Follow The Contrails

By William White-acre

Bradford Tuttle is a script doctor, brought in by studios to resurrect movie scripts. His resides on the bottom rung of the ladder in Hollywood, just surviving. Then he is thrown a lifeline, two film projects simultaneously, his one big break. Unfortunately, it will turn out to be all he can do just to stay alive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William White-acre
• Release date: Dec 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370554126

William White-acre

Photographer first, scribbler second. Lived a long time. When your life resembles an epoch, well, it is scary. Just hope I can entertain.

Book preview

Follow The Contrails

by

William White-acre

Copyright 2019

Smashwords Edition

Chapter 1: THE BACKSTORY:

I am what is usually (in the business) called a script doctor. My name is Bradford Tuttle and I was born and raised in Oro Rios, California, which is a small town not far from San Diego. I still live in the Golden State, having never lived anywhere else in my thirty one years. Only now I've moved up I-5 a little ways and live in a small apartment on the outskirts of Santa Monica.

Then again, this book isn't really about me at all; but background is almost always vital to a story, so I was told by my favorite professor when I was at USC. Never finished though, dropped out in my third year after I was offered a plum job at one of the studios. That may be stretching it a little bit. What it was, to be truthful, was a gig trying to make sense of some idiot's written slop, a screen play about, of all things, Philo Farnsworth, the guy who (arguably) invented television. If they aren't dreaming up projects that are way out there, they want to do remakes, unearthing classics that either shouldn't see the light of day again or can't be improved on. By they, I mean the arbiters of creative input in this town.

Don't ask me how these things get started in Hollywood. There are so many bizarre ideas that get off the ground in TV and Movie land it boggles the mind. Anyway, I was approached by this underling at one of the studios and asked to patch up the script. Why they came to me is the usual convoluted, funhouse mirror type of activity that happens in LA all too often: a friend of a friend, who has a cousin...etc. The nebulous connection that connected me to the project was a guy in one of my classes who just happen to be the nephew of some guy who was an associate producer for HBO and--you get the picture. Because I was indeed plugging away at USC in the wildly overrated film study courses, I was qualified to take a stab at the abortion the honchos were calling a working script. It wasn't, working that is. First, Philo Farnsworth? Secondly, Philo Farnsworth. I don't care if the man did invent the best thing to happen to the modern world, it was still a stretch.

Thankfully, the entire project never saw the light of day. The plug was pulled on the fiasco even before one camera was turned on. Some bigshot came to his senses and stopped it in its tracks, but not before I got my pay check. And it was a big one. They actually paid me gobs of money for, essentially, nothing. Not a thing. I had hardly gotten through the first act. Didn't matter. That was the way it was in Hollywood. Money gushed. It was like classic, simple economics didn't apply. The concept of making film, and TV, all began with the big idea and from there greed and ego took over. On the one hand you had the Suits who wanted to add to their bank accounts, and then on the other was the talent, a stable full of glassy eyed simpletons intent on tasting sweet fame. It was often times a volatile combination but had been working ever since the old farts from back East settled in LA and brought a nation starving for entertainment their fix. I had become just a very small fixture in that production line.

Then I quit school, taking my big pay day, along with my WGA (Writers Guild of America) card, and heading to Venice beach, where I thought I was going to be a successful screenwriter. My parents were horrified. No one wants a college dropout for a son. Hey, they had been against my college major all along anyway. My dad was retired Navy and my mom had been the devoted military wife from way back, enduring long (long) months alone while her husband completed his tours of duty. One of my brothers had gone off to the Naval academy and made our dad proud. The other brother, younger by five years, was a minister, with a wife and two kids. My parents attended his church. My sister, the baby of the family, worked as a flack for our local Congressman, Republican of course. It was said, (by me mostly), that I must have been adopted, from some wayward Hippies.

Let me get this straight, my father had bellowed once upon a time, right after I told him I would be going to college in LA to study movie making, you want to go up to LA LA Land and do what? After a few more choice words on the subject my father, thankfully, never mentioned it again. It helped that I had scored a partial scholarship, thereby alleviating some of the financial burden for my parents, not that it made it any more acceptable.

My father had been a Chief Petty officer on an aircraft carrier for most of his career, which included making sure jets took off and landed without crashing as they did bombing runs over Hanoi back in that war he never really wanted to talk about too much. His world was defined by bulkheads and the smell of aviation fuel for the most part. Everything else he left up to my mother, who was the type to show up at PTA meetings and ask why there wasn't a class about the Ten Commandments in the school's up coming curriculum. I was the proverbial fish out of water, to say the least. In fact, my father had asked, frequently, why I wasn't looking to follow my older brother's lead and gear up for a four year stay at Annapolis. Failing that, he wished that I would enlist like he had done back in the day. There was absolutely nothing wrong with having another enlisted man in the family.

My mother's input branched off in another direction, of course. There were plenty of times I would return home from High School and find a brochure on my bed, usually with Jesus prominently displayed on the front. Her less than subtle hints always included glowing reports about the campus of such and such college and how the courses prepared fine and upstanding young men for the challenge of delivering the Word. Almost all of the colleges were academically suspect, leaning heavily on the scripture, resulting in a greased pipeline right behind the pulpit of some church somewhere out there in the Bible belt. It didn't take, skipped right over me and grabbed my younger brother, who was, bless him, more gullible and a bit of a mommy's boy anyway.

USC was, in the past, a party school, with a reputation as a place rich kids collected at to spend their fortunes with abandon. After all, it was smack dab in the middle of LA. Diversions were built in. The college's mascot name was the Trojans for Christ's sake. OJ Simpson had gone there, or, at least, played for the football team. It did have a film school with some renown, listing among its alumnae personages like: Ron Howard (Opie) and Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame; not to mention a long list of actors, for instance: Tom Selleck, Cybill Shepherd, Kyra Sedgwick and Forrest Whitaker. It was all window dressing of course, because going to college in order to excel in the Arts, especially the movie industry, was asinine. Getting an A on a term paper was never going to get you in the game, much less even in the door. It was all about circumstance and connections, the two acts of God that made everything in Hollywood function.

Did I say I was also gay? Being a homosexual in Hollywood isn't exactly something of note. Half the community seems to be limp wristed, from the hair and makeup crew all the way through a good percentage of the talent in front of the camera, both female and male. We are all so creative and all, don't you know.

Needless to say, back home this wasn't anything remotely to my advantage. My sexual orientation was concealed until the point that I permanently left the city limits. It was the prudent thing to do. Between the Neanderthal leanings of my father to the Scripture screeching of my mother, with the conservative bent of the High School I attended, I didn't feel safe revealing any predilection for delving into same sex, you know, sex. Not that I didn't know which way I wanted to go. The selection process had arrived early enough. By seventh grade to be precise. No more details need be supplied, except suffice it to say my date for the prom didn't have all that good of a time.

Informing my parents, and, by extension, my family of my sexual orientation is a whole another story altogether. Suffice to say my mother cried, my father bellowed, and my siblings looked confused, then angry, like I had somehow offended them. I finally did the deed, after encouragement from a guy I was seeing at the time convinced me to (the bastard) pull the trigger at one of our family gatherings. He had assured me I would feel better about myself afterwards, that I wouldn't have to live a lie all the time around my family. Sometimes lies serve a better purpose in life. It could have been worse, like at one of our family reunions, where Aunt Mildred and Uncle Jim would spit out their drinks at the news. As far as I knew, I was the only faggot in the family; at least no one else had come forward at that point. I'm sure if you did a genealogical search you might find some light in the loafer types somewhere along the line in the family tree.

There were the usual recriminations, along with some beseeching of the heavens too, mostly from my mother, who seemed to take the news the hardest. Not unlike a kick to the solar plexus I guess. Hey, didn't you ever wonder why I never had any girl friends to speak of? When it was over and I had slinked back to LA, glad to be away from the verbal shrapnel, I regretted ever having burst their bubble. I was now a blot on the family name. I couldn't wait until the next holiday, where I was going to have to break bread with my relatives, all the while enduring their smoldering hatred.

That was what shaped my past, or so it goes. I left college and never looked back, off to pursue that Hollywood dream. Make no mistake about it, LA is for dreamers. They come from far and wide, all in pursuit of fame and fortune, which are, most times, symbiotic. You have farm girls from Iowa washing up on the street corners, bringing their fresh scrubbed faces and malleable morals, which are usually easy pickings for the sharks out there, the ones waiting to prey on the gullible, the star struck idiots. To complement the stable of nubile nymphets, you have young studs arriving daily, hoping to get a shot at their destiny. Being handsome doesn't always fit the bill though. Hollywood creates its own karma. Timing and just plain dumb luck play a part as well.

I would know. I was the lucky recipient of both; of course I will always insist that I am talented as well and would have probably made it even if things hadn't fallen into place like wayward stars aligned in the heavens. No, not really. To this very day I know people on the periphery of the business who are still struggling to make their mark and they are far more talented than me with the written word. LA is like that, one big carnival of injustice and anti-meritorious behavior. Otherwise how can you possibly explain away some of the drivel that ends up on the screen, big and little.

Hollywood could be baroque, while being similar to some Balkanized continent set adrift in a sea of desire and if that sounds like philo-poetic nonsense you have only to spend one day on Wilshire Blvd to see you are looking out through the looking glass, if you know what I mean. The rules, such as they are, exist in a vacuum, one created and designed by the power brokers, the ones who bring you your daily entertainment, from pot boiler movies, with insanely sophomoric plot lines, to contrived sit-coms on TV where the actors all seem as if they have been lobotomized. Hell, most times they even add a laugh track so the viewer doesn't even have to think about the humor content. Flabby, atrophied sense of humor aside, we, the public, are just the minions in the process.

It's true. Sure we have, (in this economic give and take), the leverage because we pay the money, which is the fuel that keeps every thing in order, but we possess no power. None to speak of. In offices all around LA you will find beady eyed cretins devising new entertainment to foist on us, usually with a small brain trust of, say, lawyers and bean counters. Even though there might be different tracts in which to deliver the goods, so to speak, representatives of the big and small screen still share one thing in common and that is: remittance.

Little screen, TV, sucks on the teat from advertising, while the big screen looks to ticket sales, either from the theaters or DVD's. The bottom line prevails, always. If your really bad picture brings in the big bucks, even if the movie makes a star of some functioning idiot in the process, you have another lease on life, good until that next film or TV show bombs. I know all about this little phenomenon first hand because one of my scripts--a tidy little project I was called in on after the original screenwriter actually tried to drown himself by jumping off the Santa Monica pier--went belly up, costing the studio a bundle along the way. Afterwards, for maybe some two years, my name was radioactive. Oh yes, Hollywood has a penchant for seeking out scapegoats. Some exec gets a hair up his butt about wanting to make a movie about circa World War II LA, casts an actor right out of rehab for the lead, one who can't even remember his lines, then wonders where it all went wrong. The box office, the final word, was not too kind.

I survived, barely, by doing any odd job that came my way, such as TV scripts from the outer limits of cable land to B movies, you know, where the actors sound like they are reading from a school primer. The paychecks were small and it was a blow to my ego but a necessary step in order to stay hooked up to the vital lines that would keep me connected.

There were a few scores along the way, thankfully, keeping me linked to the flow of business coming in and out of LA. Fortunately, for me, my rep was rehabilitated when I worked on a screen play which turned out to be a sleeper hit for a small Independent, one that grossed a boat load of bucks. The star of the project was a washed up actress who had been off of everybody's radar for a long time, so long that she had fallen down so far she wasn't even considered D-list material. If memory serves me correctly, she had taken to living in, of all places, Alabama--or was it Georgia? Didn't matter. She couldn't even get her agent to answer her calls. The plot was straight forward, where the lead takes in a runaway, a young black girl, and the two of them pass through the usual stages of discovery, ending up on the other side of things better people. Sure, it was the usual sentimental tripe but the acting turned out to be above average. Anyway, it struck a chord with the public, winning some awards at a few of those phony film festivals that every podunk town seems to have nowadays. Word of mouth did its trick and the picture went on to be nominated for an Oscar.

Didn't win, but my name was back in the mix because of the film's success. Not that I had much to do with it. I like to give credit where credit is due. The down on her luck actress did a glorious job of acting, carrying the project to the very end. She was a real pro, as they like to say. She coached the young, Afro-American actress all along the way. I guess it helped that she was indeed from the deep South originally and was able to reach back and portray the character with a lot of authenticity. The film only worked because of the inherent racial overtones and all. Not that it was all that sociologically important in the scheme of things. Yet it did bring to light the new South's growing pains, something I wrote into the script even though I haven't ever been east of the Mississippi in my life. I did do some research. Thank you Internet, from Google earth to the Wiki, I don't know how I would have pulled it off. How in the hell did the world exist before the Net?

The Motion Picture Industry does have happy endings sometimes. The lead actress took home a Golden Globe and got to fire her jackass agent, replacing him with one of the high powered kind, the ones who get their phone calls returned by all the important types in the biz. I was glad about that. When you have been in this business for any length of time it does tend to strip your soul bare, leaving behind a general all around sense of distrust and simmering rage. Humanity as it is on display in movieland isn't pretty most of the time. The deadly sins are routinely flouted, as they say.

Still, I live here, even (of late) thrive in these environs. I have a relatively (emphasis on relative) nice place in a more or less appropriate part of town, with the requisite expensive car (my one bow to my new found financial situation) and on the go life style. While we wordsmiths aren't exactly high up on the food chain, we do have our mantle in the scheme of things. Out front and center are the celebs of course, with your well known Producers and auteur Directors up on their pedestals too. Behind the public scenes are the Studio heads and the like, the real power brokers if truth be known. They pull the levers behind the curtain, allowing the empty headed Stars to live their gaudy lifestyles, perpetual fodder for the weekly mags. All of those depraved movie stars you see on the covers own their very existence to the chieftains who collect the investment moola that brings the product to life.

Fortunately for all of us who toil away in the industry, bringing more fantasy to light, the American public can't get enough of celebrity trivia, from DUI's to court ordered rehabs to who is bopping whom on any given Sunday. It is all so, you know, unbecoming for a nation to even want to hear about some idiot's wayward practices, all the while he or she is pulling down millions per annum. I am no historian but it does seem to me that never before in recorded history has a civilization been so preoccupied with a strata of society that lives high off of labor that doesn't produce anything but organized mirages. The average person's life is so devoid of meaning that they have to alleviate their sense of emptiness by escaping through cinema and TV, then chase it all with a large dose of journalistic gossip.

I use the word journalistic loosely, of course. Writing about so and so's drunken melt down, with the almost mandatory mug shot supplied, does not make for any authentic journalism, if we are being completely honest here. I have an ex who makes a six figure income from taking photos of celebrities in the act, the act being anything that shows them misbehaving, which occurs on a routine basis in Hollywood. On any given night you can find some dickhead out and about creating havoc at some club after hours. Late night LA is alive with drug and booze fueled decadence. All you need is a reasonably good SLR camera with a decent telephoto lens, a general all around lack of standards, and the ability to stay awake late at night in order to get plenty of shots most photo editors would fork over big bucks for. Like any good wildlife photographer, you have to have patience.

Paparazzi are, for the most part, vermin. They prey on their prey with heartless abandon, always willing and eager to push that shutter button like a trigger on a rifle. This cat and mouse game between the Stars and the camera toting jackals is, ultimately, good for Hollywood. In its own warped way the interplay between them feeds the beast, if you will. It allows the grubby mystique of Hollywood life to be perpetuated, continually. Little blond Starlet decides not to wear any panties out in public, who is there to record this tiny bit of human history? The photographer gets an eye full, the magazine editor gets a story, the Starlet gets more pub, and we as a civilization get entertained. It is a chain of events that, while disheartening, creates its own little economy. I'm no economist but it does seem like supply and demand have never been so...so delineated.

So that is where we are now in this new century of ours. The crossroads has been passed, so it seems. Back in the 1700's, the world feted scientists, (e.g. Herschel, Watson, Priestley, and Rutherford), people who actually were making earth shattering discoveries. Today, we lionize people who recite lines written for them and get paid obscene sums of money to do so. Things have been turned on their head for sure. Ask me if I'm proud to be a part of it and I will tell you, after some equivocating, maybe. I do work hard, in a way. I mean putting words to paper isn't exactly backbreaking labor of course but it is work. Trust me, after you have had to deal with some of the nincompoops in the biz I deserve all the recompense I can get. Truly.

Being in my early thirties, I am in my prime. At the height of my creative output I can only hang on as the inevitable decline begins. The things I have experienced would make for good TV, as they like to say. Hell, they could build one of those ridiculous reality shows around me, despite the fact that I don't live by the mantra: Show Your Ass. Who wouldn't want to watch some fussy homo dishing on the back streets of LA? Not that I'm all that flaming or anything. In fact, I am one of those reserved type of gay men, you know, where you are never really quite sure what team they are on. Might just be metrosexual, you might think.

That's not true either. You won't find me pumping it at the nearest Equinox gym, hell, you wouldn't see me even at a Snap Fitness. I don't dress like I just stepped out of a high fashion catalogue and if you saw my apartment you'd immediately think I was in the process of moving out--or in. I still have card board boxes stacked in one corner. It is safe to say also that Martha Stewart wouldn't approve of my mismatched set of dishes and silverware, some chipped and slightly broken. I am, if not anything else, utilitarian, as I fail to continue to uphold any outstanding stereotypes. Oh, I like sports too, especially those fringe ones like they have in the X-Games competitions.

As to relationships, I've had several, all ending in abrupt changes to the living arrangements. Nothing to see there. Heterosexual unions end just the same way, you know, slightly messy with some shouting along the way. We gay men can be demonstrative of course but then again, judging by the neighbor to my immediate right, the one who had the cops at his door at two in the morning to break up a pan throwing contest, couple contretemps aren't the exclusive domain of the homosexual community. It is said that we in the gay end of things have more partners, which may be true but I think it only establishes the fact that we, as a minority, have a compressed set of guidelines that facilitate our relationships faster. Not unlike comparing dial-up to broadband.

Currently, let me just say I am unencumbered and like it that way. I don't really but like to tell myself that. It is what people do as a defense mechanism of sorts. We humans desire to be connected to each other on whatever level. It is built into our mutually shared psyche. Makes perfect sense. Evolution may keep changing the order of things on some molecular level yet it can't extinguish certain traits. I'm sure my mom would disagree but then again she can't come to grips with biology being at odds with Biblical strictures. It goes without saying she hasn't accepted having a son that does things the Bible proscribes against. You are not going to win that argument, mom. Lord knows she has tried.

My little brother, the minister, has tried too, often. He still sends me brochures for this religious camp where they pray the gayness out of you. At least that's what I think they do. I think it was called reparative therapy or something. The front of the church bulletin type of thing always has several smiling men on it, all former butt fuckers, as my dad likes to call us. They have been cleansed, made whole by Jesus. Pithy to the point scripture is included too of course, making their case against the sinners who can't seem to get their orientation right. To a man, all of the former faggots on the page look like they miss that little dab of KY in their life. I mean it. Each one of them has this demonic smile plastered on their face and look for all the world as if they have suffered from some sort of cruel shock treatment. I suppose they have.

Honey, did you get the brochure your little brother sent you? my mother will invariably ask in our weekly phone call, the one where we talk about everything and nothing simultaneously. He says they have new sessions starting all the time.

This is a timeworn conversation and I have long since grown weary of it. I'm a good son though and try to humor her the best that I can by replying: Got it, mom, but I'm kind of busy working on this script right now. This accomplishes little because she is determined to save my soul at all cost. No man is going to be burned in the flames of hell for bending over on her watch, especially if it is her own son. How's dad doing? I usually throw in, hoping to switch up the conversation, divert her missionary zeal anyway I can.

She doesn't miss a beat though and brings in her ace in the hole by announcing: Did you ever know Jerry Howell? Here it comes, I think, dreading the avalanche of righteousness coming my way. He is back with his wife, you know. They are very happy.

It always seems that these confused sinners are married and have strayed from the marital bed, escaping to do some of the devil's unnatural acts. Apparently, they are men who suppressed their inner urges long enough to accept society's norms and lay down with the opposite sex, resulting invariably in marriage. It happens, a lot. There are kids in the picture too, along with a mortgage and prying in-laws to avoid. How their eventual transgressions come to light I have no idea. Did the wife open up her husband's sock drawer and find a stack of Blueboy magazines concealed under his Hugo Boss briefs? Whoops! Or was he seen exiting that disgusting gay bar down on the avenue, you know, the Cockpit? Did he come on to your next door neighbor, Jim, the ex-football player who works out religiously in the backyard with weights, grunting in time to hip hop tunes. Didn't the panicked wife ever wonder why her husband was so fond of Lifetime movies, or why her husband's clothes were always folded so neatly and why he had his butt beard waxed? Who knew?

I didn't. That was a dynamic I couldn't get my brain to even think about. Although I had concealed my gay orientation early on I could have never gone through with matrimony for heaven's sake. How did that work exactly? I knew where all the parts were of course but damn if I could imagine linking them up in any way, much less procreating in the process. Pretty damn weird, if you ask me.

Sounds like another success story, I told my mother, imagining her standing in her kitchen while we chatted, probably simultaneously perusing her recipe box contents, wondering whether or not to make that custard concoction she has been wanting to spring on my dad.

Unfortunately, for me, my mother detected my sarcasm and stated reproachfully: It works, you know!

My mother wasn't one to raise her voice all that much, mainly because she was so certain of her convictions she didn't think she had to. I called it the certitude of her rectitude, not to her face of course. I was always amazed how some people could possess such unwavering personal beliefs. Hell, I even envied them. They were unshakeable for the most part. I don't think anything I had said on the subject of my sexual orientation had ever registered with my mother. Never. She most likely thought it was the devil talking through me anyway. Somewhere along the line I had been corrupted and it was now her life mission to absolve me of my predilections.

Why don't you give it a try? What do you have to lose? she went on, using her customary line of reasoning, a form of logic that, to her, seemed full proof.

My identity, I answered, regretting it immediately because in these little give and takes over the phone I never wanted to put up any type of resistance, something to latch onto so she could quibble about my intransigence. Persistence was a virtue to my mother.

She gasped into the phone and I imagined her losing her place in the recipe box full of 3 by 5 cards. That's not your true identity, you know, she exclaimed. The Lord doesn't let his--

Mother, listen, I interrupted, going into evasive mode, I gotta run.

Bradford...

I'll call you next week. Say hello to dad and company, I stated, hurrying off the phone.

So there was an uneasy truce in my family. My older brother, the Naval Academy grad, barely tolerated me and my baggage, while my sister took time out from her busy schedule