Chapter 9 #2
“Is this a script?” Mann asked warily.
“Not yet. I’m working on the script now.”
“You want me to buy it as a treatment?”
“Only if you’re interested,” Paul Fox said. “Only if you’re interested.”
“Let me think about it,” Mann said. For once he seemed relieved when I walked up. “Do you know Harvey Jason? Paul Fox.”
“Hi, Harvey,” Fox said. Fox did not look happy to see me. He knew Mann was giving him the brush-off.
“Hi, Paul,” I said. “What brings the Newsweek critic to Arizona?”
“I was in Los Angeles,” Fox said, “talking to the executives at Warners and Metro about my screen idea. They seemed very interested. I think somebody will do it. It’s a terrific idea.”
Of course they were interested. They would be interested if it was a story about a pig that ate its own shit.
And they’d probably even buy it, if a critic were selling.
Which most critics do. You know the old saying: Everybody wants to be in show business.
Most movie critics are frustrated writers and directors, and they’re trying to break into the business.
(The others are just trying to get laid.
You can tell when they do a review and it has a line like, “Fifi Lamammary gave an excellent and sensitive fleshing out of a small role as the serving girl. This is a newcomer to watch.” That translates into, Fifi, if you’re ever in New York, you owe me one, honey.)
Paul Fox was as bad as they came. He was always running around Hollywood, hobnobbing with directors and producers and trying to get some project off the ground.
I knew for a fact that Metro had already bought one of his ideas last year.
One of the Metro executives told me it was the worst movie idea he’d ever heard of, but Metro bought with the promise to “try and turn it into a worthy script.” Well, that’ll take a year or so, and in the meantime, Paul Fox would be rather well-disposed to Metro pictures.
Which wasn’t bad, for about ten grand cash for an idea.
The only thing that rankles, of course, is the fact that those New York critics are so snotty about Hollywood and its values. It looks pretty funny when you realize how many of them are dying for a piece of the action.
Well, Fox was here now, and he was a problem. I asked him how long he was staying.
“Just a few days.”
“It must be slack time in New York,” I said.
“No,” he said. “I have films to screen, but I only screen alone. I insist on that, to retain my objectivity.”
“Movies aren’t made to be seen alone.”
“Oh, you’re one of those.”
You may be thinking that I wasn’t at my diplomatic best in handling Mr. Fox. It was true. I was tired and a little frazzled. And still confused as hell.
“Where did you go to school?” Fox asked me.
“Hard Knocks,” I said.
We could have gone on like this for hours, but I saw Perkins standing over by a group of stuntmen, and I figured I’d better get over and see what was happening.
Fox saw the group too. They were clustered around a piece of equipment resting on the ground. “What’s that?”
“Looks like the stuntmen are setting up a nitrogen ram.”
“What’s that?” Fox asked.
I bit my tongue. Another thing about critics is that they know nothing at all about movies. They are full of little pronouncements about the lighting and the directing and staging, but they have no idea what they’re talking about. It’s like a color-blind person talking about subtle shades of color.
“A nitrogen ram is a device for knocking people down after they’ve been shot on-screen,” I said.
“Oh, it’s for violence.”
“Yes,” I said, “it’s for violence.”
* * *
“So what happens,” Al Chadney said with a gleam in his eye, “is that you get a blast of nitrogen gas at about three hundred pounds per square inch coming in here, and it blows the cylinder back and yanks the wire, and the guy goes flying. Now, when—”
“Quiet for a take! Roll cameras!” Claude shouted.
The group of people clustered around Al Chadney, and the nitrogen ram fell silent. In fact, all 120 people on the production fell silent. There was no talking, no walking around. People broke off conversations and just stared patiently at each other until the take was over.
It’s a crazy moment, but it happens all day long in a movie, and you adjust to it. Two people can be in the middle of a shouting argument, and go silent for the take, then pick up again right where they left off.
I looked at Chadney and his friends. And at the nitrogen ram itself.
This was a new version of the old standby that has been used in Hollywood for years.
You probably remember the great wire-pulls of history.
Jack Palance plugging the guy in Shane—and he’s picked up six feet and dumped in the mud.
The guy getting shotgunned in Bullitt. Ben Johnson being blown across the room out of his chair by McQueen in The Getaway.
Those are all wire-pull gags. The person is fitted with a harness under his clothes, and a wire is attached coming out of his back through a hole in his shirt.
The camera is set up so you can’t see the wire, because the person’s body blocks it.
On action, you have a simultaneous blood hit with a squib—that’s an explosive charge wired to blow out a packet of blood—and you have the wire-pull itself.
Now, it has to happen too fast for a manual yank of the wire.
So you use a mechanical yanker. These days, you use the nitrogen ram, which looks like a big squat cylinder maybe four feet long with an attached bottle of compressed gas.
You can adjust the force of the yank to compensate for the weight of the guy being pulled.
And you can adjust the length of the throw—how many feet you want to pull the body.
It’s a precision piece of high-pressure equipment.
But the stunt is still dangerous as hell.
Which is why Al Chadney had the gleam in his eye.
Chadney is like all stuntmen: He’s certifiably nuts.
His best friends are guys like Glenn Wilder and Dick Ziker, guys who roll cars between takes to keep from getting bored.
Stuntmen are so nuts that they do dangerous things for recreation.
They’re all off on weekends skiing down glaciers or hang gliding or some damned thing. They love the risk of getting killed.
And Chadney certainly could get killed with the nitrogen ram.
One little slip and the device would snap his back like a toothpick, and he’d be dead before he hit the ground.
Or if he landed wrong, he’d snap his back on impact.
And yet here he was, very excited over this chance to eighty-six himself.
He’d come close enough in the past. Chadney had broken his back in three places doing a ramp gag with a car.
He’d been set on fire for real in another car doing an episode of Mannix.
He crushed his leg when a Sherman tank hit it during a collision sequence for Only the Brave.
And he’d lost partial vision in one eye driving out of a third-floor window for some English production. But here he was, happy again.
The take was over, and he picked up again.
Now, when he’s flying, you can do a straight front and an angled side, if you have something to cover the wire.
If there’s empty space, you will see the cable, because it’s got to be fairly big.
But if it’s against a background of buildings or something, you’ll never see it.
Tom Franklin wandered over. He said, “I’ll have three cameras on it.”
“Any speed?” Chadney asked, meaning slow motion.
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s hard to catch without speed,” Chadney said. This is a trick of stuntmen. They try to get the cameras set up so their stunts look good.
“How much speed?”
“Oh, ninety-six. Maybe one twenty-eight.”
“We might try one at ninety-six. I’ll see if I can get a high-speed Arri.”
“Get a Mark II,” Chadney said.
Franklin looked at Binyon. Binyon shrugged. “I know the high-speed Arris jam, but we may not be able to get a Mark II.”
I glanced at Perkins during all of this.
He had wandered over and was paying a lot of attention to the conversation, and in particular, to Chadney.
Chadney didn’t seem aware of it. He was caught up in his enthusiasm for the equipment.
Then Mann wandered over, sniffling a little with his perpetual cold.
Mann paid a lot of attention to Chadney too.
Then the DP called that he had his lighting ready, and Franklin left to go back to work, and the group more or less broke up.
I walked off with Perkins. “That interest you?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because of this,” he said, and took a piece of paper from his pocket.
It was a diagram of some sort. At first I didn’t recognize it, and then I saw it was a floor diagram of the Holiday Inn.
A series of little boxes, with the names of everybody inside their rooms. Perkins only gave me a brief glimpse. Then he put it back in his pocket.
“I don’t understand.”
“The Holiday Inn is L-shaped,” Perkins said. “What does that suggest to you?”
I shrugged. I was honestly starting to feel a little sick of always being one or two steps behind him. Always in the dark.
“Many of the rooms have windows looking out on the corridor,” he said.
I still had no idea what he was talking about.
“Do you remember the call sheet for Tuesday? The day that was canceled because McDougall was dead?”
“No,” I said.
“Mr. Chadney was scheduled to do his nitrogen-ram stunt first thing in the morning.”
That was no help to me at all. I said so.
Perkins just sighed and shook his head, as if he were dealing with a fool who couldn’t see the nose in front of his own face. Which is exactly the way I felt. Yet again, and more and more, every single minute I had to spend with him.
I admit it, that’s when I found myself secretly hoping, in my heart of hearts, that Mr. Harlow Perkins would be unable to solve the mystery, and he would make a very large, pompous, elegant ass out of himself.
Little did I know, he was just one more piece of the puzzle away from having it all figured out.