Chapter 5
Stolen Gods
At age twenty-eight, instead of being a promising young screenwriter who has just bought a custom-tailored tux for the Oscars, I’m a freelance propmaster whose biggest claim to fame so far is that Renn Ivins remembers my name when our paths cross during a shoot. This wouldn’t bother me so much if I thought that my screenplays were MFBS (masturbatory-fantasy bullshit), but they aren’t. They’re original, morally complex stories like Truffaut’s and Kieslowski’s, but I’m in Hollywood, not in France or Poland or even New York. Needless to say, no one gives a shit.
It could be that I don’t fit in here the way I should, despite going to UCLA and spending the last ten years of my life in southern California. Countless people, I’m pretty sure, live large portions of their lives within pissing distance of the 101, the 110, and the 405, but don’t ever really feel like they fit in. It depends in part on what you expect from your life—if you want to be rich and famous, this probably isn’t the best place to start, paradoxical as that must sound. You would probably be better off writing screenplays and making short films in Omaha or Minneapolis for a while and approaching Hollywood from an oblique angle instead of head-on like I did.
At eighteen, I showed up for freshman year at a big, sun-dried university in a place that wasn’t anything like the town between Ann Arbor and Detroit where I grew up. I brought along huge expectations with my extra-long twin-set sheet and new gym socks, and a long-distance relationship that, no surprise, went off the rails a few weeks before Thanksgiving. I liked many of the differences between here and home, but it wasn’t like the best film studios had their doors wide open, their sexy receptionists waiting to take me upstairs to see the executives with all the biggest stars on speed dial.
I thought college would be different from high school, filled with charismatic, friendly weirdos, but after a year or so of living in student squalor at UCLA, I realized that the rest of the world, Hollywood in particular, is no different from the tenth grade. It’s probably much worse, because the people in charge have real power. They decide who makes what films, and how, and these are the films that the rest of the world flocks to see. The studio executives, the directors and producers and marketing millionaires, many of them no more evolved than newly pubescent twelve-year-olds, are responsible for the images America beams out to the billions on the planet who aren’t Americans. That movie about the two idiots who can’t remember where they parked their car because they were too high the night before? This is the cinematic ambassador we deliver to the rest of the world, ninety minutes of Grade-D eye candy that forever corrupts the gray matter of twelve-year-olds in Tokyo or confirms the low opinion that the teashop owner in New Delhi has had of Americans ever since a group of fat, belligerent tourists from Hartford staggered into his shop and complained that his teacups were dirty.
I was in the drama club in high school, and instead of trying out for the plays, I stuck to the stage crew. I learned how to work hard, move quickly, and let the actors and director take the credit for a good production. Even at fifteen, I understood that all clubs have their ritual hazings, especially ones where members of both sexes find themselves in close, competitive relationships, an underpaid teacher barely in charge of the whole hormonal gang. A Hollywood movie set isn’t much different. I get most of my paying work for Sony, and it comes in more or less regularly, but it’s not like I’m flying to Maui every other month to spend time at my second home. There aren’t many union or guild jobs anymore for people who aren’t in front of the camera; like everywhere else, the movie industry is trying to make as much money as possible by spending as little as it can on production.
Before the mostly regular Sony gigs, I worked as an assistant in set decoration at Paramount after spending six years at UCLA, the last two in the graduate screenwriting program. I moved to props within a year and thought that I’d only have to do this kind of work a little while longer before I’d have saved some money and found a backer so that I could start my own production company, Binocular Spectacular. Needless to say, it hasn’t happened yet. The truth is, without a friend in a high place, you often have to start on the lowest rung in the film industry, which is porn. You work as an editorial assistant to some coke-sniffing greaseball director out in the Valley, and you learn how to use the editing software and you pretend you don’t mind and maybe if you’re lucky, you move up to some B-level but more legit studio, and then from there, you keep going. If you’re lucky.
There’s no way around it. This town is superstitious about everything, especially good luck. If you have it, they love you. If you don’t, or don’t outwardly appear to, no one will give you the time of day or night. They don’t want to be tainted by you or your ugly luck.
The job I’ve been doing at Sony, however, isn’t without its rewards. I get to work closely with the actors, making sure the briefcase opens the way it’s supposed to, that the wristwatch the Eisenhower-era lawyer wears is the right one. Before I became propmaster, I sometimes had to run miscellaneous errands that other production people were supposed to do but managed to squirrel out of, like finding the star her favorite shampoo, which could only be purchased at salons in Palm Springs and Miami, or I had to race across town to pick up a prescription for the constipated cinematographer who didn’t want anyone else to know about his affliction.
The two movies I’ve liked working on the most during the time I’ve been at Sony have starred Renn Ivins. His son and I were undergrads together at UCLA for two years. When he was a freshman and I was a junior, we took a class together, a film studies course in which the professor kept trying to convince us that Godard was much more brilliant than Truffaut, which made me furious. The professor gave me a C because I questioned his arguments on a few occasions, but it seemed to me that each time I called him on something, he had no real basis for his claims. Ivins’s son didn’t ever say anything in class, and the couple of times I tried to talk to him, he was polite but it was clear that he didn’t really want to have anything to do with me. He played a game on his phone a lot under the desk and wrote in a notebook that had a picture of a black horse on its cover, the kind of notebook a girl would carry in the fourth grade, but maybe he thought he was being ironic.
I wondered about him, wondered what it was like to have Renn Ivins for a father, someone who has managed to make more of the right films than the wrong ones, though The Writing on the Wall from eight or nine years ago was a disaster, an ambitious one, I guess, but it ended up being a joke because Ivins had no business trying to play a transsexual opera singer. He must have thought that he hadn’t taken enough risks with his career, but seeing him in scene after scene with those ridiculous blond wigs and that frosted lipstick seriously made me wonder what kind of drugs he’d been taking when he read the script and talked to his agent about it. Didn’t he know that after Tootsie, all that needed to happen with the gender-swap thing had already happened?
Not long after he played the tranny, he made The Zoologist, one of the best movies I’ve ever seen, and all was forgiven. He directed and had a small role in it, and Zoologist is different from all the other movies he’s been associated with. The title character is a forty-nine-year-old woman who lives by herself in an old Texas ranch house with a huge number of stuffed animals, the toy kind, not the taxidermied. They all have names and she spends a lot of her time making clothes and writing little plays for them that she then stages. It’s an amazing film, one I wish I’d written, and maybe at some point I would have if a person named Pamela Liston hadn’t written it first.
I know a lot about Ivins, and though he knows next to nothing about me, he does remember my name when our paths cross at Sony. I know that he likes to eat maraschino cherries right from the jar when he’s out of sorts, probably because he’s worried about his business manager embezzling millions from him, or some con artist in Germany is going from city to city impersonating him and getting laid every time he turns around. I had to go out once during a blinding downpour and buy a jar of cherries for him. I know that he doesn’t like to gamble, even though he likes Vegas. He took part in a celebrity poker tournament last year because the prize was a half-million-dollar donation to the winner’s favorite charity. Ivins’s was an AIDS hospice in Pasadena where a friend of his from college died in the early 1990s. He won the tournament too, though I’m not sure how, because if he really doesn’t like gambling, how was he good enough to beat the other guys who do like to gamble and do it often? He might be lying about not liking it, or else he used to like it but doesn’t anymore. I blog about him sometimes and read other blogs about him, and I have some of his old costumes, items he left on the set and I collected. If I hadn’t, these things would have moldered away in the studio’s huge wardrobe storage area: three white T-shirts and a pair of running socks, a couple of pairs of khaki shorts, a pair of Moroccan leather sandals, and three hats—a derby, a straw Panama, and a wool fedora. I also have a pair of gold cuff links that he wore in Pacific Coast, a wristwatch (a stainless steel Seiko, not a Rolex), a pair of reading glasses (+2.0 magnification), and a tattered paperback copy of The Stranger(which he told a film critic at the New York Times is his favorite book, but I’m not sure if he’s actually read it. I’ve never seen him reading anything but a script). I’ve managed to obtain other clothes and trinkets of his, but I sold them on a sort of black-market website. I don’t sell anything on eBay because someone from Sony would probably catch me. Other things of his that I’ve picked up—an empty cherry jar, a half-used bar of Irish Spring (two stray hairs included), an old razor, a blank checking deposit slip, a few yellow pencils with teeth marks near the erasers, a stray wooden button, receipts from Starbucks, salt packets from the Habit and In-N-Out Burger, several sticks of Doublemint gum, silver foil intact.
Perhaps the best find of anything that I’ve ever collected: his cell phone numbers. They were written on a little yellow slip of paper that he’d wedged into the frame around one of his dressing-room mirrors. I suppose it might be hard to keep the two different numbers straight, but if he can remember all of those lines, I don’t really get it. I knew they were his because I called them to make sure. When he answered, I said nothing and hung up. He sounded like he’d been sleeping, and even if he hadn’t been, I knew that I was being a jerk, not saying anything, not even “Sorry, wrong number.”
If I ever did call and talk to him, if I ever said who I am and asked for his tolerance and patience and he agreed to talk to me for a little while, I have the interview questions ready. I’d like to make a documentary about him. One of the reasons I’m so interested in him is because he’s the kind of actor other actors respect, and he doesn’t ever really seem to f*ck things up, aside from the tranny movie (which John Waters was supposed to direct, but the rumor is, he wanted to cast Keanu Reeves in the lead, not Renn Ivins). I’m not sure how Ivins keeps doing it, how so much of what he touches seems to blossom or at least not to wilt. My documentary project probably won’t ever happen, but if I did have a chance to ask him my questions, I have a pretty good idea how he’d respond to most of them.
THE IMAGINARY IVINS INTERVIEW
Jim M.: Of which role are you most proud?
Renn Ivins: I like something about all of the roles I’ve played, but if I had to choose, it’d probably be Javier’s Sons. We shot most of it in Peru and I got to see Machu Picchu for the first time. It’s really an amazing place, and to think they built it before the discovery of electricity or the invention of the steam engine.
I also felt even more respect for human rights workers after making this film. They’re extraordinarily brave people, living and working in strange, hostile places, and fighting for abstractions like justice, peace, and equality, things that most of us take for granted in America.
JM: What was your least favorite role?
RI (laughs): Oh, I’ve liked every film I’ve made.
JM: That’s a diplomat’s answer. What’s the real answer?
RI: If you really have to know, I’d say that it was Broken English. Not because I didn’t like the cast or the director, but a lot of things didn’t turn out the way they were supposed to with that film. We were going to shoot it in Toronto, which is where quite a few films are made now because Canada doesn’t charge as much as a lot of places do for permits and other things you need to make a film. But we ended up having to shoot most of it in Cleveland, which was fine, overall, but I’m still not really sure why. Also, one of the stunt people, a young woman named Paisley Braun, died while driving a car off a bridge, which is supposed to be a pretty routine stunt. You can imagine that someone dying is enough to make any shoot tougher than usual.
JM: Yeah, I can see how that’d be true. I heard somewhere that you didn’t like making Cloudburst, that it’s a movie you wish you’d never been associated with. But I love it, and the reviews were really good, weren’t they?
RI: I don’t know who told you that I didn’t like making Cloudburst. I liked everything about it. Who’s spreading these rumors? Where did you hear that?
JM: I read it online somewhere. I don’t remember where.
RI: Whoever wrote that is full of shit.
JM: Now that you’ve achieved a level of success that most people can only fantasize about, what’s next?
RI: I don’t know if I’m really that successful. It doesn’t—
JM (laughing): Of course you are. Unless you’re doing an independent project, you usually make a minimum of nine or ten million a picture. You don’t think that’s success?
RI: Financially, sure. But there are other things that matter more. I’d like to take a year or two off and travel for leisure, rather than only for work. I’ve traveled all over the world already, but I don’t usually have much time to relax and sightsee when I’m overseas. I’d also like to write more screenplays. I really loved writing Bourbon at Dusk, and even though the whole process was pretty arduous—I nearly gave up on it about five times—it was immensely rewarding. More than acting is. Maybe even more than directing.
JM: If you don’t mind me asking, I’m wondering if you’ve always been a ladies’ man, even before you became famous.
RI (hesitates): That’s your question?
JM: I think a lot of guys want to know how you do it, but they don’t have the guts to ask.
RI: How I do what?
JM: How you handle all of the sexual attention.
RI: Those are different questions.
JM (pausing): You’re right. I guess what I really want to know is, how hard is it being faithful if you have so many women throwing themselves at you all hours of the day?
RI: I’m certainly not a ladies’ man, and I don’t know if I have that many women throwing themselves at me. Certainly not at all hours of the day.
JM: Come on. Of course you do.
RI: Some days I do have to, you know, tactfully decline the offer of a date or two, but in general, it’s not like women are lining up around the block to give me blow jobs.
JM: I’m sure you’ve had your share.
RI: You sound like my ex-wives.
JM: They both said that?
RI: Yes. On many, many occasions. If I had a dollar for every time . . . you know the saying.
JM: Your second ex-wife, Melinda Byers—
RI: I remember her name. Thanks.
JM: Your second ex-wife has a book coming out next month, a tell-all about the four and a half years she was married to you. What do you think about this? Didn’t you have her sign some kind of prenup so she wouldn’t be able to reveal any of the secrets of your marriage?
RI: Secrets of my marriage? What qualify as secrets of my marriage? Do you mean like how often we had sex? Or how much she stole from me to give to her ex-husband, who used the money to buy heroin? Isn’t that all common knowledge by now?
JM: I guess it’s a given that you wouldn’t be too thrilled about Ms. Byers becoming an author.
RI: She’s not an author. She’s an opportunist.
JM: And a scumbag.
RI: Those are your words, not mine. Make sure that’s clear.
JM: I’m sorry that you have to put up with these kind of things.
RI: The price of fame. Needless to say, most people can’t afford it.
JM: I heard she’s calling her book This Isn’t Gold.
RI: Not a bad title, I guess.
JM: Does she mean it as in “all that glitters”?
RI: I suppose she does. I haven’t read it.
JM: Will you?
RI: Not unless I’m kidnapped and threatened with beheading if I don’t.
JM: What about your first wife? Are you two on good terms? Is she going to write a tell-all memoir too?
RI: Whatever Lucy’s faults might be, she doesn’t kiss and tell.
JM: What are her faults?
RI: I don’t really want to talk about her. Water under the bridge.
JM: Of course it is. But it would still be interesting to hear what you think of her.
RI: I almost never talk about my exes, but I will say that she’s a decent person, very smart, and I know that my work schedule was pretty hard on her while we were together, especially during the last seven or eight years. She also has a short temper. She’s impatient and holds grudges much too long, and while we were married, she was prone to believing the worst. She still is, I think.
JM: You left her for Melinda. I suppose in that case, she was right to assume the worst.
RI: I’d really rather not talk about this. As I said, it’s water under the bridge.
JM: How would you describe your relationship with your children?
RI: We’re good friends. I love them, and I’m pretty sure that they love me.
JM: I read somewhere that your daughter is about to finish med school. You must be really proud of her. What does your son do for a living? I looked him up online, but there wasn’t much information about what he’s doing right now.
RI: He’s thinking about going to law school. I think he’s doing some online trading too.
JM: I’ve always wondered how he reacted when you made Parachute Point and played Wickley Ryerson’s father, who I think was probably the same age as Will at the time. Was your son jealous when he saw it and he had to watch you doing all of the fun things fathers sometimes do with their sons, like when you took Wickley to the park to fly a kite or when you taught him to swim the front crawl or gave him advice about how to talk to girls? Did he think you meant it when your character said “I love you” to Wickley’s character?
RI (long pause): I think Will has always been pretty good at separating fantasy from reality.
JM: You hesitated before answering. What’s the real story?
RI: That is the real story. Will and I have a complex, constantly evolving relationship. Believe it or not, we’re not very much alike. And that’s just fine. He should be his own person.
JM: Just a couple of more questions. What’s Renn short for?
RI: Renaldo, but I’ve gone by Renn since I was about thirteen.
JM: Why not just one “n”?
RI: I don’t know. I like two.
JM: Okay, now for one more: what’s the story with you and Elise Connor?
RI (hesitates): We’re close friends. She did a stunning job in Bourbon at Dusk. I think she’ll be remembered when the awards season starts.
JM: I’ve heard that you two are a couple and that it’s serious.
RI: She’s important to me.
JM: She’s a lot younger than you are.
RI: Yes, I’m aware of that. What’s your point?
JM: No point. I suppose I’m just stating the obvious.
RI: That’s not necessary.
As you can see, I’ve given him a few quills. He’s not without his defenses—to get to where he is, you have to be tough, but I think he keeps the darker side of his personality, which I know is there, pretty well under wraps most of the time. I’ve only seen him have one real temper tantrum, and that was when a sound guy kept hitting the top of his head with a boom mic. I think the sound guy might have been stoned, or else he was just sleep-deprived. Some of the crew couldn’t stifle their laughter when they saw Renn getting bonked again and again, and the guffaws, no surprise, made him angrier. The sound guy was told to leave the set, but they let him come back the next day. He was union, so that was part of it, I’m sure. Renn has sometimes gotten a little grouchy about the catering, and he also complains if there’s even the smallest chance he’ll look fat onscreen—this is one thing he’s pretty adamant about with the wardrobe people, unless the role requires him to look paunchy, but I can’t think of more than one or two movies where this was the case. I don’t think he takes roles where he’s required to look bad, unless there’s a huge transformation somewhere in the script where he ends up looking like himself again by the middle or end.
He’s going to be releasing Bourbon at Dusk soon, a film that he directed and co-wrote. I’ve heard it could win a little (or a lot) of everything—Golden Globes, Oscars, BAFTAs, SAGs. It was only a finalist at Cannes, but that is still a solid accomplishment. After his big trip to France, however, he has had to come back down to earth very fast because he agreed to do a cameo in the film I’m working on right now, More Liar’s Poker, which isn’t about poker, instead, two rival hitmen organizations that are hired to kill each other. Ivins is playing a retired hitman who is like a hitman guru. It’s a nothing movie (which is a sequel to, yes, Liar’s Poker), but he’s got one of the few slightly less dull roles because the director is his friend, as is one of the two stars, Wells Bradford, which is a fake name, but his real one, Hubert Smids, isn’t exactly marquee material.
Ivins is only in one scene, but it’s an important one—five minutes, which is long in movie time. Many scenes only last a couple of minutes, and quite a few are shorter, which means that the crew work their asses off with all of the setups and teardowns for these two-bit scenes, though some can be unforgettable when you see them in finished form, spliced into exactly the right place. They’re like the one card that causes the house to collapse if it’s pulled out.
In his scene, which is with Wells Bradford and some guy named Billy Pistol or Billy Pirate who is at least a few years younger than I am—I’d be lying if I said that this doesn’t make me bitter (though it’s not like I could ever be an actor—I get too nervous if too many people are looking at me)—Renn is wearing a glued-on goatee and a black silk shirt with gray pants and these very cool Ray-Bans I want so badly that I’ll have to find a way to get them on the Loss/Damage report when we wrap.
For four hours, between errands and phone calls to track down two Depression-era ebony walking sticks, I keep checking to see if they’re done with the scene. When they finally are, I know that I’ll have to wait some more before I have a chance at those sunglasses. Ivins heads straight for his dressing room, which isn’t far from the sound stage where we filmed his scene. I hang around in the hall outside, making more calls about ebony canes, until Ivins comes out about fifteen minutes later and nods at me and I nod back and smile as if the person on the other end of the line is testing my tolerance for stupidity. I don’t hear the click of the lock when he shuts the door of his dressing room.
After he disappears down the hall, I try the door and it opens. I slip inside, already sweating, and close the door behind me without turning on the light. I have trouble finding the sunglasses. What look like manila folders and unopened mail are scattered across a small table and the sofa next to it, and there are also several pairs of shoes in a pile by the door. I trip over one of the shoes, almost falling, and it isn’t until I start to look for a case rather than the glasses themselves that I find them. I grab the case, along with a couple of cheap pens, and these three things are in my hands when the door opens. The lights come on, and my heart almost stops dead. Despite all the studio property I’ve removed from the set over the past couple of years, I’ve never been caught. Even before I turn around, I know it’s him. It occurs to me then that he left the door unlocked because he was planning to come back, and he must have trusted me, the peon out in the hall, to keep an eye on the place for him.
Framed by the doorway, he looks very tall and burly, menacing too, but it’s probably because of the fake goatee that he hasn’t yet ripped from his face. He says nothing, only sighs when he sees me drop the pens and sunglasses on the table I’ve just taken them from. I can’t meet his eyes, my shame worse than the afternoon fifteen years ago when my friend Cal’s mother caught me shoplifting a Snickers bar from a gas station near our school.
“Is there something I can help you with in here, John?” Renn Ivins asks in a calm, weary voice.
“Actually, it’s Jim,” I say, realizing too late that this probably isn’t the best time to correct him.
“Jim,” he says flatly. “Was there something in particular you were looking for?”
“No, I was just checking to see if you had enough bottled water in your fridge.” The words come so easily that it’s as if someone else is speaking for me.
“And my sunglasses were helping you accomplish that task?”
I force myself to hold his gaze. “I was just going to try them on.”
“Everyone likes those Ray-Bans,” he says. “They were a birthday present from my son. I’d let you borrow them, but I wear them every day. We’re burning through the ozone layer pretty fast, and you know what that means, don’t you?”
“I think so.”
He ignores this. “Wrinkles,” he says, laughing in a hard burst. “Eye damage too. The sun has one mission: seek and destroy.”
“I was just going to try them on,” I repeat lamely. “I’m sorry.”
“As long as you weren’t going to steal them, Jim. Some of my things here seem to grow legs and walk off. I know it’s best not to get too attached to your possessions, but I can’t help but feel fond of a few of them. I’m sure you understand.”
I nod, wanting very badly to leave but not sure how to manage it. Ivins is still in the doorway, and he has started to pry up the edges of his goatee, which makes him look both comical and sinister. “Tell me, do I need any water?” he asks. “Or is my fridge well stocked?”
Along with yes or no, I can only think of one other reply, not really, which means that I probably have a thirty-three percent chance of choosing the correct answer. I have no idea if Ivins knows what’s in the fridge; his face gives nothing away. I wonder if he recognizes that we’re playing our own game of liar’s poker.
My throat feels very dry. “You could use a few more bottles,” I manage to say.
He gives me a long, unblinking look. “Really? Why don’t you double-check?”
A horrifying urge to laugh seizes my chest. I take the few steps over to the fridge and am now even farther from the door. The refrigerator is almost empty. Inside are only two bottles of water, one very shiny Granny Smith, a few pieces of string cheese, and a bottle of O’Doul’s. O’Doul’s? Despite the fact that I’m in no position to judge him or anyone else, I can’t help but wonder. Does he really drink that swill? Or does he keep one on hand for his friends who are in AA? Would they even be allowed to drink O’Doul’s?
“Gotcha,” he says. He’s standing only a couple of feet behind me now. “You looked pretty nervous for a minute or two. I bet you weren’t too sure what you’d find in there.”
I turn around but can’t meet his eyes. “I’ll go get you some water,” I mumble. My stomach feels like it’s living in my shoes now. I shut the refrigerator and move toward the door. I have never in my life wanted so badly to leave a room.
“Hold on a second, Jim,” Ivins says.
It stings like a slap, but I force myself to look right into his tired, suntanned face.
“I’ll let you off this time,” he says, his eyes malice-hardened. “But I don’t want to catch you in here again.” He peels off his goatee and rubs his reddened chin for a few seconds. “There’s a reason you’re the person you are and I’m the person I am, no?”
“Yes, I guess so,” I say.
He finally steps aside and lets me go. I hear him shut the door behind me, the lock clicking into place.
He must know that I won’t have the guts to bring him the water. I wish that I could prove him wrong, but I can’t. You’re the person you are and I’m the person I am. I find one of the caterers and ask her to bring Ivins eight bottles of Evian, which she does without complaint, her pretty face blank, but I know she doesn’t mind.
Admittedly, he did me a favor. He could have had security throw me out, and I would promptly have been fired, possibly arrested. He could also have made it impossible for me to be hired anywhere else. Maybe he still will, but I don’t think so. It’s over now though—my side business, our friendly acquaintance, if that’s what it was. Yet as far as I know I’m still employed at the studio. I still have a decent place to live, a coach house that I rent in Topanga Canyon, a two-bedroom with a small garage that sits behind a bigger, nicer house. I have a car given to me by my parents when I graduated from UCLA. It’s a Honda, only six years old, and hasn’t needed any major repairs. Larissa, my girlfriend, who is a full-time preschool teacher and a part-time spinning instructor, seems genuinely to care about me and stays over three or four nights a week, if I don’t have to work too late. She doesn’t know about my side business, and I haven’t ever had the urge to tell her. She still thinks one of my screenplays will sell and be produced and I’ll win an Oscar or at least a Golden Globe and then I will finally be able to take her to Spain and France, the two countries she has most wanted to visit since high school. I don’t see us going there any time soon, even if I have a second bank account into which I’ve now deposited a couple of thousand dollars, most of it money from the things I’ve taken from Renn Ivins and a few of the other actors I’ve worked with. My plan has been to use it to get Binocular Spectacular started so I can film one of my screenplays if no one else will. Sometimes, to get ahead, to step out of the rapids that are rushing you toward nowhere but death, you have to do a thing or two that wouldn’t make your parents or the president or your therapist proud.
I learned in high school that character is fate, but I can’t remember who said it. At the time, I thought, Sure, whatever. Now, no surprise, it’s a little more complicated. You’re the person you are. I don’t like it at all that Renn said this. It might be the worst thing anyone has ever said to me. Especially because he must think he’s right.
A few months ago, probably to guilt her into visiting, Larissa’s mother sent her a copy of the newspaper from the small Wisconsin town where her family still lives. Larissa spent half an hour reading it, and before she tossed it in the recycling bin, she pointed out something on the last page. It was the town’s police blotter, laughably benign with its reports of bounced checks and littering citations and high-schoolers blowing off stop signs. There was also a small section that should have said “Stolen Goods,” but someone hadn’t proofread very carefully and the heading was printed as “Stolen Gods.”
“I wonder what gods were stolen last week?” Larissa said, chuckling. “What will their owners do without them? Will their goldfish start barking? Will their rosebushes grow legs and run off?”
I rolled my eyes but couldn’t help laughing. “You’re strange.”
“I hope whoever stole those gods knows what he’s gotten himself into,” she said. “Their phone bill alone will probably be enough to put him in the poorhouse. How much does it cost to call Mount Olympus or wherever it is they live?”
“And the grocery bill. Nectar’s expensive.”
“If you ever want to steal a god,” she said, looking at me intently, “make sure you consider the possible consequences. At least when you buy something, you get a receipt and can return it.”
She saved that section and taped it onto my refrigerator, a small gray square from Beaver Creek’s weekly newspaper that’s supposed to remind me to laugh, not to take myself too seriously. I’m pretty sure that she doesn’t know about the goods I’ve stolen because I’ve been careful about where I hide everything. I might only be a second or two away from getting caught every time that I take a hat or a shoehorn or a pair of cuff links from the set, but at home, it’s not hard to keep this business to myself. If I didn’t take these props, I wouldn’t be able to pay all of my bills each month—rent and student loans the worst of it. Hardly anyone tells you in film school that you’re not likely to make any money after you graduate, not for a long f*cking time, if ever. Or if people do tell you this, you ignore them. It’s like getting married—you’ve heard how many couples end up filing for divorce, but you go ahead and get married anyway, thinking your marriage will be different. Maybe it will. But more likely it won’t.
In any case, there are worse things than stealing a couple of hats and cuff links to get by. And it’s not like I’m some slob who goes home and stares at the TV every night until it’s time to go to bed. When I’m not too tired and Larissa and I aren’t going out, I sit down at my desk and write for a couple of hours, and after several years of doing this, I have eight unsold screenplays. This has become one of those jokes you once thought were hilarious, but after telling it so many times, it’s turned rancid.
The three screenplays I like most are Winter Equinox (I realize there’s no such thing), Old Growth Forest, and So Close to Home. So Close to Home is the most autobiographical of any film I’ve written so far, and it’s probably also the one I’m most ambivalent about. The protagonist lives in a tiny apartment in one of the most complicated cities in the world, and he works with famous people who live in beautiful houses that a few of them earned enough money to buy before their eighteenth birthdays. Some of these people worry that they aren’t nearly as talented or as interesting as they’re supposed to be, and they go on to make unnecessary trouble for themselves and those closest to them. What they want in their secret hearts is simplicity—less clutter and more substance, both objects and people—but they’re not sure how to achieve either of these things. They’re often lonely and undereducated, superstitious, grudge-bearing, worried, and envious about how much publicity (which to them, equals love) their friends and competitors are getting for their latest projects. Even though they are actors, skilled at creating a facade, they cannot keep these feelings from glaring through from time to time.
Most days they speed from one highway to the next, from one lunch meeting or fitting or screening to the next, feeling like they’re missing something, that this thing, whatever it is, will always be missing.
I don’t have any solutions to their problems, but I love these characters. They are children inhabiting beautiful adult bodies. They are victims of their own appetites, but I suppose this is true of everyone. They will stuff themselves with junk before dinner or sleep with their friends’ wives or drive their cars over cliffs because they own ones they don’t know how to drive or else they are desperately lonely. Their nightmares are other people’s daydreams. At least, that’s how I’ve chosen to write it.