Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Jason,” Greenblatt said. “Are you awake?”
I cradled the phone against my shoulder and flicked on the bedside lamp. It was five a.m. I yawned. “Yes, I’m awake.”
“Jason, you damned well better be awake.”
“I’m awake, Mr. Greenblatt.”
“Now look, Jason, I want you to make some arrangements. Are there any decent hotels in that town? I don’t mean the Holiday Inn.”
“Yes, there are decent hotels,” I said, rubbing my eyes.
“I want two suites for tonight,” Greenblatt said. His voice was very serious. “You got that? Two suites.”
“Two suites. In what names?”
“Greenblatt and Robinson. And that’s a secret, so keep it quiet. We’ll be coming out on the six o’clock plane. Meet us.”
“All right, Mr. Greenblatt.”
“I’d rather you didn’t tell Charles,” Greenblatt said, and chuckled.
“Of course, Mr. Greenblatt.”
“Goodbye, Jason.”
Click.
I hung up the phone. So Robinson was coming too. Robinson was the president of the company. He was usually based in New York, but if he was coming to Tucson with Greenblatt on the six o’clock plane, then Robinson must now be in LA. Which meant he must have flown out from New York last night.
I knew Robinson only by reputation, and that reputation was unpleasant. He was known as Robber Roger because of his ruthlessness as a dealmaker. He had also been arraigned on assault charges several times in New York and had beaten the rap at the last minute each time.
Of course, I had no idea why Robinson was coming out to location.
It seemed like a very stupid idea. When the president of a corporation arrives on a set, it either means a social call, or it means the shit has hit the fan.
One day after a mysterious death, it had to mean shit-slash-fan.
It had to make all the publicity problems much worse, and now I wondered if Greenblatt had thought of that.
I wondered if he cared. I also wondered if he even had a choice about whether Robinson came out or not—if Robinson chose to say he was coming, then he was coming. Nobody argues with the boss.
Anyway, I made a mental note to call Appelbaum later and discuss the situation with him. I swung my feet over the side of the bed, yawned once more, and headed for the shower.
The phone rang again.
It was Mann. “You didn’t report last night,” he said.
“We finished pretty late,” I said. “I thought you’d be asleep.”
“Jason, when I ask for a report, I expect to get it.”
“Well, I’m sorry—”
“Don’t be sorry, Jason. Be in my room in fifteen minutes and give me your report.”
“Yes, Mr. Mann.”
I hurried to take my shower.
* * *
“And then what happened?” Mann said, grunting as he pressed ninety pounds over his head. His face was red, and the veins stood out on his forehead. He was stark naked. From the bathroom, Sally was softly singing “Back in the Saddle Again,” the old Gene Autry song. Or was it Roy Rogers? Anyway.
I stood there, feeling like a fool, and said, “We went up to see Tom Franklin.”
“And?”
“He talked about today’s shoot.”
“Uugh!” Mann said as he dropped the weights with a slam, shaking the floor.
I glanced at my watch. It was not yet six a.m. Whoever was in the room below was getting a nasty surprise.
“Don’t worry about that,” Mann said, apparently understanding my concern.
“I make sure they don’t rent out the room underneath.
I have to exercise every day or I feel like hell.
Man can rot on a location like this. Ooph!
” He lifted the weights again. “Aaaaaand . . . uumph!” He got them over his head. “What else did Franklin talk about?”
“Not much,” I said. “Perkins asked whether McDougall was disruptive.”
“Aaah!” The weights slammed to the floor again, and Mann took several deep breaths. He flexed his pectorals and looked at me. “No flab here,” he said. “No flab at all.”
Sally stuck her head around the corner. “Where’s the Rise?”
“The what?” Mann asked.
“The Rise shaving cream. I have to do my legs.”
“Oh. It’s around there someplace. Look in the medicine cabinet.”
She went back into the bathroom. “Found it,” she called a moment later.
I wondered what kind of person doesn’t think to look in the medicine cabinet when something is missing in the bathroom. She started humming some cattle roundup song. Get along little doggies . . .
“Eee-ach!” Mann said, hefting the weights again. When they were over his head, he said, “How does he seem to you?”
“Who?”
“Perkins. Uumph!” The weights slammed down again.
“He seems okay.”
“You have to do three sets of three, or it doesn’t count. Eee-ach!”
“He seems to be focused, that much I can say.” Even if I wasn’t totally sure what he was focused on yet. He’d been here for a whole day and part of the next and still hadn’t talked to Clete Williams—the most likely suspect—yet.
“Uumph! Okay,” Mann said. “Report to me later.”
I said that I would. I left and shut the door behind me. The last thing I heard as I walked down the hall was a muffled “Eee-ach!” and then a moment later, the floor shook, like a minor earthquake.
* * *
“Now this is the delicate part,” Perkins said, in the breakfast room.
He was an incongruous sight, wearing a dark tie and a chalk-stripe suit, looking like a banker in the midst of a bunch of ragged cowboys, and he was frowning at his eggcup.
He chopped the top of the soft-boiled egg cleanly.
“There,” he said, sitting back. “Perfect. Pass the pepper, please.”
“You sleep well?” I asked, sitting down and nodding to the waitress. I didn’t have to give her my order—I always had the same thing every morning, and she knew by now.
“I didn’t sleep at all,” Perkins said, stirring the egg and tasting a spoonful. “I worked.”
I looked at his face. It was relaxed, rested, composed.
“On what?” I asked.
“The murder,” he said, shaking his head.
He hadn’t said the word out loud all day yesterday, but now here it was, before he had even finished his breakfast.
“So a murder, then,” I said. “Who did it?”
“That,” Perkins said, “is the very thing I am going to find out. Now I want to know about Bobby Venn and Millicent Pink.”
“You think they might have done it?” He was talking about the assistant cameraman and the script supervisor.
“Absolutely not. I was wondering if they were good at their jobs.”
“Sure,” I said, not sure at all. The unit publicist isn’t in a position to evaluate the technical competence of people like that.
If somebody’s bad, I may hear something, but otherwise, I don’t concern myself with the script supervisor and the camera assistants.
“If you want a better opinion, ask Claude.”
“I did,” Perkins said. “He said they were both excellent.”
“Well then,” I said. My orange juice came, and coffee. I sipped the coffee. “Why do you ask?”
“Because of this,” Perkins said, and passed a xeroxed sheet of paper across to me.
It was titled “STUDIO CAMERA REPORT,” dated Tuesday, September 14.
I had seen such sheets before. Each day of shooting, the camera assistant and the script supervisor send in a camera report to the camera department at the studio.
The report lists things like total footage shot, total footage to be printed, total number of setups, and total page count for the day.
Every movie studio has an office full of pale accountant types who are called estimators, and these camera reports are mostly for them.
The estimators have one function in life: to figure out the daily ETC—the estimate to complete—for every picture shooting at the studio.
They need to have the ETCs on Greenblatt’s desk every morning at nine.
What they do is they take the original budget, the original shooting schedule, and the original script, and then they compare progress against it.
And each day, they come up with some figure like Bloodrock, twenty-two and five-eighths pages of script shot, $940,000 spent, six and seven-eighths pages behind schedule, four and a half days behind schedule, estimate to complete five days over schedule and $87,000 over budget.
The actual figures are more detailed, but that gives you the idea. That’s what Greenblatt reads every morning, for each of the half-dozen pictures his studio is shooting at any particular time.
The estimators are supposed to be superefficient clairvoyants, but actually they’re not much good.
To protect their jobs, they have to be conservative, so they always say a picture is to hell and gone, when in fact it may be ahead of schedule.
Greenblatt knows they’re conservative, so he doesn’t pay any attention to the reports—he’d never cancel a picture, for example, on the basis of the ETCs.
What he does do is pick up the phone and yell at somebody about how far behind the picture is on the basis of the ETCs.
Then the other person says the ETCs are wrong, and there is an argument, but the point is made and pressure is exerted. That’s how it works.
I couldn’t imagine why Perkins was interested in the camera report form. It seemed like such a trivial thing. I said so.
“Trivial?” His eyebrows went up. “Everything is trivial until its significance is understood. People watched apples fall out of trees for centuries before anybody saw the significance of gravity.”
And a good morning to you too, I thought, but all I said was, “What do you expect to learn from this form?”
“I have already learned something,” he said. He tapped the form.
The sheet looked like this:
[1] Setup 1
[2] Sc. 287
[3] p. 47–48
[4] Med. 2 shot D. and L., D. crosses L/R, dialogue. Takes 1–9, print 2,6.
[1] Setup 2
[2] Sc. 287A
[3] p. 47–48
[4] CUD. as above. Takes 1–4, print 3, hold 4.
[1] Setup 3
[2] Sc. 287B
[3] p. 47–48
[4] CUL. as above. Takes 1–2, print 1 only.