Action! Read online

  Andy whispered, “Now we’re in deep shit.”

  Jessica stared daggers and disbelief. “You’re not giving up already, are you?”

  The pros averted their eyes. Tonight should have been sold-out. Movies targeted to a young market performed best on Friday nights. The weather was ideal and there was no major competition for their demographic. If The Scholarship performed poorly in the San Fernando Valley under playbook conditions, it surely struggled everywhere.

  “Maybe it will build,” Jess offered plaintively.

  “Maybe.” AJ spoke without conviction. In prior years, when studios released movies initially in a few theaters, a film with positive word-of-mouth could overcome a weak opening. But The Scholarship was already playing in twelve hundred theaters. Exhibitors would kick it out on its sprocket holes before word of mouth could spread. The opening weekend was now the tyranny of the movie business. In an attempt to anchor their films, marketers increased and front-loaded advertising dollars. And to offset the greater risk, production executives selected movies because they were easy to sell. A movie with a concept that could be grasped in a thirty-second spot stood a better chance of getting made than a film that was complex and character-driven.

  AJ crunched numbers: J2 faced a ten-million-dollar defeat. He gathered his team in front of a Penguin’s Frozen Yogurt outside the theater. “Welcome to the movie business. It’s the best in the world . . . and it can be cruel as hell. We made a fine movie. We sold it well. But the audience chose not to buy. Injustices even out. Believe me, if we do our jobs in the future as well as we did them on The Scholarship, J-Squared will be fine.” He wasn’t sure if he believed his own proselytizing.

  Megan sat in the back of the bus, her eyes closed, her head against the window. AJ decided not to console her. Pete plopped down next to him. “If you combine our loss on The Scholarship with the write-off on General Assembly and add in our overhead, I figure our bottom line to date—”

  “Is more than fifteen million dollars in the red. That means that the Keikus can legally override my decisions.” AJ sighed. “I recall who said I shouldn’t accept the ‘samurai clause.’ Tomorrow I’ll listen. But tonight I’m just going to feel sorry for myself.”

  CHAPTER 43

  The canopy of Cuban cigar smoke wafting over the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton could have choked a customs agent. But the two thousand businessmen at the “Predators’ Ball” didn’t give a damn about import bans—or any governmental regulation that meddled with their God-given right to amass and enjoy wealth. They came to swap deals, sip ‘61 Pétrus, and listen to Michael Milken’s gospel of greed. The lights dimmed, the theme song from Dallas blared, and Larry Hagman, dressed as J. R. Ewing, appeared on the screen above the dais flashing his Drexel Express Titanium Card. “It has a ten-billion-dollar line of credit, so don’t go hunting without it.” Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, Steve Ross, Barry Diller—the entertainment industry’s high and mighty—cheered his spoof of the American Express commercial like kids at an Indiana Jones matinee.

  Ricky whooped it up with them, despite ranking as the poorest person in the crowd. After existing in the company of struggling artists, he found power intoxicating. Nobody told these moguls they were too short or too tall, too ethnic or too bland. Nobody rejected them after five callbacks, and nobody blamed them for a rotten performance that was the fault of the asshole who wrote the lines. These men wrote their own lines. He grinned at the man on his left. “Thanks for inviting me.”

  “My pleasure, pardner.” Dillard Cass was a kick-ass young Texan, complete with twang and cowboy boots. In six months of managing Grandma’s money, he’d increased her net worth by thirty million dollars. Those were hard numbers to ignore, so Ricky checked out his action. The guy was like a keen-eyed agent, but instead of actors, he targeted deals—everything from golf-course developments in Scottsdale to wind farms in Modesto to hot penny stocks. Intrigued, Ricky joined a couple of meetings at the office, a few lunches and dinners, then a field trip to a gold mine in Brazil. As an actor, he always researched his parts. Playing a businessman was a kick. Dill’s bankers were wilder than Ricky’s acting buddies—and they could afford better coke.

  After the ball, a limo drove them to Bomba, a club in downtown L.A., where they met a model Ricky knew from acting class. She sat her billiard-ball butt on his lap and made a call on her cell phone. Ten minutes later three Xerox copies of her arrived. The evening looked promising. As the girls giggled off to the john to throw up and snort, Ricky pounded the black granite table to make a point. “You see, they’re indispensable.”

  Dill seemed skeptical. “I’ll tell you after I dip my wick. I finger-fucked the redhead and she’s kind of—”

  “Not the babes—the cell phones.” They were the next big thing, Ricky was sure of it. “My neighbor’s an engineer and he took a job at McCaw Communications—”

  “He was there tonight, Craig McCaw.”

  “I know, I introduced myself while you were chatting up Milken. Anyway, my guy says the FCC’s going to expand the bandwidth these cellular companies can use. When congestion decreases, sales will go nuts. It’s already like that in Europe. Shit, I made this movie in Hungary last year, and people on the streets had them. Hungary, for Christ’s sake, where they can’t afford a sausage.”

  Cass sat back with a smile. “What the hell, we can invest a few mil, see what happens.”

  That’s what Ricky loved—if you wanted to try something, you tried it. No fucking screen tests.

  AJ prayed the next reel would be better. But there was no better—only worse—in Gordo Slaughter’s cut of The Coney Island Maniac. Instead of a taut horror movie, the director had assembled a turgid two-hour drama about a tortured soul. Slaughter’s pretensions outstripped his talent, and in the twilight of his career the schlockmeister had chosen to make a statement about the human condition rather than scare the pants off teenagers.

  When the lights came up, Gordo misinterpreted the reason his employer had turned ashen. “Pretty terrifying, isn’t it?”

  “To say the least.”

  “I know it’s a tad long, mate, but I think I can remove three minutes without hurting the quality.”

  AJ silently talked himself off the ledge. There was a movie in the mess. Slaughter wasn’t the first director to stray off course. He would agree to make the necessary changes when he understood the problems. But the facts outshouted AJ’s soothing inner voice. Water, Water Everywhere had just opened to modest box office and would ultimately generate a million-dollar profit. That put all the pressure on The Coney Island Maniac. If it failed, J2 would lose twenty million dollars in its first year, killing any chances for a second. A calm, measured response was for some other time and place. “Gordo, the movie is atrocious.”

  The brutality of his comment shocked Slaughter. “I . . . I don’t know . . . uh . . . what to say. Perhaps you didn’t see what I went for.”

  “What I saw was a fucking embarrassment!” AJ’s spit splashed the man’s face. “Do you hear me?”

  “The dead can hear you. I obviously don’t agree, but perhaps we should test the film with an audience.”

  In a town that feasted on failure, AJ knew that lousy preview results would leak, crippling Andy Faddiman’s efforts to book the film. “You have the right to a screening under the DGA rules. If you insist, I’ll arrange it this week. But after the movie bombs, I’ll fire your ass and ruin your reputation at every studio in town.”

  Slaughter’s eyes popped. “You’d do that?”

  “No one will hire you to direct a game show on television. But it doesn’t have to be that way. If you waive your right and allow me to fix this mess, I’ll swear you did a great job.” A confident director would have shoved the deal up AJ’s ass, but Slaughter secretly feared he was a hack.

  “Maybe you should take a crack at it.”

  “Thanks, Gordo, I appreciate your openness.”

  AJ spent the next nine days and nights parked in an editing
bay with Jimmy Millman, who’d begun the 1970s cutting Roger Corman movies and ended the decade with an Academy Award. The two men ate enough pizza, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Chinese food to gain five pounds apiece. After watching Bob Evans refashion The Godfather, AJ knew what miracles could be wrought. With their hack director out of the picture, they found the real Maniac within the mass of existing footage. Slaughter’s attempt to tell a Frankenstein story created ambivalence. To clarify the emotional line they adjusted scenes so that the audience would hate the Maniac rather than pity him. And they gave people someone to root for by restoring scenes that enhanced the character of the teenage girl who fought the Maniac in the end. Their recut version was thirty-three minutes shorter and ten screams scarier.

  But a critical problem remained: the special effects. All they lacked were “Zap!” and “Pow!” in bubbles above the actors. When AJ screened the movie for his senior staff, the cheesy shots ripped them out of the movie.

  With film cans in tow, AJ and Millman boarded a plane for the Bay Area to seek the cure at the movie industry’s Lourdes. If anyone could enhance the images in The Coney Island Maniac, it was Industrial Light + Magic. The chief doctor and priest was Tony Adamo, a boy-man with a peach-fuzz goatee and thick glasses. “You should sue the guy responsible for this crap. It’s malpractice.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” AJ replied.

  “I can save it . . . I think.”

  “You think?”

  “It’s going to take at least a hundred new effects shots. If someone else can give you a guarantee, take it.”

  “How much.”

  “Two million dollars.”

  AJ maintained a poker face. The number was double his estimate—and a quarter of the movie’s original budget. Because it was the last week in April, ILM couldn’t complete the job for a summer release, though they could make Halloween—if AJ proceeded now.

  “There are a lot of filmmakers out there who need our help,” Adamo noted noncommittally.

  If he were buying a car, AJ might have bargained. Instead, he impulsively shook Tony’s hand. “Let’s get going.”

  A musty odor assaulted him when he entered his house just past midnight. During his immersion in the editing room, Megan had traveled to location to do an on-set production rewrite on 8 Million Ways to Die, the new movie by legendary director Hal Ashby. AJ threw open every window. Today’s decision was tough, and everyone would scrutinize it in light of his recent run of mistakes, from Kinison to Slaughter. But he was a dead man, AJ told himself, if he succumbed to self-doubt. This reassurance didn’t work, and he remained too wired to fall asleep, so he rummaged through his closet until he found a Baggie filled with a stash of marijuana. Slipping into bed, he inhaled a joint. The stuff was potent. Hey, fuck everyone. He was the hire-wire act.

  The last time Jessie had visited the Paramount lot she’d been a ten-year-old with braces and her daddy had been vice president of production. For her return at twenty-five she splurged on a Calvin Klein suit and a haircut at Christophe, since today’s appointment was with Matt Margolin. Jess hadn’t spoken to him since Sun Valley, but last week he’d invited her for lunch. They ate in his newly redecorated office—at least Margolin did, because Jess was too busy voting thumbs up or down on a list of thirty movies whose titles he read off in rapid-fire succession. Reclining in his custom-made Le Corbusier desk chair, he harrumphed and applauded her answers. Meanwhile, Jess gulped down her Cobb salad, trying to ignore how his ears made him look like a Volkswagen with its doors open.

  “I was a twelve-year-old picking dates on a kibbutz when the Six-Day War broke out.” His non sequitur startled her. “I grew up outside Tel Aviv. You know what that experience taught me, Crash?” Was this another quiz? “It taught me that life is war. The movie business is life, ergo the movie business is war. Rival studios will swarm Paramount like a pack of Arabs unless I’ve got soldiers willing to die to defend the Melrose gate. In Sun Valley I saw a warrior who fought like that. You remind me of Israeli women. They’re great in the trenches and in bed.”

  “I wasn’t aware of that.”

  “Your preferences on the Margolin Movie Test indicate pent-up aggression. I intend to unpent you.” It sounded vaguely dirty, but Jess didn’t mind, because Matt offered her a job as a vice president.

  Marching back to her car, she wondered if he’d assessed her correctly. Admittedly, her competitive instincts had become sharper. Playing doubles last week, Jessie had slammed an overhead that almost broke the nose of her friend Stacy Snider. As the Paramount patrol officer waved her out, she saluted smartly, then dissolved into unmilitaristic merriment.

  Over dinner at a steak joint called Dominick’s, Jess shared the news with Sean. “Margolin said everyone touted me as brilliant—even Ovitz. You were behind this, weren’t you?”

  Her boyfriend was uncharacteristically self-effacing. “Hollywood has no secrets when it comes to talent. Matt asked my opinion, I told him he couldn’t do better—and he can’t. When do you start?”

  “You think I should take it?”

  “Of course you should.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “His background seemed fascinating, so I did some checking. The only time he spent on a kibbutz was one summer after the seventh grade.”

  “What difference does that make? He’s a star—so are you, so am I, so are our friends. We’re going to run the business five years from now. Being a charter member of the club means everything.”

  She felt like an idiot missing the obvious. He took her hand. It was stupid how so small a gesture turned her on.

  “You’re afraid of leaving your dad, aren’t you?”

  “ ‘Afraid’ isn’t the right word.”

  “If he knew you had this opportunity, he’d urge you to grab it.”

  Jess wasn’t so sure.

  Pete stood on the threshold of his boss’s office, a document in each hand and a frown on his face. AJ smiled. “All you’re missing is the scythe. Okay, what’s the problem?”

  “It’s not funny,” Leventhal replied. “In the last hour ILM faxed a bill for payment of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. They’ve commenced work.”

  “Good.”

  “Not good.” He waved the other piece of paper. “This is a registered letter from Hiroshi Hama. Keiku Enterprises has refused to authorize the additional two million dollars. We don’t have the money to pay ILM.”

  AJ rubbed his eyes, but the dilemma only loomed larger. “What if I get on the phone? Can I convince Seiji?”

  “You won’t even find him. He’s on an inspection tour of his whaling fleet in Guam.”

  “I’ll burn the negative before releasing Maniac in its present form.” AJ pounded his desktop. “Why can’t they see you have to spend money to make money?”

  “They see the spending part.”

  “Koji poisoned the waters by bad-mouthing the project before we even started.”

  “And now he’s bored with the movie business. His new deal is racing cars.” Pete’s voice shook. “It’s over. It was a crazy idea to begin with—start a studio, go up against the majors. Both of us must have been out of our minds.”

  AJ slid open his drawer, removed his leather-bound checkbook, and wrote a personal check for the ILM deposit. “Wire this now.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll get a second mortgage on the house for another quarter million and borrow the rest.”

  “You can’t do this,” Pete pleaded. “Nobody in our business uses their own money.”

  “Nobody in their right mind, but as you so eloquently pointed out, I don’t have a right mind.”

  A Brancusi and a Giacometti had joined the collection of Rodins and Henry Moores in Ray’s sculpture garden. It made AJ feel less guilty about asking for a handout. Still, he fought back tears when Stark handed him a check for half a million dollars. “Thank you.”

  “Forget it. Have you got enough?
”

  “I FedExed Seiji Keiku a letter explaining that J-Squared will put up half the cost of the bailout. My sacrifice will look like an honorable sacrifice—and a sign of the importance of the work. He’ll come through with the second million.”

  Ray’s housekeeper arrived with iced Red Zingers, and the two men sipped them in silence, enjoying the afternoon sun on a warm spring day. The grandeur of the bronze and marble made Stark contemplative. He often came out to the garden to remember his son Peter. “You’re going to miss her a lot, aren’t you?”

  AJ looked puzzled. “Miss who?” The Rabbit’s ears drooped. “Miss who?”

  “Oh, God, I thought you knew. It’s Jess—she took a job . . .”

  Stark had to be wrong. He was old and had misunderstood. But he babbled on till AJ screamed “Shut up!” Shut up? To a friend who’d just loaned him five hundred grand? He ran from the garden. There was another explanation for this treachery. He was sure of it.

  CHAPTER 44

  AJ tailgated the rush-hour traffic into West Hollywood. Stark had heard the news from Jack Rapke at CAA, who’d heard it from Frank Mancuso, the chairman of Paramount. But AJ didn’t care that he was the last to know—he cared only about losing Jess. His fury at her dissipated by Beverly Hills, replaced by anger at himself for blowing it. He was too autocratic. J2 was a sinking ship. A stint at a major studio could advance her career more than an apprenticeship to a failed father. It was all of the above—and none of his business. Climbing the steps to his daughter’s apartment, AJ debated how to initiate the dreaded conversation. Casual, don’t make a big deal out of it—even though he couldn’t imagine a bigger one.

  “What’s wrong?” She stood in the hall, hands on her hips, concerned, suspicious.

  “Why does something have to be wrong?”

  “Surprises aren’t your thing. And you sounded like a game-show host on the intercom.”