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Authors: John Scalzi

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“I don't know if I'd want to look like a Gabor sister,” Joshua
said. “Although it could have interesting ramifications. ‘People of the Earth! Surrender now, or we will slap your policemen!'”
“Maybe not a Gabor sister,” I said. “But not a blob, either. If you looked like Ralph,” I motioned to the sleeping dog, “then we'd be set. Everyone loves dogs.”
“We know about this problem,” Joshua said. “That's one of the reasons we came to you.”
“I know. That's what I'm saying. By now I should have some idea of how to get away from this or work around it. But I'm having a hard time. I know I probably shouldn't tell that to you, but there it is. You've got me stumped at the moment.”
“You'll figure it out,” Joshua said. “Maybe while you're doing that, I'll take some lessons on dog behavior. As a backup. There are worse things than being a dog. Right, Ralph?”
Ralph cracked an eye open at the sound of his name.
From beside the cooler, my cellular phone rang. I sighed and picked it up. “Miranda, I'm busy with a client right now,” I said. Miranda was the only person that had the number to this particular cellular phone (I had two), so I didn't worry about who it would be on the other end.
“Tom,” Miranda sounded upset. “You remember Jim Van Doren?”
“Yeah,” I said. During the last week Van Doren had been calling every couple of hours trying to get an interview with me. I eventually told Miranda to tell him whatever it was, I was not available for comment. “What about him?”
“Where are you?” Miranda said. “Are you in LA?”
“I'm in Glendora,” I said. “It's about forty-five minutes out.”
“This week's edition of
The Biz
just came out,” Miranda
said. “You need to get back to LA and pick it up. You're on the cover. And you're not going to be happy with the story.”
“Why?” I asked. “What's it about?”
“Here's what it says on the cover,” Miranda said. “‘Tom Stein is the hottest young agent in Hollywood. So why is he acting so damned weird?'”
Secretive Agent
Tom Stein is the hottest young agent in Hollywood.
So why is he acting so damned weird?
By James Van Doren
At first glance, Tom Stein doesn't seem like your typical Hollywood millionaire. Maybe it's because he's lugging a five gallon bottle into his car. The bottle is filled, he says, with sulfurous waters from an out-of-the-way desert spa the agents at Lupo Associates go to whenever they're feeling a little stressed out. The fact that Stein is hauling this into his car tells you two things: first, he's stressed out. Second, he doesn't have time to feel stressed out right now.
And who can blame him? Last week, Stein pulled the biggest coup of his young agentorial career, when he managed to pull a $12.5 million paycheck out of the hat for client Michelle Beck, for her return to the
Murdered
Earth
series. There have been larger paychecks for an actress, but not many, and certainly not so soon: Michelle's most recent paycheck for a supporting role in the just-wrapped
Scorpion's Tail,
was a mere $650,000—a twentieth of her next. Or, to put it another way, Stein's 10% is worth almost twice as much as his client's previous highest salary.
Stein's success is another example of hard-nosed Hollywood capitalism—but the question becomes: at what price? For shortly after Stein's magic trick with Michelle Beck, friends and colleagues started noticing the normally affable Stein has become more closed and secretive. And his clients are discovering the oddest behavior of all: without warning, Stein has dropped them onto a subordinate agent, whose inexperience and (some allege) incompetence could send their careers into cinematic limbo. What have they done to deserve this, they ask? And what secret is gnawing away at Tom Stein? Is his red-hot career over just as it begun?
(Continued on page 65)
 
The
story itself would have been funny, if it had been written about anyone else. Van Doren, in the absence of reality, spun out a fascinating tale of stress and paranoia that speculated that I was suffering from everything from conflicted sexuality to drug use to a “late-blooming Oedipal conflict,” with my agent father—my making my first million apparently being a way to “claim my father's crown” in my chosen field, according to what the psychologist Van Doren managed to dig up.
The Biz
being the pariah magazine it is, the quotes about me from colleagues and friends were unusually skimpy—the attributed quotes coming largely from high school acquaintances and college dorm-floor residents who generally described me as “friendly” and “driven,”—nothing to get worked up about, since they were true, and blandly nonspecific; these folks could
have been describing a ski rescue dog with the same words, with equal results.
The unattributed quoters, of which there were two, were not that hard to figure out. The first, the “Lupo Associates Insider,” was obviously Ben Fleck. Ben, no doubt relishing a chance to take a whack at me, described me as a “shark with Brylcreem” who was “insanely secretive, to the point of forbidding his assistants to even talk with other agents.” The latter I found amusing, the former, inscrutable—I don't put anything in my hair, much less Brylcreem. I suspected Ben didn't actually know what Brylcreem was. I had Miranda send him a tube with my compliments.
The second was a “strongarmed client” who described Amanda as a “shrieking virgin” and myself as a “fucking overlord of ego,” and then went from there. It was pretty clear that Van Doren got more than he expected from Tea Reader, since by the end of it, even he noted that it seemed this particular client “was on her own personal vendetta against the universe, and Tom Stein happens to be the closest moving object.”
Be that as it may, Van Doren took Tea's grudge against Amanda and ran with it, taking a bat to the poor girl. Van Doren dug up the Mexican soap star, who complained, through an interpreter, that Amanda had found her no work in the big Hollywood productions. The actor who revived her at the marathon described how they met, which made Amanda appear both sickly, for passing out in the first place, and then flaky, for representing the first passing jogger who happened to administer mouth-to-mouth.
Ben Fleck then reappeared in his Lupo Associates insider guise to make dismissive comments about the practice of bringing up agents from the mailroom (Ben got his job through nepotism: his stepfather was a senior agent before keeling over,
corned beef in hand, at Canter's Deli), and mentioned, darkly, that I had come up from the mailroom myself. Obviously we mailroom types were looking out for each other, like frat brothers or Templars.
Amanda read the story and burst into my office, flinging
The Biz
onto my desk and then collapsing into the chair, moody. “I want to die,” she said.
“Amanda, no one reads
The Biz,
” I said. “And those that do generally know enough to realize that it's full of shit.”
“My mom reads
The Biz,
” Amanda said.
“Well, all right,
almost
everyone knows it's full of shit,” I said. “Don't worry about it. Next week they'll find some more naked pictures of celebrities and they'll forget all about it. Don't be so upset.”
“I'm not upset, I'm pissed off,” Amanda said, whispering the words
pissed off
like she was worried about being punished. I wondered again how she ever managed to become an agent. “I know who talked to
The Biz.
I know who that unnamed source is. It's that bitch Tea.” She stumbled over
bitch,
and then she gave me a bitter smile. “You know, I just got her a part in that new Will Ferrell film, too. A good part. Guess it doesn't matter.”
“I'm sorry, Amanda,” I said. “I shouldn't have unleashed Tea on you unawares. I should have let you know she's a high-riding bitch. It's my fault.”
“No, it's all right,” Amanda said. “It's okay. Because I know something Tea doesn't know.”
“What's that?”
“That she got a part in a Will Ferrell movie.”
“Amanda,” I said, genuinely surprised. “You star. And here I was beginning to worry about you.”
Amanda smiled like a five-year-old who had gotten her
first taste of being naughty and realized it was something she would enjoy doing. A lot.
Amanda ended up getting the best of it; the worst of her problems were over with Tea right then. My problems with my clients had just begun. For the next week, I was in Agent Hell.
 
“
Mind
the light,” Barbara Creek said.
The light she was referring to was a huge klieg light, which lay on the set of her son's sitcom,
Workin' Out!
The light casing was heavily dented and the lens was shattered and strewn like jagged jewels across the floor, nestled up to the weights and exercise equipment that made up the health club locale set.
“I'm guessing that light's not supposed to be on the set,” I said.
“Of course it's not,” Barbara said, and then raised her voice so everyone on the set could hear her. “It's on the set because some damned fool UNION light hanger doesn't know how to do HIS DAMN JOB! And he wouldn't HAVE a JOB unless HIS DAMN JOB was protected by his DAMN UNION!” Barbara's voice, a commanding boom in normal conversation, reverberated through the set like the aftershock of a particularly nasty quake. From the corners and the rafters, members of the crew glared down at her. Something was telling me this was not going to be a frictionless set.
“Shouldn't someone come and pick this up?” I asked.
“Hell, no,” Barbara said. “It's staying where it is until the union president gets here. I want him to see what sort of job his IDIOT UNION BROOM PUSHERS”—once again Barbara pitched her voice to the cheap seats—“have been doing around here. No one here is going to do a DAMN THING until he gets here.”
That much was true. There were forty people on the set, mostly crew, ambling around aimlessly. The cast seemed to be missing, with the exception of Chuck White, who played Rashaad Creek's best friend on the show. Chuck was working out on one of the set decorations.
“How long have you been waiting?” I asked.
“Six long, unproductive hours,” Barbara said. “And I'm going to keep waiting, and everyone here is going to keep waiting, until the union president gets here. Anyone who leaves before he gets here is fired, UNION OR NOT.”
Directly behind Barbara, one of the cameramen gave her the finger.
“But I didn't ask you here to talk about the lights, Tom,” Barbara said, strolling over to the audience seats. “I want to talk to you about the future of Rashaad's representation.”
I followed Barbara. “Has there been a problem, Barbara?” I asked.
Barbara took a seat on a bleacher. “Not as such, Tom—here, sit down a minute,” she patted the seat next to her, “but I have to tell you, I'm hearing some very disturbing things.”
I took a seat. “This wouldn't have anything to do with that article in
The Biz,
” I said.
“It might,” Barbara said. “You know, that reporter Van Doren gave Rashaad and me a call. Asked us if we've been noticing if you've been acting strangely lately. And then he told us that you had dropped so many of your clients. As you might imagine, we found this
very
disturbing.
I
found it
very
disturbing.”
“Barbara,” I said, “you really have nothing to worry about. Yes, I transitioned a number of my less important clients, but I certainly have no intention of doing that with Rashaad. He's on his way up, and I intend to keep him going there.”
“Tom,” Barbara said, “are you on drugs?”
“Excuse me?”
“Are you on drugs?” she repeated. “That reporter mentioned something about a health spa and sulfur treatments. To my ear, that sounds like rehab. You know how I feel about those drugs. I won't have them anywhere near my boy. You know I had everyone here on the set take a urine test before they could work here. If they had the slightest hint of anything in their system, they're gone.”
After
Workin' Out!
was green-lighted, Rashaad threw a little party for himself and thirty of his most geographically immediate friends at the Four Seasons hotel in Beverly Hills. One of Rashaad's “pals” arrived with more cocaine than was in the final scene of
Scarface.
But then, Rashaad wasn't the one having to pee in a cup.
“I'm clean, Barbara,” I said. “The last time I smoked anything illegal was my junior year in college. You don't have to worry about it.”
“Then what is wrong, Tom? I—” she stopped as someone approached us. It was the assistant producer of the show. “What do you want, Jay?” she asked.
“Barbara, we really have to get a move on. Another forty-five minutes and we have to start paying overtime. And we still haven't shot half of the episode. We're going to be here all night if we don't start now.”
“Then we'll be here all night,” she said. “Nothing's happening until that damned union man gets his lazy ass over from Burbank.”
“Barbara, we have to get this show in the can. We're already two days behind schedule.”
“I don't give a damn about the schedule,” Barbara said, building up a head of steam. “What I give a DAMN about is that my son's show is being held hostage by MORONS WHO CAN'T SCREW IN A LIGHT BULB. And if these boys think they're getting overtime, they are seriously mistaken, Jay. It's their fault we had to stop. If anything, at this point, they ought to pay me.”
Jay the assistant producer threw up his hands. “You're the boss, Barbara.”
“That's RIGHT,” Barbara said, looking around. “I AM the BOSS. You'd all do VERY VERY WELL to remember who's signing your DAMN PAYCHECKS. Now leave me alone, Jay, I've got to talk business.”
Jay split. Barbara turned back to me. “Do you see what I have to put up with around here? Now I know why Roseanne was so hard on her crew. You have to be. These folks are nothing but a bunch of lazy assed slackers. Do you know, that light almost killed me. Another two feet and it would have landed right on my head.”
“That's awful,” I said.
“Now, enough about this,” she said. “What's your problem, Tom? Something's up with you, and it has us worried. How can you be my son's agent if you're falling apart over there?”
“I'm not falling apart, Barbara,” I said. “
The Biz
piece had nothing to it. Everything is fine. Really.”
“Is it?” Barbara said. “I wonder. I've been thinking about where my son is at, and I truly wonder if this is where he should be at this juncture of his career.”
“Well, hell, Barbara,” I said. “He's got his own show on a national network. I say that's pretty good for a twenty-three-year-old.”

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