by Davis Bunn
“Is that it?”
“No.” Allerby rose from his chair. His desk was positioned close enough to the center of the room for him to be able to pace easily. The region between his chair and the rear wall was his own little stage. “There’s been a change of plan.”
“About the special?”
“From this point on, there is no special.” He let the moment stretch until he was certain the diminutive AD was going to shriek like the whistle of a steam train. Kip Denderhoff’s features were that tight. When it was either speak or watch his employees explode, Martin stopped pacing and declared, “We’re going to make a feature film.”
The AD actually squeaked. The rest of the room made do with a swift indrawn breath. No one knew anything except, of course, for Milo. Even Gloria gasped.
Britt had gone pasty. “For real?”
“Last night I received confirmation from Carter Dawes’ attorney. The financing is in place. Heartland is headed to the big screen.” He returned to his pacing. “PR and Milo’s division will both use the angle that a new star has restored the show’s original polish. He’s been shown across the nation saving two people from the wildfire. We have received more publicity from those shots your DP took than we could have bought with our entire annual PR budget.”
“Fox News is still running the tape as part of their thirty-second intro,” Milo added.
“People is naming him one of the year’s sexiest men,” Allerby said. “I just got that from PR.”
Martin Allerby could hear the director’s mental gears grind from across the room. Like everyone who had ever immigrated to Hollywood, Britt Turner had always yearned to make the leap to film. But if his chance had ever come, he had missed out. Timing, ability, right script, right meeting, whatever. A thousand things must come together in the correct order to build the impossible bridge from television to dreamland. Only one item needed to go wrong. But in Britt’s case, Allerby suspected it was simply a matter of talent. Britt Turner was made for the tiny screen. Martin inspected the man, and knew his initial judgment had been sound. Britt Turner was going to take this chance and fail.
Allerby said, “I’m absolutely confident you and your team are going to triumph.”
Britt swallowed audibly. “What’s our budget?”
“Twelve million.”
Allerby glanced at Milo. They had argued for six days before settling on the amount. Twelve million dollars was no-man’s land. Television topped out at two and a half million dollars for an hour of absolute top-drawer television miniseries drama. Which Heartland definitely was not. Five to eight million dollars was tops for an indie feature or art-house release. These days a feature from a major studio started at forty mil. With another twelve to fourteen on top for marketing. Call it fifty-five mil as a bare minimum. The average studio feature cost ninety-seven million dollars to make and market.
Twelve million dollars for a feature was a neither-here-nor-there budget. It fit into none of the standard calculations. It was doomed from the outset.
“That’s the absolute maximum we were able to obtain from Dawes and the board,” Allerby warned. “Don’t come back and ask for more, because there won’t be any.”
They spent four hours discussing issues that would have been vital if there was any chance whatsoever of success. Gloria’s deal memo alone ran to nineteen pages. When they were done, Britt and his AD rose from the chairs like automatons whose batteries had died. Dull-eyed, stiff, barely able to make the door. Allerby personally ushered everyone out, repeating several times to make sure the entire stunned group had it embedded in the memory banks for posterity. “I am absolutely certain you folks are going to bring back a triumph on film.”
Milo waited until they were in Allerby’s Volkswagen and out the Centurion gates to say, “We might as well pile the old man’s money on the pavement and set it on fire.”
Chapter 24
The hotel’s inner-facing rooms overlooked a grassy courtyard, garden, and a little pool area. But there was no view of the sunset, so JayJay and Kelly had gone out front and climbed up onto the cab roof of one of the lighting trucks. Like they were up in the high-range country instead of stuck in a hotel parking lot with trucks rumbling down the blacktop. The day had been the first they hadn’t worked themselves to exhaustion, what with Britt and Kip called back to the studio. Up until then, these television folks on location had worked farmer’s hours, dawn to dusk and long beyond. Come quitting time, JayJay hadn’t had much interest in anything more than dinner and bed. Until today.
The sunset turned the world into a fairyland so sweet even the passing truckers were caught up. The highway drifted out of town and ran straight to where the first set of hills took hold and rose up to meet the golden sky. Neighboring orchards blanketed them in sweet fruitiness. Kelly waved at passing freighters and got honks and sunburned arms lifted in response.
It was not until the light began fading that they noticed the strangeness. The windows fronting the highway revealed film crew locked in worry and fret. When they walked back into the courtyard, they found the same thing in one room after another. Derek stood looking at a grease-board with his arms wrapped around his body. Every once in a while he’d unclench himself long enough to reach up and grab two fistfuls of hair and tug. In the room next to Derek’s, the lady who played JayJay’s sister smoked and paced and argued into a cell phone. Room after room showed the same air of tense concern.
It seemed natural enough when Kelly said, “We ought to do something.”
The computer screen in front of Peter was empty. He had typed nothing for hours. A script ran in the mental space behind his eyes. One he could not use. But it was all he could think of just then.
INT. PETER’S MOTEL ROOM. EVENING.
Peter is working at his desk. The motel room is flooded with the remnants of a desert sunset, his seventh since arriving on location. His room is located in an upmarket small-town hotel: plush carpet, one wall of stone, two beds, sofa, two easy chairs, desk, huge television, one window, view of the interior courtyard and pool. His laptop is angled so the screen is shaded from the sunset. He does not want to pull the curtains because the isolation becomes too great.
The mirror over his desk is lost behind hundreds of sticky-notes. The near bed has become an extension of his desk. As has the coffee table and one of the chairs and the sofa. Scribbled concepts and hundreds of notecards are laid out in a possible shooting sequence. Sheets of white drawing paper are taped to the motel wall, forming a fifteen-foot-long timeline.
Peter turns his chair away from the desk and the laptop. He looks across the room.
CLOSE-UP. PETER’S BEDSIDE TABLE. EVENING.
On the table rest two pictures. One is of CYNTHIA, Peter’s wife. The other is a sonogram of two babies locked together in a uterine embrace.
INT. PETER’S ROOM. EVENING.
Peter’s laptop has idled so long it pings and cuts off. He turns and stares at it, but clearly can’t bring himself to cut it back on. The fading sunset illuminates a face locked in anguished regret. He turns back to the pair of photographs.
PETER
(to the photograph)
I shouldn’t be here. I should have argued harder.
Script structure was intentionally very terse. A screen script was a ballad told with an engineer’s ear. Poetry in blueprint form. One of the first bits of advice Peter learned was that a screenwriter should count one page of script for every minute of film. Which meant a good script should read far faster than it would show upon the screen.
The second lesson came from the same source, his former boss, Ben Picksley, a grizzled veteran of the Hollywood trenches. The money was ridiculous, Picksley had warned Peter his first day on the set, but so were the demands. Worst of all, studio execs would take his finished script, his treasure, and feed it into the blender of hyperinflated egos.
The way to avoid self-destructing, Picksley advised, was to remember that no matter whether Peter worked on a televi
sion script, a short, or a feature, one rule remained the same. The Hollywood writer must never see himself as delivering a finished product.
Basically, a screenplay was a skeleton. Bare bones. When things worked well, the script would then be taken by an incredibly talented team called a production crew. They would pour their creative energies into this crucible he had created, molding something complete. Something timeless.
So far, Peter had been shaping scenes. He and Britt, the director, had worked out a tentative sequencing. Where the major explosions would come, and what they might be. A studio illustrator was housed in the next room, working out the initial storyboard. They had spent the past week rehearsing and scene-setting and lighting. They worked to a typical TV-frantic, on-location schedule, with a tight budget and tighter timeline.
Peter had never worked on a two-hour program before. He had decided, with Britt’s permission, to structure it in a three-act format, something more akin to a feature than a TV-special. Even so, all he had been doing thus far was working on images. They still needed the single unifying concept, the hook, to bring it all together.
The central action was the same as every Heartland episode. The homestead was under threat. JayJay would save the day. He would do so honestly and with bone-deep integrity. Exactly what the most loyal audience in television-land had come to expect.
But the hook. The single emotional concept that made this summertime special unique. That was the clincher.
Peter went back to what he normally did whenever hitting the barrier. The stone wall. The impossible cliff. Electronic or paper, the unattainable challenge remained the same.
Filling the empty page.
Peter sorted through the pile of notecards beside his computer. In the process of writing a script, he filled as many as three thousand cards with his scribblings. Most were discarded. Cynthia had urged him to sort through the ones not used and garner ideas worth keeping. His garage was walled by floor-to-ceiling boxes of notecards awaiting his attention.
The cards by his computer represented the next scene. He knew it was going to be a dynamite action sequence. The cards almost vibrated in his hand. But this was not the issue. Without a central theme, he was just creating a collage. And one thing was certain. The viewing public might not ever know precisely what was missing. But the show would not keep their attention. And when they reached for the remote and changed the channel, they’d chop Peter’s career off at the knees.
Peter heard the footsteps scrape along the sidewalk outside his door. He waited for the knock. When it came, he was tempted to tell whoever it was to go away. More than likely, Derek had come down for a chat. And he needed to get this scene done.
Even so, he called out, “It’s open.”
JayJay stepped inside and said, “Looks to me like everybody’s fighting ghosts tonight.”
The sunset silhouetted JayJay in Peter’s doorway, rimming him in gold. “What?”
“You been sitting here for an hour, doing as close to nothing as a fellow can with his eyes open. Derek’s upstairs wearing a hole in his carpet. The guy next door is laying on his bed arguing with the ceiling.”
“You’ve been watching us?”
“Hard not to.” He pointed a thumb behind him. “Kelly and me, we been out there watching the sun go down. All we had to do was turn around to see y’all fret.”
“It’s this scene,” Peter said lamely.
“No it ain’t. It’s going from full on to idle.” JayJay started spinning his hat. “We spend nine days working hard as we can without a pick in our hands. Then the boss is flown back to headquarters. He says he’ll be gone a couple of hours. It’s been all day and he’s still not back. So everybody is sitting and sweating, wondering who’s gonna be stood up against the barn and shot.”
JayJay didn’t give him a chance to respond. “Kelly and me, we been thinking. We figured it might do us all some good to get together. Pull out the Good Book. Spend a few minutes looking where we might actually find some answers.”
JayJay stepped back into the golden sunset. “You feel like joining us, we’re gonna meet over in the breakfast room. Fifteen minutes.”
Sure enough, this was something, all right.
They all had a list of rooms assigned to crew. He’d taken the ground floor, Kelly the second. The motel didn’t have a restaurant. But the owner’s wife served up a fine country breakfast. Now there were nine of them situated around the breakfast room, a lot more than JayJay had expected to see show up. Double doors shut the breakfast nook off from the hotel lobby. They could hear the television’s murmur and somebody answering the phone. But it didn’t hardly matter. The sun was gone and the night outside the window was made darker by the streetlights and the passing traffic. The day of rest had not been enough to erase the fatigue from the faces JayJay saw. Or the worry.
Kelly was giving him a woman’s look, one that said without words that she was handing things over to him. Which was kind of ridiculous, since this’d been her idea. But now wasn’t the time to argue, so he cleared his throat and said, “I didn’t have any real idea of what we were gonna do once we got here. Except, well, I had the impression we had some burdens we were having trouble laying down. Which is what we’re supposed to be doing.”
“Says who?”
JayJay looked over to the far corner. Now that was a real surprise, having Claire Pietan show up. JayJay stared into the face of this woman who playacted his sister. He’d sure been amazed to see Kelly walk through those doors with Claire behind her. Claire was doing the same thing she’d done since entering the room, which was use one arm to hug a sweater to her while the other held another cigarette.
When he didn’t respond fast enough for her liking, Claire’s voice tightened down. “What kind of jerk would suggest we could just set problems on the ground and walk away from them. Like they were some kind of, I don’t know, weight or something.”
Derek answered to the floor by his feet, “The Bible says that, Claire.”
She blasted out a hot breath of smoke and thumped her cigarette hard into the ashtray she’d brought with her.
JayJay stared at her a long time, seeing not just the woman but all the questions she represented. He spoke the only words that came to mind just then. “I’m sure not any closer to answers for my own worries. But I know one thing for certain. I haven’t been doing much of a job of asking for help. I’m strong enough for most things, which is a right hard curse when it comes to knowing when to get down on my knees.”
The nine were an odd Hollywood mix, was how it seemed to JayJay. There were two electricians, one male and one female, both lean and close-faced and wearing thick glasses. Across from them sat two grips, which was the word JayJay’d heard them use for the picker-uppers and the haulers. The grips were big men who looked to JayJay like they were on a first-name basis with trouble. But here they sat, the breakfast chairs groaning under the loads of muscle and beards and tattoos. And Kelly and Peter and Derek. And there in the corner, the mystery woman. His fake sister. So hard-faced she appeared ready to bite somebody’s head off. Or sob.
JayJay went on, “It was Kelly’s idea that we get together. And it struck me as something I should’ve thought of long before now. So what I reckoned was, maybe we ought to make this a regular thing. Just meet up and have us a little Bible reading and then anybody who wants can talk about what they are worried about. After that we could have ourselves a prayer time. Help each other out in a way that might really do us all some good.”
He nodded to Kelly, who opened a well-thumbed Bible and said, “I thought it might be a good thing just to read a few of the passages I’ve underlined that help me when I’m down. I’ll read from Deuteronomy for starters, because that’s what I’ve been studying lately.”
She read slowly, in a voice that said clearly this was a natural thing. “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.’
“‘He is your God, and you have
seen with your own eyes the great and astounding things that he has done for you.’
“‘I call heaven and earth to witness the choice you make. Choose life.’
“‘These teachings are not empty words; they are your very life.’
“‘The Lord loves his people and protects those who belong to him.’
“‘He guards them all the day long, and he dwells in their midst.’ ”
Kelly shut her Book and looked at him.
JayJay wished he’d brought his hat. He never knew what to do with his hands when he was talking. Spinning his hat always helped his mind work easier. He looked down at his hands, the fingers laced together in a suntanned bundle. “Since I was the one who suggested it, maybe I’d best be the first to talk about a problem I’m finding difficult to lay down.” He took a breath, then spoke the words that burned coming out. “I stared into the mirror this morning, and I didn’t even know who I was.”
The sound of a woman choking for control lifted his head. Claire had her mouth open wide as she fumbled for another cigarette. Her eyes gaped at the night-blinded window. Her fingers made a mess of the cigarette pack. Finally she gave up, slammed the pack down on the table, and took a two-armed grip on her sweater.
Kelly stood and walked over. She settled an arm on Claire’s shoulders. The woman jerked at the unexpected touch. But she did not draw away. JayJay watched Kelly draw a chair closer and sit herself down.
“I’ve got a problem,” Derek said. “Actually, I’ve got two. One of them is mine. The other is Peter’s. But he’s a friend, and—”
“Derek.” Peter did not look over.
Derek persisted, “Peter is a friend and a brother, and I’m worried for him.”