don’t believe in props.”
“Oh.”
“For us, reality is the key.”
Richard—“Absolutely”—whatever the hell that meant. In a flash he pictured punching this Curtis guy in the nose
—pop
!—his knuckles perfectly designed for the bloodying of seersucker. The thought calmed him down. But he winced at how he started kicking the poor man in the head. His fantasies always turned into felonies.
“I tell you,
The Erasers
was an amazing project to work on,” Curtis started to say, his hands impatient, as if he constructed balloon animals in his spare time, “because I’m a huge fan of Robbe-Grillet and I remember reading
Les Gommes
at Brown with Coover and thinking even then that with the right tweaking this could be a terrific film. Very strange, very compelling. I’m the one who brought the idea to Rainer, just like I’m bringing you to him, or him to you, but that’s my job. I’m a facilitator. A connector. I thought it was going to be a hard sell—Robbe-Grillet, not you—but Rainer understood the potential immediately.”Hands in need of something heavier than air, Curtis picked up a small wooden sculpture, a modernist totem carved from ebony. He could have been Yorick if Hamlet were the skull. It was clear that Curtis was part of that Ivy League crowd that Richard called the Moveable East, innately privileged yet no longer happy with the idea of simply making money, these pseudo-creatives embracing the business of Los Angeles, with its ease of living and its lifestyle of plausible deniability. Curtis smacked the sculpture against his palm. “This Noll right here is what Wallas used on Dupont’s head. It’s probably worth thirty thousand, but as a piece of movie memorabilia, who knows, maybe fifteen more. Rainer doubled the value like that.” Curtis put the sculpture back on the credenza, readjusted it numerous times as though its proper alignment would guarantee him a sleek afterlife. “But that’s what we do,” he said. “Attention to detail, Integrity toward the material, Respect for the artist.” Curtis stepped back from the sculpture. Perfect. “That’s the kind of place this is.”
The place in question was called Aires Projects, a production company under the umbrella of Sony Pictures. Aires had declared an interest in one of Richard’s screenplays, which was amazing, not the screenplay but the interest, amazing because Richard had basically given up on the screenwriting experiment. Over the last eight years he had written four and had landed an agent and a handful of meetings but that was about it, the
it
losing its meaningful referent, which was fine. Richard was perfectly content with his twelve-plus years in the trenches of substance abuse counseling. It was a good job, a sane job, a job he thrived in, bringing a particular brand of tough love to the process, breaking the body and its wants down to base mechanical function, emotion and ego the unwanted fuel. He preached a form of Radical Honesty and Personal Transparency. Some people even told him he should write a book on the subject, and though the idea of self-help literature turned his stomach, he often found himself coming up with imagined titles—
The Lasting View
—and perfect first lines—
When darkness falls, the window becomes a mirror
. These thoughts usually hit him during the first few miles of his normal eight-mile run, when his body preached the importance of exercise, his breathing a perfectlycomposed pop song, verse-chorus-bridge, but by mile five started to go atonal with all the deceptions, all the rationalizations, the near-manic extremes, the nineteen vitamins a day, the regimented breakfast of blueberries and kale, his confidence splintering near the seven-mile mark as he considered his career helping fellow fuckups, his sense of accomplishment losing its wind, his wife and children falling behind, until his father invariably peeked in, disappointed at the square footage and the limited scenery—this is
“Oh.”
“For us, reality is the key.”
Richard—“Absolutely”—whatever the hell that meant. In a flash he pictured punching this Curtis guy in the nose
—pop
!—his knuckles perfectly designed for the bloodying of seersucker. The thought calmed him down. But he winced at how he started kicking the poor man in the head. His fantasies always turned into felonies.
“I tell you,
The Erasers
was an amazing project to work on,” Curtis started to say, his hands impatient, as if he constructed balloon animals in his spare time, “because I’m a huge fan of Robbe-Grillet and I remember reading
Les Gommes
at Brown with Coover and thinking even then that with the right tweaking this could be a terrific film. Very strange, very compelling. I’m the one who brought the idea to Rainer, just like I’m bringing you to him, or him to you, but that’s my job. I’m a facilitator. A connector. I thought it was going to be a hard sell—Robbe-Grillet, not you—but Rainer understood the potential immediately.”Hands in need of something heavier than air, Curtis picked up a small wooden sculpture, a modernist totem carved from ebony. He could have been Yorick if Hamlet were the skull. It was clear that Curtis was part of that Ivy League crowd that Richard called the Moveable East, innately privileged yet no longer happy with the idea of simply making money, these pseudo-creatives embracing the business of Los Angeles, with its ease of living and its lifestyle of plausible deniability. Curtis smacked the sculpture against his palm. “This Noll right here is what Wallas used on Dupont’s head. It’s probably worth thirty thousand, but as a piece of movie memorabilia, who knows, maybe fifteen more. Rainer doubled the value like that.” Curtis put the sculpture back on the credenza, readjusted it numerous times as though its proper alignment would guarantee him a sleek afterlife. “But that’s what we do,” he said. “Attention to detail, Integrity toward the material, Respect for the artist.” Curtis stepped back from the sculpture. Perfect. “That’s the kind of place this is.”
The place in question was called Aires Projects, a production company under the umbrella of Sony Pictures. Aires had declared an interest in one of Richard’s screenplays, which was amazing, not the screenplay but the interest, amazing because Richard had basically given up on the screenwriting experiment. Over the last eight years he had written four and had landed an agent and a handful of meetings but that was about it, the
it
losing its meaningful referent, which was fine. Richard was perfectly content with his twelve-plus years in the trenches of substance abuse counseling. It was a good job, a sane job, a job he thrived in, bringing a particular brand of tough love to the process, breaking the body and its wants down to base mechanical function, emotion and ego the unwanted fuel. He preached a form of Radical Honesty and Personal Transparency. Some people even told him he should write a book on the subject, and though the idea of self-help literature turned his stomach, he often found himself coming up with imagined titles—
The Lasting View
—and perfect first lines—
When darkness falls, the window becomes a mirror
. These thoughts usually hit him during the first few miles of his normal eight-mile run, when his body preached the importance of exercise, his breathing a perfectlycomposed pop song, verse-chorus-bridge, but by mile five started to go atonal with all the deceptions, all the rationalizations, the near-manic extremes, the nineteen vitamins a day, the regimented breakfast of blueberries and kale, his confidence splintering near the seven-mile mark as he considered his career helping fellow fuckups, his sense of accomplishment losing its wind, his wife and children falling behind, until his father invariably peeked in, disappointed at the square footage and the limited scenery—this is
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