PART TWO
  THE HEART-THROB
  
  ONE
  	There's a premiere in Los Angeles tonight, at Grauman's Chinese Theatre. The 
Chinese has been housing such events since 1923, but of course the crowds were much 
larger back then, tens of thousands of people, sometimes even hundreds of thousands, 
would block Hollywood Boulevard in their hunger to see the star of the moment. Tonight's 
event is nowhere near that scale. Though the studio publicists' will massage the numbers 
for tomorrow's Variety and Hollywood Reporter, claiming that a crowd of four thousand 
people waited in the chilly evening air for the appearance of the star of tonight's 
movie, Todd Pickett, the true numbers are in fact less than half that.
  	Still, a third of the Boulevard is barricaded off, and there are a few cop cars 
in evidence, just to give the whole event more drama.
  	As the limos approach the red carpet, and the ushers, who are dressed in the 
black leather costumes of the villains in the movie, step forward to open the doors a few 
'screamers', paid and planted in the crowd by the studio publicity people to get a little 
excitement going, start to do their job, yelling even before the face of the limo's 
passenger has been seen. There's a large contingent of A-list names on tonight's 
guest-list, and plenty of faces that elicit screams as they appear. Cruise isn't here, 
but Nicole Kidman is; so is Schwarzenegger, who has a small role in the picture as the 
retiring Gallows, a vengeful, mythological character whom our hero, played by Todd 
Pickett, must either choose to embody when his time comes round, or-should he refuse-be 
pursued by the ghosts of several generations of former incarnations of the character, to 
persuade him otherwise. Sigourney Weaver plays the woman who has broken the curse of 
Gallows once before, to whom Pickett's character must go when the phantom pursuers are 
almost upon him. Her arrival at Grauman's is greeted by a genuine roar of approval from 
the fans, who are devoted to her. She waves, smiles, allows a barrage of photographs to 
be taken, but she doesn't go near the crowd. She's had experiences with overly-possessive 
fans before: she walks straight down the middle of the red carpet, where she's out of 
reach of their fingers. Still they shout, 'We love you Ripley!', which is the character 
she plays in the Alien movies, and with which she will be identified until the day she 
dies. She waves, even when they call the name Ripley, but her eyes never focus on anybody 
in the crowd for more than a moment.
  	The next limo in the line contains the bright new star of Gallows, Suzie 
Henstell, named by this month's Vanity Fair one of the Ten Hottest Names in Hollywood. 
She is petite (though you'd never know it on the screen), blonde and giggly; she's shared 
a little marijuana with her boyfriend in the limo, and it was a bad move. She stumbles a 
little as she steps onto the red carpet, but the crowd has been prepped, thanks to 
several months of puff pieces and photo-spreads and in-depth interviews, to think of this 
woman as a full-blown star, even though they have yet to see more than a few frames of 
her acting ability from the trailer for Gallows. So what do they care if she looks a 
little out of it? Unlike Ms. Weaver, who wisely chooses to be elusive, allowing the 
photographers just a minute or two to catch her, the new girl is still hungry for 
adulation. She goes straight to the barricades, where a number of young women with 
souvenir programs for Gallows are waving them around. She signs a few, giving her 
boyfriend, who is a six-foot Calvin Klein model hunk, a goofy 'gee-I-must-be-famous!' 
look. The model looks back vacantly, which is the only look in his repertoire. He can 
give it to you vacantly with a semi hard-on in his jeans, or vacantly with his ass 
hanging out of his Y-fronts. Either way, it is heart-achingly beautiful; almost 
troublingly so.
  	The wind comes in gusts along Hollywood Boulevard, and the security men start to 
look a little worried. It was some bright publicist's idea to build two gallows, as a 
kind of gateway through which the audience for the premiere will need to come. Not, it 
now seems, a clever notion. The gallows are made to be trashed tomorrow morning, so 
they're made of light timber and foam-core. The wind is threatening to topple them; or 
worse, pick then up entirely and deposit them on top of the crowd. Light though they are, 
they could do some serious damage if they fell.
  	Four of the ushers from inside the theatre are summoned from their duties and 
told to go and stand beside the gallows, two on either side, holding on to them as 
casually as possible. Security is told that the publicity people only need five more 
minutes. As soon as Suzie Henslett can be persuaded to move on up the carpet and into the 
building (which at present she is showing no desire to do), the director's, Rob 
Neiderman's, limo can be brought to the carpet, followed by the last and most important 
of the bunch, Todd Pickett.
  	The wind is getting worse; the gallows sway giddily. An executive decision is 
made to bring Neiderman's limo in, and if Suzie's screaming fans are visible waving like 
lunatics behind Neiderman in his press pictures, so be it. This isn't a perfect world. 
It's already 8:13pm. At this rate the picture won't be able to begin until half past the 
hour, which wouldn't be a problem if the damn thing weren't so long, but Neiderman's cut 
came in at two hours and forty-three minutes, and though the studio appealed to Pickett 
to get him to shave the thing down to a tight two hours, Todd came back saying he liked 
the picture pretty much as it was, so only four minutes were going out of it. That means 
it'll be past eleven before the picture's finished, and almost midnight by the time 
everybody's assembled at the party venue. It's going to be a long night.
  	Neiderman has persuaded the easily-distracted Miss Henslett away from her fans 
and down the carpet to the door. The big moment is at hand. The ushers cling to the 
gallows, their jobs depending on the perpendicularity of their charges. The largest of 
the limos comes up to the curb. Even before the door has opened, the fans-especially the 
women-are in a state of ecstasy, shrieking at the top of their voices.
  	"Todd! Todd! Oh God! Todd!"
  	The cameras start to flash, as though the incomprehensible semaphore of their 
flashes is going to summon the man in the limo.
  	And out comes Todd Pickett, the star of Gallows, the reason why ninety-five 
percent of its audience will be there when it opens next Friday (it is now Monday); Todd 
Pickett, one of the three biggest male action-movie-stars in the history of cinema. Todd 
Pickett, the boy from Cincinnati who failed in all his grades but ended up the King of 
Hollywood.
  	He raises his hands like a presidential candidate, to acknowledge the shouts of 
the crowd. Then he reaches back into the limo to catch hold of the hand of his date for 
the night, Wilhemina Bosch, a waitress-turned-model-turned-actress-turned-model again, 
with whom he has been seen at parties and premieres for the past four months, though 
neither will say anything about the relationship than that they're good friends.
  	He gathers Wilhemina to him, so that the photographers can get pictures of them 
together. Then arm in arm, through the blizzard of rights and the barrage of We love you, 
Todd coming at them from every side, the pair make their way to the cinema doors, 
which-having gathered their most important guests into the fold, then close rather 
defiantly, as if to divide the important from the unimportant, the stable and the solid 
from those who are simply objects of the night's wind.