At one point, as they passed downtown Los Angeles on their right, he asked her for more succinct directions to her house and she gave them. The address sounded suspiciously close to what he recalled had been Nicole Brown’s address, site of the sensational murder case.
“Are you near Dutton’s bookstore?” he cautiously asked.
“Victor, where I am is right across the street from the scene of the so-called ‘Crime of the Century,’” she admitted.
So he’d been right. “What’s that like?”
“Just awful! It was bad enough when it happened. So terrible! Those two nice young people! And all the police people all over the neighborhood for weeks, asking questions over and over again. But once the trial began, and it dragged on for months, you’ll remember, well, it got so bad with strange people visiting all over the neighborhood, gawking, stomping on lawns, looking into my windows, that I had to leave the house. I moved into a hotel on the beach until it was all over.”
“That really stinks.”
“I felt I had no choice.”
He got off the 10 at the Bundy ramp and drove north. Approaching her area, he said, “When I lived here in L.A. in ’83, I would take Sunset and turn down Bundy to San Vicente to drive out to the beach near the Santa Monica Pier at least once a week, maybe more. And there I was, living in Berlin, Germany, on Schiller Strasse in the Charlottenburg area, in ’94, getting the trial on CNN News Nightly, an hour of it at a time. It was weird. Especially hearing O. J.’s lawyers saying that he couldn’t have made the drive from Nicole’s house back to his own in fifteen minutes late at night. I used to do in eight minutes or less during the day, and so could anyone, except maybe during rush-hour traffic.”
The area was quiet enough when he dropped her off. After its flurry of attention, it had sunk back into suburban quietude. Gloria’s street had large trees with leaf-dappled lawns and sidewalks. Her house was a rambling story-and-a-half cottage guarded by mature roses and other foliage. It wouldn’t have looked out of place in southern Connecticut. “Not the big place we lived in for years in Beverly Hills. But I’m all alone now, except when the grandkids visit.”
They promised to keep in touch.
Driving home to Laurel Canyon, Victor remembered, when he’d specifically asked her about sacrificing her movie star career for marriage, Gloria had replied: “I didn’t ever think that was what I was doing. I thought I could return at any time. And I did. Well, anyway, I was kept laughing all those years. It seems like a fair trade.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-eight
Producer number four was located in Pacific Palisades, a pleasant drive on a spring afternoon, right across Sunset Boulevard from the Yogi Paranamansha Self-Realization Center, and so was at least scenically situated amidst towering eucalyptus and pine trees.
Five little cottages had been painted dove gray and trimmed bone white with severely stripped pale-ash floors and maybe two pieces of furniture assigned to each. The only décor in this office of any excess was a single floor-placed earth-tone ceramic vase holding a six foot high stalk topped by a single, thorny, pale-purple thistle-flower—it looked like what the monster in Alien would sport should it happen to require a buttoniere.
Amid all this extreme “taste,” the producer wore nothing but white: white suit, white t-shirt, all-white track shoes—only once flashing an unanticipated charcoal gray ankle-sock when he crossed a leg—the latter matching his odalisque eyes and his expensively snipped helmet of jet hair.
Middle-Eastern and of recent provenance. Unlike the others, he was clean and perfectly, almost astoundingly, courteous.
However he said at most six words altogether in the entire half hour, including “Hello,” and when the phone rang, even his taped message was a terse, “Yes?!”
Unspeaking, unresponsive, adamantine in his politeness, he sat: a nice looking Persian or Armenian or Syrian or Turkesmani guy clad in overpriced white material upon an overpriced matte dove gray sofa and listened to them talk about the novel and what a great film it would become. At no time did he respond in any way that could be humanly interpreted as interest.
Within ten minutes, his utter passivity, his lack of any signs of life save for a barely audible, occasional hmm, led Victor to—correctly—assume that he wasn’t in any way interested in them or their project.
More than that, it led Victor to fantasize about coming back after hours, grabbing him unawares, tying him up, slowly stripping him, and having his way with the man—if only to elicit some, any, reaction!
By the time the more avid, or more unnoticing, Dmitrios was asking Victor which packet of material they ought to leave with the book, Victor was caught wondering why it was they hadn’t left hours before, since their interlocutor had been mentally out of the room at least that long.
Joel Edison spread out the photos on his lap and popped the video into the entertainment center TV that took up most of the back of the driver’s seat in his Lincoln. “Well! Well! Well!” he said after about five minutes. “And what’s Don Wright like in person? Please don’t tell me he’s five-two.”
“Six-two and so butch it hurts. From close up, he smells like he’s about to orgasm or just has.”
“Gosh All Mighty, Miss Scarlett. You do say the nicest things!”
“What if he’s straight?” Victor asked.
Joel stifled a laugh. “That’s his problem!”
“You’re going to call him, aren’t you?”
“Puh-leeze, I can taste him from here! If you weren’t about to make some big money, I’d offer you a finder’s fee.”
A few minutes later they were at Sam Haddad’s office.
In the lobby, two dark, wiry, curly-haired young men met them. Joel introduced them around, but Victor didn’t quite get their names nor figure out who they were and why they were going inside with him and Joel.
The double doors opened and in they went.
For a minute Victor thought, “Wait! I’ve been here before!”
But when? And where?
When he realized both when and where, he also realized that the view, while almost the same, wasn’t, couldn’t possibly be the same. Because wasn’t that one building away? On the other side of Constellation Boulevard, in Century City? That had been 1977, NBC, Brandon Tartikoff’s office.
So, Victor hadn’t been the only young man to be impressed on that day.
The office was large and the windows were on three sides, with the huge main one behind Sam’s desk, which was an antique cherrywood partner’s desk from the 1920’s with old brass fittings, all of it shined to a dull gleam.
Two other people came in and sat down with notebooks, both evidently from Sam’s staff. One was a sexy dark blonde mid-thirties woman, very tightly dressed yet formally, too. Her Peter Pan collar even enclosed a necktie the same color as the blouse. She was officious and crisp down to her slitted gray eyes and somewhat kick-ass attitude, and was named Jamie Drexler. The guy was mid-forties and had a sluggish British, more likely Commonwealth accent. Very nice looking, with dark blue eyes, rugged face, brighter than hers blond hair that he wore long on the sides and back, casually dressed in Dockers and a black Izod that showed a nice torso. He was intro’ed as Colin Renfrew, and based on the shards remaining of Victor’s gaydar, he was queer. Sam had just joked that both Jamie and Colin were his “right hand men.” Victor wasn’t at all surprised to see that Haddad had become one of those executives who always kept a gay man close by at work, whether for contrast, loyalty, or some other unconscious reason.
When Sam shook his hand, Victor murmured, “I remember it like it was yesterday.”
Sam gave him a conspiratorial half-smile. Then sobered up to meet the others.
From there on, the meeting was so professional, so succinct, so fast moving, that Victor found he missed a great deal of what was proposed, discussed, thought necessary, added, eliminated, and figured out.
Later on, discussing it with Joel to ensure that
he’d gotten it right, Victor came to understand it all in detail. But even during the meeting he had realized that the two dark-haired young men they’d met were Joel’s clients, “hot young screenwriters” who would actually be writing the script for Justify My Sins. Both liked the story, but each had plot revisions to suggest to update it, and both foresaw technical problems to be gotten around.
When Victor asked the group why they couldn’t just go back to the script he and Frank Perry had worked so hard on, Sam stepped in.
“Black Hawk Pictures still owns that script. And yes, the company still exists as some sort of legal entity. Even though Frank is dead, his last wife is still alive as are other relatives and heirs, and even though everything involved with the company is probably embroiled in a variety of suits and countersuits as well as unresolved tax situations, it still owns your script. And while we’re on that topic, we can’t even use the scenario that you first did for Silver Screen—remember that one, two decades ago? It was pretty good. Why not? Because, again, that company is still existent as a legal entity in some form, and it owns that scenario.”
“Explaining why Scott and Evan here will do the story and script,” Joel explained. “If you do it, both other parties might get wind of it, step in, and hold up or even legally stop the process at the onset or at any point along the way.”
“It will still say ‘From the novel by Victor Regina’ won’t it?” Victor wondered.
Sam, conciliatory: “Naturally! Naturally! It’ll say that in the biggest type we can get for it. You know . . . what’s not already co-opted by the actors or the director above the title in their own contracts.”
Joel: “How about a consultancy for Victor? A co-producer credit?”
Sam: “We’ll have to see about that. Jamie,” to the younger of his colleagues, with whom one of the screenwriters was flirting, “look into that possibility. And, Colin,” addressing the man, “what about those diagrams that I showed you that I’m hoping for us to use as the basis of our production’s sets? Those were never purchased by Black Hawk. So, Victor and Joel, we’ll include them in whatever agreement is drawn up, and refer to them as ‘collateral intellectual property.’ Will that cover their sale and use, Colin? Good.”
Victor was going to ask what diagrams when he saw photocopies being handed around and took them. They were the two drawings he had done on the spot for Frank at Frank’s desk in his office: one of the street layout from the book, the other of how the two apartments lined up facing each other, to clarify the script’s action.
Seeing them, remembering that day and Frank’s exultant excitement over how he’d already done so much of the work for them, Victor suddenly felt the loss of the older man with a jolt that he’d not experienced since hearing the news of his death. Frank had really liked Victor. And the feeling had been mutual.
Sam and Colin, Jamie and Joel were now all discussing other details. He wasn’t even sure what details since it had become even more technical, having to do with “most favored nations clauses” and “graduated clauses for sequels and prequels,” and he found his mind drifting back to one day when he and Frank had been working out a scene in his office, acting it out. He couldn’t even recall what scene, but suddenly they’d both fallen to their hands and knees, Victor hiding behind Frank’s giant can of popcorn, Frank behind a stuffed chair, and had begun pretend-shooting at each other like nine-year-olds, using their outstretched hands as guns, until Frank mimed being fatally shot and did an elaborate death scene and they ended up laughing on the carpet.
He remained sitting there, looking out the windows, half hearing the others discussing, wrangling, suddenly stopping and agreeing to discuss whatever it was later, and he found himself thinking it was all so different now: the technical-technological issues were now so hugely complicated for such a simple plot, such an easy-to-make film with its two or three sets and half dozen locations. The financial issues were now equally dauntingly complex for such a simple film with such a small cast. There would have to be dozens more meetings like this, with or most likely without him, or even without Joel, possibly without even Sam, before anything would even begin to happen to launch the project.
He was pulled back into the here and now by Joel at his sleeve and Sam saying, “This is of the utmost importance and will either make or break the project. Casting. We need everyone’s input now. Colin has a list of people we want to approach for the two main roles. Go on.”
Colin rattled off a series of names of young actors and actresses, only one or two of whom Victor had ever heard of. Colin, often Joel, even the two writers and Jamie all knew these actors, however. They knew their upcoming roles, what roles they’d recently shot, what they already had in cans waiting for release at which studios, and what the “buzz” around each unfinished, sometimes still being shot, or still in post-production, or unreleased film and performance was believed, said, or thought to be.
Victor was about to stop them all and remind them that in the book, the girl was dark, ethnic, Mediterranean, while the boy was fair, Nordic, Midwestern, and the contrast between the two of them was absolutely needed—that is, the same speech he’d made to Frank and Sam sixteen years before.
Then he thought, Why bother? These people know what they’re doing. Good-looking Colin here, Joel’s casting people, the make-up folk, the advertising people, the marketing and publicity people: they are who will select the actors, based not on how they look, or whether they fit the roles or if they can act, that’s all assumed or can be rearranged. It’ll be because of many other factors, beyond mere availability and the career building programs in place for each, but also on how the actor “tracks” in name recognition and general likeability among film viewers of different ages, according to surveys handed in at screenings in cinemas in Westwood and Pacoima and Simi Valley. So, anything I say will just be utterly retro and lame and . . . old fashioned.
Lame and old fashioned!
Colin had done some pre-assessments of the production costs under three separate probabilities, dealing with well known stars, actors and director combos, as well as lesser-known and on-the-rise talent combos, and he now began laying those out for everyone in the room. Again utterly losing Victor.
Before he knew it, the meeting was over, people were congratulating each other all around, including him, as though he had actually said or done anything useful or been anything more than merely a presence in the room while it all happened around him.
“I wanted to say what a huge fan I am of your work.” Colin took him aside. From close up he was even better looking, strong jaw, facial skin smooth and tanned, the eyebrows intriguingly multicolored blond. From his rather sluggish first impression he’d become more vivid when speaking at the meeting, and now he was completely alive, his eyes dancing as though with little lights in them.
“When Sam said we were prepping and then meeting about one of your novels, I was totally stoked. I’d not known this one. But I’d picked up Nights in Black Leather at Heathrow on my way back home after University one year and read it the entire twenty hour trip, only stopping to eat and use the loo.”
“We had the paper chemically treated so you couldn’t put it down.”
“I couldn’t. And I’ve read everything since. Or, most of them, I believe. It’s going to be great working with you. And as you also write screenplays, which I only just discovered ten minutes ago, I’m wondering if we couldn’t at some point talk about a project I’ve got the rights to and am interested in. It’s a bit arcane for these folks and will need a literary touch.”
“Sam has my number and e-mail.”
“Oops! That’s His Nibs now,” Colin said turning and seeing Haddad and Jamie together, discussing something, “With something not quite so pleasant. We have to hire someone none of us like for a project. I’d better go.”
In the Lincoln driving back to Joel’s office, the agent was on the phone virtually all the time, excitedly talking to various people in
his office or in other offices. Leaving Victor to think about the meeting and, even a little, Colin. He’d not noticed a ring on any finger. Was he perhaps unattached? Unlikely. He was too much of a catch for that. Dream on, Victor.
Only when they were separating at Victor’s car in the building’s underground garage, did Victor ask Joel, “So . . . We are where? Exactly?”
“They’ll do more work on it, then in a few weeks Sam and his people will present it to the larger group there.”
“Meaning no offer has even been made yet to option the book?”
“No. But I’m on top of it, Victor. Trust me. Everything will happen in time. Item after item. Everything in the proper order. It’s a process. Believe me. Formal as a Japanese tea ceremony. I do this all the time. And today! Today this was a great meeting! And I’ve been to more than a few, so I know,” Joel concluded and took another call as he headed toward the elevator, blowing a kiss to Victor.
CHAPTER thirty-nine
“This guy’s the real deal. He’s aligned with Fox. Worked with them before and they want to work with him again,” Dmitrios said as they drove along Beverly Boulevard
He added that Jonathon Dembrowski had done “several big international projects based on the classics, working with people like De Laurentis and Cubby Broccoli making features in Europe. Over here, of course, they’d been major events on television. Miniseries and the like. Very prestigious!”
When Victor heard what they were, he had to agree.
So Dembrowski had actually himself produced long and good movies, although the past tense on that verb was growing ever longer.
Justify My Sins Page 32
