Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Have you ever spent much time at the Tucson airport?
Well, I was there for several hours that day.
It’s a surprisingly busy airport, what with the nearby air force base, and the University of Arizona, and the town itself.
The town has doubled in the last ten years.
It used to be a cattleman’s town. Ranchers would come in from all over the surrounding countryside, and also from Mexico, Nogales being just a short distance to the south.
Now Tucson has skyscrapers and, though they hate to admit it, smog.
And they have an airport that’s way too small for their needs.
I met the lawyers at noon. There were three of them, and they looked like a cartoon: three little men in identical dark gray suits with identical leather briefcases and identical stern frowns on their faces.
They didn’t have much to say to me—the general feeling seemed to be that this was all my fault, a giant hunk of bad publicity that I should be held responsible for. I walked them to the limo.
Nobody said much of anything. As they got into the car, one of them looked around at the desolate red hills in the distance and breathed in the hot air, and then he turned to me and said, “Is there any way in this godforsaken hole to get laid?”
“Depends on who’s trying,” I said, which wasn’t very diplomatic. But I was annoyed. He got into the limousine, and it whisked away toward the town.
In fact, Tucson is a good movie town. The university has lots of students and lots of them are girls and they just love show business.
This had been one location where there were no gripes from the crew—plenty of little sun-drenched cuties who were fascinated with everything about movies, fascinated enough to spend an evening with a soundman or an electrician.
The girls were all over the Holiday Inn every night. It was an embarrassment of riches.
I went back to the snack bar in the airport, had a sandwich, and called Appelbaum in Los Angeles. Appelbaum was actually in his office. In fact, I got a certain nasty pleasure in thinking that Appelbaum had probably been forced to stay in his office all day. For once.
“This is the greatest challenge in the history of studio publicity,” Appelbaum said over the phone. “This is a unique and unprecedented event that is a first in film.”
That’s the way Appelbaum talks. He’s written too many press releases in his life.
“Well,” I said, “I don’t see what we can do. It’s in the hands of the police at the moment.”
“The challenge is there and must be squarely met,” Appelbaum said. I wasn’t sure what he meant. Maybe he wasn’t sure either, because he changed the subject. “I hate to say I told you so, but I told you to keep an eye on Williams. He’s erratic, I told you.”
“Clete is fine,” I said. “It’s McDougall who’s dead.”
“Yes, but Clete killed him, didn’t he?”
“No. Who told you that?”
“I heard Williams killed him,” Appelbaum said, “an absolutely unprecedented event in film history.”
“I hate to let you down, Sam,” I said. “I mean, there was an altercation in the bar between McDougall and Williams, but then it looks like McDougall just got looped and fell and cracked his head. So just an accident.”
“If it’s an accident, what’s all the fuss here?”
“Don’t ask me.”
“Well, they’re talking about canceling.”
“Sounds like business as usual,” I said.
Studio executives love to talk about canceling a film, and they almost never do.
It’s just something to talk about. They never do it because an unfinished movie is totally worthless—whatever you’ve spent on it is entirely down the drain.
Of course, the finished movie may turn out to be worthless too—but you can’t know that for sure.
What you know for sure is that no audience will pay to see half of Bloodrock.
“Greenblatt is talking cancel,” Appelbaum said. “Kelso is holding in there, and Robinson is somewhere in New York getting laid on his lunch hour and can’t be reached.”
“Is Greenblatt coming out?”
“He may,” Appelbaum said. I heard a munching sound. “Things are very upset here. I haven’t been able to go for lunch. I’m having lunch in, right now.”
“It sounds like a tuna-fish sandwich,” I said, just to irritate him.
“Pastrami and rye,” Appelbaum said. “Tuna fish gives you hepatitis, did you know that? Never eat tuna fish. Now listen, I want you to keep Clete away from the reporters. And if any agents show up, for Christ’s sake, don’t let them talk to the press. That’s fighting fire with fire.”
“How am I supposed to control the agents?”
“Impress them with the legal problems,” Appelbaum said. “Agents don’t know anything. If you scare them with a legal problem, they won’t know the difference. Just tell them anything to keep their mouths shut.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes,” Appelbaum said. “No more releases from location. We’ll do all the press stuff on the murder from here.”
“You keep saying murder . . .”
There was a pause. “Are you sure Williams didn’t kill him?”
“There’s no reason to think he did. That’s all I can say right now.”
“I’m pretty sure he did it,” Appelbaum said, and took another bite of his sandwich.
* * *
I was supposed to meet the insurance people at three p.m., but I wasn’t happy about that. Somebody from the production office should have been there. It was a matter of making the right impression.
Movie insurance is a crazy business. The risks are high and the premiums are high and the desire to steal can be overpowering. And the insurance companies know it.
Here’s how it works: You’re a movie company. You’re insured for losses resulting from injury or accidents that affect the production’s progress. Normal insurance is a $10,000 deductible per incident. Something’s got to produce a bigger loss than that or the insurance company doesn’t pay.
Now, as a movie company, your costs are about $10,000 a day. Let’s say you have an accident one morning and lose a day. You don’t collect. The next morning, you have another accident and lose another day. You still don’t collect, because it’s per incident. That’s how it works.
But a movie is so complicated that you can, if you’re smart, make an accident work for you.
Let’s say you’re hopelessly behind schedule.
An actor has an accident, and you have to juggle the remaining schedule.
It can be very complicated to decide what should be shot next, and then after that.
Everything is improvised. Maybe you’d like to shoot a crowd scene, but the sets won’t be ready for a week.
Or maybe you can’t get the extras unless you carry them all because ten days haven’t intervened since they last worked, which means you have to pay them for nine nonworking days and that might cost tens of thousands of dollars.
It is very complicated. So insurance companies want to look over the board—meaning the production schedule—themselves to see how they figure the changes should be made.
They know a good UPM, a unit production manager, can cheat them blind.
A good UPM can start with a tiny accident and make it worth two hundred grand in insurance losses.
And somehow, in the process, he gets the picture back on schedule and on budget.
Anyway, it seemed like a bad idea for the publicist to be meeting the insurance auditors, and I was relieved when Jim Stone, the second assistant director, showed up to meet the plane.
Stone is a graduate of VMI, and he has a military bearing that makes a solid, businesslike impression. He stands very straight and looks neat.
I asked him how things were back at the Holiday Inn.
“It’s a mess,” he said. “I hear the cops are talking about booking Clete.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said, wondering where this rumor had started. First I hear it from Appelbaum and now Stone. “Clete may have gotten in a fight with McDougall, but then McDougall just went back to his room and passed out in his bathtub.”
“I’m just telling you what I heard.”
No doubt from Appelbaum, I thought, remembering our phone call. What did he call it, an “absolutely unprecedented event in film history”? I guess some rumors are just too good not to keep alive.
* * *
At four thirty, Perkins arrived from Chicago.
I had never seen him before, although I’d certainly heard his name.
Harlow Perkins was a legendary figure in the movie business—the most ruthless, cold, astute insurance investigator on the job.
Everybody on a production had an immediate cardiac arrest whenever he showed up to check accounts.
He was worse than the head of any studio, because while the studio heads screamed and yelled, Perkins would just stand there, in his three-piece suit and his Phi Beta Kappa key on his vest, and watch.
Then he would look at the books and he would ask a few questions, and somehow he would catch every error, every bit of sleight of hand, that a production was trying to get away with.
He never made notes, and according to rumor, he never smiled. It was said that he had a photographic memory and a computer brain—he could add a column of figures as fast as he could read them.
I recognized Perkins immediately as he came off the plane. He wore an English-cut suit and brown suede shoes, and he had a professorial air. His face was composed and watchful, almost detached.
I walked up to him. “Mr. Perkins? Harvey Jason, publicity on Bloodrock.”
“How do you do,” Perkins said. No handshake. No smile. “I’m sorry you’ve had to wait here so long.”
I blinked. He walked off toward the baggage claim area. I went after him.
“How do you know I was here so long?”