Read Midnight Movie: A Novel Online
Authors: Tobe Hooper Alan Goldsher
Midnight Movie: A Novel
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Tobe Hooper
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com
Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hooper, Tobe, 1943–
Midnight movie : a novel / Tobe Hooper with Alan Goldsher. — 1st ed.
1. Motion picture producers and directors—Fiction. 2. Supernaturals—Fiction.
I. Goldsher, Alan, 1966– II. Title.
PS3608.O5955M53 2011
813′.6—dc22
2010040358
eISBN: 978-0-307-71702-3
Cover design by Kyle Kolker
Cover photographs: © Julian Andrew Holtom/Flickr/Getty Images (zombie);
© Roger Charity/Getty Images (brunette screaming);
© Peter Dazeley/Getty Images (blonde screaming); © Ting Hoo (back)
v3.1
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
Some wise guy dubbed it the Game Changer, which, as you undoubtedly know, was shortened to the Game. It was a flip, dismissive way of referring to an ugly, unexplainable situation, but I suppose that’s the way America rolls; the cavalier way our public dealt with it was the only way they
could
deal with it. If you turn something awful into a joke, you can trivialize it, and if you trivialize it, you can convince yourself it isn’t real
.Many researchers still contend the Game was not an actual virus, but rather an event. An event? Seriously? The Super Bowl is an event. The Game was … fucked-up. To me, tagging it as an event was another way of making the horrible palatable
.In some areas—most notably Texas, Southern California, and the northeastern seaboard—it oozed through the populace like lava, whereas the northwestern and midwestern sections of the United States (save for Chicago) went all but unscathed. The international ramifications have yet to be fully determined, but aside from the outbreak that practically wiped a tiny town in Italy called Montciano San Galgano off the map, it appears that the rest of the world got off easy. Fortunately, as of this writing, there have been no signs of a second outbreak either in the States or abroad, and experts are confident that the Game will remain dormant. Nobody, however, is saying that the Game is definitely over. How could they? They barely know how it started
.I guess the media didn’t want to really, truly face it. The mainstream outlets reported on the effects—of course they did; laying down the facts at hand is easy—but nobody went after the cause. There were plenty of websites that spewed out theory after theory, but, as is often the case, the overwhelming majority of Netheads were dismissed as hysterics, or conspiracy nuts, or crazies looking for attention. Listen, it’s
2011, people; yeah, the blogosphere and the social networks have their fair share of oddballs, but there’re also hundreds of thousands of people who’re plugged into reality, who know what they’re writing about. You have to pay attention. I did, and it was a damn good thing, because if this book didn’t exist, I honestly believe the Game would be forgotten, and that would be really, really bad, because those who don’t remember the past are condemned to blah blah blah, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and next thing you know, welcome to Outbreak City, population: you, your family, your friends, and your lover
.The fact is, if the media and/or the scientific community had looked even just a little bit harder, they’d have figured it out. In this day and age, anybody can figure anything out … if they want to. If a pissant journalist like me could find answers, imagine what a real reporter could’ve done. Shit, I tracked down a journal by a guy who was practically a real-life Jack Bauer with three phone calls and a discount plane ticket to Chicago. You mean to tell me there wasn’t a G-man or a
New York Times
scribe out there who could’ve done what I did? Give me a goddamn break
.Yes, it was a scary situation, scary as all hell. But, as my new friend Tobe Hooper might say, “Nut up, you pussies, and do your fucking job.
”—Alan Goldsher, March 2011
March 15, 2009
SOUTH BY SOUTHWEST FESTIVAL SCHEDULE
FRIDAY, MARCH 31 @ MIDNIGHT
TOBE HOOPER’S
DESTINY EXPRESS
Screening and Q & A
The Cove
121 Third Street
(512) 343-COVE
We’re not going to lie here, folks: This is one weird-ass booking, probably the weirdest-ass booking of this year’s extravaganza. We loves ourselves some Leatherface, no doubt, but do we really need to see a film that the auteur behind
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
slapped together when he was still using training wheels? Apparently the SXSW brain trust is also concerned about the turnout, because they stuck the sixtysomething-year-old director off in a club just north of the boondocks,
way
far away from Sixth Street, at a bar that is arguably the diviest dive in Texas. Not just Austin.
Texas
. And that’s saying something.
No idea what the flick is about. All the press release said was, “Who knows what lurks in the young heart of Tobe Hooper? Find out Friday blabbitty blah blah, bullshitty bull bullshit.” There’s a chance that
Destiny Express
is good—Hooper is Mr. Chainsaw, after all, and it’s possible that he had chops even as an adolescent—but the guy
was
sixteen when he made it, and it
was
1959, so we’re skeptical. Sure, he could’ve been Herschell Gordon Lewis before there was a Herschell Gordon Lewis … but he also might’ve been Richie Cunningham dicking around with daddy’s neat-o video camera.
The Decemberists are playing at the exact same time. So we’ll wait for the DVD.
(film director):
I wasn’t anywhere close to awake when the guy called. It was first thing in the morning, like eight o’clock, and I’d been at the studio editing that remake of
Carrie
for Fox until well after midnight, and I didn’t hit the sack until after four, and I was in deep REM sleep, and having some fucked-up dream about bowling, and then there’s the
ring, ring, ring
, and I’m awake. Sort of.
Nobody
ever
called me on my landline, so I’d never bothered to get my answering machine fixed, so that fucking phone just kept ringing, and ringing, and ringing. My first instinct was to kill it, to shoot it dead, to send it back from whence it came. But my gun was in the safe in my office in the coach house, and the thought of getting out of bed, then going downstairs, then going outside, then jimmying open the door—no way I’d find the damn key before the phone stopped—then trying to remember the combination of the safe, then opening the safe, then grabbing the Colt, then putting bullets in the chamber, then going back upstairs, and then shooting the phone seemed like a lot of effort. So I picked up the receiver.
I coughed and cleared my throat right into the mouthpiece, then said, “What.” That’s all. Nothing good could come of an eight-in-the-morning phone call, so I figured the quicker we got down to business, the better. Screw pleasantries.
The dude said, “Mr. Hoopler? Toeb Hoopler?” He said “Toeb” rather than “Toe-bee.” An eight o’clock phone call with a mispronounced first name and a butchered last name. Fuck, man.
I said, “Can I help you with something?” I kind of disguised my voice, deemphasizing the Texas accent. I don’t know why, really. It’s not like he would’ve recognized me or anything—if he didn’t know how to say my damn name, it’s doubtful he would’ve known my damn voice—but you never know. If he didn’t know I was me, maybe I could tell him he had the wrong number.
The dude said, “Toeb, my name is Dude McGee, and I’m calling from the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.”
I was a fan of South by Southwest, so I decided to not curse him out and hang up. I said, “Hold on,” then I put the phone down, went to the bathroom, took a leak, flushed, washed, squirted some Purell on my hands, then picked up the receiver again. I asked the guy, “Your name is Dude?”
He laughed a little bit, then said, “Nickname. I’m a big
Big Lebowski
fanatic. Big, big, big.”
Eight o’clock in the morning. Mispronounced name. And a Coen brothers obsessive. I again considered getting the gun, and again decided it was too damn much work. I said, “How can I help you, Mr. McGee?”
He said, “Call me Dude.”
I said, “I’ll call you Mr. McGee.”
He was quiet for a sec, then said, “Okay, Toeb”—still mispronounced, mind you—“here’s the deal: A guy who knows a guy who knows a guy came across a print of
Destiny Express.
” He gave a weird laugh, then said, “Remember that one?”
It took me a second. Or two. Or three. Or a hundred. And then,
lightbulb
. I said, “Mr. McGee, where the hell did you get a print of
Destiny Express
?”