The bulk of this novel was written during NaNoWriMo last year (yes, I got over the 50,000 word mark). It all takes place during the filming of the latest in a long string of highly successful movies. Actors, insecurities, affairs, helicopter crashes, reclusive authors, sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, lots of drinking, producers, fans, publicity – all that sorta stuff.

The Book Of The Movie

By Barbara Welton

several smaller extracts together…

'Jake! Mind if I join you?'

Jake Jorgen looked up from his lunch to see John Dillon standing on the other side of the trestle table. He grinned widely and indicated the bench seat opposite with his fork. 'Not at all, John! Pull up a pew!'

John put his plate and cutlery onto the table top and steadied himself as he eased first one leg and then the other over the top of the wooden bench and plonked down onto it as gracefully as possible. Jake and John were seated at the very most centre table of the meals marquee, right beside the centre post that held the big top up. Where the pole disappeared through the canvas, a small circle of sunlight tumbled down and danced on the table while the two actors got stuck into their lunches.

'How was New York?' Jake asked between bites of meatloaf.

'Hurried,' was the reply. 'These networks obviously have far too much bloody money to splash around. Flying me from here up to there, limo to the studio, wining, dining, do the show, more wining, limo back to the airport, fly me back down here. I can only surmise that they are desperate for guests.'

'Just desperate for the good ones, John.'

John waved his knife in the air. 'Oh, don't give me that! I hate doing those fucking things and you know it. Why they didn't ask you to do the bloody thing, I don't know. You cope far better with them than I ever do.'

Jake lifted one shoulder elegantly and let it drop again. 'Americans grow up speaking in sound bytes. It's in my blood.'

'But the falsity of it, Jake! The façade of it all!' John shook his head and speared a roast potato. 'I almost felt my face would crack if I smiled any harder.'

'Be thankful you weren't in all this makeup, then – it might've done!'

'Too fucking true, darling.'

The two men ate in silence for a few minutes, always vaguely aware that meal breaks at this stage of Richard Grace's temperament were not exactly leisurely affairs.

'Did you see the show, by any chance?' John suddenly asked his companion.

Jake swallowed some pumpkin and shook his head. 'Sorry. I was shot through that night. Fell into bed as soon as I got in the door. Please don't tell me I missed the show of the year?' His mouth twitched up into a small smirk.

'Not bloody likely,' John mumbled. 'No, it was just something that twat said. Do you happen to know what a "Slash Writer" is when it's at home? I haven't got a fucking clue…'

'You haven't heard about slash yet?'

John Dillon blinked. 'Should I have?'

Jake leaned back slightly and crossed his long legs under the table. 'Not necessarily. It is still a fairly underground kind of thing, I guess. But it's certainly getting more and more prevalent. At least, it seems that way lately.'

'And this phenomenon would be… what, exactly?'

'God, how can I explain this? Um… you've heard of Fan Fiction, right? Where fans of a movie or a tv show start writing their own stories around their favourite characters?' John nodded for him to continue. 'Well, for quite a while now, a lot of these stories have been getting more, well, sexier. More, er, provocative.'

John Dillon processed this information alongside the remembered comments made to him by the interviewer, particularly those about the characters Getting It On. 'You mean porn. People are writing porn about our characters having it off?'

Jake laughed. 'Yeah.' John noticed that the younger man wasn't meeting his gaze though.

'Somehow, I suspect there's a little more to it than that. Come on, you puritanical Yankee, stop holding out on me and give me the bloody dirt!'

'Well… slash fiction, generally speaking, is er, rather homoerotic in nature.'

'I see. Anything else I should know?'

'Yeah. Maybe. There's an even more underground sub group of slash.'

'Yes… ?'

'That stuff's called RPS. Real Person Slash, or Real People Slash, I can't remember which. And that's all about – '

'Oh, fuck me sober, you're not serious?'

Jake looked his friend squarely in the eye and gave another smirk, this one larger and cheekier than the previous one. 'There's even stories about us, John.'

'You and me? As ourselves? Fucking? Who on earth would want to read shit like that?'

'Lots of people, apparently. Mainly women.' Jake shrugged.

John chewed on a piece of roasted parsnip thoughtfully. 'And… have you read any of these… stories?'

'I've seen a few on the Net.'

John lifted one perfect eyebrow. 'Seen them, Jorgen? Or read them?'

Jake couldn't help a chuckle. 'Okay, yeah, I've read a few. So?'

'So, what are they like? Are we talking Mills and Boon standard bodice ripping? Or are we talking a Zero Gen Cock 'N' Arse Fest here?'

Jake spluttered slightly over his peas but managed to compose himself. 'Ar, more of the latter, I'm afraid, John.' He was curious to see how the older man reacted to the news that he was starring in gay porn all over entire sections of the Internet.

John pushed at a string bean for a moment, seemingly lost in thought. He lifted his gaze to Jake's suddenly, two pairs of blue eyes locking fast across the table. 'They don't involve the children, do they?'

Jake shifted a little uncomfortably. 'Some,' he admitted. 'Many of them are careful to skew time frames and stuff though, so that the kids are over varying ages of consent and the like. Though, you know… not all of them.'

'And nobody gets prosecuted for this sort of thing?'

'It's all so grey, I guess. It's just fantasies. Just fiction.'

'But they're using our real names?'

Jake laid his knife and fork down on his plate and pushed it away from himself a few inches across the table. 'The way I look at it,' he began, 'is that, even if they do use our real names, even if they're writing stories in which we aren't supposed to be one of our characters, the people they're writing about are still just another character to them, really. They don't know us, they don't know what we're really like. They still have to create all of that stuff. So, yeah, even if they do use our real names, it's all just fantasy and fiction to me.' His shrug was a punctuation mark.

'Hrm. I might have to read a few of these things and make my mind up about that…'

'You should, John. Some of them are actually quite well written.'

John cast him a knowing look. 'Don't tell me you got off on any of these things, Jake!' He smiled. 'Did it make you horny, baby? Have a little tug afterwards, did we?'

Jake was laughing too hard to respond for a moment. 'Fuck you!'

John's look was imperious. 'Apparently, some people think I do.' He quirked his eyebrow again and the two actors dissolved into laughter that only subsided when John's assistant approached their table and quietly informed them both that they had ten minutes to get back on set.

'Can you show me how to find some of this stuff?' John asked as he and Jake strolled out of the meals tent.

'Sure I can. Free tonight? How about I come over with my laptop?'

John rolled his eyes at the clear Florida skies. 'Why does such an innocent query suddenly sound so filthy?'

'Because we've just been deep in discussion about the Zero Gen Cock 'N' Ass Fest?' suggested Jake helpfully.

John sniffed in mock disdain. 'Ah yes. That would be it. Shall we say ten-ish?'

'Suits me.'

***

Jake slid sideways off the couch in John Dillon's hotel room, clutching at his spasming sides as he fell to the floor. 'Stop it! Oh, god! Please stop!' he managed to plead between bouts of hysterical laughter and attempts to gasp for air. 'I'm in fucking pain here! Quit it!'

John grinned lopsidedly and paused in his reading aloud to take a long sip of red wine. He tapped a couple of times at the mouse pad on the diminutive machine in front of him and cleared his throat. 'Oh for fuck's sake!' he said, 'Just listen to this!' and proceeded to read another passage to his guest.

Both men were now shaking with need, poised in their positions on the trailer floor. "Please, Jake,' John pleaded with the younger actor, pushing his hips backwards in order to try and get more of the greased fingers inside him. "I want to feel your cock in my ass right now."

'Ass?!' John spluttered indignantly. 'What the fuck have donkeys got to do with anything? Even if I did own a donkey, I wouldn't be begging you to shove your cock into the poor creature when I'm so obviously gagging for a shag! I'm an Englishman, for fuck's sake. I do NOT say "ass" when I am referring to my arse!'

That sent Jake into a fresh wave of hysterics. 'Oh! Please, no!' he begged.

John, however, was cruel and enjoying it. 'Oh, and this! You'll love this bit.'

In one slick motion, the three fingers slid out of John's body. Just as he was starting to regret the loss, he felt the large head of Jake's cock push against his well prepared entrance. Jake gripped John's hips hard as he began to push the head into the tight hole, feeling his foreskin pull back tightly as he delved deeper and deeper.

'I thought you were circumcised, Jew-boy?'

Jake mentally shook himself out of the trance John's deep, classically trained dulcet tones could all too easily put him into. Even when reading badly written porn. 'Huh? Oh, yeah, I am! Poor girl is obviously as observant about me as she is about you and your speech patterns. Like I was trying to get through to you today – it's all purely fiction. These two guys might have our names and the way they're described may look like us, but there's no way in hell you could confuse them with the two of US. They're just another couple of characters.'

'Yes. I hate to admit it, but I am beginning to see your point.' John drank some more wine and pressed the Page Down button a couple of times, then closed that particular document and opened another. 'Mm, it takes on a slightly different ambiance, however, when one of the children is included.' He read the new story in silence for a few minutes. 'Of course, I'm absolutely and completely opposed to the blatant Fascism that is censorship. That goes without saying. But.' He read for a while longer then closed that document, too, and started on another one.

Jake, now suitably composed from his laughing attack, poured himself some more wine and clambered back onto the couch next to his friend, simultaneously drinking and reading over the other man's shoulder. 'But?' he enquired after a few more minutes.

John read some more lines before giving his attention back to Jake. 'But… I do feel very protective of all our youngsters, you know. Sure, I swear my black little heart out in front of them and don't censor my conversation topics at all, but that's all just part of treating them as equals, you understand. I have a great deal of respect for those kids. And I care for them very much. I probably wouldn't want them to see some of these stories.'

Jake nodded solemnly. 'At the very least, it could give them some terrible ideas.'

'I was being serious, you fucker.'

'You think I wasn't? They're all in their late teens now, John. Every day is a battle for them to not let their hormones tear them apart from the inside. Surely you remember how that felt?'

'Of course I do. That's precisely what makes being around them en masse so bloody terrifying.'

'They all seem to be rather good at hiding their crushes though,' Jake said. 'I mean, they must have them, right? They're all regular teenagers, they must be lusting after every second thing that walks by, all day, every day. Yet I can't say I've noticed anything blatant from any of them.'

John grabbed his wine glass and settled back against the couch. 'I think the two young ladies both like me. Fucked if I know why, but there you go.'

'Young ladies all over the world like you, you stupid old coot.'

'I say again – fucked if I know why.'

'It's that suave older man thing you've got going. Apparently young girls react to that rather positively.'

'Mm. Particularly when they are, as my dear old Dad used to put it, "burgeoning".' John frowned a little at his own thoughts. 'I'm not entirely sure if I like that expression or not. Could so easily be construed as such a Dirty Old Man sentiment, couldn't it?'

'You are NOT a dirty old man just because you've noticed our little girls are growing up. There's nothing at all inappropriate about your behaviour around them. That's probably a big part of why they feel so comfortable around you, y'know. It must be nice, being an awkward, insecure teenager, having a gentleman like you treating them like young ladies. Plus, you know, you ARE gorgeous. Hell, if I was a teenaged girl, I'd definitely be lusting after you, too, John.'

John's dark blue eyes blazed for a second before his well practiced mask settled over his features and the perfect eyebrow, as if on cue, quirked upwards. 'In light of the fact that we've just been reading queer porn together – queer porn, might I add, that featured the two of us going at each other like randy schoolboys – I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to retract that compliment unless you add to it a raucous laugh.'

It was easy to laugh to John's presence. His good humour and his sardonic wit, in fact, made smiles and laughs impossible to conceal around him. They were both soon rolling around the cushions in hysterics once more, wine-lubricated laughter spilling out of them.

John managed to compose himself first, wiping at his eyes and downing the rest of his wine, trying to determine if he should refill it at this late hour or not. He decided not. 'Hrm,' he looked at his wrist watch with a sigh. 'It's getting late.'

Jake drained his wine glass. 'I should get going, then, and let you get your beauty sleep.' He started pushing buttons on the laptop in front of them, shutting down documents and programmes and finally the machine itself.

'I thought you said some of these slash stories were actually well written?' John suddenly asked. 'Where are those ones, then?'

Jake's eyes glinted as he stood up and retrieved a disc from the inside pocket of his jacket. 'Way ahead of you, old man.' He held the disc out to his friend. 'I saved some of my favourites to this. Here – you may read them at your leisure.'

John took the disc and looked at it a tad suspiciously, ignoring whatever implication the word "favourites" might have been hinting at. 'How do I make it work?'

'You stick it into the corresponding slot on your computer,' he pointed over to John's desk. 'And use the file manager to open the documents that are on it. It'll show up there as "Removable Disk" or something like that. Just, look, call me if you run into any problems, okay? But you should be fine. Embrace the technology, John!'

He was rewarded with a baleful look. 'God, I hate computers.'

Jake laughed softly. 'See you in the morning. Thanks for the wine. And the hysterics.'

'The hysterics came courtesy of you, you pillock.' John smiled. 'Good night, Jake.'

'Night.'

***

John Dillon's blue eyes flashed over the last few lines of text on his computer screen. "The End", he finally read. That was it – the last ending of the last story on the disc Jake had given him. The disc that Jake had said contained some of his "favourites" from among these bizarre erotic stories that apparently proliferated the Internet. These Slash stories. Well, well well.

He took his reading glasses off and fell back against the back rest of his desk chair, staring at the computer screen but not really seeing it. Jake hadn't been fucking with his mind, then. There really were some very well written stories among this stuff. He allowed his head and – yes, he could admit it to himself – his heart to reflect on the tale he had just finished reading. The author had certainly put a lot of time and effort, and talent, into the creation and execution of her story. It had stretched to almost three hundred pages of text! And its story arc was tight and plausible, retaining a taut dramatic tension relieved by sparks of genuine humour along the way and a satisfying resolution at the end.

He stood up and paced across his hotel room. The story had affected him, there was no denying it. The sensual elements had titillated him, he'd been surprised to find. The sexual scenes that he had at first been so wary of had turned out to be tender and loving whilst also managing to be arousing. John didn't really want to wallow on that point for too long. He was, for the most part, a man with a long heterosexual history – some experiments along the way and certain roles notwithstanding. In order to read a story in which a character called John Dillon (who looked like him) was making love to a character named Jake Jorgen (who looked like him), he had first had to tamp down his raised hackles. But he had done so, and had similarly managed to suspend his disbelief adequately to find himself actually getting into the cut and thrust of the narrative.

So. There were good authors in this genre. There were good stories. A couple of documents in on the disc of selections had shown him that much. What had continued to surprise and touch him from the first word of the first story to the last word of the last had been something else entirely. Something he had known intellectually for the past twenty years or so. Something he thought he had long ago accepted when people told him. Something that only just now, sitting on his own in a hotel room, reading literature that basically amounted to very well written pornography, had he realised he had never truly believed about himself.

People – women – found him to be… beautiful.

He noticed his hand shaking ever so slightly as he poured himself two fingers of single malt whisky. He paced about his room with the tumbler, easing the numbness in his bum and the ache in his lower back from having sat on the hard desk chair for so many hours in a row. He saw his full length reflection in the glass of the French doors that lead to the balcony. Outside, the London skies were inky, the lights of the city's landmarks winking into every direction, into the river, into the dark clouds, into his hotel room. The reflection in the doors showed a tall, slim man dressed in dark tones, only his long fingered hands and his pale face breaking the harmony of the shadowy form. He stalked over to the windows and pulled the heavy curtains closed over them. The room felt immediately smaller. He took a swallow of Scotch and resumed his pacing, vaguely disappointed with himself, but not in the least surprised, when he found himself inexorably drawn to the mirror on the far wall.

In the theatre for many years and then in movies for years as well, John Dillon had been known as a great character actor. Once of a day, audiences had not been quite so kind with their descriptions and had freely dubbed his sort "grotesques". Lon Chaney was probably the last to carry the banner. Since the golden days of the great matinee idols, and even more so now in the era of perfect, forever youthful pin-up stars, "character actor" had become something of a polite euphemism for, if not downright ugly, then at least not particularly good looking.

John met his own gaze in the looking glass. The face he saw there was of a man of fifty-six years. A fifty-six year old man with wrinkles and grey hair and even an age spot or two. A fifty-six year old complexion was never going to be as rosy or youthful as that of a younger model. But then, John had always been rather pale, even sallow for a good portion of his life, even when he WAS the younger model.

And look at that nose! Hardly a nose at all, really; much more rightly a beak. He'd read an article once describe how it had taken him "a good deal more than half his career to grow into that nose". He smirked. That could be true for the whole of his face, really. No one had mentioned the words "sex symbol" in reference to him until he was well into his Forties, though he doubted the tastes of the world's females had experienced such a shift of tectonic plate proportion in that time – it was far more likely that he'd simply had to grow into his face before he started looking decent enough for them to notice him.

It wasn't that he'd ever felt sorry for himself about his looks. He'd never been lacking for company, certainly. Truth be told, he'd always done rather well in that respect. So his looks had definitely never kept him down, never been to blame for any loneliness or depression in his life. No, never that… It was true that very few romantic leads had ever come his way, but that was no great loss, surely? Very rarely was the leading man the most interesting character in a story, and besides, the villains usually got the sexiest costumes and most of the best one-liners anyway. So he'd never felt that his looks had impeded his career at all, either.

Simply put though, it was a shock for him to discover how… beautiful (he still stumbled over thinking the word) some of these Slash writers described him as being. Painfully beautiful. Awe inspiringly beautiful. Gently and purely beautiful. And yet they described the beaky nose in all its glory! They articulated the lines and planes of his fifty-six year old face. They revelled in the paleness, the ropey muscularity, the skinniness of his body. They saw all this and described it with beautiful words, in beautiful language.

He stared into his blue eyes. His eyes had always been a good point in his face, there was no arguments there. His eyes, his expressive hands and his melodious voice – oh, and maybe his above average height – they were all he'd had going for him at times. And these writers loved his eyes, of course. And they could wax lyric for paragraphs and even pages about the elegance of his hands. And fuck, how they loved his voice! (O, theatre training, how indispensable hast thou been?) And his height, although not so above average these days as it had been three decades ago when he started out, was still pleasing enough that nearly all of the writers mentioned it somewhere in their stories.

But they also described in detail assets that he had honestly never realised he had in his arsenal. His legs! Those skinny, pale appendages that had been laughed off football pitches his entire childhood – his legs! His legs were now being lauded as, there was that word again, beautiful. Sexy, even! His arse, for the love of god! These women had adjectives for his poor old saggy arse that made John's face flush just at the memory of them. They even extolled the virtues of his bloody mouth, for fuck's sake! Describing his thin lips and his lopsided, almost painful-looking smile, with words like "delicate" and "fine" and "kissable". Even his shoulders got a look in. These women elegised his every feature, every minutiae of his anatomy. Every good point he had (few as he'd thought there were), yes, but also every bad point he'd always thought he'd had as well. They were rapturous in their descriptions of him.

It was, he had to admit it, quite a bloody shock.

Fuck that, it was a bone fide bloody revelation! He was beautiful! With all his faults! With all the encroachments of ageing! He, John Dillon, was A Beautiful Man. A beautiful fifty-six year old man.

The face in the mirror smiled at him, the blue eyes glinting.

He suddenly felt like either shedding a quiet tear, here on his own with the mirror and his Scotch, or finding himself someone to agree to go to bed with him, someone upon whom he could try out his "new" beautiful body.

His smile widened and he realised neither option would come to pass this night. Although the quiet tears he felt tempted to shed would have been happy ones, he acknowledged that he could save them for another time, perhaps some time when he was feeling at a lower emotional ebb than he felt at this moment. He realised, also, that he didn't mind too much the thought of lying in his bed on his own tonight. The thought of stripping naked now and stretching his long limbs out between the cool cotton sheets of the king sized bed, feeling fully cognisant of the Self that lived within his frame and within his skin… that didn't sound too bad at all.

Not bad at fucking all.

***

'Karaoke?' The face that looked out of the makeup mirror was half John Dillon and half Fizar Nomere, but the voice was definitely, no mistaking it, that of the former. 'You must be fucking kidding me.'

From the next chair, Bradley Rice smirked into the long mirror and shook his head, causing a frustrated sound to emanate from the fussy man whose job it was to try and remove Brad's makeup and hair piece. 'Aw, c'mon John! It's fun! The kids are coming this time, too! A proper Zero Gen crew chorus!'

John shuddered theatrically. 'I can't stand fucking karaoke. I'm serious, Brad, I think the entire concept is a pox on the modern word. You realise it's probably all some elaborate joke the Japanese came up with in order to make fools of Western tourists, don't you? It's all just an exercise in humiliation – just like those fucking game shows of theirs where people dangle their testicles in tubs of scorpions while a midget paddles their arse with a 2-by-4 with nails through it. I don't know how anyone professes to find the ordeal "fun" in the slightest…'

Brad waited for the tirade to peter out ever so slightly before speaking again. 'So… you coming, or what?'

John sighed very heavily. 'If everyone else is. I suppose I'd look like an utter killjoy if I skived off.'

'I knew you'd come around!'

'No fucking singing though!' John pointed into the mirror at Brad's reflection. 'I mean it. If any fucker thinks it'd be funny to put my name up for any bloody singing, I'll eviscerate them. Worse! I'll make it my life's work to find an humiliation of equal evilness for them. I'm not joking, Bradley. I'll be an utter cunt to anyone who tries to make me sing. Is that clear?'

'Erm.' The broad smile dripped off Brad's face. 'Crystal.'

The older actor settled a little in his makeup chair. 'Fine, then. Are we meeting in the hotel lobby?'

Brad stood up as the last of his character was wiped away from his visage. 'Er, yeah. Sevenish. See you.' He exited the makeup trailer as fast as he could.

John and both of the makeup assistants dissolved into fits of chuckles after he'd gone, the one who'd been working on Brad making a half-mocking "Tsk, tsk, tsk" sound as he waggled a plump finger at John's reflection.

***

'Does anybody honestly think it's appropriate for one of the kids to be singing an Eminem song?' Priscilla Fidelis waved her cocktail around in the air as she addressed no one in particular.

'Oh, come on, Priscilla!' Jake smirked at her. 'It's not just plain ol' Eminem anymore, you know. You have to call him by his full title now. It's "Academy Award Copyright Winner Eminem", isn't it?'

The table of actors all roared with laughter, then promptly tried to calm themselves just in case Christopher, alone up on the tiny stage, might think they were laughing at his singing.

'Anyway,' said John Dillon rather wistfully, 'this song's actually quite nice…'

Christopher finished his song and the karaoke bar crackled with applause. Smiling shyly, the tall Australian lurched back to his seat and his friends and a pint of icy cola that he grasped thankfully. Priscilla stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray at the centre of the table as the compére announced her name and song of choice – "You Don't Own Me".

By the first chorus, every customer in the bar was staring, dumbstruck, at the shiny stage. For a woman noted in the tabloids and women's mags for hardly ever being photographed without a smoke hanging out of her mouth, Priscilla Fidelis had a set of lungs on her that would put most town criers to shame. When her song finished, there were already four sparkling fresh drinks sitting at her spot on the table, and three more were deposited as soon as she resumed her seat – all gifts of various still shell-shocked admirers in attendance.

'My turn!' Evan jumped up from his seat and jogged across the small dancefloor to the stage in his youthful enthusiasm.

'And now!' yelled the karaoke host from wherever it was he was hidden. 'Mr Evan Gallacher with the great Robbie Williams song – How Peculiar!' The audience applauded as the young acting star took the microphone out of its stand and wrapped the cord around his hand a couple of times, grinning his trademark cheeky grin into the room the whole time.

John Dillon leaned in close to JJ's nearest ear. 'How soon before our young Scot turns eighteen now?'

'About six months or so now, I think.'

John nodded as the music for Evan's song began. 'He's growing into a fine young man.'

JJ quickly buried his nose in his beer, glad that Evan's song had started so that he didn't have to respond to John's comment at all.

'Oh, I don't know what to do with you,' Evan sang on the stage, briefly holding his free hand over his eyes so that he could see out to the tables through the spotlights. 'Jesus, what am I gonna do with this crush? Just whack the old man out and get it up against your tush!'

Jake choked slightly and put his beer down on the tabletop with a little more force than he'd intended, as he realised that Evan was looking him square in the eye as he sang.

End of extract.