Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
I’m going to tell you the real story behind Bloodrock and how we ended up with a dead man in a bathtub.
I was right there on location and saw just about everything.
More than anyone else, at least. I’m sure you remember hearing about it, even if you’re not a regular reader of the Hollywood trades.
You also probably remember that there were some questions floating around, the big one being: Was it just an accident, or was it a murder?
So I’ll tell you everything I know, and then you can decide for yourself.
(Do I sound like a born publicist, or what?)
Anyway, the picture starred Clete Williams and Brenda Conrad, the producer was Charles Mann, and the director was Tom Franklin. I could pull out the bios on all those names, if you really need them, but I guess you probably don’t.
But about the dead writer in the tub. I first heard about it on Wednesday morning, September 15.
I was asleep in my room at the Tucson Holiday Inn when I got a call from the studio.
At seven in the morning. I never expected to get a call from the studio because here in Arizona we were an hour ahead of LA, which means it was six a.m. Los Angeles time, and nobody in the studio’s White Building is awake at that hour.
Let’s face it, those executives lead a social life that would exhaust Jack the Ripper, and they usually stagger in around midnight their time.
But here it was, Greenblatt himself calling, with that stuffy whine of his, and the first words out of his mouth are something like, “Jason, what the fuck are you doing about that mess out there?”
You have to understand that everybody abuses the unit publicist. The unit publicist is somebody who is assigned to a movie production to generate publicity about the movie as it goes along.
It’s an important position, but statuswise it’s just about the lowest job there is, and everybody feels free to yell at you.
And Greenblatt yells at everybody, anyway.
Well, on that particular day, at seven o’clock in the morning, I didn’t know what he was talking about.
At first I assumed there was a production problem.
I mean, another production problem. Bloodrock had already had its share of them already.
We were scheduled to shoot fifty-four days—ten in the studio and forty-four on location.
We started the shoot—I mean principal photography—on location just outside Tucson, and almost immediately, everything went wrong. I mean everything.
First Clete Williams broke his toe when a horse stepped on his foot.
Clete Williams is a hypochondriac anyway, and that broken toe put him away.
We had to carry him on a damned stretcher all the way out of the location to the hospital in Tucson, and then he didn’t like the doctors there, and he insisted on being flown by private plane to San Diego to get his toe set there.
We lost a full day.
Then there was Brenda’s rash. Brenda Conrad woke up one morning and her face was bright red and covered in little bumps.
She started screaming at the top of her lungs.
We brought in all the doctors and makeup people, and everybody clucked and fussed and said they didn’t know what was the matter.
They gave Brenda cortisone. Her rash didn’t clear up for two days.
Then we had some flash floods. The runoff from the mountain washed out the only road to our location.
We had trucks and other equipment we were leaving overnight there—a guard was posted, mind you—and now that equipment was stranded.
We couldn’t get to it, and we couldn’t get it back.
We lost four more days picking alternate locations and waiting for new equipment to arrive from the studio.
Meanwhile, there was more trouble with Brenda.
She’d lost her confidence over her rash, and she was not feeling too good about the second lead, Sally Oldman.
By the way, if you don’t recognize that name, it’s because we knew we were going to change it before the picture broke.
I mean, the last name. Oldman was her real name, but if you think about it, old and man don’t quite sound right on a beautiful young woman.
Anyway, Sally Oldman, as she was still called then, played the second lead, the saloon girl who Clete falls for in the film.
Sally was the discovery of Charles Mann, the producer, and Charles was spending a lot of time working with her.
Charles kept insisting that Sally’s part be rewritten to make it bigger, and Brenda didn’t like that.
Finally, Brenda insisted that Sally be fired for incompetence, which was funny because Sally hadn’t done a single scene yet. It was crazy. We were losing days on the schedule like buttons popping off a fat man.
So when Greenblatt called, I assumed it was another production screwup. I didn’t want to say I didn’t know what he was talking about, so I gave him the usual line. “Mr. Greenblatt,” I said, “I think we’ll have everything under control by the end of the day.”
“I don’t care how fast it’s resolved,” Greenblatt said. “I just want to make sure of one thing. Will we be able to keep Clete out of it?”
Hmm, I thought. This was getting sticky. Half of my mind was trying to figure out what the hell he was talking about. The other half was putting together an answer. I gave him the usual line. “It’ll be tricky,” I said, “but I think we can pull it off.”
“You’ll be able to handle the police?”
Now that stopped me cold. Police? Police? I was stunned silent for a long time.
“Jason, you have no fucking idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
“No, sir.”
“Jesus Christ, Jason. What am I paying you on this job?”
“Scale,” I said, which was a lie. But he already knew what he was paying me.
Three hundred and twenty dollars a week to run around and soothe ruffled feathers and write publicity blurbs and ferry reporters in and out of the location.
Three hundred and twenty dollars, which was not enough.
If I had any guts, I would have been doing something else, like, say, collecting garbage in New Jersey.
Something that was more fun than what I was doing and paid about the same.
“Jason,” Greenblatt said heavily, breathing into the phone, “if you would get off your ass, you would discover that somebody in the company was found dead this morning, and if you had half the brains that we all like to pretend you have, you’d immediately think of publicity problems. That’s your responsibility, Jason, publicity problems, and right now you’re up to your ass in them. ”
“Who’s dead?” I had been sleeping when the call came, but by now I was sitting up in bed, wide awake. For the record, I was alone in bed. Lately, I’ve been alone in bed most of the time. The old days when every chickadee wanted to bang the unit publicist are long gone.
“McDougall,” Greenblatt said. “Found dead in his room. Four hours ago, Jason. And his room is right down the hall from you, as I recall. You a sound sleeper?”
Arthur McDougall was the writer. I groaned inwardly.
I knew there were still some rewrites to come.
This is really a mess, I thought. I don’t mean to sound uncaring about McDougall as a person, but the fact was that nearly everyone on the set hated him, with good reason.
He was a short, feisty little guy with a pipe and a pretentious manner.
There are some people who will never let you forget that they went to Yale, even if they’re now working in a whorehouse. McDougall was that sort of person.
“I’ll get on it right away.” I started to get out of bed.
“Just a minute,” Greenblatt said.
I stopped getting out of bed.
“You should know what I am doing,” Greenblatt said. “There’s a release in it. Today I am sending for Harlow Perkins. He’s in New York doing an audit, but he will be flying out. I want him to look into all this.”
“Harlow Perkins?” I was astounded.
“Jason,” Greenblatt said, “I want this fucking mess cleaned up, and cleaned up fast. Perkins is honest and he’s smart and he knows movies. In addition.” And then Greenblatt stopped.
“In addition?”
“In addition, nothing,” Greenblatt said. “Just get the release out. Len will be contacting you about Perkins’s flight. Arrange to meet the plane.”
Click. Buzz.
I started to get dressed. Tucson, Arizona, in September is damned hot.
Most of us had been going around in shirtsleeves, but today I put on a coat and tie.
Also, we had all been shaving at night, not in the morning—when you’re working in the high desert with all that sun and wind, it’s better to shave at the end of the day, not the beginning. But this time I shaved in the morning.
And then I went out to see about our dead writer.