The Unauthorized Guide to MindShifter

A novella in 8 episodes. Episode 7: Mother Knows Best

MindShifter continues!

After Episode 7 gave us a breather, the final approach beckons.

The videocassette of “Zero Hour,” the lost episode of MindShifter, has been located. It’s in the hotel room of Dorothy Steinmetz, Emma’s boss. Chloe Rachel Mann has convinced Emma to break into the room and steal it. But will Emma even get the chance?

Read on, then tune in next week for the THRILLING SEASON FINALE!

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Episode 7: Mother Knows Best

Everyone in Emma’s life was compelled to tell her what to do. Her superiors at NowPlay, telling her to steer toward the documentary division—more women were needed there. Her roommates, telling her she needed to quit putting all her energy into her career and just get laid for once. Even waiters at restaurants insisted she order a cheeseburger and cut loose.

Was she so uncertain, so unmolded, that the world felt it was incumbent to place some stamp upon her? Any stamp at all? Just so there would be some shape to her life, some direction?

Chloe Rachel Mann was doing it as well. Same as everyone else. Insisting that she, and only she, had to be the one to pilfer the “Zero Hour” videocassette from Dorothy’s hotel room. It had to be her. Circumstances had been ordained to deliver her to this point, where she was the only key that would fit this particular lock.

And she would do it—she knew that. The world was right. She did require molding from some outside force. Chloe Rachel Mann recognized that the moment she entered the hotel room. Dorothy too, when Emma first started delivering scripts at NowPlay. And Melinda, back in childhood. The first one to see that in her.

But she wanted to ask for something in return. Because she wanted something, yes. But also because she wanted to do something for herself, for once. Assert her own will rather than bear the brunt of others.

She said, “Where is Melinda?”

Chloe Rachel Mann said, “That interview is not happening. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can do what has to be done.”

“Where—is—Melinda?”

Chloe Rachel Mann glanced at Eunice. She said, “I don’t know. I checked in here yesterday and messaged her last night. Usual stuff. Keep an eye on the film crew, try to talk to you alone. I’m here to get “Zero Hour,” same as her. That’s what she wants us to find. That’s what we have to find.”

“If we find it, do we find her?”

“I don’t know what will happen when we find it. When I watch it. Genuinely. I just know that makes something happen.”

“What is it? You were there, on set. Melinda wrote all about it.”

“I sat in a room and I stared into a camera all day. That was it. That SynTech guy Jane mentioned? Baldy? He was there. Watching me stare into the camera.”

Like me, Emma thought. Staring into Dorothy’s camera and confessing what she had done to Melinda. Cameras and mirrors.

“Whatever ‘Zero Hour’ is, they made it on their own. Cooked it up in post. Spliced my footage into something larger. Whatever it does, whatever it unlocks—I have to be the one to watch it for that to happen.”

“You’re the special little girl,” Emma said.

A few moments ago, that would have sounded like another taunt. Yet as Emma heard herself say it, it sounded less like a taunt, and more like a declaration.

Chloe Rachel Mann said, “Not special enough.”

Something locked into place within Emma. Some tumblers in her heart she never knew were there. She said, “I’ll get it.”

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Excerpt from The Unauthorized Guide to MindShifter by Melinda Midge:

Harold Lieber was born in New York City on January 31, 1942. His father was a kosher butcher. His mother was a seamstress. He was a poor student, never getting a grade higher than a C throughout his entire elementary and secondary education, causing his parents no small amount of grief. Yet there was one exception: theater, where he was granted an A. His performance as Mercutio in his high school’s production of Romeo & Juliet was so magnetic that it was written up in the New York Post.

Upon graduation, he tried to break into theater while working in his father’s butcher shop. Throughout the 1960s, he studied at the Lee Strasberg Institute and landed small parts in off-Broadway shows, including Cowboys, Sam Shepard’s first play. He counted among his friends the actors and performers who would go on to transform the conception of acting onstage and especially onscreen. He caroused with Robert De Niro; he ran lines with Al Pacino. Yet the fame and acclaim that they found continued to elude him. Even when Dustin Hoffman demonstrated that a male actor could perform in a leading role while being short and Jewish, Lieber was unable to land the meaty, dramatic roles he longed for. He still managed to make a living through a series of stage roles, commercials and small parts in films. Pauline Kael said of his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in The Panic in Needle Park that “he possesses the strange confidence one finds in born losers haunting the tables of Atlantic City.”

When the 1970s ended, and with it the promise of a New Hollywood, Lieber found himself out of step. While his friends landed big paychecks in the blockbuster era, he couldn’t even land bit parts. Seeking work, he left New York—the only home he had ever known—and moved to Los Angeles. He floundered for a few more years, landing exactly one part as a guest role on Diff’rent Strokes, until he got the part that would end up defining his career, not always to his liking.

Bloodlust was a vampire noir that followed a detective trailing a series of killings through the garbage-strewn streets of 1980s New York City. Lieber played the part of a university professor the detective consults for advice on the strange killings. Lieber was reluctant to take such a role, so different from the high-minded fare of his earliest ambitions. But since the film was shot in New York, and his airfare and lodging was covered, this allowed him to visit his home and his family after years away. He couldn’t afford to make the trip otherwise; he had less than $100 in his bank account.

Lieber found it humorous that he, a poor student who had barely finished high school, was cast as a patrician man of learning, right down to the pipe and sweater vest. Yet the director’s instincts were correct. Lieber shined in the role. Soon, every horror-meister who needed a touch of gravitas amidst the gore came calling. Within a few years, from the mid-to-late 80s, he landed more roles than he had in every earlier phase of his career combined. Hallows Eve, River of Blood, Bloodlust II: Dark Passions—through these roles, and many others, he earned steady paychecks and banked royalties. And though it didn’t happen overnight, he eventually made peace with his more niche brand of fame.

Speaking to Fangoria magazine, he said, “I ran into one of my old friends from back in the day. Big name actor, he’s won an Oscar, the kind of guy I should be jealous of. And I was! But he told me he had seen Bloodlust II on a whim, not even knowing I was in it. At first, he was pleased to see his old friend onscreen, then he wondered how I had ended up working in something like this. But then, he really started paying attention. He saw the layers I added to the performance, the history behind it, without ever getting showy. ‘Harry, that was a great performance!’ he said. And I couldn’t have asked for a better compliment. This friend of mine, this actor I really respect, saw the work I put into this role. That’s my Oscar.”

His output in the 90s remained steady, from arthouse fare like David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, where he played a salesman, to family-friendly films like Angels in the Outfield, where he played, well, an angel. But more and more downtime elapsed between roles. By the end of the decade, he was looking for something steady, with a paycheck he could rely on.

Enter Paul Gass.

As a teenager, Gass had thrilled to Bloodlust. The chance to cast one of the icons of his adolescence in his show was a dream come true. Lieber accepted the role. On the set of MindShifter, he was regarded as an elder statesman, an industry veteran who had seen it all.

And then, during a break in the filming of the second season—which, of course, would never air—Lieber traveled to New York City, to promote the show and visit his old stomping grounds.

He would never arrive.