Read Online Another Thing to Fall by Laura Lippman - Free Book Online
Authors: Laura Lippman
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ready.
You
know that.”
“Yeah,” Ben had said. “You’ve zipped through the collected works of Ben Marcus and Flip Tumulty, reading our rough drafts, following our stunning trajectory from
No Human Involved
to
Ottoman’s Empire
to
Mildred, Pierced
. You might aim a little higher, you know. Billy Shakespeare. Chekhov. Hell, at the very least try Robert Towne or William Goldman.”
She had dutifully recorded those names in her notebook — Towne and Goldman, that is. She wasn’t so ignorant that she needed Ben to tell her about Shakespeare. But she also wasn’t so naïve that she thought she would learn to write television by studying
playwrights
.
Yet Ben had hit close to an uncomfortable truth without even trying, his peculiar talent. So far, Greer
hadn’t
been able to bridge the gap between wanting to write and writing. For one thing, there was never any time. But when she did find a free hour to sit in front of her computer, she froze. Staring at a blank screen almost made her feel sorry for Ben, something she
never
felt. Filling up that emptiness with her own ideas and stories — it seemed as unfathomable as contemplating one’s own death.
Where did a story begin? What kind of story should she tell?
In the early days, when Ben still sort of liked her — or, more correctly, didn’t actively dislike her — he would offer advice. “Take one idea — for example, the housebound private investigator, à la Nero Wolfe. Add something new — a female Archie Goodwin. That’s all we had when we started
Ottoman’s Empire
and everyone loved it.”
Everyone but the viewers,
she had amended silently.
Idea number one: A girl wants to work in the movies. Idea number two: She gets a job, through hard work, and keeps her eyes open. But that was just her life, and she could not imagine her life becoming a movie or a television show. If her life had been rich enough to be the stuff of fiction, she wouldn’t be so desperate to flee it.
What she could imagine was
success,
the end result, at once vague and specific. She had — yes, why not, it wasn’t wrong to dream, quite the opposite — she had even imagined herself in a gown — floor length, gold, assuming gold was a favored trend, with a high waist to make the most of her top-heavy figure, although she would probably be thinner by the time she won a big award, having found the time and money for a personal trainer. In her fantasy, the statue was an Oscar, which made no sense relative to her own ambitions, but the Oscar looked to be a far more satisfactory object to clutch than the Emmy, with its sharp, pointy wings.
She had held an Emmy, secretly. Flip had won one, awarded for a spec script written for a long-running comedy. Just twenty-three at the time — younger than she was now — he had written it as a calling card, determined to break into the business without using the connections that his father could have provided. Flip had never expected to sell it, but the producers had loved it and used it, revising only a third of it. Greer knew this story because Flip had told it often, in almost every interview. “I was so depressed to find out that they had rewritten some of my pages. I didn’t know that first-timers often see their scripts rewritten from top to bottom, much less that spec scripts seldom become episodes, much less that they go on to be submitted for awards.” Greer was skeptical of that story. Could Phil Tumulty’s son really be that naïve about the television business?
She glanced again at the clock, realized she had forgotten to send the backup electronic copies of the call sheet and quickly fired it off to the mailing list. Lottie would chew her out for that, even though the paper copies had been distributed hours earlier. The call sheet shouldn’t fall to the show runner’s assistant, but Lottie had somehow finagled that. Greer assumed it was punishment for wanting to work for Flip instead of Lottie, but then Alicia had been forced
You
know that.”
“Yeah,” Ben had said. “You’ve zipped through the collected works of Ben Marcus and Flip Tumulty, reading our rough drafts, following our stunning trajectory from
No Human Involved
to
Ottoman’s Empire
to
Mildred, Pierced
. You might aim a little higher, you know. Billy Shakespeare. Chekhov. Hell, at the very least try Robert Towne or William Goldman.”
She had dutifully recorded those names in her notebook — Towne and Goldman, that is. She wasn’t so ignorant that she needed Ben to tell her about Shakespeare. But she also wasn’t so naïve that she thought she would learn to write television by studying
playwrights
.
Yet Ben had hit close to an uncomfortable truth without even trying, his peculiar talent. So far, Greer
hadn’t
been able to bridge the gap between wanting to write and writing. For one thing, there was never any time. But when she did find a free hour to sit in front of her computer, she froze. Staring at a blank screen almost made her feel sorry for Ben, something she
never
felt. Filling up that emptiness with her own ideas and stories — it seemed as unfathomable as contemplating one’s own death.
Where did a story begin? What kind of story should she tell?
In the early days, when Ben still sort of liked her — or, more correctly, didn’t actively dislike her — he would offer advice. “Take one idea — for example, the housebound private investigator, à la Nero Wolfe. Add something new — a female Archie Goodwin. That’s all we had when we started
Ottoman’s Empire
and everyone loved it.”
Everyone but the viewers,
she had amended silently.
Idea number one: A girl wants to work in the movies. Idea number two: She gets a job, through hard work, and keeps her eyes open. But that was just her life, and she could not imagine her life becoming a movie or a television show. If her life had been rich enough to be the stuff of fiction, she wouldn’t be so desperate to flee it.
What she could imagine was
success,
the end result, at once vague and specific. She had — yes, why not, it wasn’t wrong to dream, quite the opposite — she had even imagined herself in a gown — floor length, gold, assuming gold was a favored trend, with a high waist to make the most of her top-heavy figure, although she would probably be thinner by the time she won a big award, having found the time and money for a personal trainer. In her fantasy, the statue was an Oscar, which made no sense relative to her own ambitions, but the Oscar looked to be a far more satisfactory object to clutch than the Emmy, with its sharp, pointy wings.
She had held an Emmy, secretly. Flip had won one, awarded for a spec script written for a long-running comedy. Just twenty-three at the time — younger than she was now — he had written it as a calling card, determined to break into the business without using the connections that his father could have provided. Flip had never expected to sell it, but the producers had loved it and used it, revising only a third of it. Greer knew this story because Flip had told it often, in almost every interview. “I was so depressed to find out that they had rewritten some of my pages. I didn’t know that first-timers often see their scripts rewritten from top to bottom, much less that spec scripts seldom become episodes, much less that they go on to be submitted for awards.” Greer was skeptical of that story. Could Phil Tumulty’s son really be that naïve about the television business?
She glanced again at the clock, realized she had forgotten to send the backup electronic copies of the call sheet and quickly fired it off to the mailing list. Lottie would chew her out for that, even though the paper copies had been distributed hours earlier. The call sheet shouldn’t fall to the show runner’s assistant, but Lottie had somehow finagled that. Greer assumed it was punishment for wanting to work for Flip instead of Lottie, but then Alicia had been forced
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