And Sons. David Gilbert
Richard said.
“Where have you been hiding? Do you have other scripts in the top drawer?”
“Actually—”
“Because we want to be in business with writers like you.” Curtis checked his phone. “That’s the short answer to what will be a longer conversation. We usually don’t go for movies about movies, I mean Day for Night, sure, The Player maybe, but mostly they tend toward the solipsistic and too clever by half, and the satire, because it’s always a satire, the satire tends to be a snooze. Actors are self-involved pricks, wow, alert the media. But you’ve done something different here. The setting is both real and absurd, and the characters, well, your Martin Forge is right up there with Geoffrey Firmin in Under the Volcano and every other loon from The Day of the Locust. Reading these pages I kept on thinking of Brando toward the end, in one of those junk movies he did, Brando as played by Richard Burton stooping to the level of the gruff but lovable grandfather in—sorry, what’s the name of your movie-within-the-movie again?”
“Dog Daze,” Richard said.
Curtis flexed a smile, his bow tie the dumbbell. “Right right right right right right right. I love it. The whole man-switches-places-with-his-dog story is so perfectly high-concept I’m sure half a dozen studios would green-light your fake movie in a heartbeat. I’m almost tempted—it’s crazy, I know—but I’m almost tempted to push Rainer to do both movies and have you write the fake one and we release them simultaneously. How excellent would that be? Dog Daze and A Louse and a Flea on a double bill, like, like, like a diptych, a mise en abyme. Forget sequel or prequel, how about”—Curtis tossed the word forward with both hands—“metaquel? Maybe that sounds too much like a cough syrup. I’m sure we could come up with something better.”
The funny thing was that Richard had had the same thought when he first toyed with the idea. It usually came to him right before falling asleep, during those moments of pre-dream seeding, where he would start to think about Martin Forge, the once-in-a-generation actor praised for his intensity and admired by the younger set for barreling into life like a bullet, right up until the last stupid movie to pay another stupid debt, and Richard, eyes closing, would imagine both movies intertwined, tragedy and comedy, playing side by side in the same multiplex. Fully awake, he gave Curtis a nod and a grin. Was there smugness in that grin? Richard hoped not, he despised smugness, but here was this Curtis guy, smart and successful and seemingly conjured from a world that finally understood just how special Richard Dyer was. “Yeah,” Richard said, “that would be ama—”
Without warning, the office door flew open and in came Rainer Krebs, the head of Aires Projects. Meeting Rainer was the obvious goal. Curtis was all talk, but Rainer was the action, and Richard was ready. Last night he had practiced the pitch with his wife and thirteen-year-old daughter (his sixteen-year-old son found Dad, the scriptwriter, to be its own lame sort of a movie). Richard had even rehearsed the small talk and was willing to reach back and go down the unpleasant road of growing up in Manhattan and how he always passed the Dietmar Krebs Gallery on 76th and Madison, with all those Schieles and Klimts inside—just spectacular—and from there maybe he’d ask Rainer where he went to school—Collegiate, he believed—and then might fish up a few names they had in common—his cousin, Henry Lippencott—even if Rainer was a few years older and part of that Euro crowd who cared more about clothes and clubbing than baseball, who even in eighth grade reeked of sexual boredom. They all ended up at Brown, it seemed.
Richard rose to his feet with East Coast propriety, but Rainer had company, a boyish man expertly casual in Converse sneakers, a machinist union T-shirt, and a baseball cap pulled tight to the brow. This guise belonged to a familiar species of L.A. duck. One could imagine all the young white males in this city migrating from the wetlands of various Midwestern malls, flying west when the weather turned boring and gray. Rainer and his guest were in mid-conversation, oblivious to anything but the room itself.
“So …,” Rainer said, pleased.
The young man froze with stagey admiration.
“Amazing, huh?”
“You took the paneling too?”
“The paneling is Prouvé; so is the door.”
“Of course, the portholes.”
“I liberated them from a technical school in Algiers.”
“Fucking insane.” The young man continued with the drama, pressing his palms and face against the wood as if his touch could transduce the grain. “When I get to the right age I want to play Le Corbusier. I already have the perfect Charlotte Perriand in mind.”
“Actually that would be a good project,” Rainer said.
“Hell yeah it would. Bring in Pierre Jeanneret and we have Jules et Jim but with an architecture, French Resistance vibe. Total slam dunk. I even have Le Corbusier’s glasses, like his actual glasses glasses. Cost me a hundred grand. I’m told it’s the second-most-expensive pair of modern eyewear ever sold at auction.”
“Very nice.”
Richard stood there, at first annoyed, smiling like a photograph waiting to be taken, but then the young man, his voice, his face—think of the three phases of matter, of a solid heating into a liquid heating into a gas—finally conveyed the steamy presence of Eric Harke, the actor, the movie star, the teen heartthrob. Richard tried to act nonchalant within these strange thermodynamics of celebrity, but being the lesser actor, his posture stroked into a stiff approximation of cool. Eric Harke was taller than expected and less pretty, thank goodness, since onscreen he appeared summoned from the baby pillows of a thousand pubescent girls, including Richard’s own daughter, who was presently screaming Oh-my-Gods in his head.
“You remember Curtis,” Rainer said to Eric.
“Oh-yeah-sure-absolutely-hey.”
Rainer then turned toward Richard and smiled like an oven revealing a loaf of bread. “And it’s really nice to finally meet you,” he said, taking Richard’s hand. “I think our mothers know one another, from the Chamber Music Society or the Cos Club or something small-world like that.” Rainer was huge without being fat, his six-foot-eight bulk belonging to an antiquated class of male who by dint of size exist on another, arguably greater plane. “And aren’t you friends with Henry Lippencott?” he asked.
Richard was thrown by the stolen small talk. “He’s my cousin.”
“Oh, okay. You get back much?”
“To New York?”
“Yeah.”
“Never.”
The oven opened again. “And said with conviction. I hear you. I have my issues with the city as well, mostly family related, ex-wife too, that and my built-in cynicism doesn’t quite jibe with the place anymore. I get there and just turn mean, you know, wonderfully mean but mean nonetheless. Out here my cynicism seems, I don’t know, seems somehow jubilant. I can relax enough to hate the world with a tremendous amount of affection.” Though raised in New York, Rainer spoke with a vague European accent that seemed rucksacked to his shoulders, the straps pulled tight, giving the impression of an overweight boy who had spent long, over-enunciated summers with his grandparents. “I still manage to go back at least once a month,” he said.
“I’m buying a loft,” Eric offered, “in the Meatpacking District.”
“Of course you are,” said Rainer, who, rather than roll his eyes, practically threw them toward Richard as if Richard would find this rush into nouveau trendiness risible. But Richard didn’t. Or not in the way Rainer imagined. Because in Richard’s memory the Meatpacking District still existed as the capital of sex clubs, with roving bands of transvestites sucking five-dollar cock. “You see poor Eric is from Minnesota,” Rainer added, as if this further explained his choice of neighborhood.
“Go ’Sota,” the actor fake-cheered. He was not known for his comedies.
“Son