It starts with the dishes. When you’re always at home you’re always eating at home, which makes for a lot of dishes. Then the hardwood floors. The hardwood floors of this apartment blanket themselves in dust every chance they get. Had I known that four months ago, I never would have ripped up the carpet, especially not without the landlord’s consent. Now it’s just perpetually dusty wood. And then after you clean the floor you look around and see that the bookshelf could use some dusting, because your collection of three softcover Vonnegut novels doesn’t scream out like it used to. Then you move the lamp and end table closer to the cleaned bookshelf to show off your handiwork, and then, of course, you must move the small ornate rug closer to the end table, to help it all flow together. By then it’s 3:00 in the afternoon and you haven’t yet eaten breakfast, and you’re starting to get the shakes from too much coffee in a hypoglycemic stomach. And the laptop still sits on your desk idling, with its little spinning blue circle telling you that your $39-a-year antivirus program still hasn’t found that particular virus which prevents you from going online to send out resumes. But all that’s okay because you’ve been unemployed for four months and a few more days aren’t going to make much of a difference. And the apartment is now clean. Again. Third time this week.
The job leading up to this odd period of orderly fixation was one of the better ones from my canon. Among all those retail gigs and cash-register careers, I had lucked out and scored a job as a manipulator of foreign television entertainment for a shoestring production company in Los Angeles—a scriptwriter, they called it. But being hired to “write” TV documentary scripts really didn’t involve the act of writing at all; at least not at Pungent Productions. Within that boxy two-story building, it was more a matter of perusing the film vault closet and sifting through a few hundred hours of handheld camera footage from Hollywood press junkets, movie premieres, red carpet footage, and celebrity interviews, and hopefully finding a couple hours’ worth that didn’t have a copyright attached, or at least didn’t have a recognizable TV interviewer on-camera. Sometimes Pungent Productions paid for the rights to use the footage, but most times they just illegally recorded large chunks of it and hoped for the best.
Then it was time to piece together a decent 46 minutes’ worth to illustrate some semblance of a celebrity’s rise to stardom. And then the actual writing part came in, when you were able to compose little segue-sentences like, “But then tragedy struck the young actor …” You then tell the video editor to slide that foreboding segue-sentence in between footage of Keanu Reeves at the premier of his breakout role in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and the audio track of the 911 phone call of close friend and actor River Phoenix overdosing on Sunset Blvd. That’s the magic right there. That’s Scorsese style.
Those TV documentaries we made were the cheapest products ever produced, with a good portion of them literally costing us $70 and an afternoon to make. But to basic cable stations in Canada, Yemen, and the Czech Republic, our programs were star-studded red carpets right into the glitzy celebrity world that was Hollywood. They were also the same shitty DVDs for sale on Amazon.com for $4.29, promising to reveal never-before-seen footage of Elvis Presley’s secret love life or Leonardo DiCaprio’s undiscovered early years. But they never do. They just showed the same old shit from every other TV documentary out there. And sometimes they actually were the same old shit from every other TV documentary out there—our boss was known to record programs right off his TV, from the History Channel and PBS, then have his graphics department add our own logo directly over the other station’s logo at the bottom corner of the screen. Then he, of course, would package and sell the show as his own. Seriously. If you’ve ever bought a celebrity biography or Beverly Hillbillies box set off the DVD rack at Ross Dress For Less, then you may have been duped by my old boss. And you’ll know one of our documentaries when you see it. Words are usually misspelled on the cover, proper apostrophe usage is rare, and the phrase “This DVD is neither endorsed nor authorized by the (fill in the name) Estate” always rests somewhere near the bottom of the plastic cover. Our shows had a constant one-star rating on Amazon.com, and “Biggest pile of sh@t ever!” was a recurring mantra in the customer reviews section.
You see, Donatello, the president of Pungent Productions, was a con man who was once chased out of Brooklyn with just a suitcase—at least that’s how the story went. He was a swindler, a grifter, and the self-appointed Executive Producer for every single show we made, whether or not he even knew we were making it. He didn’t care too much for all the bad reviews, or for little things like legalities. He knew his shows would rarely be seen by American audiences, so issues like copyrights and trademarks and logos were of little concern to him. And these shrewd filmmaking practices were also a major part of the rest of his business structure, especially the hiring process. Donatello knew that if he only hired the dregs of Hollywood—the alcoholic editors, the drugged-out writers, the Spanish-speaking-only producers, and the still-in-college legal team—he could both save a fortune with shitty take-it-or-leave-it salaries and employ workers that would never question his copyright ethics. We were the unemployable outcasts and pariahs of the entertainment industry—a few of us on the way up, but most on the way down. Cigarettes, porn, and poor work ethics filled our days, and cocktails and karaoke filled our nights. We were the Bad News Bears without the Walter Matthau, and much older.
As piss-poor as Donatello’s approach to filmmaking was, it also had its perks for us, the people who made the documentaries. The shows were pieced together at such a rapid rate that they were rarely proofed or checked over by anyone other than the aforementioned alcoholic editors or drugged-out writers. We had complete autonomy in content and direction, and we could shape the show any way we pleased, whether factually or fantastically. If someone brought some good pot or decent cocaine into the editing bay, then you could be damn sure that a Beach Boys show would have a strange four-minute freak-out montage, or a narration diatribe comparing Keanu Reeves’s film career to Jesus’ resurrection from the cross, or possibly even a shoddy reenactment of Elvis dying on the toilet.
A perfect example of this would be the once-serious documentary African-Americans in Cinema. I use the term “once-serious” because it was the first time that Donatello had actually paid a genuine TV writer/producer to make a substantial show about the rise of the black actor throughout Hollywood’s history. Three weeks later, that genuine TV writer/producer abruptly quit because all of Donatello’s checks bounced. The half-finished script for African-Americans in Cinema then landed on my desk, attached to a Post-It note saying, “Make this work fast, kid.” All of the semicelebrities and film historians had already been interviewed on-camera, and most of the needed film clips had been procured; it was just the narrator’s dialog that was only halfway written. So all I had to do was write up a dozen or so little cinematically historical segue-sentences about particular black actors from the 1930s on up to 1989.
We stopped at 1989 not because it was some centennial year in filmmaking, but because there was a stricter copyright involved with movie trailers made after that year—at least that’s what our college sophomore legal adviser explained. The past 12 years of Spike Lee, Denzel Washington, and Morgan Freeman, all erased from the glory that was African-Americans in Cinema because Donatello didn’t want to spend a few bucks. Regardless, as I was writing up my little segue-sentences I realized that my name would never be in the film’s credits. The previous writer, the genuine TV writer/producer that quit, would get full billing. This left me with a whole new world of freedom in which to change the plight of African-Americans in cinema forever.
The script wasn’t too bad in its current form; but that last third—after I got through with it—was where it got weird. Seven solid minutes of that 52-minute program now celebrated James Earl Jones being the voice of Darth Vader, including as many film snippets, movie stills, and poster zoom-ins that I could convince the editor to throw in. Then I focused the last few minutes of the documentary on the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s, mostly because all those film trailers were in the public domain and free to use. And they showed tits too. But that was that—no Spike Lee, no Morgan Freeman, no 1990s, not even much of the 1980s other than an Apollo Creed reference and a film snippet of the Russian boxer killing him in Rocky III. If you should happen to watch a documentary about the history of black actors and wonder if it’s the one I wrote, simply look on the menu screen for the show’s fourth chapter. If it’s titled Chocolate Dreams then you’re in for a James Earl Jones treat.
Then like any good thing in life, it had to end. The poor quality of our products as well as the multiple cease-and-desist lawsuits from the Elvis Presley Estate, the Sinatra Estate, KISS Music Licensing, and a few others finally caught up with us. In one big sweeping week, 70 percent of the company was laid off with promises to be rehired once “that lawsuit thing” was resolved. That was four months ago—when I had carpet.
I have now spent spring and much of summer within the confines of my apartment complex, spying on neighbors and watching the bougainvillea on my balcony come to full bloom. Judge Judy and Judge Alex, and even Judge Millan from People’s Court, have given me so many valuable insights into our judicial system that I feel adequate enough to represent myself if those documentary lawsuits should ever find their way to my front door. But I’ve been cooped up here for so long that I’m starting to feel like Martin Sheen from the beginning of Apocalypse Now, when he’s stuck in the hotel room and falling deeper and deeper into insanity until finally breaking the full-length mirror while drunk and naked. I’ve been waiting too long for my next mission; my mirror moment is coming, I can feel it. I even started waking up in the mornings muttering, “Saigon … shit.”
But the apartment is clean now, and the bougainvillea blooms an electric pink at sunset, and the world will forever have a permanent reminder that Keanu Reeves’s film career is as glorious and monumental as J.C. getting the cross job. All thanks to a con man from Brooklyn hiring a drugged-out writer from North Hollywood, and the butterfly flapping its wings.