I
came out of the bathroom with thirty seconds left on the ticker, and started walking briskly towards the conference room. Miranda was trotting immediately behind.
“What's the meeting about?” I asked, nodding to Drew Roberts as I passed his office.
“He didn't say,” Miranda said.
“Do we know who else is in the meeting?”
“He didn't say,” Miranda said.
The second-floor conference room sits adjacent to Carl's office, which is at the smaller end of our agency's vaguely egg-shaped building. The building itself has been written up in
Architectural Digest,
which described it as a “four-way collision between Frank Gehry, Le Corbusier, Jay Ward, and the salmonella bacteria.” It's unfair to the salmonella bacteria. My office is
stacked on the larger arc of the egg on the first floor, along with the offices of all the other junior agents. After today, a second-floor, little-arc office was looking somewhat more probable in the future. I was humming the theme to
The Jeff ersons
as Miranda and I got to the door of the conference room and walked through.
In the conference room sat Carl, an aquarium, and a lot of empty chairs.
“Tom,” said Carl. “Good of you to come.”
“Thanks, Carl,” I said, “Good of you to have the meeting.” I then turned to the table to consider probably the most important decision of the meeting: where to sit.
If you sit too close to Carl, you will be pegged as an obsequious, toadying suck-up. Which is not all that bad. But it will also mean you run the risk of depriving a more senior agent his rightful position at the table. Which
is
very bad. Promising agency careers had been brutally derailed for such casual disregard of one's station.
On the other hand, if you sit too far away, it's a signal that you want to hide, that you haven't been getting your clients the good roles and the good money; thus you've become a drag on the agency. Agents smell fear like sharks smell wounded sea otter pups. Soon your clients will be poached from you. You'll then have nothing to do but stare at your office walls and drink antifreeze until you go blind.
I sat about halfway down the table, slightly closer to Carl than not. What the hell. I earned it.
“Why are you sitting so far away?” Carl asked.
I blinked.
“I'm just saving space for the other folks in the meeting,” I said. Had he heard about the Michelle Beck deal already? How does he do it? Has he tapped my phone? I goggled frantically at
Miranda, who was standing behind me, notepad at ready. She shot me a look that said,
Don't ask me. I'm just here to take shorthand.
“That's very considerate of you, Tom,” Carl said. “But no one else is coming. In fact, if you don't mind, I'd prefer it if Ms. Escalon wouldn't mind excusing us as well.”
This would be the point where I casually dismissed my assistant and turned suavely to Carl, ready for our executive powwow. What I ended up doing was staring blankly. Fortunately, Miranda was on the ball. “Gentlemen,” she said, excusing herself. On her way out, she dug the spike of her shoe into my pinky toe, and snapped me back to reality. I stood up, looking for where to sit.
“Why don't you sit here,” Carl said, and pointed to a chair on the far side of the table, next to the aquarium.
“Great. Thanks,” I said. I walked to the other side of the table and sat down. I stared at Carl. He stared back. He had a little smile on his face.
There are legends in the world of agents. There's Lew Wasserman, the agent of his day, who went over to the other side of the movie business and thrived at Universal Pictures. There's Mike Ovitz, who went over to the other side and exploded, humiliatingly, at Disney.
And then there's Carl Lupo, my boss, who went over to the other side, took Century Pictures from a schlock-horror house to the biggest studio in Hollywood in just under a decade and then, at the height of his reign, came back over into agency. No one knows why. It scares the hell out of everyone.
“I'm sorry,” I said.
“What?” Carl said. Then he almost immediately laughed. “Relax, Tom. I just want to have a little chat. It's been a while since we've talked.”
The last time Carl and I had talked directly to each other in a nonmeeting setting was three years earlier. I had just graduated from the mailroom to the agency floor, where I shared a pod with another mailroom escapee. My client list was a former teen idol, then in his thirties and a semi-regular at intervention sessions, and a cute but brainless twenty-two-year-old UCLA cheerleader named Shelly Beckwith. Carl had dropped by, shook hands with me and my podmate, and blathered pleasantries with us for exactly two minutes and thirty seconds before moving on to the next pod to do the same thing.
Since then, the former teen idol strangled in his own saliva, my podmate imploded from stress and left the agency to become a Buddhist monk in Big Bear, Shelly Beckwith became Michelle Beck and got lucky with two hits in a row, and I got an office. It's a strange world.
“How are things going with Michelle Beck's negotiations?” Carl asked.
“They're done, actually,” I said. “We're getting twelve five, cash and percentages, and that's before merchandising.”
“That's good to hear,” Carl said. “Davis thought you'd hit a wall at about $8.5 million, you know. I told him you'd top that by at least three and a half. You beat the point spread by a half million dollars.”
“Always happy to overachieve, Carl.”
“Yes, well, Brad's no good at bargaining anyway. I stuck him with Allen Green, of all people, for twenty million. How that film is ever going to make a profit now is really beyond me.”
I chose not to say anything at this point.
“Oh, well, not our problem, I suppose,” Carl said. “Tell me, Tom. Do you like science fiction?”
“Science fiction?” I said. “Sure.
Star Wars
and
Star Trek
,
mostly, same as everyone. Watched a couple of those new
Battlestar Galacticas
. And there was a period when I was fourteen when I read just about every Robert Heinlein book I could get my hands on. It's been a while since I've really read any, though. I watched
Murdered Earth
once, at the premiere. I think that's killed the genre for me for a while.”
“Which do you like better, movies with evil aliens or movies with good aliens?”
“I don't know,” I said. “I haven't really ever given it much thought.”
“Please do so now,” Carl said. “Indulge me, if you don't mind.”
Carl could have said
Please disembowel yourself and sauté your intestines with mushrooms. Indulge me
,
if you don't mind
and anyone in the agency would have done it. It's disgusting what sycophancy can do.
“I guess if I had to make the choice, I'd go with the evil aliens,” I said. “They just make for better films. Put in a bad alien and you get the
Alien
films,
Independence Day, Predator, Stargate, Starship Troopers.
Good aliens get you, what?
*Batteries Not Included
? No contest.”
“Well,” Carl said, “There is
E.T.
And
Close Encounters
.”
“I'll give you
E.T.
,” I said. “But I don't buy
Close Encounters
. Those aliens were cute, sure, but that doesn't mean they weren't evil. Once they got out of the solar system, Richard Dreyfuss was probably penned up like a veal. Anyway, no one really knows what's going on in that movie. Spielberg must have been downing peyote frosties when he thought that one up.”
“The
Star Trek
movies have good aliens. So do the
Star Wars
movies.”
“The
Star Trek
movies have bad aliens too, like the Klingons and those guys with the wires in their heads.”
“The Borg,” Carl said.
“Right,” I said. “And in
Star Wars
, no one was from Earth, so technically
everybody
was an alien.”
“Interesting,” Carl said. He was steepling his fingers together. Apparently the revelation that everyone in
Star Wars
had a passport from some other planet had transfixed him like a particularly troublesome Zen koan.
“If you don't mind me asking, Carl,” I said, “Why are we talking about this? Are we putting together a package for a science fiction movie? Other than
Earth Resurrected,
I mean.”
“Not exactly,” Carl said, unsteepling his fingers, and placing them, flat out, on the desk. “I was having a discussion with a friend of mine about this and I wanted to get another opinion on it. Your opinion on the matter is like his, by the way. He's pretty much of the opinion that people are more comfortable with aliens as a hostile âother' rather than a group that would have friendly intentions.”
“Well, I don't think most people really think of aliens one way or the other,” I said. “I mean, we're talking about movies, here. As much as I like the movies, it's not the same thing.”
“Really?” The fingersteeple was suddenly back. “So if real aliens dropped from the sky, people might accept that they'd be friendly?”
I was back to staring again. I remembered having a conversation like this, once before in my life. The difference was that
that
conversation was back in my deeply stoned college freshman days, in a room strung with Christmas lights and tin foil, lying on a beanbag. The conversation I was having now was
with one of the few men on the planet who could have the president of the United States return his call. Within ten minutes (they roomed together at Yale). Having this conversation with Carl was profoundly incongruous, right up there with listening to your grandfather talk about the merits of the hottest new sports kayak.
“Maybe,” I ventured. When in doubt, equivocate.
“Hmmmm.” Carl said. “So, Tom. Tell me about your clients.”
I have a little man in the back of my brain. He likes to panic in situations like these. He was looking around nervously. I kicked him back into his hole and started down the list.
First and foremost, obviously, was Michelle: beautiful, in demand, and not nearly smart enough to realize the dumbest thing she could do at this point in her life is not take the money and run. I blamed myself.
Next up was Elliot Young, hunky young star of ABC's
Pacific Rim
.
Pacific Rim
was second in its Wednesday 9 p.m. time slot and sixty-third overall for the year. But thanks to Elliot's tight, volleyball-player ass and ABC's willingness to have him drop his shorts to solve crime at least once per episode, it was cleaning up in the 18â34 female viewers category. ABC was selling a lot of ad time to yeast infection treatments and feminine products with “wings.” Everyone was happy. Elliot's looking to expand into film, but then, of course, who isn't.
Rashaad Creek, urban comic, originally from the mean streets of Marin County, where they'll busta cap in your ass for serving red wine with fish. Rashaad wasn't nearly as neurotic as most comedians, which means on his own he's generally not as funny. Nevertheless, thanks to some nice packaging work, we'd sold his pilot
Workin' Out!
to Comedy Central. Rashaad's budding
career was watched over like a hawk by his overbearing manager, who also happened to be his mother. We pause for a shudder here.
The unfortunately named Tea Reader (pronounced tee-a), singer-turned-actress who I inherited from my old podmate after his forebrain sucked inward. Tea, from what I can figure, contributed a good half of his stressânotoriously difficult and given to tantrums far out of proportion to her track record (three singles from one album, peaking at #9, #13 and #24, respectively, a second female lead in a Vince Vaughn flick, and a series of ads for Mentos). She was just this side (she insisted) of thirty, which made her a perfect candidate to host her own talk show or infomercial. Tea called about once a week and threatened to get other representation. I wish.
Tony Baltz, a character actor who was nominated for a Best Supporting Oscar a decade ago, and had since refused to consider anything that's not a lead role. Which was a shame, since the lead role market for fifty-something chunky, bald guys was pretty much already sewn up by James Gandolfini. We managed to get him the occasional Lifetime movie.
The rest of my clients were a collection of has-beens, never-weres, near-misses, and not-there-yets, the sorts of folks that fill out the bottom half of every junior agent's dance card. Someone has to play the second spear-carrier on the left, and someone has to represent them. Be that as it may, going over the list with Carl, I realized that if it wasn't for the presence of Michelle, my client roster was of the sort that makes for a lifetime of junior agenthood. I decided not to bring it up.