Hollywood (18 page)

A few days later we went over to the mixing room. Jon Pinchot and the Film Editor Kay Bronstein were busy at it.

Jon pulled up some chairs for us.

“I’ll show it to you uncut. It’s still very rough, you know. There’s a lot of work still to be done...”

“We realize that,” said Sarah.

“We want to do justice to your film,” said Kay. “I really love it!”

“Thank you,” I said.

“We’re mixing in the music now,” said Jon. “Both Friedman and Fischman are in London working on a new deal. They phone 4 or 5 times a day screaming, ‘STOP THE MIX! STOP THE MIX!’ I pretend not to understand. We’ve selected some great music but it’s going to cost a lot to obtain the rights. Friedman and Fischman want me to use canned music, which won’t cost anything but which is awful. It would ruin the film! So I am mixing the good music in with the soundtrack so they can’t take it out later...”

“Have you ever made a movie under these conditions?” I asked.

“No. There is nobody like these two guys. But I love them!”

“You love them?”

“Yes, they are like children. They have heart. Even when they are trying to cut your throat, there is a certain warmth about them. I’d much rather deal with them than with the corporate lawyers who run most of the business in Hollywood.”

Jon cut the lights and we watched. It was being shown on a small screen, like a TV set. The credits rolled. Then there was my name. I was a part of Hollywood, if only for a small moment. I was guilty.

It moved along well. I found nothing wrong with it as it went on.

“I like it, I like it,” I said.

“We’ve got something here,” Jon said.

Then there was the scene in which Jack and Francine had just met. They are sitting down at the end of the bar. Jack has brought Fran-cine a couple of drinks. Francine has downed them. Jack is sitting with a half bottle of beer. With his right hand he pushes the beer out of sight, says, That’s it...’ ‘That’s what?’ Francine asks. Jack goes on to explain that he has no more money, he’s broke, can’t buy any more drinks...

“NO! NO!” I yelled. “OH, HOLY CHRIST, NO!”

Jon stopped the film.

“What is it?”

“The alcoholics who see this will laugh us right out of town!”

“What’s wrong?”

“A drinking man would never push a half bottle of beer away and say, ‘That’s it.’ He’d finish the bottle to the last swallow, then say, ‘That’s it...’ “

“Hank’s right,” said Sarah, “I noticed that also...”

“I took 5 shots of that scene and felt that this was the best one...”

“Jon, I felt
affronted
when I saw him push that bottle away, it hurt, it was like getting hit in the face!”

“I think I have a shot where there is only a tiny bit left in the beer bottle...”

“Even a tiny bit is too much but use that one please, if you have it,” I said.

That’s what could happen when you had a director who wasn’t an alcoholic and an actor who hated to drink and they were both working in the same film. And an alcoholic writer who preferred to be at the racetrack rather than at the set.

We watched the remainder of the film.

Jon turned on the lights.

“How’d you like it? I mean, this is very rough, you know

“The music and camera work are great,” said Sarah.

“Baby, how about the writing?” I asked.

“Chinaski is as good as ever,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said.

“The whole cast and crew were always conscious of you,” said Kay, “even when you weren’t there.”

“Ah,” I said.

“But, Hank, what did you think of it?” Jon asked.

“I liked Jack’s acting. I felt Francine needed a little more oil in her joints.”

“Francine was very good,” said Jon. “The film really comes alive when she is on camera.”

“Maybe so. Anyhow, I’m glad to be part of this film and part of her great comeback...”

So, to celebrate our good feelings, we locked the cutting room, got into the elevator and got out into the street and into my car and went off to eat. Not Musso’s this time but someplace closer, a restaurant about 8 blocks west. It was curious, I thought, the way things got done. It was just one day at a time, day after day and then there it was. In a sense, I felt as if I hadn’t yet even written the script. You haven’t, some critic might say, as long as you embrace the bad and the obvious in your writing. But what was the difference between a movie critic and the average movie-goer? Answer: the critic didn’t have to pay.

“Pull over here,” said Jon, “this is the place!”

And I did.

I went back to the racetrack. At times I wondered what I was doing out there. And at times I knew. For one, it allowed me to view large numbers of people at their worst, and this kept me in touch with the reality of what humanity consisted of. The greed, the fear, the anger were all there.

There are certain characteristic individuals at every racetrack everywhere, every day. I was probably viewed as one of those characters and I didn’t like that. I would have preferred to be invisible. I don’t care to hold counsel with the other players. I don’t want to discuss horses with them. I don’t view the other players with any kind of camaraderie at all. Actually we are playing against each other. The track never has a losing day. The track takes its cut, the state takes its cut, and the cut keeps getting bigger, which means for a player to win consistently he or she must have a decided betting edge, a superior method, a logical insight. The average player plays daily doubles, exactas, triples, pick sixes, or pick nines. They end up with handfuls of useless cardboard. They bet win, they bet place, they bet show. But there is only one bet, and that bet is to
win
. It takes the pressure off. Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicity. I think that the racetrack keeps me aware of this.

But, in another sense, the racetrack is a sickness, a fill-in, a cop-out, a substitute for something else that should be faced. Yet, we all need to escape. The hours are long and must be filled somehow until our death. And there’s just not enough glory and excitement to go around. Things quickly get drab and deadly. We awaken in the morning, kick our feet out from under the sheets, place them on the floor and think, ah, shit, what now?

At times, I’d get sick with the need for the racetrack. I’d play the thoroughbreds during the day and then at night I’d find myself playing the quarter horses or the harness races, depending on what was available. And there in the evening I’d see some of the same people that I saw during the day. They were betting at night too. The ultimate sickness.

So I went back to the racetrack and forgot all about the movie and the actors and the crew and the cutting room. The track kept my life simple, although maybe “stupid” is a better word for it.

At night I usually watched a bit of TV with Sarah, then went upstairs and played with the poem. The poem was what kept the mind from cracking. The poem was what I needed. Really needed.

I was back into this routine for two or three weeks when the good old phone rang. It was Jon Pinchot.

“The film is finished. We are going to have a private screening at Firepower. No press. No critics. I hope you can be there.”

“Sure. Tell me the time and place.”

I wrote it down.

It was a Friday night. I well knew my way to the Firepower building. Sarah was smoking and musing about something. As I drove along I began having some thoughts too. I remember something Jon Pinchot had told me. Long before he found anybody to produce the screenplay, he went all around town each night scouting the bars, looking for just the right bar, for the right barflies. He gave himself a name: “Bobby.” And he went from bar to bar, night after night. He said he almost became alcoholic. And in all those bars, he said, he never met a woman he’d care to go home with. Sometimes he took a night off and came over to our place with all those photos of the bars he’d visited and put them on the coffee table before me. I’d choose the best ones and he’d say, “Yes, I will concentrate on these…”

He always had faith that the screenplay would become a movie.

The screening room was not at Firepower but in a lot behind it.

We drove up. There was a guard there.

“Firepower screening of
The Dance of Jim Beam
,” I told him.

“Go on in...take a right...” he said.

There. We were bigshots. I drove on in, took a right, parked.

It was a lot full of private studios. I had no idea why Firepower didn’t have their own screening room. Their building was huge. But they probably had a damned good reason why they did what they did.

We got out and began looking for the screening room. There were no signs. We seemed to be the only ones about. Yet we were on time. We walked on. Then I saw a couple of slim, movie-studio types leaning against a half-open door. Everybody in the business looked nearly the same—I mean the crews, consultants, so forth, they were all between 26 and 38 years old and were slim and were always talking to each other about something interesting.

“Pardon me,” I asked, “but is this the screening room for
The Dance of Jim Beam
?”

They both stopped and stared at us as if we had interrupted something important. Then one of them spoke.

“No,” he said.

I don’t know what will happen to those fellows after they reach 39. Maybe that’s what they were talking about.

We walked on looking for the screening room.

Then standing near an automobile with the motor running was somebody familiar. It was Jon Pinchot standing with the co-producer Lance Edwards.

“Jon, for Christ’s sake, where’s the screening room?”

“Yeah,” said Sarah, “where?”

“Oh,” said Jon, “they moved the location. I tried to phone you but you had already left...”

“Well, where is it baby?”

“Yeah, baby,” said Sarah.

“I was looking for you...Listen, Lance Edwards is driving over there now. All right if we ride with you, Lance?”

Lance nodded as if he was pissed off. I thought that we were the ones who should have been pissed off. In Hollywood those things sometimes get mixed up.

Jon got in front with Lance and Sarah and I got into the back. They claimed Lance was bashful and that’s why he wouldn’t talk. I had the feeling that he just didn’t give a fuck. One of the TV interviewers, the woman from Italy had told me, “I used to work for that son of a bitch! I never met such a cheap bastard! He doesn’t pay anything. He doesn’t even use his own stationery. He’d use envelopes that people had mailed to him. He’d have me cross out the names and addresses and write new names in and we’d mail the same envelope out again. He’d rip off stamps that weren’t cancelled on incoming mail and use them again. One day I was working and I felt his hand on my leg. ‘Did you lose something?’ I asked him. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked. ‘I mean, did you lose something there on my leg? What are you looking for? If you didn’t lose something then take your hand off my fucking leg!’ He fired me, without severance pay.”

The car kept driving on. It seemed like a very long drive.

“Hey, Lance,” I said, “you going to drive us back to our car?”

He nodded as if he were pissed off. Of course he was pissed off: gas expense.

We finally got there, got out and went into the screening room. It was full. Everybody was there. They looked comfortable and at ease. Many of them were holding golden cans of beer.

“Son of a bitch!” I said loudly.

“What is it?” asked Jon.

“All these people have beer! We have NOTHING to drink!”

“Wait! Wait!” said Jon.

He ran off.

Poor Jon.

Sarah and I were being treated like second class citizens. But then, again, what could you expect when the leading man made 750 times as much as the screenplay writer? The public never remembered who wrote the screenplay, just who fucked it up or who made it work, either the director or the actors or whoever. Sarah and I were only slum dwellers.

Jon made it back with two cans of beer for us just as the lights went out and the film came on.
The Dance of Jim Beam
.

I took a gulp of beer in honor of the alcoholics of the world.

And as the film began I flashed back (as they do in the movies) to that morning in the bar when I was young, when I was feeling neither good nor bad, just rather numb, and the bartender said to me:

“You know what, kid?”

“No, what?”

“We’re gonna put a gas pipe right through the bar here, right here where you sit all the time and we’re going to cap it.”

“A gas pipe?”

“Yeaji. And so when you feel like ending it all, you can uncap it and take a few whiffs and go...”

“I think that’s damned nice of you, Jim,” I said.

There it was. The film was rolling. I was being beaten up in the alley by the bartender. As I’ve explained before I had small hands which are a terrible disadvantage in a fist fight. This particular bartender had huge hands. To make matters worse, I took a punch very well which allowed me to absorb much more punishment. I had some luck on my side: I didn’t have much fear. The fights with the bartender were a way to pass the time. After all, you just couldn’t sit on your barstool all day and all night. And there wasn’t much pain in the fight. The pain came the next morning and it wasn’t so bad if you had made it back to your room.

And by fighting two or three times a week I was getting better at it. Or the bartender was getting worse.

But that had been over four decades before. Now I was sitting in a Hollywood screening room.

No need to recall the film here. Perhaps it’s better to tell about a part left out. Later in the film this lady wants to take care of me. She thinks I’m a genius and wants to shield me from the streets. In the film I don’t stay in the lady’s house but overnight. But in actual life I stayed about 6 weeks.

The lady, Tully, lived in this large house in the Hollywood Hills. She shared it with another lady, Nadine. Both Tully and Nadine were high-powered executives. They were into the entertainment scene: music, publishing, whatever. They seemed to know everybody and there were two or three parties a week, lots of New York types. I didn’t like Tully’s parties and entertained myself by getting totally drunk and insulting as many people as I could.

And living with Nadine was a fellow a bit younger than I. He was a composer or a director or something, temporarily out of work. I didn’t like him at first. I kept running into him around the house or out on the patio in the morning when we were both hungover. He always wore this damned scarf.

One morning about 11 a.m. we were both out on the patio sucking on beers, trying to recover from our hangovers. His name was Rich. He looked at me.

“You need another beer?”

“Sure...Thank you...”

He went into the kitchen, came back out, handed me my beer, then sat down.

Rich took a good swallow. Then he sighed heavily.

“I don’t know how much longer I can fool her...”

“What?”

“I mean, I don’t have any talent of any kind. It’s all just bullshit.”

“Beautiful,” I said, “that’s really beautiful. I admire you.”

“Thank you. How about you?” he asked.

“I type. But that’s not the problem.”

“What is it?”

“My dick is rubbed raw from fucking. She can’t get enough.”

“I have to eat Nadine every night.”

“Jesus...”

“Hank, we’re just a couple of kept men.”

“Rich, these liberated women have our balls in a sack.”

“I think we should start in on the vodka now,” he said.

“Fine,” I said.

That evening when our ladies arrived neither of us were able to perform our duties.

Rich lasted another week, then was gone.

After that I often ran into Nadine walking about the house naked, usually when Tully was gone.

“What the hell are you doing?” I finally asked.

“This is my house and if I want to run around with my ass in the wind, that’s my business.”

“Come on, Nadine, what is it really? You want some turkeyneck?”

“Not if you were the last man on earth.”

“If I were the last man on earth you’d have to stand in line.”

“You just be glad I don’t tell Tully.”

“Well, just stop running around with your pussy dangling.”

“You pig!”

She ran up the stairway, plop, plop, plop. Big ass. A door slammed somewhere. I didn’t follow it up. A totally over-rated commodity.

That night when Tully came home she packed me off to Catalina for a week. I think she knew Nadine was in heat.

That wasn’t in the film. You can’t put everything in a film.

And then back in the screening room, the film was over. There was applause. We all walked around shaking each other’s hands, hugging. We were all great, hell yes.

Then Harry Friedman found me. We hugged, then shook hands.

“Harry,” I said, “you’ve got a winner.”

“Yes, yes, a great screenplay! Listen, I heard you’ve done a novel about prostitutes!”

“Yes.”

“I want you to write me a screenplay about that. I want to do it!”

“Sure, Harry, sure...”

Then he saw Francine Bowers and rushed toward her. “Francine, honey doll, you were magnificent!”

Gradually things wound down and the room was almost empty. Sarah and I walked outside.

Lance Edwards and his car were gone. We had the long walk back to our car. It was all right. The night was cool and clear. The movie was finished and would soon be showing. The critics would have their say. I knew that too many movies were made, one after the other after the other. The public saw so many movies that they no longer knew what a movie was and the critics were in the same fix.

Then we were in the car driving back.

“I liked it,” said Sarah, “only there were parts...”

“I know. It’s not an immortal movie but it’s a good one.”

“Yes, it is...” Then we were on the freeway. “I’ll be glad to see the cats,” said Sarah. “Me too...”

“You going to write another screenplay?”

“I hope not...”

“Harry Friedman wants us to come to Cannes, Hank.”

“What? And leave the cats?”

“He said to bring the cats.”

“No way!”

“That’s what I told him.”

It had been a good night and there would be others. I cut into the fast lane and went for it.