“Are you kidding?” demanded Sid with great indignation, albeit somewhat nervous, “do you think I’d make a goof like that, for Chrissake?”
Boris shrugged. “Looks short to me.”
Sid deprecated the judgment with a wave of his hand. “Ah, well, you’re talking about the Concorde, one of those big mothers—”
“No, man, I’m talking about a DC-Nine. I’m talking about five thousand feet.”
Sid scrutinized the strip with a frown as the plane turned and taxied over to where a gigantic Mercedes 600 waited, with three men standing beside it—able Morty Kanowitz and his trusty assistant, Lips Malone, the third party being dapper Art Director Nicky Sanchez.
The Mercedes 600 is the largest car in the world; an exaggerated limousine, about twenty-seven feet long, it looked oddly disproportionate against the miniature airstrip.
Giant hellos were exchanged all around, and Boris and Sid were flourished into the front-facing back seat to sit opposite Morty and the art director, while Lips slipped in alongside the driver—this being the present pecking order within the tiny hierarchy.
“Ya looking beautiful,” Morty was saying, with a playful slap to Sid’s knee, “both you guys are looking beautiful, for Chrissake!”
Morty, a short, fat sort of professional Bronx type, had complemented his smart Cardin combo with regional headgear—a tight-brim Tyrolean featuring two colorful feathers—as, of course, had his front-seat shadow, Lips Malone.
“I’m telling you,” Morty went on, “you guys are going to love it here!” He shook his head, rolling his eyes up, Eddie Cantor style, to indicate his hat. “Look, we gone native awready!”
Sid stared morosely at the short runway, then turned to scowl at Morty.
“Get rid of that freaky hat, will ya,” he growled. “Makes you look like a goddamn fruit!”
2
THE PRODUCTION OFFICE had been set up on the top floor of the Imperial Hotel—a squat, four-story brown brick building in the middle of town.
“Come on,” said Morty, with a slightly nervous laugh, as he led Boris, somber in dark glasses, and Sid, mopping his perspiring brow, down a half-lit hotel hallway, “I’ll show you around the lot.”
An old-line production manager who knew where his bread was buttered, so to speak—or, in other words, a sort of sycophantic ass-hole—fat Mort had already fixed their names, in raised cardboard letters, painted gold, on the doors which they passed now in succession:
SIDNEY H. KRASSMAN
Executive Producer
BORIS ADRIAN
Director
MORTON L. KANOWITZ
Production Manager
ART DEPARTMENT
Nicholas Sanchez
WARDROBE
Helen Vrobel
ACCOUNTING
Nathan A. Malone
All the rooms were the same—ordinary hotel rooms, except that a desk and three telephones had been installed, and a large couch instead of a bed. Another unusual feature of each was a young, but not-too-nifty, miniskirted girl sitting behind a typewriter, smiling up eagerly when introduced as “Gretel,” “Gretchen,” “Gertrude,” “Hildegarde,” etc.
“Where’d you get those broads?” asked Sid, scowling. “I don’t know whether I’m at a whorehouse or a dog show!”
“Believe me, Sid,” Morty explained, “I could of gotten some ravers, but it was hard enough finding broads that could unnerstan’ English, let alone type, for Chrissake! So I thought to myself, ‘what the hell, the picture comes first!’ Am I right?” He cast a beseeching look around to the others.
“Whad’ya say the name of mine was?” Sid wanted to know.
“Grunhilde!” said Morty, with a vaudeville leer and wink. “Takes twenty-seven words a minute and gives the best head in the city!”
Sid guffawed, and Morty, thus encouraged, tried to follow it up, grinning crazily:
“Swallows it too, Sid—just the way you like it, huh?”
Sid, in grand good humor now, and wanting to infect the silent Boris with it, gave a snort of mock derision: “‘Best head in the city’! What fuckin’ city? This tank?” He looked at Boris in hopes of an appreciative take, but the latter seemed not to have heard, and Sid thought he might have said the wrong thing. “Not that we can’t make a whale of a movie in a tank-town!” he added, then nudged Boris, desperate enough now to insist. “Get it, King? ‘Whale?’ ‘Tank?’ Haw-haw!”
Morty, of course, joined in the laugh—but too heartily, considering the way the shaded B. looked at them now—one to the other, with a sort of deadpan compassion—so he choked it off abruptly.
“Yeah, I get it, Sid,” said Boris then with a sad smile. “‘Whale,’ ‘tank.’ Terrific. I guess I was thinking of something else.”
Both men nodded with vigorous understanding and a show of relief, but when Boris turned away again, Morty whispered urgently to Sid: “What’s the matter with him? He’s not on the stuff, is he?”
“He’s thinkin’, fer Chrissake!” snapped Sid. “Ain’t you never seen nobody think?!?”
But this display of irate impatience was not very convincing, so that a certain mild concern was evident in both their faces as they followed Boris through the door marked “SIDNEY H. KRASSMAN, Executive Producer.”
This room, like such offices the world over, wherever films are being made, was intended to function as the nerve center of the production; instead of three telephones on the desk, there were five; against one wall was a combination bar and refrigerator; and against the other, a stereo and two TV sets; the oversize couch was covered with what invitingly appeared to be some kind of white fur and several soft-looking pillows of the same fabric in different colors. On the desk, along with the five telephones, digital-clock, and the rest of the usual stuff, was a small framed photograph of Sid’s wife.
“Where the hell did you get this?” he asked, picking it up, frowning at it.
Morty beamed. “Had it blown up from a snap I took at the beach one time we were all out at the beach—remember, out at Ed Weiner’s place? Old Colony Road?”
Sid replaced it carefully on the desk. “Christ, I haven’t seen that cunt in two years,” he muttered, then to Morty: “Still, it was a nice thought, Morty. Thanks.”
“My pleasure, Sid.”
Both their voices seemed to quaver for an instant in near-tearful camaraderie, or similar—a short-lived absurdity, however, as they turned to join Boris, who was staring at the most salient feature of the room: the big, wooden shooting board, which dominated one entire wall.
“Well, there she is,” said Sid, with a heavy sigh, and he and Morty gazed at it reverently, while Boris walked to the window.
The purpose of the board was to forecast the shooting schedule, day by day, and then to reflect its progress—all done with gaily colored plaques, pegs, and disks, to be fitted snugly into slots and holes against a dazzling white, like an elaborate children’s game. Since there was as yet no schedule (in fact, no script), the board, still smelling of fresh paint, was empty—its red, blue, yellow, and green counters neatly grouped in readiness below the blank white rows, numbered one to one hundred, representing days to come, unfitted and unfulfilled. But this quality of freshness made the board seem innocent, virgin, and most important of all, optimistic.
“Where you going to put up the principals?” asked Sid.
“Sid,” said smug Mort, “we also got the two floors below this—one for the actors, one for the crew.”
Sid was irately astonished. “You’re gonna put up the actors and the apes in the same hotel?!? Are you outta your nut!?!”
It is classic Hollywood protocol that the actors be quartered separately from the technicians (“apes” or “gorillas,” as they are affectionately called)—allegedly in apprehension of the leading lady being gang-banged to death by a raving horde of drunken grips and gaffers, thus seriously jeopardizing the pic’s all-important completion date.
“Yes sir, boy,” Sid stormed on, “you must r
eally be outta your fucking nut!”
“Have a heart, Sid,” Morty pleaded, “it’s the only hotel in town, fer Chrissake!”
“Whatta you mean ‘the only hotel in town’? It can’t be the only hotel in town, fer Chrissake!”
“Awright, awright, there’s two more,” Morty admitted mournfully, “but they’re complete flea bags, Sid! Believe me, we try to put the apes in one of them, they’ll go absolutely . . . well, it would be a disaster, the union would kill us.”
“Okay, okay,” said Sid, pacing about, gesturing, making the most of the film’s first production problem. “We’ll work it out, it ain’t the end of the world, right?”
“Right, Sid.”
Sid pointed to the phones on the desk and spoke sternly: “Just you find someplace else for the apes to stay, Morty. Got it?”
“Got it, Sid.” He went straight to the desk, picked up the nearest phone, and started trying to locate Lips Malone.
Sid joined Boris at the window, rubbed his hands together gleefully, then put an arm around his shoulder.
“Well, B., we’re off and running! Right?”
Boris looked at him absently for a moment. “It’ll never happen,” he said.
“Huh?”
“We can’t make a film working out of a place like this. There’s no way.”
Sid looked around the room as though he must surely have missed something.
“Well, I admit it ain’t exactly the Thalberg Building, but Jeez . . .”
“That’s the trouble,” said B. sadly, “it is the Thalberg Building. Can’t you feel it?” He indicated something unseen with a slow arc of his hand. “Death—there’s a lot of death here, man. I expect Joe Pasternak to crawl through that door any minute.”
Sid shot a quick glance at the door, as though it might actually be possible; then he looked back at Boris, and an expression of panic moved into his eyes. “Listen . . .” he faltered, “listen, B . . . .”
At the desk Morty suddenly began talking in a loud furious voice into the phone: “Where the hell you been, Lips?!? We’re trying to make a picture here, fer Chrissake! Now get your ass over here pronto, we got a problem!”
“Will you shut the fuck up!” Sid bellowed at him, then turned back to Boris. “B. . . .” he pleaded, one arm outstretched, the other touching his heart, “whatta you doing to me?”
Boris nodded toward the window and beyond. “Look at that tower, Sid.”
“What?” Sid peered out wildly, “what tower?”
“There,” said Boris, pointing with childlike excitement, “isn’t that fantastic?”
In the distance, just beyond the edge of the town, rose a dark turret—apparently the remains of a castle.
“A Gothic tower, Sid—that’s where the production office should be. Beautiful!” He turned again to gaze out the window, a soft smile of rapture on his face.
Sid stared at him morosely. Behind them Morty was still on the phone talking in a low voice. Sid sighed and slowly turned.
“Morty, would you please get your ass over here, we got a problem.”
“Don’t move, Lips,” said Morty tersely into the phone. “Be back to you in five.” He hung up and bounded over, assuming a jovial mien.
“Kanowitz reporting! No job too big or too small.”
“Uh-huh, well whatta you know about that pile of rock over there?” He pointed to the tower.
“Whatta I know? I know all about it. We scouted it for locations awready.”
“Never mind location, would you believe it as a production office?”
“Are you kiddin’? It’s a ruin, fer Chrissake!”
Sid nodded, satisfied, turned toward Boris.
“It’s a ruin, B.”
“Beautiful,” said B.
Sid and Morty exchanged quizzical looks, and Sid gave Morty the nod. Morty cleared his throat. “Uh, you don’t seem to understand, B., there ain’t any, well, you know, electricity, things like that.”
“Get a generator,” said Boris.
“There’s no water.”
“We’ll drink Perrier, it’s good for you.”
“B. . . .” said Sid, with the maniacal calm of someone trying to prove that the earth is not flat, and at last comes up with the clincher, “B., there are no telephones.”
“And if you knew what we went through to get these phones,” exclaimed Morty frantically, “I mean, there’s a six-month waiting list for phones. We had to go to the minister hisself—”
“We’ll use field phones.”
Both their mouths fell agape with total incredulity, and they spoke almost at once:
“To talk to the Coast?!?”
Boris turned to look at them for the first time, removed his shades, breathed on the lenses, and began rubbing them against his shirt.
“There’s nine hours difference between here and the Coast,” he slowly explained, “and any talking we do will be done from the hotel, at night—when it’s night here, and day there. Got it? Now why don’t you just use your fucking heads?”
He put his glasses back on and turned to the window again, leaving Sid and Morty face to face in defeat. Sid shrugged. “So? Give him his tower already.”
3
WHEN TONY SANDERS, the hot-shot writer from New York, arrived, the first item on the agenda was to get him laid . . . or so gross Sid had reasoned, because in order to entice the writer away from his novel and onto yet another amorphous screenplay, halfway around the world, Sid’s inducements—aside from the usual cajolery, flattery, appeals to loyalty, friendship, art, and seventy-five hundred a week—had also included the blatant fiction that “it’s a swinging scene, baby!” And to this end, he had contrived to engage an ambulance to meet his plane, and inside the vehicle, two panty-and-bra nifties, who had been given a hundred each with instructions to “do him up right” on the way from the airstrip to the tower. There had been a last-minute hitch in the scheme, however, in that the ambulance, the only one in town, was pressed into some local emergency use, and the single other suitable vehicle to be found was a hearse.
Sid was at first somewhat disturbed by the necessary substitution, remarking gravely that he didn’t “wantta show no disrespect,” but was reassured when Boris broke up laughing. “Well, that’s show biz for you, Sid,” he said when he was able to speak.
In any case, Tony Sanders stepped from the extraordinary vehicle, in fine form and fettle, looking completely relaxed after his long journey. He sauntered into the room where Boris and Sid were waiting, champagne in three buckets sitting on the desk. They were already drinking.
“News,” Tony said, still holding his bag, “I got the title.”
“Beautiful,” said Boris, handing him a glass of the bubbly, “how about the story?”
“Story can wait—” he gulped down the drink. “Are you ready for this? Dig . . .” He raised the empty glass and moved it across an imaginary marquee:
The Faces of Love
He scrutinized Boris’s face for the almost indiscernible take, as the latter, head to one side, slightly quizzical, stared back at him, waiting for more. “Yeah?” he finally asked.
The writer, still carrying the bag, walked about the room, gesturing with the empty glass, and talking rapidly:
“Episodic, right? Stories about the different kinds of love. Five, six, seven kinds of love—Idyllic . . . Profane . . . Lesbian . . . Incestuous, like brother-sister, father-daughter, mother-son . . . Sadism . . . Masochism . . . Nymphomania . . . are you with me?”
By now Boris was ahead of him, and turned to Sid. “Angela Sterling,” he said, “we’ll use Angela Sterling as the nympho,” then back to Tony, “beautiful blond American heiress from Georgia . . . no, from Virginia . . . tobacco heiress, an only child . . . she’s uptight because she thinks Daddy wanted a boy instead of a girl . . . Daddy’s a very distinguished southern gentleman, mint juleps on the veranda, watching the happy darkies bring in the crop—‘Yessuh, ah can tell a field nigra from a house nigra as fah as a
h can see him!’ Daughter flips out, goes to Morocco, fucks every spade in sight.”
“Beautiful,” said Tony, “beautiful.” He dropped his bag abruptly and collapsed on the couch. “Man, those chicks wiped me out. . . . Gimme some Scotch, will you, Sidney . . . whatta town—wow.”
Big Sid beamed as he moved to the bar, on tiptoe, almost clucking like a mother hen protective of the brood—because now it was happening, the magic had started, the weird creative thing, the Great Mystery . . . one minute, no story—the next, a smash-fucking hit! God was in his heaven and all was right in Sid Krassman’s world.
4
WORKING STRAIGHT THROUGH three days and nights—aided by the judicious use of vitamin B-12 injections, stoutly laced with speedy amphetamine—Boris and Tony were able to come up with a script, or at least enough of one to show to the departments concerned: Art (for the sets and the props), Wardrobe (for the costumes), and Casting (for the extras), and for them, in turn, to submit an estimate of the cost. In this way, eventually, would the film’s above-the-line budget be determined—“above-the-line” meaning the cost not counting the actors.
The budget breakdown and a rough schedule were most important to Sid, because he was still wheeling and dealing in getting the money together—although with Angela Sterling committed to the picture, this was largely academic, simply a matter of accepting the best proposition. He was talking to the Coast about ten times a day—very often with Les Harrison, whose overwhelming anxiety these days was an imminent meeting with Dad and the New York stockholders, at which time he would have to divulge the fact that their principal asset, Angela Sterling, was making a film in which they had no participation—especially awkward since the chairmanship had been virtually given to him as a result of his “absolute personal assurance” to the board that Metropolitan Pictures had her exclusively.
“Well, for Chrissake, Sid,” he kept shouting on the phone, “at least tell me what the picture’s about! I can’t ask for a million and a half if I don’t know what the picture’s about! What the hell’s it about, Sid!?!”
“Well, I’ll tell you, Les,” said Sid, sounding very serious, “I’d say it’s about . . . oh, let’s see, I’d say it’s about, er, uh, ninety minutes! Haw-haw-haw! How does that grab you, Les?”
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