Chapter Fourteen

4O6

Chapter Fourteen

Making hit movies was one of the smaller problems in John's life. Ivan handled the workaday stuff like budgets and wind machines and union haggling. John's role was to walk into a room where nothing really existed except for a few money guys who wanted a bit of glamour, a good dollar return and a few cracks at some industry sweeties. John would conjure up a spell for these Don Duncans, Norm Numbnuts and Darrens-from-Citicorp. He had to cram his aura deep, deep, deep inside their guts, spin it around like a juicer's blade, then withdraw and watch the suits ejaculate dollars. " People, this isn't about cash, this is about the American soul—it's about locating that soul and ripping it out by its root. It's about taking that root and planting it deep into the director's warm beating heart, hot pulsing blood feeding the plant, nourishing it until it flowers and gives us roses and zinnias and orchids and heliotropes and even, fuck, I don't know, antlers. And we sit and watch the blooms and we've done our part. It's the only reason we're here. We're dirt. We're crap. We're shit. But we're good shit. We're nothing but soil for the director to grow a vision. And we should be proud of it. " Usually, John would climb right up onto the meeting desk for this portion of the event. People rarely wanted details. They wanted hocus-pocus and John gave it to them. John had good

4O7 hunches and he acted on them quickly, with almost alien accuracy. He believed that most people had at least a few good ideas each day, but that they rarely used them. John had no brakes. There was no lag time between his idea and its implementation. He was a film commando. Sometimes it frightened him how easily people would follow somebody who conveyed the appearance of direction or will.

Bel. Air PI was a reasonably low-budget buddy-cop film in which a has-been rust-belt homicide-detective-turned-PI partnered up with the mayor's daughter, a tawny renegade (" Darling, " said Doris after reading the script, " your heroine is a tawny renegade. Whatever next. '" ) to establish a PI agency. Their first case was to search for the missing wife of a studio executive who was located in many KFC-sized pieces in an Imperial County lemon orchard. Drugs were involved. Betrayal. A final shoot-out and chase in which Cat and Dog stopped fighting each other to unite against the forces of evil and then Get It On.

The movie relaunched the career of a faded seventies rock star and gave steroids to a film genre then on the wane. Almost immediately Bel Air PI 2 (Bel Air '²) was in the works, and John had drugs and dollars and pussy hurled into his lap.

Bel Air ² became a monster hit, bigger than the original, and was followed by an alien invasion thriller with a soundtrack that number one'd for five weeks, and a terrorists-occupy-Disneyland-style thriller that went ballistic in European and Japanese release but didn't work so well in North America, as copycat directors had glommed onto John's noisy, music-drenched formula. To John moviemaking wasn't formulaic. It was a way for him to create worlds wherein he could roam with infinite power far away from a personal history, free of childhood disease and phantom relatives,

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