Ivan had written every one of Igor's blockbuster films;
he was used to writing alone but had been saddled
by the studio w/ a personal assistant who was ever
up his *** about the most trivial, mundane ****; he
pretended to know no English w/ her which forced her to
try out her garbled, | broken Russian, which sounded
like she was giving head w/ a mouthful of marbles;
Ivan should only be so lucky; the blonde ponytail
was at the glass door peeking in suspiciously; he had
an office overlooking Ventura Boulevard that smelled
like the pollution outside; 'Da?' he said by rote,
wanting to hear nothing she said; she took her earphones
off & came closer; Patti had a crush on her slinky Rusky 'boss'
as she liked to think of him in her KGB & James Bond inspired fantasies;
Ivan's madness showing through his genius when she sat
up watching bootleg Blu-rays of Igor's films all night long,
paying especial attention to the Russian dialogue,
which was meager at best & mostly incoherent. Ivan was
staring into the girl's mooning blue-eyes, as she snapped
out of her daze she began prattling off his supposed schedule
for the day; 'u kid me, right? TV show?; a game show?'
'No, silly,' she grinned, 'a talk show; Late, Late Night w/ ...'
'Forget it,' he said flatly: 'send one of the girls;' he'd insist,
meaning the two stars of most of their pictures, although
Hel had gone back to part-time circus performing on
Broadway, making a bundle doing tricks she learned in
childhood while showing off more or less the same skin
she wagged in underground dives from Siberia to Kiev,
staking her claim to fortune alongside TT the tgirl, who was
now a popular regular at any number of high-end hipster venues;
the artsy scene mostly
centered around the semi-expat, Mennonite apostate
American action painter Eli Simple; Eli more or less
permanently ensconcing himself | in a chateau in the mountains
of Monaco; his name was mud in America as a celebrity;
Eli wasn't even sure why -- but his name had been
prominently mentioned in one of the more widely read
Saturday night ****** rags; as at one time he was thought to have killed
the unnamed actress' father in cold blood,
[a crime she later confessed to in the media,
dampening any chance of a fair trail & the slender,
vamping 'sad little bad girl' was acquitted | all while
Eli was
out of the country & in Russia at the time;
harassed as a newly minted
Hollywood star by the cold-blooded paparazzo
for his
Oscar Nominated turn as Robert Motherwell in the independently produced biopic of the same name; Igor's first International Hit,
Ivan winning for best screenplay; Patti not having said anything worth hearing,
Ivan stopped pretending to listen
