking camera operator! And Kevin is the
best ever
fucking assistant camera operator. So if Skip says that
he has it
and Kevin says
it was in focus,
then we’ll do this the old-fashioned way and wait for dailies!”

“Dailies?” the Pooleys repeated simultaneously.

J.T. was now officially angry, the mad-scientist visual in petri-fying, full-frame close-up. He knew that his crew—and even Jan-

ice—had done something

worth kudos, yet these Pool-

ey assholes were pissing all

The Hollywood Dictionary

over their efforts. They didn’t

DAILIES:
(1) In the feature film

deserve anything as good as

world, film is sent to the lab, de-

what they’d just been giv-

veloped, and viewed the follow-

en. J.T. was ready to fight at

ing day. When asked if the dailies

any cost—to his reputation

were any good, an old, cynical

producer once said, “Have you

(again), to his bank account

ever heard of bad dailies?” (2)

(again), and even to his abili-

“Look at how wonderful the film

ty to get insurance (he wasn’t

looks! I look! You look! We all

thinking. Again). He’d lost

look!”

all sense of where he was, of

right and wrong. All he saw

was the two-headed Pooley enemy, and it was going to go
down
.

“Hey—I know! Let’s play a game!” he said, spitting more blood.

The flickering spirit of Natasha on J.T.’s shoulder whisper-

ing
Jeremy
to calm him down and give him the strength to take the high road was no match for the intense, muscular, life-force fury J.T. was conjuring. Suddenly Ash appeared and saw J.T.’s

naked ire.

“I know the dollar amount you two make on this show to pre-

tend you know what you’re doing,” J.T. raged. “How about we bet R o b b y

B e n s o n

2 1 9

. . . let’s say, one hundred thousand dollars that the shot was ON

fucking TV!”

Oh crap!
thought Ash.
What am I going to tell Tasha?! He’s
gonna kill somebody!
Ash hadn’t seen him this mad since the time he threatened to throw an executive from the USA Network out

of a window.

“One hundred thousand dollars? What, are you crazy?” Mar-

cus Pooley asked.

“Two
hundred fucking thousand dollars that the shot was ON

TV!”

Conrad, who’d stayed to watch the take, moved forward.
Please
don’t hit them, please don’t hit them,
he willed J.T.

Debbie and Lance watched with fascinated horror as the di-

rector nobody wanted saved the Pooleys the trouble of inventing a reason to fire him.

J.T. was now up in Marcus Pooley’s face and was discharging

bloody dribble on him every time he upped the ante. “Was it ON

TV,
Skip?” J.T. asked his camera operator without taking his unblinking stare away from Marcus.

Skip smiled mischievously. “It was
on TV,
J.T.,” he said with pleasure.

“Was it ON TV, Kevin?” J.T. asked his assistant cameraman,

whose PTSD was beginning to manifest itself in the form of

twitches and tics.

“It was
on TV,
boss,” Kevin said in his deep, powerful voice.

Those who worked with him frequently knew that he was only a

twitch away from going nuclear and having a Vietnam flashback.

“It’s cool, Kev. It’s cool. Calm down,” Skip whispered to Kevin.

“Kevin—send that shit to the lab early. Are you okay with that, Mr. McCoy?” J.T. asked, still not taking his eyes off the Pooleys.

“Yes, sir, J.T.,” Mick said, “you’ve got it. Off to the lab.”

“You’re going to owe me two hundred fucking thousand dol-

lars,” J.T. said vengefully, “so you’d better get your fucking check-2 2 0

W H O S T O L E T H E F U N N Y ?

books out.” By now J.T. sounded like a little kid on a playground:
How ’bout that? I can “fuck” just as well as you. Fuck!

Ash finally pulled J.T. away and walked him out of the cave and into the light of day where J.T. could
walk it off
.

“Man, I guess I’ll have to say it again: Sorry I wasn’t there

sooner. This time I had to go to the bathroom . . .” Ash said. “But I did hear you all the way from there. You were very . . . loud. And forceful. And—”

“I behaved like an ass, didn’t I?” J.T. whispered to Ash.

“Yup,” Ash replied.

“Fuck!”

They took a stroll past the crime scene from earlier in the

morning. The police were finally allowing the coroner to take Leo Thacker’s body and what was left of his head away to the morgue.

“But,” Ash said, “if the shot works as well as I think it will, you’ve had a very productive morning.” He smiled.

The body bag was lifted out of the schoolroom and heaved

into the van marked CORONER/MORGUE. “Yeah . . . productive