VERUM PRODUCTIONS:
THE FINEST IN FAMILY REALITY MILITARY SPECTACLES
by David Berger
Reaching out from the street, the garbage-strewn cul-de-sac ran about twenty-five feet to a blank wall topped with razor wire. On the wall were complex graffiti swirls of red, black, and white. Some homeless person had made the alley their home, and there was the usual pile of junk at the base of the wall. One of the pieces of junk was a filthy, pink teddy bear.
Tens of millions of viewers watched as the seven-year-old girl, identified as “Rainbow” in the opening credits, walked toward the wall and the teddy bear. She stared at the toy and finally picked it up. The wall and its graffiti puzzled her. It puzzled her more when they started spelling VERUM PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS!
“Look at those numbers,” the Director said to the Producer. “726 MEGs and climbing.”
The Producer nodded. His proposal had competed against loads of others for this reality miniseries. There were a couple of juicy space disaster scenarios (the public eats them up), a volcano-tsunami tropical island story (kinda unique), and even a domestic/road drama involving an actual serial killer and the woman who loves him (done before). But in the end, the Producer’s idea had been selected. It was brilliant, lavish, expensive, spectacular, the best ever! And the commercials could easily be integrated into the storyline.
A perfect “shock and awe” behind the credits involved the actual bombing of a small city, an amphibious landing, and a showy airborne drop. These had been planned and carried out to set up this scene in the cul-de-sac. These events would be covered subsequently, as background to further episodes, but the radical decision had been made to “personalize” this premier event.
Hundreds had died and thousands had been injured, in order to create the backstory for the opening shot of “Episode 1.” Shortly before this opening scene, Rainbow had been snatched from her family and dropped in the cul-de-sac with the garbage, the teddy, the graffiti and the wall.
Rainbow slowly walked back down the alley toward the street, half-dragging, half carrying the teddy, observed by a drone-cam. The teddy contained a cam that peered out through one of its eyes. Hundreds of millions watched as she shrank back from the sounds of distant explosions. Almost a billion gasped as she cut her right foot on broken glass. A camera, mounted in the wall of the alley, zoomed in on the bright red blood.
“Oh, this is great vid! The best ever!” the Director cried with joy.
“One GIG and up!” the Producer screamed.
A billion people were viewing, and the number was rising!
Rainbow sat down to look at her foot. She did nothing about it but touch the cut. There was nothing she could do.
“Let’s get her moving!” the Director said. “Numbers are already sliding.”
The Director waved his hand behind him. A technician threw a switch. There was a small explosion at the base of the wall that scattered smoke and debris through the alley. Rainbow screamed and ran toward the street. Just as she reached the sidewalk, another
explosion went off behind her. The drone-cam that was hovering over her head almost lost its equilibrium. Rainbow froze.
“Don’t overdo it,” the Director barked over his shoulder.
The drone-cam pilot worked to keep his camera steady and always behind Rainbow. She could be seen dimly through the dust via a camera positioned across the street from the cul-de-sac. With great skill, the cameraman zoomed in for a close-up as the dust settled. Tears trailed down her face.
“Tears bring cheers!” the Director said. “I want her out of there and onto the street in thirty seconds.”
Fifteen seconds later, a bell rang behind Rainbow. She looked back into the cul-de-sac. Only a deft twist by the drone-cam pilot kept her from seeing the thing that was following her. There was nothing for her to see but the wreck of the alley.
Then came the horrendous blast of an air horn. Rainbow raced out into the street, screaming. She tried to shield her eyes from the bright sun with the arm carrying the teddy bear.
Dragging the toy, Rainbow trudged a few blocks along the street. There was no one in sight.
“Getting boring,” the Producer said. “Numbers are dropping. Fucking do something!”
“Thirty seconds,” the Director said.
As Rainbow passed the first cross street, trucks raced by. They were so close to the curb that she had to jump into the cross street to avoid getting flattened.
“Now sit down, you little shit!” the Director shouted.
A couple of technicians took his words up as a chant. He cracked a smile at that. His smile widened as Rainbow sat on the curb a few yards into the cross street.
“Yes!” the Director shouted, pumping his arm. “Cue the Riders and the Crowd!”
“Roger Riders and Crowd, D,” a technician said.
“Use the teddy-cam,” the Director said. “Slightly elevated if you can, for a
pan. Then keep switching back to the Crowd’s and Rider’s drones as they approach. Then let them drop off and stay with the girl.”
Twenty-five people, ragged and bloody, screaming and panting, appeared at the far end of the block. They were pursued by four motorcycle riders about a quarter of the block behind them.
Just as the terrified group barreled past Rainbow, the riders fired their pistols into the air. But when the camera panned to one rider, he fired into the crowd. A young man fell in front of Rainbow, splashing a puddle of filthy water and soaking her. The dark red patch of blood on his back spread.
“Are you okay, Mister?” Rainbow asked.
The young man shuddered and breathed his last.
“Did you get that?” the Producer screamed. “The kid, the rider, and the guy kicking the bucket?”
“Every second of it,” the Director said and turned to the technicians. “Gimme instant replay on the whole thing: from when the kid sits down to when the guy croaks.”
The technicians ran the replay.
“That’s a beautiful vid,” the Producer said. “Beautiful, beautiful vid. I see an Emmy for the miniseries, an Oscar for the documentary, a Grammy for the score, and a Tony when we get the musical written.”
“I’m cumming,” the Director said.
“Marry me,” the Producer said.
“Viewership up to three GIG!” someone said.
Rainbow still stood over the dead man, looking down on his emaciated, mud-flecked face. She bent over and closed the young man’s eyes.
“Kill me now,” the Director said. “My life’s complete.”
Dragging the teddy bear, Rainbow shuffled in the direction that the crowd and the motorcycles had come from. The teddy-cam afforded a fine shot of the side of Rainbow’s bobbing pigtail. The new drone-cams, two meters behind her, captured the pathetic view of Rainbow picking her way through the rubble.
“Can’t you speed her up?” the Producer asked. “We’re starting to lose share already.”
“I haven’t got any assets along this street,” the Director said. “The last rider was supposed to grab her. Dumbass crashed into a trash can.”
“Well, let’s do fucking something!” the Producer said, turning to the technicians. “Bring up some music. Slow first, then hard and dramatic. And give me some angles with the drones, cool angles, crazy angles that match.”
Rainbow was followed by the drone-cams weaving in and out and even in front of her. She was accompanied by music she couldn’t hear: wild, tearing sounds. Tears oozed out of her eyes. Her mind was blank. Her terror, constant. But she kept walking.
“What’s she doing?” the Producer gasped.
“Don’t you remember?” the Director said. “She was supposed to have been grabbed by one of the riders? The clown missed his cue, thought he was a bandido or something and shot that guy. I’ll strangle him myself when this is over. I’ll roast and barbecue him.”
“When she crosses the street, she’s out of The Zone!” a technician shouted.
Instead of a dust-covered street filled with rubble and fire, the street stretched to the left and right of Rainbow was clear and silent. No vehicles. No pedestrians. No signs that a block behind her a war was going on. The Director signaled for the music to be cut off. Rainbow saw a pizza place down the block and ran toward it.
Almost at the place, through a window, Rainbow could see a man making pizza and another man standing next to him. She was hungry from fleeing a combat zone.
“Cue ballistics,” the Director said.
As the child leaned into the pizza place’s window, a seventeen-year-old boy approached on a bike from the opposite direction. An alert drone pilot clearly picked up The Pizza Kid’s words as he muttered: “Sending me out to deliver at a time like this! Middle of a war! Gotta be fucking crazy!”
An armored drone hit the pizza place! Rainbow, The Pizza Kid, and his bike went flying like confetti in a tornado. The pizza place burst into green flames. The two men trapped inside screamed as they burned to death.
“That’s gonna cost alotta money,” the Producer said. “The chain that owns that place, and the men’s families are gonna sue for sure. And we ain’t fully covered since we’re outside The Zone.”
“Forget it,” the Director said. “You can’t fake sound effects like that.”
The Pizza Kid got up and leaned his bike on its kickstand and scooped Rainbow up. He stuffed her into the bike’s carrying box on top of a pizza he hadn’t been able to deliver. Then he pedaled like the devil himself was behind him. The drone strike’s hungry fire was at his back. The heat faded as he wove back and forth through the rubble. Rainbow screamed over the clattering of the bike.
After a few minutes of dodging shrapnel, The Pizza Kid swerved into his parents’ driveway toward a garage whose doors were ajar. The drone-cams that weren’t hit with friendly fire followed the new reality TV stars.
As The Pizza Kid pumped the last few yards, the Director yelled: “Okay, follow them in, but hold some cams back to cover the street.”
“Our audience is holding at two-and-a-half GIGs!” the Producer screeched. “This is vid history!”
In the garage, The Pizza Kid put Rainbow onto a cot and wrapped her and her teddy bear in some old army blankets. Then he brought tap water in a cracked cup and a soggy slice of pizza to Rainbow. She ate with as big bites as she could manage to chew and swallow.
The drone-cams surrounding the garage watched him and Rainbow.
“Keep it in tight,” the Director said.
“Have we got an ID on him?” the Producer asked.
“We’ve got facial recognition!” a technician shouted. “Name’s Hakim Jerome. His uncle owns the pizza place.”
“Our new star!” the Director said.
“Keep all the drone-cams, helicopters, and foot cameras ready,” the Producer said as the scene faded out on Rainbow sleeping and The Pizza Kid picking glass out of her hair. For thirty seconds, the vid feed was quiet shots of the destroyed part of the city, punctuated with smooth jazz. A technician whispered into a voice command module.
A cartoon began, with thirty-second sequences: the Trojan Horse in the side of a wiggling Grecian urn, the Battle of the Three Hundred Spartans as a popping floor mosaic, David and Goliath etched in a melting clay tablet, Washington crossing the Delaware as a Day-Glo mural. Finally came these words:
VERUM PRODUCTIONS
THE FINEST IN FAMILY REALITY MILITARY SPECTACLES
“Funny how he knew to feed the girl,” the Producer said as the commercial ran.
“And she responded and ate just like that,” the Director said.
“You can’t make shots like that up.”
“Serendipity’s the name of the game.”
“The weirder it is, the better. She must be pretty shook up.”
The Director turned around to the technicians behind him.
“Anyone know if the kid’s uncle and the other guy were completely toasted?” he asked.
The technicians shrugged.
As the commercial ended, the drone-cams adjusted their lenses.
“Sting him and scare him,” the Director said. “Get them out of there and back into The Zone.”
Two billion people watched as Hakim Jerome slapped the back of his head as a drone-cam hit him and retreated away. At the same time, the drone-cams now in the garage began to flash super-bright LEDs and emit a high-pitched whistle. Hakim snatched up Rainbow and flew out of the building.
“Bear! Bear!” Rainbow cried.
Hakim looked at her without comprehension.
“Your new star really is an idiot,” the Producer said.
“No, this is great, fantastic.” the Director said. “Watch this! Ballistics!”
Rainbow wiggled out of Hakim’s arms and ran back up the driveway to the garage. A drone inside the garage detonated a smokey flash-bang, just as another drone threw the teddy-cam at Rainbow, as if the blast had blown it to her. The bear hit her square in the chest, knocking her to the ground.
The technicians cheered! Some hooted as the viewership numbers went up another 250 million to past three GIGs.
Hakim again scooped up Rainbow and ran blindly away from the blast.
“More on the kid,” the Producer said. “We need to keep all this focused on her. This is a human interest story: not a war story.”
“Cue the Dewey,” the Director said. “That’ll get the numbers up even higher.”
“I was hoping we could get away without using it,” the Producer said. “It’s the one asset that’s not psychologically reliable: too many bad memories. It’s also a fucking deus ex machina. The more sophisticated viewers hate that shit.”
“It’ll be there in five,” the Director said. “Get the commercial going.”
Hakim was scrambling down the street, dodging explosions left and right, clinging to Rainbow. Several of the drone-cams got in close. Almost three GIGs of viewers could practically taste the tears running down Rainbow’s face and the sweat running down Hakim’s.
The next commercial:
A vast open, sunny green field with hundreds of young people dancing in concentric circles dressed like eighteenth century French aristocrats. Gracefully and easily, the dancers converged into a giant V. Four couples twirled around each other. At the vertex of the V, there appeared from nowhere a beautifully laid table. Two elaborately coiffed royal couples were seated at the table sipping champagne.
A thrumming shadow darkened the couples. A huge black Dewey helicopter plowed across the screen. On its side in enormous blinking LEDs:
VERUM CHAMPAGNE
FOR ALL OCCASIONS
The royal couples raised their glasses to the helicopter. As it passed over their heads, a large black box fell out of it. A camera followed the box all the way down. A parachute opened gracefully, and it landed next to the seated couples. The box broke open on impact and revealed several hundred miraculously unbroken bottles of Verum champagne and champagne flutes. The dancers cued up to be refreshed. The couples toasted the helicopter again as it floated away over the field.
The helicopter blinked out of the commercial and started hovering over Rainbow and Hakim. Suddenly, Rainbow lifted up the teddy-cam and pointed it at the Dewey.
“Look Teddy,” she said. “It’s God!”
“Fuck!” the Producer said. “Now we’re in trouble with the fucking religious types. Shit!”
“Don’t worry about it,” the Director said. “This is the best vid ever.”
The helicopter’s LEDS spelled out:
VERUM IS HERE FOR YOU AND YOUR FAMILY
“That should shut the Jesus freaks up,” the Director said.
And, indeed, the viewership, which had been dropping, bottomed out at 2 GIGs and began to rise slowly
“RAINBOW!” a voice boomed out from the helicopter accompanied by the said words in LED lights.
“RAINBOW AND HAKIM!”
Rainbow, Hakim, and the drone-cams squinted at the Dewey.
“RAINBOW AND HAKIM, YOU’RE IN DANGER! RUN! RUN DOWN THE ROAD. FOLLOW ME! TURN INTO THE STREET WITH THE GREEN LIGHT. GO NOW!”
Hakim put Rainbow on his shoulders. She held onto the teddy-cam.
“I hate this last minute improv,” the Producer said. “Just get them back into The Zone and back on track and on budget.”
With the drone-cams around him, Hakim Jerome sped after the Dewey, which drew away from him. The drone-cams formed a wedge in front of him to protect him. Behind him, another group swarmed in a semi-circle.
“RUN HAKIM! FOLLOW THE HELICOPTER! FIND THE GREEN LIGHT!”
The Director gave a cut signal. The audio and lights were shut down.
“Watch this,” the Director said as Hakim passed a side street.
The Director made a chopping motion. A very bright green light flashed on a light pole about a block down the side street, branching to the young man’s right. Hakim whipped around to turn and almost fell with Rainbow on his shoulders: one hand actually touching the pavement. But he managed to keep running: toward the green light and back into The Zone.
“Thank God for that,” the Producer sighed.
“Get that rider bastard ready,” the Director said.
And he, the Producer and the technicians held their breaths collectively as Hakim reached the first cross street in The Zone where the green light still flashed. As he ran into the intersection, the motorcycle rider flashed past and snatched Rainbow without slowing down.
The lead swarm of drone-cams started following the Rider. The drone-cams that were behind Hakim covered him chasing after the rider. A screaming Rainbow was clutching desperately to the teddy-cam as her head was practically scraping the pavement.
“Great! Great!” the Producer said. “Everyone loves a chase. Can you get anything from the teddy-cam?”
“Just blurs,” the Director said.
“Give ’em a few seconds of blurs with some good background music.”
“Nah. That won’t work. Too artsy.”
“Just fucking do it.”
Within seconds, two and half billion viewers were treated to a jerky shot down Rainbow’s right leg. Because of the high-speed grab, the rider didn’t quite have the grip he needed, so the girl’s foot nearly touched the rubble-covered pavement, until finally it did. The teddy-cam showed the new flow of Rainbow’s blood.
“Now that’s art!” the Producer said.
“Get ready, Ballistics,” the Director said.
The motorcycle’s front tire blew out. The bike skidded on its left side and tumbled.
Hakim got to the wreck and reached out to take up the child. The rider drew a red Desert Eagle. The screen split in four: the Rider’s face, Hakim’s face, Rainbow’s face, and one down the barrel of the gun.
“Really?” Hakim said.
The rider shot him in the right shoulder. Hakim fell on his side as the Rider shot again. The second bullet hit the teddy-cam. The thing broke in half, showing its wiry innards to Rainbow. The camera eye formerly concealed behind its face stared at the little girl as it died. She screamed, ripped off the head, and flung it away like it was a poisonous snake. She wrapped the torso in her arms and kept on screaming.
“Enough,” the Producer said.
“You want the Dewey to pick them up?” the Director asked.
The Producer nodded.
“Helicopter extraction,” the Director yelled over his shoulder.
Covered by at least six drone-cams, the Dewey landed. Half a dozen medics jumped out and lifted out the sobbing Rainbow and the unconscious, bleeding Hakim. Two cams followed them inside.
“Ready Comm 3,” the Director said, as the drone-cams filmed the Dewey take off toward a field hospital.
At the hospital, one drone-cam witnessed Hakim being taken to a trauma station. The second watched a group of doctors, nurses and psychologists surround Rainbow.
Gradually, this scene morphed into a scene of a bunch of little girls, all about Rainbow’s age, of all the races of the Earth, sitting in a circle in a gray, shabby playroom. They wore drab, gray pajamas. They were swaying and singing a sad song together.
Suddenly, a group of beautiful fairies, each with shiny V wings, came singing and dancing into the room. Each fairy carried a large beribboned box, covered with brightly colored Vs. Each fairy placed one in front of one of the little girls. Each girl, then, still singing, but up-tempo, opened her box and dived into it. A few seconds later, the girls emerged into a bright and colorful room. Each girl now wore an outfit that was radiant and covered with small, sparkling Vs.
The girls and the fairies danced in a circle as they sang a song, as colorful and bright as the room. Then they curtsied, and the performance was over. There was a fade-out to the field hospital where Rainbow and Hakim had been taken. Across the screen crawled:
END OF EPISODE 1
EPISODE 2 — TOMORROW NIGHT!
During the fade-out, the Producer asked no one in particular, “How’s The Pizza Kid, our brand new star? What’s his name? Hakim something?”
“Hakim Jerome,” a technician said.
“Yeah, Hakim Jerome. How’s he doing?”
“He’s pretty banged up,” the Director said. “He’ll be okay, but he’s out for at least the next episode or two.”
“Too bad. And getting the releases and contracts from him and his family is going to be hell—and expensive. And the kid, Rainbow?”
The Director shook his head.
“She’s not fucking dead is she?” the Producer yelled.
“No, she’s alive,” the Director said. “And except for her foot, she’s pretty undamaged.”
There was a pause.
“And?” the Producer said.
“She’s got PTSD. Bad. She’s catatonic. She won’t let go of the teddy-cam and wouldn’t dance with the fairies.”
“Damn! Are you sure? Can’t we get some quick work done on her with a psychiatrist. Some drugs?”
“I don’t think so. She’s pretty fucked up.”
The Producer shrugged and turned to a technician.
“You know what to do,” he said. “We chose her because she’s a twin. Some of you guys go out and get her sister. Don’t forget the cut on her foot!”
David Berger is an 82-year-old socialist New Yorker, living in Manhattan with his wife of 33 years: the finest jazz singer in NYC. He’s currently a union organizer and a writer. He is also the author of Bohemians (with Paul Buhle) and two forthcoming graphic novels from Duke University Press: one about Malcolm X and the other about C.L.R. James. He hopes to see the Revolution before he croaks.
Picture Credit: UNTITLED by Mario Loprete
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