"First to the ocean and then the mountains. Maybe just the ocean. Maybe it won't take that long. I don't know yet."
"Have you ever failed with a student? Not given them what they needed?"
"Sure. I wanted to work with Weber but he wasn't interested."
"Will he be all right?"
"I don't know, Phil. He's still got a bird on his back."
He was dead a couple of days later. One strange thing was the pig died very soon after Venasque. Harry Radcliffe kept Big Top at his house in Santa Barbara afterward because there was a yard for the dog to enjoy. I guess it's still there, the last living magic of the great Venasque.
Have I ever seen the man here? No.
The earthquake came, Weber finished Wonderful, I began Midnight Always Comes. He left for Europe as soon as post-production was done, saying he'd be back when there was reason to come back. That turned out to be over a year later and only long enough to pack boxes for his move east.
You've heard the rest. You've heard most of this story from Weber, but as you can see, there were small details to be filled in. And what of Pinsleepe, vis a vis the gospel according to Strayhorn? Or Sasha? Even little Flea? Later.
I will tell you one thing – I didn't kill the dog.
"Yes, you did!"
"The fuck I did!"
"Okay, Sean, James, that's enough. B.D., you wanted to say something?"
"I wanted to say this discussion is bullshit and boring."
I don't know what it was about the man, but whenever he said anything, the room went silent for a few beats before the noise picked up again. Maybe it was his reputation. Or else all of us kept sizing him up. This was the strongest thing he'd said since we began work.
"Go on."
"There's nothing else. All this about what is the 'real evil.' You sound like Jehovah's Witnesses. We've been here two days bullshitting around and getting nowhere. You want to know what evil is? Evil's a gun. Evil's a creep who puts bullets in it. Evil's a tree that's been split in half by lightning.
"It isn't some thing. It's everything, turned bad. A kid's bicycle is okay, but when you see it turned over and blood on the ground nearby then it's something else."
Sean, angry at having been interrupted in her yelling bout with James, asked aggressively, "What was the worst thing you ever did?"
B.D. sneered. "I wouldn't tell you, even if I knew you. Because something that bad, I don't want anyone to know."
Wyatt leaned over and said quietly in my ear, "This is going nowhere fast."
I nodded and stood up. "Let's break for the day."
No one needed urging. The room emptied in about twenty-five seconds.
"What am I doing wrong, Finky Linky?"
"B.D. is right – we are boring ourselves with so much talk. It sounds like kids sitting around a campfire telling their best gross-out stories. 'What's the worst thing you ever did?' Who cares? I'm sure Blow Dry has the most hideous tale, but even if he does, we'd react to it like kids, say 'That's really gross,' and wait for someone else to one-up him."
Walking out of the rehearsal room, I thought for the hundredth time of what I was trying to do. Was our purpose to make a couple of frightening, black scenes which, when slipped cleverly into the greater context of Midnight Kills, would finish the picture satisfactorily? Or did "they" want a clearly moral statement, something saying Bloodstone and anything he stood for was sick and rotten?
What Phil had succeeded in doing in three films was to make a monster into a kind of perverse antihero. Kids loved Bloodstone. They wore T-shirts of him holding a magnifying glass. Over a hundred thousand posters were sold. People magazine did a cover story on him. According to the article, Midnight was one of the most popular films in Beirut. Soldiers on both sides would go into theaters with their guns and, when favorite parts came on, wave them and shout his name.
Cullen believed we should make an anti-Bloodstone, anti-Midnight statement.
Wyatt was convinced that if Phil had touched some heart of darkness, it was by lucky mistake. Whatever he'd created to do, it had since been destroyed. As a result, our job was to finish a film that, without those special Strayhorn scenes, would just be another silly horror film destined to go nowhere a few months after it came out and thus effectively defused.
There were other possibilities that only added to the confusion. One of them, which was seductive, came from a literary critic I'd recently been reading. According to him, "The genre to which a story belongs can be changed just by adding or subtracting a few lines." Before leaving for New York, I'd told Wyatt to try taking Midnight Kills in a humorous direction, just to see what he'd do with it. What he came up with was funny and surreal, but inappropriate and too much like his old television show. Yet the idea of changing the whole direction by "adding or subtracting a few lines" stayed with me and kept coming up in my thoughts.
I still believed that by sitting around and throwing out ideas with the people who'd be involved in the scenes, we'd find something important. So far, we'd come up with nothing.
Wyatt asked if I wanted to go to dinner, but the worthless afternoon had taken away any appetite I might have had.
"Then let's go to a movie. What do you want to see?"
"No, thanks."
"You want to go dancing? We can go to Jack Nicholson's –"
"Wyatt, don't worry about me. I'm all right. Discouraged, but all right. Thank you for your concern."
He dropped me off at the house and took the car to visit a friend. I let myself in and, without thinking, walked to the kitchen for something to eat. Not that I wanted it, but it was something to do until I could come up with something better.
"Weber? Is that you?"
"Hi, Sash. Yeah."
She came in smiling widely. "The results of some of my tests came back today, and the doctors were really positive."
"That's good news! Oh, Sash, I'm glad to hear it."
"Something else, too! I guess I should let Wyatt tell you, but he keeps saying he will and then he doesn't. He went to the lab and had a blood test when you were in New York. His blood count is the best it's been in almost two years!"
Ever try looking happy when you were suddenly scared shitless? Good luck trying. Sasha's news sent a hundred ants crawling over me. Their better health had to be linked to what we were doing. But what happened if we failed? What happened if the new scenes were lousy, or 'only' good, and didn't reach the level that had been prescribed?
"You know, the strangest memory came to me today. After I got back from the doctor's, I felt like seeing a film, something positive and hopeful. First I put on Fellini's Amarcord but then realized I wasn't in the mood for that. So I put on your film Babyskin. I forgot how funny and generous it is, Weber.
"The scene at the end when the two old people go swimming naked in the moonlight? God, that went straight through me! But you don't feel sorry for them. You know why they're there and that it was inevitable, but you just want them to be happy swimming and face what has to come later.
"But that's not what I wanted to tell you. About halfway through, you have a scene where they put the party hat on the old man's dog –"
"That was Nicholas Sylvian's idea. The one where he goes into the man's room and wakes him up with licks?"
"Yes, but you know what it reminded me of? When my father was dying he told me one day that the sicker he got, the more his breath smelled like our dog's. When I remembered that, it was like someone threw a rock through a window in my head. It's always so crazy what sets off memories."