Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

THREE

While the two mismatched adventurers slept in the subterranean murk of Room 131 in the Wilshire Plaza Hotel, a sleep too deep to be called comfortable; too close to death, in fact—the city of Los Angeles got up and went about its daily business. There was profit to be made. There were movies being shot all over the city. Joyless little pornos being made in ratty motels, witless spectacles with budgets that could have supported small nations made on the soundstages of Culver City and Burbank; penniless independent films about the lives of hustlers, whores and penniless filmmakers shot wherever a room could be found and the actors assembled. Some would go on to glory; even the pornos had their nights of prize-giving now, when the lucky lady voted Best Cock-Sucker was called to the podium to humbly thank her agent, her mother, and Jesus Christ.

But the fictions, whether sex or science-fiction, were not the only dramas that would be played out today. This was a city that made its profit by selling dreams, not least of itself, and so every day young hopefuls arrived by bus and by plane to try their luck. And every day a few of those dreamers, having been here a few months (sometimes a few years), realized that their place in the food chain of fame was lower than a piece of week-old sushi. It was not going to happen for them: they weren't going to be the next Meryl Streep, the next Todd Pickett, the next Jim Carrey. They'd have to wait another lifetime for their slice of fame; or the lifetime after that, or the lifetime after that. And for some, it wasn't news they could bear to take home with them. Better to buy a gun (as Ryan Tyler, real name Norman Miles, did that morning) and go back to your one-room apartment and blow out your brains. He'd had two lines in one of the Lethal Weapon movies, which he'd told everyone in Stockholm, Ohio, was the beginning of a great career. But the lines had been cut, and for some reason he'd never caught a director's eye ever again. Not once in six years, since he'd had those two lines, had he been called back for an audition. The bullet was kinder than the silent phone. His death didn't make the news.

The suicide of one Rod McCloud did, but only because he'd thrown himself off a bridge onto the 405 and brought the morning traffic in both directions to a halt for an hour. McCloud had actually won an Oscar; he'd been the co-recipient (with four other producers) of the coveted little icon fourteen years earlier. There hadn't been time for him to reach the microphone and thank his agent and Jesus Christ; the orchestra had started playing the exit music before the man in front of him had finished giving his thanks; then it was too late.

At noon, another suicide was discovered; that of a man who, unlike McCloud—who had been sixty-one—was still at the beginning of his life. Justin Thaw, who two years ago had been named by Vanity Fair the Most Powerful Agent in LA Under Twenty-five (he was twenty-two at the time), and had been groomed by the greatest of the city's agent-deities as the inheritor of his chair, made a noose and hanged himself in his brother's garage, leaving a suicide letter that was arranged as a series of bullet-points (in the style his ex-boss had taught him), for maximum clarity. He could no longer fight his addiction, he said; he was too tired of feeling as though he was a failure, just because he was hooked on heroin. He was sorry for all the heartless things he'd said and done to those he loved; it had been the drug doing, the drug saying: but it was he who was sorry, and he who was glad to be leaving today, because life wasn't worth the effort anymore. He was wearing the ten-thousand-dollar suit he'd had made for himself in Milan, the shoes he'd purchased in Rome, and (so as not to make as much of a mess of his death as he had of his life) a pair of adult diapers.

The news of Justin's death would spread quickly, and a few executives' doors would be closed for a while, giving the men behind them a moment to remember the occasions they'd got high with Justin, and wonder whether it wasn't time they asked for help from Narcotics Anonymous. Then the phones from their powerful contemporaries started to ring again, and the pressure of the day meant that meditation had to be put off for a while; they took a snort or two of coke to put Justin out of their minds, and got on with the deal-making. They could think about him again at the funeral.

Speaking of which: the ashes of one Jennifer Scarscella were on a Chicago-bound plane that afternoon, headed for interment in the city of her birth. Jennifer had died nine months ago, but her body had only recently been found and identified in the LA Morgue. She had left home seven years before, without telling her parents where she was headed, though it wouldn't have been hard for the Scarscellas to figure out that their daughter had left to try her luck in Tinseltown: all she'd ever wanted to do was be a movie star. She had been murdered by her boyfriend, because she'd refused, he said, to take a role in an X-rated movie. He was now in jail, and Jennifer was going home, having kept her ambitions high, and died for doing so.

And so the day went on, the shadows of the city lengthening as the sun began to drop from its high-point at noon.

At a little after four, there was a crisis at Warner's, when a set under construction caught fire, gutting an entire soundstage, and badly damaging two adjacent soundstages. Nobody was killed, but there were still grim faces in the boardroom that afternoon. Insurance would cover the reconstruction of the stages, but the set had been built for the Warner's Christmas offering Dark Justice. With an elaborate post-production schedule for the picture that required the main shoot to be over in a month's time, things looked bad. There had been a great deal of "creative debate" about the script, which had no fewer than fourteen writers presently attached to it. Arbitration by the Writers Guild would thin those numbers, but nothing would make the calculation look any better if the picture missed its Christmas release date, which it now looked likely to do.

Two executives received calls from their superiors in New York, pointing out that if they hadn't warred so much about the script the picture would have been shot by now and the agonizingly slow post-production underway. Instead they had a smoking shell of a building where the big scenes were to have been shot, starting in two days. There was a fiscal disaster in the offing, and certain people should be ready to hand in their resignations before they were embarrassed into leaving by the imminent and unflattering analysis as to why ninety pages of dialogue about a man who dressed up as a jaguar to fight the villains of some fictional metropolis could not have been agreed on earlier, when there was four and a half million dollars' worth of writing talent on the job. The observation that "we're not making fucking Citizen Kane here" dropped from several mouths that day; more often than not from men who had never seen Kane, nor would have cared for it even if they had.

By five, with the freeways bumper to bumper as people got out of town for the weekend, there was a plethora of accidents, but nothing of consequence. Scripts were delivered for the weekend read; writers crossed their fingers and hoped that somebody would read what they'd slaved over without kids fighting at their feet or their dick in somebody's mouth or a smudge of coke on their nose; plans were made for weekend adulteries; those letters of resignation were penned by smiling assistants.

And through it all Todd and the woman who had once idolized him slept side by side in the stale darkening air of Room 131.