Chapter 7 #2
And it went on like this for sixteen different camera setups—giving the script scene number, the page of the script, and a description of the shot, including the number of takes and which were printed or held.
(A held shot is a notation that if the printed take is unsatisfactory, the lab should print the shot marked “hold.” That’s sometimes necessary because when you see dailies screened, you notice something that nobody caught at the time, like a car zipping by in the far background when it’s supposed to be an 1880 Western. Or a jet trail in the sky.)
Well, I didn’t notice anything odd about the sheet, and I said so.
“The seventh setup,” Perkins said.
I looked again.
[1] Setup 7
[2] Sc. 290
[3] p. 49
[4] 2 shot D. and L., D’s dialogue. Scrubbed. (Takes 1–3.)
I shrugged. “So they adiosed the seventh setup,” I said. “It happens. The director sets up a shot and then changes his mind, or an actor gets uncomfortable, and the director kills the setup to let the actor have time to cool off.”
I glanced at Perkins, who seemed singularly unimpressed.
“I’ll bet this setup was just before lunch,” I said. “Franklin broke for lunch after doing three takes and then decided to do something else. He came back and scrubbed the setup.”
“Franklin can’t afford that,” Perkins said. “You heard him last night. He has a slow cameraman, and he needs every setup he can get. He struck me as an extremely well-prepared director.”
“Here’s the person to ask,” I said. Across the way, Millie Pink, the script supervisor, was tripping into the breakfast room.
Literally tripping. She stumbled and banged against a table, dropping her stopwatch on the floor.
She bent over to pick it up and dropped her notebook, papers fluttering across the linoleum.
A couple of electricians stopped eating to help her get organized.
You should know that script supervisors are a very strange breed.
Some of them are sloppy and dress like hobos, and some of them are extremely prissy, neat, and proper.
Millie was actually good-looking, if a little overdone.
She tended to wear too much makeup, and short skirts, and stiletto heels that she must have gotten from Frederick’s of Hollywood.
She was married to a male makeup man who was always working on another production, and she wasn’t exactly opposed to a little excitement on location.
Millie’s trouble was that she was badly organized in person.
Her script notes were perfect—she always knew how far down an actor had smoked a cigarette before delivering a line, and whether the actor had held the cigarette in his right or left hand—but her personal life was a mess.
Her miniskirts invariably showed legs all black-and-blue from banging into tables, camera tripods, car doors.
Her notes were dusty from being dropped countless times, and even her makeup was often a little askew, one eyebrow heavier than the other, and so on.
I guess the crew liked her because she was so vulnerable. A crew can easily get down on a script supervisor because it’s not exactly a popular job. But everybody liked Millie.
When she had her notes collected again, I beckoned for her to come over and introduced her to Perkins.
“Please join us for breakfast,” Perkins said, in his most polite banker’s manner.
“Thanks, only coffee,” Millie said, blowing a wisp of streaked blond hair out of her eyes. “I’m on a diet. It’s starting to spread south of the border. Whew! What a morning.”
Perkins poured her coffee from a plastic pot that sat on the table. “I understand,” he said, “that you had the unfortunate distinction of being the person who found Mr. McDougall.”
“Oh, so that’s who you are,” she said. “I was trying to place you. Yes, I found him.” She lit a cigarette, leaving the filter edge dark red from lipstick. “Is that what you want to talk about?”
“Not exactly. But it must have been an upsetting experience.”
Millie blew a stream of smoke. “Well, look,” she said.
“I’m not going to kid you. I’ve been around movies all my life, and I’ve seen a lot of strange things.
The truth is, I really just didn’t believe it.
I kept thinking, ‘They finally got the blood to look real; that makeup man’s a genius.
’ I’m married to a makeup man, you see, so I know about those things.
Anyway, it was a couple of seconds before it hit me that McDougall was really eighty-sixed. ”
“His door was open, is that right?”
“Yeah, it was open. That struck me as funny. And the bed wasn’t slept in. That struck me as funny too. I mean, he wasn’t the most popular guy around, so I wondered who had put him up for the night, you know what I mean?” She paused. “Then I found him in the bathroom.”
“You had gone to his room for script revisions?”
“Yeah, I stopped there every morning to get the changes. I have to do that; otherwise, nobody will tell me there’s a change until we’re actually shooting, and then it’s a mess.”
“So this was routine for you.”
“Yeah. About five thirty, like always.”
“Was the door always ajar?”
“No,” she said, “but sometimes it was. I don’t want to say anything bad about the dead, Mr. Perkins, but Arthur was a heavy drinker.
My father was a heavy drinker, too, so I know about these things.
Arthur drank a lot, and he was forgetful.
The door was open several mornings when I came by, and I used to come in and see quite a mess from the night before, I can tell you. ”
“But yesterday the room was neat?”
“Neat as a pin. Unusually neat.”
“Was Mr. McDougall a neat person?”
“Not when he drank.”
“And he drank most evenings?”
“He drank every evening, Mr. Perkins.”
“I see,” Perkins said, pouring her more coffee. “Now, when you came into the room . . .”
“When I came into the room, I looked left and saw the bed was made, then looked right and saw the desk. I crossed right and stopped by the near corner of the desk left of the chair. I looked for revisions on the desk, but the desk was very neat and tidy—script on the right, legal yellow pad and pencils on the left, bottle of Scotch upper left-hand corner. Then I saw the light was on in the bathroom and there was a faucet dripping, so I crossed over to there and found him in the tub.”
“What did you do then?”
“I went and got Mr. Mann. It was all I could think to do.”
“And what did he do?”
“He was lifting weights at the time. He put on his bathrobe, and he came and looked at the room, and then he told me to call the police.”
“Where did you call from?”
“My room. It’s down the hall.”
“And what did Mr. Mann do?”
“He stayed there, I guess. He was there when I got back.”
“I see. Were there any script revisions, by the way?”
“No,” she said. “I looked at the desk where he worked when I first came into the room. The script was set out there, and I guess he started to work, but he must have had too much to drink and didn’t finish. The bottle of Scotch was half empty.”
“Do you remember what kind of Scotch it was?”
“Sure, J it’s part of my job.” She thought for a moment. “Right-handed, I think. But don’t hold me to that.”
“Fine,” Perkins said. “Now I wanted to ask you—”
“Is that important?”
“What?”
“Whether he was right- or left-handed.”
“It may be,” Perkins said. “Now, I also wanted to ask you about this,” he said, and handed her the camera report form.
She looked at it with a puzzled expression for a moment and then nodded. “Sure,” she said. “I remember. This was from Tuesday, the day before yesterday.”
“That’s right,” Perkins said. “Now, I’m interested in the seventh setup.”
Millie ran her finger down the page. “Seventh . . . seventh . . . Oh yeah, I remember. It was a two-shot with Clete and Brenda. Brenda has that dialogue about taking care of himself. Camera was left of action with a three-inch lens, and Clete crossed left to right, kissed, then exited camera left; Brenda watches him go, looking camera left, then turns away and walks off camera right.”
“I was wondering,” Perkins said, “why it was scrubbed.”
“Oh, that was Tom,” Millie said, sipping her coffee and wincing. “I hate it black, but I can’t put sugar in. I’m on a diet.”
“So you said, but the scene was scrubbed by Tom because . . .”
“Let’s see . . . We broke for lunch, and after lunch he felt that the setup was wrong, so we moved the camera in and went to a fifty lens and did it again.”
“Does that happen often?”
“You mean, he changes a setup at lunch? About once a week, I’d say.”
“Why didn’t he print anything from that setup?” Perkins asked.
Millie leaned toward him in a conspiratorial manner.
“You know, he should have. I told him that. It looks bad when the camera report goes in and one of the setups has been dropped. And if he just prints one take—even if he isn’t going to use it later—then it looks much more efficient, you know, back at the studio. ”
“But he printed nothing.”
“Yeah. I don’t know why. I told him, but he just kept shaking his head, no, no prints.” She shrugged. “It’s no skin off my nose. If anybody catches it from the studio, he does. I was just trying to protect him. Even if he’d said hold a take from that setup. But he wouldn’t.”
“Is that typical of him?”
Millie leaned closer and dropped her voice. “No,” she said, “and I’ll tell you, I think it was pretty strange, the whole thing. It was like he felt he couldn’t print one of those takes.”
“Do you remember anything unusual about the setup?”
Millie shook her head and opened her notebook. “Let me just check,” she said. Papers spilled out, corners dipping into her coffee. “Damn,” she said. “You have a tissue?”
I gave her my paper napkin. She wiped off the coffee.
“Now let’s see,” she said. “That was scene two-ninety, wasn’t it .
. . now . . . uh-huh, uh-huh.” She was looking at her script, which was covered with fine notes in pencil.
“Nope,” she said, finally. “I have no record of anything wrong. Three pretty good takes. Oh, wait a minute. Here, on take three, we have a question about the governor. Ran another several hundred feet of film.”
She slapped her hand on her thigh. “That’s right,” she said. “I remember now. We were going along fine, and just around lunchtime the camera operator began to worry about the governor, so Tom said let’s break for lunch and let the crew check the camera. It was fine.”
“The governor?”
“The thing on the camera that controls the speed, so it goes exactly twenty-four frames of film a second.”
“I see.”
Claude came into the room and said, “The bus is waiting.”
“That’s me,” Millie said. She joined the crew, all getting up from their tables and filing outside to the waiting bus to go to location.
I looked over at Perkins to see if he wanted to go as well. He just sat there. Finally, he said, “What time does the lab print?”
“The lab at the studio?”
“Yes.”
“They start about six in the morning and print until they run out of material. Ten or eleven, maybe.”
“Then there’s time,” Perkins said. “I wonder if you could call them and get this material printed up.”
“What material is that?”
“The seventh setup. Scene two-ninety, takes one to three.”
“You want them all?”
“Yes. All.”
“Sure,” I said.
“And have them put it on a separate reel,” Perkins added. “Don’t put it in with regular dailies.”
“Okay, fine,” I said. “I should be able to get it here by six tonight.”
“Excellent,” Perkins said. “But make sure the reel is marked as special for me. Nobody else can see it, and whatever you do, don’t say a word.”