Read Online Who Stole the Funny? : A Novel of Hollywood by Robby Benson - Free Book Online

echoing
    through the empty soundstage. He had been ranting aloud. That is not a good sign , he thought, is it? Certainly not on day one . No one answered. Phew.
    The Production Meeting
    J.T. walked out of Stage Five and past two more gargantuan stag-es to a row of old cottages. There was no latent glamour here. He walked up the rotting wooden stairs of the first cottage, through a door that had been repainted every year for the past thirty years but never once sanded, and into the room where the production
    meeting was to be held.
    This was a room of confrontation: a room where descriptive
    sentences and the actual details of filming them converged, and clashed. Thoughts. Practicalities. Left hemisphere, right hemisphere. If I were to tell you, the reader, that this room was painted a depressing gray and the walls had the pockmarks of a kid with bad skin, that although no one was allowed to smoke in it anymore the odor of stale tobacco still leached from its pores, you would have no trouble imagining it. But put that description in a script for a TV show, and at the production meeting someone from the art
    department would say, “What the fuck shade of gray is depressing to you? Because I find all shades of gray depressing. So? Which is it? Do you want cinder gray? Battleship gray? French gray? Hoary-haired gray? Smoke gray? Steel gray? Silver gray? Quaker gray?
    Gray-gray? I’ve gotta paint these fucking walls tomorrow unless you want to pay overtime for the depressing gray which of course would then definitely be a depressing gray.”
    5 6
    W H O S T O L E T H E F U N N Y ?
    A room of passive aggression.
    “No, really. I want you to have that oh-so-depressing shade
    of gray. I’ll do everything in my power to make it as depressing as possible yet still cheery and happy for a sitcom. Well, I guess you want sitcom-depressing gray! But here’s the deal: how much are
    you willing to spend on the depressing gray? Because we have entire new sets to build.”
    A room of power struggles.
    Then the scriptwriter would say, “You know, I’ve changed my
    mind. Strike the depressing gray. I now see the room as a thought-ful patina-green. Actually, see if you can find a Quaker green.”
    A room of Fuck You and You and You.
    “Touché. Quaker green it is. ( Asshole .)”
    Trust me. The room is depressing and it’s gray.
    Which of course sends mixed signals to a director: “Oh. So
    now it’s the room that’s depressing, not necessarily the color? It also just happens to be gray? Props and Set Dressing—that should send you guys in a completely different direction. One thing’s for sure it is not—Makeup, Hair, and Wardrobe, listen up!—it may be Quaker green but it is not a room full of Quakers.”
    “Oh. So what do I do with all of the oatmeal?”
    It is a room where Abbott and Costello meet Vincent van
    Gogh. And it can be a room where unfunny comics meet a thief
    who forges paintings.
    Now, keeping all of that in mind, add in sliding windows that
    don’t slide and coffee stains on the one-one-hundredth-inch de-
    pressing-gray carpet.
    It’s a war room.
    J.T. stopped just inside the door and sighed. By his count, he’d sat as director for thirty-plus other famous and forgettable shows in this very room. This would be thirty-plus, plus one.
    J.T. believed that a good director had the detective skills of
    an experienced old cop who absorbed everything around him.
    R o b b y
    B e n s o n
    5 7

    He tried to absorb the vibes of the room. This room is empty, he thought. I flew almost three thousand miles to get here on time but people who live blocks away aren’t here yet? What’s with that?
    It was obvious that the department heads who came to the
    meeting only wanted to be there exactly when they had to be there .
    Not a second before. Bad sign. Crap.
    The assistant director, a man named William Kay, wasn’t even
    there. An assistant director should always show up before the others, especially before the director. An