Chapter 1 : Part 1

Exposure: A Novel
by Kurt Wenzel

Los Angeles, a few years from now. Technology has changed the rules of the movie business with old, long-dead stars brought digitally back to life. Billboards cover every available surface of the city, beaming out a constant flood of commercials starring the likes of John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe, and - the great exception, the last 'real' movie star - Colt Reston.

But something is going wrong: A group of anti-tech rebels are attacking the billboards, inspired by a mysterious manifesto known as 'The Black Book.' A burnt out screenwriter addicted to the latest hot drug finds his world wobbling. Colt takes ill with an unexplained disease - perhaps literally dying of overexposure. A guru who might know why has vanished. And then Montgomery Clift suddenly walks off his virtual set and goes AWOL....

A blistering mash-up of William Gibson, The Ring, and Chuck Palahniuk, Exposure is a great step forward for Kurt Wenzel. Convulsive and thrilling, EXPOSURE is a devastating tour de force by one of the best novelists working today.

Chapter 1

From his tomb at the Ming Blue, Marshall Reed watched the curtains part along the bearings with a cool silence.

A Ming thing, he murmured to himself, setting down the remote. Men like him - whose lifestyles were predicated, to a large degree, on privacy, and whose behavior the trades characterized as "unpredictable" - usually found themselves a few blocks down at the Marmont. But Marshall preferred the stark precision and monastery silence of the Ming. The Marmont, he'd decided, had grown self-conscious. Television stars on tasseled Harleys, party in the Belushi bungalow. I'm past that now, he'd thought, or maybe behind it. Either way was fine with him. He was thirty-nine and had done his share, without the self-congratulations. Real self-destruction, he knew, went on secretly. And alone.

Plus, he could work at the Ming. In this new cacophonous age, the Ming Blue offered the most elusive of contemporary luxuries: silence. A hotel on mute. No squawking plasmas blaring at you in the lobby, no thumping P-hop at the bar. Of course you weren't allowed to open the windows, but in L.A., who cared? All this had made the hotel a popular destination for two primary groups: the faddish weekend media fasters - those who couldn't get to the mountains for the full cure - and high-priced screenwriters who could afford to work away from the lot. Marshall Reed was one of the latter. Though he had but a single screen credit to his name, the murder mystery Chula Vista ('09), the script was generally considered one of the greatest ever written and had guaranteed him gainful employment in Hollywood for the rest of his life. Why he had failed to deliver on this promise, even now, almost ten years later, and why he contented himself with what in a different era might have been called hackwork, were riddles still pondered by cineastes the world over.

Deciding to take his breakfast by the pool, Marshall shook out his shaggy brown hair and dragged his slight frame into faded jeans and a denim shirt, which he wore untucked, in defiance of local fashion. He rode the elevator to the roof and found a table under a cool niche of palm planters. There he sipped coffee while discreetly lifting his sunglasses as a young Nubian performed the breaststroke, legs lissome as the tail of a spermatozoon. Not until she had tucked herself away in a towel did he begin to scan the newspapers on his Pod. Mr. Black was all the rage, of course. National Insider was announcing it had indeed secured an interview, and precoverage had made the front page of the L.A. Times. Marshall had just started to read the article when he noticed his waiter, a young Asian male in a blue Nehru jacket, hovering behind one of the palms.

"Hello there," the screenwriter announced, somewhat annoyed.

Though his own celebrity quotient was blessedly low, there was a certain young Hollywood type, usually male, for whom the name Marshall Reed inspired a sort of cultish awe and, at times, an intrusive curiosity. He realized now that the waiter had been peeking over his shoulder at his Pod screen.

Knowing he'd been had, the young man stepped out from behind the palm. "Sorry," he said, trying to keep his voice down. He pointed at the screen with his tray. "I was just wondering what you make of this guy."

"Ah yes, the infamous Mr. Black," Marshall replied with a chilly sarcasm. The waiter had the look of a budding screenwriter, he was sure, and so would now have to be dispatched with benevolent firmness, the usual modus. "Nice publicity stunt. The book has its moments, though." Marshall lifted his coffee cup to signal both a refill and dismissal.

The waiter overlooked the gesture. "I'm about halfway done with it. I think it's great."

"Well, good for you," Marshall replied, surprised at the rapture. "Most people haven't bothered to read it, though everyone seems to have an opinion, don't they?"

Mr. Black, as he was known, had been named by default. It was nearly two years ago now that a conspicuous volume had appeared on the nonfiction tables in bookstores. It had a completely black cover - no title, no jacket copy, no author photo. No author, far as anyone could tell. And the publishing house wasn't saying a thing. As for the book itself, it turned out to be an augury, a digressive warning on the dangers of media saturation. There was actually a glut of such books these days (such were the ironies of the media age), and the whole thing would have been dismissed as the rant of another killjoy except that the author's anonymity lent the whole thing an air of mystery, if not legitimacy. If for five hundred pages you were going to harangue the age of the moving image billboards (or MIBs, as they were known, the new giant digital plasma screens that had replaced static billboard advertisements, and smaller versions of which seemed to be popping up just about everywhere - on the sides of buildings, on the hoods of cars, on changing-room mirrors and the interior of bathroom stalls), at least this "Mr. Black" had the good taste to do it anonymously.

However improbably, the book had become a cult sensation. The author had defined some universal malaise in the mass subconscious: an unease with the new visual technologies, a disgust with the insidious psychology of advertising. Owing to a particularly virulent strain of Hollywood self-loathing, Mr. Black's message had even been embraced by the entertainment industry. The author's suggestion of "media fasts," for example - extended dry-outs from the image world - had become Los Angeles's most fashionable new diet, and there was not a person of stature in Hollywood who did not have a copy of the Black Book proudly displayed on the office desk.

"You're Marshall Reed, aren't you?"

Marshall nodded with a pained grimace.

"Daniel Lee," said the young man, putting out a hand to shake. "I'm a screenwriter too."

Marshall shook the waiter's hand, lowering his sunglasses for a quick look. Daniel was new, he'd surmised, and not particularly well polished by Ming standards. Hovering near guests was forbidden, and engaging them in conversation was near blasphemy. Marshall thought to warn the waiter he was probably being watched on the Eye this very moment but decided it was too late. Daniel Lee would be gone before lunch.

"Hey, I gotta ask you - "

Copyright © 2007 by Kurt Wenzel

About the Author

Kurt Wenzel is the author of Lit Life. He and his wife live in East Hampton, New York, and Manhattan.