Chapter 5 #2
Mann and Franklin immediately began to discuss making up the lost shots.
Claude talked to the DP about whether there was any chance the lab might still have the film—was there somebody the DP could call?
DPs always have a special relationship with the film labs, because if something goes wrong, it’s one of their heads.
Either the DP gets axed, or the lab gets axed on a screwup.
The DP said he’d make a couple of calls.
The general atmosphere was businesslike, and nobody seemed to be aware that their writer had died that morning.
I noticed that and wondered if Perkins had noticed it too.
Perkins stood, adjusted his jacket, shot his cuffs, and said, “I would like to have dinner. Why don’t you ask Mr. Mann if he is free to join us?
And I would like to see Mr. Binyon before dinner. ”
I went over and told Claude that Perkins wanted to see him. Claude apparently knew Perkins from some past insurance thing. He nodded, and a moment later I saw Perkins talking with Claude.
I asked Mann about dinner. “Yeah, fine,” Mann said. “But I’ll be a little late. I have to call Greenblatt first. I’ll be fifteen minutes, if I can get through.”
I went back to Perkins. He had finished with Claude.
Perkins and I walked next door to the dining room.
We got a table for four, in the corner. The cocktail waitress asked if we wanted something.
I wanted a double Scotch. Perkins wanted orange juice, if it was fresh.
It wasn’t. He had tonic water instead, specifying Schweppes. The girl left.
“What’s your impression so far?” I asked.
Perkins gave me a little frosty smile, the first I had seen. “Binyon is a good UPM. He’s holding the company together because Franklin is weak, though competent. Mann is obviously not well informed on the process of making films.”
I let that one go without comment.
“Not going to defend your producer?” Perkins asked.
“Fortunately, that’s not part of my job,” I said. “What did you want with Claude?”
“Just a few technical details.”
The drinks came.
I sipped my Scotch and suddenly felt overpoweringly tired. I hadn’t realized how tense I had been all day. And it had been a long day. I looked over at Perkins and thought I should make polite conversation, but I just couldn’t.
I looked at the rest of the company in the dining room.
Here, you could tell that something was wrong.
The conversation was subdued, and there was no sense of the usual fun, the joking and banter.
The coeds who drifted in for a little action were ignored.
Jim Stone, the second assistant director, went around the room, distributing call sheets for the next day to everybody on the crew.
Usually, people joked with him. Not tonight.
When Jimmy got to our table, Perkins took a call sheet and said, “Can you get me yesterday’s call sheet?”
“I think so,” he said.
“I’d appreciate it,” Perkins said.
After he left, I said, “Why do you want that?”
“Just curious.”
Mann came down with Sally Oldman, the ingenue lead. I’ve mentioned her before, along with why her name was all wrong. Charles discovered Sally, who was working in Malibu for the summer as a waitress. She was a coed at the University of Texas, and he and Greenblatt decided she should be in movies.
Everybody was fond of Sally. She was a sweet, simple girl who happened to be absolutely gorgeous.
She had no particular ambition to act or to be in movies, so you may wonder why Mann and Greenblatt were so insistent on her being in Bloodrock.
It didn’t seem to be a trade for her favors, as they say.
Not at first, anyway. Actually, it was probably just some sort of ego thing for them.
A lot of studio people have this habit. They decide that somebody is going to be a big star, and then they stake their reputations and their jobs and the company’s money on that fact.
It has nothing to do with getting laid. It has to do with sheer will.
They just want to make somebody a star. I guess it makes them feel powerful.
Sally was the rather unwilling recipient of their enthusiasm, but she was nice about it. Everybody liked her, as I said. She was pleasant and friendly and not stuck-up. And she was awfully beautiful in a sweet and gentle kind of way.
If anybody should have disliked her, it was me.
I had to arrange interviews and press releases for her, but there weren’t any interesting angles on her, so it was very hard to manage any copy for her.
Most interviewers ended up taking the “beautiful new face” line with her, which is what they always do when the new face has absolutely no drama behind it.
But I didn’t dislike her. I actually kind of adored her and was protective toward her, like everybody else.
Mann and Sally sat down. Mann shook hands with Perkins. “Glad to meet you,” Mann said, in his he-man manner. “I hope you can clean up this mess quickly.”
“I’ll do my best,” Perkins said.
“Get the waitress, Jason,” Mann said. I left the table to get the cocktail waitress and ordered what Mann wanted—a dry gin martini with an olive, straight up, and a glass of white wine for Sally.
When I came back, Mann was saying, “No point in giving you a line. I liked the man, personally, even though he gave me plenty of reason to hate him. He wasn’t easy to deal with. Writers never are.”
“What do you mean?” Perkins asked.
“He had that slippery way of doing things,” Mann said, “and he was pretty precious, you know what I mean? And he talked out of the corners of his mouth. And he didn’t get along with women.
And he hated guns. Isn’t that a bitch? A guy writes a Western and he hates guns.
I’m a hunter myself. As a matter of fact .
. .” Mann looked up at me. “Those drinks coming?”
“Coming,” I said.
“Mine’s with an olive.”
“I know. I ordered it with an olive.”
“The last time it came with a twist.”
“I asked for an olive,” I said, sitting down.
“You were talking about McDougall,” Perkins said.
“Yeah,” Mann said. “I asked him if he wanted to go hunting with me—you know, a weekend of deer in Nevada, get a feel for shooting a gun—but he said no. He hated killing things. That was when I started to worry about him.”
“I see,” Perkins said.
Mann gave him a quick glance. I could tell that Charles Mann was viewing Perkins in a new light, taking in the elegant dress and polished manner.
It was almost in his eyes: Christ, another one.
Charles Mann distrusts any man who doesn’t live exactly the way he does, hunting every weekend and lifting weights in the gym twice a day.
“But you were saying you liked McDougall personally.”
“Yeah,” Mann said. “I liked him personally. I didn’t like him professionally.
I’ll tell you what he was like professionally.
Okay. We have a contract with him, the usual contract—first draft, rewrite, and polish.
All the built-ins. But the bottom line is, he has to have his polish in by such and such a time—I think two weeks after the accepted rewrite.
Okay. Now we cast Brenda, and I’m happy about that, but it does require some changes.
McDougall hasn’t done his polish yet. I say, make the changes as part of the polish.
“He says, no, it’s not a polish. I say, what do you mean?
He says, this casting requires a rewrite, not a polish, and you have to pay me more.
I tell him his own guild, the Writers Guild—and if you don’t know it already, the Writers Guild is the worst; it’s Snake City—won’t support him on that.
They’ll say the changes are within the limits of a polish.
He says, fine, submit it to arbitration.
“Okay. The kicker is, I don’t have time. We’re shooting in ten days, and the arbitration would require at least three weeks. So what do I do? I cave in and give him his rewrite payment—ten grand. That’s what I paid him for his first rewrite.
“Only now ten grand isn’t enough. Now he wants twenty.
I got to fire him now. But I need a script doctor.
Okay. There’s only three decent script doctors in the business—I mean the guys who work under the table, fast, and whip a script into shape, no questions asked, no screen credit, nothing.
One is Stirling. He’s in London. The second is Elmo.
He’s got two other projects and a television pilot, and he’s swamped.
The third is Irving and Sally, but they’re the worst of the three and also the most expensive.
Irving and Sally want twenty for an under-the-table rewrite.
So I’m screwed. I might as well stay with McDougall. ”
Mann sighed at the recollections. “So I paid the bastard his twenty grand. And he’s going to get me the rewrites in ten days.
Only he doesn’t. He calls me up and says it would be better if he met with Miss Conrad before rewriting her part.
I say Miss Conrad is finishing a picture in Seattle and won’t come in except for one day for wardrobe. He has to do the rewrites without her.
“He says, he can’t, but he’ll try. The bottom line is, he doesn’t try very hard.
Now we have to take him with us to Tucson so he can finish the rewrites as we shoot.
This is bad for everybody. First of all, he gets his room and a per diem, and that’s going to add another twelve hundred to the cost above the line.
Second of all, the whole damned company hates him.
But he comes to Tucson. And he meets with Brenda. Okay.”