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“It’s still not too late to change your mind.” For the past month Bluhdorn had badgered AJ to forget about working in production and become one of his top staff men, involved with Paramount and the conglomerate’s other businesses. “You’ll learn everything and wield more fucking power than you ever dreamed of.”

  “The only power I want is to make movies. I’m a film guy, plain and simple.”

  Bluhdorn looked disgruntled. “You’re a fool. But Evans likes you.”

  “I like Evans. When you announce him as head of production, the town’s going to go nuts.”

  “Fuck the town.”

  And fuck Paul Herzog—especially Paul Herzog. “It might go smoother today without me in the meeting,” AJ suggested tentatively.

  “He’s got the right to meet his accuser face-to-face. It’s in the Constitution.”

  When they reached the main gate, a guard stepped forward and saluted. “Welcome to Paramount, Mr. Bluhdorn.”

  Charlie saluted back. “Hey, my own fucking army.”

  “What’s he doing here?” Herzog croaked.

  “Jastrow? I don’t make a move without him,” Bluhdorn replied matter-of-factly.

  “We’re on the same side now, sir.” AJ extended his hand, and the studio’s president couldn’t think fast enough to avoid shaking it. AJ figured his presence must be disconcerting, because Paul had told friends he was confident of keeping his post under the new owner.

  “You and the mutt close?” Bluhdorn gestured to the wall, where a candid shot showed Rin Tin Tin licking Herzog.

  “He made Paramount a lot of money.”

  “A long time ago. All our production is for shit, Paulie. You want to tell me why?”

  The bold gambit shocked even AJ.

  Herzog looked appalled. “I don’t understand. We’ve got excellent projects—”

  “Hurry Sundown is a disaster. Only an idiot sends a crew to Louisiana. Right, AJ?”

  The locals had persecuted the black actors, especially Diahann Carroll. “We think that you might have anticipated the racism in the state and filmed in Florida instead, where you’d get more help from the officials.”

  Herzog glared. “Preminger is an experienced producer and he assured—”

  “How could you trust Preminger?” AJ shook his head. “He’s certifiable.”

  “And the dailies—they’re awful! That’s also right, isn’t it?”

  AJ nodded. “The scene in which Jane Fonda seduces Michael Caine with a saxophone, that’s pretty rank, Paul.”

  Herzog attempted to defend the movie, but Bluhdorn interrupted to savage The Busy Body. “It’s going to lose me more fucking money!”

  “Sid Caesar’s a major star and—”

  “Was. Was a major star,” AJ corrected. “And only on TV. We don’t think movie audiences will pay to see him.”

  “I don’t care what you think!” Herzog bellowed. “I’ve been a senior executive in this business for thirty years. I will not be patronized by the likes of you.” He whipped around to Bluhdorn. “I’m willing to answer any of your questions. But I want this punk to leave immediately.”

  The silence must have lasted ten seconds. “Jastrow doesn’t leave until we’re finished.”

  Herzog steadied himself against his desk.

  “Now, I’ve got some news. I’m firing Howard Koch and naming Bob Evans as my new production chief.”

  “Robert Evans, the actor?”

  “Yeah.”

  Herzog was aghast. “He’s . . . he’s a failed leading man with virtually no experience.”

  “So?”

  “Don’t you think you should have consulted me? I’m president.”

  “Nah.” Charlie waved him off. “You don’t talk to Evans—he’ll report directly to me. You’re no longer involved in the movies we make. I can’t afford your mistakes.”

  Cut out of the loop—Hollywood’s version of stoning. Paul tried salvaging his dignity. “Abuse someone else. I’ll have my resignation on your desk by close of business.”

  “As you wish.” Bluhdorn departed, signaling for AJ to follow.

  But Herzog grabbed him by the arm, pulling him so close that AJ could see the hatred in the man’s soul. “There’s something I wanted to say. It’s about your father. Everybody liked good old Harry. But you know the truth? Your old man was a putz.”

  Charlie was yelling impatiently from the outer office, but AJ broke the man’s iron grip. “Your opinion of my father is as irrelevant as you are. “ He turned and walked out.

  Hiking down the hall together, Bluhdorn seemed untouched. “I thought that went better than I expected.”

  “Jastrow? Is that you?” Bernie Marcus wedged through the doorway of his office and enveloped AJ in a hug. AJ disappeared into the fat man’s flesh. “Thank God you’re here. We’ve needed some new energy.” Marcus shook Bluhdorn’s hand. “Hiring this guy, Mr. Bluhdorn, is a stroke of genius. He was a motherfucker of an adversary, so it’s great to have him on our side.”

  AJ was confused. “You guys know each other?”

  Charlie laughed. “As smart as you are, kid, you’ll never be smarter than me. Remember when you asked how I knew what was going on at the studio, and I said I had ‘sources’?” AJ nodded dumbly. “Bernie here is fat enough to qualify as plural.”

  At that instant AJ lost any illusions that Paramount would be a cozy place to work.

  “I like that guy.” Charlie waved back at Bernie’s office as they continued through the halls. “Maybe we should send him to one of those places that sew your stomach shut. So, what’s next?”

  “I need an office and a phone. I’ve got scripts to read and phone calls to make.”

  “Good. Get down to business,” Charlie urged. “I’ve only got two pieces of advice—make hit movies and make them fast.”

  AJ supplied the “or else.”

  1974–1975

  THE

  CHAIR

  SHOT

  FIRST

  CHAPTER 28

  AJ jived to “Jailhouse Rock” on an ice floe in Hudson Bay. The glare from the midnight sun obscured the identity of his partner, so he angled to the left for a better look but . . . no, the woman remained in the shadows. Then a serrated knife the size of a shark’s fin slashed up through the ice. Quick cuts left him dancing on a cube. A polar bear extended a paw, but was it rescue or was he dinner? “Take it,” Phil Kaufman screamed. Why were the director and crew of The White Dawn filming him instead of their movie? With the frigid water lapping his ankles, AJ leaped . . .

  He awoke with the covers cocooned around him. It must be minus ten outside, with a wind that could blow you backward. But rising to dress for the day’s shooting, AJ’s toes sank into cozy wool pile rather than curling on the freezing concrete of the Admiral Byrd Hotel. Sun peeked through the windows, not fresh snow. It took him a moment to reorient—he was back home in California, not visiting a set fifty miles from the Arctic Circle. His unconscious was becoming an incorrigible pain in the ass.

  At six A.M. he grabbed a head start on the day by making a crisis call to Europe. The dailies on Mandingo, a blaxploitation film about miscegenation in the Deep South, had drawn blood in the Paramount screening room. The movie needed a dexterous touch, but the early footage was purple and violent. He caught the legendary Dino De Laurentiis in Rome returning from lunch. While listening to the producer’s rapturous description of his rigatoni al verdi, AJ scraped crusty scrambled eggs into the garbage disposal—three years as a bachelor and his cooking still stank. He ordered Dino to reduce the whippings, splayed flesh, and contorted faces, and refused to wilt when the producer screamed that he was a “poossie” who lacked the vision to see that Mandingo was a black “Gun wid da Win.”

  Lacing up his sneakers, he mused over how people could be so blind. Couldn’t they tell the difference between good film and bad? Or were they too scared to own their failures? There wasn’t enough time to conduct seminars in taste or coddle sensitivities. Fix the problem or get out of
the way. The tide rolled in as he ran the beach in Malibu. AJ had rented a cottage on the ocean because the Pacific promised a new start. He zigged and zagged around pools of water, stones, and jellyfish, leaving him saltwater soaked by the time he flopped on his deck. Squeezing his incipient love handles, AJ vowed to add a fourth mile tomorrow.

  Dressed in a black turtleneck and tan cords, he eased his Mercedes 450SL onto Pacific Coast Highway for the forty-five-minute commute to Paramount. Normally he used the time to prepare for the day, but today he made the mistake of turning on the radio. Every station was reporting the gap in the Watergate tapes, an event that rendered movie plots conventional. No writer could create a character like Richard Nixon. The president was such a bucket of slime it was a wonder that he’d wound up in politics instead of the film business.

  Ronda Gomez-Quinones waited at the office wearing the necklace of dominoes he’d given her to celebrate his former assistant’s promotion to West Coast story editor. Her predilection for kooky jewelry belied a speed-reader with an eye for compelling scripts. Two of the five she’d covered yesterday merited his consideration, which spelled four hours of homework for him.

  Mornings like this, AJ required an air-traffic controller more than a secretary as writers and producers pitched stories they wanted Paramount to commission and agents pitched talent for projects the studio already owned. Yes two times out of fifty rated a positive week. AJ had earned the town’s respect for being definitive, unlike studio execs who cowered behind “Let me think about it.” He emerged from his meetings to a spate of urgent messages, putting out the worst of the wild-fires before double-timing it to the commissary for lunch with Peter Bogdanovich.

  They had become friendly during the making of Paper Moon—the movie that encapsulated the long-running soap opera of Paramount’s production process. Two years ago Peter Bart, a New York Times reporter recruited to the production team at the same time as AJ, had shown him a novel about a precocious girl and a con man who crossed Kansas in the 1930s selling Bibles. Together they’d hooked Bob Evans on the project. But Bluhdorn, who monitored every decision made at the studio, had called from New York to complain that period pictures were the plague. Evans had held him at bay until Bogdanovich had evinced an interest. If the director of The Last Picture Show liked Paper Moon, Charlie conceded, maybe his executives weren’t total idiots.

  AJ had then undertaken the mission of getting Peter to commit, which had proved an exercise in mud wrestling because the director couldn’t articulate what he needed to feel comfortable. Then Polly Platt, Bogdanovich’s ex-wife but continuing collaborator, had suggested casting Tatum O’Neal, which had given AJ the idea of hiring Ryan and marketing a real-life father-daughter team. Bogdanovich had loved the notion. But when AJ had broken the good news, Evans had bellowed that he was a traitor. Was he the only one who hadn’t heard the rumors that Ryan had slept with Bob’s wife, Ali MacGraw, during the making of Love Story? Chagrined, AJ had volunteered to kill the deal, but Evans had ordered him to let it stand—Paramount couldn’t give up a potential hit.

  Paper Moon opened to smash box office and lavish reviews. Unfortunately, the demon of success swallowed its filmmaker. At lunch, after interrogating the waiter to ensure that his cold poached salmon had been spawned in Alaska, Peter obsessed on whether the credits for his next film, Daisy Miller, should read “A Peter Bogdanovich Film of Henry James’s Novella” or “Henry James’s Daisy Miller, a Film by Peter Bogdanovich.” But a more serious crisis loomed. Should he walk ahead of Cybill Shepherd—the film’s leading lady and Peter’s girlfriend—at the New York premiere or be on her arm? Perhaps he should be the last to enter?

  Forget the last to enter—he might be the only one. The movie was stillborn two months before its opening, as turgid and stiff as Paper Moon was tart and witty. AJ longed to wring the polka-dot ascot around the demon’s neck until it coughed up the old Peter—the one more concerned about on-screen images than his own.

  Back at the office, a three-hour story meeting on The Hephaestus Plague proved a welcome relief. The studio owned a novel about scientists fighting a colony of fire-breathing insects, but the challenge was to anthropomorphize the creatures into interesting villains. Brainstorming even absurd premises was AJ’s favorite part of his job. His least favorite was goosing Paramount’s business-affairs people. The kid making the deal to option North Dallas Forty whined that the agent wouldn’t agree to a reasonable price. Bernie Marcus would have squashed him. “Alas, poor Bernie”—he’d weighed less than 150 pounds by the time he’d died of pancreatic cancer.

  AJ knew he was entering a minefield as he hiked across the lot at four o’clock to join his boss in the editing room of Chinatown. Not only was Evans the studio’s chief, he was also the producer of the film. Bluhdorn had awarded him this unprecedented perk rather than raise his salary. But the dual roles meant Bob had to be both good cop and bad cop in a raging dispute between writer Robert Towne and director Roman Polanski over the ending. Neither was present while Evans ran Polanski’s version.

  “Tell me the truth,” Evans ordered.

  It was the last thing anyone in Hollywood really wanted, but Bob had an indefatigable dedication to perfection—and a flawless bullshit detector. AJ watched the scene in which Faye Dunaway’s character died and her father stole the daughter born of their incestuous relationship, while Jack Nicholson’s Jake Gittes watched impotently. “That’s dark.”

  “Depressing dark or memorable dark?”

  “Both.”

  “You think it’s too dark—you do, don’t you?”

  Eight years and still testing. Was it because AJ was Bluhdorn’s boy? Perhaps their skills overlapped, or maybe Bob, who had the sleek look of a tango dancer, resented that AJ was almost as good-looking. The guy deserved a lot of credit. When AJ expressed a passion, Bob backed it, and when AJ failed, Evans took responsibility. Their relationship generated profits for Paramount—but also thunderclouds. “It depends on what you want to say to the audience.”

  “Towne’s a mess.” Bob spoke like a telegram. “Weeping it’s ‘ruinous and immoral.’ My sense—he’s scared. Can’t see the genius. Afraid audiences won’t like it.”

  AJ shook his head. “Robert’s seen Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, and Rosemary’s Baby. The movie doesn’t need a happy ending to succeed. He probably hates Polanski telling the audience that evil triumphs.”

  “Look at the successful assholes we deal with. Tell me evil doesn’t triumph.”

  AJ took a different tack. “It might be novel to respect the writer’s vision instead of the director’s.”

  “That gets us Towne’s next script, my way gets us Polanski’s next movie. Sorry, AJ, but you’d suck as head of production.”

  It was the muted trumpet call of the elephant in the editing room—any room the two inhabited. Persistent rumors predicted AJ replacing Evans within the year. No one in New York had spoken to him, and he and Bob never discussed it directly, but Hollywood was a “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” town. AJ smiled thinly at Evans. “Compared to you, anyone would suck.”

  His dinner guest was Michael Douglas “the producer,” who was flogging a movie version of Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. AJ found the project off center enough to be intriguing. By dessert, he was more interested in Michael Douglas “the actor.” Although the rap was that Michael had reached his potential with The Streets of San Francisco, AJ saw a dangerous, mischievous quality reminiscent of Kirk in his prime. Then again, he was so bushed by the time he paid the check, maybe he couldn’t see clearly.

  Mercifully, the first of Ronda’s recommends resembled Shampoo, which was in production at Columbia, so AJ discarded it after forty pages. He fought through the second, a drama about a California lifeguard. The writer had too much talent to ignore, but his main character lacked ambition. After a couple of hits off a joint, AJ reevaluated. Did the lifeguard know more than he did? If he was happy soaking up rays and rescuing lame swimme
rs, so be it. Look how ambition had twisted Nixon. Maybe AJ had too much, spewing in too many directions. Then again, lifeguards probably didn’t pay child support. He decided to show the script to Evans.

  At eleven P.M., AJ cast off his day job, slipping into his den, drawing down the shades, and removing a sheaf of neatly stacked paper from the right-hand drawer. A goosenecked desk lamp shadowed him and a typewriter. Had his dad followed a similar routine? AJ had begun his screenplay in the midst of the bitter funk that had trailed his divorce. Some nights he wrote an entire scene, more often a few paragraphs of action or a single speech. The next evening he’d read that work aloud, playing each part and envisioning the staging. If it didn’t scan true, he ripped it up and started again. But when it worked—he was a child again, playing with words instead of blocks.

  Tonight wasn’t an ordinary night. Screenwriters no longer penned “The End” on the final page of a screenplay, which was a shame, because AJ wanted the closure. He read the last line aloud. “Do you think anybody in the hamlet knows how the Yankees did last night?” Maybe it was too cute. Tomorrow would tell. Heading off to bed, he offered a silent prayer: no more polar bears for the next six hours.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences welcomes you to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for the forty-sixth annual Academy Awards. Your host for the evening . . . Mr. . . . David . . . Niven!”

  AJ had sat on the fifty-yard line at the Super Bowl, in the pit at Indy, and ringside for the heavyweight championship of the world. But attending those events hadn’t diminished the honor or dulled the rush of joining nominees and neighbors in the orchestra at the Oscars. This year his anticipation soared because Paramount had fourteen nominations, trailing only Universal. Although it was the hottest April day on record, Niven stood at the podium as cool as a Tanqueray and tonic. “Tonight I’m reminded that those of us in the movie business are the luckiest people in the world. Can you imagine being wonderfully overpaid for dressing up and playing games?”