Turn of the Century (7 page)

“Remind me about the conversation in Las Vegas?”

“You promised Sandi you’d talk to Angela about enrolling her pooch in one of Sandi’s seminars, which are literally fantastic. Aroma
and
meditation, one price. It rocks. The other dogs are A-list.”

Dogs can be trained to meditate? He has erased the conversation entirely, and now he sees an even more mortifying show business moment rushing toward him: he will have to ask Angela Janeway (his Yale School of Drama star, his Creative Coalition board of directors star, his star who’s insisting that he figure out a way to get Nelson Mandela to guest-star on an episode of
NARCS
) if she’ll let the network president’s girlfriend—the acting president, and not even his main girlfriend—perform some quack regimen on her German shepherd, Peacemaker. The dog, which Angela adopted during a visit to Sarajevo in 1996, appeared with her on the cover of
People
last month. (Sixteen thousand, five hundred and seventy-five dollars a week sounds like a lot, sure, but it amounts, after taxes, to not even $200 an hour—less than lawyers make.)

“Right,” George replies, standing up, in an aggressively noncommittal attempt to change the subject. “Right.”

“The sessions are at Trump’s hotel on Columbus Circle. Sandi’s there for a week in April. Mega-exclusive. Sandi would comp Angela, needless to say. It’s a total win-win.”

“Right.”

“The new Mrs. Ron Perelman has already signed up all three of her whippets, and Puffy Combs’s two shar-pei bitches will be there.”

“The actors are on hiatus this week, but I’ll have Iris let Angela know all about it.”

“My
man
!” Featherstone says, giving a double thumbs-up as he steps toward the door. “See you and Emmarooni upstairs.”

The
NARCS
production meetings take place at a long, cheap, paint-spattered table right on the soundstage, in the basement of the MBC Building (or “the The MBC Building,” as the office clowns call it). This is partly for expediency, since most of the principals—the directors of photography and sound, the designers of costumes and sets, and the gatherers of props—spend so many of their hours in the adjacent offices and nooks. But George also prefers having the meetings down here because he likes the glamorously unglamorous industrial space,
the Masonite slabs covering wood beams and tons of sand (to keep the floor level and vibration-free), the trusses and lights overhead, the cozy pool of light at the center of the dark factory cavern. Down here, George is the master among his trusty craftsmen. The questions and answers are precise and straightforward. The chain of command is clear. Shooting on West Fifty-seventh Street, an elevator ride away from the production offices, is more convenient than schlepping out to Astoria, Queens, or down to a pier in Chelsea. But the numbers are not what justify spending nine million dollars on a new soundstage in midtown Manhattan—Harold Mose enjoys having a studio underfoot because it’s a palpable reminder that he’s in show business. Just as the MBC soundstage makes George feel like Preston Sturges, it makes Mose feel like Irving Thalberg.

The below-the-line production staff, unlike the writers, convey by their very demeanor a kind of proletarian deference: George is the show-runner, the boss. Lizzie says she dislikes the sense of always scaring her employees slightly, but George finds it pleasurable. He tries never to abuse it, but that special combination of overeager friendliness and fear, as if he’s walking around with a loaded weapon or a live grenade, is just old-fashioned respect.

Two people, Mary Ann the makeup artist and Marjorie the director of photography, both tell him they’re sorry about his mother. Gordon Downey, the director, has already sent him flowers.

“Really excellent sound, the footsteps crunching on the cocaine, on Saturday night’s show,” George says to Fred, the long-haired sound designer whose job it is to enhance natural noises—to intensify audio reality, sweeten it.

“You liked it? Cool.”

And the production meeting begins, calm and orderly, with each department head posing problems and solutions as they move through the script scene by scene. George will make dozens of choices in the next half hour that will aggregate into the look and sound and feel of the episode. He doesn’t have to
do
, he must only decide. It’s grand.

“I don’t mind white at all,” he’s telling the production designer about the proposed color for a fake airport interrogation room.

“White won’t give you any trouble in post. We’ll have to rebuild that wall.”

“Can we just attach the RPG to that header?” asks Gordon about a rocket-propelled grenade launcher in another scene. “It only has to be functional from this side, and we can have a plug on that side.”

“We don’t have to build it, do we?” George asks. “Isn’t there a boneyard where we can get one?” A boneyard, he has learned, is a warehouse where props from old shows and movies are stored for reuse. It’s one of the antique, below-the-line show business words he gets a kick out of saying.

“They won’t let it out,” the prop woman tells him.

“We can sell it with effects in post,” Fred the sound guy says about the big-machine-gun sound.

“Marjorie,” Gordon says, “you have to be able to light the thing.”

“We can fix that in post too,” she replies.

The discussion moves onto another scene, in which one of the stars, DEA agent “Cowboy” Quesada, is at home watching TV, and the camera moves around a wall of his apartment to find his girlfriend snorting heroin in the bathroom. The script specifies that Quesada is watching a video of
77 Sunset Strip
, the fifties TV show.

“How much is the clip?” George asks.

“Eight grand,” Jerry, the line producer, tells him.

“You’re thinking of a Foy track here?” Gordon asks the director of photography, who nods.

“In scene twenty-five,” George says, “in Cuba, have we figured out how to make the hurricane look real? It needs to look like Jennie is about to be blown into the sea.”

“A big Ritter fan won’t do what we want,” the production designer says. “You’re going to need an air mover—you hook it up to a compressor.”

“Expensive,” the line producer tells George.

“I’m not worried about cost,” George says, “as much as I am about the time it’s going to take to shoot it.”

“We can sell the wind in post,” Jerry says.

“Let’s do an overcranked master on that,” Gordon says, and his first assistant director makes a note.

“Gordon,” George asks, “is it undercranking or overcranking that makes things look slow-motion?” George can never remember this. And by occasionally exposing his own ignorance, he figures he appears secure in his new-boyhood, an unembarrassed mensch.

“Overcranking. And George, we’ll use a little person, not a real child, for the smuggler’s kid, right? I got a time problem with kids.”

“As long as he looks like a kid,” George says. “I mean, we’re going to be pretty close. And he’s got a line.”

“It’s just
‘Por favor, Papi!’
which we’ll put in in post. And just his body is in the shot, not his head,” Gordon says. “It’s the head with the body that makes little people look like little people.”

“In the next scene,” one of the prop people says to George, sounding excited and proud, “when the bad guy gets sliced to ribbons in the sugar-cane harvester? We’re getting a yard of actual bioengineered skin, this new stuff called Apligraf that surgeons use. It looks really real. Even feels real.”

There are a few smiling
ewww
s around the table. “Nice,” George says, pleased as well as disgusted.

Over the next hour, George and his staff say another dozen times, “You can do that in post” or “Can we put that in in post?” or “We’ll fix that in post.” And before the meeting is over, George finds himself thinking about his mother, how his equanimity over Edith Hope’s death is causing him more pain than her death, how he’s like the awful Jonathan Pryce character in
The Ploughman’s Lunch
. He hasn’t yet cried, not a tear in eight hours. He thinks,
Can we put that in in post?

At the MBC, the Fifty-ninth Floor and Fifty-nine and (as Featherstone calls it) Five-Nine are proper nouns. Even though Mose himself is only intermittently in the city, the synecdoche is total. It is the floor where Harold Mose and all his senior New York executives have offices—Featherstone; Arnold Vlig, the chief operating officer; Hank Saddler, the head of corporate communications; and a dozen men whose names George doesn’t know. Depending on context and vocal inflection, “Fifty-nine” can be portentous, menacing, flip, or contemptuous.

The Fifty-ninth Floor wants to lose the question mark in
Janeane Garofalo Live?
as soon as possible
.

Fifty-nine wants to try selling coffee break sponsorships company-wide
.

No, she’s too skinny for daytime talk. Fifty-nine wants a host for
Day-O!
who’s more than thirty pounds and fewer than fifty pounds overweight
.

The Fifty-ninth Floor just doesn’t understand why
Mr. McCourt
is cleared on only sixty-one percent of the affiliates
.

News will definitely have to get a sign-off from Fifty-nine to start announcing exit-poll numbers at eight Eastern Time
.

“I’m frankly amazed Fifty-nine is cool with your going so urban,” Laura Welles, Featherstone’s smart deputy, told George a few days ago. “I’ve been telling Timothy for a year that part of the show’s genetic code is definitely urban.”

In the entertainment business, “urban” is the euphemism for black. George and Emily decided, starting with the January fifteenth show, to lay bits of rap into the
NARCS
soundtrack—what the show’s musical director calls their Spackle of Sound, a maximum of six seconds at a stretch, three times per episode. A week of audience testing in Omaha determined that was optimal: any less and the young, rap-friendly audience segment didn’t respond, any more than eighteen seconds an hour and the antirap audience majority became, as the research firm described it, “assertively intolerant.” Testing over the last month has discovered a substantial audience segment, mostly whites in their thirties, who find the rap interludes on
NARCS
“energizing” and “stylish,” but only in the precise, small doses the show is giving them. The research firm calls this middle group the Hip Urban Ambivalents, or HUAs. It is all such a delicate balance—fascinatingly so, like constituency politics, like trying to keep soccer moms and Social Security recipients all voting Democratic, or Christian fundamentalists and libertarians in the Republican party. No, not
like
politics, George realized the day after the New Hampshire primary: getting an audience for a TV show (or a movie or a magazine)
is
politics, what America has now in lieu of real politics. Being a
Saturday Night Live
viewer or a
Touched by an Angel
viewer or a
NARCS
viewer is at least as meaningful for most people as being a Democrat or a Republican. Sure, the Democratic party “has mismanaged its brand image and brand equity for a generation,” as Bill Bradley said at Ben Gould’s cocktail party last month, pandering smartly to the Manhattan crowd, but Republicanism is a dying brand too; national politics is a dying brand category, like organ meats and typewriters. When Fifty-nine wants their disinclination to cover campaigns affirmed, George knows they have more than once cited “Mactier’s end-of-politics paradigm.” It’s easier for them to make a zeitgeist argument than a lost-ad-revenue argument. George has become their pet intellectual. It both embarrasses and pleases him.

“Iris, we’ll be—”

“I
know
,” she says in her perpetual stage whisper.
“Fifty-nine.”
From Iris’s mouth, it always sounds like “the
principal’s office
” or “the
oncologist
.”

George carries the notes, as he always does when he and Emily are in meetings together. That way, she doesn’t have to be the girl. With her expensively blond, not-quite-short hair, Emily looks ten years younger than she is. She acts ten years older, George thinks.