The Deal, page 17
Charlie stared at them for a moment, almost trancelike, then murmured, “It’s amazing, isn’t it?”
Deidre turned to him, not sure she had heard what he said. He had spoken very softly. “It’s amazing that it ever gets done. It’s amazing that anybody ever shoots a foot of film, isn’t it?”
She looked at him, astonished. She had been thinking exactly the same thing.
Deidre Hearn would remember this shared moment as marking the beginning of something. Just what it was, she wasn’t sure. But later that night, sitting on the wicker couch in Studio City, she told Ellen that something had definitely happened. Ellen looked up from her knitting with that peculiar creasing of the eyebrows that indicated that Deidre needed to explain what she had just said.
“I don’t know exactly what happened. I mean, we were just walking on the back lot. Whenever I walk on the back lot I get this strange feeling, you know, like the ghosts of all the old actors and directors and writers, all those words from old movies are stored up in the soundstages, in the walls, collecting there like layers of wallpaper or rust or something. And like I’m a part of this continuum…. You understand what I mean?”
Ellen hadn’t the slightest idea what Deidre Hearn meant but she didn’t want to discourage what could be a very cathartic outpouring. And so she nodded rhetorically, giving Deidre permission to keep going.
“Instead of just making movies everyone’s trying to fuck everyone else. We spend the day making phone calls, avoiding phone calls, waiting for phone calls. It’s a power game. What we’re supposed to be doing is making films. That’s what it’s all about, right? Sooner or later film has to roll through the camera. But nobody cares about making films anymore. We might as well be making lawn mowers or harpoons or ice-cube trays. What difference would it make? Nobody gives a shit. They’re too busy making deals….”
Deidre stopped to catch her breath for a moment. It was perfectly quiet on the sun porch except for the faint squeaking of Ellen’s rocking chair.
“So anyway, there we were, Charlie Berns and I, standing there watching these extras in costume. The sun was setting and it was sort of surreal, kind of like Salvador Dalí. I mean, the whole thing about making movies is surreal enough, but sometimes you get surreal on surreal, and it’s like whipped cream on ice cream…it’s overwhelming. The British colonial army marching through the back lot with eighteenth-century wigs and Reeboks, and you say to yourself, ‘Am I dreaming this?’ But you’re not dreaming. That’s the point. This is it. This is what it all boils down to. There’s nothing else that matters at this point. Whatever the deal was, if it was one point two million or two point one million, who cares? It’s time to roll the cameras. A handful of sixty-buck-a-day extras in red coats are going to get shot twenty-five times and bleed ketchup into the Astroturf…. So he turns to me and says, ‘It’s amazing it ever gets done, isn’t it?’ What’s amazing is that that’s exactly what I’m thinking at that moment. It was like he was inside my head reading my thoughts. Isn’t that weird?”
Ellen rocked placidly for a long moment before asking, in her quiet, nonconfrontational voice: “Who is this man, Deidre?”
“Well, that’s just it. He’s a very hard read. I don’t really know….”
“Because it sounds to me like you’re trying to tell me you may be getting involved.”
“Jesus, I hope not. This is not a guy you want to get involved with. This guy’s a walking minefield. He’s in his fifties, probably has at least two ex-wives…. His career’s in the toilet…. I mean, nobody knew who he was before this picture. He lives in a white elephant in the Flats with ripped-out shrubbery and no telephone…. He’s kind of funny-looking, sort of rumpled and out to lunch. He looks like he just woke up half the time…. But there’s something about him….”
“What?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He doesn’t buy into the bullshit. It’s like his ego isn’t involved in the process. He doesn’t make any excuses. He just does it. He floats through it all with a kind of Zen-like calm. You know what I mean?”
Ellen finished a row of stitches for the new afghan she was making before replying.
“It sounds to me, Deidre, like you are getting involved with this man. Am I right?”
“I don’t know, goddamnit!” Deidre was surprised by the emotion of her own outburst. She had practically shouted.
Ellen allowed the moment to dissolve quietly into the therapeutic calm of the sun porch.
“I mean,” she said, her voice subdued once more, “it’s been so long I forgot what it feels like.”
“Deidre, do you remember the talks we had about how you make choices? We talked about appropriate and inappropriate choices. We talked about a propensity to choose men who were inappropriate as a way of avoiding involvement. didn’t we?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It sounds to me like we have a case study in inappropriateness here. This man gets a ten on the inappropriateness scale. Are we going to be sitting here three months from now with you in tears wondering why it didn’t work? Are we going to be having to pick up the pieces again?”
Deidre sat there assailed by the truth of Ellen’s words. It was undeniably inappropriate to have anything to do with Charlie Berns. The man was an accident waiting to happen, a clearly advertised disaster area.
Anyway, he would soon be off to Belgrade to make this ridiculous picture and she wouldn’t see him for months. In fact, she might never see him again. She would soon be off on other pictures, mercifully finished with Lev Disraeli: Freedom Fighter.
Driving home from Ellen’s, Deidre felt the little cold sadness that often overcame her following their sessions. She felt as if her insides had been vacuumed. She felt as if she were drowning in appropriateness. Suddenly she thought about the original Disraeli script and how refreshingly absurd it was, how wonderfully inappropriate.
She started to giggle again over the herring-eating scene with Bismarck in the Radziwill Palace. She had to pull over and wait for the fit to pass. She sat in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven on Coldwater and roared her guts out until she was able to regain enough composure to drive back over the hill.
10
With less than two weeks before the cameras were set to roll on Lev Disraeli: Freedom Fighter, Charlie, Dinak, Wilna and Lionel were en route to Belgrade via London. The ten-week shooting schedule called for principal photography to begin in Yugoslavia and then move to Israel, a reversal of the usual procedure of shooting the exteriors first, to guard against weather problems. For a multitude of reasons, however, ranging from the availability of some key crew members to the rate of exchange of the dollar vis-à-vis the Israeli shekel, the decision had been made to spend the first four weeks on soundstages in Belgrade before going out and blowing up the Negev.
The blocked dinars, fortunately, were immune to the vagaries of exchange rates, and with the substantial sum locked away in their Yugoslavian distributor’s coffers they were able to buy the best production talent the country had to offer. A crew was busily at work building the sets they would need to double for the King David Hotel, the American embassy and the hotel rooms for what Sidney Auger referred to during production meetings as “the fuck scenes.”
Rabbi Gutterman and Lionel’s work on adding a spiritual dimension to the script had been well received by the star, who was going to try, for the first time in his film career, to deliver a soliloquy to the camera. It was Lionel’s idea, a sort of stream-of-consciousness interior monologue delivered from the top of Mount Zion as Lev Disraeli reflects on the continuum of Jewish history since Moses led his people out of Egypt. They’d lay it in over a helicopter shot of Bobby Mason alone against a setting sun.
The star had wrapped Desert Commando and was presently on his way to Palm Springs, via Las Vegas, to rest up for his next picture. Tricia Jacobi was busy shedding a few excess pounds while studying the Torah to get into character for her portrayal of Victoria Halevi, the sabra intelligence officer. And Nigel Bland, according to his agent, was “firming up a bit” as well in order to be able to play the love scenes with Victoria without a stunt double.
They would be in London for two days to clean up some minor casting and to meet Nigel Bland for a drink. They checked into suites at the Dorchester and went to work immediately.
The script called for a number of characters of indeterminate origin and race—freelance terrorists of no precise national allegiance. The studio was concerned about offending any of the actual Palestinian, Iranian or Libyan terrorist organizations and risking reprisals during production. Care was taken, therefore, to create what is called in the movie business “n.d.” terrorists, i.e., “nondescript” terrorists, terrorists without any specific characteristics that could link them to an identifiable group or nationality. Nowhere in the script was a terrorist described physically. In order to avoid reference to a specific language, they never spoke. They were silent and multicolored. Lionel suggested they make one blond and blue-eyed, just to balance out the spectrum, but Norman Hudris said he had never heard of a blond, blue-eyed terrorist.
Their London casting director had arranged a schedule of interviews with Sudanese, Saudi, Somali, Bengali and Pakistani actors. They sat in the suite at the Dorchester and saw a collection of off-white, nondescript actors. Since the actors didn’t speak in the movie, there was no point in having them read, and they were reduced to sitting in the stuffed Edwardian armchairs sipping tea and making small talk.
The following afternoon, after they had hired their cast of n.d. hit men, they went downstairs to meet Nigel Bland in the bar. They found him sitting at a corner table, away from the light, already into a brandy. Nigel Bland was probably pushing sixty, though his agent listed him as forty-three. He had a florid, boozy face redeemed by remarkably clear blue eyes and a strong chin. Well over six feet, he uncoiled with some difficulty from his chair and greeted them, shaking hands and muttering, “Good of you to come.”
After pleasantries and a second round of drinks, Nigel Bland turned to Dinak and said, “Tell me, Dino, what the devil do you make of this chap Bill?”
Dinak blinked several times, rubbed his forehead, was about to issue one of his classic shrugs, when Charlie came to the rescue: “Well, Bill is a basically sympathetic character. Though he competes with Lev in the love story, they wind up being on the same side.”
The actor nodded furiously at this information, took a long sip of his brandy, nodded some more. “Aha,” he uttered, as if what Charlie had said was a revelation to him, then, “Actually, he’s a bit of a double-dealer though, isn’t he?”
“How’s that, Nigel?”
“Well, you see, after having a diddle with the girl in the King David, he goes through her purse and takes out the roll of film, now doesn’t he?”
“Well, yes, but he does that to protect her from Mordecai, who he knows is going to search her later.”
“I see…. So when they first meet in the bar in Beirut, Bill thinks she’s working for the terrorists? Is that it?”
“Not exactly…”
Nigel began to nod furiously again. Charlie and Lionel exchanged a look. It was disconcerting to discover at this late date that one of the lead characters had entirely misunderstood the story.
“Well, it’ll all work out, I suppose,” Nigel said. “Shall we have another round?”
Several rounds later everyone was on excellent terms. Charlie decided not to bother explaining the intricacies of the plot to the man who was to play Bill Gladstone. Nigel Bland was apparently the type of actor who had difficulty keeping a lot of variables in his head at one time. You needed to explain things to actors like that scene by scene, preferably just before they went on camera. You didn’t want to belabor them with too much information too soon.
By the time they separated later that evening, after dinner at the Savoy Grill accompanied by several bottles of Château Pétrus, they were all dear friends. Outside the restaurant, they hugged and kissed like they were saying good-bye at a wrap party.
“See you in Belgrade,” Nigel waved, as he got into a cab and drove off.
Charlie stood there waving back and watching the cab disappear into the London drizzle. Seven hundred eighteen pounds of hard currency had just been charged to the picture. The auditors back at the studio would blanch at this one, but by then the train would be well out of the station and chugging along quite nicely.
Belgrade. No other city in the world can claim to have been totally destroyed at least a dozen times in its history. From the first sack by the barbarians in the fourth century B.C., through the Romans and the Turks, to Hitler’s systematic saturation bombing, its ravishers have always been thorough, if nothing else. The city has risen repeatedly in its ashes, like a stubborn phoenix, continuing to rebuild itself.
As their JAT flight descended into Surcin Airport, overflying the sprawling, somewhat charmless city below, Dinak explained this Yugoslavian propensity for self-immolation. “God don’t like you, he makes you a Serb,” he said, looking dourly out the window as if he were less than thrilled to be back home. His compatriots seemed to be no more thrilled to see him. As they went through passport control, Dinak got into a loud argument with an immigration official. It started with a series of low, breathy, gesticulated sentences and degenerated into a high-pitched screaming match, accompanied by Dinak banging his fist on the counter.
The official stamped his passport so hard that it fell on the floor. Dinak kicked it across the room, to indicate, perhaps, how he felt about his nationality. Riding into town in the taxi, Charlie asked him what the problem was.
Dinak scratched his forehead, shrugged. “Son of a bitch don’t like me.”
“You know him?”
Dinak shook his head. “He’s a fucking Slovene.” As if that explained the ferocious argument that had just taken place.
“Are all…Slovenes like that?” Lionel asked.
“Fucking Slovenes. Slovenes and Serbs argue all the time. It’s nothing. Worse with Macedonians. Real assholes, Macedonians. You scream at Macedonian he don’t even know you screaming at him. You have to scream at him in Macedonian.”
They checked into the Hotel Balkanska on Ulica Marsala Tita. It was a large hotel across from the Tito Mausoleum, with poorly soundproofed rooms looking out on the noisy thoroughfare. It was Dinak who had suggested the hotel, once again for reasons that escaped Charlie. It had the virtue, however, of being large enough and vacant enough at this time of year to accommodate the entire cast and crew. Everyone, that is, except Bobby Mason. Bobby’s contract called for certain amenities that were not available in the Hotel Balkanska. Their local production manager had to have a suite in the Intercontinental Hotel specially refurbished with Jacuzzi, VCR, vibrating bed and a refrigerator full of Pepsi soft drinks.
Tabor Gubca, the production manager, was to become a very important member of the crew of Lev Disraeli: Freedom Fighter. In Yugoslavia he was the man with the can opener. Though Charlie was the producer and the ranking officer on the picture, he was entirely dependent upon Gubca because Gubca knew how to get to the dinars. Neither Charlie nor Dinak had the slightest idea where the blocked dinars were actually coming from.
When Charlie asked for something, Gubca had one of two basic responses: “Can do,” or “No way.” It was either feast or famine with him, and he never qualified or explained any of his decisions. It didn’t help, of course, that he was a Bosnian from Sarajevo and, as such, not overly sympathetic toward Serbian directors, but he did his best to hide his feelings and do his job. He did better than Dinak, who referred to him simply as “the fucking Bosnian.”
The fucking Bosnian took them out to the studio to inspect the work that had been done on the soundstages. The Novi Beograd Studios, across the Sava River in Novi Grad, was a sprawling complex of buildings with high walls resembling a prison. The art director, a tall thin esthetic-looking man named Marka Mladosi, had done an excellent job designing the sets. Working from photographs, he had duplicated the interiors for the scenes they would shoot later in Israel. While Dinak walked the sets, grunting, inspecting the gaffing, checking the wild walls, Charlie and Lionel stood in the middle of the entrance foyer of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem marveling at the precision of Marka Mladosi’s work.
“Terrific work, Marka,” Charlie commented to the man standing beside him puffing on a niska drina, the smelly local cigarette whose acrid odor Charlie would learn to hate.
The art director shrugged modestly and said, “No problem.”
“It’s really great. I mean, it’s like you’re actually there,” Lionel enthused.
“Piece cake,” Marka Mladosi explained. “You have enough dinars, I do anything. You want Sistine Chapel, I give you Sistine Chapel. Piece cake…you know big producer Ed Mutnik?” he asked.
Charlie shook his head.
“He come here last year to do picture. I design him a fountain for swimming pool in L.A. I make him miniature Trevi Fountain in Rome.”
“Uh-huh…”
“I make it for house in Holmby Hill. You know Holmby Hill?”
“Sure do.”
“You give me photo. I do it. Piece cake.”
When they got back to the hotel that evening there was a message to call Norman Hudris at the studio. Charlie looked at his watch, calculated that with the nine-hour difference it was only 8:00 A.M. in Los Angeles, and wondered what Norman Hudris was doing in his office so early.
Norman had actually been in his office since seven that morning. He had wanted to get New York early and see what was happening with the stock. He took the call from Charlie in Belgrade on his Exercycle, between the fifth and sixth mile.
“How’s it going?” Norman asked, panting.
“Fine,” said Charlie.
“That’s good…. Listen, I got a call from Bert Sully lastnight….”
Charlie felt himself tighten up. A call from the star’s manager to the head of the studio on the eve of production was never good news. Norman paused, letting his words hang for a moment, then, “Anyway, it seems he’s got a little problem with the script.”
