The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death - Charlie Huston [31]
There, at Wilshire and Crenshaw, the house that served as exterior for Nora Desmond's mansion. There, the rest home Jack and Faye go to in Chinatown. There, the Ennis Brown House, Price's House on Haunted Hill. The Ambassador Hotel, where Anne Bancroft and Hoffman have their affair. Your mom and I fucked there once. Here in San Pedro, right there, they filmed the Skull Island landing in King Kong. This spot here, Hollywood and Sunset, where Griffith built his Babylonian temple and staged the single largest orgy of all time.
Mom was spending most of her time in Big Sur by then, hanging with the Esalen crowd. Yoga and transcendental meditation and organic hummus and mud baths and, I assume, fucking men considerably younger and less caustic than her older and no longer looked-up-to husband.
So she wasn't around when L.L. got the call that his screenplay had finally been green-lighted. She missed the scene when his ghostwriter pals drove up the canyon to drink their way through the case of Krug he opened for the occasion. She missed the following morning when he got the final draft of the script from his agent and found that it had been rewritten five times in the year since it had been most recently optioned; thick batches of colored pages mixed into the script, indicating the many hands that had revised his work. She missed the evisceration he performed on the house after reading the rewrites, while I sat out front on my Big Wheel, and Chev and I listened to him creating a whole new lexicon of cursing. And by the time the movie was made two years year later, with Judd Nelson and Molly Ringwald in the leads, directed by John Badham, she had relinquished claims on communal property and left for Oregon to find her true self, unencumbered by the artificial constraints of marriage and rigidity of bourgeois child-rearing concepts. That final exit relieving her of the scene after L.L. went, hope springs eternal, to the premiere.
He sat through it. All one hundred and seventy-nine minutes of it. Sat through every tired cough and forced laugh from the audience, sat through the round of relieved applause as the credits rolled. Sat through the entirety of its mediocrity, and saw it as a movie guilty of the ultimate crime: forgettability It wasn't even bad enough to be remembered for the incompetence brought to bear. Nor, after all the years and near-misses gone by, were the expectations, or the budget, high enough for it to be held out as a great flop. He sat in the theater, enduring the shoulder pats and congratulations of various sucker fish of the movie business. And I sat in the seat next to him the whole while.
The climax Mom missed by fleeing north was to come the following morning when L.L.'s agent informed him that his name could not be removed from the credits. An Alan Smithee Film would never grace the opening titles. So he began making a bonfire of every bit of movie memorabilia, every treasured celluloid print, stacks of laser disks, collected and bound editions of every screenplay in which his talent had played a roll, and his SWG membership card, and proceeded to burn down half the house, nearly sending an inferno through the canyon and over the entire range of the Hollywood Hills.
The next day, after L.L.'s lawyer got him out on bail for his arson charges, I was enrolled in private school, gifted with a collection of the Great Western Works of Literature, and received my first in a lifelong series of lectures praising the professional educator and condemning popular culture in all its forms.
But never condemning the movies. Which, to tell by their eradication from L.L.'s conversation, were an advancement in entertainment that had never existed at all.
I followed him out to the parking lot, to his current SL, the latest in a line of annual acquisitions. That residual money for the years of hackery still rolling in.
—L.L.
He dropped the books on the back seat of the open-top car, adding them to the small library jumbled there, and turned to me.
—What? What can I do for you that I have not already done? Having