Sex and Violence in Hollywood Read Free

appeared to sit between his shoulders without suspension, as if he were always shrugging.
    “If you can write poetry and short stories, you can write a script,” he went on. “Just write what you know, then add the honey.”
    “Honey” was his euphemism for sex and violence. Adam had heard it all countless times before.
    Michael’s dark brown hair was long and thick and wild. It curled and waved just past his shoulders. Bushy eyebrows and a bushy beard and mustache that looked as if they had been purchased to match the bushy hair on his head. For all Adam knew, they had. There was a streak of gray in his beard on each side of his chin, both artificial. He thought the look commanded more respect than facial hair with no gray.
    The beard and long hair helped disguise the fact that his face was not only, like his head, unusually large, but perfectly round. The facial hair, however, could do nothing to camouflage the flatness of his face. It even sank in slightly in the center, giving him an ugly profile that he never knowingly allowed to be photographed. Gossip columnist Mitchell Fink had referred to him once as “the dinner-plate-faced scribe.” The tossed-off remark had so infuriated Michael Julian that both Adam and his mother had been even more careful than usual to stay out of his way for about two weeks.
    “That honey sweetens the box office receipts,” he continued. “Pays more than any Goddamned short story. Who the hell’s gonna read a short story? I don’t think anybody even publishes them anymore. But everybody goes to the movies.”
    Adam did not respond to his dad’s screenplay speech. He wished the conversation had never begun, and certainly did not want it to continue. The food was good, though. Adam seldom ate at the table when his father was around, but the food made up for the company.
    Saturday and Sunday breakfasts had been Adam’s favorite meals as a boy. His mom always cooked them. Saturdays, she would make waffles with fresh fruit and whipped cream. Sunday, eggs and bacon and fried potatoes. The indulgent breakfasts were eaten at that table, with Adam seated in the same chair he occupied now. And with his mother seated in the same place as Gwen.
    He frowned slightly as he thought about those weekend breakfasts. They had stopped abruptly when he was still a little boy, but he could not remember why.
    He looked at Gwen, sitting in his mother’s place, and felt a moment of déjà vu. It had been longer than he had thought since he had eaten at the dining room table. The last time, that spot, where Gwen sat—his mother’s spot—had been empty.
     
    * * *
     
    Mom was Emily Moessing. She had not been quite as pretty as Gwen, but much more beautiful. A bigger forehead, bigger nose, weaker chin. Long straight dishwater-blonde hair that would not curl or take on any shape no matter what she did with it. But she was not ugly or even plain. Tall, a killer smile, big brown eyes.
    Adam could not hear the massive wind chimes she had hung around the patio without thinking of her laugh. She used read to Adam at night, acted out each story, made Dr. Seuss sound like Shakespeare.
    If they met today, Adam guessed, Michael Julian would not give Emily Moessing a second look. She simply was not his type now. Of course, when Michael Julian and Emily Moessing met, Michael had not yet achieved his tremendous success.
    They met while he was writing for a few television action series and she was working in wardrobe at Paramount. Their marriage was a good luck charm at first. Somebody bought one of his screenplays, and the movie, Mayhem, did surprisingly good business. Somebody saw her sketches and made her a designer. He started selling scripts for big money. The critics laughed at and eviscerated the movies, but they were hits at the box office. Emily was in big demand, worked with the biggest directors in the business. His reviews got worse...and she got an Oscar nomination. Then another. The third time, she