The Deal, page 18
“I thought Bobby loved the rewrites.”
“He does. He’s crazy about the Jewish stuff. The monologue on the mountain, he adores it. Listen, before I forget, we can always lose the monologue in post, right?”
“Right.”
“You know, in case it doesn’t work.”
“No problem. We can lift it right out…. What does Bert Sullywant?”
“It’s about the fuck scenes.”
“Which ones?”
“The ones with Bobby.”
“What’s wrong with them?”
“He doesn’t want to do them.”
“Why not?”
“As near as I can figure from Bert Sully, Bobby doesn’t like playing love scenes. He figures it’s not his strong suit.”
“Yeah, but why does he wait till we’re just about to shoot to tell us that? He’s had the script for months.”
“Who knows?”
“It’s not that easy a fix. The whole love triangle is based on those scenes. We can’t just lift them out of the script like they were never there.”
“You’re going to have to figure out something, Charlie.”
“It’s going to throw the whole production board out of kilter….” Charlie heard himself objecting, listening to the words come out of his mouth, knowing all the time that it was pointless. If Bobby Mason didn’t want to do the fuck scenes, then he wasn’t going to do them. It was as simple as that.
“Tell you the truth, Charlie, it may be a blessing in disguise.”
“How do you figure?”
“Marketingwise…lot of people aren’t comfortable watching fuck scenes between people of different colors. Like in Natchez, Mississippi, not to mention Johannesburg…”
“Right.”
“Don’t get me wrong, Charlie. I’m not prejudiced. But with the cost of making pictures these days, you can’t overlook a single market.”
“I suppose not….”
There was a long moment of silence. Static crackled over the ten thousand miles separating them.
“Listen, is it all right if they ride in the same jeep together?” Charlie asked, deadpan.
“As long as she doesn’t go down on him.”
Norman hung up, checked the odometer. He had just passed mile six. He stepped up the pace. He wanted to get ten miles in before the morning staff meeting.
Actually, the suggestion that they lose the fuck scenes between Lev Disraeli and Victoria Halevi had not come from Bobby Mason. It had come from Frederick the Great via Howard Draper. Someone had made the mistake of sending the chairman of the board a copy of the script. According to his secretary he stormed into his office at 9:00 A.M. sharp, demanded that she get Howard Draper on the line in Los Angeles. Howard was woken up at six to be told that ACI did not want its name on any motion picture that “promoted irresponsible miscegenation.”
Howard hung up the phone and lay there for a long while wondering if there was a difference between responsible and irresponsible miscegenation. Then he called his vice president of production, West Coast, and told him to lose the fuck scenes.
Meanwhile, in the Bobby Vinton Suite at the Riviera Club in Vegas, Bobby Mason had just finished miscegenating with two showgirls from the road company of Oh! Calcutta! Viki and Pam were both five ten and slim, the way Bobby liked them, one blonde and one redhead. Whenever he indulged in one of his sporadic constitutional ménages à trois, he liked to have girls with different-colored hair but always the same color skin. White. Preferably very white. When it came to miscegenation Bobby Mason was a purist.
He gave each of them a $500 chip to play with and dismissed them. He took a long hot shower, then stretched out on the bed to catch a little Talmud before going out and doing his five miles of road work.
He opened the thick black volume, The Talmud Made Easy, and started the chapter called “Isaiah.” The book had large print and was annotated and illustrated to make it easier to follow. He read for a while, quickly starting to glaze over. Between the miscegenation and the hot shower he was fading.
The phone rang. Bobby ignored it. His security people in the next room were supposed to screen his calls. It kept ringing until he finally picked up. “Yo…”
The call seemed to be coming from another planet, so faint was the connection.
“Who is it?” Bobby repeated.
“Jew bastard,” a gravelly voice spit out.
“Huh?”
“Nigger Jew bastard,” the voice amplified and then hung up.
“Fuck you too, buddy,” Bobby muttered, slamming down the phone. Pissed, he got up and went over to the connecting door, opened it and looked into the adjoining room. One of his security guards was fast asleep. The other was emerging from the bathroom with a newspaper.
“Didn’t you hear the fucking phone?” Bobby snapped.
“Sorry, Bobby, I was in the can….”
“I just got a hate call.”
“From who?”
“They didn’t leave their name.”
“You want me to call the cops, get it traced?”
“Jesus. Forget it.”
He closed the door, crossed to the closet, hesitated between his blue and his pink Nike sneakers. Decided on the blue. They were less conspicuous.
As he laced up his Nike sneakers he wondered whether it was foolish to jog in Vegas in broad daylight. There could be some crazy guy with a scope rifle in a window. Like the guy who got Kennedy. And it was coming out of both barrels now. He had both the Jew and the nigger haters on his ass. He wondered whether Sammy Davis had had to put up with this kind of shit.
* * *
When Tricia Jacobi made her entrance into Tascorama, the new punk Mexican place on Robertson, wearing a gold lamé blouse and ruby-studded toreador pants, her hair up in an Ingrid Bergman bun, two large tortoiseshell earrings dangling beneath, she stopped traffic. Every eye in the place followed her as the mâitre d’ led her across to Brad Emprin’s table.
He got up, took both her hands in his and raised them to his lips, a maneuver he had seen Charles Boyer pull off in a movie on cable. Tricia Jacobi blushed delightfully and sat down. He suggested an aperitif. She said she had a wardrobe fitting to go to that afternoon. Brad Emprin told her that was no excuse not to have a drink at lunch. He ordered two strawberry margaritas, in spite of the fact that he had popped a couple of Sinutabs in the car on the way over. If worse came to worst, this wouldn’t be a bad way to o.d.—having lunch with a soon-to-be major new star at a conspicuous table in a trendy restaurant.
“So, you excited about going to Belgrade?”
“You bet,” she replied, flashing a potent smile. It was the kind of smile that people who have learned to smile for a living threw at you. Brad Emprin found it a little overpowering at close range. Unconsciously, he moved his chair a few inches back from the table.
“Sounds good to me,” he offered and turned the conversation to the pleasures of shooting in Yugoslavia, where, he explained, he often went to meet with his clients who were shooting there.
“Do you have a lot of big clients?”
Brad Emprin nodded casually, took a sip of the strawberry margarita. “A few,” he admitted. “Well, I mean Jack’s been with me for years…but, you know, it’s not how big a star they are. It’s the relationship that’s important.”
“I know what you mean,” she agreed. “I’ve been with Herbert Cain for just ever and ever. He’s like a father to me.”
“Herbert who?”
“Cain. He has a little agency in the Valley…. He used to represent Paul Anka.”
He smiled vaguely and said, “It’s good to start out with a ma-and-pa shop. It helps in the beginning,” then added, as an afterthought, “at least until you start getting hot. Then you’re in a different ballpark….”
Their appetizers were served. She took a bite of her tamales Benedict, stopped, looked across at him.
“Uhh…what do you mean…in a different ballpark?”
“You’re on a whole different level of the business. you’re not in Kansas anymore, if you know what I mean. If you’re not careful you start feeling the altitude….”
“Really?”
He worked over his taco mondo carne without looking back up at her.
“You’re up there in the stratosphere and suddenly you start to get a little dizzy. Lack of oxygen…”
“Lack of oxygen?”
“Strangulation at the source. Happens all the time. Talented actress gets the one big break she’s been waiting for. The picture gets made. It gets released. A little bit of flutter and then it kind of dies down for a while…. The phone stops ringing. Suddenly nothing’s happening. Boom. Six months later she’s back going out on cattle calls for laundry detergent.”
“You really think it can happen that fast?”
“Without follow-up? Absolutely. Follow-up’s the name of the game. Follow-up and foresight…you see who Richard Farley is having lunch with over there?”
He indicated a Paramount vice president and a major movie star, who were involved in an intense conversation in the corner. She shook her head.
“He’s having lunch with Mitch Terrazzo. You know who Mitch Terrazzo is?”
“No.”
“A vice president at Paramount. What do you think they’re talking about?”
She shook her head again. “They’re talking about the picture Richard Farley’s going to make after he finishes shooting the next three pictures on his schedule.”
“Really?”
“You better believe it. You’ve got to move before the picture is in production, let alone released. Let me ask you something, your guy, what’s his name…Hank?”
“Herbert. Herbert Cain.”
“Herbert. What’s he doing for you right now while you’re sitting here having lunch with me?”
“He’s probably having his lunch.”
“With who?”
“Herb usually grabs a sandwich at the deli on Ventura….”
“He should be following up….”
“Following up…”
“Do you know why Richard Farley and Mitch Terrazzo are having this conversation today?”
She shook her head once more on cue, getting used to the Socratic rhythms of the dialogue. “Because somebody followed up. Somebody had the foresight to get Mitch Terrazzo on the phone and set this lunch up. You follow me?”
“Uh-huh…”
“The thing about the ma-and-pa shops is they can’t get it done. They don’t have the manpower to follow up. They don’t have the connections. They can’t pick up the phone and get, say, Charlie Berns on the line. Charlie Berns doesn’t know who they are….”
Tricia Jacobi sat there, no longer interested in her lunch. She was wondering if it wasn’t all slipping away already. Right then and there, while she was having lunch at Tascorama with the man who represented Jack…
Last week she was just another aspiring actress taking lessons, refining her instrument, selling a little real estate on the side. Suddenly, the door had been opened. Miraculously. She was able to glance inside, see down to the end of the corridor where a crowd of admirers was standing and applauding. It looked magnificent to her. But she was already losing oxygen. Slow strangulation was setting in. The door was already starting to inch closed again.
Herb was a sweetheart. He’d gotten her a guest star on Spenser: For Hire. She had played a bulimic junkie and received mention in one of the reviews. And it was Herb who had read in the trades that Bobby Mason was thinking of converting to Judaism, who had come up with the idea of the T-shirt. But it had taken two weeks to get the audition. They had to go through the casting director. The truth was that Herb couldn’t just pick up the phone and get Charlie Berns on the line.
The waiter brought her ropa vieja tartare, but she no longer had any appetite. Actually, she wasn’t feeling very well. The image of an oxygen shortage had made her feel faint. She ran her hand over her forehead, massaged her temples. A cool sweat had broken out under her armpits, threatening to stain the gold lamé blouse. She began to hyperventilate ever so slightly.
“Mr. Emprin,” she managed, in a soft, underaspirated voice, “this is embarrassing but…do you happen to have…any Valium?”
“No problem. I’ve got some in the car.” As he got up to go get them, he asked, “Five milligrams or ten?”
“I think I’m going to need a ten….”
Deidre Hearn sat on the Italian leather couch in Norman Hudris’s office playing idly with an ugly jade paperweight that Norman had bought in Ensenada. They were in the middle of a meeting, another long, boring, inconsequential meeting that would drag on most of the afternoon and keep her from attacking the ever-growing pile of scripts on her desk.
The subject of this meeting was the marketing of Lev Disraeli: Freedom Fighter. The studio had run a series of concept tests to see if there was any inherent consumer resistance to overcome in marketing the picture. They had shown a synopsis of the story and a list of alternate titles to a group of demographically selected subjects. Barry Cornwall, the v.p. for marketing, a thirty-five-year-old refugee from Madison Avenue, was reporting the results.
“We’re through the roof, of course, on eighteen to twenty-five black males…though some of them had trouble with the title. A couple of them thought Disraeli was Italian, and it was a Mafia picture.”
Sidney Auger began humming the theme music from The Godfather.
Barry Cornwall forged ahead. “Anyway, not to worry. As long as Bobby Mason’s name is above titles, they’re going to buy tickets.”
“We’re going to need repeat business from that group,” Norman said.
“We ought to get it, as long as we don’t get too Jewish.”
Norman turned to Deidre with a pained expression. “I’m telling you, that Mount Zion monologue is going to kill us. It’s going to bury us.”
“We can always cut it, Norman.”
“I don’t even think we should shoot it. You know, word can get out from the set….”
“From Belgrade?”
“They’re shooting that in Israel,” Sidney Auger corrected.
Barry Cornwall cleared his throat, to indicate that he had not finished with his test results. He summed up his report by saying, “Guys, I think we’ve got to stop jerking ourselves around on the title.”
“What’s wrong with the title?”
“First of all, you’re looking at only a thirty-one percent approval factor with women. More than two thirds of women twenty-one to forty-five won’t go see this picture based on the title alone. That’s disastrous.”
“What about Nigel Bland? Women like him.”
“Nobody under fifty, Norman. That’s a hard figure.”
Barry Cornwall’s words hung heavily in the air for a long moment. Norman got up, walked over to his desk, sat down, played with a paper clip. Then: “So what are you saying, Barry?”
“I think we need a title change.”
“You got any ideas?”
“First of all, I think we need to lose the name Disraeli. You’ve got two negatives. You’ve got Jewish and you’ve got Italian.”
“Barry, the star of this picture, without whom we wouldn’t even be discussing it, wants to do a picture about a Jew,” Deidre said. “That’s why it’s getting made.”
He looked back at her condescendingly. “I’m aware of that, Deidre. Let me ask you something…does he have anything in his deal to say he has title approval?”
“No, but we’ll have a major attitude problem on our hands.”
“So, don’t announce it until after you’re in the can and you have all the loops you need. What’s he going to do then? Sue us?”
“What are you suggesting we change it to, Barry?”
“Well, first of all, I think we need a name. A tough, macho, sexy name. Like Kojak or Rambo…that kind of thing. So maybe in deference to Bobby we keep it starting with the letter D…. What do you think of Decker?”
There was no response. Barry Cornwall took this as a cue to run more names by them. “Darrow. Drake. Diamond…Lev Diamond…”
“I don’t know, Barry…” Norman’s voice sounded a little manic.
“You don’t like Lev Diamond?”
Norman shook his head.
“I really think Decker’s the best. It’s a swing name. You can tell Bobby it’s Jewish and still get the women twenty-one to forty-five into the theater. Listen, I’ve come up with a tag line, you want to hear it?”
Norman exhaled, shrugged. He was almost beyond caring. Barry turned pages of his legal pad, found what he was looking for. “Listen to this,” he announced. “‘Decker: When It Hits the Fan You Want Him on Your Side’…”
At this point, Deidre Hearn excused herself from the meeting. She exited Norman’s office, walked to the ladies’ room at the end of the hall. She went in, looked around, made sure it was deserted. She entered a stall, closed and locked the door carefully, sat down on the toilet seat. And screamed.
11
Principal photography on Decker (When It Hits the Fan You Want Him on Your Side) began on Stage 9 of the Novi Beograd Studios on a hot, cloudy Monday morning. If getting a green light was tantamount to a declaration of war, then starting to shoot was the invasion of Poland. Except that it usually didn’t go as smoothly.
In order to get over their jet lag and rest up, Nigel Bland and Tricia Jacobi had arrived a week ago. Bobby Mason, however, did not deplane from the private jet loaned him by a multimillionaire from Rancho Mirage—with whom he was partnered in a business venture, selling sweat socks, called Jock Socks—until the Friday night before the first day of production. The late arrival did not leave the men’s wardrober a great deal of time to fit the star. Fortunately BM’s wardrobe was largely limited to mixing and matching a selection of designer combat ensembles.
Charlie had gone out to the airport with Gubca in the limo to meet him. The paparazzi were there in full force, a few having driven all the way from Italy to get a picture of the American superstar. Bobby walked down the ramp of the Learjet, wearing lollypop dark glasses, a Lakers jacket and his yellow-and-green Nikes.
