Becoming the Storm
24 Rip-off
MONDAY, CLASSES STARTED AGAIN. I regretted my schedule immediately. I’d managed to compress my entire schedule into the morning so I had every afternoon free, but that made my classes almost impossible to get to on time. I failed to consider that my State and Local Government class was halfway across campus from where my science and math classes were. It wouldn’t be quite as hard to get to Telecommunications Management class, but I never wanted a class farther away. Only then there was Urban Forestry on Tuesday and Thursday and half the time it wouldn’t even be on campus. To top it off, I got home from Monday class at twelve-thirty and found indigestion instead of lunch.
Sarah met me at the door of the house and led me immediately to the studio. Jessica’s manager/agent, Conrad, was there. The Redress team had all arrived at the Ranch Sunday afternoon, but I wasn’t expecting a big meeting today. Conrad was laying into Jessica.
“You wanted to get in bed with this rinky-dink little outfit and look where it’s put you. You still have to do all the work and nothing will be shown for it. Let me get you out of this!” he shouted at her.
“What’s going on?” I asked. Jessica was sitting in a chair and looked like she’d been crying. Maggie had her head in her hands. Amy was pacing back and forth and looked furious. Hannah blasted into the studio a minute or two behind me.
“You!” Conrad exploded at me. “You don’t even know what’s going on. You’re some executive producer. I’ll bet you didn’t even watch her show last night.”
“We were rather busy last night. We set the recorder up to tape it so we could watch this afternoon,” I said as calmly as possible. It was the miracle of a video recorder. We could tape a show and watch it later. And fast-forward through all the commercials. I really enjoyed watching the program, even though it was squarely targeted to women seventeen to twenty-five. Well, so was I.
“Well, your tape is blank,” Conrad snarled. “They cancelled the show.”
“They can’t cancel the show. They have a 26-episode contract with fifteen episodes to go,” I said. I did know where my show was in the cycle. I went over the books every week with Louise.
“No. They have to pay you for 26 episodes and you have to produce 26 episodes. They don’t have to broadcast them. And as long as they have first rights, you can’t distribute them anywhere else. You’re screwed and because of your incompetence, Jessica is screwed,” Conrad said. Hannah ran into the office where we should have been having this meeting instead of in the middle of the studio. April was sitting on the stairs with Jess and Jason. There was a clatter of pans in the prep kitchen and I knew at least one person was back there.
“It seems to me that you were the one who insisted that we take the LWN offer instead of releasing it to our syndicate,” I said. “Even though it paid less than we would have gotten by selling it independently, you insisted that we needed the dependability of a major network.”
“Don’t try to pass this off on me. You’re the so-called executive who cut the deal.”
“Why have they cancelled? The ratings have been improving,” I said. “We need to get Barb and Don on the line.”
“They’re here,” Hannah said as she walked out of the office with a speaker phone on a long cord.
“Tell us what’s happening,” Barb said. We went through a brief explanation frequently interrupted by Conrad’s outbursts and threats to sue us all. Throughout it all, Jessica sat off to the side with her head hung down. Amy was trying to rub her shoulders, but Jessica shrugged her off. Eventually we got back to the question of why LWN would cancel an apparently successful show.
“Oh, very cagey,” Conrad said. “They called it policy conflicts with their family-oriented programming.”
“Family-oriented? They showed Basic Instinct last week as their movie of the week,” Maggie fumed.
“And what kind of conflicts could they have with what we’re producing?” I asked. “Everything in the program has been down-right wholesome. Jessica is an all-American girl. There’s never anything suggestive or rude in the program. That…” I broke off. It dawned on me. There could only be one thing. “When does Adam get home today?” I said.
We talked for an hour and the lawyers instructed us not to do anything until they’d gone back over the contract. When Adam came in he had his own horror story to tell. There was an article in the Hoosier Daily titled “Gays in the Locker Room.” While the article didn’t take a conservative approach and seemed to be generally supportive of campus diversity, Adam had been outed. That had to have been part of what this was all about. Since we started Redress, we presented him as Jessica’s boyfriend. So, she has a gay boyfriend. I don’t get the big deal. It had been pretty common in our clan over the past several years.
“This just gets better and better,” Conrad moaned. “They’re going to ruin her. There will be tabloid articles out Friday. You can bet on it.”
“You know, Conrad, you are so worthless on this situation, you should just leave now,” Hannah said. “I don’t know why Jessica insists on keeping you around.” Conrad stood up and took a step toward Hannah, raising his hand.
“You little cunt…”
“Conrad, there are four people a step away from you who can break you in half,” Jessica snapped. “You’re thinking of hitting one of them. Go to your hotel and I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Do the stuff you do and get me a modeling job.”
Conrad turned to snap at Jessica and saw Amy, Adam, and me a step away from him. He stormed out of the studio.
I held out my arms and Jessica flowed into them.
“Why do you stay with him?” I asked after Jessica had quit sobbing. We all sat at the table in the studio and Jessica was in my lap.
“You don’t understand. He’s really very good. He’s exactly what is needed in the modeling industry. I have to have him. He just has no concept of what a friend is or why our family is different than a talent agency,” Jessica said.
“He’s still an asshole,” Amy said. “He doesn’t treat you well.”
“He makes me $150,000 a day for modeling. That’s nothing like Christy Brinkley makes. But think about it. I work ten to thirty days a year now and make one to three million dollars,” Jessica said. “It’s all part of the act. I need him in order to keep working. It’s more complicated than you think.”
“Shit. We really are rinky-dink, aren’t we?” I said. “We’re hardly paying you anything by comparison. You get peanuts for doing this show. And you had to put up part of the costs.”
“That’s just it, though,” Jessica explained. “My modeling contracts have doubled since Redress started airing. That’s probably what has Conrad in a snit. He thinks the modeling gigs will taper off without the show to drive them.”
“That’s different. Here I thought we were using your popularity as a model to press Redress.”
“One fuels the other,” Hannah said. She was deep in thought.
“We need our team together,” I said. “Full production company meeting. April! Can you try to round up Elaine and Samantha? Jason and Jess, you might as well come down here. We need Nikki and Jennifer and Rose and Louise. Adam, you’d better get Warren here, too.”
“Do you want me to call Lonnie?” Hannah asked. I thought about that for a minute.
“Not this time. We might need to talk later. Right now, this needs to be our team,” I said.
“We should get Joyce then, too, if you are calling all our production people. And Sora,” Hannah said. She started dialing the phone. I kissed Jessica on the cheek and got her off my lap so I could go to the kitchen.
“We need coffee,” I said. “Sing out what you want to drink. Coffee? Hot chocolate? Soft drinks? Anybody else we need to call in?”
“Lamar,” Maggie said. She ran out the side door and headed to the barn duplex.
“And Sarah,” Jessica yelled after her.
I had to chuckle about that. As soon as I had things started in the kitchen, I went to the production room and dragged out the flipchart we used to storyboard shows on. I’d learned a lot in Prof. Z’s Media Management class.
“I think we need to move aggressively on this,” I said when we reviewed the brainstorming session notes that we’d tacked up. We filled five sheets. “Jen? How soon do you think we can get our story out?”
“The fastest would be on television. We could send a press release at the same time,” Jen said. “Let me call over to WIUB.”
“Call WNAP in Indy,” Maggie said. “Better to go to commercial broadcast than educational or public TV. Shelly Ames would jump at this. That’s where she went after graduation last year. They might even do it remote. We could get an audience on campus.”
“We need it released before the tabloids come out on Friday,” Jen said. “Do you have a direct phone number for her?” Maggie got the info to Jennifer. “We also need some new publicity shots. I can take them tomorrow morning if you want to wait, or if you two want to get cleaned up, we could take them yet tonight and I can have them printed tomorrow. I love the University Photo Lab.”
“Let’s do it tonight if you are willing, Adam,” Jessica said. “I’m so sorry this came down on you.”
“Oh, I figured we’d get outed eventually,” Adam said. “Neither one of us want to pretend all our lives.”
“I wasn’t pretending, Adam,” Jessica said. “I do love you. I’ve liked having a regular boyfriend.”
“That’s a good angle,” Lamar said. “Why don’t you stay boyfriend and girlfriend?”
“Well, because I’m gay and she’s a girl,” Adam said. “Doesn’t that kind of rule out that kind of relationship?”
“It hasn’t for Geoff and Robyn,” Lamar answered. “We could all see at Christmas that they love each other. You don’t even have to live together. It will just be that now you could add Warren when you are out.”
“I like that,” I said. “The more we can establish that this new shocking revelation is no big deal, the better. Especially if we can show that really nothing has changed in your relationship. You are seen together, but we’ve never made any suggestion that you were intimate.”
“I guess that’s just something that everyone assumed,” Jessica said. “The subject really never came up. I’d love to still be seen with you, Adam.”
“Let’s see if we can get a gig together for a photoshoot. Didn’t you say that Carlisle Jewelers wanted us both for something?”
“I’ll get on the phone. It will give Conrad something to do besides be an ass.”
“Maggie, can we get Jessica to Memphis to shoot a scene with her next guest? We were going to start Monday, anyway. We could film them in a grocery store actually looking at the tabloids,” Jess said. Fucking brilliant!
“It’s a little risky since we don’t know exactly what they’ll say, but the theme for that show is supposed to be about overcoming a bad reputation. It could work,” Maggie said. “I’ll call the guest and talk to her.”
“We should leak where you’ll be taping so there’s some coverage. We might even want to find that scummy little paparazzo who keeps showing up and tell him where you’ll be,” I suggested.
“He just shows up. Nobody actually knows who he is. I’ve tried to find him before. I bet he tipped off the Hoosier Daily,” Amy said.
“We could work this into an Elaine monologue and shuffle it into next week’s lineup,” Nikki said.
“We’d need to tape it tomorrow in order to make the UPS shipment on Wednesday,” Hannah said. “We can do this.”
It was obvious that we weren’t going to get a lot of sleep tonight. What a great way to start the semester.
Comments
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
