Millions of words later, I'm still writing. If not for Stirling, I would never have gone on to college. I wouldn't have gotten a B.A., let alone an M.A. and a Ph.D., wouldn't have met Philip Klass, wouldn't have written First Blood. One of my greatest thrills came on a summer afternoon in 1972 when Stirling phoned to thank me for having sent him a copy of First Blood and to say that he'd liked it, that he was gratified to have been an inspiration. "If I were a cat," he said, "I'd purr."
We stayed in touch but never met until the summer of 1985 when he suggested that I come to Los Angeles and spend the Fourth of July weekend with him. Twenty-five years after I first experienced his work, I finally got to meet him, a stocky, broad-smiled, gentle-featured man with short gray hair and generous good nature. It was like coming face-to-face with the father I'd never known. Finally, in a closing of the circle, he took my novel, The Brotherhood of the Rose, to NBC and suggested that they do a miniseries of it. In 1989, when the series was broadcast after the Superbowl, the most coveted spot in television, I was struck by awe when I watched the credits and again saw the magical words: Executive Producer Stirling Silliphant.
Shortly afterward, Stirling told me that in one of his former lives he had lived in Thailand and that now he was going home. He had a Beverly Hills garage sale, moved to Bangkok, and had the luxury of writing whatever he wanted with no deadlines except his own. We often talked about my coming to visit him, but our various schedules kept conflicting. My only contact with him was via frequent faxes. Regret is a terrible emotion. At a little after 8 a.m. on the morning of April 26, 1996 (as with the debut of Route 66, I can be very specific about this moment), I was eating breakfast, listening to the news on National Public Radio, when the announcer informed me, "Academy-Award-winning screenwriter, Stirling Silliphant, died this morning from prostate cancer. He was 78." My Cheerios stuck in my throat. It was two days after my birthday. The man I thought of as my father was gone.
Stirling was as determined a writer as I ever encountered. He once had two wisdom teeth extracted in the morning and was hitting the typewriter keys by noon. He worked almost every day and was religious about meeting deadlines. Legendary for being prolific and fast, he was hesitant to show a complete list of his credits because he was certain that no one would believe that anyone could write that much. I've never been prolific or fast, but at his best, his action-filled scripts were inventive, compelling, and thoughtful: his Oscar-winning screenplay for In the Heat of the Night, for example, not to mention his television work for Naked City. I have tried to follow his example.
Thus my first contact with Hollywood was positive. The troubled street kid who became addicted to movies as an antidote to the darkness of his life found that the dreams those movies inspired could, with hard work, be fulfilled. But many who've been exposed to Hollywood have had the opposite experience. Too often, writers are treated with indifference at best and malicious contempt at worst. They're stonewalled, misled, or blatantly lied to. Some producers can't imagine showing courtesy to anyone they don't have to impress. Their inability to relate to others borders on the sociopathic. That never happened to me on any of the projects based on my works, but I certainly came across it in other contexts, enough so that I eventually decided to write about the bottom part of dreams in Hollywood. This is the final story in my trilogy about the paradoxes of ambition and the dark side of success. We began with a paper boy. We moved on to a teenaged football player. We now meet an adult who tells us about the heartbreak of the movie business. I haven't updated the financial figures in this story. After the $200 million price tag of Titanic, I'm amazed to look back at how comparatively cheaply a film once could get made. The following story was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award as the best novella of 1985.
Dead Image
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"You know who he looks like, don't you?"
Watching the scene, I just shrugged.
"Really, the resemblance is amazing," Jill said.
"Mmm."
We were in the studio's screening room, watching yesterday's dailies. The director — and I use the term loosely — had been having troubles with the leading actor, if acting's what you could say that good-looking bozo does. Hell, he used to be a male model. He doesn't act. He poses. It wasn't enough that he wanted eight million bucks and fifteen upfront points to do the picture. It wasn't enough that he changed my scene so the dialogue sounded as if a moron had written it. No, he had to keep dashing to his trailer, snorting more coke (for "creative inspiration," he said), then sniffling after every sentence in the big speech of the picture. If this scene didn't work, the audience wouldn't understand his motivation for leaving his girlfriend after she became a famous singer, and believe me, nothing's more unforgiving than an audience when it gets confused. The word-of-mouth would kill us.
"Come on, you big dumb sonofabitch," I muttered. "You make me want to blow my nose just listening to you."
The director had wasted three days doing retakes, and the dailies from yesterday were worse than the ones from the two days before. Sliding down in my seat, I groaned. The director's idea of fixing the scene was to have a team of editors work all night patching in reaction shots from the girl and the guys in the country-western band she sang with. Every time Mr. Wonderful sniffled… cut, we saw somebody staring at him as if he was Jesus.
"Jesus," I moaned to Jill. "Those cuts distract from the speech. It's supposed to be one continuous shot."
"Of course, this is rough, you understand," the director told everyone from where he sat in the back row of seats. Near the door. To make a quick getaway, if he had any sense. "We haven't worked on the dubbing yet. That sniffling won't be on the release print."
"I hope to God not," I muttered.
"Really. Just like him," Jill said next to me.
"Huh? Who?" I turned to her. "What are you talking about?"
"The guitar player. The kid behind the girl. Haven't you been listening?" She kept her voice low enough that no one else could have heard her.
That's why I blinked when the studio VP asked from somewhere in the dark to my left, "Who's the kid behind the girl?"
Jill whispered, "Watch the way he holds that beer can."
"There. The one with the beer can," the VP said.
Except for the lummox sniffling on the screen, the room was silent.
The VP spoke louder. "I said who's the — "
"I don't know." Behind us, the director cleared his throat.
"He must have told you his name."
"I never met him."
"How the hell, if you…"
"All the concert scenes were shot by the second-unit director."
"What about these reaction shots?"
"Same thing. The kid had only a few lines. He did his bit and went home. Hey, I had my hands full making Mr. Nose Candy feel like the genius he thinks he is."
"There's the kid again," Jill said.
I was beginning to see what she meant now. The kid looked a lot like —
"James Deacon," the VP said. "Yeah, that's who he reminds me of."
Mr. Muscle Bound had managed to struggle through the speech. I'd recognized only half of it — partly because the lines he'd added made no sense, mostly because he mumbled. At the end, we had a closeup of his girlfriend, the singer, crying. She'd been so heartless clawing her way to the top that she'd lost the one thing that mattered — the man who'd loved her. In theory, the audience was supposed to feel so sorry for her that they were crying along with her. If you ask me, they'd be in tears all right, from rolling around in the aisles with laughter. On the screen, Mr. Beefcake turned and trudged from the rehearsal hall, as if his underwear was too tight. He had his eyes narrowed manfully, ready to pick up his Oscar.
The screen went dark. The director cleared his throat again. He sounded nervous. "Well?"
The room was silent.
The director sounded more nervous. "Uh… So what do you think?"
The lights came on, but they weren'
t the reason I suddenly had a headache.
Everybody turned toward the VP, waiting for the word of God.
"What I think," the VP said. He nodded wisely. "Is we need a rewrite."
***
"This fucking town." I gobbled Dy-Gel as Jill drove us home. The Santa Monica freeway was jammed as usual. We had the top down on the Porsche so we got a really good dose of car exhaust.
"They won't blame the star. After all, he charged eight million bucks, and next time he'll charge more if the studio pisses him off." I winced from heartburn. "They'd never think to blame the director. He's a God-damned artist as he keeps telling everybody. So who does that leave? The underpaid schmuck who wrote what everybody changed."
"Take it easy. You'll raise your blood pressure." Jill turned off the freeway.
"Raise my blood pressure? Raise my — it's already raised! Any higher, I'll have a stroke!"
"I don't know what you're so surprised about. This happens on every picture. We've been out here fifteen years. You ought to be used to how they treat writers."
"Whipping boys. That's the only reason they keep us around. Every director, producer, and actor in town is a better writer. Just ask them, they'll tell you. The only problem is they can't read, let alone write, and they just don't seem to have the time to sit down and put all their wonderful thoughts on paper."
"But that's how the system works, hon. There's no way to win, so either you love this business or leave it."
I scowled. "About the only way to make a decent picture is to direct as well as write it. Hell, I'd star in it too if I wasn't losing my hair from pulling it out."
"And twenty million bucks," Jill said.
"Yeah, that would help too — so I wouldn't have to grovel in front of those studio heads. But hell, if I had twenty million bucks to finance a picture, what would I need to be a writer for?"
"You know you'd keep writing, even if you had a hundred million."
"You're right. I must be nuts."
***
"Wes Crane," Jill said.
I sat at the word processor, grumbling as I did the rewrite. The studio VP had decided that Mr. Biceps wasn't going to leave his girlfriend. Instead his girlfriend was going to realize how much she'd been ignoring him and give up her career for love. "There's an audience out there dying for a movie against women's lib," he said. It was all I could do not to throw up.
"Wes who?" I kept typing on the keyboard.
"Crane. The kid in the dailies."
I turned to where she stood at the open door to my study. I must have blinked stupidly because she got that patient look on her face.
"The one who looks like James Deacon. I got curious. So for the hell of it, I phoned the casting office at the studio."
"All right, so you found out his name. So what's the point?"
"Just a hunch."
"I still don't get it."
"Your script about mercenary soldiers."
I shrugged. "It still needs a polish. Anyway, it's strictly on spec. When the studio decides we've ruined this picture sufficiently, I have to do that Napoleon mini-series for ABC."
"You wrote that script on spec because you believed in the story, right? It's something you really wanted to do."
"The subject's important. Soldiers of fortune employed by the CIA. Unofficially, America's involved in a lot of foreign wars."
"Then fuck the mini-series. I think the kid would be wonderful as the young mercenary who gets so disgusted that he finally shoots the dictator who hired him."
I stared. "You know, that's not a bad idea."
"When we were driving home, didn't you tell me the only way to film something decent was to direct the thing yourself?"
"And star in it." I raised my eyebrows. "Yeah, that's me. But I was just making a joke."
"Well, lover, I know you couldn't direct any worse than that asshole who ruined your stuff this morning. I've got the hots for you, but you're not good looking enough for even a character part. That kid is, though. And the man who discovers him…"
"… can write his own ticket. If he puts the package together properly."
"You've had fifteen years of learning the politics."
"But if I back out on ABC…"
"Half the writers in town wanted that assignment. They'll sign someone else in an hour."
"But they offered a lot of dough."
"You just made four-hundred-thousand on a story the studio ruined. Take a flyer, why don't you? This one's for your self-respect."
"I think I love you," I said.
"When you're sure, come down to the bedroom."
She turned and left. I watched the doorway for a while, then swung my chair to face the picture window and thought about mercenaries. We live on a bluff in Pacific Palisades. You can see the ocean forever. But what I saw in my head was the kid in the dailies. How he held that beer can.
Just like James Deacon.
***
Deacon. If you're a film buff, you know who I'm talking about. The farm boy from Oklahoma. Back in the middle fifties. At the start a juvenile delinquent, almost went to reform school for stealing cars. But a teacher managed to get him interested in high-school plays. Deacon never graduated. Instead he borrowed a hundred bucks and hitchhiked to New York where he camped on Lee Strasberg's doorstep till Strasberg agreed to give him a chance in the Actor's Studio.
A lot of brilliant actors came out of that school. Brando, Newman, Clift, Gazzara, McQueen. But some say Deacon was the best of the lot. A bit part on Broadway. A talent scout in the audience. A screen test. The rest as they say is history. The part of the younger brother in The Prodigal Son. The juvenile delinquent in Revolt on Thirty-Second Street. Then the wildcat oil driller in Birthright where he upstaged half a dozen major stars. There was something about him. Intensity, sure. You could sense the pressure building in him, swelling inside his skin, wanting out. And authenticity. God knows, you could tell how much he believed the parts he was playing. He actually was those characters.
But mostly the camera simply loved him. That's the way they explain a star out here. Some good looking guys come across as plain on the screen. And some plain ones look gorgeous. It's a question of taking a three-dimensional face and making it one-dimensional for the screen. What's distinctive in real life gets muted, and vice versa. There's no way to figure if the camera will like you. It either does or doesn't. And it sure liked Deacon.
What's fascinating is that he also looked as gorgeous in real life. A walking movie. Or so they say. I never met him, of course. He's before my time. But the word in the industry was that he couldn't do anything wrong. That's even before his three movies were released. A guaranteed superstar.
And then?
Cars. If you think of his life as a tragedy, cars were the flaw. He loved to race them. I'm told his body had practically disintegrated when he hit a pickup truck at a hundred miles an hour on his way to drive his modified Corvette at a race track in northern California. Maybe you heard the legend. That he didn't die but was so disfigured that he's in a rest home somewhere to spare his fans the disgust of how he looks. But don't believe it. Oh, he died, all right. Just like a shooting star, he exploded. And the irony is that, since his three pictures hadn't been released by then, he never knew how famous he became.
But what I was thinking, if a star could shine once, maybe it could shine again.
***
"I'm looking for Wes. Is he around?"
I'd phoned the Screen Actor's Guild to get his address. For the sake of privacy, sometimes all the Guild gives out is the name and phone number of an actor's agent, and what I had in mind was so tentative that I didn't want the hassle of dealing with an agent right then.
But I got lucky. The Guild gave me an address.
The place was in a canyon north of the Valley. A dusty winding road led up to an unpainted house with a sundeck supported on stilts and a half-dozen junky cars in front along with a dune buggy and a motorcycle. Seeing those clunkers,
I felt self-conscious in the Porsche.
Two guys and a girl were sitting on the steps. The girl had a butch cut. The guys had hair to their shoulders. They wore sandals, shorts, and that's all. The girl's breasts were as brown as nutmeg.
The three of them stared right through me. Their eyes looked big and strange.
I opened my mouth to repeat the question.
But the girl beat me to it. "Wes?" She sounded groggy. "I think… out back."
"Hey, thanks." But I made sure I had the Porsche's keys in my pocket before I plodded through sand past sagebrush around the house.
The back had a sundeck too, and as I turned the corner, I saw him up there, leaning against the rail, squinting toward the foothills.
I tried not to show surprise. In person, Wes looked even more like Deacon. Lean, intense, hypnotic. Around twenty-one, the same age Deacon had been when he made his first movie. Sensitive, brooding, as if he suffered secret tortures. But tough-looking too, projecting the image of someone who'd been emotionally savaged once and wouldn't allow it to happen again. He wasn't tall, and he sure was thin, but he radiated such energy that he made you think he was big and powerful. Even his clothes reminded me of Deacon. Boots, faded jeans, a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pack of cigarettes tucked in the fold. And a battered stetson with the rim curved up to meet the sides.
Actors love to pose, of course. I'm convinced that they don't even go to the bathroom without giving an imaginary camera their best profile. And the way this kid leaned against the rail, staring moodily toward the foothills, was certainly photogenic.