LITMIR.BIZ

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Dylan said.

      “Till tomorrow then.”

      “Yes. See you tomorrow.” Dylan had sworn to himself that he’d find out more about Gilliam’s intentions before agreeing to meet him, but his star-struckedness had gotten the better of him.

      So the next day Dylan took a trolley at noon to 69th Street and then the el downtown. He was a couple of hours early, so he wandered the city, wondering at omnipresent graffiti warning him that “Andre the Giant Has a Posse,” and ogling all the exotic city girls. Suburban girls so often put a premium on comfort, but these city girls dressed up. Even Erin was wearing sweats around him lately, and while he loved her, he was at the height of his virility and beginning to feel the tug of wanderlust.

      Come half three, he made sure he was at Xando, however it was pronounced. Gilliam showed a couple of minutes later and gave Dylan a firm handshake. “Shall we dine al fresco?”

      “Okay,” Dylan said. Now what did ‘al fresco’ mean again?

      “So, Dylan, you’ve grown up in this fair city?”

      “Near it,” Dylan said.

      An androgynous, bald barista came to take their order.

      “What’ll you drink, Dylan?” Mr. Gilliam asked. “It’s on me, of course. A cappuccino?”

“Can you do an espresso con panna?” Dylan asked the barista. This was just a fancy way of saying “espresso with whipped cream,” but having spent the past couple of summers working in the café at Borders,9 he had become a bit of a coffee snob.

      9_____________

      One of the mega-bookstores once ubiquitous throughout the United States. These temples would stand as the high-water mark of American literary culture in Dylan’s mind. No one knew back then how fragile the business model was, how Omni was about to usher in a whole new paradigm. For a heady moment there it was like the Library of Alexandria was up and running again, and everyone had a card.

      “Sure,” the barista said.

      Mr. Gilliam looked impressed. “I’ll take the same. And some s’mores, too, would be lovely.”

      “Will that be all?”

      “For now anyway.”

      The barista went away.

      “All right, Dylan, you’ve been a good sport, but you must be wondering why I brought you out here.”

      “I was sort of wondering that, now that you mention it.”

      “So let me just cut to the chase. I’d like you to audition for my next project.”

      This was precisely what Dylan had hoped Gilliam would say, but it was no less stupefying for his having anticipated it. “Wow,” he managed at length.

      “If it came down to appearance alone,” Gilliam went on, “I could tell you already that the part’s yours if you want it. You’ve got just the face I’ve seen in my dreams, handsome and angular, but tender and childlike at the same time. Looks aren’t everything, of course. Not by a long shot. I need to verify that you can act. Mind you, I’ve never done this before, scouted prospective talent like this, but since I spotted you on the set yesterday, my gut’s been telling me not to let you get away.”

      Holy crap! Was life really going to be this easy? Was high school really such a reliable predictor of future success? Was he really handsome and angular and tender and childlike?

      “I don’t know what to say,” Dylan said. “May I ask what the project is?”

      “You’ve seen E.T.?”

      “About a million times. It was one of my favorite movies as a kid.”

      “Good. Well this is the sequel. E.T. II: Nocturnal Fears. The idea has been kicking around Hollywood for years. There’ve been countless scripts. Spielberg himself wrote the first treatment and then abandoned it, said a sequel would rob the original of its virginity, which immediately struck me as a worthwhile undertaking. When I asked if he’d mind my adopting the project, he said, ‘Be my guest, just make sure my name’s nowhere on it.’ Naturally I went right to Henry Thomas, who played Elliott in the first film, but he read the script and declined, said pretty much what Spielberg had been saying, that it did violence to the spirit of the original, which is of course the point.”

      “May I ask how this one’s so different?”

      “I dare say you just did. Nocturnal Fears strikes a very different tone from the first E.T. Much darker. It begins the same way, with a spaceship landing in the forest and a silhouetted alien waddling down a ramp, but this alien, it turns out, is no angelic vegetarian like ET. No, this one is Korel, the leader of a race of red-eyed, albino carnivores from the same planet as ET. They intercepted ET’s distress signals when he was phoning home from his umbrella communicator in the first film, and they have come to capture and possibly eat him. ET’s name, by the way, turns out to be Zrek.”

      “Who knew?” Dylan said.

      “Right. So these evil guys end up trapping Elliott, who’s an adolescent now, in a cage aboard their mothership, and they interrogate him about Zrek’s whereabouts. They don’t speak English, so a good deal of the second act is told through the impromptu drawings they pass back and forth. It makes for some pretty bold cinema, if I may say so myself. Ultimately the albinos resort to out-and-out torture and things get quite brutish before Korel’s wife, Korelu, shows mercy on Elliott. She doesn’t have the wherewithal to set him free, but she mocks Korel through her drawings and she and Elliott laugh together. Before you know it they can be seen, in silhouette, making love through the beams of his light cage.”

      “Elliott loses his virginity to an alien?”

      “Quite right. But wouldn’t you know that in the very height of their passion, who walks in but Korel himself! His eyes glow blood-red and his wife shouts all kinds of protests in their strange, chordal language. Korel, meanwhile, rips some razor-sharp teeth out of the mouth of this winged shark thing in one of the other cages—a specimen from another planet, presumably—then he unlocks Elliott’s light cage with his mind and, using an excretion from the base of his spine, proceeds to glue the teeth to Elliott’s penis. Mind you, none of this is shown directly so much as it is implied—we want the R rating after all. Korel then instructs Elliott, via a drawing, to pick up where he left off with Korelu. Elliott refuses. Korel rips out another tooth, holds it to his wife’s neck, points to the drawing again, and utters his first phrase of English: ‘Fuck you.’ Elliott begins to cry.”

      The barista put down their drinks and s’mores. They thanked the barista.

      “Well?” Dylan said.

      “Well what?”

      “What happens next?”

      “Excellent. Act three: Zrek, of course, re-arrives from space to kick albino ass and save the day. Zrek turns out to be highly skilled in the celestial martial arts. Certain critics are going to say that I cheated by taking the climax out of the protagonist’s hands and handing it over to Zrek, making him in effect a deus ex machina, so in order to at least acknowledge that I’ve done so consciously, I have Zrek land in a different part of the country, the planet’s having rotated and whatnot, and commandeer a Ferrari Testarosa. Machina, you know, is the Italian word for car, so what you get in effect is a clever pun for the intellectual set. Meanwhile, it also makes for some comic relief and thrilling action sequences.”

      “How does it end?”

      “Okay, so just as we recapitulated the beginning of the first film, we do so again with the ending. Korelu gives birth to a boy. Looks-wise he’s exactly intermediary between her and Elliott. Elliott’s mother has a talk with Elliott about how her little boy has really grown up and how he needs to step up and assume responsibility. This is clearly a very personal issue for her, her own husband

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