The Reluctant Tuscan (9 page)

After the introductions, the sitting down, and the offering of mineral water, we devoted a moment of foreplay to my house in Italy and its cornucopia of problems. I told them that whether you want it or not, Italy gives you a lesson in patience every day. After all, Rome wasn't built in a day and apparently neither was anything there. They laughed, but I could tell from their comments that, like most Americans, even the more sophisticated ones, their image of Italy was mostly macaroni and mandolins.

Pleasantries aside, we got down to business. It's important to understand that these script meetings tend to have a structure as tightly forged as a Kabuki theatrical. The performance invariably opens with a ritual praising of your writing. How much they were moved by your “searing insight” and your “compelling narrative.”

But just as day follows night, their faces darken and they reluctantly voice their concerns. My script was just too time bound in the late fifties/early sixties and relentlessly mired in a type of factory town that just didn't exist anymore. They feared that those two elements would make the film inaccessible to the all-important male teenage audience.

Then, acting like his idea was completely spontaneous, the cornrow guy suggested we update the story by placing it in the present day.

“Okay . . .” I said, mourning all the wonderful stuff I'd have to lose.

“And instead of a small town, how about setting it in the inner city? Uh, like Harlem, for instance,” the girl with the triangular hair said.

I pursed my lips and nodded as if I were thinking about it. But I wished I were wearing a Kabuki mask to keep them from seeing my left eye starting to twitch.

They were congratulating each other over these improvements when I first heard the name Charlie. As in, how Charlie could play the living hell out of a present-day kid from the hood.

“Charlie?” I wondered.

Hope piled upon hype as they buzzed over the possibility of casting Charlie.

Apparently Charlie had read the script and expressed interest. But now with these changes . . .

Charlie Sheen? Charlie Chan? Charlie Manson? I had no idea who Charlie was, but rather than betray my woeful lack of hipness, I grinned back in mindless delight.

“The songs Charlie could do for the soundtrack!” the girl cooed.

“Totally,” her partner said, suggesting they go for a mix of Charlie's classic rap hits with some new stuff.

They slapped hands and she broke into an impromptu riff of what appeared to be one of Charlie's songs. It was as familiar to me as the Bulgarian national anthem.

Of course with the casting of Charlie, I needed to rewrite most of my scenes to highlight the Charlie persona. For example, they singled out an easy change I could make. It was in the part where the kid went out to dinner with his parents every Sunday. The parents were morbidly obese, and their favorite restaurant was a place called Paul Bunyan's, an oversized, all-you-can-eat smorgasbord whose motto was “Big Food on Big Plates.” One Sunday, as they pulled up, the owner spotted them, turned out all the lights, and pretended to be closed so they wouldn't eat him out of business.

They loved that scene but thought it needed to be edgier. So perhaps, outraged at Mom and Dad getting dissed, Charlie could kick open the door and spray the restaurant with an AK-47.

This is madness! I thought. But I said, “Well, that's certainly interesting, but don't you think that such sweeping changes will destroy the essential spirit of the work?”

“Not at all,” the guy was quick to say. “Charlie's acting will bring such poignancy, it can only make it better.”

“And with Charlie starring, we're talking about a whole new thing here,” the girl said in a scolding tone. “Not just a TV movie. This could wind up being released as a feature!”

And so, like many Kabuki performances that stress the importance of one's duty over one's conscience, our play ended with the promise of untold riches and eternal happiness for all. As I started for the door, they suggested we meet the following week so I could pitch out the changes I'd made. I indicated I would look forward to that, but first I had to go home, cleanse my hands, and slit open my belly with a harikari knife.

I drove down Sunset Strip. My stomach was churning and my brain bubbled with rage. If I worked in this town a hundred years, I'd never understand why they buy a script they love and proceed to change it beyond all recognition. There are fifty thousand scripts floating around—why don't they just buy one that already has what they want? And if they can't find one, why don't they just grab one of the ten thousand writers hanging around Starbucks and tell him to write down what they're saying?

For God's sake, after twenty-five years of shoveling jokes in the sitcom boiler room, aren't I entitled to something real and heartfelt? How could they take this away from me?

I stopped pounding on the steering wheel long enough to realize that I was stuck in that knot of traffic that always jams up around Tower Records. I decided to put aside my self-pity and at least see who this Charlie was. The guy must have some talent or they wouldn't get so excited. Who knows, maybe he was the next Denzel Washington. Or failing that, the next Ice T.

After much browsing through the Rap/Hip-Hop/Urban Top 40 Section, I couldn't find anyone named Charlie. But I did come across a whole rack devoted to Charylie. So Charlie was a chick!
Son on the Moon?
I couldn't even keep my own title!

I picked up a CD and studied the angry young lady glaring at me. She was wearing a doo-rag and camouflage overalls. Her hair bristled in every direction, as did her facial piercings. I flipped over the CD and saw that it featured such classics as: “Yo' Mama Is a Hootchie Ho' ” and “F.T.C.H.C.P. (Flush the Crack, Here Come the Pigs).”

 

 

I lay in bed
surrounded by books on hip-hop culture. I was staring at the TV, where a movie I had rented was playing. It was a teenage slasher flick called
Is the Noise in My Head Bothering You? Part II
. One of its stars was Charylie, and the best thing I could say about her performance is that she screamed very effectively.

I had been working for days and everything I wrote was bad. The words I put in Charylie's mouth seemed leaden and contrived. I was supposed to meet with the producers in a couple of days, and I was starting to panic.

Had I lost my fastball? Was I so busy pouting over these changes that my heart wasn't in it? Throughout my career I had moved easily from show to show, writing for casts that were black, Hispanic, or female. Each time I was able to submerge myself inside the characters. I would start talking like them and soon I could hear them chattering away inside my head, until all I had to do was jot down what they were saying.

But not this time. This time I was just a middle-class, middle-aged white guy trying to sound like an angry teenage girl from the projects.

Maybe they were right. Maybe I was too old.

I stopped the movie. The TV was set on the Discovery Channel, where a dry, PBS-type voice was narrating the cycle of life as played out by a herd of wildebeest on the Serengeti Plains. How they frantically fought off the fiercest adversary to protect their young, but callously left the old to fall behind and be eaten.

Just like when I was a young writer coming up, and my peers and I snickered at the old guys and their talk of Jack Benny and Fred Allen. How could these old farts understand our generation? How could they ever know how we thought and spoke and felt? If there was anything more ridiculous than how we dressed in the seventies, it was the sight of some old man in a bad toupee, his saggy butt squeezed into a pair of bell bottoms and his belly bulging under a psychedelic T-shirt. How we laughed at them in our eagerness to take over their jobs.

Now it was happening to me.

 

 

I needed to talk
to somebody. I couldn't call any of my fellow writers, even to ask if they knew whether or not Britney Spears had had breast implants. They'd be so envious I had this deal, they'd think I was calling to rub it in. Which perhaps I was.

I started to call Nancy when I reminded myself that I couldn't tell her about the struggles I was having. She'd see it as my way of saying that I really didn't want to be here anymore. And even if she were right, what did it matter? What choice did I have?

I dialed up my sister, Debbie, who still lived in the town we grew up in. Debbie and I talked for about an hour, chewing over all the latest comings and goings back there. Things like the old greasy spoon next to the high school suddenly becoming an upscale Thai restaurant, and how ancient Mrs. McCauly up the block had finally passed away. Our conversation only underscored how lost I felt. I knew that small town and its people in ways I would never know Charylie. Sure, I could write her anger, but where was her humanity?

I decided to talk to my agent, but I had to handle this delicately. After two years of my bugging him, he had finally sold something, and now here I was bitching about it. Of course he would be sympathetic, but in Hollywood you never knew who was in bed with whom. He, or his agency, might represent the producers. Or Charylie.

I got an appointment to see him the next day. In the meantime I put in a call to the producers. About an hour later they called back. I started with the prerequisite pumping of sunshine about how well things were going. I tried to sound carefree and confident, but I could hear my own voice and it sounded full of wrong notes. They asked me if any parts were giving me problems, which opened the door for me to be honest. But I was so terrified that this gossamer thread my career was hanging by would dissolve with one wrong word, I just mumbled that everything was going great.

The following morning I drove to Beverly Hills and was valet-parked at my agent's office. It was hot and sticky, and I picked my shirt away from my skin as I walked across the vast marble plaza. I passed a towering fountain my years of work had helped pay for. The cooling mist of its spray glazed my face and I felt slightly reimbursed.

I took the elevator up to his floor and stepped out, to be greeted by his assistant, Greta, a disturbingly pretty California girl. You just knew that there had to be tan lines under that Prada suit. She told me that he was on a conference call and would be with me shortly, but in the meantime would I like some mineral water or a cappuccino? I chose the latter, settling into one of those plush, oversized chairs they have to make you feel insignificant. I picked up
Daily Variety
and thumbed through it. As I glanced at the articles, I thought about getting a little ink for myself. A blurb about me selling my script, blah, blah, blah. But what if the whole thing blew up in my face? Better wait. Plenty of time for some big-time pub if and when.

Greta returned with my cappuccino and a smile. She told me how happy she was to finally meet me after we'd spoken on the phone so many times. She had always wanted to tell me how much she loved a certain show I had once worked on. I thanked her, privately grateful she hadn't mentioned that she was in junior high at the time.

She went on to say how much she loved the writing, and how she believed it had actually sparked her ambition to try and break into the business. I knew it was all boilerplate bullshit. Knew she probably said that to everybody who sat in this oversized chair. I knew all that, but it still felt good.

Greta trotted off to check on his conference call, and I took a sip of my cappuccino. It looked beautiful but tasted like coffee-flavored dishwater. I desperately yearned for a
caffè macchiato
from that little place with the green awning across from the . . . I suddenly wondered what the hell I was doing. When I was in Italy I kept thinking about L.A., and now that I was in L.A., I was yearning for Italy. What was up with that? I forced myself back to the trades, flipping past all the articles about those younger and more successful than me.

But when I got to the obituaries, something caught my eye.

Remember the guy who told me never to fall in love with my own stuff? There he was, dead at sixty-three. The obit listed the shows he had written, which were impressive, and the awards he had won, which were numerous. I drifted back in time. About ten years after he had given me that advice, I was producing my first network show. I had heard that he was out of work and I wanted to repay his kindness, so I called him. I explained that the star of our show had packed the writing staff with his relatives and his running buddies, so I didn't have the title or the money to give him what he deserved. But I'd love to have him involved, perhaps as a consultant who came in once or twice a week.

The offer was demeaning for a guy of his stature, and the show was, quite frankly, one of those idiotic eight o'clock family comedies that I'd built a career out of writing. He thanked me for thinking of him and a few days later showed up at one of our run-throughs. Out of the corner of my eye I watched him grimace at the over-the-top acting and the sophomoric writing. He left as soon as it was over, muttering something about being too old and too rich for this.

I saw him again three years later. I walked into a restaurant and spotted him at the bar. I sat down and tried to make conversation, but all I got was a drunken rant against every prick who'd ever screwed him. Here was a guy who had made a lot of money, won a shelf full of awards, and had achieved about as much acclaim as any TV writer can ever hope to get.

I still remember how he looked at me with unfocused eyes and said, “In the end, kid, no matter how big you are, this town won't leave you with one shred of dignity on your bones.”

His death made me realize how lucky I was. I had my health, I had about as much sanity as I'd had when I first got here, and most importantly, I had somebody who loved me so much, she wanted to drag me out of L.A. by my hair. Maybe she was right. Maybe I needed to get out now before I became that bitter, drunken bastard on the barstool.