Turn of the Century Read online

  George produced one very fine piece of work at Newsweek. In 1984 he spent a month and a half driving a station wagon down the Pan-American Highway from Texas to Guatemala, then through El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua to Panama. The magazine sent along a British photographer, Edward Ingram, a jittery son of a thief who called himself Zip, and their big cover package on the several ongoing civil wars won magazine awards and then, reconstituted as an eight-hour PBS documentary miniseries that George took a sabbatical to help produce, won Peabody and Polk awards. So George found himself a TV producer. (“Television, George?” his mother said, as if she thought he was joking about the new ABC News job. “So you’ll write the … scripts those anchormen read?”) As it happens, he is now eating a Sabrett sausage bought from a vendor outside the old ABC tower on Sixth Avenue. Swallowing the hot dog too fast, tossing the mustardy napkin wad in the garbage, he fixes on his new building’s six-foot-tall letters, in platinum italics—THE MBC. Already the sign seems dated, a little vestigial. Almost everyone calls the network MBC, although it is still officially The MBC. Since England has the BBC and Canada has the CBC, why shouldn’t America have the MBC, the founder and chairman asked his first executive team. “Because Warner’s beat us to it with the WB,” the former president of his Entertainment Group told him. And because Mose, unlike Britain, is not the name of a sovereign nation, no one said.

  George pulls the Discman earplugs out just before he takes that final jump-step into the revolving door, and thinks, As we approach the New York headquarters of the Mose Broadcasting Company and Mose Media Holdings, we have come to the end of “George Mactier, Infotainer: A Walking Tour.” Thank you. Please return your audio devices. And now he realizes for the first time, connecting the dots, that each successive job has taken him farther northwest. (Thus, extrapolating: Lincoln Center in 2003, New Jersey around 2008?) And he also realizes, thinking again without grief or anger of Edith Hope Cranston Mactier, born 1918, died 2000, that in his own career, ontogeny has absolutely recapitulated phylogeny—from newspapers to slick magazines to TV news to docudramatic entertainment, the whole media century compressed into his last twenty years. Jesus, George thinks, stepping off the thirty-eighth-floor elevator toward Daisy’s sweet, skeptical smile, that is so pat.

  4

  “Hey, buddy! What up!” Timothy Featherstone has arrived. He walks straight into George’s office as if he owns it. Which he does, more or less, since the MBC owns half the assets of Well-Armed Productions, George and Emily’s company, and the NARCS offices are in the MBC Building, and Featherstone is the acting president of the Entertainment Group. “T minus …”—he checks and taps his gigantic platinum Rolex, which he has customized to receive alphanumeric pages—“… one hour forty-seven, and counting. Are we ready to rock? Are we ready to roll?” His left hand springs up, a high-five receptor. George never liked any of the elaborate cool-cat handshakes in the sixties and seventies, and his timing at high fives is inevitably half a beat late. But what choice does he have? He slaps Featherstone’s hand. “Mac Man!” Featherstone says—sings, really, to the tune of the theme song of the old Batman TV show—as their palms make contact. Although the over-amped bonhomie is that of a big guy, Featherstone is small and almost prissy, with facial hair like Beverly Hills shrubbery, insubstantial but intensively manicured. Since the last time George saw him, just after the first of the year, his long sideburns and goatee have been replaced by a kind of Philippe Starck handlebar mustache, with swoops that are slightly, deliberately asymmetrical. He’s wearing a brand-new charcoal-gray cashmere Nehru jacket so beautifully made that it almost doesn’t look foolish. George is never sure whether Featherstone is a dork or affecting a version of dorkiness-passing-for-hip. He just turned fifty.

  “Hey, Timothy.” He punches the remote control to mute the Coleman Hawkins on his stereo. MSNBC, already muted, is on the TV. “How was the flight?”

  “Not too shabby. I ran into your partner getting off the plane—business class! Frugality! Love that! Love it. Where is Emiliana?” Featherstone calls practically everyone by special nicknames, often several different special nicknames, particularly people who have no nicknames, who’ve never had a nickname. No one else calls George Mac or Mac Man, and no one calls Emily Emiliana.

  “She’s in a meeting.” She’s napping on a couch in an editing bay. “She’ll be back by quarter of.” He plans to wake her up as soon as Featherstone leaves. “Do you want to talk before we meet with Mose?”

  “A quick huddle never hurts. Why don’t you and Emmy Lou drift up to my place on Five-Nine at”—he exposes and taps the Rolex, its face as big as an Oreo cookie—“six-fifteen? Yeah? Groovy.” He finally turns to go. Is that a retro, semi-ironic “groovy,” or an earnest, unthinking, post-retro “groovy”? “Hey,” he says, inspecting George’s computer monitor, “where’s your camera? No videocam? Get digital, bro! Official MBC policy! V-mail is the coolest, man, completely mad. I just got one from Ng this morning. Even Harold’s started sending them.”

  “Yeah, I should get hooked up.”

  “Hey,” Featherstone says, reminded, “you know the conversation we had in Vegas with Sandi?”

  “Sandy Flandy, from William Morris?” Flandy is a Hollywood agent who represents two of the stars of NARCS. (Everyone repeats his full name—Sandy Flandy?—with a smile and a question mark the first time they hear it. Saying Sandy Flandy’s name absolutely straight-faced, George realized last fall, is one tiny measure of show business insiderdom.) George has no memory of encountering Flandy in Las Vegas. George and Featherstone did spend an evening together there in January at NATPE, the annual convention of the National Association of Television Programming Executives. It was George’s second NATPE, and one of those rich, ghastly contemporary spectacles—cigar aficionados, Scotch breath, extreme tans, winking—that are highly entertaining once, tolerable another time or two, pretty much unendurable thereafter.

  “Nooooo, Sandi, my friend, Sandi Bemis, the therapist.” Now George remembers. After dinner in Las Vegas, he consented to go to the Hard Rock with Timothy and Sandi, a woman who looked like a fortyish Cameron Diaz, and whom Featherstone introduced—seriously? jokingly? both?—as “the aromatherapist to the stars.” George figured she was somewhere in that fuzzy Hollywood sector between executive girlfriend and call girl, particularly after he learned that she was the aromatherapist to the stars’ pets, pet aromatherapy seeming like a plausible exit strategy out of high-end prostitution—Wow, Sandi, your Shalimar really seems to calm down the border collies. George’s attempt at conversation consisted of asking if she knew Buddy Ramo, his stepdaughter’s father, who made his living therapeutically massaging horses around Malibu; she didn’t. At the Hard Rock, Featherstone ordered her a nine-dollar-a-bottle granite-filtered, sorghum-infused microbrew lager from Montana, because he thought it was more her style than his other possible choice, a Washington State ale—which, he had added, wasn’t “really a craft brew, since the company produces, I think, like, twenty-five thousand barrels a year.” In the old days, prostitutes were obliged only to pretend to enjoy sex; now they have to pretend to be impressed by beer connoisseurship.

  “You know, the girl who looked like the young Michelle Pfeiffer … the one you,” Featherstone adds with a smirk, “copped a Miata for. Back in the day, Jo-Jo, back in the day.” Now George remembers why he recalled her as a version of whore: Featherstone asked him, literally with a nudge and a wink, to charge Sandi Bemis’s car rental and room at the Venetian to the NARCS T & E budget. At first George had thought he was kidding, some kind of Rat Pack revival joke. But he was serious, and George handed over the Well-Armed Productions corporate Amex card when asked a second time. George’s problem with being an accomplice wasn’t so much ethical as aesthetic. Putting the girlfriend on his expense account—in Las Vegas!—is the cheesiest act he’s committed during his first full-time year in show business. Featherstone’s show of male bonding, the dirty grin four inches from George’s face, the mingled sc
ents of Stephen Sprouse pour Homme and Tic Tac, made it even worse.

  “Remind me about the conversation in Las Vegas?”

  “You promised Sandi you’d talk to Angela about enrolling her pooch in one of Sandi’s seminars, which are literally fantastic. Aroma and meditation, one price. It rocks. The other dogs are A-list.”

  Dogs can be trained to meditate? He has erased the conversation entirely, and now he sees an even more mortifying show business moment rushing toward him: he will have to ask Angela Janeway (his Yale School of Drama star, his Creative Coalition board of directors star, his star who’s insisting that he figure out a way to get Nelson Mandela to guest-star on an episode of NARCS) if she’ll let the network president’s girlfriend—the acting president, and not even his main girlfriend—perform some quack regimen on her German shepherd, Peacemaker. The dog, which Angela adopted during a visit to Sarajevo in 1996, appeared with her on the cover of People last month. (Sixteen thousand, five hundred and seventy-five dollars a week sounds like a lot, sure, but it amounts, after taxes, to not even $200 an hour—less than lawyers make.)

  “Right,” George replies, standing up, in an aggressively noncommittal attempt to change the subject. “Right.”

  “The sessions are at Trump’s hotel on Columbus Circle. Sandi’s there for a week in April. Mega-exclusive. Sandi would comp Angela, needless to say. It’s a total win-win.”

  “Right.”

  “The new Mrs. Ron Perelman has already signed up all three of her whippets, and Puffy Combs’s two shar-pei bitches will be there.”

  “The actors are on hiatus this week, but I’ll have Iris let Angela know all about it.”

  “My man!” Featherstone says, giving a double thumbs-up as he steps toward the door. “See you and Emmarooni upstairs.”

  The NARCS production meetings take place at a long, cheap, paint-spattered table right on the soundstage, in the basement of the MBC Building (or “the The MBC Building,” as the office clowns call it). This is partly for expediency, since most of the principals—the directors of photography and sound, the designers of costumes and sets, and the gatherers of props—spend so many of their hours in the adjacent offices and nooks. But George also prefers having the meetings down here because he likes the glamorously unglamorous industrial space, the Masonite slabs covering wood beams and tons of sand (to keep the floor level and vibration-free), the trusses and lights overhead, the cozy pool of light at the center of the dark factory cavern. Down here, George is the master among his trusty craftsmen. The questions and answers are precise and straightforward. The chain of command is clear. Shooting on West Fifty-seventh Street, an elevator ride away from the production offices, is more convenient than schlepping out to Astoria, Queens, or down to a pier in Chelsea. But the numbers are not what justify spending nine million dollars on a new soundstage in midtown Manhattan—Harold Mose enjoys having a studio underfoot because it’s a palpable reminder that he’s in show business. Just as the MBC soundstage makes George feel like Preston Sturges, it makes Mose feel like Irving Thalberg.

  The below-the-line production staff, unlike the writers, convey by their very demeanor a kind of proletarian deference: George is the show-runner, the boss. Lizzie says she dislikes the sense of always scaring her employees slightly, but George finds it pleasurable. He tries never to abuse it, but that special combination of overeager friendliness and fear, as if he’s walking around with a loaded weapon or a live grenade, is just old-fashioned respect.

  Two people, Mary Ann the makeup artist and Marjorie the director of photography, both tell him they’re sorry about his mother. Gordon Downey, the director, has already sent him flowers.

  “Really excellent sound, the footsteps crunching on the cocaine, on Saturday night’s show,” George says to Fred, the long-haired sound designer whose job it is to enhance natural noises—to intensify audio reality, sweeten it.

  “You liked it? Cool.”

  And the production meeting begins, calm and orderly, with each department head posing problems and solutions as they move through the script scene by scene. George will make dozens of choices in the next half hour that will aggregate into the look and sound and feel of the episode. He doesn’t have to do, he must only decide. It’s grand.

  “I don’t mind white at all,” he’s telling the production designer about the proposed color for a fake airport interrogation room.

  “White won’t give you any trouble in post. We’ll have to rebuild that wall.”

  “Can we just attach the RPG to that header?” asks Gordon about a rocket-propelled grenade launcher in another scene. “It only has to be functional from this side, and we can have a plug on that side.”

  “We don’t have to build it, do we?” George asks. “Isn’t there a boneyard where we can get one?” A boneyard, he has learned, is a warehouse where props from old shows and movies are stored for reuse. It’s one of the antique, below-the-line show business words he gets a kick out of saying.

  “They won’t let it out,” the prop woman tells him.

  “We can sell it with effects in post,” Fred the sound guy says about the big-machine-gun sound.

  “Marjorie,” Gordon says, “you have to be able to light the thing.”

  “We can fix that in post too,” she replies.

  The discussion moves onto another scene, in which one of the stars, DEA agent “Cowboy” Quesada, is at home watching TV, and the camera moves around a wall of his apartment to find his girlfriend snorting heroin in the bathroom. The script specifies that Quesada is watching a video of 77 Sunset Strip, the fifties TV show.

  “How much is the clip?” George asks.

  “Eight grand,” Jerry, the line producer, tells him.

  “You’re thinking of a Foy track here?” Gordon asks the director of photography, who nods.

  “In scene twenty-five,” George says, “in Cuba, have we figured out how to make the hurricane look real? It needs to look like Jennie is about to be blown into the sea.”

  “A big Ritter fan won’t do what we want,” the production designer says. “You’re going to need an air mover—you hook it up to a compressor.”

  “Expensive,” the line producer tells George.

  “I’m not worried about cost,” George says, “as much as I am about the time it’s going to take to shoot it.”

  “We can sell the wind in post,” Jerry says.

  “Let’s do an overcranked master on that,” Gordon says, and his first assistant director makes a note.

  “Gordon,” George asks, “is it undercranking or overcranking that makes things look slow-motion?” George can never remember this. And by occasionally exposing his own ignorance, he figures he appears secure in his new-boyhood, an unembarrassed mensch.

  “Overcranking. And George, we’ll use a little person, not a real child, for the smuggler’s kid, right? I got a time problem with kids.”

  “As long as he looks like a kid,” George says. “I mean, we’re going to be pretty close. And he’s got a line.”

  “It’s just ‘Por favor, Papi!’ which we’ll put in in post. And just his body is in the shot, not his head,” Gordon says. “It’s the head with the body that makes little people look like little people.”

  “In the next scene,” one of the prop people says to George, sounding excited and proud, “when the bad guy gets sliced to ribbons in the sugar-cane harvester? We’re getting a yard of actual bioengineered skin, this new stuff called Apligraf that surgeons use. It looks really real. Even feels real.”

  There are a few smiling ewwws around the table. “Nice,” George says, pleased as well as disgusted.

  Over the next hour, George and his staff say another dozen times, “You can do that in post” or “Can we put that in in post?” or “We’ll fix that in post.” And before the meeting is over, George finds himself thinking about his mother, how his equanimity over Edith Hope’s death is causing him more pain than her death, how he’s like the awful Jonathan Pryce character in The Pl
oughman’s Lunch. He hasn’t yet cried, not a tear in eight hours. He thinks, Can we put that in in post?

  At the MBC, the Fifty-ninth Floor and Fifty-nine and (as Featherstone calls it) Five-Nine are proper nouns. Even though Mose himself is only intermittently in the city, the synecdoche is total. It is the floor where Harold Mose and all his senior New York executives have offices—Featherstone; Arnold Vlig, the chief operating officer; Hank Saddler, the head of corporate communications; and a dozen men whose names George doesn’t know. Depending on context and vocal inflection, “Fifty-nine” can be portentous, menacing, flip, or contemptuous.

  The Fifty-ninth Floor wants to lose the question mark in Janeane Garofalo Live? as soon as possible.

  Fifty-nine wants to try selling coffee break sponsorships company-wide.

  No, she’s too skinny for daytime talk. Fifty-nine wants a host for Day-O! who’s more than thirty pounds and fewer than fifty pounds overweight.

  The Fifty-ninth Floor just doesn’t understand why Mr. McCourt is cleared on only sixty-one percent of the affiliates.