Passing Through the Flame (52 page)

“That’s not such a difficult connection to make these days,” Gentry said in a strange breathy hiss full of anger and undertones of menace, while looking like Doug Winter making a snappy remark.

He may not be doing a great job of acting what’s being shot, Sandra thought, but the mind fuck number he’s trying to run on Paul deserves an Oscar. But by letting this go on, Paul’s getting the footage he needs. Who’s mind fucking whom?

“Who knows,” Paul said, “you might enjoy yourself.” The emphasis he gave the words made it an obscene suggestion and drew laughter from the crew. But it didn’t make Rick Gentry blow the shot. What a diabolical situation it was, what a sick game was going on! Paul was letting Gentry run his little number, even egging him on, but he was turning it to his own advantage. He was challenging Gentry, and Gentry was responding.

“At least I’ll probably get laid,” Gentry said in a leering suggestive voice breathy with feminine lust, in the manner of an open invitation. There was no laughter from the crew this time; Gentry had gone beyond what they regarded as humor and into something that made them embarrassed and squirmy. Holy shit! Sandra realized. That faggot wants Paul! That’s what this hostility is all about. I wonder if either of them knows it?

“Don’t get the clap on our expense account, Doug,” Paul said, in character. “Penicillin isn’t tax-deductible.”

Then he shouted “Cut,” and bolted out of the chair, and turned to face the crew. “Okay, that’s it for today. Thank you for your patience, see you tomorrow.”

He walked rapidly toward where they stood without looking at Gentry again, without giving him the satisfaction of seeing the contortions of rage that he was now allowing to turn his face into a mask of fiery anger.

When he saw her standing there with Jango, that rage found an instant focus. He double-timed up to them and spoke to Jango in a voice full of quiet fury. “How could you do a thing like this? How could you lock me in a cage with something like that? How do you expect me to get a film made? My God, if Velva wasn’t impossible enough!”

“You seem to be coping quite well,” Jango said smoothly. “I applaud the quality of your performance.”

“Well, I don’t applaud the quality of your performance, Beck. As a casting director, you’re an imbecile.”

Sandra cringed. People didn’t
talk that way
to Jango Beck. Paul had no concept of how dangerous angering Jango could be.

But Jango was moving along his own mysterious track, in one of those moods where nothing could give him offense. “I’m not a casting director,” he said. “I’m a promoter of events. You mistake the nature of the game.”

“Oh, shit!” Paul snarled, throwing up his hands. He stared at Sandra with eyes like furnaces and a face that seemed larger, more vivid than life, inflamed with rage and frustrated energy. “Are you coming with me or are you staying with this bullshit artist?”

The question was its own answer; all that animal energy drew her like a moth to a flame. Jango seemed to fade gracefully back out of the picture, not contesting anything.

Without a word, they were walking together across the dark sound stage toward the exit.

“Christ, I fucked up today!” Paul snarled. “I really blew it. I was awful. The shitty footage I got. The numbers I had to go through to get it! All those blown takes!”

“But you’ve got such awful people to work with,” Sandra said soothingly.

It only seemed to enrage him further. “I let them get to me. They stink, but I wasn’t as good as I could be either. I let two shitty actors bring me down to their level. A director’s job is to bring their level up to his. Well, I’m not going to let it happen!”

“Paul, stop tearing yourself to pieces.”

“Let it bleed, will you?” he snarled. “Don’t try to feed me any chicken soup.”

“I wasn’t planning on that,” she said, grabbing his cock, kissing him hard on the mouth with a deep thrust of her tongue, catching them both by surprise, instantly igniting a red blast of lust.

Yes, Jango certainly had something to do with creating tonight’s demon lover, Sandra though as she clung to Paul’s sleeping body in the breezy San Fernando Valley night. But more than superfuck had happened. Paul had opened up into another person. Whether a more pleasant person or not, there was no question about his being larger.

Sandra held this younger man in her arms, realizing that she was no longer balling a promising young kid, but hugging a formidable unknown to her breast. It was a little frightening.

But the ride was going to be exciting.

John Horst slumped back in his plush seat as the disaster on the screen before him pounded into his psyche, feeling grateful for the anonymous darkness of the screening room.

A medium close-up on Velva Leecock, as she says good-bye to her boyfriend Tod, her eyes bugged into an unnatural expression perhaps supposed to approximate dewy-eyed sadness.

“Oh, Tod,” she says in a breathy voice, “I’m just going on a trip, I’m not walking out of your life.”

“Cut!”

It was godawful, it was the fourth take, and the other three were worse.

A full shot on Rick Gentry, naked to the waist, lying on a bed talking to a bleary-eyed brunette in a filmy nightgown, who dangles a cigarette from her lips as she talks, Humphrey Bogart style.

Brunette (cynically): “Just do me a favor, Doug, get a Wasserman after you come back from this thing before you see me.”

Gentry (an attempt to sound like a hard guy which comes out manly faggot): “Why does everyone think I’m going to be up to my ankles in hippie snatch?”

From his lips, that line is irretrievably ludicrous, Horst thought. A million takes, and you wouldn’t get anything better. “Enough, Jango, enough!” he called out into the darkness. “My God, this is hideous!”

“That’s enough, Tom,” Beck’s voice said. The projector went off, the lights came on, and Horst glared across the three intervening seats at Jango Beck. Beck, cool as a cucumber in a black turtleneck and mint-green pants, smiled a Mona Lisa smile with a thin cigar in his mouth. How can he be so calm? Horst wondered. Unless he’s a complete idiot.

“I think we’d better take our losses and cancel this project now,” Horst said. “This is hopeless. To go on from here would just be throwing good money after bad. These rushes are horrible.”

Beck turned to him with an insouciant wave of his head that dismissed the whole matter as trivial. “What are you getting so excited about, John?” he said. “These are just the first four days’ rushes.”

“They’re unretrievably awful.”

“Conrad’s only been shooting for four days, you can hardly expect him to be at the peak of his form. Remember, he’s never directed a major feature before. He’ll be okay once he gets his sea legs. We can always go back and shoot this early shit over if we have to.”

Is it possible that he doesn’t understand what these rushes mean? Horst wondered. Have I been stupid enough to trust a project like this to a man who knows as little about film as that? Maybe I
deserve
to be out on my ear, which may just be where I’ll be after having to cancel this project after already committing nearly two hundred thousand to it.

“It’s not Conrad,” Horst said. “It’s this terrible cast you’ve forced on him. The most hideous aspect of these rushes is that they’re clearly the best footage anyone could extract out of this situation. Velva Leecock and Rick Gentry are impossible. Ingmar Bergman couldn’t get professional performances out of them. Conrad’s doing the best job one could expect, and that’s
still
lousy, which is why this project is hopeless. Which is why the only thing we can do is cancel it now, before we waste any more money.”

Beck sucked in smoke, blew it toward the ceiling. “All this is academic, John,” he said. “We’ve got to press on no matter what. This project can’t be canceled.”

“What do you mean it can’t be canceled?” Horst snapped. “All I have to do is stop signing the checks.”

Beck smiled a basilisk smile. “But you don’t sign the checks anymore, John,” he said. “I do. Remember?”

“You son of a bitch!”

“John, John, don’t get excited!” Beck said silkily. “I’m merely pointing that out as a technicality. Would I attempt to pull rank on you? No, the project can’t be canceled because it would be disastrous to both of us to cancel it now. And by going through with it, we’ll both come out on top no matter how bad
Sunset City
turns out to be.”

“You’d better explain yourself,” Horst said coldly, his heart pounding in his chest with impending dread.

“Explain myself!” Beck exclaimed. “What makes you think I understand myself? Fortunately, I’m far too complex for that. What a bore it would be if I could! In fact, every time I find myself in danger of understanding myself I take emergency action to make my reality more complex.”

“Stop bullshitting me, Beck, and start giving me answers!” Horst said angrily, a vein throbbing in his right temple. I’ve been mousetrapped! I can’t kill the project against his will, that’s what he’s really telling me. But it’s worse than that, he’s telling me he doesn’t even think he’s going to have to use his power to sign checks against me.

“It’s really quite simple, John,” Beck said. “We’ve spent too much money to turn back. And the film has too much built-in profit for us, no matter how bad it turns out to be.”

“What do you mean we’ve spent too much money to turn back?” Horst said. “We’ve spent only about two hundred-thousand dollars. That’s about the same loss as an unsuccessful TV pilot.”

Little flecks of light seemed to dance in the depths of Beck’s eyes. “Mike Taub, however, has spent over a million dollars,” he said. “Ryan and his numerous cronies have squeezed about three hundred and fifty thousand in graft out of him already, and the end is nowhere in sight. He’s already committed seven hundred and fifty thousand to staging the Sunset City festival which can’t be recalled. He’s counting on the albums to make Eden Records a fortune, and he’s counting on the promotional value of the film to sell the records. If you killed the film now, he’d still have to go through with the festival.”

“So what?” Horst said. “He’s stuck with the festival expenses and a big loss, he’s dead with the board and out of my hair, and you end up with his job, just as we planned. In fact, with the loss Taub will show, I’ll look
good
holding our end of this fiasco to two hundred thousand.”

“But, John, Eden Pictures
commissioned
Taub to stage the festival for the movie,” Beck said. “If the movie doesn’t get made, you’re going to be stuck with Taub’s expenses.”

“What?”
Horst cried, feeling a sudden sharp pain in his chest. Auroras danced across his field of vision, and his arms felt as if they were tingling back from having fallen asleep.

“Are you all right?” Beck said, leaning closer to him, seeming to sway like a snake, growing a little misty around the edges.

“Take it easy,” Beck said. “I told you, we have no problem. I’ve already accepted the festival expenses from Taub as producer of the film, but as long as we have something on film to actually distribute, no matter how bad it is, I can bill him back as Dark Star Records for recording rights to the festival performances after the dust clears, according to the fine print. But I can’t force him to buy recording rights to a nonexistent film. If we don’t produce an actual film, he can get out of that contract, leaving me holding the bag. At which point, I’ll have to bill Eden Pictures as Dark Star and write myself a check as producer for Eden on the film in order to get my money back. A tiresome procedure, don’t you think? Especially when all we have to do is complete the film to get everything we both want.”

The pain in Horst’s chest faded to a dull throb, then a mere ghost of itself, a reminder of his own mortality, a road marker on the downhill slide. Maybe I ought to go see a doctor, he thought.

Then the pain was gone, leaving him feeling older, frailer, but also possessed of a strange glacial calm. Beck’s told me the worst, he realized, and it’s not so fatal. Even if the film is such a flop that we have to salvage it as a TV movie, we could still get back a rock-bottom two hundred thousand dollars, which, with a five hundred thousand dollar budget, would leave me only three hundred thousand dollars in the red, with a chance to pick up most of that in Europe. While Taub is destroyed, just as we planned. It amounts to making a piece of shit that might lose a couple hundred thousand in order to save the studio from being turned into a giant parking lot.

“I can’t say you’re not delivering what you promised, Beck,” he said. “You
are
saving the studio, in your own greasy way.”

“Why, John,” Beck said, “why are you being so negative about it?”

“Because I don’t like going ahead on a film I know is going to be a flop,” Horst said. “I’m going along with it for practical reasons, but it goes against my grain.”

“A flop? What makes you think it’s going to be a flop? All we’re putting into it is a half million, and no matter how bad it is, the appearance of the Velvet Cloud, let alone all the other groups, will guarantee us some kind of reasonable theatrical gross. With Taub footing the festival bill, I guarantee you
Sunset City
will show a profit. You ever hear of me being involved in any enterprise that didn’t?”

He was right, and he was wrong.
Sunset City
would show a profit, but it would still be a flop. That’s something Beck just can’t comprehend, Horst thought. You can’t measure success just by a balance sheet in this business. Getting good films made it as important as making money on them. You get good films made
because
you know how to make money on them.

But when you start doing bad films just to make money, you start forgetting how to make good ones, and pretty soon you’re hanging on until someone like Taub feels like stomping on your fingers with his boots.

When you start thinking the way Beck thinks, the way he’s forced me to think now, you start dying inside, you’re getting caught up in the gears of the Hollywood studio mechanism that’s killing the industry by making it slowly devour itself like a wounded hyena. As Jodi would say, you become part of the problem instead of part of the solution.