THE SECRET HISTORY OF XANADU

    Hollywood changes people, but those changes don’t usually involve tentacles. In 1978, I went to Tinseltown with stars in my eyes and dreams of writing the Great American Movie. Instead I got a funny piece of rock.
    I always knew Hollywood was strictly an access town, but I didn’t really appreciate that until I tried to get a job there. I thought quality of work would open doors, but by the time I learned quality didn’t matter I was down to my last dollar.
    It seemed like a gift from God when I got my first job. I should have wondered which god.
    Dagon/Hydra Productions wasn’t big enough for Hollywood, in every sense. It occupied a run-down office building in east central L.A. that always smelled like a fishmonger had used it last. The plumbing leaked, and the acoustic tiles overhead showed brown stains that grew day by day. Mr. Orne and Mr. Marsh were queer old birds, flabby-mouthed and goggle-eyed, with web-fingered hands. They were cheap, too, but a job was a job.
    What Dagon/Hydra was doing, said Mr. Marsh, was staging a revival. He was big on that word, “revival”. They wanted to make a 40s-style musical using 70s-style music. “Something with class!” he said again and again, waving his webby hands. “Something people old and young will notice. Something that will change them, make them feel good about the Great Old Ones. Times. Great Old Times.”
    Mr. Marsh placed a dog-eared manuscript in my hands. “Here. Turn this into a script.” What he gave me was a three-chapter novella called R’lyeh, with loose pages of verse stuffed in — the songs. I was to skip the treatment and crank out the screenplay. They insisted I be careful with the originals. Their attitude toward the novella and the song sheets was almost reverential, as though there was something sacred about them. They referred to them as “the Thurston manuscript” and “The Zann score”, reminding me of my friends in theatre who always referred to “Macbeth” as “the Scottish play”.
    I got to it. The office was a lousy place to work, but I couldn’t work from my apartment because they wanted me to use their computer, an expensive Apple II bought just for the project. Took some getting used to, but fixing mistakes was easier than on my typewriter. What really took getting used to was that story. R’lyeh was a bizarre supernatural romance between an artist in a dead-end job and a muse from the sea that unleashes the artist’s inner creativity by granting him incredible visions. The story was kind of disturbing, and the songs bore vaguely threatening lyrics and every possible rhyme for “tentacle”. One song goes “I’m never gonna set you free/because I was born to love you for eternity”. Still makes me shudder.
    The story ended with the girl, K’rrha, luring young Gus Johanson into the sea with her siren song. That song, a kind of hymn to K’rrha’s father, had the weirdest lines of all. What the heck did Zann mean by “In his house at R’lyeh/dead Ct’hul’hu waits dreaming”? I have to admit, though, the songs were catchy. I found myself unable to forget the melody that went with the lines “That is not dead which can eternal lie/and with strange aeons even death may die.” Damn near drove me crazy.
    I used as much of the original story — “the Thurston Manuscript” — as I could, but there were too many holes for a perfect translation from prose to script. To bridge the gap between the 1940s and the 1970s I invented a friend for Gus, Danny McGuire, an old nightclub owner who had known K’rrha from the 1940s, but who’d been too attached to his life on land to join her in the sea. I had them team up to open a new nightclub called the Temple of Great Ct’hul’hu. Marsh and Orne liked my addition so much they actually gave me a bonus. “You understand what we want,” Mr. Orne said when he gave me the check. “People like you are so hard to find among the...what do we call the land-dwellers?” he asked Mr. Marsh.
“Prey,” said Marsh.
    Orne shushed him and hurried him out of the closet I used for my office. In less than a minute he was back. “By the way, you should go see that new movie, Grease. We’re going to try to get the girl, Olivia Newton-John, to play K’rrha and John Travola for Gus.”
    “Sounds good,” I said. “What about Danny McGuire?”
    “Ah. For him we want a great old one: Gene Kelly.”
    I gasped. Frankly, I didn’t think the lines I’d written for McGuire were worthy of the man from Brigadoon and Singing in the Rain. At home, all night long, rather than pat myself on the back for the fat bonus, I fretted about how to fix the script.
    I showed up a couple of hours early for work the next day, just in time to see a man in a shabby suit crouching at the front door, picking the lock. He heard my shoes scuff the sidewalk as I came to a stop. He spun round with a shout and thrust a rock in my face. The rock bore a weird symbol like a swastika. I jumped back.
    “Ha!” he shouted, and thrust the rock towards me again. He held it like Peter Cushing’s van Helsing wielding a cross against Dracula.
    “Um...can I help you?” I asked.
    His dark eyes lost their fire. His mouth, no longer open in a triumphant cry, shrank to a narrow gash on a stubble-darkened face. He shrank within his suit, which I realized was a much-abused Armani. He looked like a studio VP who’d been living homeless for a year. His eyes rested on the rock in his hand. “This doesn’t frighten you?” he asked like a disappointed child.
    “Sorry, no. Who the hell are you?”
    He straightened up and stuffed the rock into his pocket. “Name’s Legrasse,” he said, holding out his hand. When I didn’t shake it, he let it fall to his side like a dead thing. “If you work here, you’re in trouble.”
    “I’m in trouble? Which of us was just caught breaking and entering?”
    “I neither broke nor entered, friend. But I have to warn you. If you’re working for Marsh and Orne, your very soul is in danger.”
    I shrugged. “I’m in the movie business. Of course my soul’s in danger.”
    “You don’t know how your bosses spend their nights,” he said, hunching his shoulders up to his ears. He pulled the stone out of his pocket again and held it out for me. “Take it.”
    I took it. Yeah, the design was kinda like a swastika, if it had been drawn by a drunken Nazi. Looking closely at it I couldn’t be sure if it was a swastika, a pentagram, or an eye. “What’s this?”
    “It will protect you. Go to the Pan Pacific Auditorium. See what your masters are doing!”
    “I got work to do.”
    “You have to see with your own eyes!” he cried. “You wouldn’t believe me if I just told you.”
    “Try me.”
    Legrasse drew himself up to his full height. The flame in his eyes returned. “They have turned that abandoned edifice into a temple to Great Ct’hul’hu, and are even now sacrificing the homeless and the hopeless to inhuman gods!”
    “My God! You were right. I don’t believe you.”
    In the end I had to call the cops to get him to go away. I got into the office and started on my changes. I reached the scene where McGuire talks about his old club when I realized something disturbing. Ct’hul’hu was the name of K’rrha’s father, deep under the sea. How had Legrasse known?
    Ah. Of course. He looked like a former studio exec; he probably had been. No doubt he’d read the original story himself. All that crap about human sacrifice was just cover for his blatant attempt to break into the office and steal my script. I went back to work, determined to make the script worth stealing.
    Marsh and Orne showed up an hour later, plainly surprised to see me. Orne carried a strange statuette in his webbed hands — a crouching, bat-winged figure with a face full of tentacles.
    “What are you doing here?” demanded Marsh.
    “I’m punching up the script. I want to be sure it’s as good as it can be.”
    “You’ve seen the statue,” he said, reaching out for me. His hands dripped with red fluid.
    “You’ve got something on your hands.” I fumbled for my handkerchief and pulled it out, along with Legrasse’s rock.
    Marsh recoiled, disappearing into the hallway. Mr. Orne looked at the rock in my hand like it was an infant’s severed head.
    “You wanna see the script changes?” I asked him.
    “Yeah, sure. Bring them to me when you’re done. Leave the rock.”
    A few minutes later I ran the changes past them. They were delighted. Really improved the script, they said. Certain to widen its appeal to audiences young and old. “We haven’t met anyone else in Hollywood who could do for us what you do,” said Marsh. “And to think I was going to kill you!”
    The old kidder.
    Anyway, I kept Legrasse’s rock as a reminder of that special day. It sat on a filing cabinet by the door. Marsh and Orne never did ask where it came from — in fact, they stayed out of my office from then on.
    Sure enough, that draft gave us the break we wanted. Universal Studios agreed to make and distribute the picture. Celebration all around. We got Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly, though not John Travolta, who thought our “ethics” were “out” and that we were “PTS” (whatever that meant). Things were looking good — until Universal started making changes. They didn’t like the names K’rrha or Gus, so suddenly they were Kira and Sonny. Sonny? What the hell kind of a name is “Sonny”? They didn’t like “Ct’hul’hu” either, and because they took my description of the girl as a muse literally, they changed him to Zeus. They didn’t like the Zann score and threw almost all of it out (though they kept the “love you for eternity” bit that I thought was so creepy; go figure). The sanity-challenging visions they changed into a cute cartoon sequence.
    Orne and Marsh were not happy. Every day I heard them on the phone, screaming, begging, pleading with the Universal folks, resisting the changes. The final straw was when they turned the Temple of Great Ct’hul’hu into a roller disco. “You people are inhuman!” screamed Mr. Marsh into the phone and slammed it down. He ran gibbering into the streets. I never saw him again.
    After that, Orne relied on me more and more, but I could tell Dagon/Hydra Productions was finished. Orne gave me a four hundred percent raise to keep working on the script, and to defend as much of the original material as possible. “You’re the only one I can trust,” he said, his flabby, fish-like mouth gasping for air, after one particularly stressful call. I felt proud of his trust, and poured my heart into every revision.
A few days after the raise, a guy from Universal called me at home. He said his name was Gordon. “I like your scripts. Is this really the first time you’ve written professionally?”
    “It is,” I admitted, looking around at the movie posters on my apartment’s walls. I was awed — there were a lot of Universal logos on my posters, and here I was talking with them directly. “I hope it doesn’t show.”
    “Oh, it doesn’t, no. Look, I’ll get to the point. I want you to work for me directly. Come to my office first thing tomorrow.”
    I felt a momentary indignation. I couldn’t betray Mr. Orne just like that. “I’d love to,” I said, “but they really need me at Dagon/Hydra. They don’t have anyone else, and they just gave me a raise.”
    “I’ll pay you seventy-five thousand dollars for the first draft you write for me.”
    I swear my heart stopped. “I’ll see you in the morning,” I heard myself say.
    Such was the end of Dagon/Hydra Productions. After I left him, Mr. Orne went back to Massachusetts, taking his hopes for a “revival” with him, mumbling something about getting into musical theatre. He and his partner had been crushed by the studio system. Neither of them ever worked in pictures again.
    Neither did I. Gordon took my script, stripped my name from it, and gave it to some playwright to finish. By the time it hit the theaters in 1980, the mystical name of R’lyeh had been stripped from it, to be replaced by the less mystic but more pronounceable Xanadu. The film crashed and burned, and even though my name’s nowhere in the credits, I was poison everywhere because of it.
    I’d been cheated by Gordon and Universal, but I still went to the premiere. A lot of very strange people, some of them clearly related to Orne and Marsh, attended the premiere as well, clutching the colorful tickets in their clammy webbed hands. A group of them sat behind me; I heard them whispering to each other as the theater filled up.
    “They changed the name,” said one, “but this is it. The revival begins tonight, and when enough people have seen, they will share in the vision, and R’lyeh will rise from the depths.”
    “Ct’hul’hu fhtagn!” said her companions.
    The director appeared at the front of the theater and briefly introduced the film. The lights went down to many cries of “Ia! Ct’hul’hu fhtagn!” — and that was as cheerful as the audience got. As the film rolled, a murmur of discontent swept through the theater, growing more intense with each scene. I understood their discomfort; if they knew either the Thurston Manuscript or the Zann Score they were bound to be disappointed.
    It was just before the cartoon sequence that the first piercing shriek rang out. Right behind me, a woman stood up and screamed, “Legwarmers and roller skates? Great Ct’hul’hu, save us!” As if her cry were a signal, chaos broke out in the theater. Gibbering, ululating, the audience fled the bright glow of the screen. They pressed and stumbled against me, knocked me to the ground. I squeezed up close to the seats and curled into a ball, enduring the blows of feet and knees until they had all passed.
    I got up. I was the last one in the theater. Premiere pamphlets littered the floor. A few seats down from me I saw a tentacle-faced statuette, just like Orne’s, lying face-down on the carpet. The film rolled on. I suffered through the rest of it alone, wondering if I’d be better off face-down on the carpet like the statue.
    So I learned my lesson the hard way. Tentacle-faced monstrosities may challenge your sanity, but if you really want to be deprived of your humanity, go into the movie business.