The Player (3 page)

“Forget it, Griffin, the ending is ironic. The audience is too angry, too impatient. They hate ambiguity, they want everything reconciled.”

“Why wasn't I at the meeting yesterday?” Attack.

“There may be some changes.”

“Am I in or out?”

“Larry Levy is coming aboard.” He said this quietly.

“I report to you. I'm not going through Levy. If I have to report to Levy, I quit.”

“You can't quit. I won't let you, and you have a year and a half on your contract. I'll get in your way if you try. Don't go looking for offers at other studios. I'll hold you to your contract, and if you make trouble, I'll sue you for breach unless you come to the office every day, and I won't have anything for you to do. Relax. Levy's bright. He was available, and I thought we could use him. He's good. He's real good.”

“I know him,” said Griffin, irritated.

“He can make us all look good.”

“So I'm not the flavor of the month anymore?”

“You haven't been for a year. And neither have I. And Larry Levy will lose his flavor, too. Look, if you really want to leave, I won't stop you. I want you to stay. Griffin, I need you, but I can understand your feelings. Forget what I said about a lawsuit. If it's impossible to share the power, I'll give you a development deal. You can be a producer.”

“Right, so
Variety
can quote me saying, ‘It's a chance I've been waiting for since I came to Hollywood. I'm thrilled.'”

“Don't be bitter.” Levison poured him another cup of coffee, which Griffin accepted against his will. The coffee burned his stomach all day and made him feel like he was gliding over the surface of everything, impossible to find traction.

At the office, Jan handed him a souvenir packet of “Ten Memories from Southern California,” a pleated strip of cards that folded flat and then closed with a tab inserted through the card on the back. The front was for the address but managed to save room for a cartoon of the region, with the most famous sights drawn in extreme relief. Disneyland's Matterhorn was the size of Everest, huge surfers rode boards the size of aircraft carriers on tidal waves into Malibu. A camera on a tripod was the Colossus of Hollywood and Vine. The picture on the back was of
BEAUTIFUL LAKE ARROWHEAD, JUST AN HOUR FROM THE WORLD'S FINEST GOLFING AND SAILING
. Griffin opened the packet. This message was typed.

Dear Griffin,

I'm still waiting for you to call. You said you'd get back to me. My answering machine is on all the time, so you can't say that you called but I wasn't in. I told you my idea, you said you wanted to think about it, and you said you'd get back to me. My agent said that was a
good sign, the part about getting back to me. I've waited long enough. You lied to me. It's obvious you have no intention of hiring me. In the name of all the writers in Hollywood who get pushed around by executives who know nothing more about movies than what did well last week and have no passion for film, I'm going to kill you.

Griffin folded the cards.

“Well, who's it from?” asked Jan. “The actress?”

“She says she was just having fun with me and wants to know if I'll have dinner with her soon. She says she knows how hard it is to cross over from TV to film, but she wants to try, and she's not holding me to any drunken promises.”

He danced to his office and pulled the door shut. He hoped that he was smiling.

Why aren't I afraid? he asked himself. Why don't I call Walter Stuckel? It would be so easy to show him the postcards. Griffin pictured himself withdrawing from Stuckel's concern; it would be that arm around his shoulder, an hour of advice about security, a bodyguard, an investigation into his friends. Word would get out that he was a target. Stigma.

He called Jan on the intercom. “I'm going to be tied up on the phone for a while. It's important. Tell anyone who wants me that I'll be back later.” Then he called the number for the time, so a light on Jan's phone would show that he was talking, that he was busy. He took his desk calendar and sat on the couch. He got up quickly and went to his refrigerator for a can of tomato juice. He put the latest postcard on his coffee table and tried to take a deep breath. The room was quiet.

A few phrases leapt from the card, like the Southern California Hi-lites on the cover.
My idea
…
my agent
…
everyone knows writers
…

Griffin turned the pages of the calendar. Three or four times a week he heard ideas from writers he didn't know. Most of them had never had a movie produced. Griffin barely remembered the names or the faces. He remembered none of the ideas more than two weeks old. He remembered enthusiasm, calculated optimism and offensive cheeriness, and sometimes a sad, embarrassing panic. Yesterday one had come in; Griffin had already forgotten his name and he checked it on the calendar. Doug Krieger. Doug Krieger, without saying hello, launched into the story from the effect of silence after the brilliant title sequence faded to the rhythm of a hundred drummers from Ghana. He was pitching some stupid African adventure story. No one would want to make it.

Griffin looked at the names of other writers. Jan never gave them longer than thirty minutes. He never needed more than fifteen. Some tried to condense their ideas to twenty-five words, in and out, as they'd learned in some screenwriting class taught by someone who'd made a science of yesterday's formula. They'd talk about the “arc of the story.” They'd use little code words and phrases like
paradigm
and
first-act bump.
They were exact. “At minute twenty-three she finds out …” What does she find out? That this movie won't get made. They'd talk about “the rules of the genre.” They'd set the scene with casting: Jeff Bridges and Meryl Streep are locked in a bank vault. They combined stories: It's
No Way Out
meets
Jagged Edge
with a twist from
The Searchers.

Some tried to chat for ten minutes before they began the story, to make friends with him. They'd talk about politics or try to teach him a little lesson about art. Some were afraid, their mouths dried out in the middle of the pitch; he could see the tide of fear in their eyes when they could read his boredom. Some talked with Jan like they were long-lost cousins, and then they crumpled in his office.
Some were cocky and leaned back into the couch like they owned the room, and they looked up to the ceiling, releasing their stories in a monotone. What was their point? They'd pause before the moment which they were sure would force Griffin to his feet and his desk and a pen, where he would yank his checkbook from a drawer and write them that ticket to a legendary career, to the beginning of their real lives, the promised lives they contained within themselves, inscribed in their genetic code, lives of perfect harmony, where even the bad moments were epic, where tragedy replaced confusion, and ecstasy replaced the merely happy. Yes, Griffin Mill could anoint them, make them Gods, he could grant them everything, he could grant them Christmas in Aspen with Jack Nicholson.

Some worked in teams, like pickpockets or police detectives, completing each other's sentences, playfully contradicting each other, or sometimes flashing murder as one of them botched that fantastic part of this incredible story which would make everyone rich. Some of them even talked about money, about how much the movie would make the first week if Harrison Ford played the hero, how much less if they went with someone else.

They came in with big ideas, rebellion, divorce, revenge, honor. They offered atmosphere: It's sort of a red mood, it's kind of a gritty future, it's funny. Each idea represented a million adjustments to reconcile the difference between the writer's movie of his dreams, which would be the really immortal movie, that tour through the brilliant connections of his freely associating but always focused mind, and the studio's version of that dream, toward the production of which the writer conceded the banal necessity to tell a story. The writers leapt to all this accommodation in anticipation of the thirty-minute audience they'd have with Griffin Mill, that chance of a lifetime to impress their pure, almost unknowable genius on the mediating taste of someone who knew what America wanted to see.

He never said no.

They made their little speeches, then they waited for his response. If he said no, they might challenge him and ask him why, and then they would sell it to him once again, which was futile. He might ask a few questions about the setting, or he would object, moderately, to some unsympathetic quality of the main character, but he would allow them to leave his office thinking that although their chances were slim, yes, yes, yes, there was a possibility. Sometimes, when he walked writers to the door, he pointed to the photographs hanging in the hallway. These were small publicity stills, behind glass, no frame, famous scenes from the movies that had built the studio. He wanted the writers to understand that his door was always open, but they had to bring him a story with crises so powerful that the future could make its images sacred. Kisses while a city burns. Desperate submariners gathered around the periscope. The cavalry leaving the fort. The guilty confronted. The spaceship appearing. Lovers reconciled. Funny men (nervous, innocent) hanging from high places. Monsters. Women screaming. Comedy of inappropriate behavior. Airmen serenading the captain's girl. These were the emblems of the movies' spirit, of love, blood, and speed.

Griffin expected the writers to understand from his silence after a few days that they had failed.

Now he wondered if using time in the service of so much disappointment wasn't a sin.

What happened when writers left him? If the meeting went well for them, did they think that now their lives were different, now their lives had begun? How long before the bogeyman tapped them on the shoulder and said, “No. Not yet. Not you. Not now.” What happened to them then, when they were alone and ashamed under the relentless, boring sun of their usual life, burning them with the mundane, with frustration?

If he wasted their time, hadn't he also wasted his own? Somewhere in his mind, wasn't there a fussy little man pushing colored pins into a bulletin board every time a promise was made, and didn't that little man cry for all the pins he'd bought, arranged, and wasted, because the board was covered with pins and he'd never been told what to do with them. He had lost track of the promises.

What about all those meetings? Griffin asked himself. He turned the pages of the calendar. So many meetings. Had he ever said yes? There were some meetings that had led to deals, there were a few deals that had led to movies, but only when writers had come in with producers, or when writers had reputations, when they were on the list, when they'd already sold something or made something. The Writer sending the postcards wasn't on any lists. Griffin guessed he had written a good script, something that attracted the attention of a good agent, and that the agent had then called a few executives, who took his calls and had the Writer meet them. The line in the letter about the agent saying this was a good sign told Griffin that the agent didn't know him very well. He could make a master list of writers and the agents who had sent them to cross-reference the least familiar names, but he would have to ask Jan for help. That was out of the question.

Griffin told Jan to get Mary Netter. After a moment she told him that Mary was in a meeting. Griffin said it was important, Jan put him on hold, and in a few seconds Mary got on the line.

“What's up? I'm in a meeting.”

“I've got a question. How long do you have to wait before you've waited long enough?”

“Is this a plot point?”

“Yes.”

“What are we waiting for?”

“This is an etiquette problem, a thank-you letter. How long do you wait for one?”

“Someone sends a gift, she doesn't get a thank-you note and she gets really steamed?”

“He. And he gets mad enough to pick a fight.”

“A man is getting this angry? This is a comedy, no?”

“It's just an idea right now.”

“If this isn't a comedy, a man shouldn't get that angry. You're describing indignation, which is not for heroes of movies. Whose idea is this?”

“Forget the film for a minute. How long would you wait before you'd waited long enough?”

“When I give a gift to someone and the gift and the person are special to me, I get very excited every time I imagine the person unwrapping the box. If it's for a girl, I think about her saving the ribbon, because I save the ribbon. So, if you've sent the gift by mail, or even if you had the store deliver it, how long does that take? Three days local, a week to New York? If you send something nice and you don't hear back within two weeks, you have a right to be really angry—if they got the gift, of course—unless they got run over by a truck. You imagine your friend with this precious thing and he's enjoying it, but he's not responding. Maybe he hated it. He doesn't know what to say about it. Is that possible?”

“Very possible.”

“Well, you think that he hates it, which is just as bad. So you start to resent him, and then you wish you hadn't sent the gift. Maybe it was too extravagant and the person who got it doesn't know what to say, maybe you overestimated the friendship, maybe it's only in your mind. You've sent something valuable, and the person who got it didn't really like you before, and now he's even a little scared of you because only a lunatic would be so generous to a casual acquaintance. Anyway, if the person who sent the gift is really quite proper, then he'd be angry in two weeks. If he brooded a lot, he'd be ready to kill in four or five weeks.”

“Who said anything about killing?”

“It's funnier if he wants to kill. This is a comedy, no?”