“Tom?”
“Yes, Missy?”
“Frank Toccin is here for his nine o’clock.”
“Good. Send him in.” He opens a folder on his desk and stands. “Frank! Good to see you, man!”
“Mr. Sinclair. Thanks for seeing me.”
“No worries, Frank. Thanks for working with our schedule. You gotta know things are just BLOWING UP around here these days, but I wanted to make sure we saw you ASAFP. Please, have a seat. Coffee? We know how you like it. No? Okay. Let’s get to it. You seen eager to put everything behind you.”
“No kidding. That last news cycle was…”
“Okay. So. Here’s our record of your account. Pre-revelation ‘Q-score’ was strong – strongest in four quarters, in fact. No doubt that was because of the B.O. on last summer’s third biggest hit and the buzz for ‘Allen’s Gaunlet’ for the OSCARs this year. Your foundation had 82% of the Elite Artists Agency in attendance and you took in an impressive four humanitarian awards in 2017. Well done.”
“Thank you, Mr. Sinclair, I like to think…”
“And so, you hit a wall with the allegations of this Murder Club of yours. That’s a bit of a puzzler.”
“(sigh) Yeah. It was a long…”
“Save it for your lawyers, Frankie-angel. Let’s see here. So as of this morning, your Q-Score dropped sixty-two percent, which isn’t bad for a director in a scandal. No one gives a fuck about a director unless they’re picking up hardware or fucking a dog on live TV. Gareth Powell did that and we handled that case, by the way. So, chin up, Frankie. New day and all that. You had three humanitarian awards revoked and I would be perfectly ERECT to see the volume of news coverage parroting your name across the world. You were the punch line of every late-night comedy host in the market. TMZ has already hinted at four other claims of murder-death-kill by ex-participants and we know there’s money heading that way to secure video statements. The police are cooperating in the usual fashion – that is, waiting for us to tell them what to do.”
“Pardon me, Mr. Sinclair…what are you gonna do? I’m quite anxious to know. Sir.”
“Frankie. Let’s speak real to one another, okay? Your global box office from 1993 to 1997 was the biggest we’d ever seen from an independent producer-director. It was astonishing and opened up a whole new revenue stream for mainstream companies to pretend to be like you – reckless indies without a care for BO. It put us in those little shitty festivals you’re now dominating. Plus, it was the 1990s when people didn’t care – morally, I mean – about important people abusing positions of power. Fuck, Bill Clinton’s little weed and BJ parties in the Oval Office should have been the biggest thing to blow up ever, but not even the Starr investigation would defy us when we told them to shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down. You were on FIRE then, my brother. $2.7 BILLION. BILL-yun in B.O. over that period. You had skin in toys, laundry care, and dildos – THAT’S how broad a market you brought us in those days. So when you decided to start your little sex camp in Indonesia, we covered it up for you.”
“And I still thank you for…”
“When you started dating that 14-year-old girl you called a ‘soul mate’ in Phuket, we helped you adjust your world view and come back to us. We helped you, didn’t we, Frankie?”
“Yeah. Yeah, Mr. Sinclair. You did.”
“Your personal worth is just shy of a billion dollars based on three golden hits, a summer film franchise, two holiday film franchises, thirteen industry awards, and you even stared earning honorary degrees! Kudos, man…though for how long, we’ll see. You still have respectable merchandising and buzz. Cameras still follow you around. We really turned you from another abusive, perverted white man of privilege into a good, yet cryptic man with an edge…a man of mystery and singular vision, but with a heart of gold. That was the whole point of our 2001 PowerPoint presentation on your re-invention. You cried at that meeting, I remember.”
“Yeah. And I really hope you can help me again.”
“Frankie. It is one thing to pay off a bunch of poor Indonesian kids and women. We disappeared everyone else we had to. We put your childhood friend – wasshisname -…”
“Billy Peterson.”
“- Billy-fucking-Peterson in jail as the mastermind and practically made you the hero of that story. We did good work. And what did we get out of it?”
“I think you…”
“Creative bullshit, Frankie. I mean, you made some of the most memorable films of the ’90s and took home a few dozen more awards in the oughts, but none of their B.O. would crack a cold February Top 10 if Uwe Boll and Kevin Smith were the big releases. I mean, you went Terry Malic to the extreme.”
“Not fair, Mr. Sinclair. I kept on the major franchises. My boxofficemojo cumulative gross is nearly $4 billion.”
“As a legacy producer. You and Stan Lee can share war stories at ComiCon over that shit. What did you build and produce new since ’97? Nada. You make kinky rom-coms that aren’t funny so you call them ‘art films.’ You get asked on ‘The View’ to talk about feelings to women who now want to cut off your dick and feed it to pigs. You come to me, after going all Woody Allen with your bullshit knowing full well that being my $3 million-a-year critical darling does not cover the same kind of criminal bullshit that $3 billion box office bitch made almost a protection of one’s investment.”
“I, um, see.”
“(sigh) But you’re our boy, Frankie. We got a history. Tell me what you did.”
“Well. What the media is saying isn’t true…”
“The media reports what sells, and I don’t give a fuck what they say. I can change that. Remember how we, like, own all the prime-time entertainment shows and most of the major “gotcha” web sites? We let TMZ exist at our leisure. So, shut the fuck up about the media and tell me the truth. And remember, I probably know more than you do.”
“I started an actor’s forum for young men and women in Los Angeles. It was to focus on future action stars.”
“Frankie?”
“Y-yes.”
“Do another take and this time, don’t fucking bullshit me. I’ve got a 14-year-old Disney child star-turned-serial-rapist waiting to talk to me.”
“o-Okay. My ex-wife and I started a swinger’s club in the L.A. underground. We started it in 2002 as a casual gathering – kind of a hedonist club.”
“A ‘hedonist club’?”
“Yeah. There was staged BDSM events and open scenes, but it was all above board, I swear. We even had this awesome nightclub – you know it, you were there a few times! About, um, 2010 or so, some of us broke off into this private concern where we just were a little more…rambunctious with our submissive members. Eventually, though, you can’t find people willing to be THAT submissive, even in LA, so we started inviting people in and… paid them to bleed. Eventually, we started a sort of street clean-up program designed to clear the homeless from the city. We just thought we would, you know, give back. One of our founding members owns a few scrap yards and a quarry so we were able to free the city of about…oh I don’t know…a hundred people each year? We’d all get together, drink some wine and treat these people with the utmost respect. I swear, they ate better that night than probably their whole lives. We brought in hookers and got them feeling good, man, and, wow. They felt like kings and queens. Even when we started stringing them up and gutting them, some of them thanked us. Some of us started bringing home personal tributes…”
“‘Tributes’?”
“That’s what they were. It went both ways. They thought it was tribute to them, but we knew they were, uhm, not.”
“How so, Frankie?”
“We both know these people out there. They fuckin’ scream their heads off over people we work with, right? We know those people. We’ve watched them eat sloppy joes in a cafeteria. We walk in after they take sloppy shits, right? They’re just people but those fucking idiots think we’re the new modern GODS, right? So, when we’ve spent a say cleaning up and treating these dumb fuckers to the best day of their lives, we let them think we’re there for them, not the other way-round.”
“I see where you’re going and know where you’re landing, Frankie. Go on.”
“After a while, some of us created special basement rooms where we just bring home this weak-minded underpass trash and give their shitty lives meaning for an hour before we released them from their lives.”
“Did the larger group know about these private concerns?”
“In general, but after a while, the larger group was more a drag. When you can bring home a fan or one of those hot little starlets with no self-esteem, you can just do whatever you want. Sometimes, it isn’t even about killing them. It can be about altering their minds so they go home to Buttfuck, Utah and join a church choir or some shit.”
“I see.”
“It’s just what we’ve been doing here, right? I mean, they’re just people and we’re the god-damned business. How many decades have we just fucked or fucked over whoever we want because the end of the process is a billion-dollar project? Do you know how many business relationships I built from those Tribute events? I brought in Travis Wurther to take over the Star Dust franchise. I secured an international distribution network for films that usually go nowhere after South by Southwest. I opened doors for this industry in those events, Mr. Sinclair. They profited Hollywood. The fucking Hollywood Press went nuts over all that stuff. We brought ‘culture back to Hollywood’ they said.”
“Because that’s what we fucking told them to say, Frank.”
“What?”
“(sigh) I mean, I can’t imagine what it’s like to have your dick inside a man while you’re crushing his skull, but I do know how I might spin that for the man I knew back in the 1990s. You? Frank, in Hollywood, you’re the drunk uncle sleeping on my couch. You bring a little bit of light and laughter to the visit, but you’re asking more than you contribute to the industry.”
“What are you saying, Mr. Sinclair?”
“I’m saying, Frankie, that with every other scandal in mitigation right now, yours is not one we can make go away. Not entirely. You made deals with other quasi-powerful parties and we have to handle them, too. They will fall just as you will. How far THEY fall will be based on how much we need them. You had two actors in your little club – the A-Listers who won their OSCARs their first year out for their screenplay – THEY have to live on because they are tied to multi-BILLION-dollar projects. We’re gonna protect them, Frankie, just like we protected you in Indonesia.”
“And how are you gonna protect me?”
“Don’t worry. We’re not going to Billy Peterson you. We know you’re weak and have too many secrets.”
“But?”
“Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, E! News Now…the big ones, are going to run a story tomorrow night that will be the result of a six-month internal investigation. It’s really just a narrative I had three interns write up this morning at Starbucks. Want to hear it?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Once upon a time there was a murder cult in Los Angeles run by a German financier named Travis Wurther. He may have had ties to the Russians, we don’t know. Anyway…’award-winning director Franklin Toccin was implicated as a member of Wurther’s murder cult where a dozen Los Angelinos were abducted, drugged and murdered over 8 years in secret cult rituals. Upon learning of this revelation, Toccin’s ex-wife, Dorothy, apparently committed suicide and Toccin, himself…remains at large. Toccin, who was once implicated in a 1990s sex cult, is thought to be at-large in that region of the world. Interpol has re-opened the investigation into the cult upon receiving new evidence that Toccin and Wurther were both in league to create that cult long before the L.A. murders took place.’”
“What?”
“Actors Shane DeMost and Bannon Arnsten, close associates of Toccin -and OSCAR winning writers of their smash debut film ‘Happy Bill Benton’ recorded their shock and disgust at the evidence. Several witnesses and accomplices are coming forward and who knows what they will say.”
“…”
“You sure got a tight grip on those chair arms, Frankie. Look, this has never been about being moral or personal or just. This is about US…the business. You thought you were invincible. I get it. But, it’s really about us. You, my friend, are our tribute. I’m giving you passage to Indonesia. If you survive the trip, I suggest staying low. I hear Wurther’s Q-Scores were a little higher and his meeting with me is about an hour from now. Good day, sir.”
