Get Shorty: A Novel

for production. I’ve got a script, but it needs work, get rid of some of the more expensive special effects. So I go see my writer and we discuss revisions. Murray’s good, he’s been with me, he wrote all my Grotesque pictures, some of the others. He’s done I don’t know how many TV scripts, hundreds. He’s done sitcoms, westerns, sci-fi, did a few Twilight Zones . . . Only now he can’t get any TV work ’cause he’s around my age and the networks don’t like to hire any writers over forty. Murray has kind of a drinking problem, too, that doesn’t help. Likes the sauce, smokes four packs a day . . . We’re talking— get back to what I want to tell you—he happens to mention a script he wrote years ago when he was starting out and never sold. I ask him what it’s about. He tells me. It sounds pretty good, so 1 take the script home and read it.” Harry paused. “I read it again, just to be sure. My experience, my instinct, my gut, tells me I have a property here, that with the right actor in the starring role, I can take to any studio in town and practically write my own deal. This one, I know, is gonna take on heat fast. The next day I call Murray, tell him I’m willing to option the script.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You pay a certain amount to own the property for a year, take it off the market. It’s an option to buy. I paid Murray five hundred against twenty-five thousand if I exercise the option, then another twenty-five at the start of principal photography.”

“That doesn’t sound like much.”

“It’s an old script, been shopped around.”

“Then why do you think you can get it made?”

“Because on the other hand it’s so old it’s new. The kid studio execs they have now had just come into the world when Murray wrote it.”

“So you don’t buy it,” Chili said, “till you know you have a deal. Is that right?”

“Or raise the money independently,” Harry said, “which is the way I prefer to go. You retain control. But with the actor I have in mind, I know I’m looking at a twenty-million-dollar picture, minimum, and that means going to one of the majors. Otherwise I wouldn’t go in a studio to take a leak.”

“You’re so sure it’s a winner,” Chili said, “what’s the problem?”

“I told you, I need a half a million to get started,” Harry said. “See, the guy I want is the kind of star not only can act, he doesn’t mind looking bad on the screen. Tight pants and capped teeth won’t make it in this one. If I could get Gene Hackman, say, we’d be in preproduction as I speak. But Gene’s got something like five pictures lined up he’s committed to, I checked.”

Chili thought of his all-time favorite. “What about Robert De Niro?”

“Bobby De Niro is possibly the finest actor working today, right up there with Brando. But I don’t quite see him for this one.”

“Tom Cruise?”

“Wonderful young actor, but that’s the problem, he’s too young for the part. I’ll have to show you my list, the ones I’ve considered are at least good enough and the right age. Bill Hurt, Dreyfuss, who happens to be hot at the moment, Pacino, Nicholson, Hoffman . . . Dustin I saw as a close second choice.”

“Yeah? Who’s your first?”

“Michael Weir, superstar.”

Chili said, “Yeah?” surprised. He said, “Yeah, Michael Weir,” nodding then, “he’s good, all right. The thing I like about him, he can do just about anything, play a regular person, a weirdo . . . He played the mob guy in The Cyclone that turned snitch?”

“One of his best parts,” Harry said.

Chili was nodding again. “They shot that in Brooklyn. Yeah, Michael Weir, I like him.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Harry said.

“He’s a different type than your usual movie star. I think he’d be good,” Chili said, even though he did-n’t know how to picture Michael Weir in this movie, whatever it was about. “Have you talked to him?”

“I took a chance, sent the script to his house.” Harry sat back, brushing a hand over his frizzy hair. “I find out he not only read it, he flipped, absolutely loves the part.”

“You found out—he didn’t tell you himself?”

“Remember my saying I need half a mil? I have to deposit that amount in Michael’s name, in a special escrow account before he’ll take a meeting with me. This is his fucking agent. You have to put up earnest money to show you’re serious, you’re not gonna waste his time.”

“That’s how it’s done, huh? Make sure you can handle it.”

“It’s how this prick does it, his agent. He says, ‘You know Michael’s price is seven million, pay or play.’That means if he signs and for any reason you don’t go into production, you still have to pay him the seven mil. You make the picture, it’s released, and now he gets ten percent of the gross. Not the net, like everybody else, the fucking gross. Hey, but who cares? He loves the script.”

“How’d you find out?”

“From the guy who’s cutting the picture Michael just finished, the film editor. We go way back. In fact, I gave him his start on Slime Creatures. He calls, says Michael was in the cutting room with the director, raving about a script he had with him, Mr. Lovejoy, how it’s the best part he’s read in years. The cutter, the friend of mine, doesn’t know it’s my property till he notices ZigZag Productions on the script. He calls me up: ‘You’re gonna do one with Michael Weir? I don’t believe it.’ I told him, ‘Well, you better, if you want to cut the picture.’ I don’t know yet who I want as my director. Jewison, maybe. Lumet, Ulu Grosbard . . .”

Chili said, “What’s it called, Mr. Lovejoy?”

“That’s Murray’s title. It’s not bad when you know what it’s about.”

Chili was thinking it sounded like a TV series, Mr. Lovejoy, about this faggy guy raising a bunch of kids of different nationalities and a lot of that canned laughter. He wondered if they got people to come into a studio, told them to go ahead, laugh, and they recorded it, or if they told them jokes. He remembered a TV program about how movies were made that showed people kissing their hands, the sound of it being recorded to go in a love scene the hand kissers were watching on a screen. Movies were basically fake. The sounds in a fight scene weren’t anything like what you heard nailing some guy in the mouth. Like the fight scenes in the Rocky movies, Stallone letting some giant asshole pound him, he’d be dead before the end of round one. But there were good movies too, ones that had the feeling of real life . . .

Harry was saying once he had a development deal at a studio, that would satisfy Mesas, they’d quit bothering him. Harry saying now if he could get to Michael Weir through Karen he wouldn’t need to raise the half a mil . . .

Wait a minute. “What?”

“You knew she was married to Michael at one time.”

“Karen? No . . .”

“Four years, no kids. This is the house they lived in till Michael walked out on her.”

“No, I didn’t know that,” Chili said. “So you want her to call him, set up a meeting?”

“That’s all—put in a good word.”

“They get along okay?”

“They never see each other. But he’d do it, I know.”

“Then what’s the problem? She won’t ask him?”

“I haven’t asked her,” Harry said. “If I did, I’m pretty sure she’d turn me down. See, but if she thinks about it a while and it becomes her idea, then she’d do it.”

“I don’t follow.”

“That’s ’cause you don’t know actors,” Harry said, “the way their minds work. Karen can’t just call Michael up cold and ask him. She wasn’t even that talented—aside from having that chest, you might’ve noticed, which I think is what made her a fantastic screamer. But, she still has that actor mentality. Karen would have to feel the situation. First, she has to want to do it as a favor to me . . .”

“For putting her in your movies.”

“Yeah, and she lived with me too. Then, she has to have a certain attitude when she calls Michael, feel some of the old resentment. He walked out on her, so he owes her the courtesy of a positive response. You understand?”