Elimination Night (34 page)

So here’s how the opening of the season thirteen finale would go: In a witty reference to the most notorious moment of his career—if not all of rock ’n’ roll history—Joey Lovecraft would throw himself out of a light aircraft at ten thousand feet and land on the roof of Greenlit Studios, where a band would be waiting, already grinding out the lustful, swampy, utterly degenerate groove of “Hell on Wheels.” And at the precise moment Joey’s feet touched down, rockets would burst into the sky, the King of Sing would release the hordes of tortured banshees from his lungs, the band would stop—epic silence!—and a lone guitar, its amp stack set to a volume louder than a Nordic god in a volcanothrowing rage, would begin the riff that had helped conceive a million babies.

Dn.

Dn-nn-nah.

Dn-nn-
nah
-nh! Bleeeowww-neow-neow…

Thirty million viewers.
Like Bert had said, it was achievable. Or as Joey had put it: “Sometimes you’ve just gotta grab yourself by the nuts and reach the fuckin’ high note, man.”

Len hadn’t taken any convincing to go along with Joey’s plan.

Neither had Ed or David.

It was a go.
And because I was the only producer on
Project Icon
’s staff with any skydiving experience—thanks to all those trips to the Keys with Brock—I was appointed Joey’s jump mate, or wingwoman, or whatever you wanted to call it. The camera practically welded to my chest would act as backup for the one on Joey’s helmet.

Through the plane’s windows, Hollywood gleamed. The sun was at that point in the sky where everything turns to molten gold: windows, roofs, street signs, swimming pools… The plane banked unevenly. We were circling now. We were ready.

The technician patted me on the arm and held up his right hand: It was 4:55 p.m.

Five minutes to go.

“You okay?” I shouted over to Joey, pushing my headset aside, so I could hear his reply.

“Why?” he yelled back. “
You gonna push me?
”

Before I had a chance to answer: A tone in my ear, like an early-1950s synthesizer. It was my phone. The crew had jury-rigged it to the communications system, so I could stay in touch with Len on the ground. Snapping the foam cups back over my ears, I fumbled for the cord that dangled by my right ear. There was a button on it somewhere that let me take calls. If I could just… dah… yes, that was it…

A click. And then—

“We know who did it,” announced Len, his voice so clear, it was as though he were inside my frontal cortex. “Dick is done with his dicking. I just came out of the meeting.”

“
The leak?
” I said, looking over at Joey. His eyes were closed and he was singing. Oblivious.

“Well, yeah, we know
that,
” scoffed Len. “We also know who stole your pills.”

“Who? I mean,
how
—”

The technician raised his hand again, this time tucking his thumb into his palm.

Four minutes.

“Security footage from Joey’s trailer,” said Len. “I didn’t even know we had a camera in there, to be honest. Turns out Mitch is paranoid. Likes to check up on Joey once in a while. He’d deleted the tapes, of course—but luckily he uploads a copy to a server farm in India. It took Dick a while. But he got it. It’s unmissable.”

“Len,
just tell me:
Who was it?”

“On the tape, it looks like a bloody cat burglar. Black turtleneck. Leather gloves. Baseball hat, pulled down low. He sneaks in there—your prescription bottle in his hand—fumbles around a bit, then puts it right on the countertop, next to Joey’s toothpaste. The poor old fucking junkie didn’t stand a chance. We probably wouldn’t have been able to make out the guy’s face if he hadn’t spent so long posing in front of the mirror. Moron. Anyhow, when we zoomed in on the tape—”

Three fingers now.

“WHO?”

“Wayne Shoreline.”

“
What?
”

“Oh, it gets better. As soon as he was done, he made a phone call.”

“You could trace the call?”

“No, Sherlock:
We had audio.
We just listened to him speak.”

“And?”

“He said, ‘Nigel, my love, it’s me. It’s done. See you tonight.’ Then Crowther’s voice comes on the line, you can hear it almost as clear as if he were on speaker. He goes, ‘I’m proud of you, pumpkin,’ then hangs up.”

“So Wayne
is
gay!” I spluttered.

“No, he’s not
gay,
Bill. Jesus,
don’t you know anything?
”

“Huh?”

“You don’t seriously think Nigel Crowther was born with a penis, do you?
Please.
He’s straight. He just likes things a bit… twisted. Anyhow: Turns out Wayne is hopelessly in love with Crowther. Totally obsessed. Would do anything to please him. Crowther realized that a while ago and was using him, like he uses everybody. He even promised Wayne a job on
The Talent Machine
—as a judge, this time—if he helped destroy
Project Icon.
But it’s all water under the bridge now, I suppose. Stealing prescription drugs is a felony, and we’ve got videotaped proof. The police should be here in a few minutes. They’re going to cuff him after the show.”

“Wow,” I said, taking a breath.

The technician was showing only two fingers now. He began opening the cargo hatch.

“And the leaks?” I asked, almost forgetting.

“Nico DeLuca,” Dick replied. “The in-house barista. Real name: Kevin Smiles. He’s a British tabloid journalist—hence the ridiculous accent—who came over to Hollywood in the eighties to set up his own scumbag news agency. Employed by none other than Midas Industries. But it’s not what you think. Teddy and Bibi were on
our
side. They’d studied the UK version of
The Talent Machine
—how Crowther trashed his own contestants in the tabloids for the sake of the ratings—and
they wanted Two Svens to do the same thing, to save
Project Icon.
But he refused. The old Swede’s too soft. So they just did it themselves—and it worked, obviously. Smiles was selling stories left, right, and bloody center. He even managed to bribe one of Joey’s girls, Mu, into giving him the scoop on his relapse. Here’s the twist, though: Crowther
also
has Smiles’s agency on retainer—he keeps a boatful of his photographers moored alongside
The Talent and the Glory
at all times. Whatever Teddy leaked to Smiles, Crowther immediately found out from the captain of the good ship paparazzi.”

One finger. The hatch was now fully open. I could barely hear anything over the wind.

“So Bibi and Teddy
weren’t
trying to destroy the show,” I said, holding the mic up to my mouth.

“Of course not. If Bibi had wanted a job on
The Talent Machine,
she would have accepted Crowther’s offer last summer. As for her threat to you: Coincidence. She and Edouard have been going through a tough time. If you’d have confronted him about the cue cards, he would have thought it had come via Bibi, and it would have made things worse, so she had no choice but try and shut you down. She feels pretty bad now, after what happened with Wayne. She wants to apologize.”

Joey put an arm around my shoulder.
He was ready.

Len got off the line, and his voice was replaced in my ear by the live feed from Greenlit Studios.

Wayne was mid intro.

“… high above us at this VERY SECOND… in an airplane circling the studio… we’re going LIVE…”

Joey winked.

The red light on his helmet cam came on. We were on air.

“Look at me,” said Joey, suddenly, grabbing my arm to pull me closer. “Look at my face.”

“Joey, I’m okay. Stop it. I’ve jumped out of a plane before, hundreds of times.”

“No,
look at me,
Bungalow Bill,” he said. “I want you to remember one thing… the golden rule.”

“Huh?”

“
RATINGS,
” he yelled, unstrapping his chute in one fluid movement and hurling it out of the open hatch. I screamed and reached out to grab him, but he ducked away.

“
THEY’RE IMPORTANT.
”

That grin.

Then he was gone.

Since the conclusion of
Project Icon
’s thirteenth season, two articles regarding the fate of the show have appeared on the front page of
ShowBiz
magazine. They are reprinted here with permission.

DEATH OF AN ICON

EXCLUSIVE FOR
SHOWBIZ

BY CHAZ CHIPFORD

AFTER
months of will-he-won’t-he speculation, Big Corp honcho Sir Harold Killoch has
FINALLY
done the deed. As of last night,
Project Icon
is no more.

Dead.

Gone.

An ex-singing competition.

There were bitter tears of regret and humiliation last night at Greenlit Studios, where the long-suffering Rabbit warblefest had just wrapped its unlucky thirteenth season.

Ironically enough, ratings for the two-hour finale are projected to be up by a
THIRD
over last year, thanks largely to a near-fatal stunt by celebrity judge Joey Lovecraft. The Honeyload wildman had been scheduled to open the show with a well-rehearsed skydive over Hollywood, but changed the plan at the last minute, tearing off his parachute and throwing it from the cargo hatch of the Beechcraft Super King Air as it circled Greenlit Studios at ten thousand feet. Mr. Lovecraft then appeared to leap to his death—prompting a record 924,391 calls to 911 in the Greater Los Angeles area (and a small explosion at Rabbit’s call processing facility in Eagle Rock, CA)—only to pull
the cord at the last moment on a backup ’chute, concealed within his tux. The producers’ shock turned to anger when Mr. Lovecraft veered badly off course, ending up just south of downtown in the LA River—from which he had to be fished, sans hairpiece, and with a broken toe. The incident brought to mind Mr. Lovecraft’s infamous parachute-less jump over Manhattan in ’83, which prompted President Reagan to name him “Joey Dumbass” during a Rose Garden speech.

Result? The show’s opening number of “Hell on Wheels”—which Mr. Lovecraft had been due to perform on the roof of Greenlit Studios alongside the L.A. Philharmonic and a returning choir of Nepalese lentil famine refugees—had to be substituted in haste. Jimmy Nugget did the honors by yodeling his way heroically through the Tom Waits classic “Downtown Train,” and was later rewarded for his efforts by winning the season. Meanwhile, a junior-level
Project Icon
employee who had accompanied Mr. Lovecraft on his stunt above Hollywood had to be rushed to Mount Cypress Medical Center upon landing.

“Having not seen Mr. Lovecraft’s second ’chute open, she believed he had committed suicide,” said a spokesman for the LAFD, whose paramedics were first at the scene.

In the end, however, neither this chaotic opening spectacle, nor the extraordinary succession of scandals that have rocked Greenlit Studios of late, were enough to make up for
Project Icon’
s abject early-to-mid season performance—during which it temporarily lost the title of “America’s most-watched TV show” to
Bet You Can’t Juggle That!
(in spite of the tragic alligator mishap that halted work on the latter show for ten days). Indeed, Sir Harold—whose Big Corp empire counts the Rabbit network among its more profitable subsidiaries—had warned
Icon
staffers in advance that if the finale didn’t grab a large enough audience to give the franchise a season-long
AVERAGE
in the top position across all networks, then it would face immediate cancellation.

As
ShowBiz
can exclusively reveal: Old Harry made good on that threat last night.

“
Last night’s finale was your elimination night,” begins a message
from Sir Harold that will land in the inboxes of
Project Icon’s
cast and crew this morning (an advance copy was seen by
ShowBiz). “
You gave it your best shot—and for that I congratulate you—but your best wasn’t good enough. This is the end of the road for you. You should be proud of all you’ve achieved; of the history you’ve made. And I hope you will all join me in wishing Nigel Crowther and his team at
The Talent Machine
all the very best as they go about the hard work of reinvigorating this genre for a new generation of Rabbit viewers.”

The official ratings for the
Project Icon
finale, due out from the Jefferson Metrics Organization early this morning, are expected to show that it prevented the franchise from meeting its season-average target by a mere eighth of a percentage point—a fact that will only heighten the anguish of
Icon
staffers being laid off. No matter how close, however:
ShowBiz
has been assured that Sir Harold’s mind is made up. He is said to be looking forward to a “fresh start in Rabbit prime time” when he returns to the United States this week from Germany, where he and a team of senior Big Corp executives have been assisting the Bundestag with an investigation into televised bingo irregularities. A settlement in that case is now expected within days—finally putting an end to the bizarre and costly scandal that has distracted Sir Harold for several months.

As for those dejected souls at
Project Icon:
They will be issued their pink slips before noon today—a humbling end to twelve years of popculture domination. Reached on his cell phone last night, supervising producer Leonard Braithwaite could utter only grotesque personal insults directed at the writer of this article. Meanwhile, a cooler-headed response to the death of the once-untouchable franchise was supplied by Mr. Crowther, who is currently relaxing off the coast of Malibu aboard his fifty-million-dollar superyacht,
The Talent and the Glory.

“For me, this decision is so overdue, it isn’t even a case of ‘rest in peace,’” he said, laughing heartily. “More like, ‘Goodbye and good bloody riddance.’”

Mr. Crowther’s
The Talent Machine
will air in the fall.