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Last Writes
A Jaine Austen Mystery
By Laura Levine KENSINGTON BOOKS
Copyright © 2003 Laura Levine All right reserved. ISBN: 0-7582-0160-5
Chapter One
I should've known there was trouble ahead when I saw the sign over the studio gate:
MIRACLE STUDIOS
"If It's a Good Picture, It's a Miracle"
Miracle Studios, for those of you lucky enough never to have been there, is a sorry collection of soundstages in the scuzziest section of Hollywood, a part of town where the hookers outnumber the parking meters two to one.
But when I drove onto the Miracle lot that hazy Monday morning, I was a happy camper. I, Jaine Austen, was about to become a bona fide Hollywood Sitcom Writer. After years of toiling at my computer as a freelance writer, churning out brochures and resumes and personals ads, I was about to strike it rich in show biz. No longer would I have to come up with fictional resumes for college grads with room-temperature IQs. Or slogans for my biggest client, Toiletmasters Plumbers (In a Rush to Flush? Call Toiletmasters).
I owed my good fortune to my best friend, Kandi Tobolowski. Six weeks earlier, she'd called me with the news:
"Guess what," she said. "I've kissed the cockroach goodbye!"
The cockroach to whom she was referring was the star insect of a Saturday morning cartoon show, Beanie & The Cockroach, a heartwarming saga of a chef named Beanie and hispet cockroach, Fred. Kandi had been a staff writer on Beanie for more years than she cared to admit. Like most animation writers, she'd long dreamed of landing a job in the far more prestigious world of live-action television.
And that day had finally arrived. Her agent had taken enough time off from lunch at Spago to line up a job for her on a comedy called Muffy 'n Me-a Saturday morning syndicated show about a buxom teenage girl who gets hit on the head with a volleyball and develops magical powers.
As the Miracle bigwigs pitched it to the network, "It's Bewitched with tits."
Okay, so it wasn't going to win any Emmys. But it was a big step up from the cockroach, and Kandi was thrilled. So was I, two weeks later, when she told me she'd managed to get me a script assignment on the show.
At first, I was terrified. After all, I wasn't much of a comedy writer. But then Muffy 'n Me wasn't much of a comedy. So, after chaining myself to my computer, armed with only my wits and a copy of Henny Youngman's Giant Book of One-Liners, I managed to complete my comedic masterpiece, "Cinderella Muffy." It's all about what happens when Muffy magically changes her ratty bathrobe into a glam prom dress, only to have the spell wear off in the middle of the prom, leaving her stranded on the dance floor, doing the Funky Chicken in her jammies.
I know, it sounds ghastly to someone of your refined tastes. But remember, we're talking Hollywood here, the town that brought you My Mother the Car and The Gong Show. The head writers loved it! Okay, so maybe they didn't love it. But they liked it. Enough to invite me to be a "guest writer" on the show for a week. And here's the truly wonderful part. If they liked working with me, they were going to offer me a staff job! And if I did well on Muffy, it would be only a matter of time before I made the leap from syndication to prime time. Do you know how much prime-time sitcom writers make? Well, neither do I. But I hear it's scads. Truckloads of really big bucks. Think Bill Gates. Think Donald Trump. Think plumbers on overtime.
Ever since I'd handed in my script, I'd had visions of Seinfeldian contracts dancing in my head. I'd already mentally bought my beach house in Malibu, complete with his and hers Jaguars for me and my husband. Not that I had a husband, but I was sure I'd pick one up along the way.
All of which explains why I was in a jolly mood that morning as I drove past the wino sunning himself at the studio gates and onto the Miracle lot. I pulled up in front of the guard booth, where an ancient man with rheumy eyes and the unlikely name of Skippy asked me where I was headed.
"Muffy 'n Me!" I grinned.
Was it my imagination or did I see a trace of pity in those rheumy old eyes?
"Park over there," he said, waving to a tiny spot next to the commissary dumpster.
I parked my trusty Corolla in the shadow of the dumpster and stepped out onto the lot, trying to ignore the smell of rotting garbage. Swinging my brand-new attaché case, I headed over to the office I was to share with Kandi, eager to start on this exciting new chapter of my life. Somehow it still didn't seem real. I had to keep reminding myself that I actually had a job at Miracle Studios.
Of course, I didn't know it at the time, but the real miracle was that I'd live to tell about it.
Chapter Two
My friend Kandi has been a comedy writer, a waitress, and a part-time salesclerk at Bloomingdale's. But never as far as I know has she been a physician. Which is why, when I walked into her office that Monday morning, I was surprised to see her with a stethoscope dangling from her neck, the earpiece pressed up against the wall.
"What are you doing?"
"Listening to Stan and Audrey."
Stan and Audrey Miller were the head writers on Muffy 'n Me. I'd met with them when I first got my script assignment. They'd ushered me into their office and told me how much they'd liked my story outline, how the "Cinderella thing" really worked for them, and how they just wanted to suggest one or two teeny-tiny changes. Three hours later, they'd totally ripped my story apart and put it back together again. But I'd walked out with an assignment, and that was all I cared about.
Now here I was, in an office next to theirs, watching Kandi eavesdropping on them with a stethoscope.
"Where did you get that thing?" I asked.
"The prop department. It works like a dream. Want to try?"
"No, thanks. I prefer to do my eavesdropping at X-rated motels."
Kandi ignored my sarcasm.
"It's a great way to find out the latest dirt," she said. "Who's getting hired, who's getting fired. Who's getting laid."
"Well? What's happening?"
"Same old, same old. Audrey's accusing Stan of being an alcoholic, and he's accusing her of being a frigid bitch."
Apparently nobody was getting laid in that relationship.
Kandi took off the stethoscope and tossed it onto her desk.
"So," she said, gesturing around the room. "What do you think?"
Now I'm sure most people would assume that Hollywood sitcom writers have snazzy offices with plush carpeting and sleek teak furniture. Most people would be wrong. Kandi's office was a closet-sized affair, with stained brown carpeting and a dusty window overlooking the transvestites on Santa Monica Boulevard.
"Early Hellhole," I sighed, gazing at an ominous brown stain on the carpet. I didn't even want to think where that stain came from.
"That's your desk," Kandi said, pointing to a desk that was probably around in Fatty Arbuckle's day.
I was just about to plop down into the swivel chair in front of it when Kandi cried: "Stop!"
She reached into her drawer and pulled out a towel.
"Miracle Studios Rule Number One: Never Sit on Unprotected Furniture." She draped the towel on the chair seat. "I'm not kidding. The wardrobe lady swears she got a yeast infection from her chair."
I sat down gingerly and glanced over at a tennis racket propped up in the corner of the room.
"Do you actually have time to play tennis?"
"Nah. That's for scaring away the rats."
Obviously, this job was going to be a tad less glamorous than I'd thought.
Kandi took out her cosmetics case and started putting on lipstick without a mirror (along with comedy writing and making margaritas, one of her Major Life Skills).
"You ready for the big day?" she asked through puckered lips.
A frisson of fear shot through me. Today was the Monday morning read-through, a quaint sitcom ritual where the actors gather round, bleary-eyed from a weekend of debauchery, and read that week's script aloud for the first time. The script they were reading on that fateful Monday morning was my brilliant opus, "Cinderella Muffy."
Suddenly my palms glazed over with sweat. What if the actors didn't like it? What if nobody laughed? I'd once heard that back when Roseanne was doing her sitcom, she used to sit on the writers' scripts and fart! Good heavens! What if someone farted on my script? Or worse? I glanced down at the brown stain in the carpet and gulped.
My Malibu beach house fantasy instantly vanished, replaced by a Dickensian image of me back in my one-bedroom apartment, toiling away at a Toiletmasters brochure.
"Honey, are you okay?" Kandi ran a brush through her mane of enviably straight chestnut hair and gave her eyelashes a quick swipe with mascara.
"Oh, God," I wailed. "What if the actors don't like my script?"
Kandi snorted.
"Sweetie, they're actors. The ones with big parts will love it. The ones with small parts will think it 'needs work'." She snapped her mascara wand back into its case. "Half of them don't even read the script. They just go through it with a marker and highlight their lines. If they don't see a lot of neon yellow on the page, they get pissy."
Her toilette complete, she reached for her copy of my script.
"Come on. We'd better head over to the stage, or we'll be late."
But by now I was frozen with fear in my vermin-infested chair.
"Come on, honey," she said, prying me up. "It won't be bad. I promise."
Then she led me out the door, a Hollywood lamb to the slaughter.
There are three things visitors to Los Angeles should avoid at all costs. Earthquakes. Freeways during rush hour. And the Miracle Pictures Studio Tour. A ninth-rate imitation of the Universal Studios Tour, the Miracle "tour" consisted of a ramshackle tram snaking its way past termite-ridden sets and an ancient roller coaster the Miracle bigwigs picked up cheap from a bankrupt amusement park.
As Kandi and I stepped out of the Writers' Building into the hazy sunshine, I could see the roller coaster in the distance. The unfortunate tourists strapped on board were screaming in genuine terror. I didn't blame them. The ride looked like it was made of popsicle sticks held together with Elmer's glue. Any minute now, the cable would probably snap like a worn-out rubber band.
And the pathetic thing is that I wished I was on it. At that moment, I wished I was anywhere else but on my way to the read-through. By now I was certain the actors would trash my script and blackball me from show biz forever. Heck, after word of my humiliation spread, I'd be lucky to get work from Toiletmasters.
"Will you please stop looking so terrified," Kandi said. "Everything's going to be great."
"Yeah, right. Just like everything was great when you booked us on that singles cruise to Cabo San Lucas."
Kandi sighed. "Are you never going to let me forget that? I've already apologized a gazillion times. How was I supposed to know it was a gay cruise?"
"You could've read the brochure, for starters."
"It wasn't so bad. You got hit on by some very attractive women."
At this point, my hysteria was interrupted by a Miracle Studios tram rattling past us. Unlike the roller coaster victims, the tram people were stifling yawns, clearly bored out of their skulls.
But when they saw Kandi and me, walking along with our scripts, they looked up with interest. It suddenly occurred to me that, to these people, we were glamorous. After all, we worked in Hollywood. They probably thought we hobnobbed with the stars, doing lunch with Julia and dinner with Brad.
by now, several of them were starting to wave. For a moment I forgot my terror and basked in their admiration. Maybe this Hollywood thing would work out after all. I smiled at their eager faces and waved back at them demurely, very Queen Elizabeth. Suddenly one of them shouted, "Hey, Vanessa! How's it going?" And I realized that they weren't waving at me, but at someone behind me.
I turned and saw the object of their adulation, Vanessa Dennis, the star of Muffy 'n Me. A startlingly lovely teenager, Vanessa had the face of an angel and the body of a Barbie doll. I strongly suspected that her breasts, like Barbie's, were of the man-made variety.
She clomped over to us on tottering heels, her endless legs encased in tight capri pants, her breasts spilling out from a halter top cut so low, it was practically a belt.
"Damn," Kandi muttered under her breath. "It's V.D."
"V.D.?"
"Vanessa Dennis. An affectionate nickname favored by all who know and loathe her."
Vanessa tottered toward us, ignoring her adoring fans in the tram.
"Watch," Kandi whispered. "She's going to ask me for a cigarette. Every week, she asks me for a cigarette. Every week, I tell her I don't smoke, and she still asks me for a cigarette."
Vanessa's breasts were soon at our side; seconds later, the rest of Vanessa showed up.
"Hi, Vanessa," Kandi said. "I'd like you to meet a friend of mine."
"Whatever," she said, not bothering to look at me. "You got a cigarette?"
"Sorry." Kandi smiled through gritted teeth. "I don't smoke. I may have mentioned that once or twice."
She turned to me. "How about you?"
"Sorry." I shrugged apologetically. "I don't smoke either."
With that, I ceased to exist for her.
"Christ," she moaned to Kandi. "Did you see this week's script? What a piece of crap. Who wrote this shit?"
I smiled weakly.
"That would be me."
"Oh, well," she said, not the least bit embarrassed. "Maybe they can fix it in rewrites." And with that, she hurried off in search of a cigarette.
"Now I know why they call her V.D."
"Don't pay any attention to Vanessa," Kandi said. "She hates all the scripts. Honest. She wouldn't know something funny if it bit her on the fanny. Which, rumor has it, is at least fifty percent foam rubber."
"She wears falsies on her tush?"
"Sure. Lots of actresses do."
I shook my head in amazement. I couldn't imagine someone actually wanting to increase the size of her butt, when I spent most of my waking hours wishing mine would disappear.
"Enough gossip," Kandi said. "It's show time." And with that she took me by the elbow and ushered me inside my first Hollywood soundstage.
I have to admit, I was impressed. At one end of the cavernous building were the Muffy 'n Me sets. I saw Muffy's cozy living room, her homey kitchen, and her Gidgetesque bedroom-complete with vanity table, lace curtains, and mountains of stuffed animals on her pink chenille bedspread. It was all just like I'd seen it on TV. Only here on the set, there were giant overhead lights, and the floor was crisscrossed with marking tape, to show the actors where to stand. Continues...
Excerpted from Last Writes by Laura Levine
Copyright © 2003 by Laura Levine
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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