Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [25]
“I've worked with these guys before,” The Thumb said one day, calling from his office on the East Coast to tell me he was hooking me up with some old friends of his. “They have an excellent track record. Always produce great stuff for us. Maybe you could go for a coffee with them, hang out, see how you get along…”
He was confident he'd found a good match: the production company's many years of experience combined with my absolute confusion about what was happening to me being the perfect recipe for making quality TV.
“And what if we don't get along?”
“Hey, let's not be negative. We're gonna make a great show. I've given them your number. I'm sure there's gonna be a chemistry there. Let—”
“And if there isn't?”
“—me know how it goes. Always feel free to call me. Bye.”
The meeting couldn't take place for two weeks. (According to my imaginary calendar, I was fully booked until then.) When it did, it happened in a Starbucks in Santa Monica.
I arrived first.
Soon after, The Thumb's friend showed his face. Turned out to be a real ball of fire, bursting through the doors in a typhoon of creative urgency, chest out, dagger eyes darting this way and that, looking like he'd just been hit by a car and flung twenty feet.
“HEY, CASH!” People glanced up from their coffees. “HOW'S IT GOING?”
An attractive man in his mid-thirties, he was five-foot-eight in person (seven feet or more in his own head), with a round Hawaiian face and spiky black hair pulled back from a dickering hairline that seemed undecided whether to stay or go. High-octane, intense, and driven, he was at once Goliath to my David, Argentina to my Falklands, Nintendo to my Etch-a-Sketch, and cartoonishly masculine, the way so many of these Hollywood type A guys tend to be, which I always find amusing. As if they've spent the past twenty years stockpiling testosterone, anticipating a shortage.
“I'VE HEARD A LOT ABOUT YOU. A LOT!”
“Really?” Stepping up to the counter, I took out my billfold …
“NOW, WHAT ARE YA HAVING?”
… and quickly put it away again. Well, you don't want to seem pushy.
Once we had our drinks, we retired to the smokers’ patio, where the natural cacophony of the guy's voice would blend in with the traffic and not distract other patrons.
Clad in designer jeans and a figure-hugging black cotton V-neck—the kind worn by superheroes, and also by people who've been told “you look good in that” as a joke—his body was thin and serviceably buff while somehow hinting at an old weight problem. Not sure why. Just the way he handled himself—that classic fat-kid trick of being extra-extrovert to compensate for childhood insecurities.
“The network's VERY excited about this show,” he said after we sat down. “And I love the concept as well. It's great.”
It certainly is, I thought. That's why it's doing so well for CBS.
“What other programs have you produced?” I quizzed him.
“Oh, a whole bunch of great stuff.”
He was a successful freelancer with irons in fires all over L.A., he said, reeling off a long list of shows he'd worked on, none of which I'd ever heard of. Nor can I recall anything about them, except that they ranged from (a few) mainstream ratings-winners to (mostly) low-end reality series with names like Celebrity Tools, Splurge!, Extreme Dwarf Makeover, or somesuch nonsense. I really wasn't paying attention.
TV is awash in programs like these. The kind of series where you'd swear they arrived at a campy title first, then somehow devised a concept to fit around it.1 Cheap, mindless, generic fluff that's fine in short bursts but ultimately forgettable, wheeled out by the networks each year to entertain … no, not entertain, preoccupy complete pinheads, and foisted on them for so long now that, numbed by mediocrity, especially the kids, they're no longer able to discern between quality and dross. Which is lucky, because dross like Celebrity Tools seems to be cheap and plentiful nowadays.
“Altogether