To Be Honest by Michael Leviton

Author:Michael Leviton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2020-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

In Space, No One Can Hear You Lie

Around this time, my friend Sidney called me with a wild offer. Sidney had been one of the few in college who appreciated me. He’d played football, was tall and broad-shouldered and good-looking, could pass as normal when he tried. He’d done such a good job passing that he’d been hired at a studio in Los Angeles to package modern remakes of old movies from their archives. He said this meant he was in a position to hire me to rewrite a horror movie from the 1930s, a dream job I desperately needed.

Very soon after I started working on it, he told me the studio had taken him off my project and replaced him with a more experienced producer based in New York, that I should go into the office to meet him. I looked up this new producer’s name and found that he’d worked on a few movies I’d seen. I didn’t like them, but they were popular with everyone else I knew. When the receptionist showed me into the producer’s office, I was surprised at his appearance: blond and muscular with spiky hair like a surfer, young-looking for his forties. He cockily bragged about his career, about dropping out of high school to work at a movie studio. He described himself as a “wunderkind.” I couldn’t fathom why he was so intent on impressing me. I theorized that he might feel insecure about taking over for my friend. Maybe my being twenty-four made him feel old so he wanted to tell me he’d been a success younger than me. Maybe he did this with everyone; that possibility disturbed me most. How infinitely tedious and painful to want to impress everyone!

As the producer went on about himself, he told me a story from his first week in Hollywood, about the marketing meeting for the movie Alien. “So, I’m this high school dropout in a conference room on Sunset Boulevard, listening to pitches for poster taglines. Everybody’s talking typical horror sci-fi stuff about screams and space until someone says something about screaming in space. The wife of the producer overhears and interrupts to make fun of us like, ‘You idiots! You can’t scream in space because there’s no air and no sound!’” The surfer-producer across the desk paused smugly before the obvious climax in which, he, a teenager in his first week on the job, wrote, “In space, no one can hear you scream!”

“Hold on,” I said. “Why was the producer’s wife there? And why was she able to overhear what was going on in the conference room? Was the door open? She was standing outside the meeting room, listening, and then barged in through the open door to correct the room? And, before that, no one there had considered that there was no sound in space? How many people were in the meeting?”

The producer swiveled in his chair, stunned. I shouldn’t have been surprised; Hollywood was famous for its liars. But I

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.