Only Child

“All right, Alana,” I said to her. “It’s up to you,” I said to the target. “Do you want to see our offer first?”

“Well...”

“This is really just boilerplate,” I told him. “The blank spaces are where the numbers get filled in. I mean, some things are industry-standard, five points on the gross, separate card for the director’s credit.... You’re a writer-director, yes?”

“Absolutely. The way I—”

“Look, Vision, I won’t jerk you around. I’ve got a ceiling. A limit I can go to. But I promise you, promise you, that if your concept is as revolutionary as we’ve heard it is you’ll hit that ceiling. Right in this very contract. Fair enough?”

“I...I’d have to...”

“Well, of course, your people would have to look it over. I’m not a lawyer, either. My game’s finance; your game’s creativity. But that’s a marriage, am I right? Financing and creativity? That’s the way movies get made.”

“But when you said Blair Witch, I thought you—”

“You thought we were looking ultra-low-budget?” I said, in disbelief. “No way! I mean, look, I won’t deny that this is a business. We’re here to make money. But we know you have to bring some to get some. Our company can’t finance some hundred-million-dollar spectacle. And we don’t want to. We were thinking of a moderate investment. Say, two and a half to, maybe, four. All on digital.”

“That’s...”

“What? Not enough? Listen to me, Vision. It’s more than enough, believe me. We’ve got the distribution contacts, the overseas market—this isn’t some straight-to-video pitch I’m making here.”

“No. I mean, that could be...it could be plenty, if it was handled right.”

“Take the contracts with you,” I told him. “But, first, tell me about your concept. Tell me everything. So we can fill in some of those blanks.”

“My inspiration,” he said, leaning back, “my original inspiration was seeing one of those convenience-store holdups on videotape—not a re-enactment, the actual robbery—on one of those surveillance cameras they keep in those stores? I was struck by the...immediacy of it.”

He leaned forward to light another cigarette, then leaned back again for the first drag, keeping the interviewer on “Pause,” just as he’d rehearsed it in front of his mirror a thousand times.

Rejji came over, removed his near-empty tumbler, and deftly replaced it with a fresh drink, giving him a little extra wiggle, now that it was clear he was a VIP for real.

“There’s a power to that kind of...performance,” he intoned. “An impact never duplicated in conventional cinema. I became a kind of connoisseur of the entire...genre, if you will. There was something about those tapes that was absolutely special. Unique. So I decided to deconstruct the tapes as a totality. Not in the formal sense, of course,” he said, breezily, “more in the way of disassembling the mechanism...isolating the elements to understand the gestalt.

“From that work came my vision,” he said, in the solemnly portentous tone a pop star uses when explaining that global warming isn’t a cool thing.

“And your name,” I said, saluting him with an upraised glass.

“That wasn’t until later,” he corrected me. “Those surveillance tapes, the closest label you could put on them, artistically, would be a kind of cinema verite. But they’re not actually creations; they’re not even documentaries. Why? Because there’s no control—the filmmaker isn’t directing; it’s nothing more than the camera itself. Now, for some, that is the goal...to make the director disappear, so that the audience ‘sees’ directly into the life. But without control, there is no art. You might capture something fantastic on tape, but that’s just a question of being in the right place at the right time. That’s not art. It’s not even skill. Just dumb luck. The Zapruder film is world-famous, right? A piece of history. But nobody ever talks about his...gift. Or his art. And,” he said, in a tone of finality, “he never made anything else.”

“But you can’t direct real life,” I said, gently fanning the flame.

“No?” he said complacently.

“Well, how could you?” I asked. “I mean, if you direct it, then it’s...acting.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” he said, his voice getting tumescent with confidence. He segued into full lecture mode. “I remember watching that robbery tape. Over and over. Thinking how much better it could have been if they’d positioned themselves differently. Or said different words. Because just because something’s real doesn’t mean it’s even interesting. Much less art. That’s when I began scripting. Before that, all my work was just...filming. Without any real...vision,” he said, chuckling at himself. He shifted his shoulders, positioning himself to deliver another dose of insight. “For a while, I did straight verite. Have you ever seen a dogfight?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve heard about them, but...they’re...I mean, only hillbillies do them, isn’t that true? Like cockfights being a Hispanic thing?”

“No...” He was starting to educate me, then caught himself before the topic veered too far from his favorite one. “Anyway, I filmed one. It was incredible. I filmed other things, too. Things you’d probably never see on tape in your life. But I couldn’t control any of it. So what I had was a lot of amazing footage, but none of it—even all of it together—would add up to a movie.

“It all...evolved,” he said. “It took a long time. Years. My next stage was when I used actors to ‘be’ real. I’d put them in situations, and whatever happened, happened. Kind of verite cranked up. And what I saw was that I had a lot of control but it cost me the realism. Like, have you ever seen a trial on Court TV?”

“OJ,” I replied. “And when Frank Dux sued Jean-Claude Van Damme.” A safe Hollywood answer.

“Do you think any of them would have behaved the same way if they hadn’t known the cameras were on them every second? The lawyers, the witnesses, even the judge? And those ‘reality’ TV shows. Survivor? Right! Big Brother? Sure! That Jenny Jones thing, where the guy thought he was going to meet someone who had a secret crush on him, and it turned out to be another guy? But on camera, what happens? Not so much. Off camera? He fucking kills the queer. Blows him away. You see what I mean? What if I’d had that?”

I nodded, unwilling to interrupt the flow of something so important with speech.

“Don’t you see?” he said. “Even if all I did was set the...boundaries, like, it still wasn’t real. Because, if they knew the camera was rolling, that changed everything. I threw most of that crap out. You know what I called it, finally? Faux verite!”

“Wow,” I said softly, overawed.

“Everybody’s a screenwriter,” he said caustically. “They want to write ‘realism’ and call it their ‘creation.’ But they don’t get it. If you create the realism, it isn’t real!”

“That is heavy,” I said. CV for cinema verite; FV for faux verite. And NV...?

“That’s when it came to me,” he said. “Can I show you something?”

Without waiting for a response, he opened the flap on his shoulder bag and took out a cassette. I felt Michelle freeze next to me.

“You’ve got a VCR here...?”

“Of course,” Michelle assured him. She stood up and took the cassette from him, walked over to the console, turned it on, inserted the tape. She came back and handed the remote to Vision.

“Thanks,” he said. Without further preamble, he pointed the remote at the console and kicked the tape into life.

Darkness.

The camera’s eye picked up a synagogue.