Chapter 10 #2
You may find this a little unsavory. I find this a little unsavory. But it goes with the job, and there is a certain art to it, which I’ll explain in a minute.
After calling Herbie, I called the hotel and reminded them that Mr. Greenblatt was head of production and Mr. Robinson was president of the company, and it might be a nice gesture to have some little welcoming flowers or fruit or something, and if there was any problem, they should make the rooms ten bucks more for the night. The manager said there was no problem.
Then I went to see Perkins.
* * *
As I hope you’re starting to see by now, I have a tough job.
And I get nervous sometimes. I mean that I really get panicked and anxious, and one of those times was when I couldn’t find Perkins.
I went to his room, but he wasn’t there.
I looked around the corridor and couldn’t find him.
I went to the production office at the end of the hall—it’s a room we took over just to do typing and production reports and stuff—and the secretary said he wasn’t there, and she hadn’t seen him.
I went down to the lobby. He wasn’t there. The desk hadn’t seen him.
By now, I was really shook-up. If I lost track of Perkins, Mann would be all over me, and it wouldn’t be pleasant.
I knew how extremely not pleasant it would be.
Firing squads are more fun than getting it from an asshole like Mann, publicly yelling at you and calling you an incompetent bastard. Which is what I knew he would do.
In desperation, I went to the bar—which was deserted, it being just about one in the afternoon—and there he was, cool and collected, talking to the bartender.
Ben was the bartender. Ben knew everybody on the crew and everybody knew him. Good old Ben. Arizona, as you may know, is a dry state, and you can’t buy liquor at any supermarket at midnight like in California. Good old Ben was damned important to us all.
Ben was so important that we’d gotten him a couple of days’ work as an extra, which tickled him, although he took it very coolly, as if it was his due.
He was a craggy old guy of fifty or so, with a very weather-beaten face.
When I walked in, he was saying, “Sure, I know them all. I see they’re taken care of, you know what I mean. ”
“Of course,” Perkins said. “You have bottled liquor?”
“Well, I can manage things,” Ben said, “you know what I mean.”
“I suppose with all these people staying at the hotel, you have a lot of requests for bottles.”
“Well, not so much as you might think,” Ben said. “Truth is, most of these people go pretty straight—early to bed and early to rise, you know what I mean. Couple of them like their firewater.”
“Clete Williams . . .”
“Clete Williams is a nice man, hell of a nice man. Tends to be a bourbon or vodka man. One hell of a nice man.”
“And that writer . . .”
“McDougall. Terrible what happened to him. Now he liked his firewater, you know what I mean. He was a straight J it was for him—and he says, he doesn’t care, just give him the bottle.
So I give him the bottle and he gives me ten dollars and says to keep the blanking blank change.
” Ben shook his head. “Clean forgot that.”
“Did you see Mr. Mann again that night?”
“Nope.”
“Did you see anybody again that night?”
“Nope. Got those five cowboys out and closed up tight.”
“Thank you very much,” Perkins said.
“Now how about that drink?”
“Beer, please,” Perkins said.
Ben turned to me. “How about you, Jason?”
Now do you see? Even goddamned Ben calls me by my last name, like I was nobody. “Beer,” I said.
“Coming up,” Ben said.
We were alone for a minute. Perkins said, “Make a note of this.”
I got out my notepad.
“First, tell Greenblatt I will see him at his hotel suite at seven p.m., and that is the only time I will be able to see him tonight. Second, have that film that I ordered set up in the projection room, but don’t tell anybody about it.
I will run it at eight p.m. Third, I want to see the still man at eight thirty. By the way, do you have a still book?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Where is it?”
“In the production office.”
“Fine, we’ll go look right now.” He pushed away from the bar.
Ben came back with the beers. “Don’t want your drinks?”
Perkins pushed a ten-dollar bill across the bar. “Keep the change,” he said, and we left the room.
* * *
Alice, the production secretary, made us some coffee while Perkins pored over the book.
The still book consists of a fat loose-leaf collection of all the contact sheets for all the thirty-five-millimeter film shot by the still man during the production.
A still man will probably take about four or five thousand photos in the course of a picture. These are all for publicity.
The reason is you can’t use regular footage from the film, because the quality isn’t good enough for stills. Or, in our case, Bloodrock was Panavision, which means that all the filmed images are squeezed skinny vertically, requiring a special “unsqueezer.”
Larry McBroom was our still man. He was a very nice guy in his late forties who was stoned all the time but a good photographer.
And very diplomatic—he always made sure that he took lots of candids of the stars and had them printed up and placed in their dressing rooms every few days.
Stars love to have pictures of themselves.
They can’t get enough. So Larry was well liked by everyone.
It was clear to me that Perkins wasn’t looking at pictures of stars. He scanned the images rapidly with the help of a magnifying glass. It made him look even more like Sherlock Holmes.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“McDougall.”
“There are several pictures of him posing with the cast.”
“I saw those. That’s not what I want.” And he kept scanning.
“What do you want?”
“I want to see him writing.”
He kept looking for several moments more. Alice came back with our coffee. I sipped mine. Perkins ignored his.
Finally, he said, “Aha!” and sat back. He tapped one frame.
I looked. It showed McDougall making some script changes on location, with Mann and Franklin looking on. It was, frankly, pretty phony. It looked staged. I said so.
“Undoubtedly,” Perkins said. “But he’s writing.”
“So?”
“He’s using his right hand.”
“So? Most people are right-handed.”
“That is undeniably true,” Perkins said. And then he announced he was tired and was going to take a nap, adding that he would be waking about five or six.
Now here is a strange thing. Perkins suddenly seemed very different; it was as if all the tension had gone out of him. Or as if he thought his job was finished, or the challenge was ended. That’s the exact moment I got the distinct feeling he had finally figured it all out.
He waved goodbye to Alice and wandered off to his room. And I just stood there, with the magnifying glass in my hand and the still book in front of me, wondering how the hell he had done it.