The suicide of one Rod McCloud did, but only because he’d thrown himself off a bridge onto the 405 and brought the morning traffic in both directions to a halt for an hour. McCloud had actually won an Oscar; he’d been the co-recipient (with four other producers) of the coveted little icon fourteen years earlier. There hadn’t been time for him to reach the microphone and thank his agent and Jesus Christ; the orchestra had started playing the exit music before the man in front of him had finished giving his thanks; then it was too late.
At noon, another suicide was discovered; that of a man who, unlike McCloud — who had been sixty-one — was still at the beginning of his life. Two years ago Justin Thaw had been named by Vanity Fair the Most Powerful Agent In LA Under Twenty-Five (he was twenty-two at the time), and had been groomed by the greatest of the city’s agent-deities as the inheritor of his chair, made a noose and hanged himself in his brother’s garage, leaving a suicide letter that was arranged as a series of bullet-points (in the style his ex-boss had taught him), for maximum clarity. He could no longer fight his addiction, he said; he was too tired of feeling as though he was a failure, just because he was hooked on heroin. He was sorry for all the heartless things he’d said and done to those he loved; it had been the drug doing, the drug saying: but it was he who was sorry, and he who was glad to be leaving today, because life wasn’t worth the effort anymore. He was wearing the ten thousand dollar suit he’d had made for himself in Milan, the shoes he’d purchased in Rome, and (so as not to make as much of a mess of his death as he had of his life) a pair of adult diapers.
The news of Justin’s death would spread quickly, and a few executives’ doors would be closed for a while, giving the man behind them a moment to remember the occasions they’d got high with Justin, and wonder whether it wasn’t time they asked for help from Narcotics Anonymous. Then the phones from their powerful contemporaries started to ring again, and the pressure of the day meant that meditation had to be put off for a while; they took a snort or two of coke put Justin out of their minds, and got on with the deal-making. They could think about him again at the funeral.
Speaking of which: the ashes of one Jennifer Scarscella were on a Chicago-bound plane that afternoon, headed for interment in the city of her birth. Jennifer had died nine months ago, but her body had only recently been found and identified in the LA Morgue. She had left home seven years before, without telling her parents where she was headed, though it wouldn’t have been hard for the Scarscellas to figure out that their daughter had left to try her luck in Tinseltown: all she’d ever wanted to do was be a movie star. She had been murdered by her boyfriend, because she’d refused, he said, to take a role in an X-rated movie. He was now in jail, and Jennifer was going home, having kept her ambitions high, and died for doing so.
And so the day went on, the shadows of the city lengthening as the sun began to drop from its high-point at noon.
At a little after four, there was a crisis at Warner’s, when a set under construction caught fire, gutting an entire sound stage, and badly damaging two adjacent sound stages. Nobody was killed, but there were still grim faces in the boardroom that afternoon. Insurance would cover the reconstruction of the stages, but the set had been built for the Warner’s Christmas offering Dark Justice. With an elaborate post-production schedule for the picture that required the main shoot to be over in a month’s time, things looked bad. There had been a great deal of ‘creative debate’ about the script, which had no less than fourteen writers presently attached to it. Arbitration by the Writer’s Guild would thin those numbers, but nothing would make the calculation look any better if the picture missed its Christmas release date, which it now looked likely to do. Two executives received calls from their superiors in New York, pointing out that if they hadn’t warred so much about the script the picture would have been shot by now and the agonizingly slow post-production underway. Instead they had a smoking shell of a building where the big scenes were to have been shot, starting in two days. There was a fiscal disaster in the offing, and certain people should be ready to hand in their resignations before they were embarrassed into leaving by the imminent and unflattering analysis as to why ninety pages of dialogue about a man who dressed up as a jaguar to fight the villains of some fictional metropolis could not have been agreed on earlier, when there was four and a half million dollars’ worth of writing talent on the job. The observation that ‘we’re not making fucking Citizen Kane here’ dropped from several mouths that day; more often than not from men who had never seen Kane, nor would have cared for it even if they had.