Seeing Red, page 6
"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 cattle prod. 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 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 box office 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."
Jonathan had an absurd picture of the archetypal Hollywood Meeting. Haskell was pitching the idea for a dark little film indeed, and Jonathan was examining the concept from all angles, trying to decide whether to buy it. "The most creative intellect, therefore," he decided, "would be the person who could compose social events or sculpt media attention unobtrusively. Real death can lure a jaded and reactionary public, and the scenarios must be increasingly complex in order to remain convincingly 'real'. The challenge to any creative mind is obvious: while your legitimate screenplays and ideas were considered disposable, your dictates as a Scripter would have to be elaborate, meticulous, loophole-free . . . and absolute. You see? At last the creator gains control over one facet of the movie making business." The ictus of Jonathan's heartbeat was making his throat throb. "Tell me if I'm warm," he said without humor.
Haskell's gaze abstracted toward the curtains again. "That was the original idea. But like everything in Hollywood, it didn't take too long before the original idea got adulterated."
"That's why you had to leave?"
"That's why I went mad." He drew the last word out into a long hiss. The cognac it seemed, had displaced some of his itchy caution, "Wouldn't a job like that drive you mad?"
Jonathan shook his head. "You're not moonblind. As far as I can see. And I'm an expert at picking out the walnuts, my diplomas all say so. Besides, Haskell, I flat-out don't believe that you've actually snuffed anybody. And that leaves me in a quandary. If the Conclave is real, then you must be lying about your participation—you're no murderer."
"That returns us to the weird white vans. Scripters, are creative talent only. The boogeymen in the white vans execute the janitorial work per se."
"You're afraid a van-load of hitmen is going to tool up my drive? Nobody knows you're here."
"Ascribe it to the caution of the insane. That was how I evaded their clutches, you see. It does no good to run, so I went mad. I went mad to get out and buy time to make sure the Conclave couldn't erase me."
"After you became disenchanted with the . . . adulterations." Jonathan's own voice sounded ominous and melodramatic, and he tried to downshift his attitude into the brand of uncondescending sympathy peculiar to the analyst's calling.
"Actually, the change in the Conclave was fundamental and perfectly predictable," said Haskell. "Their aims became corrupted, people in such a position of power should never acknowledge a higher authority. And yes, I realize it sounds horrible to describe their original aims as pure, but I can't come up with a better description."
"Well, viewed objectively—pragmatically—the Conclave's objectives were pure, I daresay. Uncompromisingly pure." Jonathan was fascinated by the idea.
"Like every bloody damn thing in the industry, it wasn't satisfied with enough. Greed caused them to start monkeying around with chemicals. Additives to the junk movie audiences buy at theatre snack bars. Tiny jolts of light hypnotics, to render the viewer more receptive to planted visual subliminals. The first tryouts were merchandise-oriented—T-shirts, toys, novelizations, dolls, that whole farrago. Screenplays included a lot of subsurface pressure-point stroking for the median consumer. The suggestions, combined with the test drugs, ensured that audiences would buy tie-in merchandise like lab mice sucking up Violet Number Two—all it took was a squirt of mind-booze into the popcorn, and the funny thing was that the whole program was very cheap. Remember when popcorn butter was replaced by that orange, vegetable-oil glop at the snack bar?"
"That greasy stuff that comes in gallon cans and solidifies at room temperature, like candle wax?"
"We phased it under the guise of economization. Every household in America is sympathetic to the idea of frugality, and it was accepted as a necessary evil. Easy as a bread sandwich." Pride still tinged Haskell's voice, perversely. They were, after all, discussing his creativity.
"But so far the orientation was still profit. Money."
"Things changed." Haskell lifted his empty glass and slid it around on the tabletop in a ritualistic pattern. "About the time the government reinstituted draft registration, things began to change. The Conclave was contracted—I think—to ply our usual tactics, plus what we learned from the Popcorn Scenario, to find out if there was a cost-effective way to remilitarize the youth of the country, in order that they might accept the planned reinstatement of the draft itself more readily. The government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war."
"And the Conclave . . .?"
"Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first Lensinan space opera. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of thing they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proves how on-target our approach was."
"Oh my god . . ." said Jonathan, his mouth stalling in the open position.
"Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. We pulled a 40 share. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low-voltage shocks. Jesus, Jonathan, can you see what we accomplished? In something under half a decade, we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. They buy what we tell them to. Music, movies, whole lifestyles. And they hate who we tell them to. Khomeini, Qaddafi. Ever notice how the leader of a country we oppose automatically becomes a lunatic? It's simple to make our audiences slaver for blood; that past hasn't changed since the days of the Colosseum. We've conditioned a whole population to live on the rim of Apocalypse and love it. They want to kill the enemy, tear his heart out, go to war so their gas bills will go down! They're all primed for just that sort of dénouement, to satisfy their need for linear storytelling in the fictions that have become their lives! The system perpetuates itself. Our own guinea pigs pay us money to keep the mechanisms grinding away. If you don't believe that, just check out last year's big hit movies . . . then try to tell me the target demographic audience isn't waiting for marching orders."
Haskell rubbed his eyes, making them bloodshot and teary. "Not long after that masterstroke, I decided to take my leave of the whole cesspool. I didn't feel so goddamned superior anymore. To see the manipulation of the masses as something cleaner than outright murder, one-to-one, takes the keenest kind of egomania. I couldn't lie anymore—especially to myself. So, as I've said, I went mad."
To Jonathan, Haskell looked deflated now, slightly shrunken, as if decanting his angst had left him physically diminished. He had become his job. He had been engulfed by his own obsession to leave footprints in the world of cinema, and now was kicking the underpinnings from the obsession itself and cannibalizing his existence. Consuming himself via confession. Jonathan half expected his old friend to dissolve away like a cinematic special effect, leaving a Cheshire Cat rictus that would hold for a single, meaningful beat before fading to permanent black. He appraised Haskell through steepled fingers. After a precarious moment of silence he figured it out. "You didn't really lose your mind."
Haskell nodded, perking up. "I got angry, not crazy. It was to my advantage to convince the Conclave that one was the other." He used the tabletop to resume the liquor and cigarettes ritual, then leaned conspiratorially closer to Jonathan. "After the dazzle of the pay scale diminishes, you begin wondering what happens when Scripters say that's enough—like I was about to. We all just assumed that a letter of resignation could be tendered, everybody would shake hands, and the retiree would traipse off to Monaco to spend his Swiss balance. Four Scripters announced their intentions to quit and did so, amid quite a lot of good cheer, during my tenure. Their replacements were introduced in a matter of days, as if the Conclave had a card file full of emotionally vulnerable hard-cases . . . like mine, like I had been. Even Scripting gets mundane after a few years, right?"
Jonathan nodded, although he could not see how it could possibly get dull. He wanted more cognac for himself but the bottle was drained clean.
"Then I stopped thinking like a schmuck and started thinking like a Scripter again," said Haskell, pointing. "Wouldn't it be much simpler for the Conclave to dispatch a white van to take care of the old blood? And juggle Swiss numbers so the ex-Scripter's balance slides right back into the Conclave coffers? And thereby gain a fail-safe procedure against ex-Scripters multiplying, becoming a goddamned minority practically, and having one of them inevitably spilling the beans the way I'm doing right now?" His smile was sickly but expressive, the smile of a terminal cancer patient laughing at a tumor joke. "So yes, I did go mad. The mad are unpredictable, and if there is one quality the Conclave hates, it's mad unpredictability—because it falls outside the realm of demographics and flowcharts."
"No by-the-book solutions," said Jonathan, understanding Haskell's drift immediately. "No cut-and-dried solutions. Each case is different—almost random, like the real-life, accidental deaths versus the Conclave's planned ones. Yes." He said yes again to himself as he rose and rummaged through the low cherrywood cabinet for another bottle of something suitable. Tension was chewing at his knotted muscles. A pulsing in his head made him aware that his jaws had been squeezing together, grinding his teeth for at least half an hour. Giving up on the cabinet, he said, "Wait a second. Got to go to the kitchen."
Wandering back from his empty kitchen, he stopped in his empty bathroom and forced himself to urinate five drops, and while staring at the brandy bottle he'd scared up, balanced on the tank lid of the toilet, he told himself that he had encountered no real problems. Haskell did not seem violent, although he did seem delusional. There was no foreseeable trouble.
Haskell was peering through a slit in the den curtains when he returned. Jonathan dashed a fresh taste into a clean crystal highball glass for himself and made a point of setting the brandy bottle down on the low table near Haskell's empty snifter.
