“Well, now,” Victor reached for more Vodka and more tonic for himself and then topped off Sam’s drink, “You definitely have my attention. Tell me everything.”
CHAPTER nineteen
The “problem script” had been with Victor for nearly week already as it turned out. Well, not the script itself, but the scenario for it. That first meeting at Black Hawk Films’ Beverly Hills office, as they were leaving, Victor had asked: “By the way, is there a specific format you prefer to have your scenario written in? Since that’s what I’m doing first?”
In response, and as he was putting on his jacket to step out of the office, Frank Perry had looked over his desk, moved some papers, and tossed Victor a twelve page scenario.
Two days later, when Victor had to type up his own work on the IBM electronic word processor thoughtfully set up in the sun-filled office just off the living room in the Benedict Canyon house, he scanned what Frank had given him. He set margins, type-size, type-face, and paragraphs to match it. He also followed the layout and underlining and when to use all caps.
But for the life of him, he’d never thought this was the scenario of a film they were about to begin production on a mere four weeks from now.
In fact, Victor had assumed it was a “throwaway,” something that had come in from an agent or over the transom, and had been summarily turned down, but not yet tossed in the waste paper basket.
Why had he thought that? Well, the story was silly, the characters were ciphers, the dialogue was unrealistic and inane, and the plot had logic holes you could drive a twelve-wheeler truck through. That’s why.
So, when Sam Alan Haddad told Victor the film Frank was about to make because he was infatuated with its female writer, and when it turned out to have the same name as the scenario Frank had given him, Victor unconsciously stood up, as though to put distance between himself and Sam. Only a moment later, when he noticed what he’d done, did Victor go back and re-seat himself in the chair facing the sofa, Sam, and the by-now completely set sun.
“I see,” Sam said, “that you’ve read the script.”
“Only the scenario. I’m sure once it’s all fleshed out, it’s a lot better than—”
Victor’s belated attempt to be diplomatic failed.
“In fact, once it’s fleshed out,” Sam said, “it’s a lot worse.”
“How can that be possible?” Victor laughed nervously.
“I brought you a copy,” and Sam drew it out of the plastic bag he’d walked in with. “So you can see for yourself.”
Sam tossed it on the polished-to-a-spit-shine chunk of redwood between them where it sat, pink covered and vaguely radioactive with the potentiality of its sheer badness.
“Ideally,” Victor began, “what you’d like is . . . what?”
“For her to die and for Frank to suddenly come down with just enough amnesia to forget the entire past few months.”
Sam wasn’t making a joke
“And, failing that unlikely eventuality?”
“She’s gone back east. They speak daily. Well, they speak whenever I can’t stop them from speaking. But she’s—believe it or not—also married, and so she’s got to be with hubby . . .”
“Who is an orthopedic surgeon?” Victor asked, since that’s what the dim heroine’s equally jejune ex-husband was in the dopey scenario.
“Exactly. She’s got to be with hubby long enough for him to not suspect anything is going on.”
“Which, anyway, it’s not! Right?”
“Which anyway it’s not, I strongly hope!” Sam clarified. “The upshot is that she will not be around for the next months at least of pre-production and few weeks of early shooting, although she did threaten a weekend with some local cousin’s child’s Bat Mitzvah in the period somewhere, as an excuse to spend a weekend here.”
“You’d like me to rewrite it pretty much as they are shooting it? Change the pages every day?”
Sam nodded.
“But won’t someone see the difference, even if Frank is too besotted not to? Won’t, say, the lead actress see her part is slowly changing from the ridiculous to the, well, if not sublime, at least to the not totally awful?”
“Well . . .” Sam hesitated, then spat it out, “That’s another, and equally large, problem.”
“The lead actress is as big a problem as this script?”
“Perhaps bigger,” Sam said and poured them both new drinks. “You see, this hot new agent, Joel Edison, has joined forces with Miss Hot Pants Script Writer to convince Frank Perry that this should be a vehicle for _____ _____,” and he named a television actress who had just left the top-rated comedy of the past three years on the boob tube.
Victor was stunned. “Are we talking about the same Joel Edison who used to be a waiter at Ed Trefethern’s favorite restaurant?”
“He became maître ‘d there,” Sam said, “but yes, him.”
“The plot thickens,” Victor thought, recalling how Joel had chased him around the Club 8709. “Joel used to be partial to me.”
“Three years ago, he sucked me off at a screening, and I’m not even bi,” Sam said. “He followed me into the john, cornered me in a booth urinal, begged, slobbered all over my pants-front. It was like being attacked by some kind of gay Alien. He doesn’t understand the word ‘no.’ Finally, I just let him.”
“Me three,” Victor allowed.
“He’s probably blown half The Biz by now,” Sam added.
“Explaining his fancy new job.”
“Not Frank however. He’s old school and probably would run screaming from the john. At least I think he would. At any rate, Monster Girl Actress is Joel’s client, as is Miss Hot Pants Script Writer, which is how the two met, and no doubt how he’s foisting her onto Frank and onto the movie, which should never be begun anyway.”
“Speaking of girls,” Victor said. “You’re not seeing that same young woman as when—”
“She left me for some old guy with lots of money.”
“The woman writer convinced Frank to hire the Monster Girl Actress?” Victor asked for clarification.
“And both stink.”
That was pretty clear.
“Maybe I should pay a visit to the her, in the capacity of . . . ? What?”
“Co-producer? Exec-producer?” Sam liked the idea.
“And say to her . . . ? What?”
“Anything. Tell her she has to kiss a gorilla. No. She might like that.”
“She left you for some old guy with lots of money?”
“I was so ready for her to leave. I celebrated by buying a Porsche.”
He got up and looked out the window. Victor joined him staring at the bright little Targa 46 sitting like a yellow and chrome insect that had just alighted on the driveway tarmac.
“Very Cute. Congratulations.”
“To hell with women. I’ll just whack off and pamper my Porsche. Look. I just bought it a black leather bra.”
Victor couldn’t miss the front bumper accessory.
“I’m not going to ask what you do with that machine exactly, Sam, nor comment on how sick a fucker you’ve become.”
“I’ve no shame when it comes to ’Lotte.” Sam all but drooled ogling his car.
Lotte: short for Charlotte, as in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther or in Mann’s Lotte in Weimar. Cute. Very Deutsch. Apt. Sick, but apt.
“About the Monster Girl Actress? Let me see what I can do,” Victor suggested.
“If we can pull this off, I’ll be forever in your debt,” Sam said. Victor had to wonder how far that would actually extend.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Stop right there!” she screamed. Then hushed herself and him while she carefully stage-whispered, “I. Think. They. Can. Hear. Us.”
Victor had just driven up to a split-level, wood-beamed suburban dwelling that looked identical to one he recalled from a Seventies TV series, either The Brady Bunch or Eight Is Enough. The residence was i
n that south-of-Ventura-Boulevard no-mans-land, not still Studio City, but surely not yet Sherman Oaks, so it might have been a house used for exteriors for either TV show.
More to the point, the huge front and side lawns were hummocked with many recently quite messily dug holes. Shovels and hoe-like instruments were sticking up out of a few with other, less easily identifiable, objects scattered close about.
The Monster Girl Actress (or MGA, as Sam and Victor were now calling her) was standing at the largest hole dug so far, right off the main paved walk to the entry. She was holding some kind of lengthy metal gadget Victor had never seen before, as well as what looked to be an enormous flashlight, and a thick wire-mesh enclosed lamp on a long extension cord. Scattered about her fishermen’s thigh-high rubber boot-clad feet he could see small, deadly-looking barrels gaily decaled over with bright orange skulls, crossbones, and warnings—doubtless toxic killer.
Her boots were the least unexpected article of clothing the MGA had on. The rest of the outfit consisted of a bright scarlet closed-at-the-neck body stocking, long sleeved, and dropping down into her boots. That article of clothing was barely covered over with a tiny jumper patterned in a mucous green and drab yellow tartan, all of it accentuating how rail thin she was, with barely a boob to note. Her curly yellow hair was surprisingly Crayola yellow, and surely equally manufactured. Her face was pale, her eyes large, brown, and either determined or—and here Victor admitted to editorializing a smidgen—demented.
How she—a major television star about to embark upon a feature film career—could allow herself to be seen in that get-up amid this field of paraphernalia in broad daylight was what suggested that sanity had departed say about an hour earlier. This would prove to be not at all that far from the truth.
“Mole problem?” Victor asked.
“Is that what they are? Moles? I killed one at the beginning. And it looked like a big rat or a small beaver, but it had this mouth like a circular saw,” she said, confidentially leaning on his arm. Her posture was not Miss Porter’s School, instead resembling someone who had just been—unsurprisingly, given the surroundings—doing heavy digging.
“Sounds like moles,” Victor admitted. “But wouldn’t your neighbors know?”
He glanced around at the crinkled-up-in-the-middle café-curtained windows with little wedges of female faces peeering out, which, as he gazed, suddenly became flat and featureless and totally draped again.
“None of them have any. Only me!” the MGA confided. “See!” She grabbed him by a claw-like hand and dragged him around the house to one side, “There! Can you see?”
“You mean that stream bed?” he asked, innocently.
“Stream bed?” she accused. “It’s the Highway to Mole Hamburger Hamlet!” she assured him. “They swim up it and land directly here and they burrow right in and, well, you can see what they’ve done to my gladiolas and rhododendra! Gone. My azaleas and dogwood. Eaten at the roots! My tulips and asters! Gobbled up like so many appetizers!
“I’ve tried traps and toxins and they’ve worked sometimes. But insufficiently, so now,” her eyes glittered as she spoke, still not letting go of his arm, “I’ve discovered another way.” She dragged out the garden hose, which had a different nozzle than any he’d seen before on one end. “First I’m going to flood ‘em with water. And if that doesn’t work”—and here her voice lowered by degrees—”I’ll gas the little mothas. Zyklon-14. You know what that is?”
Wasn’t that, Victor wondered, the formula SS Storm Troopers were accustomed to pipe into padlocked lorries overfilled with Jews?
Before the horror could sink in, he tried changing the subject to the film.
She screwed up her face and looked at him clearly for the first time. “You’re not,” she hemmed and hawed, “what’s his name?”
God? he wondered. How could she tell?
“Sam?” he asked.
“Sam!” she admitted, relieved. She clearly had only half a clue.
“No. But I’ll be the guy who gives you script revisions on a daily basis,” Victor said with more pure nerve than he ever thought he’d ever utilize with another human.
The claw hand came out again and her voice dropped even deeper and less easy to discern, “Well, just between us, it’s a good thing. Because I love _____,” she assured him, mispronouncing Miss Hot Pants Script Writer’s first name, “and Joel swears up and down by her. But I did have a few ques-tee-ohns about the script myself. I’m not surprised they hired a Rewriter for it.”
“Doctor,” he corrected gently. “We’re called script doctors!” he assured her, a fact that he’d only himself discovered yesterday.
“Well,” she suddenly tossed her head, “more than once in the middle of a scene have I called out ‘Is there a script doctor in the house!’”
She laughed inordinately at her joke, literally slapping one knee repeatedly.
“Right,” Victor said as he kept subtly angling her toward the front door and, he hoped, privacy. She would allow herself to move a few steps before inevitably turning, as though inexorably drawn, to once again gaze upon the gutted miniature Gettysburg of her front yard.
“Then, you’ll be okay with that?” Victor sounded to himself almost beseeching.
“Oh, sure!” she breezed back. “We used to get minute by minutes all the time.”
Victor wasn’t sure what that meant exactly but he could guess.
“Great. Then we’ll be working together.”
They spoke a few minutes more, and Victor now began edging them back onto the street, toward where he’d parked the Z. The neighboring curtains, he noted, were once more wedged ajar with the trademark single eyes busily apeep.
He’d just made it into the car, had turned on the ignition, released the clutch and was caressing the gear stick into first when the MGA suddenly appeared at the passenger side window, fatal nozzle in hand pointed right at him, and yelled, “Make sure you call my agent and tell him all this. Because I get busy with other things and I forget. Do you hear?”
Joel Edison? Victor found himself thinking. Must I—really?
chapter TWENTY-one
”But he’s gay, so everything should be oh-kay,” Gilbert said when Victor found himself wondering what he should do about calling the soi-disant talent agent.
“Said Polyanna to the Ogre, just before it ate her whole and spat out hair, teeth, bones, and nails,” Victor replied.
He was back at the house sitting at his desk, looking out the upper window facing east and thus at the Porter’s roof, where Jared Clapham was lining up more roof tiles just prior to hammering them into place. The day had turned cloudy and gray early and remained so, postponing one of Victor’s more pressing problems—that is, what to do about sexy, ass-deprived Jared.
The roofer wasn’t making matters easy. Whenever his partner wasn’t speaking to him or looking at him, he would rub himself as though he had crotch-itch, run his tongue all around his rather nice looking lips, and in general make obscene gestures in what he knew was Victor’s general direction. As a rule this would have been a complete turn off. Unfortunately, as Victor was himself very horny and interested, it more resembled a menu of a la carte entrees, hopefully to soon arrive, and so proved most distracting.
“Listen Gilbert, Frank’s P.A.,” Victor explained, “a straight boy, and so not given to queenly exaggeration, compared this Joel guy to the Alien in the film of the same name. You remember that particular creature, I believe,” Victor added. They both knew very well that Gilbert had picked his way out of a very crowded row in the Criterion Cinema on Broadway during a preview screening of the horror flick directly following John Hurt’s stomach-exploding scene. Gilbert had dithered in the rear of the theater throughout the following hour or so, then Victor had rejoined him, unable to not notice that his friend still sported a skin tone midway between Russian and Camouflage Army Green.
“I still don’t understand,” Gilbert groaned, “how a
restaurant waiter becomes a talent agent.”
“Remember that story I told you years ago, about how Joel seated me and Ed Trefethern next to Alan Ladd, Jr.?”
“Yes, but . . . “
“Do that a hundred times to a hundred people and one is bound to hire you. It’s Aitch-Wood, Gilly! Look at Frank’s number two guy! At Silver Screen Films, Sam was the low man on the totem pole. He spoke last in any meeting. He was asked last to any gathering. He seldom said a word in public. He never offered an opinion. And now—well, now he’s got command of Black Hawk’s check book.”
“Who is Black Hawk, again?” Gilbert asked.
“What, not who. It’s the name of Frank’s film production company. Remember?”
“Oh, right. You know I woke with this god-awful headache today. Still kind of have it. Whenever I get these headaches, they really run havoc with my memory.”
This was the first Victor was hearing of Gilbert’s “god-awful” headaches—in the plural. “What does Jeff say about the headaches?”
“Oh, I don’t want to bother him with my little problems. You know that Jeff’s like one of the tip top people at G.M.H.C. And you have to admit it’s kind of complicated keeping up with all these nick names you have. Miss Hot Pants Script Writer and Monster Girl Actress and all. Maybe if . . .”
“. . . if you met them?” Victor finished the sentence. “Why don’t you? Why not come out here? The house has two entire bedroom suites and a spare I use as an office. You’d love it. You always say how you’d like to come here.” As he was suggesting it, Victor became enthusiastic: it sounded so right. “Why not take some of that time off you’ve been saving forever from Mistress Mike the Flower Demon and fulfill your L.T.H.D. Surely, Gilberto, you remember what that stands for?”
“Of course I do, L.T.H.D. is my Long Time Hollywood Dream!” Gilbert said.
For years, Victor and Gilbert had an entire, semi-private, language composed of acronyms—just like The Man From U.N.C.L.E.—that they used in public to comment upon friends, competitors, and passers-by.
Justify My Sins Page 17
