This Other Eden (25 page)

‘Good
on you, you little darling,’ they shouted. ‘Hang the bastard.’

As
Rosalie and Judy arrived at the exit the sergeant marched up to them. He
stamped and saluted in his proudest manner.

‘Well
done, Sergeant,’ Rosalie said. ‘You moved very quickly.’

‘Thank
you, ma’am,’ the proud sergeant replied, ‘and on behalf of the lads, may I
congratulate you on nabbing the little shit.’

‘That’s
very kind, Sergeant. Thank you. Now if you’d just hold this door for a moment
while I get my man here into the Special Branch car, I’d be grateful.’

And
whilst the army held back the crowd Rosalie and Judy went out and caught a
taxi.

Chapter
Sixteen

The loneliest girl in the world

Bitchin’
Pitchin’.

‘OK, it’s like this,’ said
Nathan, attempting to sound dynamic. He was back in Plastic Tolstoy’s office,
perched on the very edge of the bottomless pit which Plastic called a couch,
nervously gripping his empty soda glass and making his pitch. Nathan was at the
crunch point. That point which must be faced in every pitch. The point when the
pitcher knows that he or she can prevaricate no longer and that the actual idea
must be stated. It is always a nerve-racking moment, because so often it is the
last moment before ignominious failure. Nathan, therefore, like all pitchers,
had put it off for as long as possible, spending a full ten minutes lucidly
repeating the principles of his original brief.

‘You
don’t want a story that slags off the greenies,’ he had said in about six
different ways. ‘The greenies hold the high ground, we have to accept that.
What you want your story to do is acknowledge the moral position of the
Environmentalists, whilst showing the Claustrosphere company in a great light.
Right?’

Plastic
Tolstoy was losing patience.

‘Nathan.
I know this.
I
told
you,’
he replied testily. ‘You think I’m
renting you a house off Sunset to be told back what I told you already? Is that
how things get done in England, huh? Jesus, excuse me! No wonder you guys lost
an empire.’

‘Yes,
yes, no, fine. Just re-stating our position,’ Nathan agreed hastily. ‘You know,
checking we’re both coming from the same place.’

‘Well,
don’t because we ain’t. You’re coming from being poor, and I’m coming from
being rich, which means
you
have to impress
me,
which, I would
like to tell you, so far is not happening. No impact is being made. I am
looking around my office here and it is an impact-free zone. There is no zing
in the air, no pow! No ideas bouncing off the walls. All there is, in fact, is
nothing, and nothing, as the dead white guy said, comes of nothing. Certainly
not enough to justify the exorbitant amounts of money
—
For just one
moment, Nathan saw red.

‘Oh,
for God’s sake, you smug bastard, will you shut your stupid face for a minute
so I can explain my idea!!’

It was
out before he could even believe he’d said it. Nathan went white with fear. He
had shouted at Plastic Tolstoy. He had called Plastic Tolstoy an arrogant
bastard. He had told Plastic Tolstoy to shut his stupid face. It is sometimes
said that when a person is dying their whole life passes before their eyes.
When you die in Hollywood your whole future passes before your eyes. The beach
house you won’t own, the waiters who will not be crawling to you, the
twenty-seven page profiles which will not be being commissioned about you for
Vanity
Fair.
All this and more passed before Nathan’s eyes as the realisation of
what he had done sank in on him and the dark shadow of Shepherds Bush fell upon
his soul. (Shepherds Bush being that place in West London where what was left
of the once mighty BBC still lived.) A dark, shadowy place of plastic cups,
underfunded projects and memos querying expense claims for a taxi ride and a
sandwich. This was what Nathan was going back to and he would never see the
Californian filtered sunshine, the swimming pools, or the money ever again.

Then
Nathan noticed something strange. Plastic Tolstoy was still talking.

‘I
don’t know, maybe I’m the only idiot in this town who pays for writers to tell
me what he just said. Maybe it’s a special talent I have… “that Tolstoy”,
they all say behind my back, “he pays for an echo”. They’re laughing at me . .

Nathan
realised that the man had not even heard his outburst. Plastic Tolstoy had
just kept right on going, happily developing his little comic theme, wallowing
in the glorious sound of his own voice. As far as Plastic Tolstoy was
concerned, Nathan only even existed when Plastic wanted him to.

‘OK, so
we’ve established what I want,’ said Plastic, having finally exhausted the
particular well of sarcasm from which had been drawing. ‘Now maybe we can find
out what
you have.’

‘OK,’
said Nathan, momentarily emboldened by his close shave. ‘Mother Earth are
always attacking the Claustrosphere Company because they claim that
Claustrosphere people are hastening the end of the world. What our movie has to
say is that Claustrosphere want exactly the same things that all those greenies
want, they just happen to be a bit more responsible about it
—‘

‘This I
know!’
said Plastic, but Nathan barged on before Plastic could get going
again.

‘The
biggest mystery about the Mother Earth lot is where they get the money from, right?
I mean, I’ve seen these people, they have limos, incredible tasting potatoes,
everything. Some shadowy philanthropist is clearly bank-rolling them, but he
just won’t take the credit. Well, how about this? How about
we take it!
We
say in our movie that it’s
Claustrosphere that is providing the funding!
..
. I mean, what a great twist, right? All the time you’ve got these greenies
attacking the very people who are paying for them to do it! But the
Claustrosphere people just keep on paying, because they believe in the future
of the Earth more than anybody and think Environmental protest is important.’

Plastic
Tolstoy stared at Nathan and for once he did not speak. He was thinking. Nathan
blethered on, as writers do when met by producer silence.

‘I mean
it is
the
greatest plot twist, don’t you think?’ he said, trying not to
sound desperate. ‘Like all through the picture, the greenies are trying to kill
the head of Claustrosphere
—
we’ll fictionalise him, of course —
meantime, they’re blessing this mysterious guy who makes it possible for them
to continue the fight. Then at the end, they realise it’s the same person! That
Claustrosphere is part of the Green Movement! That’s when they learn the error
of their ways. I mean, irony or what? You’ve got to admit it.’

For a
moment, Plastic Tolstoy seemed to be far away.

‘It’s
an extraordinary idea,’ he said finally. ‘You told anybody else about it?’

‘Have
I, hell! There are more plagiarists in this town than at an Elvis convention.’

Maybe
it was the mention of the name Elvis, that hallowed and imperial American name
upon which his mother’s fortune had been based, that decided Plastic. He seemed
to snap out of his reverie all at once and make a decision.

‘OK.
We’ll run with it. It’s a good idea. It’s a great idea. Go write the script.’

Factory
town.

Nathan virtually floated
out of Tolstoy’s mansion. Even the thought of Flossie could not puncture his
delight. He nearly sang to himself as he touched his sports coupé into action.
His idea had been accepted! He was going to be allowed to write the initial
script for a genuine fully-fledged feature. He knew it would only be the
initial script, for it is a foregone conclusion in Hollywood that any feature
will be written by more than one person. It has to be this way … so that
the producer may remain in control.

Many
artists working in Hollywood resent what they see as the factory mentality of
the town. They consider it crass and wicked that their creative juices are seen
as merely one ingredient in a cocktail which somebody else is mixing. They
forget that Hollywood
is
a factory, and pretends to be nothing else. It
has no sponsors, it receives no government money. Like a producer of canned
food, it exists solely on the income it can generate in the marketplace. The
Royal National Theatre of Great Britain may proudly commission plays that
people don’t like, written by tired old playwrights who don’t like people,
because it is generally considered to be a function of government to subsidise
national culture. The New York Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art may be in a
position to purchase an obscure arrangement of wire and pebbles from a
talentless drug addict because some rich industrialist wants to cloak his
brutal legacy with a veneer of culture. This is all well and good and no doubt
much to be encouraged, but Hollywood can count on no such indulgences.

When
somebody commissions a film in Hollywood they are spending money that somebody
else has invested in order to make a profit, and, unless the artist is a
committed Marxist, then he or she has no real grounds for complaint. They may
moan about artistic freedom, financial censorship, making room for ideas to
grow, but in other industries the creative elements do not expect such
indulgences. The chefs at Heinz do not consider it outrageous that their bosses
aren’t interested in a fascinating new recipe they are working on for
anchovy-flavoured baked beans.

The
Director Monster.

Some film writers accept
these financial arguments, but still plead with producers to be given a chance
to see a script right through to production. They promise that they will make
the end product even more profitable than if the script were produced by
committee. They are wasting their breath. If scripts written by individuals
rather than a succession of hired hands were ever accepted, the writer’s vision
would be seen to have at least partially shaped the movie.

This
can never be. For the ego of the Director Monster must be fed.

It is
this gargantuan appetite that has come to shape the pecking order of the film
industry. The self-esteem of the writer must be sacrificed, along with that of
everybody else involved (barring that of the star, if very big) to satisfy the
Director Monster’s insatiable gluttony for credit and control.

The
Director Monster, or Director as they were once called, is the bloated Queen
Bee at the centre of an army of drones. It was directors who invented probably
the most arrogant billing in the annals of human endeavour. It is they who, not
content with the mere words ‘directed by so and so’ at the end of a film,
decided to insist on the phrase ‘a so and so picture’ at the beginning of the
film. The beginning of a film, it must be remembered, which will have involved
the artistic commitment of literally hundreds of people. No other command
figure feels the need to grab credit in this all-encompassing way. The
President of the United States does not insist upon the words ‘a so and so
country’ prefixing any mention of the USA. The battle of El Alamein is not
remembered as ‘a Rommel and Montgomery battle’.

Clearly
there have been many great film directors of vision and ability. Some, perhaps,
who actually deserve the credit they get. That said, a film must of course have
a script. It also requires actors, who will wear costumes that must be designed
and made. Those actors will perform within selected locations and on specially
designed and constructed sets. The film will require a cinematographer to shape
the pictures and lighting designers to provide the atmosphere. There will be sound
engineers, special effects wizards, also an editor, the person who actually
pieces together the thousands of disconnected shots to create the whole.

Of
course, the director is in charge of all these things, but he or she does not
actually
do
any of them. The director does not even have to ensure that
the actors exit through the right door and look to the correct side of camera
during their close-ups. They have a continuity person to do that.

None of
this is to run down the director’s contribution. He or she is the boss, and
since movies began the director has been rightly respected as the principal
auteur
of any picture. But the cult has got out of hand. Ask some directors what
they would like to be written on their gravestone, and the answer will be, ‘A so
and so life’. What else?

Happiness
is a temporary thing.

None the less, despite the
knowledge that his script, when finished, would be handed on to other writers,
Nathan was happy. Even though his self-respect would eventually be forcibly
taken from him, he was thrilled. Yes, his vision would be pulverised and
distorted… yet he was deliriously happy, for he had been green-lighted to
write a script, and for a writer in Hollywood, breaks do not come any better
than that.