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Chapter One

The town where the laughing images were made would always be Wormwood to me. It was where I had lived for the past two years, but it was not my home. The place ran on lies, fear, and fresh meat, and drinking absinthe in underground clubs had become all the rage that summer. I was still in the liquor's grip as I moved slowly toward work, trapped in the freeway's tight snake of traffic. Hordes of young men and women crept along around me in their shiny leased cars, filled with nagging disquiet or gripped outfight by the fear in their guts. A man to my left leaned forward in his seat and dragged anxiously on a cigarette, his vehicle the only place he was still permitted to smoke. A woman to my right looked not at the road but into her rearview mirror as she smeared inky mascara onto her lashes. I could sense their uneasiness. I knew it was almost over for me too. We were bound for the same or similar destinations--the movie studios--strange, behemoth places built by and for the incredible flickering celluloid entertainments we all had a hand in creating. We stopped and started in the early morning glare, checking our watches nervously, pulling up too close to the bumper in front of us, only to lurch hard on our brakes again and again. All of us, whether wealthy or desperate to become so, naturally beautiful or slovenly and in need of surgical enhancement, talented or chronically uninspired, had one thing in common: we wanted. We wanted to get in, we wanted to make movies, we wanted to profit by this, to be made special from it, but above all we just wanted to remain. It wasn't easy, and those around me knew well the very real possibility of being swept into oblivion at any moment. Panic united with our closely monitored emissions, and poured forth from our cars. The brown hills along the roadside were choked with ugly dry brush that quivered visibly in response.

I made my way amongst them, jockeying my old car from one congested lane to another as if in an extremely slow race. I wondered what it would be like to walk to work, and how I even managed to show up every morning. How I toiled my day out of days, a slave to the grind, a hero only in my nonexistent sleep. At last I reached my off-ramp, made my turn, and passed through the great studio gates. The fictional cities and worlds of the back lot, the humpbacked roofs of the sound stages, rose before me in the distance. Tame squirrels chattered in the already potent morning heat, and I lurched on my brakes again, this time for several grown men wearing saddle shoes who rode in front of me on brightly painted bicycles as if this were the most natural thing in the world for grown men to do. I parked my car and entered the great modern building of glass and pale umber stone, known as "The Bunker," which housed my office.

Eye-level towers of screenplays rose from the faux wood grain of my desk, and as I sat down, the stacks of printed material obscured view of me from the outside world, and my view of it. Each script was a well-intentioned paper larva, a painstaking creation by an individual author. Each represented one person's dream, but for me each was another stone in the wall behind which I spent my days. Unable to bring myself to read one, I instead spread the trade papers in front of me and began poring over the repetitive stories of blood and glory that filled them each day. I sipped my morning coffee with regret for how it washed away the faint traces of licorice flavor remaining in my mouth from last night's drinking.

How had absinthe, the fabled emerald green liqueur, become the latest fad in this town of fads? It did have a pleasant flavor and a devastatingly high alcohol content. But mere alcoholism was out of fashion, so it was more than that. The drink had been famous amongst many of the great artists of history, and that gave it cachet. Van Gogh, Oscar Wilde, Manet, Picasso, and Verlaine had all been notorious absinthe enthusiasts. Baudelaire once said of it: "If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time that breaks your shoulders and bows you to the earth, you must intoxicate yourself unceasingly." Maybe this was it, the reason we all drank it, and the reason we were all here. I envisioned some of their works--Degas' L'Absinthe , a stunned pair sitting in a booth before a glass, shoulders slumped, expressions far away. Or Picasso's The Absinthe Drinker , a gaunt woman with sunken features and talon-like hands hunched over her glass in a dark-hued portrait of addiction. How the masters would have painted this place, I thought and shuddered. I imagined their canvases filled with the vacant eyes and fallen features of the absinthe users of this town. A town that had taken to its breast something that was more than merely illegal but which was also dangerous and taboo.

I had arrived in a place where nothing was taboo.

"Sign it," an intruder demanded, interrupting my reverie, causing me to lift my head. I realized I had fallen into a gentle waking sleep, into absinthe's diaphanous arms once again. "Sign it," the intruder repeated, thrusting a Kraft envelope at my face. I signed a flapping carbon paper slip held on by a piece of clear tape. "What's the signature say?" The man squinted at the receipt.

"Pitch. Nathan Pitch." I said.

"You the story editor?" he asked.

"That's right."

He leaned onto a pile of scripts, and with irritation printed my name clearly beneath my signature as his pocket pager went off. It sounded like a scream in my head so raw from drink. He left me with a snarl and went on to his next delivery.

I instantly knew by the package's weight that it would supersede everything stacked on my desk. Tearing into it, I saw it was no mere trifle of a screenplay, but a soon-to-be-published book. A hot manuscript. Attached was a note from Chick Bell, one of the studio's creative executives.

Nathan, Enclosed is No Rewards for the Deserving, a new manuscript by Weissbrot. We need coverage on it by tomorrow. Best, Chickie.

With the last remnants of my work ethic, I attacked the hefty tome, reading straight through lunch and into the early evening. All the stories in this town had to be read, and that was my job at the studio. When scripts came in, as they did countless times every day, I would either assign it to a reader or read it myself if it was important enough. I read like a draft horse pulled and did not complain about the workload. I suspect this was why I was still around. Once, I had had the knack for picking and passing correctly on projects, and had become the go-to guy in the studio's Story Department. For the past several months I had read poorly photocopied text all day long, until my eyes were permanently pinched in a squint. I read parts or the whole of over two thousand screenplays, books, teleplays, outlines, and treatments from Nobel laureates right on down to burger flippers and valet parking attendants. Of these works, perhaps ten, not ten percent but ten, were in various stages of being made into films. Of those few, perhaps three warranted it. Unlike others in my position, I actually read what I commented on, and perhaps this is what had originally made me valuable to the studio. I had managed to make myself their little gem, their rocking horse winner. The more I read and commented on, the more they gave me to read. I had never minded the volume, though, for I was a reader for a living, a good pro. But then the lies and the fear and the absinthe seeped in, and I could no longer shield my true opinion from my own politically motivated one.

This was the case with the particular book in front of me. I did not know where I stood on it or what I should tell the studio to this end. The book was an important one. I'd dare call it literature in certain circles. The studio wasn't one of these circles, however. A literary achievement wasn't of much concern to a studio if it wouldn't yield a blockbuster movie. This book, about a boy's choice of the wrong path--away from family and religion, toward moral bankruptcy--was not filmic. The main character ended up working in the film industry, where all sorts of outlandish happenings led him to debase himself irreparably. It was dark comedy laced with bittersweet tragedy. This subject, though, was just not appropriate for the company. A belles lettres character drama--critics' fare with limited box-office potential--was not the type of movie the studio made, I decided, and so I said when I wrote up my thoughts on it that night.

It wasn't Weissbrot, the writer's, fault, but there had been several laughing images released of late that had been set in this, the very town in which movies were made. They had parodied or satirized elements of the business, and they had all gone too far. They evoked the blatant superficiality and commercialism of things here, and did so with faint hints of accuracy, but they all had a plot twist--a murder, an outlandish business coup--that was divorced from reality. The problem was, they caricatured something that was already exaggerated. If a writer, and Weissbrot seemed to know this, wanted to send up or run down the town, all he really had to do was tell the truth about it. Weissbrot had done so, but that didn't mean his book was going to sell, or be made into a movie. It meant, in fact, the opposite.

I stayed at work late into the night finishing my summary, which neatly neutered and encapsulated within two and a half pages what it had probably taken Weissbrot years to get down. I went ahead and checked off the "box score," which made coverage even quicker to read.

Premise

... X

Plotline

X....

Characters

X ...

Dialogue

X ...

Structure

X ...

Setting

... X

Project Recommendation: PASS

Writer Recommendation: PASS--too good for this place

Concept Recommendation: Forget about it.

I recognized the absurdity in what I was doing--writing a summary of a summary of a summary--when it dawned on me that there was a category missing. One that stood above the rest as far as the studio was concerned. I went ahead and added it.

Greed

Potential: Weak

What more did they really want to know?

It was four-thirty in the morning when I finished and my phone rang. My caller identification readout told me it was Jumper Sussman, the president of the studio, on the line.

"Nathan, you got it, star?" came Sussman's voice through a cloud of cigar smoke that I could fairly hear.

"Yes, Jumper," I answered. "I've got it right here. You want it between breakfasts?" I asked. No powerful executive had less than two breakfast meetings on any given day.

"Fax me," Jumper puffed.

"Done," I stated.

"You're the man," the chief offered.

I exceeded him. "No, you're the man, Jumper." This was ritual. It was as necessary to Jumper's sense of well-being as his rolling a Havana between thumb and forefinger and sniffing it, before clipping the end and lighting up.

"That's right, kid, but you're the star," Jumper last-worded me and hung up. There was a time when I had deserved this title which he conferred on me, back when I could rip through a piece of material and turn around coverage on it within an hour or two tops and had believed my job important. Now it took me nearly five times as long, thanks to my shimmering green mistress.

Before sending the fax, I opened my desk drawer and arranged its contents on my desktop. The pages sat in the machine, waiting to be sent through, but I eyed the sugar cubes, the strainer spoon, the heavy triangular-shaped glass, and label-less bottle in front of me. I had my own ritual, one for which I could no longer wait. I poured four fingers of absinthe from the bottle, lay the strainer across the rim of the glass, and placed a few sugar cubes upon it. I drizzled cool water over the sugar, which began breaking down into an opaque mush and dissolved into the glass. The verdant liquid lightened in color and turned cloudy and opalescent. Stirring in more cool spring water, I removed the strainer and drank the first bracing sip. My nose opened as it would over a can of paint thinner. The substance entered my bloodstream, a high-voltage jolt of heavy alcohol and various herbs which blended to form a potent narcotic. The result was a soothing sensation that eased the knot of tension in my neck. As I drank, I previewed in my mind what would happen here tomorrow:

When I sent the fax, Jumper Sussman would get the feel for Weissbrot's book from my synopsis. I would receive a stern memo about my "greed potential" jab before Jumper would, of course, concur with my assessment. The book was a pass. The producer, Foster Miles, who had submitted it to the studio, however, had given us an advance peek at the work, and Chick Bell would want to capitalize on that. To discard a secretly submitted piece would be a waste. Chick would slip a copy of my report to a high-ranking executive at a different studio, and another copy to a parallel development executive at yet another studio who often sent over opinions from her own Nathan Pitch-type.

The development executive, not feeling the piece appropriate either, would sling the coverage over to a crosstown studio boss who might like it. Information on a project that had been rejected but was not widely known was a way to curry favor with an executive. This was a wise thing to do, since one would no doubt be working with, or for, those whom one curried before long. All parties knew that the piece in question was useless, for a valuable project would never be shown around so indiscriminately, but this was not the point. This system let one know who one's friends were. Alas, after farming out the synopsis to his own stable of producers, who would not feel the material fetching either, the crosstown studio boss would decline with careful consideration. One of these producers from his stable, though, thinking it prudent, would run it by fax to an old co-worker now at another studio.... In this way the entire town would appreciate and ignore a fine work that, although soon to be featured in the New York Times Book Review with glowing praise, would be read by me alone.

The system hadn't always been so clear to me. In the beginning I had not understood what was happening around me, for I still cared deeply about things like doing a good job, and succeeding and being well liked and regarded. But those concerns had faded now that I knew how the business worked. It spun slowly, like a colossal grist mill, crushing and grinding everything in its path into the fine dust of ransomed humanity and failure. I was now aware of the two types who escaped it: those who abandoned their humanity and so rose to such stature that the wheel could not roll over them, and it was rather they who stopped the wheel in its track. And those so amorphous, so chameleon-like, or so insignificant, that they may be passed over by a pit in the wheel's surface and left untouched until it passed again. As a younger man there was little question of which type I aimed to be, while now I had no doubt as to which I had become.

I continued drinking as the night ran out, reaching the place on the bottle where the label would have been if it were a store-bought concoction, and then went below that. With each glass I used less water and less sugar, upping the octane of my mixture as I could tolerate the 140 proof--70 percent alcohol level--of the absinthe. I stared at the wall and considered how I had originally come here to claim my place, to become a producer of the laughing images, a creative force. Before I had even arrived, I had assumed I would automatically belong once I did. Now, though, the days had become tough to get through, and I was plagued by a constant low-grade fever and waking dreams of full bottles that pursued me until I was crawling out of my skin. Like all the rest, I had arrived innocent, enthusiastic, suffused with youthful notions of having something to say, and wanting to earn a living making films that said it. Another fool wanting desperately to crack the club-like exclusivity of the business, and willing to do whatever it took. Now the innocence was a soiled memory, the going not so easy, and I longed only for freedom. Freedom from my desk and this system to which I was shackled, freedom from story and summary and words. I wanted to speak without apology, to spare no thought for studio politics. I wanted only to do things for their own sake, and without thought of some hidden end.

In a bleary haze I drank on into the dawn, until my bottle was done. I looked at the drained vessel with a feeling of panic--panic that emptying an entire bottle in a night was even possible for me, and panic that now my bottle was empty. I felt a moment's sickening vertigo and put my head down on my desk to stabilize. I had been in my office for close to twenty-four hours, and awake for days, but when I closed my eyes sleep was still far off.

There had been nights at the beginning when I was too excited to sleep. Instead I would drive to the studio and walk around the back lots for a while and then read scripts in my office until morning when everyone else arrived. Now sleep was a corrosive state. Each time I closed my eyes at home there came turbulent dreams--a vicious side effect of absinthe. One dream in particular recurred. In it I had the sensation of hovering above and looking down upon myself on the bed. I would see an ancient, crag-faced man of the Far East approach my sleeping form and drive his elbow into my stomach in a precise way. He would methodically burst each of my internal organs, one after another, rupturing my spleen, rending my gallbladder, tearing my liver, preserving my heart for last. I would simply lie there in wonder, accepting the brutality, until he moved in for his finish. Only then would I roll into action and drive knife-like fingers into the man's throat and each of his eyes. A mysterious, beautiful woman would then enter the scene and nonchalantly greet me and the ancient man as the blood and gore ran down our hands. The dream defied any analysis I could apply. With such a panorama awaiting me, sleep was pushed beyond the realm of the possible. Eventually I stopped returning home much at all, and spent most dawns, like this one, at the studio, no longer out of joy or enthusiasm but out of paralysis.

At last I lifted my head, shoved myself away from my desk, and guided myself toward the door with a hand against the wall. Already I could hear the sound of muted "good mornings" and computers and printers and photocopiers and shredders humming to life around me. I stepped out of the building hoping for a fresh breath of morning air. Instead I got a lung's worth of hot, cinder-filled stuff that had blown in off the desert to the east. There was a reflecting pool at the foot of The Bunker, and I made my way to it and sat down on the edge. This was where I watched the rising sun illuminate a heavy opaque sky every morning. The light grew pink-gray on the pollution-fat clouds until it appeared that the underbelly of Jupiter was pressing down on the city, the studio, and myself.

Soon a serpentine line of cars began to bleed into the parking structure. I watched them arrive, each piloted by a solo driver, a new entrant in the derby. If they were like me, and I just like them, then I was supposed to have compassion for them, for their situation, for it all. But I no longer did. All they wanted was to get in and stay in, to live well, or to sleep, and it made me disgusted with myself for feeling the same way. I searched my memory for something useful I might have been taught--from my father with his noble theories, or from the professors at my fine college--an idea or philosophy that would help me care again about my fellow toilers. But there was nothing.

I looked down into the black water of the reflecting pool and was vaguely frightened by what I saw there--a gaunt, dull-eyed creature, with a forbidding, if not pained, expression across the mouth and cheeks, who shimmered as if painted by Van Gogh. I reached in and splashed some of the fetid water on my face, as much to disperse my own image as to wake myself up. The cars had stopped arriving, and the glare had grown painfully bright around me. It prodded me to go back inside. I dried my hands on my pants and stood. I had several meetings to attend--at any of which I could expect to be finally, roughly, and irrevocably fired, to be cut off from everything I'd ever wanted and worked for. Then, all at once, I decided. If it was far too late to save myself, perhaps it was not too late to save Weissbrot's beautiful book. I hunched my shoulders with resolve and moved back toward my office to rewrite the coverage. I would call Weissbrot's book the ripest screen prospect I'd ever seen. Maybe the film rights would sell, maybe I'd be executed, but I intended to at least make a terrible mess. I smiled grimly to myself as I entered the building. I hadn't foreseen any of this when I had arrived here; back then all I had wanted was a job.

My first job was in the mailroom of ACE--Associated Creative Endeavors--a large literary and talent agency where I pushed a cart while I awaited entry into their training program. I had come to town from Queens, New York, with a car full of clothes and a crisp new college diploma. A "sheepskin," my father called it. I had no idea that everybody else in town already had that much and more. "It's all about who you know in that business," it had been impressed upon me by my father, who came from the hard-work-will-yield-reward school of business thought. Also impressed upon me by him was that I had every tool I could possibly need, that by simply showing up, plugging myself in, and adding the indomitable enthusiasm and drive that were considered to be my birthright, I couldn't help but be a huge, splashy success in short order. The morning I left on my cross-country drive, he pressed a piece of paper into my hand.

"Here are a few contacts, old friends from the club who have connections. Look them up as soon as you get there." His short sentences were packed with much meaning: I was to get to work right away upon my arrival; there was to be no messing around. I was to do as he said. The subtext was that after growing up poor, he was now a member of a country club where even as he worked on his golf swing he endeavored to further his son's opportunities.

"Thanks."

"There's this too." He handed me a wrinkled envelope. It contained a thousand dollars. "You won't need anything else," he told me in a way that discouraged the idea of asking for more in the future.

"Thanks." We stood uncomfortably. I did not know if this was a hug or a handshake occasion. He extended a hand. I supposed there was no such thing as a hug occasion.

"Remember T. Boone, boy." He spoke through the open car window as I got in and started it up, invoking the name of one of the self-made heroes to whom he religiously referred.

"I'll be a studio executive within a year," I stated, putting the car into gear. As I drove away from my father's upraised thumb, I could practically hear his oft-repeated treatise on the career.

"First you get your feet wet," he'd tell me. "Then, in your thirties you secure your position within the corporate structure. First to arrive, last to leave. Every day. Your forties are when you will rise--garner a presidency or CEO status--and in your fifties you'll make your move. Flip companies, make massive stock sell-offs. No fucking prisoners." I would nod and take it all in as if we wouldn't be speaking again until after I was finished executing the entire plan. I was twenty-one and had no real idea of what even the getting-my-feet-wet part would entail.

(Continues...)

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Wormwood

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