L.A. Times

by Stuart Woods

  “Thank you, Michael. You were very supportive.”

  “I won’t be at the wrap party. Please thank everyone for me; tell them they did a superb job.”

  “All right.”

  “And let me speak to Vanessa.”

  Vanessa’s voice was tired but happy. “Hello, Michael? Where are you?”

  “I had to leave the studio. You’ve done a good job, Vanessa; you’ll get a lot of offers when the film starts to screen.”

  “Aren’t you coming to the wrap party?”

  “No. I’m otherwise occupied, I’m afraid.”

  “Michael, you sound funny.”

  “It’s time for you to do Hollywood on your own, my dear.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve moved out of the apartment.”

  “Michael, I don’t understand.”

  “You and I don’t need each other anymore. You’ll do just fine on your own.”

  “Michael…”

  “The lease on the apartment has another six weeks to run; that’ll give you time to find a new place. I’m doubling your salary under our contract. If you need anything, call Margot.”

  “Michael…”

  “Good-bye, Vanessa.” He hung up. When he turned, Margot was staring at him oddly.

  “That was…very strange,” she said.

  “Come into the kitchen,” he said. He led the way, then found a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator. He began opening it. “There’s a lot of food in the icebox,” he said. “Will you join me for dinner?”

  “Michael, what exactly does this invitation mean?”

  He found two glasses and poured the wine. “Nothing profound; just a good dinner and an evening of uninhibited sex between two people who know each other well. By Monday morning, we’ll have forgotten all about it.”

  She smiled. “In that case, I’d be happy to accept.”

  He handed her a glass. He’d always enjoyed older women, and he’d always wondered what she’d be like in bed.

  CHAPTER

  41

  Michael went to the studio on Saturday, leaving Margot lying by the pool, and saw the dailies of the last day of shooting. He was astonished at how powerful Bob Hart’s performance was in the singing scene, even without reaction shots. The editor, Jane Darling, and Eliot Rosen watched with him.

  “It’s extraordinary, Michael,” Eliot said. “You were right.”

  “Jane, I want you to keep the reaction shots of the supporting cast to a minimum,” Michael said. “I don’t want anything to detract from the performance we’ve just seen.”

  “What about Vanessa’s shots?” Eliot asked.

  “They’re important to the scene, of course, but the scene is Bob’s, not Vanessa’s, so don’t use any more of her than is necessary to convey his conquest of her.”

  “Conquest?” Jane Darling said. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “It’s a conquest pure and simple,” Michael said.

  “The male point of view, I suppose.”

  Michael laughed. “Exactly that. Jane, how close are you to a rough cut?”

  “Close. All that’s left to do is organize this scene.”

  “Can I screen the whole thing Monday morning?”

  “Oh, I guess I can work tomorrow,” she said.

  “I’ll send you large amounts of flowers if you do.”

  “How can I resist?” she said dryly.

  When he got back to the new house, Margot was gone.

  Michael arrived at his offices at nine o’clock sharp on Monday morning. He exchanged greetings with Margot as he usually did, and there was not a hint of anything other than business in her mien. That was the way he wanted it. “Get me Leo,” he said.

  “Morning, kiddo,” Leo yawned.

  “Rough night, Leo?”

  “A late one. Poker with the boys.”

  “You up for a screening of the rough cut of Pacific Afternoons?”

  “Already? You better believe I’m ready. Eleven o’clock in Screening Room A?”

  “See you then.” He buzzed Margot. “We’re screening the rough cut at eleven in A. I want you to round up enough people to fill the room, and go heavy on the secretaries.”

  “Can I come?”

  “I wouldn’t do it without you. And get the Harts for me.”

  Susan Hart sounded tired. “Hello, Michael.”

  “Good morning, Sue. Can you and Bob make a screening of the rough cut at eleven?”

  “Bob’s, ah, not very well,” she said. “I’ll be there, though. How does it look?”

  “We’ll see it together. I’m sorry Bob isn’t well.”

  “Michael, what exactly happened on Friday?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I fall asleep, which I never do in the daytime, and Bob ends up drinking wine with you.”

  “Bob invited me to have a glass,” Michael said.

  “Where did he get it?”

  “It was delivered to his bungalow. Some fan sent it, he said.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Susan, is there something wrong?”

  “Didn’t you know about Bob’s, uh, problem?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Bob can’t handle alcohol. He’d been on the wagon for months.”

  “He did say that, but I didn’t infer that he had a problem.”

  “All right, I’ll see you at eleven.”

  “Screening Room A.” He hung up.

  Barry Wimmer appeared at the door. “Got a minute?”

  “Just about that. Come in.”

  Barry handed him some pages. “I read Rick’s treatment over the weekend.”

  “And?”

  “It’s interesting stuff; certainly worth your time to read. To tell you the truth, I could never figure out what Rick does around here. He’s looking better to me now.”

  Michael tapped the pages. “This is what he does; he’s my resident expert cop.”

  “Well, I like it. A good writer could whip it into something really taut and exciting.”

  “I’ll read it first chance I get.” As Barry left, Michael reflected that maybe Rick Rivera wouldn’t be a total liability after all. Certainly this treatment, if it was as good as Barry said, could help justify having Rick on the payroll. Leo had been asking questions about that.

  Michael picked up Leo at his office and walked him to the screening room. Margot had done her job well; the room was packed.

  “What is this, a sneak preview?” Leo asked as he entered the room.

  Everybody laughed.

  Michael looked around for Susan Hart, then saw her in the fourth row, where Leo liked to sit. “Leo,” he whispered.

  “Yeah?”

  “If Susan tries to talk before it’s over, shut her up, will you?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Michael followed Leo into the row and sat down. The fourth row had little writing desks attached to the soft seats, and Leo sat down and picked up a pencil. Michael pressed a button on the arm of his chair and said, “All right, roll it.”

  Five minutes into the film, Michael got up and stood against the wall, watching the faces of his audience. He didn’t need to see the film; he needed to see their reactions. The audience was very still.

  He stood against the wall for most of the film’s running time, and he knew from the faces that he had made a good film. What he didn’t know was if he had been crazy to force a big-time movie star to do a scene that might make laughingstocks of them all.

  As the scene began, Susan Hart looked over at him with an expression of pure hatred. She whispered something to Leo and started to get up.

  Leo put his hand on her arm and pressed her back into the seat, holding a finger to his lips. On the screen, Robert Hart began to sing.

  Michael looked up the rows of viewers, mostly women, and watched their faces as Bob sang. There was a look of pure wonder on each of them, but Michael’s great surprise was Leo Goldman as Hart finished his
song. Leo’s face was shiny with tears.

  The editor had cleverly put a piano track of the song under the final scene, when Bob and Vanessa walked down the beach toward the cottage, and as the screen went dark, the little audience stood and applauded.

  It took Michael a few minutes to get to Leo, as they were both crowded by women who wanted to congratulate them. He caught a glimpse of Susan Hart’s face through the crowd, and it was stony with anger.

  Finally, only Michael, Leo, Susan, Eliot, and Jane, the editor, were left in the screening room.

  “Michael,” Susan Hart said, “I want to see the alternate scene.”

  “There is no alternate scene,” Michael said.

  “You shot it, I know you did.”

  “I burned the negative this morning.”

  She turned to Leo. “Are you going to let him get away with this?”

  “Susan,” Leo said, “am I crazy or something? Didn’t you just see the movie I saw?”

  “Of course I saw it.”

  “Didn’t you like it?”

  “I didn’t like the singing scene.”

  “Didn’t you hear the reaction of those women?”

  “Michael packed the screening.”

  “So what? Those secretaries are people; they go to the movies.”

  “I’ve been tricked,” Susan said. “I don’t know quite how it was done, but I won’t be made a fool of.”

  Leo put his arm around her shoulders. “Susan,” he said firmly, “thank Michael.”

  CHAPTER

  42

  From an article in Vanity Fair:

  As Academy Award time approaches again and the usual prognostications paper the trades and the daily newspapers, more than a little attention is being paid to a “little” film and its rather mysterious producer, relative newcomer Michael Vincent. The film is Pacific Afternoons, adapted by Mark Adair from an obscure 1920s novel of the same name by a spinster named Mildred Parsons.

  The movie has received four nominations, for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Screenplay Adapted from Another Medium. Not since Driving Miss Daisy has a low-budget film attracted such rave notices or, for that matter, such box office. Variety reported last week that the picture has had a domestic gross of more than $70,000,000, and if it does well at the Awards, insiders say it could end up doing more than $150,000,000 worldwide. This is especially good news for its producer, because if sources at Centurion Pictures are correct, his contract gives him ten gross points if he keeps his budgets under $20,000,000. Pacific Afternoons is reported to have cost less than $10,000,000 to shoot, plus as much again for prints and advertising.

  Michael Vincent arrived in Hollywood a couple of years ago with only one movie under his belt, the much-lauded Downtown Nights, which was nominated for Best Picture but didn’t win, and for Best Actress. The late Carol Geraldi, who died of a drug overdose shortly after completing work on the film, won a posthumous Oscar with a performance that everyone said would have revived her moribund career if she had lived. Downtown Nights was written and directed by a New York University Film School student named Chuck Parish, but it was the film’s producer who has, unaccountably, received all the praise. Vincent sold the just-completed film to Centurion’s Leo Goldman and simultaneously made a production deal for himself with the studio.

  Vincent is currently shooting Inside Straight, another screenplay by Chuck Parish, and his next project is said to be a cop drama brought to him by an ex-homicide detective who is now an associate producer with Vincent. This time, Vincent is directing.

  Leo Goldman, who could be said to have discovered Vincent, is bullish on the thirty-one-year-old producer. “He’s another David Selznick,” Goldman said in a telephone interview. “I’ve never worked with a young producer who had so great a grasp of what goes into making a movie—and he keeps costs down. I don’t think anybody else could have shot Pacific Afternoons on the budget Michael did.”

  True enough, Vincent is adept at shooting on a shoestring. His secret seems to be to get good people to work for very little. For instance, Robert Hart, whose usual fee these days is in the $3,000,000 range, is said to have done Pacific Afternoons for under half a million, because Mark Adair was writing the screenplay, and because the part gave him an opportunity to do something strikingly different. Adair, too, is said to have worked for a fraction of his usual fee. Neither man would comment on what he was paid.

  Another way Michael Vincent is able to keep costs down is by using unknown talent. He picked Eliot Rosen, the director of Afternoons, right out of UCLA Film School, on the strength of an eight-minute scene Rosen shot for a class. And Vanessa Parks, the beautiful young actress who has been nominated for her work in the film, was a little-known model when Vincent met her. He placed her under personal contract to him on a salary of $5,000 a week, and after Afternoons he doubled her salary. He also moved her into a Century City penthouse with him.

  So it would seem that everybody is delighted with Michael Vincent—Centurion and all the people who have worked with him. Except that isn’t the case. It seems that almost everybody who works with Vincent does well out of it in one way, but loses out in another. Witness the salaries Vincent paid Hart and Adair, compared to the money Vincent himself has made on the film. Vincent also seems to leave human wreckage in his wake. Carol Geraldi, who was, during the time she worked on Downtown Nights, a serious heroin and cocaine junkie, is now dead; Robert Hart, who had been on the wagon for some months after years of a drinking problem, was back at the Betty Ford Clinic for a tune-up three days after completing his outstanding work on Pacific Afternoons.

  Vanessa Parks is another such case. While $5,000 a week sounds like a lot of money, it is only about a quarter of a million dollars a year, and even though Vincent has doubled her salary, her performance in Afternoons and her nomination have pumped her asking price up to two million or more. She has the fastest-developing career of any actress since Julia Roberts, but Vincent stands to gain the most from her success, since he owns her contract and negotiates all her deals.

  Is this all just good business on the part of Vincent? Well, consider this: When Vanessa Parks signed her contract with Vincent, he took all her living expenses—clothes, a new Mercedes, everything—out of the weekly salary he was paying her. Then, during the shooting of Pacific Afternoons, he bought a fabulous new house in the Malibu Colony without mentioning it to Parks, and minutes after she finished shooting her part in the film, he called her and told her that he had moved out of the Century City apartment, and that she had only a few weeks to find a new place to live. After that, he declined to take her phone calls unless the subject was strictly business. Parks is now back with Chuck Parish, who was her boyfriend when she met Vincent.

  But earlier in this piece it was said that Michael Vincent was mysterious. Consider this: Vincent is happy to give interviews to the press, on the condition that no photographs are taken of him, his office, or his house, and that there be no discussion of his personal life. The only photograph extant of the producer is the illustration for this article, and that was taken from the TV screen when he accepted Carol Geraldi’s posthumous Oscar. His acceptance speech—“I didn’t know Carol Geraldi before shooting Downtown Nights and I never saw her again afterwards, but she touched all our lives with her talent” —is the Gettysburg Address of acceptance speeches, and he dodged the usual photographs and interviews after the ceremonies, heading straight for Swifty Lazar’s after-Oscar party at Spago, where he felt he had to be seen.

  When one looks into Michael Vincent’s background independently, one finds nothing; a blank. It is known that he is a native New Yorker, but no one knows where he attended school and college, except for his part-time stint as a student at the NYU Film School, or where he worked before joining Centurion. His parents, whose names appear on his birth certificate, a public record, are apparently dead, since they cannot be located.

  So the mysterious Mr. Vincent lives silently in his Malibu Colony mansi
on (practically a gift from Centurion), and the only person in whom he seems to confide even a little is his executive assistant, Margot Gladstone, a beautiful, fiftyish former actress who also once worked for Leo Goldman. Gladstone guards the gates, and she is effective.

  Leo Goldman and Centurion, as might be expected, are deliriously happy with Michael Vincent, as the total grosses on his two completed films are well over a hundred million dollars, on an investment of less than thirty-five million. Recently Goldman invited Vincent to join Centurion’s board of directors. “Except for me,” Goldman says, “our board was financial people and captains of industry. I felt it was time we had another filmmaker on the board.”

  So the mysterious Vincent sails on toward major Hollywood success, perhaps even immortality, and who cares about the jetsam left in his wake? Granted, it’s an industry of sharks, but Michael Vincent is, even in Hollywood, something special.

  CHAPTER

  43

  Michael put down the magazine and stared out at the sea. He kept telling himself that this was part of the business, but he could not put down the fear inside him. They had been checking out his background, and that was very frightening indeed. They hadn’t found much, because he had anticipated such an inquiry, but if anybody smart ever had a reason to find out about him, the truth would eventually be known.

  He turned his mind toward the past and observed Vinnie, the mob collector, on his rounds—breaking fingers and noses, forcing money out of people, getting blood from turnips. That had been his job. Vinnie was another person from another time; he in no way resembled Michael, who was everything Vinnie had ever wanted to be.

  The phone rang, startling him. He was doing a lot of his work at home now, and Margot could ring him directly and put any caller through. Only a handful of people had his home number.

  “Hello?”

  “Hiya, kid,” Leo said. “I know you don’t deign to come into the office these days, but I trust you will show up for the board meeting at two.”