His thoughts were interrupted by the chiming of his doorbell. Who would bother him so early in the day? When he opened the door, he discovered Grace, her eyes sparkling like two diamonds in a pool. She carried orange juice, champagne, and a bag of pastries.
“On your way to work?” Charlie asked.
“I was,” she said, walking inside as the screen slammed shut behind her. “But then I quit my fucking job.”
COLLABORATION THERAPY
MOVIES ARE LIKE RAILROAD TRAINS: HEAVY, BULKY, AND difficult to get started. Their locomotives are powered by hundred-dollar bills shoveled into furnaces by worsted-wool work a days at business affairs. A switchmaster sits at every junction, a production executive waiting to pull a lever, to affect the train’s course.
Like the worst cinematic catastrophes, train wrecks are the result of missed communication. Switchmaster error can cause two trains to collide, or send one of them over a cliff. Sometimes the only way to avoid this is to apply the emergency brakes, scraping steel against steel, rods against cylinders, sending sparks into the air. Hence the expression “grinding to a halt.”
Grace Gonglewski quit her job at seven-fifteen on Friday morning, and by seven-thirty, Ear to the Ground had begun to shut down. The process started with Ian, whose pages could not be input, and thus were not turned in. It moved from him to Henny who, without the pages, could not run his actors through the new scenes. Ethan heard about the problem early but, unable to reach Grace, could do nothing about it. Instead, he spent much of the day reassuring Bob Semel, chairman of Warner Brothers, that everything was fine.
There were other difficulties as welclass="underline" When it came to the train called Ear to the Ground, Grace, more than anyone, had been the driver. Among the engineers, she alone understood the machine. She knew the chain of command because she had created it. And by leaving, she threatened to destroy it.
Ehrich Weiss came from Mannheim to Hollywood in 1977, freshly Ph.D’d in psychology. He was handsome and blond, and possessed a raucous but genuine laugh. Soon, wealthy humorists were diving onto his couch, trying out new material as they investigated their pasts. In front of Ehrich they fell hilariously to pieces, so they invited him to their parties. They gave him small roles in their films. He dated actresses. By 1981, Weiss was known as a hack.
Then he fell ill with cancer, a rare form that targeted his blood without localizing its attack. His chances were slim, the doctors said. “It would be wise,” they advised, “if you’d let us experiment.” So he submitted to a painful process called hydrative therapy. His blood was thickened and thinned, its volume reduced and increased. Chemicals were injected. Readings taken, smears smeared.
From his hospital bed, Ehrich wrote a book entitled Relationships: A Collaboration. And after a month his condition improved. A simple diet and serious work restored him. He went home with his strength and, perhaps more miraculously, his dignity.
He married Hillary Semel, sister of Bob Semel. Soon he became a close friend of the entire Warner Brothers family, and when Martin Long had his legendary tiff with director Jon Lansid, Ehrich was brought in to smooth things over. The men were hugging in less than an hour. Ehrich became Warner’s vice president for psychology in 1991.
Four years later, Grace Gonglewski, Ethan Carson, Ian Marcus, and Henny Rarlin were in Dr. Weiss’s office on the Warner lot, waiting to begin Collaboration Therapy. There was little conversation among them. Instead, there was that element of negotiation where no party wished to spill before another did. It had taken some doing to get them together, and no one wanted to be the first to play his hand. With Ear to the Ground scheduled to begin shooting in twenty-four hours, confusion abounded.
Ethan sat in the first chair by the door, checking his watch every few seconds. He could hardly bring himself to look at Grace. He would have fired her if she hadn’t already quit, and he would never have asked her back if Bob Semel hadn’t demanded her presence on the set. She was a D-girl, for Christ’s sake, and now he had to kowtow to her? We’ll see about that, Ethan thought, and examined his watch again.
Next to him, Ian wondered whether he’d have time to keep his rendezvous with the blonde from the Craft Services truck. There were advantages to being the writer of a blockbuster script, but he’d been working too hard to enjoy them. Now he had to deal with this. He looked over at Henny, but the director just seemed bored.
Grace stood alone by the windows, her back to the others. All week, she had ignored messages from Ethan, even as they grew increasingly desperate. What concern was it of hers if Ear to the Ground became a multimillion-dollar flop? In a certain sense, Grace believed in karma, and if you thought that way, Ethan was getting his. Stuck in the middle of production, watching it fall to pieces, with his starched shirt collar finally slicing through the tender skin of his neck.
But then Bob Semel had called her and explained how much he wanted her around. If she would return, he would consider it a personal favor, and personal favors were always repaid. Exactly what that meant had yet to be determined, but Grace knew she had been noticed, and that she was finally in position to leave these three assholes behind.
Grace was interrupted by a door swishing open on well-oiled hinges, and the padding of Ehrich Weiss’s expensive loafers across the floor. The doctor nodded at no one in particular, then took a seat behind his desk. “Act one,” he announced, “getting to know you.” When no one uttered so much as a hello, he spread his hands and said, “Let’s not all talk at once.”
A MODEL WORLD
LOUIS NAVARO ROSE AT SEVEN-FIFTEEN THURSDAY morning to the sound of a Skilsaw buzzing through wood. At first, he just pulled the pillow over his head and tried to go back to sleep, but then he realized the noise was coming from his own backyard. He raised his body out of bed slowly and grabbed a ribbed undershirt and a pair of workpants. Then, lighting a Pall Mall and coughing the day’s first cough, he headed outside to see what the hell was going on.
In the yard, he discovered Charlie Richter, covered in sawdust and dirt, fitting a long two-by-four into what looked like an oversized frame. It was an oddly shaped construction, and Navaro noticed another, parallel structure already put together and leaning up against the house.
Navaro cleared his throat. “Little early in the day for this, wouldn’t you say?”
Charlie jumped at the sound of his landlord’s voice. “Oh, Mr. Navaro. Sorry if I disturbed you.”
“Disturbed me?” Navaro took another pull off his cigarette and threw it to the ground. “You woke me up. What the …”
“It’s a model,” Charlie said.
“A model. Just what I was thinking.”
“It’s the San Andreas, see? A replica. I’m going to rig a generator …”
“Yeah, yeah,” Navaro said, lighting his second cigarette. “You do that. But do me a favor, will ya?”
Charlie nodded.
“Don’t be sawing any wood before nine.”
Exactly six days later, Charlie finished his model, and stood over it like a god. Before him lay a panorama of the desert that was so realistic it could have been used as a miniature set for Ear to the Ground. The two wooden forms had been fitted into the frame, filled with dirt and earth, and landscaped to replicate the barren crags and rocky hillocks outside San Bernardino. Charlie had even included lichen and small bushes to approximate desert growth.