A Hollywood Ending

MICK GARRIS

Lady Hollywood is such a tease.

Every time I have given her up for a lack of interest, she tells me how beautiful and talented I am, kisses me with a playful lick of the ear, and rests her perfectly lipsticked head in my lap, her chestnut hair spilling over my thighs. But when I reach for a little handful of tit, she pulls away with a laugh.

It’s always been frustrating, but it used to be cute. It was cute when I was an Artist, and fought to slay dragons with my Art. It was cute when I bounced through one after another of her silicone-implanted minions in my quest for her throne, each time climbing another Everest to be the Everlast. I wore tights and a cape back then, if only in my mind. I was invincible.

But I’ve since been vinced.

A steady diet of the Lady’s fare led me to believe in the world of Happy Endings. Everything will always work out, she told me. And I believed her. We share the misfortune of those who suffer around us, but we are certain that their grief can never grip us personally in its thrall. Irreversibly bad things happen to other people. When my little sister crashed through the sliding glass door and her face bloomed in a welling red roadmap, I knew we could rush her to the hospital, stitch her up, and she’d be good as new in a couple of weeks. I knew that when my brother contracted AIDS, a cure would be found as he nobly fought off the spectre of death, and I would have him back to go laugh at the latest preposterous piece of crank-’em-out crap at the Chinese with me. There was no doubt that the experimental drugs my father took in the medical tests would save his life from the ravages of four decades of smoking that attacked his heart like Apaches around the wagon train. When my dog disappeared after the side gate was left open by the gardener, I knew he’d show up shivering on the porch late that night. And without question, when I got the opportunity to write and direct a Major Hollywood Studio Feature Film, Lady Hollywood herself would swoon in delight and beg me to make her mine. I might say yes, but I might play independent and hard to get.

We fear the worst, but expect the best. We have learned to expect the Happy Ending.

But Daria died in a pool of her own blood, staring up at me with wide, confused, Keane-painting eyes. Jerry wasted away horribly, angry and bitter and in pain, and died without a trace of the noble grace of Tom Hanks in Philadelphia. Dad responded wonderfully to the wonder drug, but when the tests were done, they would no longer supply it to him and he shuffled quietly off the mortal coil. I found Chewbacca in the back yard brush a week after his little heart gave out struggling to untangle himself from the fence. And when the Big Screen curled its mighty index finger my way, I answered the beckon with a masterpiece that crashed and burned mightily, and tossed me into a world of indifference. I was the crumpled Kleenex dropped into the toilet after being used to wipe away the secretions.

And yet, until now, I continued to believe in Happy Endings. I was the puppy who’d had its face rubbed into its own shit until it learned to poop outside, the beaten wife who kept coming back for more, because the pummelling blows showed I was loved; I was Sybil, filled with water and chained to the piano by a mad mother’s crazy act of devotion; the Child of God who was robbed of those I loved and who loved me by a God who chose strange ways to display his love for me. And I continued to kneel in prayer.

After climbing and falling repeatedly in the morass of Lady Hollywood’s theme park of tough love, I soon felt only pain or nothing. At USC I burned with excitement and the thrill of discovery. I pondered the profound, was brave and inventive; creativity sparked from my fingertips. All of my waking hours - and many of my sleeping - were spent exploring, inventing, creating. Or hustling hook-ups, but that’s another story.

Of course, I had no idea that my knowledge and my insights were puddle-deep; it didn’t matter. It was all about expression, even if what was expressed was bullshit. And, admittedly, a lot of it was.

When did I stop caring?

I remember passion. It was passion that brought me into this unforgiving, fickle land of pick-me!-pick-me! It was passion that fuelled the twenty-hour days on the student films and the first feature. But when the feature tanked, I was scorned by Lady Hollywood, and not for the last time. It took time and a baby - a mutant, mewling beast I’d discovered on a downtown LA street corner - to get another date. Oh, she kissed me deep during production, but when the project fell off its rails and went down in flames, she sought out newer, more virile playmates.

I went inert, creatively and physically impotent, flushed of drive and thrown off my game. I went looking for work, not inspiration. Dragged through the dregs of series TV and even pornography, being behind a camera was all about pay cheques, not passion.

There was rediscovery, however. Through a tryst with a late movie star - a story I really hope I never have to tell again - I discovered that Lady Hollywood had a glorious past, one that shimmered and sparkled and breathed heavy. There were images that lit the screen in a way the Modern Masters of CGI never imagined. It’s funny to think that my discoveries with her, with the fickle bitch of the silver screen, actually deepened me. Well, maybe it just seemed like it. But for a while, anyway, I held space warps and DTS explosions and computer-generated mummies and sequels that were really remakes and music-video film-making in disdain. I went on a quest for peace, a monk seeking salvation, a hermit drenched in the balm of celluloid archaeology.

I wished the world were viewed in black and white.

But a guy has to eat or be eaten, especially at Lady Hollywood’s table.

It was time again to be reborn, to burst out of the placental sac and shower myself clean of the corruption of my cinematic sins, which were many. Time to void myself of the love of the old Hollywood made flesh turned repulsive, leaving in its wake a cyclopean corpse ready to submit to her next debased customer. I had to leave behind the world of mutant babies and Jean Harlow. I had to dust myself anew with baby powder, spread my Phoenix wings in resurrection, and learn from a past of my own, if you’ll allow me to mix the occasional metaphor. It was time to live a life rather than watch one.

It was time to work.

The writing had again opened the door a crack. Charlie Band offered me a ten-day shoot at his studio in Romania. Canada isn’t cheap enough for Full Moon, oh, no. Australia? Sure, that’s even cheaper, but come on. New Zealand? Cheaper still, but still too stiff. How about Mexico? Nice and close, even if English is the second language. Really cheap there. Nah. Have you seen the exchange rate in Romania lately? You could buy a castle for the price of a Double Double with Cheese there. Just think how far you could stretch a production budget. Okay, so nobody speaks English, there are no film facilities or experienced workers, and they’re only now discovering the joys of electricity. That’s perfect for Full Moon. We rolled it, it rolled us, and the Puppet Freaks III DVD came out in the fall, complete with my first commentary track, as well as an exclusive behind-the-scenes documentary. Rent it, don’t buy it.

PFIII didn’t open any doors, but it did pay a couple of bills. The good news is that nobody notices a film like that except for the very youngest of Fangoria subscribers. I did a couple of convention appearances to promote it and sat at the back of the hall, ostensibly to sign autographs. The only takers were a handful of seventeen-year-olds who wanted me to read their scripts.

Through Band, I did meet some financing guys, the characters with Cannes tans, Italian cars, English suits, Israeli accents and Swiss bank accounts. And I managed to talk them into putting up a couple of hundred grand for my can’t-miss digital video masterpiece. Believe it or not, Edible actually got picked up by Lions Gate and, fuelled by a really go-for-the-throat website, got a pretty credible limited theatrical release. It became a bit of a cult classic and a cause celebre amongst the midnight movie crowd. I didn’t know they even existed any more, frankly. Never underestimate the touching tale of lesbian cannibals living and dining in die Seattle underground.

Though my status on the Fangoria convention circuit was elevated, the Lady I most loved just wouldn’t love me back. What could I do to get her to notice me? Just what did I have to do? Couldn’t I put the lessons I had learned to work? Couldn’t I create a masterpiece of wit, intelligence, sophistication, originality, surprise and suspense, dig deep into my psyche and explore the very heart of man? Was I up to the task, not only of self-exploration, but also of telling a tale that could enrich, enlighten and entertain? If not me, who? If not now, when?

So I wrote and discarded and wrote and wrote and discarded and wrote and wrote and wrote and discarded, and finally wrote some more. And one summer day, I emerged from my condo at the Marina, the bright mauve sunlight digging its fingers into my CRT-glazed eyeballs, and took a deep breath of the air that smelled as brown as it looked. I had completed a new script, and I knew it was my masterpiece. A little long, perhaps, at 146 pages, Happy Endings was everything I’d learned about life, love and relationships in all my twenty-six years. It was funny, it was tender, it was shocking, it was surprising. It even had a happy ending. I slid it into an envelope and called Metzler at Immaculate Artists to have it picked up. Metzler was delighted to have a spec script to sling, and I was energised. It was a box of Valentine chocolates, offered up to the Goddess of Love.

To celebrate, I decided to take myself out to a movie. Let’s see, what’ll it be? Which masterwork would I choose? Planet of the Apes? America’s Sweethearts? Final Fantasy} Swordfish? Rush Hour 2? American Pie 2? Dr Dolittle 2? Jurassic Park III? Osmosis Jones? Original Sin? Cats and Dogs? Ghosts of Mars?

I knew one thing with dead certainty as I perused the listings in the LA Times Calendar, nobody was going to buy Happy Endings.

So when Metzler called me back in a couple of weeks, it had nothing to do with my masterwork. But it was an offer. An offer!

‘UPN has an MOW about a cheerleader whose botched breast enhancement surgery left her disfigured and suffering from lupus and a virulent case of lawyeritis. It’s a true story, shoots on an eighteen-day schedule in Manitoba, they got one of the girls from Lucky Charms, two directors have already left the project, the nineteen-year-old UPN VP is a lifelong Fangoria subscriber who loves your work and it starts shooting Monday. Can you get on a plane today?’

Not only could I and would I ... I was glad to get it!

How far the mighty have fallen.

Being on a set energised me. I was making decisions, calling the shots, and charming Miss Lucky Charms in her trailer. I’d heard she was a bitch, but not to me. Maybe it was because she was from series and I was from features. We coupled mightily and profoundly between setups. I’d thought my experience with the monster baby and Jean Harlow and the porn work would have forever deadened my drive, but the bodily investigations we undertook in her Winnie were frequent and creative, as you might expect from artists such as ourselves. Princess Charming claimed not to have been entered since before her rehab stay, and was primed and juicy, igniting sleeping fires within my deprived male flesh. When she unsheathed, revealing creamy and alarmingly realistically augmented breasts, graced with swollen, extended nipples with silver skull piercings that dangled in grinning, shining tinkles from their proud pink hostesses, my heart swelled and every part of me stood up to salute their glory.

Though her pubis was Naired clean of any trace of hair, her labia were pierced and protected by a tiny gold padlock. It caught a beam of sunlight and my eye. She smiled when she saw me discover the tiny gold key on the spider-web-fine gold chain around her neck. She lifted her sheaf of hair to grant me access, her buoyant breasts reaching high, and I lifted the award necklace over her head. I took the little key to Nirvana in my teeth and leaned deep down into Candyland, unlocked the Gates of Hell, and climbed her Stairway to Heaven. There I go mixing metaphors again.

We explored orifices I never knew existed in the human body with such energy and invention that I was rubbed raw and swollen for weeks.

The movie was a piece of shit - how could it be otherwise on an eighteen-day cookie-cutter schedule? - but it was a union piece of shit, and I got paid and laid and rolled some film. It got a seven rating, which for any other place is Tank City but for UPN is phenomenal, and put me on their A-list. Of course, die A-list at UPN is like the X, Y, or Z at a real network, but Guild minimum is Guild minimum.

Lady Hollywood was spreading her legs again.

But hadn’t I learned? How could I not see the hollowness of this existence, the artistic and moral and downright cynical bankruptcy of my life? Because I was getting lots of money and pin-up pussy, that’s how. The Princess got respectable reviews for the first time in her life, and insisted that I direct any movies-of-the-week that she starred in.

So now I had sort-of-famous cathode candy on my arm at screenings, offers from the networks to direct really shitty TV movies in Canada with even shittier TV actors, and a glimmer of access to the Lady I truly hoped to make mine again. But nobody in the big leagues of features notices what you’re doing in the world of television. I know that when I had my brief stab at the Big Time, I didn’t.

I mean, who can watch that shit? Seventeen minutes out of every hour is spent yelling at you to buy some piece of crap you don’t want, don’t need, and would make you sick if you put it in your mouth. It’s the same old stories, the same old rhythms, the same old laugh track, the same old caricatures, the same old shit. But the big cathode eye sits in every room in the house, daring you not to watch it. The programming is just the agar that supports the bloom of mouldy commercials, sticking you in the eye with a hypodermic filled with buy-me poison, drilling products into your pod-person brain so that you cannot resist the urge to purchase them when they present themselves so noisily at your friendly neighbourhood supermarket.

Following the path of least resistance, I said yes to television, the only club that would have me as a member. I made another MOW with Princess Charming, this one the totally true - no kidding! - story of a feckless young lady lawyer who discovers a ring of body-part harvesters, selling livers and kidneys and eyeballs to high-rolling, incomplete buyers over the Internet. This one we shot in New Zealand, somehow substituting Wellington for Baltimore, and the Princess for an educated, intelligent, progressive lady lawyer. Well, the Princess, for all her charms, is sweet and beautiful and really good company, but her SATs would surely have stood in the way of a legal career.

We mated madly in her trailer (though I’d worked my way up to a contractual full single trailer of my own, hers was more divinely sized and appointed), and the unlocking and entering was performed with increasing frequency. We tried to keep it to lunch breaks and after wrap, but it was hard to keep it under wraps when the trailer rocked noisily to our samba. It was a set visit from Entertainment Tonight that spilled the beans of our relationship to the national television-viewing audience. Not that it hurt to be publicly outed as the poster-girl-for-nipple-rings’ studly boy toy, but it pissed off her muscular tennis pro/ underwear model husband. It could have got ugly, had the Smoking Gun online tabloid not discovered Mr Thirty Love’s proclivities for hired shemale encounters in the bungalow where John Belushi died at the Chateau Marmont.

Jesus, is there no morality in Hollywood?

I continued to be buffeted about by the broken winds of Lady Hollywood, passive and mindless as I fielded offers of one lame MOW after another. I took whatever was offered, knowing at least that I was directing, that I was making movies, that I had not sunk to the depths of series television. Hiatus was over and the Princess was back at her own series, Reno-divorced from Mr Fruit-of-the-Loom, begging me to shoot episodes, but was very understanding when I told her that I could be intractably reversing the course of my career if I did. I kept after Metzler to get me feature meetings at the studio, but he was finally earning some kind of an income off of my television work and was not so motivated. He was, however, able to get me a meeting on a new Jacqueline Smith pilot.

To this I said no.

I was working, earning a living, punching a clock, fucking a desirable TV debutante, and leaving my brain empty and sodden. If I allowed any personal reflection, I’d have been so filled with self-loathing that I’d have jumped off the Hollywood sign. So instead, I shaved my already thinning scalp, grew a soul patch and a paunch and dove headfirst into a personal study of alcoholism. It took me a six-pack to even sit through our cast-and-crew screening of Speaking Parts at the TV Academy in North Hollywood. Oh, it was all very chichi, with the finest catering - braised organ meats and the most cunning little cookies shaped like body parts - and an open bar. Everyone was very taken with the Importance of the Film, congratulating one another on its Theme and Performances, high on its Emmy shots, when in truth this masterwork of disposable cinema would be forgotten the day after it aired. They all are. They are the cornstarch binder that holds the advertising cocaine. We try to make movies, but they are just delivery systems for the bleating of commercials.

When I looked at the sea of agents and actors and journalists and hangers-on milling about, freeloading on ritzy-titzy comestibles in the regal lobby, broadcasting too-loud conversations on their eensy cell phones, and I saw how many of them had gleaming shaved skulls, soul patches and a paunch, I realised in a stomach-dropping moment of truth . . .

I had become One of Them!

I was an interchangeable film-rolling robot, dipped in screenings at the Academy and catered desserts, draped in Hugo Boss and Julius the Monkey, nightclub-hopping at all the right places, memorising the LA-to-Toronto flight schedules on Air Canada, talking about Nielsen shares and ad rates, turning my nose up at series and basic cable movies while wallowing in the lowest headline graveyard true-story pieces of shit. I was just another anonymous first name on Lady Hollywood’s dance card ... a name she would never get to by the end of the night. I spoke in terms of act breaks and TVQ and Broadcast Standards and hot series stars and their availability, no matter how wrong they were for the parts. I realised that I hadn’t thought with my imagination since the days before Harlow. I had been embraced, imprisoned and embalmed: a POW of the MOW.

Just when I was awakening from my pod-guy stupor, just when the pennies started to fall off my eyes, just when I was ready to remind the rest of the world that I was an artist, by God, in other words, just when I was about to fix my world . . . they stopped making TV movies.

It wasn’t a subtle shift, either. In the wake of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, Survivor, Big Brother, Temptation Island, Boot Camp, Lost, The Mole, Murder in Small Town X, The Amazing Race and all the other so-called ‘reality shows’ - in other words, shows where you don’t have to pay members of the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild of America or the Directors Guild of America, where there are no residual payments for rerun and syndication play - there was no room for my meat and potatoes. Even if the Reality Ratings were not great, compared to their low cost they were extremely profitable. So with a legacy of audience expectations lowered by a diet of cheap-shit, Canadian-cranked dime-a-dozen woman-in-jeopardy TV movies that featured one star from a familiar series and a supporting cast of anonymous Canadian thespians, the networks gleefully jumped to the next lower rung on the ladder of commercial delivery.

And I was out of work.

No longer the boy wonder, I was going to turn twenty-seven on my next birthday. The prospects were not bright. My resume reeked of mediocrity, the shooting star of my youth gone dark, the fire extinguished by assembly line crap, without a signature or a personality.

The passion long gone, it took the return of unemployment to realise I had no friends. None. Oh, it’s all kissy-face and love-ya-hon’ on the set, where you are thrown together with a new group of cast and crew on each new project. But when those twenty-some days of prepping and shooting are over, so are your relationships. Princess Charming, of course, was drenched in friends, her little Nokia constantly tweeting with one ass-kiss or another wrapping her in love. But when I wasn’t working, a condition that by now I should have been well-equipped to deal with, I was all alone: just me and my DVDs.

I was loved by Princess Charming; she told me so repeatedly. But hers was a lalaland love, tuned by the eye of Access Hollywood and E! While she worked on her series (and frankly, I don’t know anyone who has ever seen it), I went to the movies, watched movies at home, sat by myself in the most popular restaurants and wondered what to do with myself. Masturbation was an option, but since that was my career, I just was not so motivated. It started to take more than a couple of shots of Jack Daniel’s to numb me to sleep.

I stared out of the Marina condo, bored out of my skull, and unable to imagine. I wanted to write, but nothing came out. Not even bad ideas. Nothing. I was used up at twenty-six. Lady Hollywood had sapped me of my vital fluids without even taking me within her most private of parts. Ever teasing, never pleasing. The semen of my imagination was locked within my testicles, and I was getting creative blue balls. So I just opened bottles and emptied them. I felt more creative, but nothing ever got on paper. Or that which did was no better than what I’d sicked up in the toilet.

Finally, I relented. The Princess was so sweet, her eyes so dewy, the halo of her hair so perfectly framed when she suggested one last time that I could make her show something special, that I agreed to direct the season finale. It was a two-hour special, so I could at least make believe it was something special, and not really an episode: more like an MOW. Exactly like an MOW, at least in the eyes of DGA scale. Eighty-eight minutes of movie sandwiched between thirty-two minutes of bellowing buy-me and network promos flogging their latest ‘unscripted’ monstrosities.

But this was the new me. Again. No, really. This was my chance to dazzle Lady Hollywood, to grab this homely little piffle of a series by the neck and shake it until it cried uncle. I was a plastic surgeon, and by God, I would carve a beautiful countenance out of its dowdy visage or I didn’t deserve a date with the Lady. I took the script and marked it up with diagrams and designs and ideas. My imagination, unbridled by the ninety pages of soulless, mindless blather, embroidered fabrics of visual splendour. It doesn’t have to cost a fortune to make something look wonderful. The independents do it all the time. So let’s shake things up a little here. I came on like a preacher and managed to get the lazy, tubby IA crew to catch fire, getting everybody on the bus taking us to the best damned Lucky Charms episode ever. And it worked: for once, the crew felt liberated, encouraged to go beyond the beyond. The sets were actually wild and kind of wonderful. It became a sort of acid-dream playground, where we broke all the rules and created a phantasmagoric colour wheel of a movie. I got the actors to really stretch, re-imagine their characters and ground them in what passed for real emotion. It was weird and funny and . . . well, let’s not get carried away here, but at least it was not like any of the other episodes of Lucky Charms.

The Princess couldn’t have been more delighted. She loved me, she loved the show, and even the other girls on the show, who hated anything she loved, got into it. And both of them offered me space in their trailers when the Princess wasn’t in earshot. Okay, I did one of them, but not the other. I do have standards ... at least when I’m working.

The brass at the WB were delighted with the dailies, if at first a bit confused. But hell, they’d lost Buffy and Roswell to UPN, and this was all they had left. I had taken to drinking only Fiji water to keep my head clear, and though we shot a few eighteen-hour days, managed to come in on time and only slightly over budget. I actually took pride in this, this episode, and made it something that I actually cared about. Maybe I’d even do one of these again.

Then it aired. As cast and crew gathered at Residuals and hooted and cheered it around die bar’s big screen, the rest of die nation was oblivious. This very-best-ever episode of Lucky Charms was its lowest-rated. Ever. It was opposite Millionaire on ABC, a Big Brother rerun on CBS, Weakest Link on NBC, a ‘When Bad Drivers Attack!’ special on Fox, and Buffy on UPN. But we weren’t just killed by the big boys;

even basic cable got better ratings: USA, Fox Family, PAX, TBS, TNT and even TNN all got better numbers than we did. And our Very Special Episode never even got reviewed . . . not even by the trades.

No more offers.

In a life of crashing and burning, this might have been the nadir. At least my popular Princess still loved me. But I was not prepared for what she had to say the next time we coupled. It was a typically sweaty, liquid liaison, an acrobatic, aerobic performance of breath taking quality. The vast picture window of her bedroom looked out over the San Fernando Valley from our perch on the hillside overlooking Studio City. The rain was Biblical, beating against the glass as we pounded against each other. I had bite marks from those little skulls all over my body, and I reciprocated in kind. Ours was a pretzel logic that knew no convention: every orifice was fed and satisfied, no appendage left wanting as we melted together like rubber and road. I was depleted, sucked dry by a vampire that drew pearly white blood and clear sweat from my body. Lying on our backs in a cooling pool of those vital fluids, we stared up at one another in the ceiling mirror that looked down on us. Her meaty breasts jiggled with the pounding of her heart. Our faces were flushed and sheened with perspiration.

‘I love you,’ she told me.

‘Mmmmm.’

‘Do you love me?’

‘Sure.’ I supposed I did. Why not? She was great.

‘What do you mean, “sure”?’

‘I mean sure, as in of course.’

‘“Sure” you love me?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘Then tell me.’

‘I just did.’

‘No, you said “sure”. I want to hear the words.’

Why not? I mean, it was no big deal. I loved her. What’s not to love? Okay: ‘I love you.’

‘Can’t you tell me without me asking?’

‘Okay. I love you. I’ll tell you more often. I’ll bring it up on my own. I love you, Princess.’

She smiled. She did have the sweetest smile. But I sensed this was leading somewhere. A shadow of dread started creeping across the room towards me.

‘Should we think about getting married?’

Bombshell. ‘Sure; we can think about it all you want. Why?’

‘ ‘Cause I love you. And you love me. And ‘cause I’m pregnant.’

Inside, I screamed. I have a major problem with the whole baby thing. I mean, it’s not like I have a whole lot of experience with babies, but the experience I had with little Asta was all I ever wanted . . . hell, much more then I ever wanted. No babies. Not for me. No drooling, screaming, sucking, shitting, constantly feeding little squirming pink creatures for me.

‘Pregnant?’

‘You know, gonna have a baby.’

Okay, it’s been confirmed. I was terrified. As I think about it now, at least I was feeling something. That was new. But better to be the Hollywood Zombie I had become than confront fatherhood. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know where to turn. I longed to be an ostrich and jam my head into the sand. Babies are bad enough, but Hollywood babies! She wouldn’t let me look away, her face niacin-rosy, freshly fucked and shining with satisfaction. Truthfully: irresistible.

‘How pregnant are you?’ I asked.

‘All the way.’

‘I mean how long?’

‘About eight weeks.’

‘So it’s not too late for an abortion.’

She just stared at me, those lovely eyes taking on a glinting wetness, filling and spilling as she trapped me in her sight. I couldn’t have spoken a less welcome sentence. I tried to reach for her, to take back the ill-timed, if perfectly logical, statement. But she broke. Her body was given over to wracking wails and snuffling.

When the sobs subsided and she was able to speak, she spoke. ‘With you or without you, I’m having our baby. I thought you’d be happy.’

I can’t stand crying. I melt, I give way, I die. I tried to tell her that it just wasn’t the right time. Her career was on the line here. And so was mine. There’s some momentum going here, and a baby would stop everything short. She didn’t care about her career; she had enough money and investments to see her through whatever happened, and Hollywood was shallow and hollow and merely a means to an end. There was life after Lucky Charms. Well, I’m glad she thought so. I’d never considered that there was any other life than the one we’d chosen. But, hey, it was her body. If she wanted a baby, she would have her baby. Still, the thought of a squalling, bawling infant spitting up and shitting up filled me with dread. Not enough dread to give up the Princess and all her charms and career opportunities, but dread. I couldn’t think of myself as Daddy - didn’t even want to — but I couldn’t stop her from becoming a mother, no matter how foolish the notion. As was my wont, I was picked up by the winds of circumstance and blown into the gutter of Hollywood nuptials.

The wedding at Hollywood Presbyterian was enormous and star-studded. Well, TV-star studded, but that counts on Access Hollywood. The rest of her coven was there, as well as low-level WB and UPN celebrities and dignitaries. Press agents called to get their Survivor loser clients on the guest list, Sam Rubin had an exclusive KTLA wedding party interview, and the swarms of bottom-feeding entertainment media piddled in our pool and drank our champagne. A couple of members of O Town kind of sang, and teenage girls thronged the perimeter of the church, hoping to grope - or at least glimpse - a Fifteen-Minute-Famer. It was noisy and cheerful, and nothing really went wrong. The Princess’s mother beamed, at forty-two a wonderfully prescient reflection of how beautifully the Princess herself would ripen. When she hugged me after the ceremony, I felt her visibly sizable peek-a-boo nipples harden under the braless silk blouse, and she actually sneaked me a little tongue. I couldn’t keep from getting an erection, but I gave her nothing back. I mean, I’m a happily married man. Not that I expected to remain so, Hollywood marriages being what they are, but this was new, fresh and respectable.

The Princess herself, however, never was more glorious. Her face glowed, luminous in the lightest application of very natural make-up. Even swollen with child, her beauty was almost ethereal, resplendent in a custom-made Rei Kawakubo gown that allowed her protruding baby belly to be seen, even highlighted. Somehow, her pregnancy made her even more desirable. She was due to pop the pup in a month or so, so there was no secret about her condition. Most of the wedding presents were really baby presents, which pissed me off a little, but I got over it.

Our honeymoon was spent at the Four Seasons Sayan in Bali, a gift from Aaron Spelling, the generous producer who owned the Princess. The night we arrived, despite the jetlag and exhaustion, the spectacular sunset views of the Ayung River from our outdoor rock bathtub lit a fire within us. I had been afraid of pregnant sex since the swell of the baby’s presence had become overt. I mean, I didn’t want to put out its little eye or anything, though I knew I was being foolish. But then she stood over me, dripping wet and blissfully bare, her belly swollen with baby and her breasts with milk, and a curtain lifted. She’d long ago removed the nipple-skulls so that there would be minimal milk leakage, and stood completely naked, mind and body, her flesh like French vanilla ice cream, her butterfat skin shining and hairless. The new heft of her breasts was irresistible, so I reached up and slid my hands up her body to them. My face followed, and soon I was tasting warm mother’s milk as I nursed it from her. It was my favourite meal of the trip.

She gripped my hairless head in her hands and eased it lower. I slid my face along the tight, round tummy and found succour in the smooth valley below, where she had celebrated the marriage with a ritual casting-away of lock and key. I dined on her physical magnificence for a while before she eased my head back up to her stomach. She wanted to rest it there, wanted me to listen to our child. I could hear its little heart beating from her womb, a tiny tattoo nearly drowned out by the tom-tom beat of her own. And then, a surprisingly brisk little kick tapped my face through her belly. She held my head there, and something happened. For a moment, I went blind.

Everything went black, but the sounds got louder: new and different sounds, not of Balinese monkeys and birds, but of a thudding, rushing heartbeat. It was a deafening, repeating, 5.1 surround whoosh. As my eyes got used to the darkness, I saw that there was colour forming in the black: red, of course. Blood-red, with a sparkle of gold. I could see inside through my baby’s eyes. Tiny, incomplete fingers flexed clumsily before my face in the placental sac. Peering through the dim light, I could make out perfect little baby toes, even down to their little toenails. In the dim glow through the amniotic fluid, I could make out a pretty good-sized little pecker for a kid his age. We’d had all the tests done, of course, and knew it was a boy, but I was proud that my son was well-endowed.

Then the veil of darkness lifted and I was back on our private stone balcony overlooking the cliffside jungles and rice terraces, a glamorous and beautifully voluptuous young starlet dripping wet and breathing hard as she held my head against her bare skin. I climbed from the pool, lifted her up in my arms and laid her on her side on the bed, ignoring the water. I spooned against her back, hands pressed tight to her stomach and entered her from behind. As I pounded into her uncontrollably, animal instinct ruling the rooster, she threw her arms behind and gripped my ass, pulling me in deeper and faster.

And then, again, that same something happened. Heft my head and entered junior’s . . . while I was entering and re-entering his mother. I could see the length of my erection stretching and penetrating the Princess from within, the repeated plunging rhythm hypnotic in the dim, red-gold-black light. As the Princess was caught up in spasmic paroxysms of what I hoped was delight and fulfilment, I helplessly spat my seed into her and watched its milky mist creep slowly into the baby’s amniotic bath. As I withdrew from her hallowed cave, I also withdrew from this link to an unformed mind and back into the monkey chants and damp, purpling sky of the Balinese evening.

Stunned, I stared at my beautiful wife (wife!), stupored by what had just happened. She saw immediately that something was up.

‘What’s the matter?’

What could I say? What did I know? I’d seen through the eyes of my unborn son while I was fucking his mother? That’s exactly what I told her. And bless her little tattooed heart, she thought that was beautiful.

Well, it scared the shit out of me. And it kept happening, at unexpected and disorienting times. We’d be sitting in an ancient Ubud temple, watching the villagers monkey-chant for tourists, when suddenly I’d be pre-born, the sound outside muffled and drowned out by the Princess’s pounding heartbeat. It was a sensation of floating in space, of womb scuba-diving, staring through the cloudy, not yet fully formed eyes of a pre-infant. Tiny fingers weakly flexed and explored, reaching out and touching the womb, the toes, the little baby weenie. Everything else in my brain evaporated as I slid back into sensory prehistory, brain activity sliding to a nearly complete halt, running on instinct, not intellect, resting, easing myself free of the world outside. I was at peace.

Peace.

My mind had not been at rest . . . well, ever. Until now. It was like letting go. Being free. Cutting the cord. Free fall.

And then I woke up.

The loud, rhythmic, atonal chatter of the chanters drove spikes into my newly sensitive ears, jangled me, threw me violently back into my own body in the real world. I hated it, and ran outside for some semblance of quiet.

As I stood smoking out in the sultry Indonesian night, the chanting a distant dissonance, the far-off wailing of priests curling through the night sky like smoke, I tried to catch my breath. The rushing of the Ayung River calmed me, took me back to the womb. Suddenly it occurred to me that I was more than ten thousand miles away from Hollywood. I had moved to another planet.

On this planet, there were no avaricious agents, no numbskull network executives, no call sheets, no rush-hour freeway parking lots, no tap-dance meetings on movies you wouldn’t even watch, no Monday box-office reports, no cheering the failure of another over-budget creatively bankrupt celluloid stinker, no lunches at gilt-priced snooty see-me emporia where everyone is watching the mirrors out of the corners of their eyes, no taking it up the ass from ferocious ego monsters driving huge Jaguars to mask the incapacity of their penises, no style-monster fashionistas dictating what must be worn and how, no unavoidable advertising spoiling every vista, no hip-hop pounding mercilessly in your head, no seven-act structure, no broadcast standards, no MPM, no Tom Shales, no artifice, no knife-in-teeth competition, no keeping up with the Joneses. Hell, no Joneses at all.

No, on this planet there was earth, sky and water. There was the Princess. There was our son. And I was with them. We had been reduced to the Elements. My heart swelled as it dawned on me that I truly loved them. They filled me, they expanded me. They were a part of me. We were linked, chemically and spiritually. Someone once described love as caring more about the one you love than about yourself. I had never imagined that plausible, even possible. Not until now. My marriage, fatherhood: they had seemed so abstract, so distant until now. But I woke up. My love had sprouted, grown wings, lifted me. The Princess and my son opened up a brand new chamber in my heart. This chamber was not protected by a wall of cynicism, was lacking in irony, was startlingly open and sincere. It’s a chamber open to pain . . . but worth the pain. To my amazement, I was truly in love.

I turned to see the Princess, following her tight, round tummy out of the temple and into the fragrant night, and I smiled at her. She approached me, asked me if I was okay, and I pulled her into my arms and enveloped her. I held her head in my hands and kissed her softly, all over her face. When I told her ‘I love you’ over and over, it made her laugh and cry at the same time.

So this is that feeling that everybody writes about, sings about, makes movies about. The Princess had reached out to me from within, and I had never even been aware. As I looked into and past her eyes, I was in her thrall. Being reduced to the beginning of life, she and our son became meaningful; I’d been chasing the Bitch Hollywood, when what was important was here, right here in the jungle. Right here in my arms. Our connection had been made on a corporeal, carnal level, but existed beyond that somehow. I felt older, deeper, wiser. And it kind of hurt.

We silently held hands as we peered out over the vast valley of rice terraces, a jewel-box of diamonds strewn across the coal-black sky. Curls of smoke rose like thoughts from the farms. And we kissed like Brad and Jennifer. No. Like us. Nobody else has ever kissed like us.

We left the villa wide open to the night sky as we coupled that night. It was as carnal as ever, but deeper, meaningful, evocative as body met body and minds melted away into instinct. Butterflies fluttered into the room, floating over us and lighting on our wet, sticky bodies as we linked, rocked, plundered in abandonment. She fiercely grabbed me by the scalp and pulled my head back so our eyes would be locked when we both erupted into a violent, mutual orgasm that wouldn’t end. She exploded in repeated shuddering waves of almost frightening fulfilment as I kept spurting and spurting into her.

We fell asleep linked, uncovered, pretzelled. It was the first night I had fallen asleep without Scotch or Ambien or even a Tylenol PM in a couple of years.

What a great honeymoon.

On the flight home, I spent most of my time in the womb, my adult face sleeping against the curve of mother’s belly, floating mindlessly, wordlessly in the balm of amniotic fluid, a sensory deprivation tank that worked internally as well as on the other senses. I was unborn, gearing up for Independence Day, but in no hurry. I could feel everything tuning up, completing, making ready. I could feel the baby’s hand stroke curiously and calmingly against the wall that separated him from me. He let me know he loved me in his silent, unborn-baby way.

As we approached LAX, I woke to find the Princess sound asleep, her head on my shoulder, drooling, her eyes rolled back in her head. I thought she looked adorable, and couldn’t keep from gently kissing her forehead. I was relaxed and comfortable in my own body, rested and happy. I looked out the window as we made our way through the crust of muddy smog that covered die basin like a flu, the ant farm of freeways choked to stagnation. It looked brown and dry and uninviting, a corpse laid out on its pyre, ready to be ignited to set its spirit free. Princess Charming awoke with a kiss as the 747 dropped to enter the dead body of Los Angeles.

Home.

Studio City had changed in the two weeks since we left: noisier, more crowded, browner, drier, smellier, brighter, less polite, meaner, more selfish. The answering machine was flashing ‘99’ over and over; it was full. The cleaning lady had left the mail piled on the dining room table, a tower of babble that meant nothing. You could throw it all out and never notice the difference. After all, the business manager got all the cheques. We were home, but we didn’t feel we belonged there. It had changed too much.

The truth, of course, was that we had changed. In Bali, we had become a family.

We cocooned. Spinning a web of solitude around us, we turned inwards indulging ourselves in each other. Yeah, we linked sexually, but it went way beyond that. It was hypnosis, infatuation, adoration, obsession. And I couldn’t keep from kissing the mound of her stomach, silently and psychically communing with my offspring. It was a disgustingly Hollywood idyll, ordering out from Chin Chin and Mexicali and filling the new nursery with all the finest from Baby Town Online while we waited for Junior to be born. We were too focused to miss Bali’s dissipating hold on us, too wrapped in anticipation to notice that California began to take us over again. Everything changes; everything wears off. And you don’t even notice as it happens to you.

The baby was due on May 25th. I was born on May 25th, 1977, the same day Star Wars opened. In fact, my mother went into labour as she waited in line at the Chinese Theatre for the first show. It practically killed my father that he had to take her to the hospital and miss the movie after waiting in line for over two hours. He came back for the midnight show that night. To this day, my mother has never seen Star Wars or any of its sequels, won’t even have the videos in the house. It’s her own private little protest, and perhaps fuelled my fire to make movies in the first place. Nothing like a little repression to provoke a little rebellion.

Baby Day drew nearer. The Princess’s belly looked like an over-ripe peach about to burst from its skin. Every night after we made love, I drifted into the mind of the little boy in her womb, floating and forming, the rest of the planet at bay, moving more, seeing more. We were getting ready to break water, hit the lights, roll sound and camera, and call for action.

May 25th. 3:20 am. I woke screaming, my eyes wide but blind, wrapped in blackness, a spike of pain shattering my skull from within, detached, terrified, in a sudden jolt of agony that I could not cast off. I could feel the Princess’s hand gripping my own, but I couldn’t see her. Her nails dug painfully into my hand, surely drawing blood, but I was inside her, blind, screaming.

Dying.

Just as quickly, the pain ended. I opened my eyes, and there was my wife, eyes rolled back in her head, panting, pale, perspiring. She clutched me tightly, and now it hurt. She managed to look at me with red-laced eyes, speaking between agonised breaths: ‘Something’s wrong. Call 911.’

I broke out in a sweat of terror, fumbled for the phone in the predawn moonlight, and managed to hit 911. I held her close, whispering over and over how everything was going to be okay, how I loved her so much, as we waited for the cavalry.

The ambulance raced us to Cedars Sinai, where her obstetrician screeched up in his Testarossa at precisely the same moment. He called all the shots, taking charge and rushing her into emergency. But despite his handsome, Robert Redford strength, the hustle of the best medical technicians and facilities money can buy, it was to no avail. Here, in this town, at this price, we were as hopeless as the homeless on Skid Row.

Our baby was born dead.

In the movies, your baby doesn’t die. You laugh together and make home movies and go to Disneyland and Yosemite and keep a family album and mark his growth on the kitchen wall and save for his college and cry at his wedding. In the movies, love is enough. In the movies, faith saves the day.

No, in the movies your baby doesn’t die. Neither does your baby sister, or your brother, or your father. But especially not your baby.

That only happens in real life.

Movies are better.

I had linked with our little boy in a connection no other parent has ever shared with his child, actually lived in his little head. But I had no idea that his head was so malformed, that the brain extruded through the open spot at the top of his little skull. By the time he was ready for his close-up, it was too late. After a brief flash of intolerable agony, he was gone.

And so was the Princess. When she was awake, she was crying, deep, racking sobs, wailing that ripped through the house with grief. When she wasn’t crying, she was unconscious, knocked out by sedatives, sleeping pills, anti-depressants and vodka. I cried with her, held onto her, tried to ease her grief, but I was grieving too deeply to be of any help. I tried to be strong for her, but she didn’t want my strength, and pushed me away. All I could do was sit on the balcony, tears coursing down my cheeks as I listened to her anguished, jungle wail behind die closed bedroom door, throwing and shattering things and screaming at God.

I held onto her, tight, not letting her pull away. She beat on my chest with her fists, but I wouldn’t let her go. She collapsed into me, exhausted, then fell asleep in my arms.

My pain was deadened by hers. She was in such excruciating agony, draped in a smothering cowl of death, that I felt useless, responsible.

* * * *

For three solid months, she cried and I drank and cried. Her mother came by, but the Princess wouldn’t come out of her room to see her. Friends from the show came to see her, to try to bring some light into her darkness, but the door remained locked. The rest of the coven tried to pull her out for lunch, but she didn’t do food any more.

Without wearing her celebrity, her face clean of make-up, dressed only in sweats, eyes red and swollen, her face under a constant river of tears, she looked like a miserable little girl, an orphan in the storm, a helpless, hopeless little fawn abandoned in the forest. Bambi after the fire had killed her mother.

She surely blamed me, as she couldn’t bear to look at me. I could see the immolating look in her eyes before she turned away, and I couldn’t blame her. It had to have been my fault. She was right. After three months of this life of the living dead, she asked me to move out so that her mother could come and be with her. I had finally experienced the revelation of love, and it chewed me up and spit me out. Love is pain. I tried to fight her, to hold her, to keep us together, but all I reminded her of was the baby we lost. She lost. The baby I didn’t want in the first place. But the baby only I had shared a psychic link with. She had never been in his brain, and resented me for it. And for everything else. The baby made me real, and the real hurt.

So I moved back to a faceless, transitional condo at the Marina City Club, just me and my pain and my DVDs.

I wanted to hold the Princess, feed her strength, kiss her, be the reason for her to climb back into her life. I wanted to be her hero. But now she hated me. She probably always would.

Is this what everyone wants? Is all of this horror worth the moments of bliss? Is it better to feel than to be oblivious? The choice between fantasy and reality is being made throughout the basin, every minute of every day. And for most, the choice is easy. For me, there was no choice. Yes. For me, the flash of fire was worth it.

But now, as the graduated filter of browning sky began to drop, I yearned for the release I had found in my baby’s mind, that sense of freedom, the extraterrestrial departure from real life, the rejection of all that was earthbound. For me, all that was earthbound was awful. Everything hurt. This was a life not worth living. I didn’t want to start over again. There was no more Phoenix left within me. My nine lives had just about been used up. I just wanted it all to stop.

I stood on the twenty-first-floor balcony and realised how easy it could all be if I just jumped. A bungee jump without the bungee. Ten seconds of gut-punching terror, and then freedom. Release. Peace.

Peace.

I stared out into the ocean, its effluent-brown fingers lapping at the hulls of multi-million-dollar ego yachts, and my mind drifted back to the monkey forests and winding rivers of Bali. The twenty-four-hour rush hour clotted the Marina, but my brain was lifted to the better planet that lay beyond this one.

Acrophobic, I tiptoed to the edge of the balcony. All it would take is a single step, and I could fly. The pain would stop.

The phone rang.

Should I answer? What difference could it make? Why didn’t I just make that simple leap? The phone rang again, daring me. Another glance over the balcony. Another ring. No, this was not the time. I stepped inside and answered the phone.

It was Metzler. Spelling wanted to know if I had any series ideas to pitch for pilot season. Lady Hollywood calling.

It always happens. Just when you’re ready to give that bitch a shove, just when you’re ready to tell her to fuck off, she calls and asks for a date. Well, I was no longer interested. She was getting old, anyway, losing teeth, gaining weight, and her hair was going grey. I had only thought I had loved her. The Princess was much more my type, even now.

‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘They love you there. You come up with a series, write and direct the pilot, you don’t have to run the show. It’s a big chunk of change, and if the fucker’s a hit, you’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars.’

Well, I didn’t care about hundreds of millions of dollars any more. However . . . however . . .

Maybe I did have an idea. The cogs turned.

‘I’m sure you’ve got something better than the shit they’re running,’ he said. ‘Think about it.’

I thought about it.

‘You know ... I do have something I’ve been working on. Something . . . special.’’ Something they deserve. I could hear the saliva forming in his mouth.

‘Tell me.’

‘No,’ I told him. ‘Not over the phone. I’ve got something that’s just what network television is looking for. I promise. Get me a meeting in the agency boardroom with the mucky-mucks. The highest flyers at each of the networks. This is going to be an auction.’

‘An auction!’ His hands scraped together. ‘This sounds delectable!’

‘It’s better than that. Can you set it up?’

‘I’m on the phone. I don’t know if I can get everybody there at the same time, though. We might have to do separate meetings.’

‘No. I’m pitching this once. If they can’t make it, fuck ‘em. Twenty-four hours to bid, and that’s it. And if it doesn’t sell, it doesn’t sell. I don’t really give a shit. And keep business affairs away for now.’

He was panting. ‘You’re making my job easy. I’ll call you back.’

Immaculate Artists has a gorgeous Scandinavian modern conference room, with soft, calming indirect lighting, plush leather seats that roll with a whisper on the walnut flooring, de Kooning originals spotted in warm, pleasing light, and a vast array of fresh fruits, whatever you wanted to drink, and fresh, still-warm baked goods from Belwood. Iger and Kellner sent underlings, but Sassa and Moonves and Valentine and most of the other jumbo jets were there. Sceptical, resentful of the secrecy and of my station in the network TV universe, but present and accounted for. Had I been David Kelly or Chris Carter or John Wells or even the Endemol guy, they’d have fawned and cooed and kissed me on both cheeks, adding zeroes to their chequebook offers.

But it was just me, the guy who directed the lowest-rated episode of Lucky Charms ever. But even losers like me can become big winners with the right idea at the right time. It’s possible. And that possibility, especially when pumped up by Metzler and Immaculate and thrown up for bid, was worth missing one session with the personal trainer.

When they finally settled in for the 11:00 am appointment at 11:35, Metzler turned it over to me. I didn’t even stand; it was better this way. I looked at each of them in turn, cleared my throat, took a gulp of Fiji water, and began:

‘If your legal team is squeamish, you might as well leave the room now. However, if you’re bold, adventurous enough to take a chance on something that could change the course of network television, then hear me out. It’s taking unscripted television to its cutting edge. It doesn’t rely on stars or writers or directors. It is inexpensive, but powerful. I dare anybody not to watch this show.’

No one left the room. No one moved. No one even fidgeted. But no one betrayed any interest, either.

I went on. ‘This show might dance at the edge of legality, but I’ve got ways around that. There are always ways around that. This show travels around the world, is universal in appeal, and faces a life- and death-issue every single week. It’s called Suicide! With an exclamation point.’

The room relaxed. Some of the mucky-mucks looked at one another and smiled.

‘We solicit viewers with the most heart-rending tales of woe, and choose the most telegenic, document their horrible lives, do “dramatic recreations”, interview all those around them who have made their lives so miserable, and have the audience vote who deserves the most elaborate and spectacular suicide. At the end of the show each week...a magnificendy staged death. It’s probably illegal in the States, but that’s the international angle. We go to exotic places all over the world to document these deaths, sell it world-wide, tie in with all these Death with Dignity groups, and tell Regis to go fuck himself.’

Throats cleared in the room. They had to make it physically evident that it disgusted them without them actually saying so.

‘Think about it,’ I continued. ‘It’s got romance and heartbreak, the triumph over adversity, life and death, good guys and bad guys, far-reaching, exotic locations all around the world. I’m telling you, it’s universal.’

Metzler grinned like the Cheshire Cat. He knew these guys a lot better than me. It seemed to me like they found the whole thing distasteful, that they were ready to walk out in an offended huff.

‘Nobody’s hands get dirty. We shoot in secrecy in a different location every week. All legal responsibility is held by the producers, not the networks. And all legal issues will be assumed by me and the production.’

Still no reaction.

‘There will be no pilot, although I will tell you I’m halfway through production of the first episode.’

Surprised looks around the room, though they quickly tried to hide them behind slack masks of disinterest.

‘In the first episode, there is no voting anyone off the planet. We have our star, and we have our commitment. I will be the first person to take his own life on international television. I am going to commit suicide, whether you buy this show or not, and it will all be recorded and edited to better than network-quality standards. All proceeds from the show will go to my wife, and you can assign any showrunner you want to continue the production, though I have all approvals. I’ve got a commitment from Chuck Woolery to host and Bill Conti to score. The mastered show will be delivered to the winning bidder, along with a show bible and all the attendant shit you’ll need.

‘Thanks for your time.’

Metzler took over with a single sentence. ‘You have twenty-four hours to make your offers.’

I stood up arid walked out before they could.

I went home and edited the footage I’d been shooting on digital video for the last week on the Mac. I didn’t get far before the phone rang again. You and I both know it was Metzler. The suits were squirting zeroes all over their bids. Every network but NBC made offers, incredible offers, groundbreaking offers. I think NBC wanted to stand as a beacon of higher standards, but in truth, they just didn’t want to pony up the big bucks. I’d made the biggest deal of my life, and it was dependent on my death. Which was exactly what I wanted.

Predictably, Fox made the winning bid.

The Garuda flight to the Balinese capital of Denpassar was quiet, uneventful, save for documenting it with my video equipment. I tried to look as pensive as possible for the camera. The pain made it easy. I just wanted all of this to end, to let me go. But I tapped away on my iBook, writing Woolery’s narration and editing my self-interview as we bisected the sky.

The Malaysian video crew I’d hired from Kuala Lumpur met me in a limo at the airport, and became my constant companions. The camera guy didn’t speak a word of English, but the soundman spoke enough for us to communicate. The industrial ugliness of Denpassar photographed beautifully: gnarled, smoky traffic, scraggy dogs and cattle in the streets, the frenzy of motor scooters and trishaws through the clusters of pre-fab, smog-stained concrete towers and garish signs made for exciting, exotic video, and great counterpoint for the lush, quiet beauty inland.

We left the snarling city in our wake as we dug deep into the heart of the island. Roadside shops gave way to breathtaking greenery, and vast stretches of palms and brilliant tropical flowers and emerald hillside rice terraces. The simple, natural beauty of the thick, ropy vegetation that reached its fingers everywhere calmed my heart. The scent of incense burning was ubiquitous, and ropes of its smoke lifted from the offerings of gorgeous, fragrant flowers at every doorway.

Finally, we reached the resplendent Amandari. It’s a luxurious retreat, the perfect place for a Hollywood castaway to hide in splendiferous comfort for his last night on earth. Outrageously expensive, but not when it’s part of the production budget. This entire hour of programming would cost maybe a quarter of what they were paying one of the stars of Friends for an episode. The staff at the Amandari had no idea what we were doing with all the lights and cameras, but were extremely solicitous, happy to have such high-flying clients in the thick of such a very low season. My last supper, recorded in loving close-ups and soft, magenta light, was elegant and delicious, if a hit fussy for my taste. But it made for good television, framed by the burbling artificial brook and the vast jungle reaching up into the pink clouds of the purple sky. Jungle birds cawed obligingly and a gentle, humid breeze caressed me.

I missed the Princess. I missed my son.

I sent the crew off to their less luxurious digs in Ubud and went to bed. Alone. The bed was soft and welcoming, the setting perfect, but I couldn’t notice. I wanted the Princess with me. I wanted my son. I wanted a life that mattered. And all I got was this lousy T-shirt.

The next morning was kissed by a quick wash of rain, leaving a damp scent of plumeria in its wake. The sun grinned and the jungle around me stretched and yawned awake with me. It was time. I bathed, shampooed, shaved to look my best for my performance. I couldn’t eat breakfast.

The crew met me at the hotel and drove me down a deep chasm to a lonely, overgrown location at the bank of the Ayung. Moored to the shore was an intricately carved teak boat, the faces of Hanuman and the other Balinese gods mocking me with their smiles and goggle-eyes. A small coterie of locals was there with the boat, covering it in dried palm fronds and straw. The river emptied out into the brown, uninviting sea just a hundred or so yards away, as my crew set everything up.

Clouds scudded dutifully across the sky, perfecting the landscape for video. I helped the crew set up four cameras at the best possible angles and took one with me as I climbed onto the bed of palms at the centre of the craft. Each of the crewmembers shook my hand and waded back to their positions. The cameras got their final focus marks, the recorders started rolling and I took a can of gasoline from one of the locals and stood, pouring the acrid fluid all over the fronds. I had written a speech, but it seemed anti-climactic. Show it, don’t tell it, Hitchcock said. Did I really have to put the bullshit in words? It all boiled down to two simple sentences, and that’s what I said before I flicked my Bic:

‘It all just hurts too much. I love you, Princess.’

Ignition. Lift off.

The flames erupted around me and licked me like hungry devils. The heat seared me and my first breaths of the sudden fire scorched my lungs. Though I could not breathe, I watched as the flames devoured my flesh, blistering and melting it in a stench of cooked meat. My body hair burned off in an acrid stink. My skin bubbled and blistered, expanding before it contracted, dripping fat on a fire that grew with each spatter. My meat went red before it charred black, and though my eyes burst, I could still see. I drifted high above the inferno with its heat, the foul odour of my barbecue wafting heavenward with the thick smoke of the burning fronds.

* * * *

I thought it would be different when I died. I thought the pain would stop, and I would at last be at rest. I thought it would all be over. But it’s not. My body is gone, so now, all that is left is the pain. There is no sleep, there is no play, there are no movies. I don’t care about the huge ratings that Suicide! racked up. It just doesn’t matter. I bathe in my memories, which is the worst kind of punishment. I am ether; I am the cold shiver that passes through you, the sudden racing of the heart that overtakes you when you stumble for your seat at the Chinese after the lights go down. I am smoke looking for a home, pain looking for a body.

Maybe your body doesn’t hurt. Maybe your body would be a better place to live. Maybe your body can see the movie through a better set of eyes. Maybe Lady Hollywood could love you back.

* * * *

Mick Garris’s first job in the movie business was as a receptionist for George Lucas’s Star Wars Corporation, where he worked his way up to running the remote-controlled R2-D2 robot at personal appearances, including that year’s Academy Awards ceremony. After working in film publicity at Avco Embassy and Universal Pictures, Steven Spielberg hired him as story editor on the Amazing Stories series for NBC-TV, where he wrote or co-wrote ten of the forty-four episodes. Since then, he has scripted or co-authored several feature films (Coming Soon, *Batteries Not Included, The Fly II, Horns Focus, Critters 2) and teleplays (Quicksilver Highway, Virtual Obsession, Tales from the Crypt, She-Wolf of London), as well as directing and producing for cable TV (Fuzzbucket, Psycho IV: The Beginning), features (Critters 2, Sleepwalkers), television films (Quicksilver Highway, Virtual Obsession), series pilot (The Others), and network mini-series (Stephen King’s The Stand, Stephen King’s The Shining, Steve Martini’s The Judge). More recently, Garris directed Lost in Oz, a pilot for Warner Bros. Television, shot in Australia. His short story collection A Life in the Cinema was his first book, although he has had fiction published in several magazines and anthologies, including Dark Terrors 5, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Hot Blood, Silver Scream, Splatterpunks, Midnight Graffiti and Carpe Noctem. ‘This character, first chronicled in “Life in the Cinema” and years later in “Starfucker” is, like the industry he represents, a splinter I just can’t pull from my finger,’ reveals the author. ‘Though, as in all lines of work, there are the heroes and the scum, the glory-seekers and the artists, the human beings and the Sammy Glicks, Hollywood’s extremes seem ever exaggerated. We have to stop and question why we’re doing what we’re doing, and remember the rush of creative excitement that we reached for in the beginning and not the boxoffice reports in the trades and the Porsches and arm candy you can get out of it. I’m writing a book of stories about this character to keep reminding me what I’m lining this lot .’