The Deal, page 29
“I’ll be in my trailer,” the actor said pointedly, and withdrew.
As Jeremy Ikon limped toward his trailer, Lionel muttered through his teeth, “I hate him. He’s a pompous asshole. And I’m not changing the line. Period.”
Charlie sighed. One more brushfire to put out. If they could just get out of the tunnel, into the daylight. If they could just get this scene and wrap the thirty-five extras in their tunics, scarlet coats and cavalry swords, not to mention their horses…
“Lionel, it’s just a line.”
“No, it’s not just a line. It’s a dimension. Besides, I’m tired of him and his goddamn notes. Why can’t he just say the lines?”
“Because he’s an actor, Lionel.”
“Aren’t actors supposed to work for producers?”
On the set, they were ready to go again. Charlie would have to make this quick. He leaned back in his chair for a moment, adopted his best avuncular tone, “Lionel, let me explain something to you.”
Lionel began to see the big pot with the water and the stone heating up to a boil.
“Look around you,” Charlie continued. “What do you see? A hundred people hanging around this set. They’ve all stopped working and started waiting. While they’re waiting, unfortunately, they don’t stop getting paid. Money continues to flow. Imagine a water faucet turned on full force with no bucket to capture the water.”
Lionel looked around him, observed the small army of people waiting for Jeremy Ikon. He tried to imagine them as flowing water from a faucet.
“What are all these people waiting for? They’re waiting for Jeremy Ikon to come out of his trailer so that they can film him saying his lines…. Now how do we get him to come out of his trailer to say his lines? We give him lines that he’s willing to say…. We put a bucket underneath the faucet….”
They were so close to the end. They just had to carry the baton across the finish line. This was no time to lose control.
Charlie went on talking, expanding on his bucket-and-faucet metaphor, all the time listening in the distance for the sound of hoofbeats.
Parked outside the film lab in the taxi, watching the door, Sidney Auger felt like a private dick in a B movie. He didn’t have much of a choice. This was his only legitimate lead. Sooner or later, they’d drop off the previous day’s film and return to the set. With Sidney Auger on their tail.
Business at the lab was slow. Hours passed without anybody arriving or leaving. The driver was dozing in the front. Sidney made himself as comfortable as he could in the small back seat and tried not to drop off in the torpid heat.
Then late in the afternoon, a familiar sight pulled him out of his daze. She got out of a cab and entered the lab, her perfect little ass encased in a pair of tight jeans. Jesus. Cherchez la bimbo. The plot was definitely thickening.
At moments during the days and nights of silent bliss he had spent with the Polish bimbo, Sidney had reflected on the fortuitousness of the limo service sending a girl to pick him up at Surcin with a valise full of gadgets. But since no one else knew when his plane was arriving, there was no other explanation for the stroke of good fortune. God was being kind to a middle-aged man. He was giving Sidney one more party before he packed it in.
He had tried communicating with her several times, but all she did was shake her head and murmur, “Polska.” He didn’t pursue the point. Nationality seemed irrelevant at the time. Now her arrival at the film lab presented a completely new possibility. Could this once again be the Big Guy playing with his head, or was the whole thing a setup?
Could those fuckers have actually done it? Could they have sent her to waylay him, those pricks out there making a movie with his dinars? Jesus. Mata Hari in rubber gloves…
Sidney woke up the driver and put him on alert. Draping another Franklin over the seat to keep the man interested, Sidney kept his eyes glued on the door through which the Polish bimbo had entered the lab. Follow the broad. She’d lead him right to the main cable.
An hour later a battered Peugeot station wagon pulled up in front of the lab. A guy got out, entered the lab. He made three trips, each time carrying film canisters. The next time he came out the Polish bimbo was with him.
“Start the motor,” Sidney said to the cabdriver.
When the man hesitated, Sidney slipped the Franklin into his shirt pocket. The girl got in the Peugeot beside the driver.
Sidney uttered a phrase he had always dreamed of uttering. “Follow that car,” he said, his voice hoarse with excitement.
* * *
The idea of holding the wrap party on the Maltese-whorehouse set was Marka Mladosi’s idea. It seemed foolish to move to some restaurant in town when they had a nineteenth-century brothel already rigged and lit. Gubca had hired a rock band from Sarajevo, that was, according to him, the hottest group in the Balkans. Charlie had authorized him to pull out all the stops, and it promised to be a terrific wrap party.
That is, if they ever wrapped. The last few scenes dragged on interminably. As soon as Charlie patched up the squabble between Lionel and Jeremy Ikon and they were able to resume shooting, one of their generators went down. Then Tricia Jacobi lost a contact lens. By the time they got her spare pair from the hotel, planes started flying over the set at regular intervals. Somebody figured out that they were in the approach path to Zagreb Airport. Unfortunately, it was too late to fire the location manager.
The sun had long ago sunk in the west. Inside the brothel, the lights flickered and crackled. Every time the generator coughed Charlie’s stomach twisted a notch. There was no tomorrow. Gubca had told him that morning they were out of dinars. There was just enough for the last day and the wrap party. Word had gotten around the set that they were running low on funds, and the extras had demanded to be paid daily. The 357th Hussars were keeping a close eye on the clock.
What if the British-garrison extras walked? He needed them for the last shot, a wide angle of Disraeli leaving the brothel to rejoin his comrades waiting outside. This was a crucial moment in the film, the moment when the hero decides to forsake a life of frivolity and devote himself to politics and the future of England. Dinak had designed the shot to start wide on the EXTERIOR BROTHEL NIGHT, capturing the restlessness of the soldiers and horses milling around, slowly tighten as Disraeli emerges from the whorehouse, to register the look of resolution on his face as he turns away from the insouciance of youth to take on the responsibilities of manhood. Then he would mount his horse, take one last look behind him at the Maltese whore standing in the doorway, and ride off to meet his destiny. The shot depicted the turning point in the young Disraeli’s life, the symbolic representation of his movement from young, shiftless parvenu to the man who would dominate English politics for nearly forty years.
If they didn’t get the shot, they’d have to find some trick in the cutting room to make the transition with the next scene—Disraeli, his wild oats sown, back in England addressing a political meeting in Sussex. At the moment, they were stuck inside on a series of cutaway shots of soldiers cavorting in the hallways, drunkenly swearing, singing and carrying off the girls. Dinak wanted them to swear and sing in English, to give the production track texture and avoid the artificiality of the dubbing stage, and he had Lionel furiously trying to come up with appropriate nineteenth-century British military argot to be pronounced by the Croatian extras.
Charlie finally intervened. He took Dinak and Lionel aside and explained that they were going to go into Gold Time soon, that the dialogue could be added later, that the money shot was the exterior.
“You want authentic film, Charlie?”
“Dinak, do you think anybody really knows how British soldiers swore in whorehouses on Malta in the eighteen thirties?”
Dinak looked at him, crushed. Lionel protested, “It’s texture, Charlie.”
Charlie looked at his watch, said, “Maybe, but in a few hours we’re out of dinars, and unless you want to lose thirty-five extras, you better blow the inside off and start lighting the exterior.”
Dinak grabbed one more shot of a drunken soldier mounting a girl and firing his musket while shouting, in a Croatian accent, “Long live Saint George and England.”
Then he went outside to supervise the lighting of the martini shot.
Sidney Auger sped through the night in the back seat of a 1971 Fiat taxicab. The driver had to hold his foot down on the floor in order to keep the taillights of the Peugeot in sight. Sidney kept asking him where they were going, and the driver shrugged. After they passed signs for Kuzmin and Bos. Saac, wherever the fuck they were, the driver said they were going toward Zagreb.
“How far is that?”
The driver shrugged, held up three fingers.
“Three what?” Sidney asked.
The driver pointed to his watch.
“Three hours?”
The driver shrugged again. For all Sidney knew he could have meant three days or three weeks. It was all ridiculous anyway. Here he was in a taxi with bad springs, going 150 kilometers an hour, however fast that was, chasing a Polish bimbo through the night to track down a phantom production company.
They were on some sort of highway with no speed limit and very little traffic. Miles went by without passing another car. He had no idea where they were. Somewhere in Yugoslavia. Sidney wondered what the Variety obit would be if the taxi blew a tire. SIDNEY F. AUGER KILLED ON LOCATION IN YUGOSLAVIA. Would the studio take out a full-page ad? “We mourn the passing, in the line of duty, of Sid Auger, a thorough pro and a hell of a nice guy….”
Andre Blue wouldn’t spend the money for a full-page ad. There was no longer a picture to write the expense off against. Did he realize what Sidney was going through just to try to save the studio some blocked dinars? Andre Blue didn’t give a shit. No, Andre Blue wouldn’t take out an ad. By the end of the week he’d have him replaced with one of those young new bottom-line business affairs guys. Sidney would be history, the cost of his trip to Yugoslavia amortized into the studio’s general overhead budget, buried somewhere in the gardening and parking-lot expenses.
Sidney leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. He began not to care whether he bought it or not in this taxi with bad tires somewhere between Belgrade and Zagreb. What the hell? He’d had a pretty good run. And he’d gone out with a bang. Jesus. The Polish bimbo. It was too fucking unbelievable to think of what had happened in that hotel room. At his age he was taking his life in his hands carrying on like that.
Then a thought occurred to him. Maybe that’s what they were counting on. Maybe they expected him to buy it in Belgrade…. Maybe they were in league with Andre Blue. Both sides working together. This whole thing was an enormous wild-goose chase to get rid of Sidney Auger and not have to pay off his out deal….
Sidney fell asleep calculating just how much the studio would have saved if he had died under morally turpitudinous conditions, handcuffed to a bed in a hotel room in Belgrade, thereby nullifying his contract and sparing them the expense of settling out his deal.
They were lit and ready to go. The extras were in position. The horses were on their marks. The track was laid, the dolly grips ready to move. The d.p. took a last light reading. The operator verified the focus. The second had blocked off the area to traffic. The sound man looked up at the dark sky for airplanes. The makeup girl gave Jeremy a final dab of pancake on his nose. Tricia stood on her mark, wrapped in a shawl….
Charlie crossed his fingers and prayed. The shot was planned to be done in one complex camera move. A push in, hold on Disraeli as he looks back toward the Maltese whore, then pan with him as he mounts his horse, and widen as he rides off into his future.
This was it. The martini shot. Charlie needed it in one take. It would take half an hour to reset, and he didn’t have an extra half-hour at this point. He looked over at Dinak, up on the crane, about to swallow his cigarette.
“Well, Dinak, what do you say?”
Dinak looked back at him with that mad glint in his eye and nodded. There was nothing else to do but shoot it. Here we go. Knock down the first domino. He motioned for the first a.d. to ready the background action. The clackboard moved in front of the camera….
It was the longest sixty seconds of Charlie Berns’s producing career. He held his breath as the grips pushed the camera carefully along the track, as the extras mounted their horses, as Jeremy exited the brothel, melancholy and resolution in the nuances of his performance, as Tricia emerged in her shawl, the portrait of Disraeli’s dying youth, of all that is mysterious to the Anglo-Saxon soul…
Charlie didn’t come up for air until the horses rode off out of frame and Dinak whispered cut to the operator. It was a miracle. They’d got it in one. It was over. The picture was in the can.
Charlie turned and embraced Deidre. They were both too exhausted and overwhelmed to speak. He held her tight, relishing the moment, heard Dinak ask the operator if they’d gotten it, heard the operator answer that they had, waited for the traditional announcement that the war was over. It came like a bugle call of retreat over a smoldering battlefield.
“It’s a wrap,” the first a.d. called.
Cheers went up on the set. Then Charlie and Deidre heard a vaguely familiar voice bellow from across the set, “You’re damn fucking right it’s a wrap.”
They turned and saw Sidney Auger making his way toward them. The vice president of business affairs, West Coast, climbed through the cables, stepped over the horse shit and past the Hussars removing their tunics and lighting cigarettes. He walked right up to Charlie and Deidre.
“I’m shutting you down,” he announced.
“That was the martini,” Charlie said.
“Huh?”
“It’s in the can.” They stood there for a moment, not knowing where to go from here. Finally, Deidre said, “You might as well come to the wrap party, Sidney. It’s already paid for.”
At three o’clock that morning Charlie and Deidre lay in bed in his room at Le Grand Hotel. The wrap party was still going on at the Maltese-whorehouse set, as far as they knew. They had slipped away before it got too rowdy. It had been a great success, the sljivovica flowing copiously as the cast and crew of Ben and Bill consumed the remaining dinars in an orgy of exhausted sentimentality.
Sometime during the evening, a sljivovica-soaked Lionel announced with tears in his eyes that he loved everybody on the crew and then proposed to Tricia Jacobi. She said that she had to talk to her therapist about it but it sounded like a good idea. Dinak and Wilna had their reunion in sight of Sidney Auger, who wound up being consoled with one of the available Maltese whores. After a few strained moments at the beginning of the party, Sidney had wound up resigning himself to the fait accompli and entering into the spirit of the evening. After all, a wrap party was a wrap party, even among renegades. What the fuck else was there to do at night in Zagreb?
He and Deidre downed a couple of sljivovicas while he brought her up-to-date on life at the studio under Andre Blue.
“If I were you, I wouldn’t bother coming back,” he told her. “He’s going to clean house anyway.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah. We’re all history. In six months there won’t be a straight guy in the whole fucking studio. I’ve got feelers out at Paramount.”
Jeremy Ikon proposed a toast to Ben Disraeli. Everyone drank to the health of the late prime minister. Then Nigel Bland gave a thundering rendition of William Gladstone’s farewell speech to Parliament. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
Later, lying in bed, Deidre and Charlie held hands, staring up at the ornate ceiling of the room at Le Grand Hotel, feeling that peculiar emptiness that comes upon the completion of a picture. There remained a great deal to be done, of course—the editing, dubbing, scoring, the fine-tuning of Ben and Bill all had to be done somewhere, somehow. But for the moment they were both too exhausted to contemplate anything beyond the miracle of the picture being wrapped. The film was in the can. That was enough.
Charlie Berns faced a very uncertain future. He faced excommunication from the church of Hollywood, not to mention possible felony charges for absconding with a film company and forty-five billion dinars. They could throw the book at him. They could take his can opener away and banish him to Indy Prod forever.
But Charlie Berns had been there already. He had weathered it once and he’d weather it again. Like Scarlett O’Hara he would worry about it all tomorrow. Now he lay exhausted on his bed, overwhelmed with the realization that he had pulled it off. In the face of enormous odds, he had actually shot the picture. He had managed to slip the stone soup through the window of opportunity only moments before it slammed shut on him….
His accomplice lay beside him, as exhausted as he was. For her part, Deidre Hearn, an accessory to the felony and a fellow heretic, had as many unknowns facing her as Charlie Berns had. She had no idea what she was going to do after tonight. The one thing she did know was that she wasn’t going back to writing coverage for lunatics. She was checking out of the Mad Hatter’s tea party once and for all.
Skidding on two wheels, her life had nonetheless turned a corner. She was heading out into terra incognita, with only a machete to hack away at the underbrush. From here on in she would travel light and keep her eyes open.
She turned toward Charlie Berns, looked at him with amusement and tenderness. If there was a place to begin, it was here with this completely inappropriate man lying beside her. There were questions yet to be answered, things to be said that they hadn’t had time to say during the madness of the preceding weeks. In a sense, they hardly knew each other.
The best place to start was at the beginning. She leaned over and put her hand against his cheek. And smiled. He smiled back.
“Charlie,” she began, her voice hesitant, “how come there’s a tree in your swimming pool?”
18
