Wag the Dog Page 18

  Mr. Taylor finally gets tired of pretending he has important things to do and buzzes Mrs. Sligo to let her know that he can spare two minutes for Joe. She tells me I can go right in. I get up. She watches me for the whole time like she’s dying to ask me a question. So I stop as I pass her desk and say, “What is it, Bambi?”

  “Is it true?” she gushes. She’s got Sherie’s column hidden under some business files on her desk.

  I look her in the eyes. I take her hand. “It’s true. All true.” It’s as if she wants to faint. But there’s something more she wants to know. “Go on,” I say indulgently. “Ask.”

  “Do you”—she hesitates, looks away, gets it together, then gets it out—“do Scientology?”

  “No,” I tell her. But without disrespect.

  “Oh,” she says, as if she has learned something important.

  I know that Mel hates me. Which, if you know all the facts, is stupid. I probably saved his life; I didn’t ruin it. And taught him something about reality as it’s practiced in wartime. He tries to mask it, or pretends to mask it, but we both know. Now it’s gone onto a different level. I can see the tapes of Maggie and me all over his face. He hates me more because he thinks I’m getting something that he’s not getting. He has an officer mentality. He actually thinks officers are a superior breed and that they deserve more money, better food, fancier clubs, more expensive liquor, classier pussy, and that the purpose of having lower ranks is to assure the higher ranks that they are better than someone.

  “I want a leave of absence.”

  “Why don’t you just quit. I mean, you’re a hotshot now.”

  I don’t want to just quit. Maybe I want Maggie and me to be in love. But I have not yet lost my grip on reality. I know that I am playing a game. I remember that the tape recordings are fake. I don’t really expect to become her advisor and executive producer, the new wannabe Jon Peters. “I want a leave of absence, Mel.”

  “It’s not company policy. Except in cases of illness or maternity.”

  “It is company policy to grant leaves as a matter of management discretion.” Usually they grant it—actually insist on it—because it’s in U. Sec’s interests. Like when they want you to do a job that they don’t want to be associated with. I have done that and I have been on LoAs, so I feel like I’m entitled to one now, when I want it for my own reasons.

  “Well, Joe, I’m willing to consider it. Why don’t you put it in writing. I’ll consult with Chicago and get back to you,” he says. He means I’m going to jerk you around, make you ask me about it five or six times, put you off with bullshit excuses, and then, when I feel the time is most appropriate, I’ll say no.

  “I’d like to settle it now, Mel. I have things to do.”

  “I’m sure you do,” he says. “But that’s not how we do things. We have channels. We have procedures.”

  “Mel, do you want to go for a showdown over this, right now?”

  “I just want you to do things the proper way. Through channels. And goddamm it, as long as I’m in charge of this office, that’s how it’s going to be done.”

  Now I have aces I can throw on the table and probably top anything he’s got in his hand. If we go to war, maybe I win, maybe we both lose. But how would a wannabe Jon Peters, lover-producer, diamond-in-the-rough smoothie handle this? “I’ll tell you what, Mel baby. I see where you’re coming from and I respect you for it. I really do. A company has to be run in an orderly way. Just like an army. Believe me, the last thing in the world I want to do is cause disruption. I have a thought here. I’d kind of forgotten, in the ecstasy of the moment as it were, that I got a heap of vacation time. A whole heap of it coming. There’s at least eight, nine . . . ten weeks. Just from the last three years. Maybe more. Also, I’ve got at least three months of sick leave due me.”

  “This is a private-sector company,” Mel snaps. “We do not treat sick leave as pseudovacation time. Sick leave is for the ill and the injured not the lazy and that is company policy.”

  “Mel, what I’m trying to do here, I’m trying to make things easy and nonconfrontational for everyone. What I’m gonna do is put in my request for a leave in writing, just like you asked. And I bet you can get it approved in a week, ten days at the outside. Long before my vacation time is up—”

  “Who the fuck said you could take vacation now?”

  “I’m entitled to it. I’m taking it,” I say very calmly.

  “You’re on assignment. You stay on assignment.”

  “I’m done with that assignment. Thank you, Mel.”

  “I don’t care if Magdalena Lazlo is sucking your dick. That doesn’t make you something special in my book. Don’t forget, I know about you. I know the real you.”

  “Mel, that was rude.” I still stay calm. This is a game, not the street. “You’ve insulted the woman I love. You’ve insulted a client of this company. I don’t want you to do that. I don’t want this to become an exchange of insults or foul remarks about each other or anyone else. I don’t want this to become a physical confrontation.” Which is not true. I would love it. But the company tape machines may be rolling and I know the recorder in my pocket is certainly on. “So what I suggest is, don’t disapprove my vacation request. Meantime, I’ll put in my request for a leave. Just like you asked.”

  “What’s the problem, lover,” he says. “You afraid she’s gonna dump you in a couple of weeks for a better fucker?”

  “Excuse me, Mel. Are you trying to provoke me to violence? This crudeness is unacceptable. If I were recording this, I think your job would be in jeopardy.” Of course, he realizes that I am recording it.

  “You were a problem in Nam. You’re a problem here. You think you can do things your own way. Not when I’m in charge. Not anymore.”

  “Mel, I’m offering you a reasonable way to handle things.”

  “Just get out of here,” he says.

  I stand up. I lean on his desk. I look down at him. “Mel. You’re out of line.”

  “You roll in shit and you come up with roses. I got your number, Broz.”

  “This is personal with you,” I say. Come on, put it on tape, Mel.

  “I can be just as cool as you are.”

  “Good. Do it.”

  “Now get out of here. I still have a job.”

  “Expedite the paperwork, Mel.”

  When I walk out Bambi, who before this day has never said a personal word to me, beyond “Good morning—smoggy day, isn’t it?” says, “I’m so sorry. He shouldn’t be rude like that.”

  I go back downstairs. I put in for the vacation time. I drive over to Sunset Boulevard. That’s where my new office is. I grabbed the lease from a producer who finally ran out of development deals and was three months behind on his rent. Times are tough for indies. Maggie hated the place on sight. But once I promised her she could redecorate it, she said it was alright. I like it because even though it’s a small building, there are four possible exits. Hard to watch. I need a place away from Maggie’s house. We still have to pretend that we don’t suspect the LDs at her place. But with a new place I don’t have to call in Matusow. I can sweep the place myself. I’m not setting up as a P.I. I’m setting up as—what should I call it? Maggie’s advisor? Lover? Producer? We’re going to get her her own development deal. Find properties that are right for her. Match them with the right director, writer, costar. That’s what it’s all about. Packages. We’ll take a lunch with Hartman, have him put it to the studios. Whoever finances her gets first look at what we develop. If nobody offers the right setup, we go it alone. That’s the advice I’ve given her. You can’t sit back in this business and wait for them to come to you. Because they’ll only come to you with what’s good for them. That’s so clear, it’s glass. None of them care about her or what’s right for her. Except herself and—me. That’s what I told her and it very much matched with her own thinking.

  I now know how fast word gets around in this town. And how hard everyone hustles. So I’m not surpris
ed when the phone rings. Even though there’s been no announcement, nothing official, and I’m not yet open for business. Even though there’s no furniture and the phone is sitting on the floor. I figure it’s someone with a script to push, a deal they want Maggie for, a job as a reader, something like that.

  What surprises me is that the first call I get in my new office, in a sense, it’s from Vietnam.

  Chapter

  TWENTY-THREE

  BEAGLE SAT ALONE in the dark.

  In front of him was a touch-sensitive computer screen. With it he could call up images or run entire films on any one of or all of ten Musashi G-4 HDTV screens set into the curved front wall of his video room.

  The screens were arranged in two rows of five. They were flat screens and mounted flush to the wall. They had an aspect ratio of 2.4 to 1, wide enough to accommodate the full images of those films shot in the glory days of wide-screen formats like Todd-AO, Ultra-Panavision 70, and CinemaScope. When they displayed a picture from a less horizontal source, they automatically generated a flat black matte into the blank areas of the screens. The walls were painted to exactly match that black. The Center Screen of the top row was larger than the rest.

  Having viewed thousands of hours of film and tape, Beagle had selected what he thought somehow defined the essence of America’s sense of itself at war. From the chosen images he had composed something that was between a history and mythology. A high-tech ten-screen version of an American Iliad. Now he was going to play that story for an audience of one, himself, in the belief that it would make him understand what sort of war he would have to direct to make his country happy.

  Center Screen. Tearing Down the Spanish Flag. Just an image. A leitmotif. A trumpet call from a distant silence to start the epoch.

  A flagpole against the sky. A pair of hands enter the frame. They take down the Spanish flag. They hoist Old Glory.

  That was it in its entirety, shot in 1898 when America declared war on Spain.51It was the first commercial war movie.

  Then, on Screen 1, up in the left-hand corner, appeared Leni Riefenstahl’s famous 1934 documentary, Triumph of the Will. Hundreds of thousands of uniformed members of the Master Race march, turn, salute, stand, sing, heil! Hitler rants. It is the declaration of the German people that they have turned themselves into the machine that will rule the world. They will annex, terrorize, invade, conquer, exterminate, incinerate—and this is the self-image in which they will do it. One people, One will. This is the image that they will sell to the world and the world will believe in even long after Hitler is dead and the war is lost.52

  On Screen 5, upper right-hand corner, the other beginning: December 7th. Quiet, peaceful Hawaii. Formations of Japanese planes appear, buzzing through the silent skies.

  The sneak attack. The Japanese catch American boats sitting at anchor in the harbor at Honolulu. Battleship Row, pride of the American fleet, turns into the stinking black smoke of ruin. The American planes are all on the ground. Lined up, neat and orderly. Perfect targets. Helpless and defenseless, they are destroyed. Torpedoes. Ships on fire. Planes explode. Flames. Sailors running. Two sailors with a machine gun fight back, firing at the sky. One falls. The other keeps firing.

  Backstage, as it were, on the other side of the video screens, a room of industrial shelving, steel racks, bundled cable, a spaghetti land of wiring, an unmasked array of monitors and machines, Teddy Brody was watching too. When Beagle wanted a film that had not yet been loaded into the Fujitsu and digitalized, Teddy was the librarian who roamed through the racks to find it on film, tape, or disc, and put it on a projector, VCR, or player.

  He loved the sequence that Beagle had assembled. The implications were so intellectually evocative that Teddy was able to forget his terrible frustrations—stuck here as librarian, not getting anywhere in his desire to be a director, not rising to a station where he could turn back to his parents and say, “Hey, you bastards, look at me, I’m making it, I don’t need you to love me anymore and I never, ever will.” What he loved most was that the base of the pyramid, the foundation, the three cornerstones, were each of them a very special fraud.

  Tearing Down the Spanish Flag was not shot in Manila or Havana. It was shot on a rooftop in downtown Manhattan.53

  It was a terrific commercial success. The producers, Blackton and Smith, followed it up with the more elaborate Battle of Santiago Bay, the triumph of the American fleet over the Spanish in Cuba. That one was shot in a bathtub. The battleships were cutouts and the smoke of the naval guns came from a cigarette puffed across the camera lens by Mrs. Blackton.

  The gargantuan rally that Triumph of the Will showed to the world really took place. However, the rally was staged for the camera.54This may not sound particularly striking today, when all life—personal life, sporting life, political life—is rerouted around prime time. But in the thirties reality was still presumed to be real and photographs didn’t lie and no one had ever staged an event involving hundreds of thousands of people just so the camera could record them.

  December 7th won an Oscar as best short documentary.55The images that it established became the reference for future films. Footage was lifted and showed up in other documentaries. When feature films were made that included the attack on Pearl Harbor, filmmakers took great care to model their work on the record created by December 7th.

  But all the battle footage in December 7th was fake. The stricken ships were miniatures. They caught fire and billowed smoke in a tank, a larger, more sophisticated version of the bathtub in The Battle of Santiago Bay. The sailors running through the smoke and firing back at the Japs were running across a soundstage. The smoke was from a smoke machine. The tank and the stage were in Hollywood, California, a place that has never been bombed, torpedoed, or strafed.

  Teddy Brody loved it. He loved Leni Riefenstahl, John Ford, Blackton and Smith, and Mrs. Blackton too. He loved them for their audacity. There wasn’t enough reality around, so they made some up. Teddy had spent a lot of time in academic circles—B. A. from Yale Drama School, M. F. A. from UCLA—where facts were checked, where people were failed for inaccuracy and booted out for plagiarism, so he felt very tied to specific and literal truths and didn’t know how to escape them. Besides, his father had been such a liar—so adamant and violent about denying it—that it became very important to Teddy to keep precise score of who said exactly what, when they said it, when they changed it, and how they lied about it.

  Center Screen went blank. Cut to black.

  Victory in the West came up alongside Triumph of the Will. Hitler’s armies smashed through Belgium and Holland into France on Screen 2.

  Hitler believed in the power of films. He destroyed entire cities for the purpose of creating images.56When the Wehrmacht went forth to conquer the world, every platoon had a cameraman, every regiment had its own PK, Propaganda Kompanie.57Hitler conquered continental Europe very quickly and with very little resistance. Part of the reason was that he convinced his enemies that the Thousand-Year Reich was invincible. He fought with the power of the mind. By the time the French troops faced the Nazis, they had seen the massed rallies at Nuremberg, they’d seen the result of blitzkrieg in Poland. They’d seen it on the same screen on which they’d seen Charlie Chaplin and Maurice Chevalier and newsreels that brought them the results of bicycle races.58

  One by one, Beagle filled the screens with images of the enemy triumphant.

  On the left the Nazis marched into Paris, conquered Yugoslavia and Greece, North Africa, and Ukraine, and the Baltic states. The Gestapo rounded up suspects and carted away Jews. They bombed innocent civilians in London.

  Wake Island, the fall of Singapore and of the Philippines came up on Screens 4, 5, 9, and 10 as Japan marched forward (cowardly) and the Americans fell back (heroically). John Wayne watched the Bataan death march. The victors put the vanquished in brutal prison camps to languish and die.

  Casablanca59came up on the Center Screen. To Beagle there was something defining about it.
In the rhythm of the history he was creating, weaving, imagizing, it deserved to come out of the dark and be center-screen. It was the moment of choice—that’s what it was—when we went from selfish absorption to commitment. Everyone had come to Rick’s Café Americain; the refugees—Czech, German, Jewish, Rumanian, and more—Loyal French, Vichy French, a Russian, and the Nazis. And everyone’s fate was dependent on what Rick decided to do.

  Once Rick decided, all the images changed.

  became

  By the end of Sahara, Bogart and his six guys, including Frenchie, a Brit, and a black Sudanese, had captured an entire company of previously invincible Nazis.

  Over on the right the United States began to strike back in the Pacific.

  After that, America was on a roll. There was no stopping it. It was half-real, half-myth, and the two were mixed shamelessly. The military gave Hollywood footage, advisors, equipment, soldiers, transport, cooperation. In return, the filmmakers gladly told the story that Washington and its soldiers wanted told, the way they wanted it told.

  Center Screen—The Battle of San Pietro. The opening statement on the screen: “All the scenes in this picture were shot within range of enemy small arms or artillery fire.” Oddly enough, this was true. While all around the Center Screen men ran, leapt, dashed, charged into battle, the American soldiers fighting their way up the spine of Italy walked into battle.

  Beagle wondered if the film affected him so because it was where his father had fought. Maybe not at San Pietro, but in Italy. Where he had been wounded. Every time he watched the footage and saw the men being carried away or waiting on the stretchers, he looked to see his father’s face. He never did, even with freeze-frames and digital enlargements. But he was sure that his father’s face must have looked like the faces in the film. So extraordinarily ordinary. Unshaven. Cigarette smoking. Dying for a cup of joe. Wishing for just one fresh vegetable, a bite of onion, a bath. His father was dead. He couldn’t ask him, “Dad, were you at San Pietro? Is that where you won your Purple Heart? Did you feel more for your country than I do? And can I somehow get there too? Was it better then? Was it as good as they make it seem in the movies?”