Elimination Night

29

Wingwoman



THE FOLLOWING THURSDAY, when finale night arrived, I was on an airplane.

No kidding: At 4:47 p.m., local time—thirteen minutes until opening credits—I was at five thousand feet, and rising. Only this wasn’t a commercial jet, taking me back home to Mom’s place in Long Island. No, it was a Beechcraft Super King Air, a rattly old twin turboprop deal, the engines vibrating at precisely the same frequency as my recently formed headache. There’d been a lot of drinking the previous night, after Sir Harold’s speech. And who could blame us, really, after everything we’d been through? Still: There I was, in an actually-quite-flattering jumpsuit, with a parachute on my back, and a steel frame over my chest to support a wireless camera unit. Next to me: an instructor and a technician, the latter recalibrating some vital piece of mobile broadcasting equipment.

Oh, and yeah: Joey was right behind me. They had him in the “full James Bond”—tuxedo jacket, white shirt, bow tie, striped pants, cummerbund, spit-polished shoes… the works. Not to forget the Project Icon-branded crash helmet, radio headset with microphone, and—most important of all—matching black parachute.

He grinned and made the triple ring sign.

Joey, being sober, was the only member of the Project Icon staff without a skull-crushing hangover—and he’d spent most of the day being insufferable about it: making a high-pitched, nondirectional humming noise during rehearsal, for example. Or mock-vomiting in front of Bibi. (This had backfired somewhat when he actually did vomit.)

We kept gaining altitude.

Six thousand feet… seven… eight…

In case you’re wondering: I told Len and Dick everything. More or less everything, anyhow. When I skimped on details, it was to protect Joey. The details are never kind to Joey.

I started with Milwaukee, and Bibi’s threat to set me up. And then I moved on to the part about how my pills had later gone missing—what a coincidence!—and reappeared right there in the bathroom of Joey’s trailer. Naturally, I lied and said Mitch had discovered them in good time. (There was no need to get into the whole thing about Maison Chelsea, especially with regards to Joey’s tongue and my mouth.) I even came clean about Crowther, believe it or not. The helicopter, the yacht… the fact that Chaz Chipford himself was right there, by the fireplace, drink in hand, those improbably dimensioned women fawning all over him. The only detail I left out was the appearance of Bill. It was irrelevant; and besides, I’d signed that confidentiality agreement, and didn’t want to push my luck. As for the climax of my tale: It was Crowther’s revelation that he knew about Joey’s admission to Mount Cypress Medical Center, seconds after Mitch had texted me. I didn’t mention the aspirin, of course. “Someone must have tipped him off,” I said, hoping they’d suspect, as I did, that it was Bibi.

Or Teddy, of course.

Or both of them, working together: Team Evil.

I was in that room for what seemed like hours, going through all of this. When I was done, Len looked drained of what little color he’d had to begin with. Dick, on the other hand, could barely have smiled any wider. I doubted that he’d ever had a more interesting day. Then the pair of them stood up, thanked me, told me they’d look into it, thanked me again, and hustled me out of the door.

It was over. Done.

Now for the consequences.

I didn’t actually see Len again until the day before the finale, when Sir Harold made his “presentation” to the Project Icon staff. The Big Corp CEO was supposed to have delivered this in person, of course—it was an annual fixture—but he couldn’t, on account of his ever-worsening Bavarian problem. Instead, the crew set-up a video link between Greenlit Studios and his hotel suite in Berlin, and we awaited his address in the seats usually reserved for the audience.

Eventually, Sir Harold’s face appeared in triplicate on the stadiumgrade monitors.

“Can he see us?” someone whispered.

No one was sure.

“Guten Abend, Kollegen,” he began, smiling weakly. He looked every bit as bad as I feared he would: as though every organ in his body were struggling to function. His voice was half-gone, too. All that testimony, no doubt. The Germans had him in court eight hours a day. No life for an octogenarian—even if he was a billionaire.

“For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of visiting beautiful Deutschland,” he went on—without any discernible sarcasm—“that means, ‘Good evening, colleagues.’”

Introduction over, the camera panned out jerkily, to reveal a hunched, scowling figure next to him.

“Oh, Jesus,” Len groaned from the front row, not bothering to keep his voice down.

“As some of you over there in Hollywood will know,” said Sir Harold, gesturing sideways, “this is Rabbit’s Director of Global Advertising, my good friend Bertram Roberts.”

“Hello,” said Bert, his mouth curled in a way that suggested he was suffering from profound dyspepsia. Given his general posture, this wouldn’t have been surprising.

“So, over the past few days, Bert and I have been looking at the Jefferson numbers for season thirteen,” revealed Sir Harold, ominously. “And all I can say is—Wow, what a comeback. Amazing what the survival instinct can do, eh? Really, very impressive indeed.” He mimed applause, reminding me of the time he’d done the same thing in Bibi’s movie theater. “Congratulations to you all. And to think, it wasn’t so long ago I doubted you’d even make it to the live episodes! Well, now there’s hope. I’m delighted to say that Bert and I have put together some projections, run them past accounts, and we’re in a position to renew Project Icon for a fourteenth season…”—the beginnings of a cheer—“as long as the ratings of tomorrow night’s finale are enough to raise your season average to the number one position. Because number one, as you know, is what Big Corp is all about.”

A confused pause: The cheer was on hold.

Without a spreadsheet of the Jefferson numbers for every episode to consult—not to mention a calculator—it was impossible to figure out exactly how many viewers we needed to make up for the show’s atrocious performance at the beginning of the season. A lot, obviously. Still, we’d been doing well lately.

Outstandingly well.

Fortunately—or unfortunately—Bert was on hand to provide clarification. “Thirty million,” he said, with a tiny, don’t-hold-me-to-that shrug. “Should be enough. Thirty-one would be more comfortable, of course. We think it’s achievable.”

“So there you have it,” Sir Harold concluded. “Chins up, everyone. You’re almost there.”

He reached forward, and the screen went blank.

Muttering in the auditorium. A few groans. But there was hope.

That was when Joey put up his hand and said, “Hey, guys: crazy idea. How about—”



So here’s how the opening of the season thirteen finale would go: In a witty reference to the most notorious moment of his career—if not all of rock ’n’ roll history—Joey Lovecraft would throw himself out of a light aircraft at ten thousand feet and land on the roof of Greenlit Studios, where a band would be waiting, already grinding out the lustful, swampy, utterly degenerate groove of “Hell on Wheels.” And at the precise moment Joey’s feet touched down, rockets would burst into the sky, the King of Sing would release the hordes of tortured banshees from his lungs, the band would stop—epic silence!—and a lone guitar, its amp stack set to a volume louder than a Nordic god in a volcanothrowing rage, would begin the riff that had helped conceive a million babies.

Dn.

Dn-nn-nah.

Dn-nn-nah-nh! Bleeeowww-neow-neow…

Thirty million viewers. Like Bert had said, it was achievable. Or as Joey had put it: “Sometimes you’ve just gotta grab yourself by the nuts and reach the f*ckin’ high note, man.”

Len hadn’t taken any convincing to go along with Joey’s plan.

Neither had Ed or David.

It was a go. And because I was the only producer on Project Icon’s staff with any skydiving experience—thanks to all those trips to the Keys with Brock—I was appointed Joey’s jump mate, or wingwoman, or whatever you wanted to call it. The camera practically welded to my chest would act as backup for the one on Joey’s helmet.

Through the plane’s windows, Hollywood gleamed. The sun was at that point in the sky where everything turns to molten gold: windows, roofs, street signs, swimming pools… The plane banked unevenly. We were circling now. We were ready.

The technician patted me on the arm and held up his right hand: It was 4:55 p.m.

Five minutes to go.

“You okay?” I shouted over to Joey, pushing my headset aside, so I could hear his reply.

“Why?” he yelled back. “You gonna push me?”

Before I had a chance to answer: A tone in my ear, like an early-1950s synthesizer. It was my phone. The crew had jury-rigged it to the communications system, so I could stay in touch with Len on the ground. Snapping the foam cups back over my ears, I fumbled for the cord that dangled by my right ear. There was a button on it somewhere that let me take calls. If I could just… dah… yes, that was it…

A click. And then—

“We know who did it,” announced Len, his voice so clear, it was as though he were inside my frontal cortex. “Dick is done with his dicking. I just came out of the meeting.”

“The leak?” I said, looking over at Joey. His eyes were closed and he was singing. Oblivious.

“Well, yeah, we know that,” scoffed Len. “We also know who stole your pills.”

“Who? I mean, how—”

The technician raised his hand again, this time tucking his thumb into his palm.

Four minutes.

“Security footage from Joey’s trailer,” said Len. “I didn’t even know we had a camera in there, to be honest. Turns out Mitch is paranoid. Likes to check up on Joey once in a while. He’d deleted the tapes, of course—but luckily he uploads a copy to a server farm in India. It took Dick a while. But he got it. It’s unmissable.”

“Len, just tell me: Who was it?”

“On the tape, it looks like a bloody cat burglar. Black turtleneck. Leather gloves. Baseball hat, pulled down low. He sneaks in there—your prescription bottle in his hand—fumbles around a bit, then puts it right on the countertop, next to Joey’s toothpaste. The poor old f*cking junkie didn’t stand a chance. We probably wouldn’t have been able to make out the guy’s face if he hadn’t spent so long posing in front of the mirror. Moron. Anyhow, when we zoomed in on the tape—”

Three fingers now.

“WHO?”

“Wayne Shoreline.”

“What?”

“Oh, it gets better. As soon as he was done, he made a phone call.”

“You could trace the call?”

“No, Sherlock: We had audio. We just listened to him speak.”

“And?”

“He said, ‘Nigel, my love, it’s me. It’s done. See you tonight.’ Then Crowther’s voice comes on the line, you can hear it almost as clear as if he were on speaker. He goes, ‘I’m proud of you, pumpkin,’ then hangs up.”

“So Wayne is gay!” I spluttered.

“No, he’s not gay, Bill. Jesus, don’t you know anything?”

“Huh?”

“You don’t seriously think Nigel Crowther was born with a penis, do you? Please. He’s straight. He just likes things a bit… twisted. Anyhow: Turns out Wayne is hopelessly in love with Crowther. Totally obsessed. Would do anything to please him. Crowther realized that a while ago and was using him, like he uses everybody. He even promised Wayne a job on The Talent Machine—as a judge, this time—if he helped destroy Project Icon. But it’s all water under the bridge now, I suppose. Stealing prescription drugs is a felony, and we’ve got videotaped proof. The police should be here in a few minutes. They’re going to cuff him after the show.”

“Wow,” I said, taking a breath.

The technician was showing only two fingers now. He began opening the cargo hatch.

“And the leaks?” I asked, almost forgetting.

“Nico DeLuca,” Dick replied. “The in-house barista. Real name: Kevin Smiles. He’s a British tabloid journalist—hence the ridiculous accent—who came over to Hollywood in the eighties to set up his own scumbag news agency. Employed by none other than Midas Industries. But it’s not what you think. Teddy and Bibi were on our side. They’d studied the UK version of The Talent Machine—how Crowther trashed his own contestants in the tabloids for the sake of the ratings—and they wanted Two Svens to do the same thing, to save Project Icon. But he refused. The old Swede’s too soft. So they just did it themselves—and it worked, obviously. Smiles was selling stories left, right, and bloody center. He even managed to bribe one of Joey’s girls, Mu, into giving him the scoop on his relapse. Here’s the twist, though: Crowther also has Smiles’s agency on retainer—he keeps a boatful of his photographers moored alongside The Talent and the Glory at all times. Whatever Teddy leaked to Smiles, Crowther immediately found out from the captain of the good ship paparazzi.”

One finger. The hatch was now fully open. I could barely hear anything over the wind.

“So Bibi and Teddy weren’t trying to destroy the show,” I said, holding the mic up to my mouth.

“Of course not. If Bibi had wanted a job on The Talent Machine, she would have accepted Crowther’s offer last summer. As for her threat to you: Coincidence. She and Edouard have been going through a tough time. If you’d have confronted him about the cue cards, he would have thought it had come via Bibi, and it would have made things worse, so she had no choice but try and shut you down. She feels pretty bad now, after what happened with Wayne. She wants to apologize.”

Joey put an arm around my shoulder. He was ready.

Len got off the line, and his voice was replaced in my ear by the live feed from Greenlit Studios.

Wayne was mid intro.

“… high above us at this VERY SECOND… in an airplane circling the studio… we’re going LIVE…”

Joey winked.

The red light on his helmet cam came on. We were on air.

“Look at me,” said Joey, suddenly, grabbing my arm to pull me closer. “Look at my face.”

“Joey, I’m okay. Stop it. I’ve jumped out of a plane before, hundreds of times.”

“No, look at me, Bungalow Bill,” he said. “I want you to remember one thing… the golden rule.”

“Huh?”

“RATINGS,” he yelled, unstrapping his chute in one fluid movement and hurling it out of the open hatch. I screamed and reached out to grab him, but he ducked away.

“THEY’RE IMPORTANT.”

That grin.

Then he was gone.





Since the conclusion of Project Icon’s thirteenth season, two articles regarding the fate of the show have appeared on the front page of ShowBiz magazine. They are reprinted here with permission.

DEATH OF AN ICON

EXCLUSIVE FOR SHOWBIZ

BY CHAZ CHIPFORD

AFTER months of will-he-won’t-he speculation, Big Corp honcho Sir Harold Killoch has FINALLY done the deed. As of last night, Project Icon is no more.

Dead.

Gone.

An ex-singing competition.

There were bitter tears of regret and humiliation last night at Greenlit Studios, where the long-suffering Rabbit warblefest had just wrapped its unlucky thirteenth season.

Ironically enough, ratings for the two-hour finale are projected to be up by a THIRD over last year, thanks largely to a near-fatal stunt by celebrity judge Joey Lovecraft. The Honeyload wildman had been scheduled to open the show with a well-rehearsed skydive over Hollywood, but changed the plan at the last minute, tearing off his parachute and throwing it from the cargo hatch of the Beechcraft Super King Air as it circled Greenlit Studios at ten thousand feet. Mr. Lovecraft then appeared to leap to his death—prompting a record 924,391 calls to 911 in the Greater Los Angeles area (and a small explosion at Rabbit’s call processing facility in Eagle Rock, CA)—only to pull the cord at the last moment on a backup ’chute, concealed within his tux. The producers’ shock turned to anger when Mr. Lovecraft veered badly off course, ending up just south of downtown in the LA River—from which he had to be fished, sans hairpiece, and with a broken toe. The incident brought to mind Mr. Lovecraft’s infamous parachute-less jump over Manhattan in ’83, which prompted President Reagan to name him “Joey Dumbass” during a Rose Garden speech.

Result? The show’s opening number of “Hell on Wheels”—which Mr. Lovecraft had been due to perform on the roof of Greenlit Studios alongside the L.A. Philharmonic and a returning choir of Nepalese lentil famine refugees—had to be substituted in haste. Jimmy Nugget did the honors by yodeling his way heroically through the Tom Waits classic “Downtown Train,” and was later rewarded for his efforts by winning the season. Meanwhile, a junior-level Project Icon employee who had accompanied Mr. Lovecraft on his stunt above Hollywood had to be rushed to Mount Cypress Medical Center upon landing.

“Having not seen Mr. Lovecraft’s second ’chute open, she believed he had committed suicide,” said a spokesman for the LAFD, whose paramedics were first at the scene.

In the end, however, neither this chaotic opening spectacle, nor the extraordinary succession of scandals that have rocked Greenlit Studios of late, were enough to make up for Project Icon’s abject early-to-mid season performance—during which it temporarily lost the title of “America’s most-watched TV show” to Bet You Can’t Juggle That! (in spite of the tragic alligator mishap that halted work on the latter show for ten days). Indeed, Sir Harold—whose Big Corp empire counts the Rabbit network among its more profitable subsidiaries—had warned Icon staffers in advance that if the finale didn’t grab a large enough audience to give the franchise a season-long AVERAGE in the top position across all networks, then it would face immediate cancellation.

As ShowBiz can exclusively reveal: Old Harry made good on that threat last night.

“Last night’s finale was your elimination night,” begins a message from Sir Harold that will land in the inboxes of Project Icon’s cast and crew this morning (an advance copy was seen by ShowBiz). “You gave it your best shot—and for that I congratulate you—but your best wasn’t good enough. This is the end of the road for you. You should be proud of all you’ve achieved; of the history you’ve made. And I hope you will all join me in wishing Nigel Crowther and his team at The Talent Machine all the very best as they go about the hard work of reinvigorating this genre for a new generation of Rabbit viewers.”

The official ratings for the Project Icon finale, due out from the Jefferson Metrics Organization early this morning, are expected to show that it prevented the franchise from meeting its season-average target by a mere eighth of a percentage point—a fact that will only heighten the anguish of Icon staffers being laid off. No matter how close, however: ShowBiz has been assured that Sir Harold’s mind is made up. He is said to be looking forward to a “fresh start in Rabbit prime time” when he returns to the United States this week from Germany, where he and a team of senior Big Corp executives have been assisting the Bundestag with an investigation into televised bingo irregularities. A settlement in that case is now expected within days—finally putting an end to the bizarre and costly scandal that has distracted Sir Harold for several months.

As for those dejected souls at Project Icon: They will be issued their pink slips before noon today—a humbling end to twelve years of popculture domination. Reached on his cell phone last night, supervising producer Leonard Braithwaite could utter only grotesque personal insults directed at the writer of this article. Meanwhile, a cooler-headed response to the death of the once-untouchable franchise was supplied by Mr. Crowther, who is currently relaxing off the coast of Malibu aboard his fifty-million-dollar superyacht, The Talent and the Glory.

“For me, this decision is so overdue, it isn’t even a case of ‘rest in peace,’” he said, laughing heartily. “More like, ‘Goodbye and good bloody riddance.’”

Mr. Crowther’s The Talent Machine will air in the fall.

ANNOUNCEMENT

FROM THE EDITORIAL BOARD

OF SHOWBIZ MAGAZINE

With great regret, ShowBiz announces today that Executive News Editor Chaz Chipford is leaving the magazine. The mutually agreed upon decision follows an internal investigation into Mr. Chipford’s “exclusive” story regarding the cancellation of top-rated reality TV franchise Project Icon, which appeared on the front page of this magazine three months ago under the headline, “Death of an Icon.” Once again, ShowBiz apologizes without reservation for this article, and any distress it may have caused, especially to the cast and crew of that show.

An internal report produced by the editorial board of ShowBiz has established that Mr. Chipford filed the story in question with a personal guarantee of its veracity. Given this publication’s trust in Mr. Chipford, not to mention his storied fifteen-year career as an awardwinning entertainment correspondent, it was sent to press only minutes after Project Icon’s season thirteen finale aired, while simultaneously breaking on our website and Twitter feed. Alas, barely an hour later, an extraordinary turn of events proved Mr. Chipford’s report both premature and wildly inaccurate: News emerged from Germany that Sir Harold Killoch, proprietor of the Rabbit network—home of Project Icon since its debut—had been arrested and imprisoned in Berlin, without bail, on charges related to the manipulation of televised bingo games in that country.

As our readers will be aware, the arrest triggered a succession plan at Rabbit’s parent company, Big Corp, and at an emergency board meeting in Los Angeles, Sir Harold’s estranged brother, George Killoch, was appointed new Chairman and CEO of the family-controlled media conglomerate. It came as little surprise in Hollywood when Mr. Killoch chose immediately to renew Project Icon for another season, with an option over five more. After all, Mr. Killoch was the first to discover the show’s format on Belgian television, and had worked tirelessly to overcome his elder brother’s resistance to commissioning a pilot.

Mr. Chipford’s departure comes several weeks after he was placed on administrative leave. Meanwhile, ShowBiz has appointed Kevin Smiles, a British-born editor and former agency owner, in a new role as Supervising News Editor. Mr. Smiles will take responsibility for covering Project Icon’s fourteenth season, and the circumstances surrounding the cancellation of The Talent Machine after just one episode and a reported hundred million dollar loss by Rabbit. The muchvaunted show, created by former Project Icon judge Nigel Crowther, attracted only five million viewers—a quarter of what Crowther himself had once claimed was necessary to avoid a franchise being “put out of its misery”.

His theory was proved correct.

**UPDATE**

A trial date of early January is now likely for Sir Harold Killoch, in the sensational bingo scandal that has gripped Germany and sent Big Corp’s stock price reeling on Wall Street. Meanwhile, prosecutors in Berlin are soon expected to outline their case against the Big Corp mogul, with reports suggesting the evidence may rest on a “smoking gun e-mail,” sent to all senior Rabbit network executives, ordering them to “double-delete electronic files” related to Rabbit Deutschland’s bingo-related operations. Among those who allegedly received the order: Nigel Crowther, who currently has plenty of his own financial problems, following the repossession last week of his yacht, The Talent and the Glory.

Leaked details of the e-mail indicate it was written in code, with Sir Harold using his mother’s native tongue—a tribal language from the South African region of Nbdala—to maintain secrecy. It remains a mystery how anyone outside Big Corp’s inner circle could have intercepted—or indeed translated—such a message. There have been persistent rumors, however, that Big Corp was infiltrated by at least one intelligence officer working for the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence agency. The BND has neither confirmed nor denied these rumors, but one popular German website says it has confirmed the undercover agent’s cryptic, single-letter call sign: “Z.”