Read Online Easy to Like by Edward Riche - Free Book Online Page A

megastar Barry Hart, his face flattered by applied
hypoallergenic stage filth, eyes gleaming against the half minstrel, making his
way, solo, through the overgrown hills of Laos, somewhere in Mexico (near
Oaxaca, Elliot remembered). Elliot’s Vietnam script was — he’d thought — a
transparent satire about the blood-soaked debacle in Iraq. But Marv Hinks over
at Warner read the whole third draft, enthusiastically, straight. He saw it
immediately as an action vehicle for Barry. So did Barry’s agent, Herb Devine.
Elliot was only looking out for Marv’s and Herb’s feelings by not correcting
this misinterpretation. Why insult the guys? And hadn’t Mike strongly advised
him against writing it in the first place, quoting, for
like the hundredth time , the George S. Kaufman chestnut “Satire is
what closes on Saturday night”? Elliot would, it was understood, reshape the
piece into the drama Marv thought it to be on the next pass. But Marv did not
like Elliot’s next draft, in fact thought it “a step backward,” thought it had
lost most of what he enjoyed about the previous draft.
    In Hollywood, a producer’s waning
enthusiasm meant a new writer. After Elliot was shown from the project, seven
more screenwriters were put on the case. Elliot ran into the last of these
scribblers not long after shooting commenced on the picture, and felt it safe to
reveal that the original premise had been misunderstood. This was a lapse in
judgement, for when the movie was eventually eviscerated by the critics and
tanked at the box, the credited writers, among whom Elliot was not, knew whom to
blame. (Unjustly, thought Elliot now: the first couple of lines to emerge,
haltingly, from Barry’s exquisite lips bore no resemblance to anything Elliot
had ever typed.) Jesus, was it bad! Elliot pulled off his headset and turned
from the screen.
    How long to Toronto? In his haste to
get on the flight, Elliot had neglected to bring his book or to score some
Bromazepam with which to knock himself out. He fished around again in the seat
pocket. There was the in-flight magazine, dedicated, as fate would have it, to
the Napa Valley. Elliot flipped through the pictures. Napa looked better than it
drank. It was a vile example of how the rich got richer, how dabblers, in
concert with some mercenaries out of UC Davis, managed to charge suckers over a
hundred dollars a bottle for their syrup. Three parts water to one each of vodka
and Ribena: voilà Napa Cab. The only thing worse was those bubblegum Pinots out
of Santa Barbara — Elliot could taste nothing but banana in those. In the year
after the movie Sideways came out, that was all
anybody served. Elliot despised obvious wines.
    Coming to a feature article on Fred
Hanover and his Cab ranch, Elliot put the magazine back in its place and pulled
out instead the rumpled newspaper.
    Elliot deduced he was looking at a
Central Canadian edition, for there seemed few stories from Canada’s fringes.
The economy was fucked, but less so than in the USA. This was cause for several
columns of smug self-congratulation.
    There was a wine piece, actually having
the temerity to recommend Canadian plonk. (Though maybe, with global warming,
Elliot reasoned, it was becoming possible to grow grapes to ripeness in the
north. It was certainly getting too hot in California.) There had not been any
serious Canadian wine when Elliot was growing up. There were concoctions that
were made in Canada — pinkish products full of
bubbles, called things like Baby Duck — though whether of grapes, it could not
be said. These drinks were considered a step below even the brand wines from
Europe, the Black Towers and Mateuses, though, in truth, they were probably not
that much worse.
    All the new Canadian wines discussed in
the article were still named, like the Ducks, after animals of the boreal
forest: foxes and owls and wolves. Elliot’s own label featured no tasteful