The Deal, page 2
The phone calls that followed were punctuated by long beats of silence interspersed with Brad’s list of people who were aware of Charlie Berns. Then Brad was in meetings when he called and took a day or so to get back. Eventually, when Brad returned one call six days later Charlie hung up on him. And when the phone company yanked the line, he wasn’t bothered anymore by Brad Emprin.
As he drove south on Beverly Drive Charlie wondered what the reaction to his suicide would be at the Monday-morning staff meeting where they sat around and discussed client awareness. Whatever else Brad Emprin and his colleagues would say, they wouldn’t be able to say that people weren’t aware of him that particular morning. They all would have read the trades on their Exercycles before the staff meeting and they would be aware that Charlie Berns, fifty-two, producer of such films as et cetera, sucked a Mercedes tail pipe that morning in his Beverly Hills home.
He pulled into the gas station on Little Santa Monica and went directly to the full-service pump. The short Iranian with the KLOS T-shirt handed him the clipboard. Charlie signed on a Union 76 credit card that had been cut off two months ago. It gave him some satisfaction to stiff the Iranians. They were taking over the goddamn town. They could have it, as far as he was concerned. He was out of here. Let the Iranians line up behind the rest of them.
Charlie left the gas station and headed back across Beverly Hills. He drove up Canyon Drive for the last time, dry-eyed, without regrets. Turning the corner at Elevado, he passed a mini-van full of tourists with their maps to the stars’ homes. There were no stars anymore on Charlie’s block; the houses were all owned by Arabs, Iranians, Koreans and people like Charlie, who had bought in the sixties and couldn’t afford to pay their gardeners anymore.
Charlie pulled to the end of the driveway, then put it in reverse and backed carefully over the vacant flower beds, getting as close to the patio as possible and out of view from the street.
Leaving the engine on, he got out, crouched over the tail pipe and started to reattach the hose. The door chimes rang. Charlie ignored them. When they persisted, he got up, went back inside, cranked Mozart up louder on the CD player.
Back outside, he returned to the task of reattaching the hose with a leakproof fit. Humming along with Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, working intensely, Charlie did not notice the figure approaching him from the end of the driveway.
“Hello?” the figure called.
Charlie didn’t hear. Mozart was at a crescendo. The figure was practically on top of him before Charlie turned around and looked up at a tall skinny kid standing over him with a knapsack.
“I think your bell’s out of order.”
Charlie stared at this young man, drawing a blank.
“I tried calling you lots of times, but your phone’s out of order. The phone company said it’s been disconnected…. When I decided to come out here, you were the first person I called. When I couldn’t get you on the phone I decided to come out anyway. Nobody knows where you are. My mother’s kind of worried…. What are you doing anyway? You left your motor running….”
He was shouting to be heard over the Nachtmusik. Charlie scratched his head. Recognition flooded through a moment before the kid said, “You okay, Uncle Charlie?”
His sister Janice’s youngest kid Lionel. Several years ago at a funeral in New Jersey Lionel had gotten him in a corner and bent his ear about wanting to write for the movies. Charlie had mumbled some vague encouragement, promised to help him when he was ready to come out to Hollywood and try to break into the business.
Charlie hadn’t expected him to show up. Certainly not on the day of his suicide.
“I would have called if your phone wasn’t on the blink. But you said that whenever I got out here, I should get in touch. So here I am.”
“How long are you out here for?”
“For as long as it takes.”
“It takes to do what?”
“Make it. I got a script with me. I want you to read it.”
“Uh-huh…”
“It’s based on the life of Disraeli.”
Suicide requires a fair amount of concentration. You don’t want to get interrupted when you’re in the middle. It opens the flood-gates to all sorts of equivocations and doubts. Lionel’s arrival on Charlie’s patio at that moment did precisely that. It threw Charlie off. He had been cruising along, dealing with the preparations in an orderly fashion. Now, instead, he found himself in his kitchen splitting the microwave pizza with his nephew.
They were sitting across from each other at the bar as Lionel described his odyssey across the country in a Trailways bus, gathering material, as he put it. It was all grist for the mill, life real and raw out there west of New Jersey.
“My next script’s going to be about Nebraska. The story of a modern-day cowboy, except this guy’s a crop duster, but you intercut his story, see, with his alter ego a hundred years ago. Kind of a parallel structure…”
Charlie nodded, poured himself a glass of Hearty Burgundy.
“What are you working on now, Uncle Charlie?”
“I’m sort of between pictures.”
“I saw Jailbreak the other night on TV. They cut the hell out of it.”
“Yeah, they do that.”
“Can’t show tits on TV, huh?”
Charlie shook his head solemnly.
“They show almost everything else. They got people with their tongues down each other’s throats on the soaps in the afternoon. That’s why I wanted to do this picture on Disraeli. There were standards back then. People just didn’t whip their clothes off. They didn’t even sleep in the same bedroom….”
“Lionel,” Charlie interrupted, “how’d you get here?”
“I took the bus, I told you. A hundred and twenty-nine dollars. From Newark.”
“No. I mean to my house. You don’t have a car. The bus station’s downtown.”
“I have a map.”
“I see….” Then a moment of hesitation before asking, “Where are you staying?”
His nephew smiled a half-baked little grin, shrugged and said, “I was kind of hoping…here.”
“Here?”
“You said that I could stay with you when I came out here.”
“I did?”
“Uh-huh. I’m kind of short on money.”
A silence of some duration followed. Lionel dove into the cherry cheesecake and Charlie poured himself another glass of Hearty Burgundy. Finally:
“How short of money are you?”
“I got a couple of hundred.”
“Two hundred dollars?”
“A hundred eighty actually.”
“That’s not going to go too far in this town.”
“I figure I’ll sell my script.”
“I don’t know how hot Disraeli is right now.”
“Would you read it? I really want to know what you think about it.” And he was off the bar stool and into his knapsack. He dug out a thick bound manuscript, handed it to Charlie.
The title page read Bill and Ben. Charlie stared at it for several seconds. “William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli,” Lionel explained. “They were kind of like Jules and Jim. I was thinking about Tom Cruise as Disraeli.”
At three o’clock in the morning Charlie, not yet dead, lay awake in his upstairs bedroom, his mind spinning at high rpm. He wasn’t thinking, as might be expected, about the fortuitous arrival of his nephew shortly before he was planning to pollute his brain with carbon monoxide. Nor was he thinking about Benjamin Disraeli, though Lionel had stood over him until he had read all two hundred pages of his screenplay. He was thinking about Bobby Mason.
One of the qualities that had helped Charlie Berns survive in Hollywood as long he did was a nearly photographic memory for details. Every morning he read the trade papers, culling a collection of seemingly trivial facts about the shifting tides around him. It was for Charlie a sort of ritual recitation, like the daily reading of the Koran. It gave him solace to know that the show went inexorably on in spite of earthquakes, assassinations and wars. Somewhere in town at every moment a deal was being cut. He slept better knowing that.
But he wasn’t sleeping at the moment. He was remembering a filler item in the gossip column of The Reporter that mentioned that Bobby Mason, the biggest black box-office attraction in the world, was considering a conversion to Judaism following an emotional location scout of the Holy Land for his current picture. Bobby’s manager had said that his client was interested in scripts with a Jewish theme.
One of the early scenes in Lionel’s script depicted the baptism of the young Benjamin Disraeli into the bosom of Christ, renouncing his Judaism. It was an easy lift, as far as Charlie was concerned.
Downstairs in the guest room his nephew Lionel was presumably asleep. Charlie would have to explain some things to him in the morning.
A few hours ago Charlie Berns was a man at the end of his rope, or, more accurately, his tail pipe. But that was before Lionel showed up with a script. A producer was someone who had a property. And Charlie now had a property. Or would in the morning when he optioned the rights to Bill and Ben.
It was overly warm in his bedroom. And then he remembered why. He got out of bed, stripped off the perspiration-drenched pajama shirt and started carefully to peel the masking tape off his sealed windows.
2
Galump.”
“Glump?”
“No, galump. Like a shoe dropping on the ceiling over your head.”
Gunter Greisler, the service manager of the BMW dealership, raised a Teutonic eyebrow dubiously. “We’ve taken the automobile apart and put it back together again. We find nothing to cause that sound.”
“It’s under the driver’s seat when you make a right turn and brake at the same time.”
“I drove the automobile. Personally. I turned right and applied the brake. Just as you said. Nothing. I’m sorry.”
Brad Emprin was getting annoyed. This was the third time he’d had the 325i in the shop with the same complaint, and they still couldn’t find the problem. At 120-an-hour labor, the tab was mounting, and still his car persisted in making the galump sound every time he made a right turn while he was braking.
“The suspension under the driver’s seat is hydraulically lubricated….”
Brad got in the car and drove away. Two lights from the shop, he braked sharply and pulled the wheel to the right.
Galump.
The first wave of gas tickled the wall of his stomach. Nine-fifteen on a Monday morning and it was beginning already. In spite of the jog and the hot shower he’d had at six-thirty, he felt the stress gathering in the east.
The week stretched out in front of him in menacing fashion, a series of hurdles and challenges that at the moment he felt inadequate to face. The sludge pile of scripts he had taken home that weekend had been particularly dreary. In forty-five minutes they’d be gathered in the glass conference room, and he hadn’t a legitimate idea in his head.
Instinctively he reached for the car phone, got the office. Tanya told him that there were no calls but that Charlie Berns was waiting for him in his office.
“Charlie Berns? In my office?”
“Yop.”
“What’s he want?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you tell him I had a staff meeting as soon as I got in?”
“Yop.”
“Jesus…”
Brad Emprin considered the emptiness in his brain—the lack of anything, no matter how remote or inconsequential, resembling a legitimate idea to help him shine during the fast-approaching show-’n’-tell period at the agency. Anxiety gripped him squarely by the shoulders and whispered sweet menaces into his ear.
As he double-clutched to avoid braking and turned right onto Santa Monica Boulevard, he wondered whether it was too early to drop his first Valium of the week.
“This has got to be quick, Charlie, because I’ve got a staff meeting in six minutes.”
“Okay.”
As Brad Emprin sat in his tiny windowless office opposite Charlie Berns, his eyes scanned the first page of the trades. He continued to browse, trying to catch up on the morning’s news, as he listened to his client.
“I got a script.”
“A script?”
“I’ve optioned it. Exclusive.”
“What’s the script?”
“It’s about Disraeli.”
Brad took his eyes off Variety and looked at his client squarely. He seemed a little demented this morning, or at least more demented than usual. He wondered whether Charlie Berns was on drugs.
“Israel?”
“No. Disraeli. Benjamin Disraeli, the English prime minister.”
“What happened to Thatcher?”
“Brad. This is a hundred years ago. During Queen Victoria’s reign.”
Charlie reached down to a battered briefcase, took a thick-bound script out.
“It’s for Bobby Mason.”
Brad looked at him more carefully, searching for the punch line. Charlie didn’t crack a smile.
“You putting me on?”
Charlie shook his head slowly.
“Bobby Mason does black karate movies.”
“He’s looking for scripts about Jews, Brad. It was in the trades. Disraeli was a Jew.”
Brad’s eyes panned right beyond Charlie’s shoulder, through the glass partition to the conference room, where the agents were already starting to gather.
“Well, look, get me a copy of it and I’ll work up some coverage on it.”
“I want you to read it. This morning.”
“I’ve got a staff meeting.”
“Bring it up in the staff meeting. See who’s got the best approach to Mason’s people.”
“Charlie, do you know the number of people trying to get scripts to Bobby Mason?”
“That’s why I’m with this agency, Brad. You people are supposed to be able to get this type of thing done.”
“Yeah. Okay. Sure…. Now, I got to run. Leave the script. I’ll call you as soon as I have a reaction.”
Once again, Charlie’s head shook slowly from side to side, like a recalcitrant Indian chief.
“I’m going to stay here. We’ll talk after your staff meeting.”
Brad Emprin abandoned his office to the mad Indian chief and sought refuge among his colleagues.
Though they had pretensions of informality, staff meetings at GTA were highly ritualized affairs. Sy Green, the head of the agency, presided over two-dozen agents and subagents in the large fishbowl conference room on the twenty-fourth floor of the Century City high-rise. The dress code was tie without jacket, making the point that even though it may only be 10:00 A.M. Monday morning, people had already worked up a sweat.
The idea was to brainstorm projects, put together packages, run down the catalog of available slots for the clients, in order to maximize deal volume. In practice, however, these sessions often degenerated into highly inaccurate gossip sessions. The staff meeting that Monday morning was no exception. It started off with good intentions, the attempt to shoehorn an extra picture into a top client’s already heavy schedule.
“What about Paul? What do you think, Sy?” Jeff Yankow shot across the table.
Sy Green digested this notion for a moment, taking a pensive bite of his poppy-seed bagel, then slowly shook his head.
“Why not? He’s got an eleven-week hiatus before he does the thing in Munich. The picture starts up the ninth. We can get him boarded to be in and out before the first.”
“It won’t make.” Sy Green pronounced this judgment with oracular gravity. A pause as he swallowed the last of the bagel, rubbed his hands together to shed the poppy seeds. “Someone want to tell me why this deal won’t make?”
The agents looked at one another, wondering if there was some clue to this question in the weekend script packet. Nobody knew. Taking a toothpick out of his shirt pocket, Sy Green nodded and went to work on the upper incisors. The tension mounted in the room.
“Nobody in this whole goddamn agency knows why we can’t put Paul in this picture….”
He shook his head again, ruefully. “You know what the sign of a good agent is?” Sy Green tapped his head with his knuckle. “He keeps it all up here—everything that happens in this town gets registered up here.”
Tap tap on the noggin again. “It’s your own personal computer you carry around with you, you take home with you. You take it to bed with you…. Harry Gorlich, who founded this agency, could tell you who the second-unit cameraman was on a picture. Harry had it all up here…. He didn’t have to carry lists around. Now everyone’s got lists instead of brains. A lists, B lists, shit lists. We might as well all go home. Someone calls, we’ll send him a list.”
Sy Green stopped talking. It was more than anyone had heard him say in a long time. He sat there and quietly cleaned his teeth. More silence. Everyone waited for a shoe to drop. Finally, Jeff Yankow said, “Why can’t Paul do the picture, Sy?”
“He won’t work with Grey.”
This pronouncement floated over the room causing more consternation until Cissy Fuchs piped up. “They…never worked together.”
Sy Green shook his head again, allowing a little smile of triumph to float across the conference table. “Canary Yellow. Nineteen eighty-three. Paul is set to do the picture in Seattle with Ivan Grey directing. Three weeks into prep he walks. Can’t stand the director. He actually threw a punch at him. Or maybe it was the other way around. They wind up doing the picture with Hackman.”
“Canary Yellow?” Scott Nemith muttered.
“It was so bad they never released it,” Sy Green explained. “Not to mention two point five over.”
“Listen,” Jeff Yankow persisted, “why don’t we try to roll over Grey’s deal. If he goes, then Paul’ll probably do it.”
“It’s play or pay.”
“So we buy him out.”
“They’re already eight-fifty into the script on this picture. They’re not buying anybody out.”
Everyone tried to think of ways to get Ivan Grey off the picture. The entire agency noodled the problem, an obstacle in the way of a deal.
