Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

  "The movie's shit, huh?" he said matter-of-factly.

  "Worse than."

  "Sorry 'bout that."

  "Not your fault. I should never have done it. Shit script. Shit movie."

  "You want to give the party a miss?"

  "Nah. I gotta go. I promised Wilhemina. And George."

  "You got something going with her?"

  "Wilhemina? Yeah. I got something. I just don't know whether I want to. Plus she's got an English boyfriend."

  "The English are all fags."

  "Yeah."

  "You want me to swing by the party and bring her back up to the house for you?"

  "Suppose she says no?"

  "Oh come on. When did any girl say no to you?"

  Todd said nothing. He just stared out over the vista of lights. The wind came up out of the valley, smelling of gas fumes and Chinese food. The Santa Anas, hot off the Mojave, gusted against his face. He closed his eyes to enjoy the moment, but what came into his head was an image of himself: a still from the movie he'd fled from tonight. He studied the face in his mind's eye for a moment.

  Then he said: "I look tired."

  TWO

  Todd Pickett had made two of his three most successful pictures under the aegis of a producer by the name of Keever Smotherman. The first of them was called Gunner; the kind of high-concept, testosterone-marinated picture Smotherman had been renowned for making. It had made Todd— who was then an unknown from Ohio—a bona-fide movie-star, if not overnight then certainly within a matter of weeks. He hadn't been required to turn in a performance. Smotherman didn't make movies that required actors, only breath-taking physical specimens. And Todd was certainly that. Every time he stepped before the cameras, whether he was sharing the scene with a girl or a fighter-plane, he was all the eye wanted to watch. The camera worked some kind of alchemy upon him; and he worked the same magic on celluloid.

  In life, he was good-looking, but flawed. He was a little on the short side, with broad hips; he was also conspicuously bandy. But on the screen, all these flaws disappeared. He became gleaming, studly perfection, his jaw-line heroic, his gaze crystalline, his mouth an uncommon mingling of the sensual and the severe. His particular beauty had suited the taste of the times, and by the end of that first, extraordinary summer of coming-to-fame his image, dressed in an immaculate white uniform which made poetry of his buttocks, had become an indelible piece of cinema iconography.

  Over the years, other stars had risen just as high, of course, and many just as quickly. But few were quite as ready for their ascent as Todd Pickett. This was what he'd been polishing himself for since the moment his mother, Patricia Donna Pickett, had first taken him into a cinema in downtown Cincinnati. Looking up at the screen, watching the parade of faces pass before him, he'd known instinctively (at least so he later claimed) that he belonged up there with those stars, and that if he willed it hard enough, willed and worked for it, then it was merely a matter of time before he joined the parade.

  After the success of Gunner, he fell effortlessly into the labors of being a movie star. In interviews he was courteous, funny and self-effacing, playing the interviewers so easily that all but the most cynical swooned. He was confident about his charms, but he wasn't cocky; loyal to his Midwestern roots and boyishly devoted to his mother. Most attractive of all, he was honest about his shortcomings as an actor. There was a refreshing lack of pretension about the Pickett persona.

  The year after Gunner, he made two pictures back to back. Another action blockbuster for Smotherman, called Lightning Rod, which was released on Independence Day and blew all former box-office records to smithereens, and then, for the Christmas market, Life Lessons. The latter was a sweetly sentimental slip of a story, in which Todd played opposite Sharon Campbell, a Playboy model-turned-actress who had been tabloid fodder at the time thanks to her recent divorce from an alcoholic and abusive husband. The pairing of Pickett and Campbell had worked like a charm, and the reviews for Todd's performance were especially kind. While he was still relying on his physical gifts, the critics observed, there were definitely signs that he was taking on the full responsibilities of an actor, digging deeper into himself to engage his audience. Nor was he afraid to show weakness; twice in Life Lessons he was required to sob like a baby, and he did so very convincingly. The picture was a huge hit, meaning that both of the big money-makers of the year had Todd's name above the title. He was officially box-office gold.

  For most of the following decade he could do no wrong. Inevitably, some of his pictures performed better than others, but even the disappointments were triumphs by comparison with the fumbling labors of most of his contemporaries.

  Of course, he wasn't making the choice of material on his own. From the beginning he'd had a close relationship with his manager, Maxine Frizelle, a short, sharp bitch of a woman in her mid-forties who'd once been voted the Most Despised Person in Hollywood, and had asked, when the news had reached her, if the awards ceremony was full evening dress. Though she'd been representing other clients when she first took Todd on, she'd let them all go once his career began to demand her complete attention. Thereafter she lived and breathed the Pickett business, controlling every element of his life, private and professional. The price she asked studios for his services rapidly rose to unheard-of heights, and she drove the deal home every single time. She had an opinion about everything: rewrites, casting, the hiring of directors, art-directors, costume designers and directors of photography. Her only concern was the best interests of her wonder-boy. In the language of an older but similarly feudal system, she was the power behind the throne; and everyone who worked with Todd, from the heads of studios to humble hair-stylists, had some encounter with her to relate, some scar to show.

  Needless to say, the Pickett magic couldn't remain unchallenged forever. There were always new stars in the ascendancy, new faces with the new smiles appearing on the screen every season, and after ten years of devotion the audience that had doted on Todd in the mid-to-late eighties began to look elsewhere for its heroes. It wasn't that his pictures performed less well, but that others performed even better. A new definition of a blockbuster had appeared; money-machines like Independence Day and Titanic, which earned so much so quickly that pictures which would once have been called major hits were now in contrast simply modest successes.

  Anxious to regain the ground he was losing, Todd decided to go back into business with Smotherman, who was just as eager to return to their glory days together. The project they'd elected to do together was a movie called Warrior: a piece of high-concept junk about a street-fighter from Brooklyn who is brought through time to champion a future earth in a battle against marauding aliens. The script was a ludicrous concoction of clichés pulled from every cheesy science-fiction B-movie of the fifties, and an early budget had put the picture somewhere in the region of a hundred million dollars simply to get it on screen, but Smotherman was confident that he could persuade either Fox or Paramount to green-light it. The show had everything, he said: an easily-grasped idea (primitive fighting man outwits hyper-intelligent intergalactic empire, using cunning and brute force); a dozen action sequences which called for state-of-the-art effects; and the kind of hero Todd could perform in his sleep: an ordinary man put in an extraordinary situation. It was a no-brainer, all round. The studios would be fools not to green-light it; it had all the marks of a massive hit.

  He was nothing if not persuasive. In person, Smotherman was almost a parody of a high-voltage salesman: fast-talking, short-tempered and over-sexed. There was never an absence of "babes," as he still called them, in his immediate vicinity; all were promised leading roles when they'd performed adequately for Smotherman in private, and all, of course, were discarded the instant he tired of them.

  Preparations for Warrior were proceeding nicely. Then the unthinkable happened. A week shy of his forty-fourth birthday, Smotherman died. He'd always been a man of legendary excess, a bottom-feeder happiest in the gamier part of any
city. The circumstances of his death were perfectly consistent with this reputation: he'd died sitting at a table in a private club in New York, watching a lesbian sex show, the coronary that had felled him so massive and so sudden he had apparently been overtaken by it before he could even cry out for help. He was face down in a pile of cocaine when he was found, a drug he'd continued to consume in heroic quantities long after his contemporaries had cleaned up their acts and had their sinuses surgically reconstructed. It was one of the thirty-five illegal substances found in his system at the autopsy.

  He was buried in Las Vegas, according to the instructions in his will. He'd been happiest there, he'd always said, with everything to win and everything to lose.

  This remark was twice quoted at the memorial service, and hearing it,

  Todd felt a cold trickle of apprehension pass down his spine. What Smotherman had known, and been at peace with, was the fact that all of Tinseltown was a game—and it could be lost in a heartbeat. Smotherman had been a gambling man. He'd taken pleasure in the possibility of failure and it had sweetened his success. Todd, on the other hand, had never even played the slots, much less a game of poker or roulette. Sitting there listening to the hypocrites—most of whom had despised Smotherman—stand up and extol the dead man, he realized that Keever's passing cast a pall over his future. The golden days were over. His place in the sun would very soon belong to others; if it didn't already.

  The day after the memorial service he poured his fears out to Maxine. She was all reassurance.

  "Smotherman was a dinosaur," she said as she sipped her vodka. "The only reason people put up with his bullshit all those years was because he made everybody a lot of money. But let's be honest: he was a low-life. You're a class act. You've got nothing to worry about."

  "I don't know," Todd said, his head throbbing from one too many drinks. "I look at myself sometimes . . ."

  'And what?"

  "I'm not the guy I was when I made Gunner."

  "Damn right you're not. You were nobody then. Now you're one of the most successful actors in history."

  "There's others coming up."

  "So what?" Maxine said, waving his concerns away.

  "Don't do that!" Todd said, slamming his palm down on the table. "Don't try and placate me! Okay? We have a problem. Smotherman was going to put me back on top, and now the sonofabitch is dead!"

  "All right. Calm down. All I'm saying is that we don't need Smother-man. We'll hire somebody to rework the script, if that's what you want. Then we'll find somebody hip to direct it. Somebody with a contemporary style. Smotherman was an old-fashioned guy. Everything had to be big. Big explosion. Big tits. Big guns. Audiences don't care about any of that anymore. You need to be part of what's coming up, not what happened yesterday. You know, I hate to say it, but perhaps Keever's dying is the best thing that could have happened. We need a new look for you. A new Todd Pickett."

  "You think it's as simple as that?" Todd said. He wanted so much to believe that Maxine had the problem solved.

  "How difficult can it be?" Maxine said. "You're a great star. We just need to get people focused on you again." She pondered for a moment. "You know what? We should set up a lunch with Gary Eppstadt."

  "Oh Jesus, why? You know how I hate that ugly little fuck."

  "An ugly little fuck he may be. But he is going to pay for Warrior. And if he's going to put twenty million and a slice of the back-end on the table for your services to art, you can make nice with the sonofabitch for an hour."

  THREE

  It wasn't simply personal antipathy that had made Todd refer to Eppstadt so unflatteringly. It was the unvarnished truth. Eppstadt was the ugliest man in Los Angeles. Charitably, his eyes might have been called reptilian, his lips unkissable. His mother, in a fit of blind affection, might have noted that he was disproportioned. All this said, the man was still a narcissist of the first rank. He hung only the most expensive suits on his unfortunate carcass; his fingernails were manicured with obsessive precision; his personal barber trimmed his dyed hair every morning, having shaved him first with a straight razor.

  There had been countless prayers offered up to that razor over the years, entreating it to slip! But Eppstadt seemed to live a charmed life. He'd gone from strength to strength as he moved around the studios, claiming the paternity of every success, and blaming the failures on those who stood immediately behind him on the ladder, whom he promptly fired. It was the oldest trick in the book, but it had worked flawlessly. In an age in which corporations increasingly had the power, and studios were run by committees of business-school graduates and lawyers with an itch to have their fingers in the creative pie, Eppstadt was one of the old school. A powermonger, happiest in the company of somebody who needed his patronage, whom he could then abuse in a hundred subtle ways. That was his pleasure, and his revenge. What did he need beauty for, when he could make it tremble with a smiling maybe?

  He was in a fine mood when he and Todd, with Maxine in attendance, met for lunch on Monday. Paramount had carried the weekend with a brutal revenge picture that Eppstadt had taken a hand in making, firing the director off the project after two unpromising preview screenings, and hiring somebody else to shoot a rape scene and a new ending, in which the violated woman terrorized and eventually dispatched her attacker with a hedge-cutter.

  "Thirty-two point six million dollars in three days," he preened. "In January. That's a hit. And you know what? There's nobody in the picture. Just a couple of no-name TV stars. It was all marketing."

  "Is the picture any good?" Todd asked.

  "Yeah, it's fucking Hamlet," Eppstadt said, without missing a beat. "You're looking weary, my friend," he went on. "You need a vacation. I've been taking time at this monastery—"

  "Monastery?"

  "Sounds crazy, right? But you feel the peace. You feel the tranquillity. And they take Jews. Actually, I've seen more Jews there than at my nephew's Bar Mitzvah. You should try it. Take a rest."

  "I don't want to rest. I want to work. We need to set a start-date for Warrior."

  Eppstadt's enthusiastic expression dimmed. "Oh, Christ. Is that what this little lunch is all about, Maxine?"

  "Are you making it or not?" Todd pressed. "Because there's plenty of other people who will if you won't."

  "So maybe you should take it to one of them," Eppstadt said, his gaze hooded. "You can have it in turnaround, if that's what you want. I'll get business affairs on it this afternoon."

  "So you're really ready to let it go?" Maxine said, putting on an air of indifference.

  "Perfectly ready, if that's what Todd wants. I'm not going to stand in the way of you getting the picture made. You look surprised, Maxine."

  "I am surprised. A package like that. . . it's a huge summer movie for Paramount."

  "Frankly I'm not sure this is the right time for the company to be making that kind of picture, Maxine. It's a very hard market to read right now.

  And these expensive pictures. I mean, this is going to come in at well north of a hundred thirty million by the time we've paid for prints and advertising. I'm not sure that makes solid fiscal sense." He tried a smile; it was lupine. "Look, Todd: I want to be in business with you. Paramount wants to be in business with you. Christ, you've been a gold-mine for us over the years. But there's a generation coming up—and you know the demographics as well as I do—these kids filling up the multiplexes, they don't have any loyalty to the past."

  Eppstadt knew what effect his words were having, and he was savoring every last drop of it.

  "You see, in the good old days, the studios were able to carry stars through a weak patch. You had a star on a seven-year contract. He was being paid a weekly wage. You could afford a year or two of poor performance. But you're expensive, Todd. You're crucifyingly expensive. And I've got Viacom's shareholders to answer to. I'm not sure they'd want to see me pay you twenty million dollars for a picture that might only gross... what did your last picture do? Forty-one domestic? And change?
"

  Maxine sighed, a little theatrically. "I'm sorry to hear that, Gary."

  "Look, Maxine, I'm sorry to be having to say it. Really I am. But numbers are numbers. If I don't believe I can make a profit, what am I doing making the movie? You see where I'm coming from? That simply doesn't make sense."

  Maxine got up from the table. "Will you excuse me a minute? I've got to make a call."

  Eppstadt caught the fire in Maxine's voice.

  "No lawyers, Maxine. Please? We can do this in a civilized manner."

  Maxine didn't reply. She simply stalked off between tables, snarling at a waiter who got in her way. Eppstadt ate a couple of mouthfuls of rare tuna, then put down his fork. "It's times like this I wish I still smoked." He sat back in his chair and looked hard at Todd. "Don't let her start a pissing competition, Todd, because if I'm cornered I'm going to have to stand up and tell it like it is. And then we'll all have a mess on our hands."

  "Meaning what?"

  "Meaning . . ." Eppstadt looked pained; as though his proctologist were at work on him under the chair. "You can't keep massaging numbers so your price looks justified when we all know it isn't."

  "You were saying I'd been a gold-mine for Paramount. Just two minutes ago you said that."

  "That was then. This is now. That was Keever Smotherman, this is post-Keever Smotherman. He was the last of his breed."

  "So what are you saying?"

  "Well... let me tell you what I'm not saying," Eppstadt replied, his tone silky. "I'm not saying you don't have a career."

  "Well that's nice to hear," Todd said sharply.

  "I want to find something we can do together."

  "But . . ."

  "But?"

  Eppstadt seemed to be genuinely considering his reply before he spoke. Finally, he said: "You've got talent, Todd. And you've obviously built a loyal fan-base over the years. What you don't have is the drawing power you had back in the old days. It's the same with all of you really expensive boys. Cruise. Costner. Stallone." He took a moment, then leaned closer to Todd, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "You want the truth? You look weary. I mean, deep down weary." Todd said nothing. Eppstadt's observation was like being doused in ice-cold water. "Sorry to be blunt. It's not like I'm telling you something you don't already know."