man.”
Kent slowed, sidelined by all that suffering. He lowered his head somberly to ponder it all.
Marty slowed, too, despite himself, and looked at Kent. At that instant, the director looked up, his face alight with enthusiasm, and pointed his finger at Marty. “But tomorrow it’s going to be a movie, we both know that. It’s just a question of who makes it first!”
Marty groaned and continued on his way.
Kent hurried up beside him. “And whoever does is going to have to recreate all of this.”
“The tragedy and human suffering.”
“That’s easy, it’s the massive destruction that’s hard. But you’ve got the inside track.”
“I don’t see how.”
“No one has ever had good earthquake footage before. Everything’s on video. It looks like shit, it never matches the rest of the movie. The audience knows right away it’s fake, so you’ve got to spend a fortune on model work and CGI. Not anymore. I’m shooting this on 35-millimeter film. This will be the first, feature quality stock footage of a cataclysmic earthquake. It’s going to be an evergreen. You’ll be seeing this film in movies and TV shows for the next thirty years. But you, Marty, can be the first to use it.”
Marty stopped. “How do you know my name?”
“It’s on your business card,” Kent tapped the laminated identification tag on the strap of Marty’s bag. “It looks embossed. Very impressive. I’ve been thinking of doing that.”
Marty suddenly had a notion, but it would take some investigation to see if it would work. “What kind of footage do you have?”
“Hollywood Boulevard submerged, the spires of the Chinese theatre poking through the mud. Geysers of fire shooting out of Farmer’s Market. The La Brea Tar pits swallowing up Wilshire Boulevard. That’s just for starters.”
Marty suspected it might be his lucky day after all, but not for the reasons Kent thought. “You did all of that shooting in just one day on foot?”
“Hell no,” Kent jerked his head towards his camera crew. “We used motorbikes.”
Marty followed his gaze. There were three motorbikes parked on the sidewalk just outside the spitting distance of the tobacco-chewing cameraman.
Yes, indeed, it was Marty’s lucky day. “Where are you going next?”
“I hear the Century City towers collapsed. Thousands of people died. It’s gotta look spectacular.”
“You ought to go to the valley.”
“Yeah, right, like anyone cares. You’ve seen one pancaked apartment building, you’ve seen them all.” Kent took out a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, and offered it to Marty, who declined.
The director stuck the cigarette in his mouth and lit it. “I’m trying to get landmarks, or what’s left of them. That’s what people what to see destroyed. That’s what has emotional resonance and, more importantly, re- sellability. Why do you think asteroids in movies always hit the Chrysler Building or the Eiffel Tower?”
Kent took a deep drag and blew the smoke off to one side, away from Marty.
“You’re right, of course.” Marty said. “But I’ve got special needs. The movie I’m thinking about takes place in the valley and the city.”
“You’re thinking about a movie?”
“It’s about a guy who’s walking home from downtown LA to his family in the valley. The movie will shift between his wife and kids trying to survive in their ruined neighborhood and this guy’s heroic struggle to get back home.”
Kent thought about it a minute. “ Die Hard meets Cold Mountain.”
“More like The Odyssey meets Survivor. I see Tim Daly or Kevin Sorbo in the lead.”
“I like it. It’s fresh and original. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
“If you were to shoot exactly what I needed, it wouldn’t be stock footage any more(it would be second unit work. You’d get a screen credit, maybe even a co-producer card.”
“But I would still own all the rights to the footage in perpetuity.”
“Absolutely.”
Kent smiled and put his arm around Marty. “Let’s go scout some locations.”
1:30 p.m. Wednesday
Beverly Hills was not a city, it was a theme park. And today, the attractions, gift shops, and concession stands of Wealthy World were closed.
Marty shared a motorbike with Kent, holding the director loosely by the sides, as they snaked their way around millions of dollars in leased German cars left abandoned on the buckled asphalt of Santa Monica Boulevard. The Skipper and Gilligan, carrying the equipment, followed right behind them on the other two motorbikes.
They passed solemn, armed police officers leaning against their shiny, black-and-white Surburbans, manning the barricades that sealed off Beverly, Rodeo, and Camden drives from intruders.
And yet, just across the street, beyond the grassy park that ran alongside Santa Monica Boulevard, hundreds of Beverly Hills residents were trapped under their five-car garages, waiting for help that Marty knew would never come. The cops were too busy rescuing Polo shirts and dragging Cartier watches to safety from the flattened stores.
Those streets and the shops on them were the Smithsonian of Beverly Hills, where ancient history was measured in increments on a parking meter; where a Prada bag and an Hermes scarf were artifacts of incalculable cultural, artistic, and scientific value, at least until the new fall lines came in; where the original kinescope of the I Love Lucy pilot, screened hourly in the Museum of Television and Radio, was as well guarded as the Mona Lisa.
Kent made a U-turn, steered the motorbike onto the park across from Rodeo Drive, and stopped, much to Marty’s annoyance. They had hardly covered any ground yet which, of course, was Marty’s only reason for riding along with the stock footage crew.
“Why are we stopping?” Marty asked.
“Rodeo Drive is dust, we can’t pass that up. It’s like the fall of the Roman Empire!” Kent hopped off the bike and motioned the Skipper and Gilligan to park alongside.
Marty sighed, resigning himself to the inevitable. Even with the occasional stop for filming, he’d still move faster with Kent and his motorbike than without him. He sat down on the edge of a large, concrete fountain in the park to wait Kent out.
Kent looked at ruptured asphalt and crumpled storefronts of Rodeo Drive through the frame he created with his hands and yelled at the Skipper. “Get a couple wide angles from here.”
The Skipper spit a gob of tobacco into the stagnant water in the fountain. “Without a crane, we aren’t gonna see much from here ’cept the barricades. We gotta get closer. Those are the money shots.”
“Just get the damn wide angle. I’ll have a chat with the local constabulary.” Kent took a deep drag on the small stub of cigarette he had left and exhaled slowly. “When I’m done sweet-talking them, they won’t just welcome us onto Rodeo Drive, they’ll help you carry the equipment.”
While Kent sauntered across the street to work on the cops, Marty glanced at the fountain he was sitting on. It was a round pool about a foot deep, surrounding a cracked statue of a stout, naked nymph holding an armful of squirming, open-mouthed fish. According to the plaque at the base, the antiquity was a gift to Beverly Hills from Cannes, their official “sister city” in France. They’d probably been waiting 400 years for someone to unload it on.
The Skipper peered through the eyepiece of the camera, then set it down on the ground, abandoning the shot in a huff. “I don’t see how I’m supposed to shoot anything with him standing there like that. He’s right in middle of the shot.”
Marty glanced back at Kent, who was waving his arms around, animatedly articulating a point to the stoic policemen. Kent didn’t seem to be making much headway, which meant they could be here a while.
The thought made Marty look over at Kent’s motorbike. The director had left the key in the ignition.
“You work at the network?” The Skipper asked Marty.
“Uh-huh.” Marty’s gaze hadn’t left the motorbike.
“I worked a camera on The Tortellis in ’87.” The Skipper spit a gob of chaw and watched it arc through the air until it plunked into the fountain water. “Some people confuse that with The Torkelsons because they were both
