Life Goes to the Movies by Peter Selgin Page B

Mutiny.
    Behind us: a wall of luxury hotels stretching as pale and frothy as the waves that break along the shore: the Hyatt, the Hilton, the Konover, the
Fontainebleau … And the Hotel Paradise where, in a deluxe penthouse suite, Literary and Film Agent Bull Duncan dreams sweet dreams of
exclusivity, oblivious to all conspiracies being hatched in the sand.
    It’s 1978. I’m barely twenty (though it seems old to me), barely a year out of art school. Subways and winter are both as far away as can
be as I lie here, watching my best friend sleep, dreaming his own not-so-sweet dreams of sniper fire and ambushes (lips contorting, limbs bucking and
twitching, forehead bubbling with sweat).
    Suddenly a sound like a swarm of swirling kitchen knives slashes its way toward us down the shore, an airborne Cuisinart headed our way, intent on
slicing and dicing us both to smithereens. It gets to us and stops, hovering right over our heads, spewing up a tornado that makes it all too clear why
beach sand is used for sandpaper. Dwaine, my friend, my bosom buddy, cinematic Telemachus to my Mentor, lurches awake, wide-eyed and scared stiff as a
stop sign, screaming an otherworldly scream to wake the Greater Miami dead.
    The Cosmic Cuisinart shoots a cool blue beam down into our eyes.
    From the heavens an amplified voice commands:
    Get down off the beach! Get down off the beach!
    Dwaine keeps screaming, aluminum-shard pupils popping from his skull as I hold him, saying, “It’s okay, it’s
okay… ”
    The whirling death machine churns on, scattering light, sand, and terror down the shore.
     
    2
     
    We were going to be famous, that was the plan. Dwaine would write and direct movies, and I’d star in them. Like Scorsese and DeNiro we’d
ride waves of simulated gore to cinematic fortune and fame. We’d serve up bleeding slabs of grim realism to a public starving on a rabbit diet of
Mindless Entertainment. To famished moviegoers we would dish out that rarest of delicacies, the Unvarnished Truth, and get famous doing it.
    But first we needed to make some connections.
     
    3
     
    I was sitting at a corner table at the Rosinante Grill, bits of dead lettuce, raw hamburger meat and squashed French fries clinging to the crags of my
work boots, scribbling away in my black book between dishwashing shifts when a guy who looked like a stubby bearded Klaus Kinsky strutted over and
handed me his business card. “Who knows?” he said. “You could be the next William Goldman.”
    The card showed a bull in silhouette rearing up on its hind legs, its tail switching back like a whip.
    Bull Duncan’s office was a den of bulls. There were bull ashtrays, bull bookends, bull paintings, lithographs, sculptures and bull bas-reliefs,
bull tapestries, inkwells and paperweights, bull lamps, bull coffee mugs, bull coasters … On a bull-pelted loveseat winged bulls
stitched in gold soared across the faces of fat red velvet pillows. A curio cabinet with beveled glass doors shimmered with bulls haughty and heraldic,
furious and ferocious, pompous and proud, some encrusted with jewels.
    Wearing a red silk kimono embroidered with bulls, Mr. Duncan sat behind his African mahogany desk carved with bull heads, doing isometrics while
talking on his speakerphone. Before he had looked like Klaus Kinsky, now he was Claude Rains in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, orNotorious, with his sly calm smile and white brushed-back hair, waiting for the poison in the tea to do its job. As the voice in the
speakerphone squawked he looked at me standing there and said, “Talk to me. What credentials have you got?” I said, “I could be the
next William Goldman.” And he hired me.
    For two-fifty an hour I read submissions, typed rejection letters, answered the phone, made post office, copy shop and Chinese laundry runs. Bull
Duncan meanwhile spent most of his time on his speakerphone trying to land exclusive deals. “Exclusive” was one of his favorite words,
second only