STRANGE DAYS Scriptment by James Cameron At the beginning of any writing project is the agonizing period in which nebulous ideas dance before the mind's eye like memories of a dream, and vaporous vague shapes take on human form and begin to answer to their names. Trying to will a world into existence. I circle around it, nibbling at the edges, writing notes about the social infrastructure and expounding to no one in particular about the themes of the thing. Then slowly a change happens. Without warning, it becomes easier to write a scene than to write notes about the scene. I start sticking words in the mouths of characters who are still mannequins, forcing them to move and to walk. Slowly their movements become more human. The curve inflects upward, the pace increases. The characters begin to say things in their own words. By the end of this period I'm writing ten pages a day. The last day becomes endless, often stretching round the clock to the following noon. The curve becomes almost vertical as the thing seems to come alive. I become a witness only, a court reporter getting it down as fast as I can. Lenny Nero was born in 1985 when I decided to write a film noir thriller taking place on New Year's Eve 1999. I was fascinated by the dramatic and thematic potentials of the millennium, and the idea of doomsday as a backdrop for the redemption of one individual. At that time I made a few notes, totaling less than five handwritten pages. I called it "The Magic Man," because Lenny can get you anything... like magic. I never got around to writing it, at least not that decade. Eight years of vague ideas, three months of intense pondering, four weeks of writing and a few days of jamming. I had gone up a hill and come down a mountain. Any scene that I couldn't crack right away, I skimmed over and used the novelistic treatment form to sort of mumble through. What you have is at once a kind of pathetic document; it is as long as a script, but messy and undisciplined, full of cheats and glossed-over sections. But it is also an interesting snapshot of formatting a moment in the creative process. So what you are about to read is a flawed document, a work in progress, a detailed study for a painting. But what is remarkable to me when I re-read this, is how parts of it have stood up through the entire process with barely a single word changed, while other parts are almost unrecognizable in the final film. The value of this "scriptment" lies solely in it being presented unchanged, unedited, unpolished. It is the first hurling of paint against the wall in the visualization of a future world and the people in it. Enjoy. James Cameron 1:06 AM, DECEMBER 30, 1999 Blackness. We hear: VOICE Ready? SECOND VOICE Yeah. Boot it. It starts with a burst of bright white static exploding across the darkness. A high singing whine on the audio track gives way to street sounds and rapid breathing. An image wavers and stabilizes: the inside of a car, seen from the backseat in POV. A nervous POV. We're in the car, sitting in the backseat, and we're nervous, the view swinging around, showing the street rolling by outside the windows, then whipping back to the two guys in the front seat. These are not happy well-adjusted men. They're hyperventilating and red-eyed like a couple of lab rats in an electroshock experiment. They want the cheese so bad they can taste it but you just know they're going to get their little pink paws fried. The driver is a Hispanic guy named "SPAZ" DIAZ. The guy riding shotgun is a white guy, LANE, who looks very strung out. Couple of crackheads. The car, from what we can see, is a mid-seventies barge, piebald with primer. They are talking almost nonstop, cranked up and tense. Lane pulls a pantyhose over his head, smearing his features into a pig-like mask. He hands one back to us. Our POV looks down, into the pantyhose, which comes up over our field of view. We realize: this is not some ride-along verite video. WE ARE ONE OF THESE GUYS. Real honest-to-God point of view, with no cuts, no music. This is not film, it is human experience. Now the three of us are arguing over who should have which gun. We hear OUR VOICE whining about the 12 gauge. Lane turns DIRECTLY TO THE LENS, pissed off. LANE Lewis, you pussy. You don't want the pump, you don't have to use the pump. You want the nine millimeter? LEWIS (OUR VOICE) Uh uh. I never get to use the magnum. Spaz always uses it. LANE Well Spaz is stayin' in the car, so you want to use the .44 you can use it. Gimme that thing! Lane snatches the shotgun from us and hands over a big stainless steel revolver. Our hand takes it. The POV looks down as our shaky hands snap open the cylinder, check the rounds, snap it closed. LANE Buncha fuckin' woman. Okay, pull in up here. The alley, right here -- THIS FUCKING ALLEY! We rock forward as Spaz brakes suddenly. He curses in Spanish and backs up, then turns into an alley. The headlights illuminate overflowing dumpsters, trash everywhere. Lane tells Spaz to take it slow. Then he points to an open door up ahead. There it is. A Chicano in a filthy busboy uniform comes out the door, which is an island of light in the dark alley, carrying produce trays heaped with garbage. He glances over his shoulder at the headlights as he heads for the nearest dumpster. The busboy goes back inside, his arms full of trays and unable to close the door. Lane says let's go and we are on the move. Out of the car, quickly, our own breathing loud in our ears. We even hear our own heartbeat, racing now. Through the door, after Lane, moving fast. Into the kitchen. Bright fluorescent glare. The busboy turning, surprised, Lane putting the shotgun in his face. Freezing him. Lane puts a finger to his lips: "quiet" in any language. We (Lewis) show the magnum to the COOK... a young Thai man, thin as a whippet. We get them down on the greasy floor, Lane controlling them with the shotgun. He looks at us, snaps his eyes toward the front room of the restaurant. We hear voices as we approach the swing door. Go through. Whip pan left, then right. Scoping the layout. Low-rent Thai place. Red wallpaper. Middle-aged Thai man, the OWNER, by the cash register, counting money and writing out his deposit slips. Young Thai WAITRESS, straightening up. the place is empty of customers, as planned. The doors locked. The owner and the waitress look up, stunned, as we put the guns on them. We hear our voice shouting "Don't move! Keep your hands where I can see 'em!" etc. Controlling the situation. POV is whipping around, from the front door to the owner to the kitchen where Lane is standing in the doorway covering the cook and busboy, back to the owner as he steps back from the cash register. With one hand we scoop up the big wad of bills. POV looking at it. Seven, eight hundred bucks in tens and fives. Now shouting, herding the owner and the terrified waitress into the kitchen, the owner chirping rapidly in sing-songy Thai. Telling the girl to be calm and do what they say. Lane shouting at him to shut up. Into the walk-in cooler with them. Four scared pairs of eyes as the steel door closes. POV looking around, scanning for something. Sees silverware in the dish-rack and our hands pull out a spoon, drops the spoon handle through the hole in the cooler door-latch. Locking them in. Lane heading out the back door. Laughing, as he looks at the wad of cash our hand is waving in front of him. We follow Lane to the car. Snap a look down the alley one way, then the other. Shit! Cop Black-and-White pulling into the far end of the alley. Heartbeat goes tripletime. Scrambling into the car. Lane yelling something about a silent alarm. Door not even closed and Spaz has it in reverse, burning rubber as he launches back down the alley. SCRRUNCH! The car grinds along one wall as Spaz steers wildly backward. Sparks right next to us. Then-- KBOOM! as we slam backwards into a dumpster and push it right out into the street. The cop has his lights and siren on and is roaring at us as Spaz cranks the wheel and punches it down the street. We hear the engine roaring. Spaz cursing in English and Spanish as he weaves between cars. We pull off the stocking to see better. Looking back. The cop surges onto the street behind us. Looking ahead. A red light. Cars stopped, blocking the way. Cutting to the right, onto the sidewalk, around the cars, into the intersection. A near miss with cross traffic, then accelerating. Another red light ahead. Lane yelling don't stop! Truck entering the intersection. Everyone yelling. Spaz cuts the wheel but too late... Clipping the truck and spinning. The street outside smearing past like the view from a Tilt-a-Whirl. Then KBLAM! Hitting something, God-knows-what, and launching up and over, and-- KRUNCH! Crushing metal and an explosion of broken glass. It gets quiet and still. Tinkling glass as Lane moves. A beat. Then Spaz is screaming. We see the car is upside down. Crawling out the side window. A frenzy now. Whip pan to see the cops pulling up. Then whipping back to the wreck. The engine is burning. Flames spreading rapidly. Spaz inside, pinned, upside down. Screaming. Blood pumping across his face. Our hands pulling Lane out. He comes up running. We run after him... Sprinting toward the welcoming darkness of an alley. Panting breath and heartbeats and sirens and somebody yelling. Gunshots. Looking back. Cops next to their car, firing. Ahead, Lane running into shadow. Then a door opening, a man coming out of a metal firedoor. Lane grabbing him, throwing him out of the way, holding the door open as we dive through into-- A stairwell. Lane sprinting up, two steps at a time. Metal stairs clanging. Trying the door at the second floor landing. Locked.shit. Running up. Dizzying whirl as we run, up and up. The POV is finally broken by a CUT TO: A man in extreme closeup, just seeing his eyes and mouth. The eyes are closed, the eyeballs tracking under the lids, like he is watching a movie in there. This is LENNY. LENNY This is great... the doors are all locked. Who are these losers? Friends a yours? BACK TO POV as we reach the fifth floor landing. Lane is coming unglued as he finds this door locked. He pounds it in frustration. We look down, see cops coming two floors below. One cranks off a couple rounds at us and we snap back from the railing. Pounding up the last flight. Finally! The door is unlocked. Blasting through it, behind Lane, onto the roof. Running all out past AC units and pipes, air vents. Looking up: an LAPD helicopter orbiting close. It flicks the xenon onto us and we are running in a vibrating circle of blue daylight. Running along the edge of the roof. Looking down. Car burning upside down in the street below. The gas tank explodes, filling the street with orange light. We don't slow. We're running all out. LENNY (V.O.) Wow... the gas tank is a nice touch. Oh, oh, end a the line, boys. Ahead, in POV we see the edge of the roof coming up. Beyond it is another building, about ten feet lower and separated by a 20-foot alley. But Lane doesn't slow down. He leaps out across the void and makes it to the other building, landing in a sprawl. We reach the edge and look down. Six stories. No ladders or fire-escapes. Whip to behind us. Cops running across the roof. Lane yelling, "Come on, Lewis! Fucking jump, man!" The POV backs up from the edge and then runs toward it... Out into the void. Holy shit... airborne. Then-- WHAM! Right in the parapet wall. Slipping down. Brick wall right in our face. Looking up... bloody fingers holding onto a rusty piece of pipe running along the edge. Looking down... feet dangling over a 60-foot drop. A cat walking through a patch of light in the alley below, oblivious. Breathing rough and raspy, desperate grunts. Snapping a look up as the pipe is giving way. A keening whine coming from us as we scramble to climb up but-- The pipe wrenches loose and-- Snapping a look down-- Walls rushing past, sound of wind, and our own raspy scream-- Ground rushing up-- Split-second impression of a cat, looking up, yowling and running out of the way as-- Pavement fills frame. A burst of violent red light. Sounds like a gunshot... but no echo. Only silence. And Blackness. CUT TO Lenny. We see a little more. He has something on his head. Something that looks like a mutated set of Walkman headphones, except they have little gecko fingers that fit along the temples and over the forehead. Playback trodes. Lenny whips off the trodes, his eyes snapping open. He is suddenly gasping for breath, like he got gunpunched. And his upbeat mood has changed. LENNY What the fuck is this? Goddammit! You know I don't deal in snuff. Christ. How many time I hafta tell you? Lenny is with a guy named TODD COYLE, though everybody on the street calls him "TICK." Tick is a pale-skinned creature of the night. Long greasy hair, T-shirt and leather jacket. Some cheap tattoos. Not a class act. TICK Don't have a fucking coronary. I just thought you might be interested, is all. LENNY You could've at least warned me. I just hate the zap... you know, when they die. It just brings down your whole day. Jeez, Tick. TICK Sorry. LENNY NERO is low thirties. Handsome. Charming. And somehow you want to check to see if you still have your ring after you shake with him. He is wearing as expensive Italian jacket, and what he thinks of as a "power tie." His Rolex isn't real. His greasy hair is too long and curls around his collar. He needs to shave. There is an aura of sleaze around him. Like a car salesman. Or a junior agent. But he has energy, this guy, and plenty of streetsmarts. They are in a deserted underground parking garage, lit by miles of fluorescents. Lenny is sitting on the hood of his '97 BMW 1035i. Tick is facing him, sitting in the back door of his beat-to-shit 70's van. There are a lot of tapes and tech stuff piled inside the van. Lenny has a Haliburton case often next to him, like a drug dealer. In fact the whole setup looks like a drug deal, but it's not. Though it is illegal. The case holds Lenny's personal playback deck, his trodes, and a rack of the little tapes in which he deals. They are about the size of DAT tapes, and hold about 30 minutes of sensory experience... everything a person sees, hears, and feels... recorded directly from the cerebral cortex at the moment it is happening. LENNY How'd you get the tape? Why didn't the cops put it in evidence? TICK Fuckin' moron cops didn't even know the guy was wearin'. I guess his head kinda, uh... popped... when he hit, and with all the blood they didn't see the rig. Maybe he had it under a wig or something. LENNY Yeah, but how'd it get to you? TICK I got ways, Lenny, I got ways. S'why you like me so much, right? LENNY (patiently) That's right, Tick. That's why I like you so much. TICK Okay, I got a deal with some a the paramedics and one a them found the rig on the way in, you know, workin' on the guy. Paged me and I picked it up down at the morgue. Hadda give 'im five hundred for the record-deck, even though it was pretty banged up. He didn't have a playback-deck so he didn't know what was on the tape. Whadda moron. This piece a tape's worth more than the deck. Right? I mean, it's gotta be worth at least a grand. LENNY Tick. Not to dash your hopes, but I don't deal this kinda product, you know that. I'll give you four for it, cause I've gotta cut off the last bit. And my customers don't like edits. They want uncut. TICK Fuck that. The last part is the best. You dry-dive six stories and whammo -- check-out time. Jackin' into the Big Black, baby. The great beyond. That's what people want to see, and you know it, so don't be doggin' me. LENNY Look, I just don't deal it. No black-jack clips. It's policy. Got it? Sell it to somebody else. TICK You think I can't? I know lotsa people. LENNY Whatever. TICK Come on, Lenny. I got expenses. I gotta get this rig fixed... look at it, man... the blood's all inside, on the chips and everything. Tick holds up a Ziploc bag containing a Walkman-sized stainless steel CORTICAL RESONANCE RECORDER, or record deck, with a wire running to the SQUID ARRAY, a matrix of sensors designed to conform to the human head (this looks much more complex than the playback trodes). The whole works are covered with congealed blood. The surgical tape which held the recorder to the wearer's body is still plastered to it. Some chest hairs are still stuck to the surgical tape. (SQUID stands for Superconducting QUantum Interface Device, but more on this later.) TICK Gimme six at least. come on, man, it's the master. this ain't no stepped-on copy. You know you can make ten dupes and move 'em all. This's a good clip, here. You were sayin' so yourself while you were playin' back. Gets you pumpin'. LENNY Yeah, well, the first part's okay. Better'n the usual soaps you bring me. TICK Now that is cold, Lenny. I always bring you choice Lenny fishes around in a cardboard box at Tick's feet, pulling out a tape. LENNY Yeah, like this low-grade shit here, some girl in a fight with her boyfriend... it's a test-pattern. Nothing happens. I'm snorin'. TICK Hey, you're always saying, "Bring me real life. Bring me street life. And, Like, one man's mundane and desperate existence is another man's Technicolor." LENNY I said that? look, I'll take it for five, and you'll make out okay, because in this case it's pure cream, you don't have to cut anything back to the wearer, which I know for a fact. TICK Ha! That's for fucking sure. LENNY Okay. What else you got? CUT TO: Next we see Lenny on the move, driving through the streets of LA in his BMW. The streetlights and neon flare across the windshield in a calligraphy of light. It is seven years from now. Things look pretty much the same. The newer cars are smaller, more cab-forward, but they look like cars. The people on the street aren't wearing silver lame jumpsuits. Clothes look like clothes. No radical new styles. The economy is worse. The jobless rate is up. New housing is down. All the indicators are creeping steadily into the red, as they have for most of our lives. California, the Shake 'n Bake state, is still mailing out IOU's and waiting for the Big One to make Barstow into beachfront property. The freeways are a nightmare of gridlock, with smaller cars packed closer and closer together. Gas is over three bucks a gallon. Unemployment and inflation are way up. Real estate agents have the highest suicide rate in the country. The Mexicans are going back to Mexico, because it's not looking so bad anymore. The visible changes are not radical but incremental. More gang graffiti, more homeless wandering the street, more businesses closed, more burned-out buildings. Racial and class tensions are higher than ever. The city seems constantly on the verge of chaos and martial law, a legacy of social dysfunction which has grown steadily worse since the eighties. Pressure seem to be building for an upheaval which will dwarf the Spring riots of '92. The city is wound tight. The future... tense. But people still go to work, to movies, to restaurants. It's business as usual in the big city. The really big changes are all behind the scenes, in high technology, in telecommunications, in the way it's all wired up. And the average guy is barely aware of these changes. They seep into his consciousness as the new toys hit the consumer market and the new technologies become part of life. The way thing like lap-top computers and cellular phones go from novelties to basics in two or three years. The technology that Lenny deals in is still illegal. Developed in the mid-nineties, the CORTICAL RECORDER was created for surveillance applications and used by the intelligence community, initially. Use of these "SQUID RIGS" quickly spread to the FBI, DEA, Treasury Department, and other Federal law enforcement agencies, for use in undercover and sting operations, replacing the old audio- only "body wire." The "headwire" turns the "wearer" into a human video camera, providing images and sounds directly from the eyes and ears of the undercover agent. In the last couple of years it has trickled down to widespread use in urban police departments, and has been approved for psychologists to use in therapy. The courts argued over the admissibility of cortical recordings as evidence. But it was decided that they were more reliable than video and audio recordings, since advances in digital technology have made it easy to alter video images and sounds undetectably. So far the technology does not exist to manipulate or falsify the cortical recordings. They can be copied, with a significant loss of quality, but basically what you see is what happened. Lenny has the radio on. The KXXX's talk radio host is hyping a big blow-out street-party which will happen tomorrow night... New Year's Eve. They're closing down six square blocks downtown, by the Bonaventure Hotel, to celebrate the city's transition into the new millennium. It'll be like Mardi Gras, with food, music, dancing and general madness. Talk radio host calls it the party of the century. Because this is 1999. And tomorrow night, Friday, December 31st, will be the last night of the twentieth century. The next day the date will be January 1, 2000 The Big 2K. Out with the last thousand years, in with the next. Civilization will lurch into its third millennium. The start of the Trillennium, you could call it. There is a strange hysteria pervading the city, and most of the Western world, as the new year approaches. A mixture of jubilation and dread. All the religious cranks have come out of the woodwork, claiming the advent of the Last Days, the Apocalypse, with various forms of the death and destruction to arrive at midnight, when the calendar rolls around to the year 2000. Thousands have gathered in the desert for a Rapture, having sold or given away their worldly possessions. There is a madness upon the land. People chant on the streetcorners. There are threats of war worldwide, famines and natural disasters. Wars and rumors of wars. Any given moment in history always seems to fit the Biblical description of the Last Days so it's not hard for the zealots to get everyone whipped up. It's hard to distinguish the particular millennial madness from the day to day madness of street-life in LA seven years from now. Riots are a common occurrence. Drive-by shootings are so prevalent that in some areas the dead sometimes lie in the street unattended. Choppers circle constantly. Fires burn here and there almost all the time. You can drive past whole streets and neighborhoods devastated by violence. In places it looks like Beirut. But of course, life goes on. Kids play among the ruins. Civic leaders are overwhelmed. Their social and economic recovery plans aren't working. As the millennium approaches, they feel more and more like they are just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Cops are tough, and less interested than ever in civil, or even human rights. Lenny's kind of crime is the least of their worries. He inhabits a kind of gray zone anyway, invading people's privacy certainly, but the laws are unclear about the new technology and as long as he keeps a low profile the cops stay off his ass. The history of the nineties in LA and most urban areas is the history of the decline of the infrastructure. By 1999 private security has replaced the police in most affluent areas as the protective membrane against crime. A condom against the virus of violence. There has been a proliferation of private security services, patrols, bodyguards, and computerized alarm systems. There are computerized car alarms and even personal (portable) digital alarm systems, carried in a purse or coat pocket, which are tied into a digital cellular network. Hit a button and your distress signal pops up on a screen, showing location, and nature of threat, if you have time to enter it... allowing the security service to dispatch an armed response unit. It has become common for middle-income people to use security drivers, driving taxi-like armored cars, to get around... especially at night. Security is the biggest growth industry in LA, and all urban areas in the US. The court system is collapsing under the weight of rampant street crime, cops are understaffed and underfunded, frustrated and mean, alienated from the communities they protect. They have become like US soldiers in Vietnam, unable to tell the enemy for the populace they are there to defend. Private security protects only those able to pay. Obviously these services are not available to the poor. They are on their own, like always. Safety is no longer the right of all citizens, but a luxury for the haves. The have-nots are worse off than ever. If you want to sum up the history of the next seven years: things got bad for a while. Then, they got worse. As parts of LA burn, the rich party on in Beverly Hills and Bel Air, and the upper-middle-class burghers huddle in their newly gated communities in the hills of Encino and Calabasas. More and more expensive neighborhoods are retreating behind steel gates. Setting up their own guarded perimeters, and patrols. And everyone watches and is watched. LAPD Aerospatiale helicopters circle, looking down with their infrared cameras. There are crime-prevention cameras on many streetcorners, to extend the visual reach of the police. There are security cameras in malls, cameras in office buildings, cameras in banks, cameras in schools, cameras in convenience stores, even citizen patrols with handycams. The cops use handycams, fighting fire with fire, when they shake somebody down on the street... because nobody, including the courts, trust their word anymore. And there is a rise in drive-by shootings of people walking with cameras, and action news cameramen... as if the gangs are putting out a message: no pictures. The social battles of the video age are fought with images, not guns. Reality shows and amateur video shows dominate TV programming. It is the age of scopophilia, voyeurism, and vicarious living. The mania for amateur porn, starting in the early nineties, has steadily increased. We like to watch. It is a surveillance culture. Lenny, we will come to find out, is an ex-cop. He worked the street in uniform for the requisite minimum, but his talent for hustling and role-playing quickly landed him a job in Vice. He found himself attracted to the electronic surveillance team. Lenny wanted out of Vice so he slid into the surveillance team, doing "wire" work and bugging for Narco, Homicide, etc. He couldn't stand Vice anymore... all that jumping out of closets with a tape recorder the second the girl asks for the money, busting crack addict hookers, the weird scenes with S and M, B and D, getting dragged daily through the gutter of human sexual dysfunction. Surveillance team took him into a new realm, snooping on people's private lives, getting inside their heads. It appealed to his basically voyeuristic nature... he found he liked it, and had a talent for it. That's where he first saw the "squids." He learned to "wire" himself and others with concealed squid rigs, taping the recorders to the small of his back, or under the balls, and covering the squid array with wigs, hairpieces, baseball caps. Something happened on a big narcotics sting that he doesn't like to talk about. He left the LAPD under a cloud, and has been a civilian for almost two years. He now inhabits a social sphere composed primarily of street hustlers whose primary motivation is survival... hookers, druggies, post-punk criminal outsiders, anarchists, black marketeers and assorted high-tech low- life: hackers, cyberpunks, wireheads and input junkies. But with a little charm and a well-chosen wardrobe, he also accesses the social strata on which he feeds... the rich. At parties, at nightclubs, he curries a select clientele to whom he sells his illicit wares... bootleg experiences, slices of other people's lives, vicarious thrills for the jaded and insulated elite. He is to them what the coke dealer was in the early eighties. A backdoor friend. A tolerated sleazebag, who somehow connoted a kind of dangerous hipness by his presence. Lenny is on his cellular, setting up a meeting later with a client. Some doctor. Lenny says he has to make a stop first, then he'll come by the guy's house. He makes another call to somebody, promising to pay them what he owes after the first of the year, things are crazy right now. Lenny is an operator. A fast-talking salesman, scam artist. Hustler. A dealer. He is a creature of the moment. Not a planner. To him the city is like a big coral reef... a big food chain. Alive and dynamic. A place where a fast fish can eat and avoid being eaten. Lenny's great gift is insight into human nature. He twists it and uses it to manipulate people and situations, but it is a great and rare talent. Because it is a compassionate insight. The talent of a world-class psychiatrist or bartender or hooker -- the ability to see into people, to say to them what they may not even be able to say to themselves. He knows about longing and desire, pain and frustration. He knows what people want, what their subconscious minds want, and why they do things. He knows the importance of fantasy and of seeing through other eyes. To him it is not scopophilic, or voyeuristic, but a search for understanding, enlightenment, knowledge. This is the serious side of him, the side he hides with humor, the side that fuels his scams and is simultaneously the key to his redemption. The talent made him good at his job as a Vice dick, but ultimately he saw the total hypocrisy of his work. He was good at something he couldn't stand doing. He couldn't be a Vice cop anymore because he couldn't make the bad guys be bad guys in his head anymore... couldn't do his job. He just saw a lot of people wanting something which worked for them, even though it may not have been the panacea of missionary heterosexual sex which mainstream "surface" culture prescribed, even though it may be a path which caused them pain and humiliation. Christlike, in a strange way, he understands all, forgives all. Lenny driving gives us a snapshot of the exact moment in history the story is taking place... the date, the time, the city, and the energy building to the New Year. We see Christmas lights still up. Santa Clauses on the lamp-posts in Beverly Hills. We hear the talk radio host giving us a manic connection to the world we know now. This is not some wild Bladerunner future, but our future. The future we're going to be living in all too soon. Outside the windows we see street-life... and in the distance, fires lighting the sky. The chirping radio keeps the dread of the impending Apocalypse at bay. CUT TO: A woman's feet moving along the steel rail of a train track at night. The woman has no shoes, and her stockings are ripped, her feet half bare. Red painted toenails almost black in the cold light from distant mercury-vapor lights. IRIS runs along the track, stepping off once in a while as she loses her balance. she clutches one shoe pointlessly to her chest. She is swearing and crying. The latter has run her heavy mascara, leaving two tragic streaks down her pale face. Despite this we see that she is attractive, though her dress and make-up seem designed to convey overt sexiness. Her white skin is complemented by a wild mane of curly red hair. She is in her twenties, and the harshness of her life has just begun to harden her features. Especially around the eyes. On top of this is layered the terror of the present moment. She looks lost and without hope, in fear of her life. Her breath comes in hitching sobs, and her eyes are wild like those of a wounded deer. She runs through a train yard, between the cold steel walls of freight cars, looking behind her frequently. As if she is being pursued. Her breath hangs cold in the December air, and she hugs herself in her thin dress, clutching her single high-heel under her arm. Behind her, in the sky, a police helicopter is circling. Its xenon beam plays over the train yard, sweeping over the cars. She hunches into the shadows of a freight-car as the beam passes over. Looking under the cars she sees an LAPD patrol car cruising down a street adjoining the yard, its searchlight sweeping toward her. It moves on. She continues her run, moving away from the direction of the patrol car. She runs down an embankment in the dark, gravel hurting her feet, and climbs through bushes which slash at her. Her run becomes a frenzy. She reaches a chain-link fence. Crying, she scrambles over it, cutting her hands and ripping her dress. Another patrol car passes two blocks away. She crouches in the tall grass until it rounds a corner out of sight. Iris sprints down an alley between buildings. Rats run over cardboard boxes of garbage, scattering into the shadows ahead of her. She doesn't seem to notice. All she cares about are the lights, the police lights, and the sound of the helicopter droning, circling. She pauses at the mouth of the alley, scanning the well- lit street beyond. There are people here, though they are mostly downtown low-life street people. Across the road and up a half-block is a brightly lit sign marking the entrance to a Red-Line subway station. She walks along the sidewalk toward the sign. It is like a sanctuary. She keeps her eyes off the sign, feeling exposed as she walks openly, her heart pounding. She is a mess, but in this section of town people barely glance at her. LOW ANGLE on her bare feet, standing out amid the shoes and boots of winter. SHE CROSSES the street, and reaches the sidewalk just as a Black-and-White rounds the corner at the end of the block, behind her. IN THE CRUISER are TWO COPS, who are scanning the street. They look intense. Revved up. They are BURTON STECKLER, a massive, barrel-chested street-lifer in his mid-forties, and DWAYNE ENGELMAN, an aggressive hard-on in his twenties with a brush cut, a Nautilus body, and a face like a ferret. She's a hooker, Engelman says. Vice'll have her in the book. We can pick her up later. No, Steckler replies. Now. His eyes are cold as he scans the pedestrians. IRIS knows the cops are behind her. She is terrified to turn. Finally she can't stand it any more. She breaks into a run. The patrol car speeds up suddenly, roaring after her. Iris sprints along in her bare feet, all-out like a track runner. The Black-and-White screeches to the curb next to her. The doors fly open and the two cops jump out. Iris hits the stairs down to the subway station at a full- tilt boogie, knocking down some poor old guy whose groceries go flying. She trips on the landing, spins sprawling across the filthy tile floor, and comes up running. Panting with fear and exertion she clears the turnstyles like a hurdler. The cops pound down the stair two at a time. Steckler draws his 9mm. In his eyes we see an unaccountable craziness... the feral gleam of a hunter who has as much at stake somehow as the prey. Street people fall back as Steckler thunders through them. They aren't about to get in the way of this juggernaut cop and his boy wonder. The two cops reach the platform. No Iris in sight. MOVING WITH THEM as they slow to a walk, scanning. A couple of low-lifes standing around, waiting for trains, eye them warily. Step back. Engelman gets a call on his Rover, asking if they need backup. He says they have lost the suspect, and inexplicably gives the description as a black male. Tells the dispatcher everything is fine. A train pulls into the station with a woosh of air. The few people board. The platform is empty. There is only the sound of the cop's footsteps as they move along. With a pneumatic hiss the train's doors begin to close. Suddenly Iris breaks from behind a column up ahead at a full sprint. Steckler unleashes his size 13 cop shoes, thundering along the platform to intercept her. Engelman has straight-armed his pistol, yelling FREEZE! which of course she has no intention of doing. Iris clears the doors just as they hiss shut, forcing herself through. Her momentum carries her clear across the car, where she slams into the far wall and staggers back, almost falling. She gasps for breath and looks up to see Steckler crash against the outside of the doors she just came through. The train start to move. Steckler tries to force the doors apart... can't. He aims his gun through the window. Thinking fast Iris dives to his side of the car and presses herself up against the solid wall next to the door, where he can't see her. OUTSIDE, Steckler is running next to the accelerating train. He swings his pistol in a back-hand hammer blow, smashing the window with the butt. Iris screams as Steckler lunges through the opening next to her like some uniformed nightmare and grabs her. He is still running alongside pulling on her. Trying to drag her right out through the window. She struggles. Bites his beefy hand. He swears and lets go. Then makes one last grab... Gets his fingers into her long mane of hair. Yanks on her. She comes half out the window, screaming. Then... RIP! The hair pulls off her head. Steckler drops away, behind the speeding train, holding a red-haired wig in one hand. He looks at it stupidly for a second, then raises his pistol and fires at Iris. She jerks back through the window and drops to the floor. A couple of shots hit the metal outside. Iris has short hair, platinum white. In it are a few of the many pins which held the wig securely in place. She gasps for air in great shaky sobs. She hugs her knees and sits on the floor trembling, catching her breath. STECKLER STANDS on the platform, watching the train disappear, as Engelman runs up. Steckler looks at the wig in his hand, disgusted. Then he notices a fine wire dangling from it. He turns it in his hand and looks inside, at the cap. CLOSE ON THE CAP inside the wig: there is an intricate network of sensors in a grid over the entire underside of the wig. The sensors are connected by wires, in a pattern like the veins of a leaf, bundling to a small, flat metal box, the size of a cigarette case. It is a SQUID NET. The sensor array of a cortical recorder. Iris was Wired. Steckler just stares at it, his eyes going crazy wide. Engelman realizes what it is and blanches. Oh shit, he says. IT'S 4 AM. Lenny trudges up to the entrance to his apartment building. It is a two-story stucco place, built in the sixties. Upgraded in recent years with heavy security gates and bars on the windows, neither of which help its already drab design. He uses a worn key-card to release the solenoid lock at the front gate. There is no response. He tries it again. Nothing. Frustrated, he pulls on the steel bars. The gate opens. He notices that the lock has been forced with a crowbar, leaving useless twisted metal. Great. He walks across the center court of the ratty building. The pool furniture is in the pool. Leaves floating on top. Graffiti marks the walls. Gang tags. One of the doors looks like somebody opened it with an axe. The pool lights give the place an eerie, dead glow. Can our slick Lenny really live in this dump? Through a barred window we see Lenny approaching. The sound of Lenny's OUTGOING MESSAGE is heard and we see his answering machine in the F.G. The beep. We hear a woman's voice... Iris. She is begging him to pick up. Through the window we see Lenny fishing in his pocket for his keys. CUT TO Iris at a payphone in the cold light of an all- night gas station. She tells Lenny she's in trouble and she really needs to talk to him. There's no one else she can trust. It's really important. She needs his help. INSIDE LENNY'S place, Iris' voice finishes the message just as Lenny unlocks the door and comes in. All he hears is that she'll call him back later. He picks up the phone. Hears the click of her hang up. IRIS rests her hand on the phone, hanging in its cradle. She seems dazed, deflated, out of options. She looks around nervously, scanning the street. No cops in sight. She fishes in the purse on her belt for some more quarters. Feeds them into the phone and dials. She takes a deep breath, listening to it ring. LENNY doesn't stop to play back Iris' message, or any of the twenty others on his machine. He just deadbolts the door and locks a steel bar across the doorframe. Lenny sets down his Haliburton and crosses the room toward the kitchen. He becomes more stealthy in his movements... like he's sneaking up on the kitchen. He silently opens a drawer and reaches inside. His hand comes out holding a gun. He reaches for the light... and snaps it on suddenly. In the light half a dozen cockroaches freeze in or near the sink, which is piled up with a weeks worth of dirty dishes. Lenny aims his weapon swiftly. SPANG! A suction-cup tipped plastic dart splatters one of the beasts against the tile behind the sink. Lenny cheers like his team just scored. He lives for this. We see the truth of his reality. Lenny's crib is a shit-box. It is a standard one-bedroom, barely furnished. A couple of chairs. Swap meet couch. No art, no personal touches on the walls. There are cardboard boxes full of tech gear stacked in the corners. Some unidentified electronics components are piled on a table, with cables strung across the floor and into the bedroom. God knows what this stuff is. There is aluminum foil taped to all the windows. Fast food cartons, empty Coke cans, pizza boxes, etc. are everywhere. The fridge, revealed when he gets some ice for the vodka he pours himself, contains almost nothing edible. This is the bachelor apartment from hell. High-tech low-life. He goes into the bedroom. There is a mattress on the floor. Clothes strewn everywhere. More boxes. More electronic gear, on a shelf made from a board laid across two cinder blocks. The room is dominated by racks of tapes... squid tapes. The apartment is a place where Lenny sleeps, and that's all. His life is outside, on the street. His car and his clothes are all he has. He is living in a balloon... an illusion he creates for others. Lenny takes off his clothes and hangs them over a chair. He sits on the bed in his underwear, looking now lonely and depressed. This is the private Lenny, who has dropped his street face. He lives from day to day, in the energy of the moment, and when the day is over... he has nothing. No plans. No dreams. Nothing to look forward to but another day of the hustle. He sits cross-legged on the bed with his back against the wall. Then he takes a cortical playback deck from the floor next to him and sets it on the bed. He raises the trode-set and places it carefully on his head. He fishes around in a shoebox among a bunch of tapes, squinting at the hand-written dates and descriptions. We can't read much of his scrawl, but what all the tapes in the box seem to have in common is the word FAITH, printed on them clearly. He selects one and inserts it in the deck. Makes some minute adjustments. Like an audiophile tweaking the EQ. Then he rests his finger on the PLAY button. Sips his vodka. Leans back. Closes his eyes. And hits PLAY. PLAYBACK SEQUENCE/POV: We are moving along the Venice boardwalk, following a YOUNG WOMAN on rollerblades. By our motion, it is obvious that we are on rollerblades too, and not doing so well. The woman is laughing, turning circles around us, cracking up at our discomfort. We hear Lenny's voice complaining a mile a minute, and we realize the POV is his. The girl takes our hands, skating backward, towing us along the boardwalk. It is a sunny afternoon, and it is the usual boardwalk freak-show all around us. The woman is FAITH JUSTIN, but lately she just goes by FAITH (like Cher, Madonna, etc.). She is a singer, and Lenny is desperately in love with her. It's not hard to see why. She is beautiful, in an alive, dynamic way. Her hair is a wild dark mane, and her eyes are spectacular... intense. She moves with a lithe, sinuous grace. She is dressed in shorts and a halter top, showing lots of her ivory skin. We are staring at her eyes instead of concentrating on skating. Whammo! The POV spins and we are sitting, looking up at Faith as she circles, laughing. She skates over to help us up. CUT TO LENNY, on his bed, smiling. We don't know if this tape is from a year ago or yesterday, or where Faith is now. She might be dead, or she might walk in the door. He punches a button on the deck. BACK TO POV. The image goes into a kinetic blur of digital hash... FAST FORWARD. It goes back to normal running speed and we are sitting on the steps of a decrepit stucco apartment building two blocks from the beach, taking off our rollarblades. We get up and follow Faith up the stairs to a second floor apartment. We go inside. It is small and funky. You get the impression they are living together. Music is playing, a disc player she left on. Bob Marley singing "Three Little Birds." Faith, covered with a sheen of sweat, sways to the music as she goes into the bedroom. We follow her. She comes out of the small bathroom with a towel, starts to dry off. We move up behind her and take the towel away. Lenny's voice says he likes her better sweaty. We see Lenny standing behind Faith in the mirror over the dresser. Behind them is the messy, unmade bed. Sunlight comes in the window lighting up Faith like she is in a spotlight. Lenny puts his arms around her and they sway together to the music. He runs his fingers in lazy circles over her sweaty belly. He leans down and licks the sweat off her shoulder, all the while watching her in the mirror. We see past her shoulder to the reflected image of both of them in the mirror. Their eyes meet in the mirror. They both watch as Lenny slides his hand up under her halter and caresses her nipples. She moans softly, responding. She turns to him, and POV shifts directly to her. She is right in front of us, in TIGHT CLOSE UP. The intimacy is powerful. She closes her eyes and gets even closer, kissing Lenny. She opens her eyes, and laughingly busts him for keeping his eyes open during the kiss. She know how visual he is... how that is a big part of his turn on. He looks from her, inches away, back to the mirror, seeing them both together full length... a voyeur recording his voyeurism through his own eyes, so he can replay and relive the moment. Lenny's hands pull her halter over her head. Faith pulls up on Lenny's T-shirt, and we see it go over our eyes, blocking the view for a moment. Faith kisses Lenny's bare chest. We are looking down at her, looking down across our body, Lenny's body, as Faith kisses lower, kneeling in front of us. Faith unbuckles our belt and slowly unbuttons the fly of our jeans. Her hands pull down on the pants and we-- CUT TO LENNY in the here and now. Lost in playback memory bliss. He inhales sharply behind a wave of electronically recorded pleasure. BACK TO POV. Lenny pulls Faith up to his face, kissing her. We lead her to the bed. We lie down together in a pool of sunlight which slashes across the tangled sheets. We see his hands helping her pull off her shorts. We kiss our way down her body, her creamy skin filling our field of view. We look up and see her looking down at us with smiling eyes. We move below her navel and-- CUT TO LENNY, lost in the swirl of sensation. He touches his tongue to his fingertips. IN POV we move back up to her body. Supporting ourselves on straight arms, we look down at her as we enter her. She gasps and closes her eyes, grabbing the headboard with both hands. She rocks with the rhythm of our thrusts. It builds in intensity and she cries out, the tendons in her neck standing out. There is only the sound of gasping breaths, the creaking bed frame. CUT TO LENNY, reliving the past, under the electrodes. He reacts to the past orgasm. The tape ends. Lenny slowly takes off the trodes. There is a tiny tear at the corner of his eye. He seems desolate and very alone in his bleak room. 2:14 PM, DECEMBER 30 Lenny cracks an eye.Looks at the cheap alarm clock sitting on a cardboard box next to his bed. Sunlight comes like lasers through a couple of gaps around the edges of the aluminum foil over the window. TIGHT ON LENNY'S TV coming on. His companion during the "morning" routine. He goes to the fridge in his underwear. Opens it. Nothing for breakfast. On the TV, 90 percent ignored by him, is a news program. Something about a religious cult whose members, which number in the thousands, have given away all their belongings and gathered in the desert near Needles, California, for some kind of Rapture. They all expect to get beamed up on the Eve of Judgment... tomorrow night. The two news anchors at the station do their best to remain professional as they comment on the video clip of people sitting out in the middle of nowhere singing and praying. Lenny finds a raspberry popsicle in the back of the freezer. He has this for breakfast as he goes to the closet and starts picking out his clothes for the day. This is a ceremony he observes carefully. In his closet is a small selection of pretty good clothes. He lays out a shirt and jacket combo. Starts laying ties up against them. Humming to himself. Lenny scowls at the tie he has chosen. Puts it back on the hanger. Gets another. Nods to himself. CUT TO a transformed Lenny, driving through the Thursday evening traffic. It is about five o'clock: dusk. Lenny looks slick... his look dialed-in. This is Lenny on the move. Seizing the day. Talking on the phone, setting up an appointment. We sense that the hustle is what keeps him going... something he needs, that he does well... an immediacy he can immerse himself in. There's money to be made. Dreams to sell. Souls to X- ray. On the radio, we hear a late-breaking story: the bodies of two men found early this morning under the Hollywood freeway have been identified as rap-music artist Jeriko One and another member of his band. The second man was known in the music world as "Replay," born James Polton. Both men were shot repeatedly, in what police are characterizing as an "execution-style" killing. The body of an as yet unidentified woman was found with them, also shot numerous times. Police earlier said that the killings appear to be gang-related. Jeriko One, whose latest album has sold over a million copies, recently used his music popularity to become a vocal activist on inner- city issues... As this news story plays like a kind of voice over, we drive past scenes of LA deterioration. Homeless people wandering. Gang members riding around in cars. Helicopters circling. The city is settling into night. Neon and streetlights coming on. Lenny pulls into the parking lot of a bar called THE CORAL LOUNGE. He gets out of the BMW with his Haliburton and sets the car's alarm. INSIDE THE CORAL LOUNGE Lenny cruises among the early regulars. Once again he seems to know everybody. The decor is sort of Polynesian. Goofy tropical motif murals on the walls. The bartender, BOBBY, wears a Hawaiian shirt. We see that the place has a mixed bag of customers, including upwardly mobile low-life who have graduated from the streets and use it as a kind of office. It is a crossroads for druggies, upscale hookers, junior entertainment suits slumming after a day in the pressure cooker. Lenny sits at the bar and orders a drink. A guy he knows named FABRIZIO, who works as a salesman at a Ferrari dealership, comes over and puts his hand on Lenny's shoulder. Fabrizio says he has a guy that wants to talk to him, and nods his head at a booth nearby. The guy in question is dressed LA power-casual: jeans, topsiders, knit-shirt under Italian jacket. Looks like money to Lenny. Fabrizio reminds him as they cross the room that he gets 10 percent of any action for the introduction. Lenny presses flesh with the guy, whose name turns out to be GRAEME KEITH. He's an entertainment attorney that Fabrizio sold some cars to over the years. Now he's interested in what Lenny has to sell. Lenny asks the guy if he's a cop. Keith says no. Lenny laughs it off, says he knows, but he's gotta ask. My second question I gotta ask, so we get our bearings here... have you ever jacket in? Have you ever wiretripped? No, Keith says. A virgin mind, Lenny says with a winning grin. We see Lenny go to work on the guy. Very charming. Tells him how the rig works, how the whole thing got started, with Federal intelligence agencies. The guy wants to show he's cool, that he knows a bit about it. So he fills in part of the story. How SQUID technology was used by the law enforcement to replace the audio-only body wire. How the current booming black market got started, etc. Lenny says, I see you've done your homework, so you know already that the effects are harmless, done in moderation like anything, and that this bullshit over a public health risk is just bullshit. So I'm guessing you've past the homework stage, what you want now is to try it out. Am I right? Guy like you, a mover and a shaker, a plugged-in guy, wants to taste all of life there is. You drive Ferraris? You know that feeling when you shift from second to third in a 308? How do you explain that to somebody. You can't. You gotta experience it. That's what life is all about. Being there. Well that's what this is. You're there. You're doing it, seeing it hearing it... feeling it. What kinda things, exactly? Keith asks, hooked like a carp. Whatever you want. Who do you want to be, today? I'm assuming a guy like you, you wanna go skiing you go skiing. That's not what you're interested in here. It's about the stuff you can't have. Right? The forbidden fruit. Fabrizio chimes in with, Lenny gives people their heart's desire. Ain't that right, Lenny? He's like some kinda Santa Claus of the Subconscious. All you gotta do is sit on his lap and tell him what you need. Lenny goes on... You wanna take a walk to the dark end of the street? The stuff you could never do... but sometimes you think about. You say... I wonder what that other guy's life is like. If I could just walk in his skin for twenty minutes. That guy running into a liquor store with a .357 magnum in his hand, feeling the the adrenaline pumping through his veins, every nerve tight like a guitar string, feeling shit scared but so alive it's like red hot and ice cold at the same time. Or that other guy, the one with the drop-dead Philippino girlfriend, wouldn't you like to be that guy for twenty minutes... the right twenty minutes. You're married, I see the ring... so now there's so much of life you give up, sometimes you feel like a prisoner... but you don't have to. You can have it all. Anything you want. You want a girl, you want two girls, I don't know what your thing is or what you're curious about... you want a guy? You want to be a girl? See what that feels like? You want a nun to tie you up? It's all doable. You just gotta remember the brain is the most important sexual organ. Talk to me about costs, here. Okay. Well it's a hardware-software kinda proposition. First you need a playback deck, which I'm going to get for you at my cost, since my thing is the software. Clips. That's right. Very good. I get the clips. I have a very select clientele, but I'm willing to take you on since you're a friend of Fabrizio's here and we go back. How much for the deck? A businessman. I like that. Listen, before we get into numbers, I want you to know what we're talking about here. This isn't like TV only better. This is life. It's a piece of somebody's life. This isn't like anything you've ever done before, and I want you to try it... you're gonna go apeshit. I got a deck in my case here, you can try a couple of sample experiences-- What? Right here? Naw, come with me, we'll get some privacy going, you can check this out. Fabrizio, why don't you get another round, we'll be back in five. Lenny gets up and Keith follows him. They go down a short corridor to the men's room and Lenny checks to see if it's empty, then locks the door and puts his Haliburton up on the sink. Pops it open. OUTSIDE THE CORAL LOUNGE. It is full night now. We see a figure move stealthily from the shadows and approach Lenny's car. A woman with jet-black hair, wearing jeans and a coat. It is Iris, obviously trying to look as different as possible from last night. She has a black eye, which she has tried to cover with makeup. Looking furtively around, she crosses to Lenny's car and tries the door handles. It's locked. She looks at the bar. Debates going in to find him. Iris takes a piece of paper from her pocket and writes him a note: LENNY, HELP ME. PLEASE. I'LL CALL YOU TONIGHT. IRIS. Then she takes something else from her pocket, a squid tape. She wraps the note around it, holding it in place with a hair-tie, and drops it through the two-inch gap in the sunroof of Lenny's BMW. It lands on the seat, and bounces off onto the floor. Shit, she says, squinting through the windshield, trying to see where it landed. She glances around, looking totally paranoid. Iris sees a police car coming down the street. She turns her back and waits, petrified, as it passes. When it is gone she sags against Lenny's car. Her knees buckle and she slides down, with her back against the car door, crying quietly in the shadows. Afraid to move. IN THE MEN'S ROOM Lenny adjusts the position of the playback headset on Keith's head. He selects a tape and puts it in the deck. Grins at the lawyer, who nods nervously. Lenny's got the guy sitting on the counter next to the sink. He tells him to close his eyes and relax. Then he punches PLAY. We don't see what the guy is experiencing. Just his reactions. First he jerks... the his mouth drops open. He gasps and starts to breathe rapidly. He puts his hands on his body and "feels" it wonderingly. Then one hand raises reflexively, in response to something on the tape. He groans and tilts his head down, as if looking down, but his eyes are closed. He gasps... and Lenny punches PAUSE. The lawyer opens his eyes. Lenny grins knowingly. You were just an eighteen-year-old girl taking a shower. Are you beginning to see the possibilities here? The guy is clearly shocked and intoxicated by the experience. IN THE BAR a man in his late thirties enters. He has longish hair and hasn't shaved in days. He wears a long army jacket, which adds additional bulk to his massive frame. He walks to the bar with a slight limp. The bartender sees him coming and moves casually down to him. Where is he? the man says. The bartender looks toward the men's room and the man nods. ON LENNY and the lawyer, coming out of the can. They move down the short hallway. Lenny, his voice lowered, is saying let's sit down and talk about getting you set up. The door to the woman's restroom is whipped open and the guy in the army jacket comes out behind Lenny. He grabs him and hurls him face-first against the wall, sticking .45 against the back of his head and saying don't move, you miserable puke! That's right!... and kicking his feet apart, keeping him off balance. The lawyer splits in a hurry, pretending he's not with Lenny. Fabrizio gets a whiff of what's going on and goes after him. Rats deserting the ship. Lenny whips around, swearing. He roughly shoves the other man back against the wall by the payphones. The guy in the army jacket doesn't resist because now he's laughing too hard. He puts the .45 back in his waistband. Gotcha, the guy says. Goddammit, Max! I was with a client, you dumb motherfucker. Shit, look... now the guy's outta here. Son of a bitch. Come on, Lenny, MAX says, let me buy you a drink. They go to the bar. Max roars greetings to several regulars, stopping conversations all around the room, instantly becoming the center of attention. They call he "Mad Max." He says fuckin A right, I might just kill every man in here. But first I'm buyin' my buddy here a drink. Max lurches onto a barstool and hunches there like a misanthropic bear, pounding the bartop until he gets what he wants, which is quick service from Bobby, the bartender, and none of your well-shit tequila... gotta be Tres Generaciones! Double shots! Mad Max is MAX PELTIER (which he himself mispronounces as "Pelcher"), Lenny's best friend. Max is also an ex-cop. A homicide detective who's out on a disability pension. Some shitbird shot him in the head with a .22 and pushed him over a freeway guardrail. He fell 30 feet and shattered two vertebra. Woke up three days later in a hospital bed, with a .22 shot floating around in his brainpan somewhere, and a bad headache. Imagine how pissed off he was. Now he supposedly works as a private detective, but doesn't seem to do much but drink for a living. Though it never seems to affect him. On the plus side he's intelligent, articulate, funny and acidly cynical. He has a kind of cheeriness, as if the completely fucked-up state of the world is a source of endless amusement for him. Max believes in the lowest and most venal interpretation on any given event and is seldom disappointed. He is also a sort of street philosopher, given to long rambling tracts on the state of things. He can make friends with anyone in a heartbeat, and has a very low tolerance for bullshit. He's loud, boorish, thinks he's always right, and is the kind of capable guy you'd call first in a jam. He and Lenny go way back. Worked together in Vice, before Max made Homicide and Lenny went onto the surveillance team. Lenny's still pissed off about losing a sale. He's tight on cash and it's going to be a big weekend. Max tells him to relax, there's a lot more fish in the sea. And nobody knows how to work 'em like you do, pal. You could sell a goddamn rat's asshole for a wedding ring! Hey, that's a nice tie, Lenny. Thanks, Max. D'you always have to dress like a fucking pimp? Look, this tie cost more than your whole wardrobe. It's the one thing that stands between me and the jungle. Maybe, now I think about it, you are a pimp... some kinda electronic techno-pimp. He calls Lenny an input junkie. Says the biggest problem is he's sampling his own merchandise too much. Says, You should knock that shit off, or you're going to fry your brain, amigo. Hey Bobby! Another shooter right here. (to Lenny) I like the simple, old-fashioned kind of slow death. Call me a traditionalist. Hey, you seen Faith lately? Lenny gets uncharacteristically glum. Naw, she's still with that music slick. Philo Gant. Look, Lenny, she's been with that shitbird for six months, this is not news. It might be time for you to consider moving on. I hate to see you pining away like this... it makes me want to vomit, frankly. I mean sure, Faith was by far the most outstanding woman a guy like you could ever hope to get, but it's over. Thanks, Max. At the door, Iris slips inside and starts making her way toward them. She comes up to Lenny looking pale. He and Max both greet her. Max asks her what happened to her eye. Nothing, she says. Lenny can I talk to you? Sure, he says, meaning here and now. No, I mean, just you. Fuck me. Max says and gets up, crossing the room to some people he knows at a booth. What's going on? he asks. You need money? You want some wire work? Iris is nervous, evasive. She tells Lenny she is being followed, watched... won't tell him why. But something's going on. She needs his help. He's the only one she can trust. He thinks her pimp beat her up. He's seen this shit a million times. Doesn't have time for some strung-out hooker's problems. She says she put something in his car, that he needs to see right away. It's important. She didn't want to come in, because a lot of people know her here, but then she decided she better talk to him now. He asks her what's going on. Not really paying attention, scanning the room for business. He waves to someone coming in, that he needs to talk to. She doesn't want to talk in the bar. She needs to get out. She's starting to freak. He finally realizes that he should be listening to her, that however trivial her problems may be to him, she is a human being and he should help her if it doesn't cost him too much time or money. She warns him to keep an eye on Faith, she may be in danger, but can't tell him more. Now she's got his attention. Iris used to be a friend of Faith's though they have moved far apart in recent years. Lenny throws some money on the bar and takes her by the arm. They head for the door. They can talk in his car. As they go out the door Iris sees a Black-and-White pull up across the street. Lenny walks on, talking. He turns in mid-sentence... Iris is gone. He looks around. Can't figure where she went. He shrugs. Just another strung-out street loser. He forgets about Iris a second later when he sees that a tow truck has got his BMW on the hook. What the fuck? He runs to the guy... thinking it's some bullshit parking thing. Finds out the guy is a repo man. The guy says Lenny's missed five payments and the car is going back. Lenny never figured they'd find him. His apartment is under another name. Telephone is unlisted. He takes his mail at a P.O. box. The repo man looks like a biker only meaner. He jerks the hydraulic lever and the BMW's front end comes off the ground. Lenny grabs the guy's beefy arm and the guy whips around, putting a .38 in Lenny's face. Lenny shouts Oh, yeah! That's the answer, two million years of human evolution and that's the best idea you can come up with? He calms down and starts working the guy. Look, lets be human beings here. You look like a guy that doesn't mind playing it smart if he can do it clean? Am I right? Look whatya get to pull in a car? Two hundred? Two fifty? I'll pay you more not to. I'm gonna give you three fifty, right now. All you gotta do is take if off the hook and say you came by and your mark wasn't here. Simple. Make a few bucks extra. Do a good deed. Am I right? The guy's thinking. You can tell by the way his little piggy eyes turn into slits. You got the cash on you? I was going to write you a check, if that's-- The guy is getting into his truck. Okay, I totally respect that call. Cash makes sense. I got it right in there, right inside the bar, a buddy of mine owes me... I can see you're pressed for time, just give me two minutes... here keep my watch for collateral. I go inside and cop the money, come right out. He hands the guy his watch. It's a Rolex. Be right back. Two minutes. Lenny gets to the door of the Coral Lounge and looks back. The driver is in his truck, pulling out of the lot. Lenny runs after the truck, chasing his own car up the street on foot, but he can't catch it. Prick!! Lenny walks back to the bar. He sets his case up on the trunk of a car in the lot and pops it open. He takes out a tiny digital cellular phone and dials a number. While it's ringing he takes another, identical pseudo-Rolex out of the Haliburton and slips it on. CUT TO a hand pulling a little digital cellular out of a black jacket. Follow the hand and phone to the face of a black woman. LORNETTE "MACE" MASON. Late twenties. Striking features. Hair pulled back tight to her skull. She is driving, but we don't see the car, or anything but her face and some moving lights outside. Hello? Mace, what's goin' on? Hey, Lenny. Whatup? Listen, Mace, I was wondering if you could swing by the Coral.I gotta talk to you. Mace smirks knowingly. Yeah? So what happened to your car this time? BACK INSIDE Lenny is telling Max what happened. LENNY ... so I'm trying to get this prick repo guy to drop it off the hook and he sticks a .38 in my face. MAX So? D'ja pull your piece? LENNY I ain't carrying. MAX Man, I cannot feature that about you. An ex-cop that doesn't carry. In LA? It's embarrassing, compadre. I oughta not be seen with you. LENNY (shrugs) I'm still on probation. Can't afford to get popped with one on me. MAX Yeah, but you feel exposed? Like your pants are down around your ankles? I'd come unglued, myself, walking around the city. LENNY Naw, forget it. He'll be at the impound yard by now. And I don't have the dinero to bail the thing out anyway. Max notices what's on the TV behind the bar and yells at Bobby to turn it up. It is a newscast about the killing of Jeriko One. We see file-footage of Jeriko and his band, the Prophets of Light, from interviews and some of their videos. The story is about reaction among Jeriko's fans, who are mostly black inner-city kids. Jeriko One used his music as a political tool, becoming an outspoken leader... an opponent of the LAPD and the city government. File shot Jeriko One at an outdoor rally. Yelling that their social programs are not working! Their plan is not working! The mayor and the city city council sit up in their offices, and their shit ain't working... these people are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. And the millennium is coming... yeah, it's coming. The big 2K coming and when it does, there's gonna be a new day, and not the one they thinkin' of! We see that Jeriko One had a messianic quality, an aura of almost religious power. In the file footage the crowd is going wild. The shot is followed by one of the murder scene... cops milling around, yellow plastic over the crumpled forms on the ground. Max hoists a glass to the end of the world. Don't start, Lenny says. See, that guy got it, Max says. Before they capped his sorry ass. He saw the writing on the wall. Nostradamus got it, three hundred years ago. He gave us until the end of this century. It's all coming down. Look around man. The system is collapsing... the criminal justice system, the whole fucking economy is collapsing, not just here but all around the world. Max downs the shooter. Every paradigm on Earth is falling apart at the same time... every system, vision, constitution, revelation... is breaking down. Being toppled or abandoned... all at the same time! And you know what really scares me? There's no new ideas. Everything's been done. Rock music, punk music, rap music, techno, techno-Mex... long hair, short hair... no hair. Doesn't it feel like everything's been tried? Whaddya do that's new? Something new in art? Forget it. Somebody somewhere has done it. Clothes, music... it's all been done. How you gonna make it another thousand years, for Chrissake? I'm telling you, it ain't happening. We used it up. It's over. You hungry? They order some nachos. OUTSIDE A BLACK LIMO pulls into the lot. It is a Continental armored stretch, downsized from today's standards. The door opens and Mace gets out. She is compactly built, dressed in black slacks and a conservative black jacket. Heavy rubber-soled shoes, like cop shoes. She glances around as she heads for the Coral Lounge entrance, the unconscious sweeping gaze of a security professional. INSIDE, MACE looks around and spots Lenny and Max at the bar, and goes over, greeting them both casually. She takes a big glob of Lenny's nachos and shovels them in her mouth as she sits next to him. Lenny asks if she can give him a ride to a couple of places because his wheels got jerked due to some kind of computer error at the bank which he won't be able to straighten out until morning. She says no way. Mace tells him that she's already pulled a 12-hour shift and she has one more quick pick-up and drop, and then she's done for the day. Says she's gotta grab some sleep. It's gonna be a big night tomorrow night with all the New Year's parties. Lenny begs her, using all his charm and persuasion. We sense that they are friends and that it is not the first time Lenny has tried to suck her into his nocturnal rounds. What part of NO don't you understand? she says. He offers her a percentage of the money he makes tonight. Mace says she doesn't want his filthy money and we realize she does not approve of what Lenny does for a living. Finally she relents and offers him a ride to her next pick-up, which is at the St. James in Hollywood, and he can get a taxi from there. He says sure and they leave together. CUT TO MACE AND LENNY in her limo, on the road. Lenny sits up front with her while they cruise the night streets. We get a little background on Mace, and get the sense that she has been friends with Lenny for some time. He asks about her son, ZANDER, who's five already. Lenny likes Zander. They drive through the streets. They see an unrolling pageant of crime, cops, and urban decay. More sense of how far LA has fallen. They go through a police checkpoint, which resembles the border patrol highway- stops south of San Diego. Cops look in the cars with flashlights as they creep through. Mace glances at his Haliburton and starts giving him a hard time about his work. She met him when he was a cop, and he seemed like a special guy, with some real insight into people, and now he's just running around selling this shit. Breaking the law. When Zander asks what he does she has to lie. LENNY Look, you just tell him I'm performing a humanitarian service. I probably save lives. MACE I wanna hear this part. LENNY Okay, some executive in Century City is bored with his life, bored with his wife, itching to cut loose... what does he do? MACE Picks up a hooker. LENNY Yeah, or he has a smokin' one- nighter with some girl he meets in the bar at a sales convention. Then he goes around for months, paranoid that he's got AIDS, that he'll infect his wife. He's torn up. Needs years of therapy. And what if he really does catch something and totally destroys his life? MACE Price he pays for being a scumsucking pig. LENNY Everybody needs to take a walk to the dark end of the street once in a while, it's what we are. But it's just now the risks are outta line. The streets are a war zone. And sex can kill you. So I sell this guy what he needs. Almost as good as the real thing, and a lot safer. And it keeps him from jumping his tracks. MACE It's porno, Lenny. Face it, you're a sleaze merchant. LENNY No, wrong... I sell experiences. All kinds of experiences. Sexual experiences are just part of it. You put on the trodes in the safety of your ow home and you get to know what it feels like to ride with a gang, or get in a bar fight, or walk around in drag, or do the nasty with a thousand-dollar-a-night call girl or some shanky teen-hooker or a West Hollywood boy hustler. Whatever you want. You're safe from injury, safe from arrest, and safe from disease. MACE Buncha techno-perve jerkoffs. LENNY Man, you are so unenlightened. My customers are people with a lot to lose... you know, they got high- paying jobs, high-visibility, professional status... some a them are celebrities... MACE Yeah, what celebrities? LENNY That guy from the news. MACE He doesn't count as a celebrity. He does the weather. LENNY That counts. MACE Lenny, this shit's illegal. LENNY Well, it's a gray area. MACE It's not a gray area. It's a misdemeanor area. That's why I've had to come down and bail your sorry pale ass out of jail at two o'clock in the morning twice in the last two months. LENNY Look, it's not like I'm dealing crack here. MACE What's the difference? LENNY Okay, do me a favor, Mace. Just pull over at the next junior high you see, would you, I have some bondage and S and M tapes I have to sell. She pulls into the St. James Hotel and tells the doorman she has a pickup. A Mr. Fumitsu. Lenny gets out with his case and is standing next to Mace as her client, a Japanese executive, comes out to the car. Fumitsu tells her he is going to a nightclub on the west side. As mace is opening the limo's back door, Lenny brashly shakes Fumitsu's hand and tells him he is from BLS (the company Mace works for), and that he will be riding along as part of their regular driver-evaluation program, if Mr. Fumitsu doesn't mind. It's routine, we do it every six months to make sure our drivers are courteous and professional at all times, so that VIP clients such as yourself are always treated as honored guests. Of course all our drivers are bonded security specialists, trained in defensive combat, and this car is fully armored, with bullet-resistant glass all around. Lenny pats the Lincoln with possessive pride. Mace scowls at Lenny and gives him a look like "don't do this" but Lenny just blusters on, telling Fumitsu to just relax, and pretend he's not even here. He'll just sit up front and take notes. Mace gets in and Lenny opens his case, pulling out a small notebook. He gins at her and she cracks up in spite of herself. Lenny turns to Fumitsu almost right away and begins telling him about what an excellent choice he has made for his evening's entertainment. He asks if Fumitsu has ever been to the club before. Fumitsu, in broken English, says it was recommended to him. Lenny soon has worked the conversation around to another club, called CLUB MONDO 2000, which might be even more what the executive is looking for. He actually talks him into changing his plans and going to Mondo 2000. Mace rolls her eyes. She can't believe this shit. She's hissing at Lenny under her breath that he is going to get her fired. CUT TO a few minutes later. Lenny is in the back with Fumitsu. They are laughing uproariously. Lenny says something in Japanese and they laugh again. Fumitsu likes him. Lenny open his briefcase. Winks at Mace in the mirror. Now she's pissed off. CUT TO the limo pulling up at Club Mondo 2000. Inside, Fumitsu is pulling off Lenny's playback trodes and smiling. Apparently the Japanese are very hip to the playback world, and Lenny makes a sale right there. Mace can't believe this shit. She opens the door for Fumitsu and asks him if he wants her to wait. He says he will call for pickup. Lenny give Mace a shiteating grin. She waits until Fumitsu is out of sight and then grabs him by the tie. He is surprised that she is really angry. She says every time she sees him, she feels slimed afterward. Their friendship is based on her doing favors for him. And this stunt could get her fired. Making an illegal sale right in her car. He tells her to relax. The guy's having a great time. He'll probably recommend her company to all his pals. Mace is also pissed off because she knows why Lenny just had to come to Mondo 2000... Yeah, because I have business here, he says. Uh huh, right. It doesn't have anything to do with Faith being here. Oh, is she here? he says innocently. They hear shouting and look over at a scene a few yards away. Next to their armored limos two rich guys are yelling at each other, drunk. They are each backed up by two or three bodyguards... "private security specialists." Rich-guy posses. One R.G. swings on the other. The other's bodyguards jump into it, grabbing the attacker. Now the first guy's security guys have to jump in to protect him. Pretty soon the bodyguards are duking it out and the two rich guys are standing back watching. Lenny tells Mace he'll buy her a drink, now she's off the clock. She scowls but accompanies him inside. She doesn't know why she puts up with his shit. Lenny and Mace enter the Club Mondo 2000. They are greeted inside by two suited guys with metal detectors. Lenny and Mace barely notice as they are scanned, it's so routine most places these days. Mace shows her gun, a Sig-Saur 9mm, and her state carry permit. The security guys check her pistol like a coat, giving her a claim check. They walk in. MONDO is upscale and chic. Film types, music types, and rich-fucks in general. There is a bar, and a lounge with live music. Through the crowd in the lounge Lenny spots a particular table. It seems to be in a pool of light all its own. Or maybe this is just in Lenny's mind. SLOW MOTION. Lenny watches a man at the table holding court, with a beautiful young woman sitting next to him. The man is PHILO GANT, record producer and manager. He is mid-thirties, with dark intense eyes, and long hair in a ponytail. He is severely handsome, and hiply dressed in a studied eclectic-casual style. The woman is FAITH JUSTIN. We recognize her from the playback as Lenny's ex-girlfriend. But now we are seeing a new "designed" Faith. Her hair has been dyed jet black, and frames her face in a wild tangle. She is wearing an expensive custom leather jacket over a sheer silk top slashed almost to her navel. She has on too much makeup, which gives her features a strange feral-doll quality. Faith looks like what she is, a rock-star wannabe. But the look is red-hot. Gant and Faith are flanked on either side by an entourage consisting of music types, various hangers on, and Gant's personal security force of four. Somebody says something to Faith and she turns slightly to look at Lenny. Their eyes meet for a moment. Then she coolly turns back to the conversation without a flicker of acknowledgment. Mace scowls at the tableau and pulls Lenny toward the bar, reminding him that he is supposed to be buying her a drink. The following plays as they cross to the bar and sit down. Forget her, Lenny. She still loves me. She thinks you're a bucket of dog vomit, Lenny. Trust me on this. This is just something she's got to work through. She's a little confused about her life right now. Whatever. You don't understand what we have. Had. Not have. See, have is present tense. She's my destiny. Your destiny? What're you... living in a Hallmark card? She's a hard-climber that dropped you like a used tampon when she got a better ride. You'll see. The bartender slides down to them, greeting Lenny by name. FRASER LOVEJOY looks like a model, which he occasionally is when he's not tending bar at the 2000. Lenny tells him he may have a gig for him next week, that he'll give him a call. Lenny turns to look across the room at Gant and Faith. He says, Hey who's the new slab-o-meat in Gant's posse? Mace looks at the massively built bodyguard seated near Philo Gant and Faith. That's Wade Beemer, he was a running back for the Rams in '96 and '97. He's been working security lately. I've seen him around. Didn't know he was with Gant. The Rams... that's football right? Lenny says. Fraser brings their drinks and says SKINNER was looking for him earlier. He points at a table nearby. Lenny grabs his drink and motions to Mace to follow him. He crosses to the table and comes up behind Skinner, a plump guy with thinning hair who dresses too young, sitting with a pretty, stoned-looking girl and a young guy with slicked back hair and gold chains who looks like a freshman gigolo. Skinner is a porno video producer. Lenny greets him loudly as "The Skin Man" and slaps his palm. He fingers Skinner's coat. Red leather. Nice feminine touch. Fuck you, Skinner laughs. Lenny tells him he needs him to set up "a special." A guy and two girls. The guy wears. Trent yawns. There's an original idea. Yeah, I know, Lenny says. The girls have to be young, and no big tits... French tits, you know, like a champagne glass. And my client wants it fast. Trent pretends it's the last thing in the world he cares to do. Tells Lenny he needs an advance, to lock the talent. Lenny says forget it, he'll get somebody else. Skinner grabs his arm. I'll have it Monday. The usual price. Page me when you got it, Lenny says. Mace gets up. She tells Lenny whenever he's done with his squalid techno-perve business, she'll be waiting outside. He's got ten minutes and then she's gone. Skinner laughs at Lenny's uptight friend. Lenny just shrugs it off. The Skin Man says he just finished a video shoot with a couple of new girls, and he got them to do some squid stuff afterward, if Lenny's interested. Lenny shrugs... sure. Skinner hands him a tape and Lenny opens his overcoat, revealing a playback deck clipped to his belt, next to his pager. He pops in the tape and glances around casually as he pulls out the trodes. He doesn't put the trode-set completely over his head... he just sort of hunches over the bar and touches a couple of the pads to his forehead. "Sampling" the merchandise. It looks like any drug buy in a public place. CUT TO: POV of a woman writhing above us in ecstasy. Lovemaking in point-of-view. We look down, see our body, a woman's body... our hands moving over the other woman's torso. The image is dark, a primal impression. The sound of harsh breathing, rustling sheets. BACK TO LENNY, dropping the headset back in his pocket. Yeah, I can use this, he says. But tell the girl to move her eyes slower next time. It's pretty jerky. Skinner shrugs. Whattya expect, Marty fucking Scorsese? It was her first time, Lenny. Cut her some slack. Skinner introduces the young guy, who has been watching all this intently. Says this is EDUARDO, the guy I was telling you about. Apparently Eduardo is going to wear in a "situation." Lenny asks him if he's sure he wants to do it. The guy says you're going to pay me 200 bucks to put on a hair-net and bang some beautiful girl. I don't know. I gotta think about this. Lenny gives him some pointers. Like a coach before the game. Okay, Eduardo, some tips here. Don't dart your eyes around, don't do any crank or anything that will give your eyeballs the jitters, it looks terrible. Don't look in the mirror, you ID yourself, then I gotta make an edit to take it out, and it ruins the moment. Plus the edits are jarring. Feels like getting slapped on the backside of your eyeballs. You got a half hour of tape. So gimme a little lead-in to the main event. It works better if there's a little tease. But don't bore the shit outta me. And most important of all... don't act natural. Don't fucking act at all. Just completely forget the thing is on and do your thing, or it'll be dogshit. Trent, you gonna wire him up yourself? Yeah. Okay, (to Eduardo) There's nothing to it. Trent'll set you up, put on the wig and all that. Wash your hair though, that fucking axle grease'll screw up the squid receptors. What's all this squid shit? Superconducting QUantum Interference Device. SQUID. Got it? Yeah. Uh, sure. Don't forget it. There's gonna be a test. Just kidding. Relax. Okay, the receptor rig... the part that goes on your head... sends an RF signal to the recorder. It's wireless. See, we call it "being wired", but there's no wire. So stick it in your jacket pocket and then hang the jacket over a chair next to the bed. Or wherever it is you're going to close escrow, know what I mean? No problem. A star is born, Lenny says. CUT TO Lenny on the move, cruising through the crowd at the Club Mondo 2000. He just happens to pass Philo Gant's table. Pretends to see him for the first time. Grant motions expansively. Hey everybody, it's Lenny Nero. Gant's right hand man, JOEY CORTO, smirks at Lenny. Corto is whipper thin, snappily dressed. His Rolex is real. Lenny the Loser, Corto says. Philo gives a cold little grin and says (pointedly) Faith, do you know Lenny? Knock it off, Philo. Hello Lenny. Did you see Faith's video, Lenny? The one with the water pouring down all over her in slow motion? Yeah. I thought it was overproduced. Faith's too good, she doesn't need all that shit. Any producer with the taste God gave an amoeba woulda figured that out. We can see that Lenny and Philo don't care for each other. Gant and Lenny spar sarcastically. Faith tells them both to grow up. She asks Lenny what he's doing here. What am I doing here? Excuse me. I seem to recall it was me who turned you on to this club in the first place. Yeah, that's right, Lenny, Gant says, And you introduced her to me here, as a matter of fact. I never thanked you, by the way. So... thanks. Now get the fuck out of here. Hey Gant, too bad about your guy, Jeriko. Tough break. Fuck you, Nero. Show a little respect. The man was an important artist. Yeah, and a good seller for your label. Which no doubt is why you're in mourning. But don't worry, his records'll go through the roof now he's dead. You'll make out. Faith, can I talk to you a second? I don't think that's a good idea, Lenny, she says. Gant glances at Joey Corto and says, Joey, Nero was just leaving, I thought. Hey, I got something to say to her, alright? Not alright. Good seeing you, Nero. You're pretty insecure, Philo, you worried about her out of your sight for thirty seconds. You know, trust is an important element of any relationship. (to Faith) I just gotta talk to you for one second. We have nothing to talk about, Lenny. Gant turns to Corto... Joey. Wade. Corto gets up, motioning to the bodyguards. The biggest, WADE BEEMER, covers Lenny with his shadow. The second bodyguard is a woman, CONSTANCE. She is a massively built bodybuilder, who contrasts her hulking frame with a low- cut dress and pearls. Like a woman imitating a drag- queen, but definitely female... and somehow sexy and terrifying at the same time. The third bodyguard is DUNCAN, a not-too-bright classic arm-breaker. Faith, call me, okay? No, Lenny. It's not about you and me. I just have to talk to you. Corto motions to Wade and Duncan to grab Lenny. Wade gets him in a wrist-grip come-long hold and starts him moving toward the back of the club. As they are marching Lenny through the crowd somebody coming the other way greets him. Hey, Lenny. Hey, Frank. Listen I can't stop right now, but I'll call you tomorrow about that thing we were talking about. He's working the room even as he's getting dragged outside to get the shit beat out of him. Wade and Duncan take Lenny out through the kitchen. INSIDE, Faith turns to Philo and glares at him. Leave him alone, Philo. Relax, baby. They're just gonna make sure he gets to his car okay. Corto moves off a few feet from the table and pulls out a small walkie-talkie. He gives Wade his instructions, which Wade gets in his secret-service type earpiece. Corto tells him to fuck Lenny up. Ruin his New Year's. OUTSIDE Wade leaves Duncan to watch the entrance to a dark alley behind the club. Wade walks Lenny back into the shadows of the alley. Lenny starts doing what he does best... talking. Hey, I recognize you. You're Wade Beemer, right? You played for the Rams three or four years ago. Running back, am I right? Beemer, who was about to go to work on Lenny, pauses. Yeah, that's right. I saw you play, man. You were good. Like a fucking freight train, I remember saying. So what happened? Injuries or what? Bullshit politics. It's always politics, isn't it? Lenny starts to negotiate. Tries to get Beemer to cut him loose. Wade says he has to do what Mr. Gant says. We see Lenny wheeling and dealing... trying to work it out... says he'll pay him not to thrash him. Write him a check right now. Nobody needs to know. Wade won't take a check in exchange for a beating. Lenny gives Wade all his cash. Wade is philosophical. Says, We all have our roles to play... like nobody's doing anything to anybody... this is just happening. Lenny shrugs, says, I know. But can we make a deal here? Wade says, I have to do something or I'll get fired. It's not personal. Maybe I can go light. Stay away from the hands and the knees. Lenny agrees to the terms. He takes off his Armani jacket and hangs it nearby. He asks Wade to watch the eyes. Wade takes his first swing. CUT TO Mace waiting out front. She yawns and looks at her watch. Lenny walks up to her, limping. He has a bloody nose. She asks him what happened and he says, I tripped on the stairs. They oughta get some lights back there. I should sue. Let's go. CUT TO a NIGHTVISION VIEW of Mace and Lenny getting into her car. Burton Steckler, in plain clothes, lowers the surveillance device from his eyes. He is sitting in a car a block from the club, watching. As Mace and Lenny pull out he puts his car in gear and follows. IN THE CAR, on the way to his next stop, a party in Hancock Park, Lenny asks Mace to stop so he can get in the backseat. Says it'll look better when he pulls up. She tells him if he wants to be back there, he's climbing through the divider window. Lenny gets in the backseat and stretches out in luxury. Asks where the champagne is. She doesn't think it's all that funny. Driving Mr. Lenny. BACK AT THE CLUB MONDO 2000 we see Faith and Gant. They don't exactly seem like a happy couple. Gant is clearly unsettled by Lenny. Wade comes back in and asks Gant about Lenny, Who he is. Gant says he's just a little weasel, a street hustler, nobody. Since he's new to this entourage Wade is doing his homework, like any good security professional. Then Gant gives a kind of 30-second profile on Lenny... ex-vice cop, a surveillance guy... one of those snoopers, always bugging people, wearing a wire, recording what you say, going through your trash... a maggot. He got into squid recording and got hooked on the stuff himself, then he got tossed off the force for dealing squid tapes after hours. Couldn't even make it as a cop. Lenny the loser. Panhandler of stolen dreams. Coming from Grant it sounds pretty sleazy. Of course he is painting the most negative picture because Faith is sitting there. He's rubbing her nose in it. How does he know you, Mr. Gant? Wade asks. Because Mr. Gant was one of Lenny's biggest clients, Faith says. Mr. Gant likes to watch, don't you, baby? He used to buy everything Lenny had to sell. And the kinkier the better. That's right. Especially the ones of you. Yeah, you liked those, didn't you. Probably even more than the real thing. That's not true, baby. I'm much happier now that you're mine. He grabs her behind the neck and kisses her fiercely. It seems less like passion than a public branding. She pulls back. Faith hates this, being treated like chattel. Gant treats her like a beautiful car, a Ferrari, something to draw approving looks from other men... and something over which he has total mastery and complete ownership. We see at this moment that she does not love him, and that he probably knows that. But the game has its own inertia. And they both play the game. They both get what they need out of it. Faith wants to get out of the booth. She tells Joey Corto to move. Where you going? Philo says. For a walk. You mind? Constance, go with her. Alone. Gant grabs her arm and grips it tightly, pulling her down, close to him. Look, what is this shit? I'm not about to have you wandering around by yourself. Not with what's going on right now. Christ, use your head, Faith. If you're so goddamn paranoid, maybe we should have just stayed home in our little beds. Yeah, that wouldn't look too suspicious, would it? Will you calm down? I'm going to the bathroom. Is that alright? You need to give me a hall pass? He lets her go. FAITH walks down a corridor, right past the ladies' room and into the kitchen. She goes out the back door of the club and walks around to the street. She gets into a taxi and tells the driver to head downtown. She opens her purse and pulls out a handheld cellular. Recalls a preprogrammed number and pushes send. LENNY hears the phone ringing in his briefcase and answers it. He is surprised to hear Faith's voice. She tells him to meet her backstage at the Retinal Fetish later. They can talk then. She has a gig there tonight. Her set starts at midnight. Mace stops the car at a security checkpoint at the entrance to Hancock Park, which is now a closed, gated community. I have a Mr. Nero for the party at 287 Briartree, Mace tells the guard. She has to really grit her teeth, playing Lenny's hired driver. They are waved through. The license is stored by digital video, and automatically logged by the guardstation computer. CUT TO LATER, AT THE PARTY. Lenny is working the room. It is a beautiful old Spanish, with a vaulted ceiling. The crowd is LA entertainment mid-level, agents, lawyers, junior executives. A few creatives sprinkled through, as seasoning. This is prime turf for Lenny. He is like the coke dealer of the early eighties. The backroom man, chicly dangerous. We see him working from the OUTSIDE through the tall windows. Mace is in the courtyard with the car, having a cigarette with the other drivers. She watches Lenny through the glass. He didn't invite her in. She knows he is a pretender in that glittery world, an outsider, a street guy like her... trying to rub up against a world that is not really his. She is his Sancho Panza, somehow loyal despite her best instincts. It may occur to us for the first time that Mace secretly wishes Lenny would for once notice that she is a woman. But she is too cool to ever say anything. If he can't figure that one out for himself, forget it. INSIDE, LENNY is talking to a society deb named JUDE PAIGE. She is a trust-fund baby, daughter of a Beverly Hills doctor. She is going to impress her jaded friends by going out and copping some tapes from Lenny. SITTING IN HER CAR, Mace is talking to her younger sister by cellular. CECILE is babysitting Zander at Mace's house and wants to get going. Mace says she'll be home as soon as she can. While she's talking Mace flips open Lenny's Haliburton, which is on the seat next to her. She looks idly at the hand-written titles on the tapes. A couple of them say "Faith," followed by the date they were recorded. Disgusted, she throws them down and latches the case. Lenny comes out with Jude Paige. He introduces Mace, but Jude just thinks it's odd that he's introducing his driver and doesn't even look at her. Jude walks past Mace, and gets into the backseat of the car with Lenny. Mace gives her an evil stare. Lenny opens his case and goes to work. He knows that these prim Beverly Hills third-generation rich-bitches are all fucked up, with snakes eating snakes in their heads, and the stuff they want is pretty kinky. Power-trip sex, bondage stuff, hard action... and a glimpse of a world they would be too terrified to ever see for themselves... the world of the street. He makes a sale and Jude goes back to the party. Lenny tells Mace he has one more stop. She says she has to go home. He tells her it's on the way, more or less. Just head downtown. The Retinal Fetish. You know it? Yeah. Lenny, I know it. It's that slime pit Faith sings at. Mace clenches her jaw and puts the car in gear. As they pull onto the street, another car pulls out from the curb, up the block behind them. Steckler, still following. ENROUTE TO THE RETINAL FETISH, Lenny puts on the trodes again. He puts a tape marked "Faith 2/12/99" in the deck and punches it on. IN POV we experience another moment between Faith and Lenny from almost a year before. When things were still good. In it we see Lenny's POV of them talking. Faith is curious about the squid recording. Lenny says he wants her to try it out. He wants to see what they are like together through her eyes. We see him turn off the record deck. TAPE RESTARTS. We see the two of them standing together, reflected in a mirror. We are Faith now. Is it on? she says, I don't feel anything. Lenny tells her to forget it is there. In the mirror we see that Faith has her hair pulled back tight, and the squid array covers her head. Lenny takes a wild red wig and puts it on her, hiding the array. She laughs at the look. He turns her to him. They begin to make love. Lenny begins to bliss out under the electrodes. Mace is watching him in the rear-view as he plays back the electronic memories of his true love, whom Mace can't stand. He's in love with a woman on a tape, and he doesn't even see the one that's right in front of him. Plus she knows he's hurting himself with all this playback... getting strung out. Caught in a loop. Frying his neurons. Mace is pissed off, feeling used and abused. Hates being his squire. She stops the car, pulling over on a commercial street. Lenny, under the wire, doesn't notice. She walks back to his door and whips it open. Punches her finger down on the STOP button of his playback deck. IN POV we see Faith's image fade into a burst of static. Lenny opens his eyes, disoriented. The afterimage of Faith's face is replaced by Mace's. Lenny sees they are stopped. LENNY What's up? MACE Out of the car. LENNY Are you angry? She grabs him by the lapels. Jerks him out roughly. LENNY Hey, careful on the jacket. This is Armani. MACE I've had enough of this shit. You're on foot, Lenny. LENNY In LA? Are you crazy? MACE Call a cab. I'm going home. If I can remember where it is, it's been so long. Mace gets in the car and peels out... but Lenny runs and plasters himself on the hood. Mace accelerates, pretending she doesn't see him. MACE (calling her dispatcher) Six to base. LENNY Can I come in please? I'm having a hard time hearing the stereo. DISPATCHER Roger, six. You still have the client? MACE I'm making the drop-off right now. Mace jams on the brakes suddenly, throwing Lenny off (don't worry, she's not going that fast.) He scrambles up, standing in front of the car. She starts to move forward... LENNY Wait! Can we talk? MACE Lenny, don't try me. LENNY I need my case. It's still in the back. MACE Get it. He quickly moves, comes around the car and climbs in the back door. Lenny grabs his Haliburton but instead of getting out, he leans through the divider window, next to Mace. LENNY Listen, can we talk a little bit here, like two rational adults? Mace hits a button on the dash. The privacy divider rises suddenly, pinning Lenny to the ceiling. LENNY That would be no. MACE I've had it. No more of this wirehead pervo shit in my car. You wanta jerk off your brain to some electronic 900 number, you do it somewhere else. But not on my watch. LENNY Okay, you got my attention, but this is cutting off the circulation to my head, here. D'you mind? She lowers the divider, releasing him. Lenny straightens his jacket and tie. Runs a hand through his greasy hair. LENNY I thought we were friends? MACE No. See, a friendship consists of more than just one person constantly doing favors for another person. Lately, every time I spend time with you I feel like I've been slimed. LENNY Wow. Really? MACE Look, Lenny, I got a kid, I got rent, I got an ex-husband someplace who doesn't send me a dime of support... I'm just trying to hold on here. And you're always comin' along with you schemes and your slick act... well I'm not gonna get sucked in anymore-- LENNY Okay, okay, fine, I understand. I know I've been outta line. It's just, whenever I'm in a bind, I think of you. Because I know I can count of you in a jam, and that's a very rare thing... that kind of bond between two people. MACE See! There you go running a line down on me again. Damn, can't you just shutup for once and listen? LENNY Macey... I've never seen you like this. MACE You used to be a great guy, Lenny, but lately you've been turning into some kinda squid-head low-life bottomfeeder... and you're getting strung out... you don't even see it. You're always broke, you just go from one sleazy score to the next. I'm not going to hang around and watch you poach your brain-- LENNY Playback is perfectly safe-- MACE It's not, Lenny. You know it's not. LENNY It's my business. It's what I do. MACE Fine. You want your frontal lobes to look like two runny eggs, it's fine with me. Look, I gotta get some sleep. LENNY You still like me, don't you? We're still buddies? MACE (sighing, resigned) Yeah. I don't see a way out of it. LENNY You feel better now? MACE Yeah. LENNY Macey, I know you're tired but can you drop me at the Fetish? I'm going to miss her show. MACE Sure, Lenny. The only thing worse than a junkie is a man in love. Mace puts the car in gear. CUT TO Lenny entering the pounding din of THE RETINAL FETISH. The place is a fringe hangout, converted schmatte factory, and it is a warren of dark rooms and corridors off a main dancefloor. A thundering labyrinth. Steel cage-like partitions of a chain-link give the place a harsh, concentration-camp atmosphere. The music is a thundering tech-thump, and the clientele are young and on the rough side. Techie ravers. Cybergrunge. There are many large video screens around, including some large projection types, which are running a continuous montage of wild graphics and images... a flurry of disturbing videos (MTV via William Burroughs). The Fetish is a street-tech hangout, a meeting place for a lot of digital-underground types that Lenny knows. Here you can buy and sell illicit hardware and software, plus chemicals for the wetware (brain). Smart-drugs are used openly, everybody trying to turbo- charge their neurons. Jack up their neurotransmitters. We see some of the looks that are popular in '99: The Prole look, with Sinead O'Connor stubble heads and baggy denim uniforms, with work boots. The buzz-cuts and pajamas give them a kind of Auschwitz-meets-Metropolis look. The girls dance with their work-shirts unbuttoned... nothing underneath. The Primal look: body-paint, face-paint, in primitive designs stolen from a hundred primitive cultures, but done with Day-Glo colors. We also see mixtures of all the stuff currently out there (kilts on men, leather jackets, bicycle pants, etc). Costume ball masks and long gloves seem popular, on men and women. OUTSIDE, MACE is driving away when she sees a limo pull up nearby. Joey Corto, Duncan and Constance get out. Gant's goon squad, minus Wade Beemer. Mace thinks for a second. Then she swears softly. She reparks and goes into the club. Lenny moves through the crowd. He sees Tick and slaps five with him as he passes. Greets a few others. This is Lenny's turf also... the shadow side of his upscale parties. This is the tech underground, where Lenny's street cronies bring him things. This is where he buys, deals equipment, sets up "clips"... wires people up to go out and forage the street for illicit experiences. Lenny moves on, away from the din of the main floor and down trash-littered stairs to the basement. The air is rancid. He enters a concrete connecting corridor, stepping around a girl who is holding a guy while he pukes. Lenny sees six members of a VIETNAMESE STREET GANG coming toward him. The leader is TRAN, who is in his early twenties and the oldest. Next to him is his 15-year-old girlfriend, CINDY MINH, aka "VITA." She is a slit-eyed stone fox, very tough. Tran is cool and relaxed. Dialed in. Lenny greets them casually, calling them the Viet Cong. He slaps Tran's palm and they get close to talk. Tran asks if Lenny has his money? Lenny laughs and says no problem. He'll come by tomorrow afternoon. Tran gives Lenny a hard time, saying he's never going to front him any more gear, but you can see they like each other. There's no anger. Tran is a hardware dealer. A street tech pro. He runs a stolen high-tech parts rings. Sets up Lenny's rigs. Builds special stuff for him. Tran thinks life is a surreal parade. His parents squatted in rice-paddies and got napalmed. He went to high school in Huntington Beach and watched MTV. He has no discernible value system except personal survival. And he keeps an open mind about everything. He is a smart-drug user. He pulls out an inhaler, like an asthmatic would use, and does a snort of vasopressin. He's into brain enhancement. MACE SEARCHES the crowd for Lenny. Through the frenzy of dancers she sees Constance, Duncan and Corto also moving, scanning. LENNY CLIMBS TO A LANDING overlooking the dancefloor. Through chain-link he sees the swirl of activity below. He goes to a door, and enters a tiny room crammed with electronics gear. It is the control room for all the screens on the main floor. Sitting at the center of all the wires and tape-decks is TEX ARCANA, a friend of Lenny's. Tex whips around from one deck to another, his hands flying. He is in a wheelchair, which he pivots nimbly. Tex gives Lenny a high five as he comes in and pauses in his veejaying to take a belt from a hip flask. LENNY So, those rascals still haven't grown back yet, huh? Tex looks under the blanket covering his lap. Passes his hand through the air down there. Looks puzzled. TEX Nope. Guess not. Any day now, though. Lenny opens his briefcase and hands Tex a tape. Tells him it's a present. No charge. It's something he had made for him. Tex pulls a squid-deck out of a drawer and sticks the tape in. He puts on the headset and pushed PLAY. IN POV we are on a beach. Early morning. We are running. Running flat out, with the wind. Looking down... we are barefoot on the wet sand. Foaming water races up the sand and breaks around our strong male legs. Looking up again, to see our running companion... a beautiful lithe woman in shorts and T-shirt. She laughs and we speed up. Seagulls flee before us, taking off in the dawn light. An exquisite moment of pure life force. TIGHT ON TEX'S FACE... as a tear leaks from the corner of his eye. He is smiling like he is listening to beautiful music. He opens his eyes and stops the tape. Tex softly thanks Lenny. We see the quiet magnificence of Lenny's gift. Lenny always knows what everybody needs. Then Tex remembers something. He fishes around in the clutter and hands Lenny a sealed manila envelope with "NERO" printed on it. Tex says it was just sitting in here when I came in. No idea who left it. Lenny tears open the envelope. Inside is a squid tape. It is completely unmarked. Fan mail from some flounder? Lenny shrugs and puts it in his pocket. I'll check it out later. I gotta get down there or I'm gonna miss Faith's set. LENNY GOES BACK DOWNSTAIRS, and is moving down another smoky corridor when he runs into Mace. She tells him that Corto and Gant's goons are here. You come back to tell me that? I didn't want you tripping on the stairs again. Lenny grins. Busted. He thanks her. They move through the strobing din. It becomes a kind of tour of Hell. They pass people doing playback. Lenny shows her a side room, an unfurnished room with crumbling concrete walls where emaciated ravers are jacking-in directly to each other. They use cheap Korean squid equipment to make a real-time hookup. Real overload stuff. Nailing the pleasure centers directly. Very unhealthy. Lenny shows her some input-junkies sprawled in a corner. Using low-grade gear to run orgasm-loops. Dangerous. Very addictive. They are immobilized, jerking spasmodically. These are true wireheads. Lost in blissed-out electronic purgatory. Lenny thinks of this as a demonstration to Mace that what he does is a class act by comparison to these... the real junkies. He doesn't get it that it's all the same thing. This place is a kind of crossroads for all the low-life types. A girl named NINA comes up to him. She is young, with a greyhound body, but her eyes are old, hiding in black pits under her hair. Got any work for me, Lenny? He looks at her arms... bruised at the elbows. Looks into her jittery eyes. Your pupils are really slammed down... you slamming again? Sorry Nina, call me when you're cleaned up. THEY MOVE ON, crossing the main floor toward the stage. Lenny ask Mace if she knows that guy. She turns and looks at a face in the crowd, watching them. It is Steckler. He looks away, casually. No. Don't know him. He's been watching me. And I think I saw him earlier somewhere tonight. THE STAGE LIGHTS COME UP suddenly and Faith is standing there. Like she beamed in. She is wearing a revealing leather outfit, showing a lot of her milk-white skin. Her black hair frames her eyes, giving her an intense feral look. The band kicks down with a wall of thundering sound. Faith explodes into motion. It is stunning. Her body convulses like a 440-volt mainline is hooked up to her. She wheels across the stage, slashing her head up and down so that her hair bursts in the strobe-flashes like flak. Lenny is mesmerized. He has seen this before, many times. But it always has the same effect on him. He is transported into another world by her, a world in which there is only the two of them, and she dances just for him. Faith starts to sing. It is just an inchoate wail at first, a police siren of a voice which descends through all the registers to a fearsome growl, and then back up... into notes of unearthly beauty. She is really good. A techno-erotic pagan. She seems like a force of nature. Maybe for the first time we see in her what Lenny sees... her energy, her talent, the life force flowing strong through her like a river. Her movements are fierce and unchoreographed, exploding toward the audience and then folding in, as if wrapping around some deep inner pain. The song is pure edge, dark, tortured. A song of pain and loss in a speed-metal/industrial concussive rhythm. It is scary that such anger and hurt could explode out of such a porcelain perfect face. The pain and rage of an entire tormented, hellbent planet raised to heaven in one voice. TIGHT ON MACE, her mouth open. She's never seen Faith perform. Holy shit. This ain't no Whitney Houston. Faith doesn't play to the audience, or engage them in any way. She is merely taking what's in her head and letting it out. She could give a shit if they are there or not. Faith... now the whirling dervish, spinning to the speed- run of the lead guitar break. Now shrieking into the silence after a climactic downbeat, and holding the note... holding it longer than you believe she possibly could. Then nothing. When it is over she just drops the microphone and walks away. Fuck you. CUT TO LENNY and Mace entering the rat-warren of corridors backstage. Lenny tells Mace to keep an eye on the goon squad while he tries to find Faith on her break between sets. LENNY MAKES HIS WAY to an unmarked door and goes in. Faith is inside. It is not much of a dressing room. A cracked mirror and a bunch of boxes of cleaning supplies filling half the room. Faith is drenched with sweat. Spent. She is kicked back, chugging a beer. She drains it and looks at Lenny. This is the first time they have been alone together in real-time for many months. There is so much history between them, unspoken... held captive in this moment. Pain and the memory of joy. Hi, baby. I've missed you, he says. Faith breaks the moment. She turns away. Shakes her hair and sweat flies. She grabs a towel and asks him what was so important that he needed to talk to her about. He says he wanted to ask her if anything was going on. If there was anything wrong. She doesn't know what he is talking about. She says this is just another one of his ploys to get back next to her. Faith turns to him. FAITH It's over, Lenny. We've been all through this. What's the point. You gotta get on with your life. LENNY Yeah, I know. But you didn't answer my question. Is anything wrong? FAITH No. LENNY So why would Iris tell me you might be in danger if-- FAITH You talked to Iris? LENNY Yeah. But she split before she could say what was up. So what's up? FAITH Nothing. Iris and I don't hang out anymore. I haven't seen her in months. So who knows what's going on in her head? LENNY I ain't buying it. You wouldn't have called me back, had me come down here, if you didn't want to tell me something. FAITH I just... I wanted to tell you to stay away from me. Philo's acting crazy. Totally paranoid. Having his guys watching me all the time. He even hired a P.I. to follow me... your pal Max. LENNY You're kidding. FAITH No, it's true. That was about a month ago. But now it's... worse. LENNY Look if you're afraid of Philo, cut him loose. Pack you bags and get out. FAITH No, I can't. LENNY Why? FAITH If I leave now I lose everything. I've worked too hard, Lenny. And it's finally starting to go... after all the scroungy club dates and bullshit and... and eating out of Styrofoam for weeks at a time, it's going. It's happening. The video's running, and we start the new album in a coupla weeks... Philo's got it all set up-- LENNY Fuck Philo! It's you that's up there on the stage, not him. And it was me that got you your first club date... remember? Back when we were both starving-- FAITH I know, Lenny. You used to make all your friends come so the crowd would be bigger. LENNY Faith, I watched you create yourself out of nothing. You're like a goddamn cruise missile, targeted on making it. And you will. FAITH Damn right. LENNY And you don't need this guy to do it. Get out. Now. Tonight. FAITH No. Uh unh. I'm not gonna just run away. This means too much to me. LENNY So you're gonna stay with a guy that you don't love, that you're afraid of-- FAITH Lenny, I'm not afraid of him, it's you that should be afraid of him. You're gonna get hurt. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Just give up this quest of yours... give up on me. LENNY Can't do it. FAITH Give up on me, Lenny. I don't love you. LENNY I don't believe that. FAITH Go. Please. I have to go on in a couple minutes. I just need to be alone. Lenny leaves her. When the door is closed, she stares after him. She seems about to cry, holding herself back. We see that whatever is going on in her head now, and whatever game she is running, she did love him. In the corridor Lenny shoulders his way past some rowdy members of her band and some other scroungy music riffraff. He passes a figure hunched at a payphone. Lenny stops and backs up. The guy turns. It is Max. LENNY Heard about your new gig. When were you gonna tell me? MAX I was gonna tell ya. Shit. It's just a job. I feel like shit. LENNY You should feel like shit. MAX Yeah, well you introduced me to Gant yourself, for chrissakes, at the party... which one was it? LENNY One of 'em. Yeah. That's nothing... I introduced Faith to him too. MAX A questionable move, given the historical perspective. Look, this gig surveilling her... I figured I could take some of the prick's money, and make sure she was okay at the same time. Do us both some good. LENNY And? Is she okay? MAX I don't know man. This guy's a complete control freak. And he treats her like a piece of trash. It's not what you'd call a healthy relationship. I think she's got a self-image problem, you ask me. LENNY So that mail-order psychology degree finally came, huh? Lenny's cellular rings and he answers it. Mace tells him she's on the main floor but she's lost track of Philo's goons. They could be headed his way. Lenny tells Max he's got to go. He tells Max to stay on Faith, because something might be going on. Lenny says he'll call him later. CUT TO MACE moving through the crowd. Frenzied bodies. No sign of Corto, Constance and Duncan. CUT TO LENNY coming down the back stairs. He rounds the corner at the bottom and... OH OH. Joey Corto, Constance and Duncan are right there, coming the other way. They grab him and take him into a dank basement room. It is a large dark space, with rusted support columns and years of accumulated junk. Constance has Lenny's arm twisted painfully behind him. He can't break free. Lenny, though he knows it's hopeless, starts his routine. He's getting to the part where he writes them all a big check when Constance slams his back up against a column and gut-punches him. Lenny struggles but he is no match for Constance's strength and fighting skill. She works him expertly, with a series of painful jabs. He deflates and sags to his knees. Corto laughs. He gets a charge out of Lenny getting the shit kicked out of him by a girl. Constance grab him by his hair and pulls him up with one powerful arm. She is cocking back the other arm for a pile-driver punch when... Suddenly a dark shape materializes behind her. Mace drives Constance head first into the steel column. Duncan lunges in and grabs for Mace. This is a mistake. Mace doesn't fight fancy. And she doesn't fight fair. She fights to win. And she is awesomely fast. Her moves are street moves, coupled with arm-locks and come-alongs she has been trained to use as a security driver. Lenny recovers enough to get some licks in on Constance, who is still a little stunned. She has blood dripping in her eyes and can't see too well. He calls her a Hell Dyke and gets her to charge, then breaks a dusty old chair over her head. Mace drops Duncan about the time Constance is hitting the ground, leaving... Joey Corto, who fumbles out a Beretta 9mm and sticks it in Mace's face. He sniggers, loving the upper hand. Safety's on, she says. So, like a jerk, he looks. She snaps sideways in a headfake and closes blindingly fast, twisting the gun out of his hand. She continues to twist his wrist brutally and Corto goes down to one knee, groaning. She takes his Beretta and backhands the barrel hard across his face. Mace releases his wrist and he crumples in a heap. She and Lenny back out the door. Then Lenny runs back in and kicks Corto in the ribs. Lenny! Mace grabs him and pulls him out of the room, then slams the heavy metal firedoor behind them. She locks it with a piece of junk wedged behind the release bar. They walk quickly along the corridor to an exit into the alley behind the club. Mace is disassembling Corto's Beretta without looking at it as they walk. She drops pieces in dumpsters as they go. Lenny brushes himself off and checks his jacket for damage. Mentions how the fabric is really great. Never takes a wrinkle. It is a metaphor for him. He keeps getting folded the wrong way and manages to bounce back. Teflon. Nothing sticks. Mace asks him if he ever wondered why he gets beat up a lot. He never really thought about it. She offers him a ride home. LENNY AND MACE ON THE DRIVE TO HIS PLACE. They are relaxed and easy. She offers him a belt from her tiny hip flask. MACE Lenny Nero. You're some piece of work. You're just calmly backstroking around in the big toilet bowl, and somehow you never let it touch you. Like some kinda Teflon man. LENNY Thank you. MACE I mean, the man's seen it all, right? Between working Vice and your current so-called occupation, you must've seen every kinda perversion. LENNY Every dark need. Every wrinkle in the human brain. I have crawled through the gutter of sexual dysfunction. MACE What I'm sayin'. But you still manage to be this goofball romantic. What is that, some kinda defense mechanism? LENNY It is my sword and my shield, Macey. Lenny finds the anonymous tape in his pocket. He looks at it, puzzled. Mace asks what it is. He says he has no idea. He opens his briefcase. Pops it into the deck. Settles the trodes on his head. He punches PLAY and closes his eyes. POV SEQUENCE: This will be intercut between the actual POV and Lenny's reactions as he mentions some of what he is experiencing to Mace, sitting next to him. The first thing we notice is that the POV is distorted visually. The colors are de-saturated. Almost black and white. Yet the detail is crisp and clear, almost hyper- real. WE ARE WALKING down a hallway at a large hotel. An apparently endless row of doors. No sense of whether it is night or day. The Wearer's glance goes to the numbers on the doors from time to time. We come to a particular door. There is a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door. The Wearer moves to the next door. Looks both ways. The corridor is empty. It's a test-pattern so far. Lenny says. "Our" hands appear, quickly pulling on latex surgical gloves. They look like male hands. The snapping of the rubber is the only sound in the corridor. The POV hunches down to the lock and we see the hands go to work with lock-picking tools. Several seconds and the lock is very professionally picked. Okay, we got a little B and E action now, Lenny says to Mace. We enter the dark room, which is vacant. The drapes are open and we see city lights. It is night. One gloved hand picks up the guest directory and looks at it in the moonlight coming in the window. The SUNSET REGENT. The Wearer drops the directory and the hands reappear holding... a black ski-mask. He pulls it on, leaving the subsequent POV seen through the eye-holes of the mask. The Wearer now looks up into a mirror on the dresser. He has avoided his reflection up until now. We see a man, dresses in a jogging suit and black fanny-pack, and of course the ski-mask. Totally anonymous. Hey, this is getting interesting, Lenny says. This guy is good with the suspense. The Wearer climbs the railing and, six stories above the pavement, slips around the wall, stepping down onto the other balcony. We hug the wall, looking furtively into the room. It is a suite. In the living room we see a woman making herself a drink at the mini-bar. She turns... It is Iris. She is wearing a T-shirt and panties. Probably ready for bed. She looks like she can't sleep. Pours the Scotch shakily. CUT TO LENNY, the streetlights washing across his face. He gets suddenly serious with a flash of premonitory dread. IN POV we see Iris go into the bedroom, out of sight. We can hear the television on in there. Using a steel jimmy the Wearer slips the latch on the balcony slider and silently opens it, slipping inside. We stalk quietly to the bedroom door, listening to her movements. Water running in the bathroom. We come around the doorframe. Bedroom dark, bathed in TV glow. Iris in the bathroom, washing her face with cold water. We move toward her. Crossing the room as she reaches for a towel. We are now only a couple of feet away. She comes out of the bathroom, walking right past us, drying her face. She lowers the towel, turning away... her eyes whip back. Widening in terror. She reacts with surprising speed, diving across the bed. We go after her. Her hand goes under the pillow and comes out with a small automatic pistol. She whips it around toward us but we grab it before she can fire and twist it away. She smashes the palm of her hand into our face and rolls off the bed. All this happens lightning-fast. We follow her as she scrambles up, running through the bedroom door. Across the living room and down the short hall to the front door. Closing rapidly on her as she somehow gets the chain off the door and gets out into the hall. Slam! We tackle her against the far wall of the corridor. Our right hand comes into view holding a small electric stunner. Zap! We nail her right in the back, between the shoulder blades. She sags to the floor, gasping. We zap her again. The Wearer's glance does a 180 both ways down the corridor... nobody in sight. We clamp our hand over Iris' mouth and drag her back into her room, locking the door. ON LENNY, reacting. Going white. What is it? Mace says. WE ARE DRAGGING a semiconscious Iris into the bathroom... propping her up with her back against the white tile wall... grabbing her hands and handcuffing them one by one to the steel towel rack above her. She is moaning, stunned. Crying now. I don't have it, she says, then something else we can't quite make out. She is hardly able to draw a breath to talk, let alone scream. I haven't seen your face... I haven't heard your voice... you can still let me go-- ZAP! The Wearer hits her with the stunner again. She jerks and gasps for breath. We see our latex-gloved finger come up in front of us and hear SSSHHH. Moving quickly now. Our hands unbuckle the fanny pack and lay it on the floor next to her. Unzip it. Pull out something... a set of playback trodes. Our hands place them on her head. She stares uncomprehending. What? We catch a glimpse of some electronics stuff inside the pack... a record deck, some wires, a small metal box. What's he doing? He's jacked her in to his own output, Lenny says, She's seeing what he's seeing. She's seeing herself. Iris can now see herself as the Wearer sees her... wide- eyed with terror, white-lipped, weeping. Helpless. And she can feel what he feels. The Wearer's hand goes back into the fanny-pack and pulls out something else. A black athletic headband. We slip it over her head, down over her eyes. A blindfold. Now she can only see what the Wearer sees. And also from the bag we pull... A yellow plastic object. With our thumb we extend the five inch blade of th