Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
The hallway was dead silent when I took Perkins up to the room of Tom Franklin, the director. Most of the company was asleep. Perkins eyed me. “You look tired,” he said. “There’s no reason for you to follow me around.”
“It’s part of the service,” I said as cheerfully as I could.
“You mean you’re the company spy?”
“I’m supposed to look after you.”
“Well,” Perkins said, “then I guess you’ll just have to be tired.”
I knocked on the door and Tom Franklin opened it.
If he was surprised to find us out there, he gave no indication.
He waved a felt pen in the air. “Come in, come in,” he said.
He was, as usual, filled with energy. I had never seen Franklin looking tired.
Neither had anybody else. He was known in the company as the Jet-Propelled Elf.
That was because of a funny mistake where the studio gave Franklin the usual gift to a director, a leather-bound copy of the script with his initials on the cover.
But there was, as usual with the studio, some kind of screwup.
In this case, they got his initials wrong, and they printed JPE on the cover.
The crew decided it must stand for Jet-Propelled Elf.
It’s probably silly to mention it, but a company has lots of little jokes like that.
Anyway, Franklin waved us into the room. There were diagrams and sketches scattered all over the floor. They were scene diagrams, and Franklin was marking out camera angles.
“Tomorrow’s shoot,” he explained, pointing to the diagrams. “We’re shooting the scene when Clete comes into town for the first time since Black Jed’s gang burned down his homestead. It’s also the first time he meets Sally, the girl Jed has claimed as his personal property.”
The movie was being shot in an old, imitation Western town called Old Tucson, which was about a half hour west of the city.
A few other films, and many TV episodes, have been shot there.
It isn’t very large, but it has a certain dusty authenticity, which was why we were using it for Bloodrock.
Also, studio overhead dropped if we did more than half our work on location, so it paid.
(In between productions, they open it up to the public as a sort of mini-Disneyland attraction.
You pay a few bucks to get in, and you can see a show—gunfighters dueling it out every hour, stuff like that.
They pack them in for those shows. Believe it or not, a hell of a lot of people pass through Tucson and want to stop and visit Old Tucson.)
An overhead map showed the general layout of the buildings, with a single street running between them.
“At this point, we’ve got to shoot whatever,” he said.
“Clete rides in, dismounts, and then Sally walks out of the saloon. I’ve got to get in and out in one day.
Five pages.” He shook his head. “From experience on this show, I know I can squeeze sixteen setups out of Ellsworth. So I’ve got to be in and out with sixteen setups. ”
Ellsworth, the DP, was known as an artist of film. He was a crusty guy of about fifty, and a demanding perfectionist. He drove his grip and electrical crews wild.
Normally, a cameraman can move faster on exteriors, because he doesn’t have to light everything—he uses the light of the great gaffer in the sky, and maybe a little portable fill. But Ellsworth was no faster outdoors than in. Sixteen setups, like clockwork.
“I think I finally have it,” Franklin said, looking at the diagrams. “Long shot, POV random townies as Clete rides in. Matching reverse—that will become an over-the-shoulder for a piece we can cut in. That’s two.
Pan the townies watching him. Switch lenses and do it tighter.
That’s four. Waist shot and tight head on Clete riding in.
That’s six. Clete dismounting. Then one of Black Jed’s men approaches him.
I have a lateral two—seven—and matching close-ups—nine—and a high angle down in case I have to close up dialogue—ten.
Then I have two inserts: Clete putting his hand near his gun, then the other man—that’s twelve.
They shouldn’t count as setups, but they do.
Now I have a cowboy shot, that’s head to knees, holding the gun—as Clete is about to walk down the street.
That’s a lens change from the first setup, so it’s thirteen.
And a tight head. Fourteen. Then Sally comes out of the saloon.
Full figure and head and neck—sixteen. I just make it. ”
Perkins said, “You enjoying working with Ellsworth?”
“His craftmanship is outstanding,” Franklin said.
Now, Franklin is a smart man. There is no smarter director in the business.
He manages to keep everybody a little off-balance while still managing to avoid offending anyone.
He is famous for the way he talks—which is completely unpredictable; one minute sailor profanity, the next minute psychiatric jargon.
And he’s famous for the way he dresses—one minute combat fatigues or coveralls, and the next minute Beverly Hills chic.
I mean cotton shirts with epaulets and nice detail work, and rough leather pants.
If anybody ever asks him about these traits of his, he just laughs and says, “I’m a director; I have to be all things to all people.
” If you ask me, the truth is, he’s slumming.
I mean, this guy went to Harvard with John Frankenheimer, and then with Frankenheimer and Mulligan and Penn he did TV in New York—Playhouse 90, the quality stuff—and then he came to Hollywood to do movies.
He thinks it’s all a big game, and so he talks in different ways and dresses in different ways because it’s just a game.
And his hobbies: Tom Franklin’s hobby is old biplanes. He collects them and buys them and flies them around at county fairs. I mean, it’s really strange to have somebody go to Harvard and end up doing that. But he’s smart—and very, very politic. The stars love him.
Perkins got a taste of Franklin’s smooth touch right away. He asked abruptly, “How did you get on with McDougall?”
Franklin smiled. “I never minded him. Charlie was unhappy with him, but I never had any trouble. McDougall’s a difficult man—was a difficult man—in many ways, but I think very talented. Whenever we discussed scene changes, he seemed to be well attuned to what I wanted.”
In a rough translation, that meant that the writer did what the director asked for, and so the director liked him.
“How did you get on with him personally?”
“Well, that’s a strange area,” Franklin said.
“Any film is first a writer’s project. Then suddenly it’s taken away from him, and it becomes a director’s project.
There’s a changing of the guard, a transfer of power.
Many writers resent it. And McDougall did too.
At least somewhat. But I am quite comfortable with the idea that at a certain point, the film is mine, not his. So I had no trouble with him.”
“Did you like him?”
“I respected his talent.”
Perkins blinked. It was as much of a reaction as I’d ever seen from him. “That wasn’t exactly what I asked.”
“I feel,” Franklin said, “that creative people ought to be permitted their idiosyncrasies.” He smiled. “I certainly feel I should be permitted mine.”
You see what I mean? Franklin is really smooth.
Perkins said, “Did you ever argue?”
“Rarely. On occasion, I argue with members of a production company, but I find arguments are usually not useful.”
“How do you suppose he came to be murdered?” Perkins asked.
Franklin, still cool, said, “I wasn’t aware he was murdered.”
“You still think it was an accident?”
“I think,” Franklin said, “that he was both consciously and unconsciously self-destructive.”
Perkins moved further into the room and got that concentrating look on his face. I was pleased. I could tell he’d finally met his match. “In what ways was he self-destructive?”
“Art McDougall was an oral-dependent, passive-aggressive narcissistic type. He wanted desperately to be liked. He also felt inadequate, which is why he affected the tweed jackets and the pipes and the other writer’s props. He wasn’t really that sort of person at all.”
“Go on.”
“Well, whenever somebody seemed to like him, he would test that affection by doing outrageous things. Many people mistook this behavior for something else—like hostility. He was continuously seeking friendship and continuously mistrusting it when he found it. So he would do something unpleasant, just to see if his friends would stick by him through it. You follow me?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” Franklin continued, “that personality type runs the risk of engendering considerable ill will in the course of getting reassurance. And McDougall had plenty of ill will.”
“You said consciously and unconsciously self-destructive . . .”
“Well,” Franklin said, “that personality type directs the same impulses to himself. He is testing because, on the most profound level, he feels unworthy of affection. On the deepest level, he hates himself and wants to get rid of himself. Art was always doing mildly self-destructive things. He drank too much. He took too many drugs. He alienated people. He told lots of self-destructive stories, like the time he fell asleep while working and a cigarette caught his pages on fire and ruined a month of work.”
“Here?”
“No, this was in Los Angeles, where he lived, as I recall.”
“So you think his death was unconscious suicide?”
“I assume,” Franklin said, “unless there’s evidence to the contrary.”
“Did you know the room was wiped of fingerprints?”
Franklin laughed. “That sounds so melodramatic, it belongs in a movie. Who told you that?”
“The police.”