The Making of Zombie Wars (2 page)

“This is all based on a true story, gentlemen. Hollywood big shots lined up all the way to the Hills to have a diet soda with me, but I wasn't gonna let them fuck me! No, sir!” Graham flashed his middle finger to the erstwhile line of big shots. “Feel free to fuck yourselves, you bunch of Weinsteins!”

Graham rocked back and forth, Hasid-like, as he ranted, his bald crown reddening patchily like a lava lamp. Bega seemed to enjoy the rant, as he abandoned the Bic mastication for a hearty laugh. Meanwhile, Joshua rolled out of the beanbag to stand up, grimacing in the pain overriding Graham's anti-Semitic insinuations.

“Point is,” Graham continued, “you're willing to learn, and that's undoubtedly fucking great. So, Dillon, to be perfectly and productively honest, that's far from the smartest idea I've ever heard. But we're gonna work on it all day long and we're gonna make it good.”

Dillon wrote something down, then turned the page to write some more. Joshua finally pulled down his pants to release his balls, in the process of which his navel-eye blinked at everyone from a tuft of hair.

“What in hell are you doing?” Graham asked.

“Inadvertent self-wedgie,” Joshua explained.

Graham clapped his hands, startling Dillon. “Do you hear that, Dillon? Inadvertent self-wedgie! Write that down! That's what you want your characters to say, not some anodyne bullshit about corporate greed.”

The pleasure of untwisting his balls was compounded by Graham's praise, so Joshua felt entitled to make Dillon scoot over so he could sit down on the futon. He examined the night outside: the sparkle of the ball game all over Wrigleyville; the lit El train struggling along the Sheridan curve; the Lake Shore skyscrapers on the horizon; the endless darkness beyond. Bega shook his hair over the desk, as if trying to get something out of it. Could it be lice?

Joshua had been in Screenwriting I with Bega; they'd never talked much beyond exchanging remarks on their inchoate scripts. Bega would always project mean superiority while mocking the inane plots in the pages of other workshoppers. His plots would not be much better, but he'd protect himself by withholding their resolutions, claiming he wanted to keep the workshoppers involved.

“Is there such a thing as an advertent self-wedgie?” Dillon asked.

“There are all kinds of wedgies. Let a thousand flowers bloom,” Graham said. “What happens next?”

Dillon consulted his notebook. There was no writing in its pages, Joshua noticed, only doodled arabesques.

“They're like in the desert,” Dillon said, “and there are like all these things. He like stops by the fear booth and these like guys ask him what his fears are and he says, it's like sharks and waves, and these like guys come out dressed as his worst fears and like follow him around. And then he takes 'shrooms with the goth girl, and they go on the most fantastic trip of their like life, and then he decides not to go on to LA for the job and like live with the goth girl in the desert community.”

Graham watched him intently, conceptualizing the fear booth and the guys dressed as sharks and waves. “That's gonna cost a lot of money,” he said.

Evidently, money had never crossed Dillon's mind—he wrote
money
in an empty space left between the arabesques, then underlined it twice.

“Fact: you need no money to write a script, but you need oodles to make a movie. Fact: you will have to beg for money, part of the job.” Graham began rocking again. “And the Weinsteins will unleash their twenty-two-year-old dipshit suckerfish to skim your life's work in one lazy afternoon. Then they'll throw at you the piddly coin they spend monthly on their chest depilation and expect you to work with that. You need to know you're nothing to them! You're a zero! Absolute fucking nothing! Zero!”

Bega laughed again—Graham's hatred of the Weinsteins seemed to amuse him to no end. Joshua's chest constricted with a gasp of guilt—he should counter the slight, but couldn't. Dillon blinked in what must have been panic at the blotches floating across the expanses of Graham's cranium. He then returned to the safety of doodling: at phenomenal speed he was now turning spirals into tornadoes, which in the upper half of the page biblically connected with darkness. On the opposite, tornado-free page, there was a scene featuring stick people with speech bubbles over their
O
-heads, one of them grasping an oval surfboard with his stick hand.
Zombie Wars
, Joshua thought. Where do we go from nowhere?

“The good news is that if you could get a hunky male star to be the surfer dude you might be able to find some dough,” Graham said, having steadied himself. “Maybe that, what's his name, Hartnett?”

“I think you should make this dude more of real person,” Bega said. It was surprising to hear him talk—he'd been laughing on the fringes all night. “He should be normal, little bit of philosopher, maybe loser. Like Josh here.”

In Screenwriting I, Bega had wittily and deservedly, Joshua thought, picked on a Peruvian whose drafts had featured Inca gods fighting sea monsters. This time Joshua said: “Me? How did I come into this?”

From a distance, they all examined Joshua, the survivor of an inadvertent self-wedgie: the body of a lightweight wrestler who'd quit wrestling after middle school; the droopy eyes that, in a more flattering light, could appear contemplatively sorrowful; the slight overbite that often made him look unduly perplexed.

“To be perfectly honest, finding hunkiness in Joshua is a challenge,” Graham said. “I'm just kidding.”

Dillon laughed, relieved that Graham was off his back, and embarked upon drawing houses with smoke-spewing chimneys. Crematoria? Was it a subliminal—or, fuck it, liminal—way for Dillon to align himself with Graham's latent anti-Semitism? Even before the crematoria tableau, Joshua firmly believed that Dillon's chubbiness was born of devotion to obscure nineties bands, which required a uniform: flannel shirt, Costello glasses, expensive trucker hat. And who comes from LA to take screenwriting workshops in Chicago? He probably came here to
like live
for free with his grandmother. Mrs. Alzheimer, n
é
e Loaded.

“Now that he brought your ass up, Josh,” Graham says, “whaddya got? Fresh, stunning work? A roller-coaster ride of violence and sex?”

Bega leaned forward to hear Joshua, his eyebrows' grays now shimmering under the desk light.

“I don't think I have pages. But I do think I have a new idea,” Joshua said. “The working title is
Zombie Wars
.”

“What happened to DJ Spinoza?” Graham asked.

“I need to figure some things out. I can't hear the music yet.”

“And what about your teacher superhero?”

“He can wait his turn,” Joshua said. “The world is full of superheroes.”

“Sure it is,” Graham said, “as it's just about to run out of zombies.”

Dillon snickered. Joshua imagined smacking him with the back of his hand. That boy could be a tasty snack for a zombie. Bega nodded, as though approving of Joshua's vision.

“Okay,” Graham said, with exaggerated patience, “let's pretend you don't change your mind every week. Let's pretend we don't give a flying fuck. Okay. What matters is how good in the room you are. So: pitch me the damn thing! I'm your fat Weinstein. Make me fall in love with you and your story! Sell me
Zombie Wars
! I got what you need! I got no brains, but I got oodles of money!”

Joshua inhaled. He imagined a fat Weinstein behind an intimidating desk, glowering at him; he also considered getting up and leaving, never to see Graham or endure his knee-jerk bigotry, never to write another line of dialogue. There was a solid case to be made for a screenwriting career entirely organized around avoiding the Weinsteins as well as for a life arranged around the absence of hope and ambition. But Bega was looking at Joshua as though burning to hear what he had to say, and Joshua exhaled. Anything whatever can be the accidental cause of hope or fear.

“Okay. Okay: The American government has a secret program to turn immigrants into slaves,” he improvised. “The government creates a virus to turn them into zombies who work in factories, chained to the production line.”

Now they all watched him with apparent interest. Dillon stopped doodling; the blotches on Graham's forehead merged into a solid vermilion field; Bega nodded at Joshua again, approving of the immigrant aspect. It was difficult to make stuff up in the limelight of their attention, but he'd leapt up and now had no choice but to fall.

“Things go wrong,” Joshua said. “Things go terribly wrong.”

“They would,” Graham said.

“And virus spreads?” Bega asked. “Not just immigrants are infected?”

“Yeah,” Joshua said. “The virus definitely spreads. Anybody can get infected.”

“Who's gonna stay alive?” Graham asked. “Any ladies?”

“Not sure,” Joshua said. “Probably. Some will pop up as I work on it.”

“The virus spreads, then what?” Dillon asked.

“Well,” Joshua said, slowly, to bide his time. “Well, the government sends out the military. To wipe them all out. The army guys just shoot them in the head and blow them up and have fun. It would be a bloodbath, if zombies actually bled. But there are so many undead immigrants that soldiers turn into zombies too, and they start killing everybody, not just foreigners. Things get crazy, killers and zombies everywhere, chaos, no one to trust, nowhere to go. It's a nightmare.”

It all just came out, without effort or thinking. It felt like lying, only better, because he couldn't be caught, and he couldn't be caught because there was nothing to verify it against. Immersed in the flow of bullshit, they had no reason, or time, not to believe him.

“But there is an army doctor, Major Klopstock, who believes he can beat the virus. Major Klopstock works on a vaccine—”

“Wait a minute,” Graham said. “What kind of a name is that? Major Klopstock? Are you kidding me? Might as well call him Major Crapshit.”

“I actually like Klopstock,” Joshua said. “Klopstock could be a main hero. Why not?”

“Do you really think Bruce Willis would agree to be named Klopstock? You could never pay him enough for that. Think of something else.”

This was a chance for Joshua to confront Graham and defend Major Klopstock's implied Jewishness. On the other hand, the character was not quite alive yet, nor was Joshua married to the name; and strictly speaking, Graham hadn't actually mentioned his Jewishness. This was neither the time nor the place.

“Okay: Major Something Else gives the vaccine to himself,” Joshua went on. “At first we don't know if he'll make it or become a kind of zombie himself.”

“And then what?” Dillon asked.

“And then struggle ensues,” Joshua said. “That's what the story is about. The major's struggle.”

“Struggle is good. Outside the name issue, it's a start,” Graham said. “Maybe the army can also fight some, like, terrorist zombies, blowing themselves up like crazy. It's a good time to be thinking about all that, given that we're just about to tear a new hole in the ass of Iraq.”

“I didn't actually think of that,” Joshua said.

“It could be fun, believe me. We unleash the zombie army at the camelfuckers and then it all flies off the handle and our undead boys come back to feed on our flesh. I think that's pretty fucking good. Don't you think it's good? Let me pat myself on the back!”

Graham patted himself on the back.

“I don't know,” Joshua said. “I don't want it to be too political.”

“Why not?” Bega offered. “Look at situation now. Muslim enemies everywhere, every movie, everything on television, everybody happy to invade. Everything is political. Everybody is political.”

“Hey, they took our towers down,” Graham said. “Revenge is a dish best served with carpet bombing.”

“Saddam had nothing to do with towers,” Bega said. “No connection.”

“People say we did it ourselves,” Dillon said, “so that we could like attack Iraq and take their like oil.”

The red patch flared up on Graham's forehead, but then he chose to say nothing and the blotch disintegrated.

“I'd love to bullshit for a living, my friends,” he said instead, “but right now you're paying me oodles to help you with your screenwriting. You got ten minutes, Vega, if you want to talk about your stuff.”

“I'm just saying,” Dillon said.

“
Bega
,” Bega said. “I am Bega. As I was before.”

“Whatever.
Vega
.
Bega
. You can call yourself Klopstock for all I care. Let a thousand flowers bloom,” Graham said. “Whaddya got? Pages?”

“No pages. Pages I have when I know everything.”

Bega rubbed his face vigorously with both hands and then scratched his skull, ruffling his hair, possibly releasing some lice. He grinned as if experiencing a spasm. Something was always happening on his face, some flow of tricky mental states ever visible.

“It's basically love story,” Bega said. “Man is from Sarajevo. He was happy there. He was young, he had rock group, had women. War came. He is refugee now. He goes to Germany. They are Nazis there. He works like security in disco, plays his guitar only for his soul. He drinks, remembers Sarajevo, writes blues songs. Comes 1997, Nazis throw him out. He goes back to Sarajevo, but nothing is same. Heartbreak.”

“Yeah, yeah … We heard that the last time. Got something beyond that?”

“Can I smoke?” Bega asked.

“Can you smoke? Can you
smoke
? Hell no!” Graham said. “With all due respect.”

“Okay,” Bega said, licking his lips. “Man has no more friends in Sarajevo. Half of his group is dead, other half everywhere. Women have husbands. Everybody talks about the war all the time. He says, Fuck it! and goes to America—country of Dylan and Nirvana and best basketball. But he lost his soul. And American women are all feminists—”