Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 20:28:35 -0500 From: Phanny Subject: [WRITERS] SUB: CONTEST: The Green Room The Green Room Sony Pictures Studio, Culver City, California January, 1995. It starts in the parking garage, one of those wet-pleated penitentiary-textured concrete dishpiles you just know has to have a few hidden levels somewhere: that delicious primal twitch of both alarm and bewonderment. I'll take Neologisms for six hundred, please. So much wealth on wheels so suddenly after a tormented night at the Washington Avenue Travel Lodge is a ball-peen to the C3: a crimson Rolls ragtop, matching lemon Testarosa twins beside crouching surly Porsche Carreras, each vanity plated wetdream with it's own little reserved pony stall. The mounts of the overpaid, discovered (behold, Aladdin!) in the murk of a foggy LA morning. Favorites of the Talent, those faces familiar, your tele-dinner companions, The Game Show people. I wonder, not for the last time, which one is Trebek's. Maybe that gunmetal grey New Yorker. Elegant, erudite, lots of legroom. These are the first traces of the Granters of the Squealed Boon, our own Titanias and Oberons, hot leprechaun magic, all yours for the price of a few correctly answered questions. And all the while a torrent of What I Must Remember rushes sussurant under the wheels, one foot in the Green Room and one on the gas. Contestants of course must keep driving to the rooftop lot. Say hello to the incontinent seagulls, you prole. And a contestant I am, my laser-printed Jeopardy dashboard ID purchasing an entry into Sony Pictures Studios, a mammoth complex of white-sided barns where once upon a time, long before yours and mine, kids, Judy Garland traipsed with munchikins. But that was when it was MGM, in an era discontinued due to a leak in the glamour pipeline. Down on the pavement, in the morning shadows of the Inner Keep, a handful of the others shuffle, garment bags and overnighters in tow, their faces bent to cigarettes. Everyone smokes. It's that Death Row Tomorrowland kind of smoking, desultory, self-medicating, the practiced inhalation of the overeducated under pressure. Awaiting the Green Room. Awaiting selection. The guy in the three piece grey Brooks Brothers courtroom suit stubs out his Camel with a flourish then snaps another one up with a A few more before the producers come with the tram. There won't be any in the Green Room, I hear someone whisper. That grunt-in-the-bunker-before-the-charge-up-Hill 953 kind of whisper. Garland probably understood that fear, but she was chauffeured to the stage door in style, numbed up on phenobarbs. All I have are Salems and lukewarm Starbucks Cafe Americana, both of which are gone too soon. A quick headcount reveals there are thirteen of us on this day, a Wednesday in winter, and the demographics are interesting. Three women, one grandmotherly, the others of an indistinct age, bespectacled. Bank tellers perhaps. Librarians. Collectors of carnival glass. My mind is already in the Green Room, it has been for days, running through a review of possiblities - - and the identity of these people is but another catagory to face, a bit of canvas to dip in the River of Rememberances, see what develops. For some reason the faces of the men are blurred, mentally pre-smudged enemies I will have to kill to get to the money. Piled into the tram the producers are eyeing us, judging who will panic, who will freeze on the firing line. Greg, the floor producer, is the mouthpiece in a ball cap and Members Only windbreaker and kids with the survivors of Tuesday's taping as the shuttle bus rolls quietly past open soundstages toward the back of the lot. "Those plants? Shooting some interiors on Congo," he points, passing a portable jungle, bamboos and banana trees in pots spilling out of the gloom of Soundstage 12. Congo. Every remark is a trigger. Relax, Greg says, we're almost to the Green Room. Five shows a day, Tuesdays and Wednesdays every two weeks and I realize I'm sitting next to the last winner, a lawyer-philosopher from Connecticut. John. Clipped beard like Johnny Quest's dad. Affable, comfortable, brilliant. Probably married to a nymphomaniac cellist. I already hate him. The others are laughing, recounting questions from Tuesday. Bible questions. Rifling my mental filing cabinets, I realize I have no idea what they are talking about, but blurt out "Ruth", the only name I can remember. No one is listening. When the bus grinds to a halt in front of a little stairway, a postern door in the backside of Stage 18, John's lips tighten appreciably with the rictus of either triumph or dread. Dread I can understand. Grendel is in there. Time to debark. Five changes of clothes in hand (an optomistic notion, winning five times at Jeopardy is akin to defusing five nukes in five cities in five hours..possible but unlikely, and we all know it) I stumble on the last bit of Outside World before the darkness of the Real Hollywood overtakes me like a monstrous, musty swallow. Inside the Green Room there are rolls and flowers and not enough couches. Inside the Green Room a table is laden for the cognoscenti, catered for carbs, caffeine and sweetened with imported orange marmalade in disposable tubs. Inside the Green Room thirteen life forms get a pep talk from Linda, the contestant 'coordinator', one of those stabbingly beautiful women who can't act and have settled for a life in the Showbiz Auxilliary Forces, using their wits and smarts to keep the studio sausage mills grinding, grinding. "Relax, it's alright," she intones, her voice low and musical, clipboard and little techie headphone tucked in one perfect ear under a swirl of Batgirl black hair. No one is listening. She sighs and rolls her eyes, and shakes a sheaf of printouts stapled with the drivel we'd had to divulge - most interesting job, favorite food, unusual hobby, that sort of thing, stuff for Alex to hang his hat on during the interview break in the first half of the show. Names are checked. Again. Details fleshed out. Again. A slender, perfectly groomed gay man in his mid-fifties enters the Green Room unsmiling bearing a black toolbox and sets up a makeup station near one of the two bathrooms. John, being a certainty, gets his face smeared with orange foundation first, and never even flinches. What a trooper. This is a waystation place, a transient's lounge, an artifice inside a factory for Major Artifice. Built of drywall and plywood, it's no bigger than a stripmall art gallery, tucked under the risers of the studio audience. Inset from the Stage itself, escape is impossible. I take a perch on the arm of a plum club chair and gulp coffees, the only thing my stomach will handle. John, the philosopher-king, is sprawled like a Battle of Britain Spitfire pilot in a corner, a sneaky but shaky smile on his mouth for us all. Thumbs up, he gives me. I give him one back automatically. Kamarad. We who are about to die, etc. In the Green Room the walls are drearily white, with no evidence of prior occupation other than a few cheaply framed eight by tens of celebs who've played The Game. Tom Hanks. Liza Minelli. Don Rickles. No sign anyone real was ever here other than the caterers. And the wait to be told what to do is excrutiating. Bewonderment? More like the bewilderment of the newly dead at some afterlife triage camp. What was I thinking? Talk floats around about a retired cop from Philly who hit it big. A Five-Timer, hell of a guy, gave great respondez. How do these people know this? I can't remember anyone from past shows. I want to say something about the association of rituals with group acceptance but refrain. You don't talk sociology in the Green Room. Greg hits that last word hard. It's not enough to get the answers right. You have to be charming, fast and lively. Lively is good. Robotics are not. Good, just what I need, more pressure. Enid, the marmish systems analyst from Utica toys with her wedding band and looks to be near the point of tears. "This isn't what I expected," she whispers. I have to agree with her. I'd expected to be afraid, but not this much. I'd expected compression, blanking out, gallows humor. Linda is tapping her clipboard with a pen, loudly, almost in time to the Jimmy Page riffs going off in my head. Attention, class. The gibbering chapparal sorocco of Things I Should Have Studied begins to fade under the drumbeat of her tatoo. This time everyone listens. Names are about to be drawn for the first two slots of the day. Nerve is something you learn, Linda says later in the Green Room. She watches faces for a living, reads the Code of the Dancing Kneecap for bolters. We've been trundled out of the Green Room three times, to sit in the risers and watch the show being taped. Then shooed back in. The couches are deeply dented now, the bagels and pastries sodden. Once pristine dry cleaning bags hang ripped apart on a garment cart, their spilled contents testimony to a very mixed lot of tastes indeed. Who would bring heavy tweed to this? And whose yellow woolen weskit is that? Nerve came preloaded with some. After the third show, there is a break for lunch. Lunch, cigarettes, nausea pills, airline bottles of Stoly. Steven, the current winner, who has been in blitz mode since John faded on a Bible question (better him than me!) has the shakes so bad he can't cut his commisary steak. No one sits near him except me. In the Green Room, before taping began, he was a bravo in beige gabardine, but now his face is ashen, his eyes those of a beagle caught in a bear trap. I steal a pickle off his plate and toothpick an olive into it's hide. "The Order of the All Seeing Eye," I mumble, holding it up. Steven snickers then turns a warning shade of mimosa. As he bolts for the men's room I write "Nerve is something you learn" in ketchup on his plate with a french fry. Fortunately he never sees it and when I beat him, deeply, soundly, decisively, on the next show, I shake his icy hand hard after the applause dies. And go back to the Green Room to see who I have to kill next.