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The studio was often busy during the week - a total epicenter of natural ebb and flow, where all sorts of filmmakers gathered to fulfill their own artistic vision. Despite the awareness and advocacy of this day and age, a majority of these filmmakers were still white cisgender male humans, seen from the art form's infancy as the default - the one people would stick with despite other options being available. Mr. Miller, the security guard, expected this to be the norm - he had been working with the studio since the late '40s, always keeping watch over the lucky people that had their time in the sun as the replacement for the changed guards, the inmates of the asylum according to some parlances. It was rather ho-hum for the most part - mostly studio hires and unassuming filmmakers discovered from some passion project buried deep within the theaters of Park City and TriBeCa trying to finish another entry in the tentpole franchises that kept the rusted machine alive regardless of the dissatisfied youth trying to stampede in. Year after year, they always made the same promises - they'd be good, dammit, they'll make things better I swear to God, they're really gonna make some inward strides - but usually end up sticking to the tentpoles they've grown familiar with or reference the same established canon the vanguards of the '60s and '70s grew up on. The new style is the same as the old style. Day in, day out, I keep telling you.
Martin Constantin - his friends call him "Marty" - wasn't like that. He wasn't sure if he was like that. This was his return to movie production - after 20 years and still looking as young as ever, he'd be making a return to the forefront of kino or whatever the armchair critics were calling it. He pulled up to Mr. Miller's booth at the entrance and rolled down his window to his Toyota Cressida.
"Good afternoon," Miller began, "Do you have an appointment?"
"Yes." Marty pulled out his parking pass, freshly printed from his wireless printer at his humble studio apartment.
Miller pulled out his clipboard. "Your name?"
"Constantin." Marty seemed to be in a bit of a hurry, but not that sort of hurry of nervous anticipation. More like a "for the love of God I need to get this done" impatience.
Miller checked through his clipboard and immediately recognized the name. "Ah, yes, you have to make the first left, go down the road and make a right. The administrative building should be down there."
Marty began rolling up his window, but Miller interrupted, "But before you leave-"
Marty rolled down his window. "You want to tell me a story, right? I'm sure I've heard 'em all before."
"Not this one." Miller put up his clipboard and leaned into the open window. "You know how my dad was a security guard back in the '20s?"
Marty nodded. Miller continued, "Well, one day, Buster Keaton - who shouldn't be anywhere near our premises, he was working for United Artists at the time - comes up and decides to invite any random schmuck to his birthday party that Saturday. His birthday was on a Tuesday that year, but he wasn't able to hold it since he was finishing up Steamboat. Either way, this was a big deal - nobody got to go to these parties save for Buster's really close friends and whoever he thought was the least imposing on his current film set - so my father was ecstatic that he even got to go in the first place."
Marty nodded along.
Miller continued, "When Saturday came and he got there, he noticed that there had been an entire crowd gathered around the living room chocolate fondue fountain. Apparently Buster Keaton and the guy that used to run the fairy tale union over by Alameda and 103rd had got into a bit of spat over who actually did the stunts on The General and Steamboat. They were fighting with split coathangers with bananas kebobed over them - I mean the good bananas, not this semi-sweet bullshit we've got today - and they about ruined the chocolate fountain."
Marty nodded. "I was there."
Miller chuckled. "I figured. I've been seeing you here since '48, so I knew you'd probably know something about this."
"Yeah, I was the idiot fighting Buster in the fountain."
"Ho. Ly. Shit. That was you? Jesus H. Christ, you have to be at least a hundred."
"He was being a blowhard about how he always did his own stunts, you know, and, well, being me, I got some of my friends to check that out. I knew a couple of people - a merman and a demon - who were propmasters on his two recent films at the time, so I asked them what he did when he'd shoot the stunt."
"And...?"
"They'd do it on his lunch break. Like, he'd take a break by the catering tent, somebody would take Yakima, put him in a pork pie hat, shoot the stunt from far away - like, say, the facade of a house falling through Buster and him surviving - and then get Buster to do the closeup and a much smaller version of the stunt after his break. But Buster kept saying that he did it all the way through."
"So, how were those bananas?"
"Haven't had a better banana ever since."
"Yeah. What a shame."
Miller paused, walked to his booth, and grabbed his Thermos full of coffee. He sipped it. "God, I wish I could've seen the things you saw. I mean, you probably got to see those Theda Bara films before they turned to ash."
Marty thought for a moment and then: "Mr. Miller, it ain't a blessing. When you get to be my age, you keep wishing that somebody would just kill you. And yet nobody wants to. They think you're impervious to everything because you get sunburnt way too easy. Like, my canines somehow make people think I'm the worst thing in the world."
"Can I see?"
Marty bared his fangs. His canines, while not much sharper than the average human's, were still pretty sharp. A reckless finger could easily get pricked on them. Not that it'd do masochists that much good anyway - vampires didn't have the ability to transmit their curse upon other people. Most vampirism was either genetic or industrial, both of which could easily be identified in a newborn. Genetic vampirism gave results similar to Marty's - sharp, if more naturalistic, canines; a minor reliance on blood, most of which could be satiated with a pack of menthol-enriched HemoDrops, most varieties of which you could purchase at all retailers; and a deficiency in ultraviolent protective capacity in the skin - whereas industrial vampirism (which could result via anything remotely associated with the toxic and radioactive metals, from tetraethyl lead poisoning to prolonged unprotected exposure to uranium-238 to even skinny-dipping in a vat of bromine) resulted in sharper fangs, hypersexuality, an addiction to blood and absurdly sensitive skin. Industrial vampirism is easily treatable through outpatient and therapy procedures, implementing the latest pharmaceutical breakthroughs to help increase UV resistance in the skin, wean the user off of blood, diminish their libido and grind down their fangs to a more manageable size.
Marty's vampirism was genetic, but given that he had been on most census registers since at least 1777 and ways of treating early industrial forms of vampirism were common at the time, he could've easily been the byproduct of the Revolution who learned to manage his heightened symptoms. Granted that he was never much of a sexual being to begin with, but regardless, Marty's actual brand of vampirism was so unknown that historians of early Hollywood had dubbed it "Marty's being."
Miller nodded his head, walked back to the booth and flipped a switch on his console. The gate to the studio opened. "Good luck, Marty! Do to Sharlto what you did to Buster!"
"I'll think about it!" Marty exclaimed as he rolled up his window. He pulled through the gate and followed Miller's instructions. The first left. Gotta wait for that guy to go past. He's sure carrying a lot of baby spots. What kind of show needs that many babies?
Okay, down the street. Quite a few people. It'd be alarming if there were nobody. And then the first right. Now I see it - that big modernist eyesore. Doesn't mesh with the rest of the studio. It's so out of place. Sandwiched between two soundstages - both of which I know are by people I know. I think one's the recent Gravity's Rainbow adaptation. I noticed that Central put out a call for extras over the weekend. Nice, a free spot.
Marty turned the ignition off and climbed out of the car. He looked over at the entrance and found two familiar confidants standing in front of the building. "Luke. Ellie."
Luke Everdeen was a peculiar fellow, a lycanthrope unable to return to a more human form but unable to even develop more animalistic traits, i.e. digitigrade walking, claws, a desire to relentlessly howl to every natural satellite in orbit. They called his kind of lycanthropy "induced," as in he was not born to be one. He had no affinity with humanity and found the only way of quelling that suicidal dissatisfaction was to sprout fur, have a muzzle and go from a size 9 to a size 13. He looked more anthropomorphic in regards to other lycanthropes, even going as far as wearing clothes. To the onlooker, his brand of dysphoria seemed to be like a person desperately wanting to resemble their fursona from high school. Either way, that was good enough for him. He considered himself the epitome of cool, although for all intents and purposes, he was a schlemiel. A schlemiel devoted to the craft, but a schlemiel nonetheless.
Eleanor "Ellie" Volman was the most human out of the three, save for the fact that she had gills slit into the left side of her neck, her hands were webbed, and she had a sprinkling of scales across her body. She had known Luke since they were children - they experienced a lot of their firsts together, from Luke's transformation to Ellie's emotional coming-out party. Some of Luke's more cynical friends stated that his relationship with Ellie was the reason why he didn't go full werewolf. Who woulda thought, a mermaid giving a werewolf passing privilege. From a distance she didn't look much like a mythological creature - her long red hair, held in place by her black beanie, often obscured her gill slits and nobody paid much attention to her hands anyway to even notice the webbing or the scales.
"Now, Martz," Ellie began, authoritatively, "what did I tell you to say?"
"To okay the project," Marty said in a monotone. He sighed, frustrated with the whole thing. "Why am I doing this?"
Luke's calm demeanor quickly eroded on observation. "Half of Hollywood's been waiting for you to make your own goddamn movie. Please just suck it up and get it greenlit, okay? It guarantees all of us work!"
"I thought you guys were working on Gravity's Rainbow next door." Did they get cut from the show? Somebody walk up to them, take their walkies and say "see you on the next one?"
Ellie took out her vape pen and hit it. "Yeah, main production wrapped a couple of months ago. We're not on the call sheets for the reshoots."
"Did they mention your legal status?" Marty thought about suing the production just to get Luke and Ellie back on. As long as he didn't have to go get his show greenlit. Seemed unfair to about everybody else.
"Richard Ricola and Yvonne Yoyodyne are 2nd and second 2nd. Our positions. They're just doing inserts and abstract montage shots." Luke wasn't falling for Marty's bullshit.
"The elf and the kobold," Ellie chimed in, fed up, "They're the ones who keep buying drinks for everybody at Local gatherings. I know you're not big into microaggressions and all that shit, but think about it: there hasn't been anybody who's risen to the challenge of being the first big-name mythological filmmaker."
"I'm the wrong person, Ellie. I'm an organizer. You've been making films since you were seven. You're a natural Spielberg if he realized that he had gender dysphoria and helped a lycan friend look the way he does-" Ellie placed her hand over Marty's mouth.
"Christ, you're about as bad as Adam when it comes to identity politics. You've stalled enough - now get in there!" Ellie pushed Marty inside the office complex.
From inside, and without Ellie and Luke goading him at every turn to go to the meeting, Marty easily went to just right outside the offices of one Sharlto Bluhdorn, Jr., Hollywood producer of the 1960s and 1970s. Bluhdorn Jr. was known for giving opportunities to the first wave of mythological filmmakers when he ran his own film studio, Mars Pictures, Inc. It was a low-budget affair that specialized in drive-in horror and exploitation work - the kind that most studio filmmakers would not touch with a 100-foot pole - but because of a combination of his comically low budgets and the fact that he let any director who walked in his doors have creative control over their own production, his films were making money while the studios were losing them on low-risk costume dramas and musicals. Tastes were changing and Bluhdorn Jr. was giving teenagers what they wanted: abnormally artsy car chase movies with tacked-on messages about why one shouldn't stick a piece of blotter paper on your tongue. Because of this, Warner Bros. gave him his own production company - which produced more prestigious, if still experimental, fare, but with wider distribution channels and critics now praising him as a purveyor of untapped potential, completely ignoring the fact that they had continually chewed him out for using "untalented film students who know nothing about the language of cinema" (Crowther, Times, August 7, 1965).
Marty had met Bluhdorn Jr. in 1966, around the time he was nurturing the film school generation of mythologicals and humans. Marty acted as union liaison, which Bluhdorn Jr. accepted with open arms much to his surprise. Normally, when Marty even tried to negotiate a shorter working day for the mythologicals sponsored through Local 991, the producers would mention that "if we cut the working days, how else would the extras get their overtime?" Marty knew that the question itself was loaded, but either way, it was an uphill battle. With Bluhdorn Jr., it was a given that there were no negotiations - whatever Marty wanted, and with Bluhdorn Jr.'s unceasing cash stream, the workers got. They actually felt like real above-the-line crew for once, especially with the rise of Bluhdorn Jr.'s own switch to Warner Bros. and his insistence that he still run his production studio with little to no outside influence.
At a party in 1978, Marty and Bluhdorn Jr., alongside Marty's then-protege Adam Karloff - an extremely novel sort of mythological in that he was created as a means to resemble a fictional/allegorical mythological, Mary Shelley's monster from Frankenstein, albeit he didn't resemble the kind of Frankenstein's monsters that permeated the media from 1930 onwards. He resembled more closely the original monster from the novel - a carefully constructed, if obviously piecemeal, human body, a collage of cadavers, meant to resist anything. Adam was designed to be the ultimate supersoldier for the Vietnam War - something the U.S. government was looking into after the uptick in student protests, home-grown terrorism and draft dodging - but before they could deploy him, they quickly realized that his personality was not fit for a soldier. It deviated - or in their parlance, "degenerated" - rapidly. Unable to fight, Adam was sent out into the non-military world in 1976 and somehow knew enough about camera operation to the point where he was picked up by Francis Ford Coppola to help with a show that was spiraling out of control, crew members leaving, cast undergoing extreme stress, other cast members either gaining weight or under lengthy extraditions induced by their own parents because they were 15 years old working as an adult all the way in Indonesia - developed an idea not unlike Allan King's own form of documentaries with a narrative, the actuality. They'd create the scenario and the actors chosen to be covered would supply everything else. It was a slice-of-life narrative regarding a year in the life of three high-school students, preferably at the new high school that opened up in Ontario the year prior: McClintic Sphere High. Who knew? Maybe they'd discover the guitarist for a somewhat popular progressive rock band under his Lithuanian birth name. Their idea was to get Warner Bros. or Paramount to produce the actuality - the first time a Hollywood studio would indulge in that sort of filmmaking - but Marty's own activities within Local 991 increased in that same year and the project was put on hold.
That is, until now.
Ellie and Luke had rejoined Marty outside Bluhdorn Jr.'s office. Marty sat outside on a European-designed chair - one that was uncomfortably modernist and could easily be put together from a kit purchased at a Swedish flat-pack furniture store. He cycled through his portfolio - samples of scenarios he might run into with the production; storyboards for what was intended to be a more impressionistic interlude (the only staged/written portion of the actuality); a letter of recommendation from the current president of Local 991, Angus Enkidu (despite, what Luke would state ten years later, having the necessary credentials needed to get any gig on the spot) - and meditated. Marty took out his vape pen, took a deep inhale of the oil inside, and slowly exhaled, filling the hallway with a familiar smell to anybody who's ever been to a massive cattle call or in the neighborhood of many a celebrated record store (or niche-market video rental vendor). The smell didn't faze Luke, Ellie or anybody walking by, mostly because entering California guaranteed a contact high.
"I think it's time." Marty put his vape pen in his front flannel shirt pocket, closed his portfolio and stood up.
Marty walked over to the door and opened it, blankly staring down the hall in a mix of hope and regret. At the far end, an intern cycled through the paperwork she had to turn it. Her pixie cut, a mix of artificial black and blue, was obscured by her beanie - her T-shirt a walking advertisement for a mid-2000s emo-pop band. From a distance most people mistook her as the rebellious Asian stereotype that had been growing more and more prevalent in popular cinema, but one relatively close look at her and people would immediately realize that she's part of the ingroup for America. She sipped on a red coffee cup, adjusted her glasses and walked down the hall towards Bluhdorn Jr.'s office. She had some of his mail and she needed to drop it off before-
"Marty! Something's wrong!" Ellie screamed and backed away from the door. The intern's ears pricked up and she made a dash towards the office.
Marty quickly turned around and peeked inside the office. Bluhdorn Jr., once a youthful if nebbish brunet but now a balding grey-haired lecher, hung from the end of what appeared to be a makeshift elastic noose. Nothing seemed to be out of place outside of the fact that the producer bankrolling Marty's idea had committed suicide. In a panic, Marty checked his phone - goddamn it, no signal, I have to go to the lobby - and ran down the hall.
He and the intern crashed into one another. Her pumpkin-spiced latte with nine shots of espresso spilled onto Marty's flannel shirt, leaving a brown stain that he couldn't buff out with a portable Magic Eraser pen. The mail flew into the air - Ellie quickly grabbed the mail and, by instinct, put Bluhdorn Jr.'s in his mailbox.
Marty and the intern got up, both all messed up. Marty looked deep into her eyes, the intern in his.
"Oh, jeez, sorry about that," the intern softly stated, trying not to engage in much foreign interaction.
"It's alright. What I'm worried about is the dead producer in his office." Marty turned and noticed something off. The body of Bluhdorn Jr. had begun to move. As if on ironic command, the producer used the noose as something of a chinup bar for his neck, which was an increasingly popular exercise amongst aging movie producers, Wall Street bankers and image-obsessed celebrities. The neck lift craze got so pervasive, even mail-order manufacturers cashed in and made elastic ones resembling exercise belts. What Bluhdorn Jr. did was take a piece of rope, tied it tight but not airflow-restricting and used it to perform his necklifts. However, what separates a good neck-lift belt from twine is that twine can often break when placed under too much stress.
The rope snapped and Bluhdorn Jr. fell on his desk, spilling everything onto the floor and bending the one Oscar he kept on display: his Best Picture Oscar for A Confederacy of Dunces from 1983. He lifted himself up, looked at the Oscar and swore, "Fuck me. I gotta pay the Academy $50 to fix that."
The people outside the door looked in shock. Bluhdorn Jr. was confused - Marty's advanced age would at least make him aware of the neck-lift exercise fad, but the younger members seemed to be shirking their responsibilities regarding something that was commonplace.
"Oh, Marty! I was, uh, I was just doing some neck lifts! They really tone the face! Please come in." Bluhdorn Jr. motioned for Luke, Ellie and the intern to get back to their duties. They merely stepped to the side.
Marty walked in and shut the door behind him.
Martin Constantin - his friends call him "Marty" - wasn't like that. He wasn't sure if he was like that. This was his return to movie production - after 20 years and still looking as young as ever, he'd be making a return to the forefront of kino or whatever the armchair critics were calling it. He pulled up to Mr. Miller's booth at the entrance and rolled down his window to his Toyota Cressida.
"Good afternoon," Miller began, "Do you have an appointment?"
"Yes." Marty pulled out his parking pass, freshly printed from his wireless printer at his humble studio apartment.
Miller pulled out his clipboard. "Your name?"
"Constantin." Marty seemed to be in a bit of a hurry, but not that sort of hurry of nervous anticipation. More like a "for the love of God I need to get this done" impatience.
Miller checked through his clipboard and immediately recognized the name. "Ah, yes, you have to make the first left, go down the road and make a right. The administrative building should be down there."
Marty began rolling up his window, but Miller interrupted, "But before you leave-"
Marty rolled down his window. "You want to tell me a story, right? I'm sure I've heard 'em all before."
"Not this one." Miller put up his clipboard and leaned into the open window. "You know how my dad was a security guard back in the '20s?"
Marty nodded. Miller continued, "Well, one day, Buster Keaton - who shouldn't be anywhere near our premises, he was working for United Artists at the time - comes up and decides to invite any random schmuck to his birthday party that Saturday. His birthday was on a Tuesday that year, but he wasn't able to hold it since he was finishing up Steamboat. Either way, this was a big deal - nobody got to go to these parties save for Buster's really close friends and whoever he thought was the least imposing on his current film set - so my father was ecstatic that he even got to go in the first place."
Marty nodded along.
Miller continued, "When Saturday came and he got there, he noticed that there had been an entire crowd gathered around the living room chocolate fondue fountain. Apparently Buster Keaton and the guy that used to run the fairy tale union over by Alameda and 103rd had got into a bit of spat over who actually did the stunts on The General and Steamboat. They were fighting with split coathangers with bananas kebobed over them - I mean the good bananas, not this semi-sweet bullshit we've got today - and they about ruined the chocolate fountain."
Marty nodded. "I was there."
Miller chuckled. "I figured. I've been seeing you here since '48, so I knew you'd probably know something about this."
"Yeah, I was the idiot fighting Buster in the fountain."
"Ho. Ly. Shit. That was you? Jesus H. Christ, you have to be at least a hundred."
"He was being a blowhard about how he always did his own stunts, you know, and, well, being me, I got some of my friends to check that out. I knew a couple of people - a merman and a demon - who were propmasters on his two recent films at the time, so I asked them what he did when he'd shoot the stunt."
"And...?"
"They'd do it on his lunch break. Like, he'd take a break by the catering tent, somebody would take Yakima, put him in a pork pie hat, shoot the stunt from far away - like, say, the facade of a house falling through Buster and him surviving - and then get Buster to do the closeup and a much smaller version of the stunt after his break. But Buster kept saying that he did it all the way through."
"So, how were those bananas?"
"Haven't had a better banana ever since."
"Yeah. What a shame."
Miller paused, walked to his booth, and grabbed his Thermos full of coffee. He sipped it. "God, I wish I could've seen the things you saw. I mean, you probably got to see those Theda Bara films before they turned to ash."
Marty thought for a moment and then: "Mr. Miller, it ain't a blessing. When you get to be my age, you keep wishing that somebody would just kill you. And yet nobody wants to. They think you're impervious to everything because you get sunburnt way too easy. Like, my canines somehow make people think I'm the worst thing in the world."
"Can I see?"
Marty bared his fangs. His canines, while not much sharper than the average human's, were still pretty sharp. A reckless finger could easily get pricked on them. Not that it'd do masochists that much good anyway - vampires didn't have the ability to transmit their curse upon other people. Most vampirism was either genetic or industrial, both of which could easily be identified in a newborn. Genetic vampirism gave results similar to Marty's - sharp, if more naturalistic, canines; a minor reliance on blood, most of which could be satiated with a pack of menthol-enriched HemoDrops, most varieties of which you could purchase at all retailers; and a deficiency in ultraviolent protective capacity in the skin - whereas industrial vampirism (which could result via anything remotely associated with the toxic and radioactive metals, from tetraethyl lead poisoning to prolonged unprotected exposure to uranium-238 to even skinny-dipping in a vat of bromine) resulted in sharper fangs, hypersexuality, an addiction to blood and absurdly sensitive skin. Industrial vampirism is easily treatable through outpatient and therapy procedures, implementing the latest pharmaceutical breakthroughs to help increase UV resistance in the skin, wean the user off of blood, diminish their libido and grind down their fangs to a more manageable size.
Marty's vampirism was genetic, but given that he had been on most census registers since at least 1777 and ways of treating early industrial forms of vampirism were common at the time, he could've easily been the byproduct of the Revolution who learned to manage his heightened symptoms. Granted that he was never much of a sexual being to begin with, but regardless, Marty's actual brand of vampirism was so unknown that historians of early Hollywood had dubbed it "Marty's being."
Miller nodded his head, walked back to the booth and flipped a switch on his console. The gate to the studio opened. "Good luck, Marty! Do to Sharlto what you did to Buster!"
"I'll think about it!" Marty exclaimed as he rolled up his window. He pulled through the gate and followed Miller's instructions. The first left. Gotta wait for that guy to go past. He's sure carrying a lot of baby spots. What kind of show needs that many babies?
Okay, down the street. Quite a few people. It'd be alarming if there were nobody. And then the first right. Now I see it - that big modernist eyesore. Doesn't mesh with the rest of the studio. It's so out of place. Sandwiched between two soundstages - both of which I know are by people I know. I think one's the recent Gravity's Rainbow adaptation. I noticed that Central put out a call for extras over the weekend. Nice, a free spot.
Marty turned the ignition off and climbed out of the car. He looked over at the entrance and found two familiar confidants standing in front of the building. "Luke. Ellie."
Luke Everdeen was a peculiar fellow, a lycanthrope unable to return to a more human form but unable to even develop more animalistic traits, i.e. digitigrade walking, claws, a desire to relentlessly howl to every natural satellite in orbit. They called his kind of lycanthropy "induced," as in he was not born to be one. He had no affinity with humanity and found the only way of quelling that suicidal dissatisfaction was to sprout fur, have a muzzle and go from a size 9 to a size 13. He looked more anthropomorphic in regards to other lycanthropes, even going as far as wearing clothes. To the onlooker, his brand of dysphoria seemed to be like a person desperately wanting to resemble their fursona from high school. Either way, that was good enough for him. He considered himself the epitome of cool, although for all intents and purposes, he was a schlemiel. A schlemiel devoted to the craft, but a schlemiel nonetheless.
Eleanor "Ellie" Volman was the most human out of the three, save for the fact that she had gills slit into the left side of her neck, her hands were webbed, and she had a sprinkling of scales across her body. She had known Luke since they were children - they experienced a lot of their firsts together, from Luke's transformation to Ellie's emotional coming-out party. Some of Luke's more cynical friends stated that his relationship with Ellie was the reason why he didn't go full werewolf. Who woulda thought, a mermaid giving a werewolf passing privilege. From a distance she didn't look much like a mythological creature - her long red hair, held in place by her black beanie, often obscured her gill slits and nobody paid much attention to her hands anyway to even notice the webbing or the scales.
"Now, Martz," Ellie began, authoritatively, "what did I tell you to say?"
"To okay the project," Marty said in a monotone. He sighed, frustrated with the whole thing. "Why am I doing this?"
Luke's calm demeanor quickly eroded on observation. "Half of Hollywood's been waiting for you to make your own goddamn movie. Please just suck it up and get it greenlit, okay? It guarantees all of us work!"
"I thought you guys were working on Gravity's Rainbow next door." Did they get cut from the show? Somebody walk up to them, take their walkies and say "see you on the next one?"
Ellie took out her vape pen and hit it. "Yeah, main production wrapped a couple of months ago. We're not on the call sheets for the reshoots."
"Did they mention your legal status?" Marty thought about suing the production just to get Luke and Ellie back on. As long as he didn't have to go get his show greenlit. Seemed unfair to about everybody else.
"Richard Ricola and Yvonne Yoyodyne are 2nd and second 2nd. Our positions. They're just doing inserts and abstract montage shots." Luke wasn't falling for Marty's bullshit.
"The elf and the kobold," Ellie chimed in, fed up, "They're the ones who keep buying drinks for everybody at Local gatherings. I know you're not big into microaggressions and all that shit, but think about it: there hasn't been anybody who's risen to the challenge of being the first big-name mythological filmmaker."
"I'm the wrong person, Ellie. I'm an organizer. You've been making films since you were seven. You're a natural Spielberg if he realized that he had gender dysphoria and helped a lycan friend look the way he does-" Ellie placed her hand over Marty's mouth.
"Christ, you're about as bad as Adam when it comes to identity politics. You've stalled enough - now get in there!" Ellie pushed Marty inside the office complex.
From inside, and without Ellie and Luke goading him at every turn to go to the meeting, Marty easily went to just right outside the offices of one Sharlto Bluhdorn, Jr., Hollywood producer of the 1960s and 1970s. Bluhdorn Jr. was known for giving opportunities to the first wave of mythological filmmakers when he ran his own film studio, Mars Pictures, Inc. It was a low-budget affair that specialized in drive-in horror and exploitation work - the kind that most studio filmmakers would not touch with a 100-foot pole - but because of a combination of his comically low budgets and the fact that he let any director who walked in his doors have creative control over their own production, his films were making money while the studios were losing them on low-risk costume dramas and musicals. Tastes were changing and Bluhdorn Jr. was giving teenagers what they wanted: abnormally artsy car chase movies with tacked-on messages about why one shouldn't stick a piece of blotter paper on your tongue. Because of this, Warner Bros. gave him his own production company - which produced more prestigious, if still experimental, fare, but with wider distribution channels and critics now praising him as a purveyor of untapped potential, completely ignoring the fact that they had continually chewed him out for using "untalented film students who know nothing about the language of cinema" (Crowther, Times, August 7, 1965).
Marty had met Bluhdorn Jr. in 1966, around the time he was nurturing the film school generation of mythologicals and humans. Marty acted as union liaison, which Bluhdorn Jr. accepted with open arms much to his surprise. Normally, when Marty even tried to negotiate a shorter working day for the mythologicals sponsored through Local 991, the producers would mention that "if we cut the working days, how else would the extras get their overtime?" Marty knew that the question itself was loaded, but either way, it was an uphill battle. With Bluhdorn Jr., it was a given that there were no negotiations - whatever Marty wanted, and with Bluhdorn Jr.'s unceasing cash stream, the workers got. They actually felt like real above-the-line crew for once, especially with the rise of Bluhdorn Jr.'s own switch to Warner Bros. and his insistence that he still run his production studio with little to no outside influence.
At a party in 1978, Marty and Bluhdorn Jr., alongside Marty's then-protege Adam Karloff - an extremely novel sort of mythological in that he was created as a means to resemble a fictional/allegorical mythological, Mary Shelley's monster from Frankenstein, albeit he didn't resemble the kind of Frankenstein's monsters that permeated the media from 1930 onwards. He resembled more closely the original monster from the novel - a carefully constructed, if obviously piecemeal, human body, a collage of cadavers, meant to resist anything. Adam was designed to be the ultimate supersoldier for the Vietnam War - something the U.S. government was looking into after the uptick in student protests, home-grown terrorism and draft dodging - but before they could deploy him, they quickly realized that his personality was not fit for a soldier. It deviated - or in their parlance, "degenerated" - rapidly. Unable to fight, Adam was sent out into the non-military world in 1976 and somehow knew enough about camera operation to the point where he was picked up by Francis Ford Coppola to help with a show that was spiraling out of control, crew members leaving, cast undergoing extreme stress, other cast members either gaining weight or under lengthy extraditions induced by their own parents because they were 15 years old working as an adult all the way in Indonesia - developed an idea not unlike Allan King's own form of documentaries with a narrative, the actuality. They'd create the scenario and the actors chosen to be covered would supply everything else. It was a slice-of-life narrative regarding a year in the life of three high-school students, preferably at the new high school that opened up in Ontario the year prior: McClintic Sphere High. Who knew? Maybe they'd discover the guitarist for a somewhat popular progressive rock band under his Lithuanian birth name. Their idea was to get Warner Bros. or Paramount to produce the actuality - the first time a Hollywood studio would indulge in that sort of filmmaking - but Marty's own activities within Local 991 increased in that same year and the project was put on hold.
That is, until now.
Ellie and Luke had rejoined Marty outside Bluhdorn Jr.'s office. Marty sat outside on a European-designed chair - one that was uncomfortably modernist and could easily be put together from a kit purchased at a Swedish flat-pack furniture store. He cycled through his portfolio - samples of scenarios he might run into with the production; storyboards for what was intended to be a more impressionistic interlude (the only staged/written portion of the actuality); a letter of recommendation from the current president of Local 991, Angus Enkidu (despite, what Luke would state ten years later, having the necessary credentials needed to get any gig on the spot) - and meditated. Marty took out his vape pen, took a deep inhale of the oil inside, and slowly exhaled, filling the hallway with a familiar smell to anybody who's ever been to a massive cattle call or in the neighborhood of many a celebrated record store (or niche-market video rental vendor). The smell didn't faze Luke, Ellie or anybody walking by, mostly because entering California guaranteed a contact high.
"I think it's time." Marty put his vape pen in his front flannel shirt pocket, closed his portfolio and stood up.
Marty walked over to the door and opened it, blankly staring down the hall in a mix of hope and regret. At the far end, an intern cycled through the paperwork she had to turn it. Her pixie cut, a mix of artificial black and blue, was obscured by her beanie - her T-shirt a walking advertisement for a mid-2000s emo-pop band. From a distance most people mistook her as the rebellious Asian stereotype that had been growing more and more prevalent in popular cinema, but one relatively close look at her and people would immediately realize that she's part of the ingroup for America. She sipped on a red coffee cup, adjusted her glasses and walked down the hall towards Bluhdorn Jr.'s office. She had some of his mail and she needed to drop it off before-
"Marty! Something's wrong!" Ellie screamed and backed away from the door. The intern's ears pricked up and she made a dash towards the office.
Marty quickly turned around and peeked inside the office. Bluhdorn Jr., once a youthful if nebbish brunet but now a balding grey-haired lecher, hung from the end of what appeared to be a makeshift elastic noose. Nothing seemed to be out of place outside of the fact that the producer bankrolling Marty's idea had committed suicide. In a panic, Marty checked his phone - goddamn it, no signal, I have to go to the lobby - and ran down the hall.
He and the intern crashed into one another. Her pumpkin-spiced latte with nine shots of espresso spilled onto Marty's flannel shirt, leaving a brown stain that he couldn't buff out with a portable Magic Eraser pen. The mail flew into the air - Ellie quickly grabbed the mail and, by instinct, put Bluhdorn Jr.'s in his mailbox.
Marty and the intern got up, both all messed up. Marty looked deep into her eyes, the intern in his.
"Oh, jeez, sorry about that," the intern softly stated, trying not to engage in much foreign interaction.
"It's alright. What I'm worried about is the dead producer in his office." Marty turned and noticed something off. The body of Bluhdorn Jr. had begun to move. As if on ironic command, the producer used the noose as something of a chinup bar for his neck, which was an increasingly popular exercise amongst aging movie producers, Wall Street bankers and image-obsessed celebrities. The neck lift craze got so pervasive, even mail-order manufacturers cashed in and made elastic ones resembling exercise belts. What Bluhdorn Jr. did was take a piece of rope, tied it tight but not airflow-restricting and used it to perform his necklifts. However, what separates a good neck-lift belt from twine is that twine can often break when placed under too much stress.
The rope snapped and Bluhdorn Jr. fell on his desk, spilling everything onto the floor and bending the one Oscar he kept on display: his Best Picture Oscar for A Confederacy of Dunces from 1983. He lifted himself up, looked at the Oscar and swore, "Fuck me. I gotta pay the Academy $50 to fix that."
The people outside the door looked in shock. Bluhdorn Jr. was confused - Marty's advanced age would at least make him aware of the neck-lift exercise fad, but the younger members seemed to be shirking their responsibilities regarding something that was commonplace.
"Oh, Marty! I was, uh, I was just doing some neck lifts! They really tone the face! Please come in." Bluhdorn Jr. motioned for Luke, Ellie and the intern to get back to their duties. They merely stepped to the side.
Marty walked in and shut the door behind him.
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