The Informers - Bret Easton Ellis [43]
“We receive so many scripts,” Roger sighs, adding, “Bryan turned down Amadeus, so he’s got rather high standards.”
“The movie,” the producer continues, “is basically the rock-star-in-outer-space thing. An alien creature, this E.T., sabotages the—”
I clutch Roger’s arm.
“E.T. An extraterrestrial,” Roger says softly.
I let go. The producer continues.
“The E.T. sabotages the dude’s limo after a gig at the Forum and after a rather large and fiery chase takes him to this planet where the rock star is held captive. I mean, yadda whatever and there’s a princess, who is basically a love interest.” The producer pauses, looks at Roger hopefully. “We’re thinking Pat Benatar. We’re thinking a Go-Go.”
Roger laughs. “Oh, that’s bloody great.”
“The only way the guy can get released is to record songs and perform a concert for the planet’s emperor, who is basically a, um, tomato.” The producer grimaces, shuddering, then looks worriedly at Roger.
Roger is squeezing the bridge of his nose and saying, “So it’s madcap, right?”
“It’s not tacky and you have a copy,” the producer tells Roger. “And everyone is getting excited by the thing in the vault.”
Roger smiles, nods, looks over at the Oriental girl and sticks his tongue out, winking. He tells the producer, “I’m not bored.”
I actually remember the movie that was made about the band and the movie had gotten it pretty much right except the filmmakers forgot to add the endless paternity suits, the time I broke Kenny’s arm, clear liquid in a syringe, Matt crying for hours, the eyes of fans and “vitamins,” the look on Nina’s face when she demanded a new Porsche, Sam’s reaction when I told him Roger wanted me to do a solo record—information the filmmakers seemed to not want to deal with. The filmmakers seemed to have edited out the time I came home and found Nina sitting in the bedroom in the house on the beach, a pair of scissors in her hand, and they cut out the shot of a punctured, leaking water bed. The editor seemed to have misplaced the scene where Nina tried to drown herself one night at a party in Malibu and they cut the sequence that followed where her stomach was pumped and also the next shot, where she leaned into the frame next to my face and said, “I hate you,” and she turned her face, pale and swollen, her hair still wet and plastered to her cheeks, away from me. The movie had been made before Ed jumped from the roof of the Clift Hotel in San Francisco so the filmmakers had an excuse for that scene not being in the movie but there seemed to be no excuse for the rest to have been omitted and for the movie’s being made up of bones, an X ray, a set of dull facts, that became wildly popular.
A green lantern hanging from a rafter that shields the balcony pulls me back into the conversation: percentage points, script approval, gross against net profits, terms that, even now, I still find strangely unfamiliar, and I’m staring into Roger’s flute of sake and the Oriental girl, inside, is writhing, kicking at the floor, moving in circles, sobbing, and the producer stands up, still talking to Roger, closes the door and smiles when I say, “I’m grateful.”
I call Matt. It takes the operator a swift seven minutes to connect me to the number. Matt’s fourth wife, Ursula, answers, sighing when I tell her who it is. I wait five minutes for her to come back and I’m imagining Matt standing next to Ursula in the kitchen of a house in Woodland Hills, head bowed down. Instead Ursula says, “He’s here,” and Matt’s voice comes over the line.
“Bryan?”
“Yeah, man, it’s me.”
Matt whistles. “Whoa.” Long pause. “Where are you?”
“Japan. Tokyo, I think.”
“Has it been … two, three years?”
“No, man, it hasn’t been … that long,” I say. “I don’t know.”
“Well, man, I heard you were, um, touring.”
“World Tour ’84, man.”
“I heard something about that … ” His voice trails off.
Tense, awkward silence broken only by “yeah”s and “um”s.
“I saw the video,