This Other Eden by Ben Elton Page B

power stations. ‘This is very
important.’
    But
Rosalie wasn’t on the bridge of an illegal whaler, nor was she attempting to
interfere with a nation’s civil domestic nuclear capacity. She was in a little
pale bungalow on a back-lot in Hollywood, facing the most formidable attack
beast ever developed. The producer’s secretary.
    ‘Everybody’s
treatment is important, dear.’ Shannon’s smile never left her lips, but the
voice was honeyed steel. ‘Everybody’s idea is an idea that’s time is now. Just
place your micro-chip in the bucket provided, dear, and I’ll see that —‘
    Rosalie
lunged forward, intending to grab Shannon’s lapels and shake the information
out of her. Instead, she found herself staring down the barrel of a
stun-thrower. She had not even seen Shannon move.
    ‘You
know, dear, I can’t tell you how much I miss the days when writers went off and
killed themselves instead of trying to kill me.’
    ‘I’m
not a bloody writer,’ Rosalie shouted. ‘I’m a terrorist.’
    ‘I
never met anyone on this lot who didn’t think there was something special about
themselves, dear. Take a hike.’
    Rosalie
stumbled out of the little pale bungalow.
     
     
     
    Where
ideas go to die.
     
    In the midst of Hollywood,
the dream town, Rosalie had stumbled upon the place where there were only
nightmares. For in those quiet little buildings the desperate met the scared.
Desperate writers and scared producers. Writers, desperate to be used;
producers, scared of making the wrong decision.
    The
place where ideas went to die.
    There
are two ways for an idea to die in that sunny bungalow world; fast and slow.
Fast is easier. Fast is when it gets rejected outright. Of course, even then
the idea only dies for the studio; for the writer it will never die, but since
the writer is one of the living dead anyway, that’s irrelevant. The slow way
for an idea to die is in development. This happens when a person inside a
bungalow takes an interest in an idea. This special privilege is reserved for
very few ideas indeed. These are special ideas and for them a very special form
of torture has been devised: they will be discussed to death. Considered from
every possible angle by as many people as the producer can afford to employ until
nobody can remember what was good about the idea in the first place. Then
somebody will say: ‘I think we’ve gotten real complex here. We need to get back
to first cases,’ and slowly the idea will fade and die.
    There
is a haze which hangs over Los Angeles. Many people say it’s pollution, others
say it’s something to do with what happens when cold water meets warm air out
over the ocean. The truth is that it is the haze of a million ideas slowly
fading away.
     
     
     
    A
way-out appears.
     
    Rosalie knew she had to
get out, not merely because she had just perpetrated a violent act of terrorism
and the forces of the law were closing in on her, but also because she could
sense something strange and terrible about the place in which she had found
herself. Rosalie was born and brought up in Dublin; she was fourth-generation
hippy and had listened to poetry and song all her life. She knew when a place
had bad karma and this one had it. She was not a writer nor an actor. She had
nothing to do with the entertainment industry, but quite suddenly she knew she
was surrounded by lost souls and unhappy spirits. The ghosts of a hundred years
of unrequited artists, all of whom had died in development.
    She
began to run, sensing that if she stayed much longer she would never leave. A
strange sensation was beginning to overtake her. She felt a desire to buy the
daily trade papers, to attend improv’ classes, to talk to kindred spirits about
which heads had rolled at the majors, to drop a mention or two of a potential
meeting over at Fox… She ran, up one avenue, down another, past sound
stages, more bungalows. .
    A car
pulled up beside her.
    ‘Jump
in,’ said Max.
    Max had
followed Rosalie