TAYLOR WANTED TO meet in the Cube. Although his first meeting there had been sort of fun, Hartman considered the Cube an affectation.
They met at RepCo. Mike Ovitz and CAA had gone totally modernist—gray suits on the agents and a building by I. M. Pei—in effect making the statement “We are business persons running a corporation, not fast-talking comic-strip Jews with gold chains like Sib Kibitz in Doonesbury.” Hartman felt he had topped Ovitz with his dramatic re-creation of the Harvard Club, a Georgian Revival cathedral of capitalism, including the historic three-story-high main hall, with its towering windows and walk-in fireplace. Air-conditioning kept the hall, and the other rooms that had hearths, cool enough for charming and aromatic fires—oak and mesquite—even during Los Angeles summers.
“A week ago, as you know, Katherine Przyszewski, Beagle’s personal secretary, quit her job,” Taylor said. “The day before yesterday, Ray Matusow, who installed and maintains the listening post at the Przyszewski residence, was mugged while he was making his rounds. Today, Katherine Przyszewski calls Joe Broz to ask for a job.”
“Do they connect?” Hartman asked.
“Exactly,” Taylor said. “Do they connect?”
“What does that mean?” Hartman asked.
“There are no accidents,” Taylor said.
“How much does she know?” Hartman asked.
Sheehan said, “She doesn’t seem to know much.” Sheehan wanted to reassure the client.
“It’s hard to know how much she knows,” Taylor said. He wanted to make sure the case stayed alive and that if there were any chance of nailing Joe Broz, he didn’t miss it.
“We’ve reviewed her home tapes and her job tapes,” Sheehan said. “And it seems pretty clear that she doesn’t know much. About the project.”
“She could know more than she thinks she knows,” Taylor said.
“Like what?” Hartman asked.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Sheehan said, “that revealed anything to me.”
“That remark about real people,” Taylor said, although actually he didn’t know if the remark had significance. It could have been just something the director had come up with as an excuse not to give some bimbo a part. “That could mean something to somebody, puts it together with something else.”
Hartman kept a poker face and his voice indifferent. “What remark about real people?”
“Beagle said he was only using real people in his next movie,” Taylor said.
“That’s it?” Hartman asked.
“There are no accidents,” Taylor said. “Matusow, he’s responsible for watching nine people. Two days after he’s mugged, one of them, one of the three or four people closest to Beagle, the classic disaffected ex-employee, suddenly calls the guy I pick as the number-one troublemaker in the deck. That’s what I see.”
“Where was Broz when the mugging took place?” Hartman asked.
Not a question that Taylor wanted to hear. Because he didn’t know. Not for sure. The operative watching Broz had lost him. However, Mel had decided, if asked, to make the information another piece of evidence rather than an admission of failure. “Broz ducked the surveillance that morning.”
“Just keep it simple,” Hartman said. “See to it that she doesn’t meet with Broz.”
Propaganda that looks like propaganda is third-rate propaganda.
| WE are innocent. |
THEY are guilty. |
| tell the truth, inform. | lie, use propaganda. |
| defend ourselves. | are agressors. |
| are law-abiding. | are criminals and outlaws. |
| respect our agreements and treaties and abide by international law. | are liars, cheaters, thieves, and opportunists who break treaties. |
| are Peace Keepers. Our use of force is police action to protect law and order. | are violent, gangsters, a criminal brand. |
| stand for justice and civil rights. | brutalize, repress, tyrannize both, their own and their neighbors. |
| Our leaders govern with the consent of the people. | Their leaders are usurpers with no popular support who will eventually be overthrown. |
The enemy commits torture, atrocity, and murder because he is a sadist who enjoys killing.
We use surgical or strategic violence only because we are forced to by the enemy.
Killing is justified so long as one does not take pleasure in it and it is done in a clean manner—preferably from an antiseptic distance—the saturation bombing and the free-fire zones in Vietnam were legitimate, the face-to-face slaughter in My Lai was a war crime.
As a popular passion producer, experience indicates that there is nothing quite like the atrocity story.
This war is a war, as I see it, against barbarism. . . .
We are fighting against a nation which, in the fashion of centuries ago, drags the inhabitants of conquered lands into slavery; which carries off women and girls for even worse purposes; which in its mad desire to conquer mankind and trample them under foot has stopped at no wrong, has regarded no treaty. . . . What we want most of all by this victory which we shall help to win is to secure the world’s peace, broad based on freedom and democracy. . . .
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge
to the American Senate, April 4, 1917
Propaganda in America is far more successful than anyone ever thinks it is. Its achievement is what is not spoken, not talked about, not even thought. Even its invisibility is strength, it’s impossible to counterattack unaction.
For purposes of making your war look just, the most reliable device is the self-defense thesis.
In general, you should seem to prove what people already want to believe, and to justify what they already want to do.