The Hollywood Trilogy (53 page)

It was still so hot that the water felt icy and delightful against Jody's feet as she stepped into the river. On impulse she waded further out into the water until it came up almost to her waist and then abruptly she ducked under. She was in a patch of sunlight, and when she opened her eyes under water everything was eerie and green, the way she had hoped it would be. It reminded her of swimming parties in Portland, on the banks of the Willamette when she had been a child. But this was the Alabama River, and when she came up she would begin, at last, her career.

They shot the scene four times. Jody's part was to stand with the water up to her knees, her head tilted so that her wet hair hung down almost hiding
her face. Maggie's part was to swim slowly past Jody and out of frame. Elaine's part was to sit in the water near the bank and be washing herself slowly, and of course Jonathan was up on the bank. They shot four times to catch four different arrangements of sun and clouds, and when they were finished, Jack was very happy.

“I think we got something,” he said to Jody as he helped her out of the water and Bud Hanzer draped a large towel around her. “I think we really got some good footage.”

Maggie came over to her and said, “See how easy it is?” and Elaine Rudman, when the two of them were in the honeywagon alone getting dressed, said, “Kind of an anticlimax, wasn't it? I mean, just standing there after all the hassle.”

“I was a model for a while,” Jody said. “I'm used to it.”

Harry would never be able to get the picture out of his mind: Jody in the twilight, the sun behind her head, her skin shining like bronze.

THIRTY-SIX

THEN THINGS started getting better for a while. The next morning everyone arrived at the riverbank location in good spirits, partly because the weather had cooled a bit overnight (fall weather had been promised to them for weeks) and partly because the producer's girlfriend turned out not to be the problem everyone had expected. Harry had heard that members of the crew were calling Jody “The Dragon Lady” after she had so efficiently put the June-bug out of its misery her first night on location, but when she had waded out into the lagoon the night before and done her job and looked incredibly beautiful and serene when everybody knew that actresses have almost a right to blow up when they have to work naked, and of course everybody thought Jody was just the producer's girl, and now Maggie was going around telling the crew she was very talented.

Harry did not exactly feel as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders, but it was an enormous, incalculable relief not to have to worry about Jody. He knew he would never be entirely free of the worry that she would suddenly go to pieces under the strain, and frankly he would not have blamed her, but she seemed to be bearing up beautifully. Harry thought about all the years she had wasted in her life, when with a talent like hers she could have been a successful actress probably from the beginning. But then maybe that wasn't true. Maybe she had needed to throw her life away in exchange for the talent. Not every genius was a young genius. Of course Jody was no genius, just a damned talented actress, and once again Harry half-congratulated himself for seeing her and seeing talent in her.

By the time they wrapped that night up everybody was really in a good mood. After losing half of yesterday, the crew worked hard and the actors worked hard and they got their entire riverbank sequence, a matter of thirty-two setups, shot in a single day, and not even a full day at that since they couldn't use morning light.

The only one to complain was Jonathan Bridger, who took Harry aside after one of the rehearsals and said, “My reading of the script and yours must be different.”

“How's that?” Harry asked, but he knew what Bridger meant. In the
script, Jody's invitation to the others to come swimming and stop worrying seems like a minor point, a character point and a way to get out of the heaviness of the scene, but the way Jack had blocked the scene and the way the camera was being used, Jody's bit was becoming the actual point of the scene.

“It just seems a little out of proportion to me, that's all,” Bridger said. “I thought the point of the scene was me on the bank unable to unbend.”

“It's all in the cutting,” Harry said lightly, and Bridger had to accept that as an explanation.

Most of the good feelings and energy seemed to come out of the actors, who after the first take really began to have fun with the scene, and there was a lot of rude splashing and horseplay between takes, and at one point Jack laughed so hard at a blown line that he almost fell off the raft, blindly grabbed at the camera, and was nearly responsible for dumping a thirty-thousand-dollar Mitchell into the Alabama River.

Jody was just great. She did not seem to know that she was naked, and being so unselfconscious herself she made Elaine and even Bridger and Maggie feel at ease with themselves. Nobody wore the flesh-colored suits, and when Jody suggested to Jack that if the women had to show their pubic hair then the men ought to also and Jack laughed and agreed, somebody went up the bank and found Harry and he agreed, and so after a great deal of fussing with reflectors and relocating the camera raft, the longest take in the swimming sequence was enlivened by a flashing glimpse of Maggie Magnuson's sex organ. And even so they came in on time, and when Bud Hanzer yelled, “It's a wrap!” everybody cheered and the actors dubbed themselves “The Four Prunes” and rode back together in Jonathan's car, drinking bottles of ice-cold beer from the tub the prop man kept ready for Bridger.

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIS WAS to be Jody's last scene in the picture: chased by the police, they crash into another car at a little country crossroads. Jody is pinned in the wreck, unconscious and fatally wounded. Jonathan Bridger forces Maggie Magnuson and Elaine Rudman to take the money and escape through the woods to the people who will take them out of the country to safety while he stands off the police in a final shoot-out. While he fires on the two police
cars using the wrecks for a barricade, Jody comes to, makes her way dizzily out of the car and staggers into the line of fire. Bridger tries to save her and they are both killed.

The location Harry and Jack had picked was in the middle of a large plantation which occupied nearly a quarter of Grissom County and contained its own crossroads store and postoffice next to a huge rusting old cotton gin with a couple of empty cotton wagons out in front. The whole place looked as if it had been built and then abandoned in the Nineteen Thirties, but as a matter of fact the plantation was a bustling business, raising not only cotton but soy beans, millet and beef cattle. The attractiveness of this particular crossroads was that since it was on private property and both dirt roads were owned by the Sumner family, it would not be necessary to have Alabama State troopers present for the filming to direct traffic, and Harry did not want troopers around for any of the scenes involving the police. The police in the script were just dog heavies, not people at all, and Harry knew from experience that real policemen had a tendency to resent the theatrical kind.

But there were other advantages to the location. It was a beautiful setting, for one thing, and for another the usual collection of Sugarville people who had been watching most of the filming were not able to get out here, and Harry did not want any civilians around for these scenes. A lot of explosives were going to be used to make it look as if the cars and people were being riddled by gunfire, and Harry always hated the thought of anybody getting hurt, especially civilians.

The cars had been wrecked the day before, with cameras mounted inside the cars, strapped to trees, one on top of the Cinemobile and one inside the entrance to the little store, Harry was certain that they had gotten good coverage, although he would not really know until he got back to Hollywood, because they had received their last batch of location dailies three days before, and after they finished this scene, there were only a few pick-ups and run-bys to shoot. And they were only two days over schedule.

Now while the special effects man supervised the placing of the explosive charges for the first setup and the grips were building a long platform for the camera to roll along during the shot, Harry took a moment for himself to walk alone down the road toward a copse of oak trees. He did not know how he felt. Like everyone else he had gone crazy once or twice, and now he had an almost desperate longing for Hollywood, civilization, good food
and peace, but there was a sense of regret in him too. This had not been the easiest picture he had ever worked on, but it certainly had the most potential, both commercially and artistically. His telephone calls to Bill Zimmerman the editor had been full of guarded enthusiasm, and of course Harry and everybody else had been seeing the uncut film in dailies shown down at the Sugartown Bijou two mornings a week. The photography was nothing short of brilliant as far as Harry was concerned, although Bob Teague the cameraman always squirmed and writhed in his seat during the screenings and seemed horribly relieved when people did not hate him. And the acting was right on the money, especially Magnuson and Jody.

In the shade of the oak trees Harry squatted down and rested for a moment, seeing the distant activity of the film company through the wavering heat of the morning. When he had been a little boy growing up in Nebraska he had often gone out into the countryside by himself, hunting arrowheads and imagining he was an Indian, and that was his true secret reason for coming over here now. A couple of days before a member of the crew had found some points—“arrowheads” he had called them—under these trees, and Harry really wanted to find some for himself, remains of the Alabama Indians who used to be all over this land. He had meant to go out hunting artifacts with the local expert, a druggist in the Selma shopping center, but it just hadn't worked out that way, and now this was going to be his last chance. He no longer worried about Jody at all. She had not had more than two drinks in a row for the entire six weeks, and although she was showing the strain of the production just like everyone else, she was certainly not the problem they had all expected. To the cast and crew she was just another actress in the company now, and the fact that she was the producer's girlfriend meant nothing. There were too many other things to gossip about: Bridger's and Elaine Rudman's brief but explosive affair after her husband had left; Maggie's sorties into the local communities; the crazy woman who kept going after Bridger's stunt double, and on and on, just like any other company on location.

He did not find any points, but he did gather a handful of potsherds which could have been anything from fifty to two thousand years old. They were light-brown clay, glazed or painted a dark brown on the outside. When Harry got back to the crossroads he went into the store where old Mr. Bill Sumner was behind the counter telling stories to Maggie and Jody. Harry lay the pieces of pot on the counter and the old man said, “Well, you seem to
have found some of my cooking utensils,” and with a slight twinkle in his old blue eyes he swore to Harry that the fragments were the remains of a terrible crockery battle between Sumner and his wife only last year. “I recall being hit on the head three or four times,” he said to Harry, “and after the first few blows I began to lose track of what particular utensils were being employed.”

Back out in the heat they were almost ready to go. Jack Meltzer, who like Harry had been averaging fifteen hours a day except Sundays when he would lock himself in his motel room and watch pro football all day sipping from a quart of Rebel Yell, was talking to the heavyset special effects man about the clouds of dust he wanted, to match the crash of yesterday. Harry listened for a few moments while the effects man explained that he personally would create the dust-cloud and Jody, inside the wrecked Chevrolet, would be asked to pull a wire that would cause steam to arise from the engine.

Harry moved on over to where Jonathan Bridger was sitting in his canvas chair in the shade of the honeywagon with the costumer, a stocky Italian who had flown in the day after Donald Bitts had gone home, made friends immediately and was now telling Bridger eggplant recipes that were guaranteed to “keep it up.”

“How are you feeling, Johnny?” Harry asked him. Bridger nodded and grinned, and Harry moved along. He had long ago decided that Bridger was a cold fish, but thank God he wasn't temperamental, just a young Republican who was able to earn excellent sums of money by acting. There really wasn't anything for Harry to do. He was not a working part of the company, he was only the producer, and now that he had lied, stolen, cheated, wheedled and berated everybody and everything, there was nothing further for him to do but worry, and even the worrying was in far more capable hands with Lew Gargolian, who, even though they had only five or six days of work left, still wore the wrinkles of anxiety on his forehead. But that was his job. Harry's job here on location was really over until they wrapped the picture, when Harry and Lew would oversee the closing out of the location to see to it that Sugarville would not regret having had a film company in their town. Plenty of film companies left bad debts, pregnant girls and angered citizens in their wake.