Casual Friday Read online

“How many scripts do you have to read and write coverage for in a week?” I asked.

  “Fucking zillions. And I’m backed up two weeks.”

  “I’ll read and cover twice what you’re doing every week. I’ll offer unbiased, objective observations about the material so you can ultimately be the judge of its merit. And I’ll find the diamonds in the rough so you can impress your boss with work that has actual merit.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “John Lago.”

  “Well, John Lago. You better get started. It’s Monday. If you don’t deliver what you just promised by Friday, I’ll shitcan you back to the rock you crawled out from under. Okay? Great.”

  I knew exactly how to deal with Trey. First I shipped a pile of shitty scripts over to Bob in NY and he assembled a nerd squad to read and cover. Second, I met up with a former military drug chemist that Bob knew in Venice Beach, and he cooked up a pound of yayo so pure you could get high just looking at it. But we tested it too. It was a fucking dancer, a V8 engine with velvet ribs purring in the candy apple shell of a Bentley roadster. It was perfect for Trey. He was so happy about scripts I covered that he took me for a drink. After a few cosmos, he reached for his coke bullet and I casually offered mine. I think he muttered “fly me to the moon” before he proceeded to dance on the bar and blow ten guys in the bathroom.

  From that point on, he was hooked on me and I could start doing some real work. Intel Bob sent me showed that Mr. Katz’s security force was ex-president worthy. You don’t score a studio boss gig because you’re stupid and charming. Guys like Izzy are OG cutthroats who’d sell their grandma to a sausage factory if they thought it could get a picture made. Izzy must have gotten tired of his $12 million a year in salary and bonus and decided to cliché himself into one last big score. Fat ass thought he was going to ride into the sunset with a wagon full of gold. Wrong. Bzzt. Thanks for playing. Guess what’s behind door number two? Six plastic trash bags full of body parts and a vat of sulfuric acid to dump them in at a nameless chemical plant somewhere outside Barstow.

  As far as I could see, I had one shot at Izzy. One of his movies, an $85 million dollar crime thriller inexplicably titled Angel Parts had stalled on account of the director got whacked on mollies and absinthe and groped an extra behind the taco truck. So Izzy had half of a money pit movie in the can and less than six weeks to finish shooting and push the fucker into post before the end of the third quarter. If Izzy didn’t finish the film, then he would probably be fired and his little protection bubble would evaporate. So I figured I would make my move while Izzy was in the weeds and his guard was down.

  I had become Trey’s right-hand bitch over the couple of weeks I had been there and kept dropping hints to him that I really wanted to get some production experience too. Unfortunately, this only vexed him because he was development, and he preferred that nebulous world where no one really tracks your performance and you spend most of your time either trying to avoid blame for a box office flop or take credit for successes that exist in spite of your best efforts to sabotage them.

  But Trey had developed a very strong affinity for my brand of Bolivian flake, and when I hinted that my source might dry up, he became very accommodating. I also greased the wheels a bit by giving Karen, one of the production executives, a medically induced case of vertigo. While Karen recovered at her house in Palm Springs, Trey was asked to fill in for her on the set of Angel Parts as story editor. Trey nearly had a nervous breakdown until I coked him up and he started swaggering around like Robert Evans, sporting a condescending prick routine that, of course, people in the entertainment business glom onto the same way they glom onto anyone with a fucking British accent.

  He immediately intimidated the new director, a four-foot-tall Dutch music video jockey who went by the moniker “Meta K” and looked like an eleven-year-old girl going through a butch field hockey phase. Being a young’n myself, I was able to talk Special K off the ledge and remind him that he had been given a golden fucking goose and that he should take care not to ruffle its feathers lest it stops laying eggs. This was the first action that put me on Izzy’s radar screen. Izzy has two speeds: asshole and Satan. So when he saw me smooth out his manchild director’s feathers, he talked about me to Trey while I was standing right there.

  “Who’s the monkey?”

  “Intern.”

  “Tell Nobody if he ever talks to my director again, I’ll have the prop master nail him to a cross for the office holiday party.”

  “Will do, Iz.”

  Izzy started to walk away but stopped abruptly and put his empty coffee cup in my hands. Although this may have seemed like a dis to the outside observer, it was actually a clear acknowledgment that I was welcome to the crew. I knew this because when Trey saw it happen, he nearly burst into bitter Jerry Springer tears.

  “By the way, Trey.” Izzy smiled. “Bitch on wheels hates the script and is refusing to come to set until it’s fixed. You have twenty-four hours to make her soaking wet to shoot this thing or I’ll fire you and tell every bleeding heart Sundance catalog liberal in this town you’re a pedophile. Have a nice day.”

  Trey was actually crying as we walked back to his office with boxes full of the 187 drafts of the script the studio had paid God knows how many millions to God knows how many hack writers to make completely unrecognizable as a movie that any human might want to watch. The reason Trey was crying was because it was all his fucking fault, and he knew it. His lazy, nonsensical approach to story was the reason all of the scripts were toilet paper now. And this same approach was not going to serve him in his current gun-to-the-head task.

  I made him some hot cocoa with Dilaudid and covered him with his Hermès scarf when he decided to take a short nap under his desk. Then I went to work. First, I read the original script for Angel Parts, which was originally titled Casual Friday. So, already a much better title. Same story with the script. Fucking brilliant. Funny, violent, dark, sexy, and ultimately redemptive—all the things I have grown to love in good movies. Then I read some old clippings about it. Thing was a huge spec screenplay deal, made the writer’s career, rose petals, champagne, and sugar up your ass. Then Trey got his grubby hands on it, and when I tracked the progression of writers hired to “fix” it, I was able to put together the path of the train wreck like a bona fide crime scene investigator. (As a side note, this is exactly why the movie business is shit. It’s all art-by-committee, and the committee consists of a bunch of incestuous cousins semiremoved who know nothing about film and even less about modern culture outside of their pink champagne bubble of psychiatric meds, serial philandering, surrogate child conception, Botox, boob jobs, and the Sundance fucking film festival. They are exactly like politicians. Their only mission in life is to simply keep their overpaid jobs by any means necessary—which precludes them from taking any risks and, thus, totally destroys originality. But I’m not bitter.)

  Then the phone rang on Trey’s desk. Internal private line.

  “Hello?” I said, hoping they would think I was Trey.

  “Hold please,” said the dry flat voice on the other end.

  “Oh my God! Stop it! Get your dirty fingers out of there!” A woman’s voice. Sounded like a pain in the ass.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Oh sorry! This place is so loud. Are you the, uh, script person?”

  “Yeah. Who’s this?”

  “Peeka, you dummy.”

  It was Peeka Swan-Torres, the twenty-million-a-picture actress that Izzy had earlier referred to as the “bitch on wheels.”

  “Oh. Hi. Sorry. I thought you were my old girlfriend.”

  “Really? Is she hot?”

  “Yeah. Not as hot as you of course, but then again who is?”

  She screamed into the phone with glee and deafened that ear for a solid day. I switched ears. Actresses. Flattery is their drug and they need it on an IV drip or the
y melt like the Wicked Witch.

  “You have a sexy voice,” she said, already attempting to undermine my fictitious old girlfriend.

  “Thanks. So do you.”

  “I do? Mmmmmm. You make me feel like a cat. I want to curl up by the fire right now and listen to you hum Christmas songs.”

  Hello Molly. Peeka was clearly peaking hard in an ecstasy cloud.

  “That can be arranged,” I said, careful to show no enthusiasm, the one thing that will always cock block you from getting what you want in the entertainment business.

  “Where are you?”

  “Studio. Working on Angel Parts.”

  “Mmmmmm. I want to work with you. I have some . . . ideas.”

  If I had been a writer, I would have had a stroke hearing the I word from an actress. It was music to my ears.

  “But I don’t want to come to that stinky old studio. Let’s slip into something more comfortable.”

  “Whatever you want,” I said, turning on the charm.

  “I have a suite at the Peninsula. Meet me there.”

  The line went dead. What the fuck? I thought. Unbelievable stroke of luck. I remember thinking that if I could get in good with Peeka, then I had my keys to the kingdom. Hell, I had the kingdom. Izzy may have called her a bitch, but he worshipped her. And, he had a reputation for playing genie in a bottle and granting her any wish she wanted. I read once in a gossip rag that she was shooting a movie in Thailand for Izzy and she was bummed that she was missing a Paul McCartney concert in New York. I know. Tragic, right? So, Izzy rented some sultan’s private 747 and flew Paul to Thailand to play a private concert for Peeka aboard an actual yellow submarine. So, I was pretty sure that if Peeka wanted to make me her pet for a while, Izzy would not object.

  When I got to the Peninsula suite, Peeka was waiting for me in total darkness.

  “Sensory deprivation,” she whispered.

  She slipped her hand in mine and led me down the massively long hallway. Place wasn’t a suite, it was a mini mansion. We walked into the bedroom, which was lit with hundreds of candles. That’s when I saw that Peeka was completely naked. She led me to some pillows on the floor and stretched out on them.

  “Meow,” she purred.

  “Good kitty,” I said.

  “You seem young to be a development executive,” she said.

  “I’m not a development executive.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “I’m an intern.”

  She laughed out loud for what seemed like nearly ten minutes.

  “You’re funny.”

  “Thanks. You’re beautiful.”

  That one I wished I could have had back. I sounded like a fucking tourist.

  “Oh. Thanks. Want a drink?”

  “I’ll get them,” I offered.

  I made us some drinks while she played a harmonica (badly) and slithered around on the pillows.

  “I’ve decided I’m going to quit the movie instead. Sorry.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Excuse me?” She had never been told no in her life.

  “Just what I said. You’re not going to quit. Not your style.”

  “How do you know my style?”

  “What I know is this: you love Izzy. Izzy loves you. You’ve never walked away from him before. You won’t now. He needs you.”

  “That was such a good speech. You should be an actor.”

  “Maybe in the next life.”

  “You know. I’ve been reading a lot about past lives and—”

  I kissed her, mainly to shut her up but also because she was smoking hot . . . and naked.

  “You’re so forceful. Like a real man. Most men in LA are—”

  I kissed her again.

  “Take me . . . what was your name again?”

  “John,” I replied.

  And I did exactly what she asked me to do. I know you want the dirty details, but there is nothing all that exciting to report.

  As far as I could tell, Peeka covered the orgasm scenes from True Romance, When Harry Met Sally, La Femme Nikita, and Wild at Heart. The postcoital glow was followed by another hit of molly and a frenetic discussion about the script and how it was the most important movie of her career. I pitched her the original script, and she immediately fell in love with it.

  “My God. It’s genius. You’re a genius.”

  “No, the original writer is the genius.”

  She kissed me dramatically, biting my lip like a vampire ingenue in some horrible young adult novel.

  “How do we break the news to Izzy?” she asked, not caring at all.

  “Just tell Izzy that a fanboy e-mailed you the original script from a pirate site. You fell in love with it and want to shoot this version with minimal changes.”

  “I will. That dickless worm will do whatever I say, anyway.”

  “I figured as much.”

  “Let’s celebrate.”

  She cavalierly snatched a bottle of rapper champagne from a leopard-spotted fridge and popped the cork, which flew across the room like a bullet and knocked her teacup Yorkie unconscious.

  “Ashton!” she screamed and ran to him, sobbing.

  “I’ll show myself out.”

  When I arrived at the office the next day, Izzy was screaming at Trey. It was a brutal tirade. Not only had Peeka told Izzy that she wanted to do the original script, but Izzy also realized that morning that he had never even seen the original script. Trey didn’t send it to him until it had been rewritten sixteen times by a D-list writer who just happened to be Trey’s former lover. After the bloodbath, Trey stormed out of his office with the standard issue cardboard box of stolen office supplies and never even looked at me as he passed. But Izzy did. He pointed his crooked finger at me and curled it, jerking it in an upward motion that resembled a hook being set in a fish’s mouth.

  “Nobody. Get your ass in here.”

  I dutifully walked into Trey’s office. Izzy was pacing like a dog looking for the source of a foul but delicious smell. Then he just stopped and glared at me.

  “I guess I should be happy that Peeka is happy.”

  I started to speak.

  “No! I don’t want to hear shit from you, Nobody. You’ve already had your taco pipe open a bit too much, Pedro fuck face.”

  He jabbed Trey’s letter opener into the desk and cut a long gash into the wood veneer. I could have just shoved the letter opener into his neck right then and there—two-for-one special on his carotid artery and cervical spinal cord. Then he would have danced for me like a Mexican beach marionette on the end of a dirty string. I was seriously considering it when, as if on cue, his assistant came charging into the room, all ruddy faced and gasping.

  “Peeka’s here,” she squeaked.

  Izzy got up, looked at me for a long beat, and smiled.

  “Welcome to the big leagues, Nobody. Before you break your arm patting yourself on the back, keep in mind that my Happy Meal of a director is going to freak his shit when he hears about what you’ve done. And guess what, Sir Fucksalot? You’re gonna make him feel all warm and cuddly inside about this. If you don’t, I’m gonna kill you. Not in the figurative I’ll yell at you and fire you sense, but in the literal I’ll fist your eye socket until your brains come out of your asshole sense. You want to know who’s running this studio? For real?”

  “Sir, we have to go. She just sent me thirty-two texts—”

  “Daddy’s talking!”

  The assistant ran out of the room crying and Izzy glared at me again. “Tonight, Nobody,” he sputtered. “You, me, and that foreign twat, whatever the fuck his name is. My house. We will drink. You will talk. And if you don’t talk pretty, I will bury you in my yard.”

  That night, as I was driving up to Izzy’s house, Bob called.

  “Wh
at the fuck is taking so long?” he asked politely.

  “Fucking guy is ALWAYS surrounded by people. But I have a plan.”

  “Oh you have a plan, huh, rookie? Maybe I should pull your ass out of there and send someone with more experience. I never should have trusted a boy to—”

  “Bob. I’m handling this. It’ll be done tonight. I have a dinner meeting with the target and one other person. I’m showing up early. The other person is compulsively late. Target will be a writhing suckhole by the time the Cabernet is done breathing.”

  “Good. Don’t make me have to call you again.”

  “I won’t. And I appreciate—”

  And the line went dead. Asshole.

  As I walked up to Izzy’s Spanish whorehouse revival McMansion, the black SUVs owned by the members of his security detail slumbered and ticked in the driveway. I did have a plan. It was a sucky one, but I figured this was probably my best shot at getting him with the least number of people around. Yes, his security goons were there, but no civilians. Since this was supposed to look like a mob hit, I was going to keep it really old school and simple. I planned to work my way to the target by quietly slitting the throats of his posse (see The Professional—the best in the trade get close enough to use only a knife), being careful not to cause a ruckus that would inspire Izzy to pull iron or get the hell out of Dodge. By the time he realized his crew was on ice, I would be on him like a cheap suit. Both barrels of a sawed-off 12-gauge to the face so his mama couldn’t bury him with an open casket and a white carnation in his lapel. No horse-head-in-the-bed warning bullshit. Straight-up Mafia execution and one more roll in the hay with Peeka before I washed my hands of this town with the blood of one of its legendary sons.

  When I got to the front door, it was slightly ajar. That, brothers and sisters, was not a good sign. If someone got here before me and capped Izzy, I was a dead man. Contract jumping makes everyone look bad, and Bob wouldn’t make himself an example, so if our target was facedown in a pool of his own blood and piss, I was going to be joining him shortly thereafter. The house was ransacked when I walked in.

  Shit, I thought. My first gig, and I’m about to become another bad Hollywood ending.”