where the tarmac was stenciled LOU KENSON. The erstwhile star had lost his deal with Sunrise and was now on the actor's Out List. Kenson could be relied on not to show up to claim his parking place and Prentice was on the verge of being late. He took Kenson's place, but with a twinge: thinking maybe it was bad luck
You could be as rational as a mathematician, but working the film industry you eventually came to believe in good and bad luck.
Prentice got out of the car and looked around. The studio looked like a series of overlarge warehouses and overgrown barns with oversized doors. The sunwashed buildings were old, mostly dull green, their paint peeling. On the other side of the lot, just visible between the interior-shoot buildings, there were a few generic tenement- facades, false fronts used for shooting generic inner-city street scenes in generic cop movies.
Prentice glanced at his watch, hurried out onto the little studio road. He found Building E and Zack Arthwright's office.
Arthwright could have had a spacious suite in the big mirrorglass skyscraper that Sunrise had built adjacent to the old studio, but he affected the air of a Colden Era traditionalist – 'Arthwright Pictures' was printed on the door – and he stuck to the old-fashioned office bungalows with their wonky air conditioners and cracked green walls.
This particular air conditioner was working too well, and noisily, thrumming rheumily to itself from a corner window behind a secretary who probably no longer heard it. The room was almost refrigerator cold, making Prentice think of the morgue. Amy in the file drawer. He'd worked hard at not thinking about that and he'd almost succeeded for half an hour.
Arthwright's secretary was busty but otherwise scissor-thin; gold mascara around eyes glamoured by blue- tinted contact-lenses.
She had a gold streak in her feathered blue black hair and a New Age crystal on a gold chain around her slender neck.
'Hi, I'm Tom Prentice…'
She glanced up from her work station with a brief but professionally sunny smile. 'Go right on in, Tom, he's expecting you.'
Tom, she said, though she'd never met him before. Fake intimacy. Welcome back to Hollywood.
Arthwright was, of course, using a speaker phone. He sat tilted back in a swivel chair with his faded black cowboy boots on his antique, leather inset desk, his brown leather suit jacket buttoned up in the excessive air conditioning. His long, curly brown hair was tied with rawhide strips into a small ponytail; his sharp-featured boyish face didn't tan very well, so his nose and cheeks were always a little burned. Lines at the corners of his eyes, and the beginning of a double chin, told the truth: he was no more the enfant terrible journalists had made him out to be just a few years before. But he was hot with a string of hits, taking first and third place in the Summer Box Office, rentals going strong on the new release. Everyone wanted into see him, everyone had a pitch for him, and Buddy probably had to use up a favour to get Prentice the meeting.
Prentice felt like he had been smuggled in, like a spy. The Spy Who Came In From The Out List, he thought.
Arthwright winked, gestured at a chair. Prentice sat stiffly, trying not to be obvious about wiping his damp palms on his jeans.
It was wrong to be here.
'If your client doesn't want to deal, he doesn't want to deal,' Arthwright was telling the phone, not missing a beat. 'I'm not going to give him control. Whenever I give up creative control the damn thing just doesn't work. He can have an extra fifty out front. That's the best I can do.'
Prentice was embarrassed. Made to wait out a negotiation carried on in front of him as if he weren't there. But in fact part of it was probably Arthwright flashing power at Prentice. It didn't matter that Prentice was a relative nonentity. The demonstration would be something Arthwright did compulsively.
Prentice tried to look interested in the office decorations. Framed movie posters on the walls, going back fifteen years to some of Arthwright's earliest: The Hellmakers, an old Lou Kenson western vehicle; The Grafters, the expose that had given Arthwright a veneer of respectability; Warm Knife, his mega hit thriller. The teaser read: Keep the knife under the pillow. It'll be warmer that way…
Prentice stared at the poster for Warm Knife. Thinking: We're a sick bunch of flickers, all of us.
'Creative control stays right here,' Arthwright was telling the speaker phone. Turned sideways from Prentice, looking as if he were talking to the air; like Jimmy Stewart talking to Harvey. 'If I need to, I can get Hagerstein. She's damn good.'
Arthwright took his long legs down and spun his swivel chair around once, in an absently playful way, as he waited for the ultimatum to sink in.
'Zack, get real' A crackly female voice on the speaker phone. That'd be Doll Bechtman, Jeff Teitelbaum's agent. Prentice and Jeff had gone to NYU
Film School together; had chased girls and made pretentious 16 millimeter student films together. Prentice decided he was going to have to look Jeff up.
Evidently Arthwright was arguing with Doll Bechtman about Jeff. Prentice had met Doll once; a middle-aged woman with a look like Betty Crocker and a style like Roy Cohn. A barracuda, Jeff called her gleefully. The tougher she was, the better he liked it. It appeared she'd met her match in Arthwright. But she kept on: 'I'm telling you, Jeff has good instincts. This Hagerstein woman cannot write an action picture. It'd be a joke.'
Jeff, Prentice mused. Arthwright was fucking Jeff Teitelbaum out of creative control on a movie? So what else was new.
'Then tell Jeff to compromise a little, work with us, Doll. Look, I got someone here. You talk to Jeff.'
'I'll get back.'
'Sure, okay.'
Arthwright swivelled to the phone and hit the disconnect. He cocked his head impishly, grinned at Prentice, and said, 'Tom. Long time no see.'
'Yeah. I've been holing up in New York.' Prentice had only met Arthwright once, briefly. Arthwright probably didn't really remember the occasion.
Prentice toyed with the idea of asking what Sunrise had cooking with Jeff. But, even though he was undoubtedly supposed to hear Arthwright throwing his weight around on the phone negotiation, he wasn't really supposed to listen to the details. He didn't need to ask, anyway, when he thought, about it. Arthwright was co- producing A Cop Named Dagger II for Sunrise; Jeff had conceived and written the first A Cop Named Dagger picture. Chances were, he was supposed to do the screenplay again but was holding out for creative control. Something few writers got till they became a 'hyphenate' – writer-director, a writer-producer. Usually he had to be a Player, a guy who could command points of the gross profits. Jeff wasn't there yet.
Why the hell did Jeff want to hold out for creative control over an action picture? But come to think of it, Jeff thought action pictures could be high art.
Arthwright checked out his watch, and said, 'Glad to see you back in town. What have you got for me?'
Arthwright wanted the pitch now. It was do or die. 'What I've got is…' Prentice spread his hands – and then stepped off the cliff into space. '… a comedy with a strong drama backbone, a twist on buddy pictures.' He could see Arthwright's eyes glazing already. Another buddy picture. Prentice went on hurriedly, 'A lady cop walks a beat in San Francisco. She walks it alone, in a tough neighbourhood. One day she gets a new partner – a rookie, a kid who ignores her eight years on the force and thinks he's hot shit, compared to her, because she's a woman and he can't take a woman seriously as a street cop. The humour'll come naturally. She's going to learn he's not the asshole he seems, deep down; he's going to learn she's a good cop and that he's got a lot to learn.'
It sounded stupid to Prentice in his own ears, just now. It sounded vague and fatuous.
'Uh huh.' Arthwright managed to seem half interested. 'Might be a little predictable. Familiar.'
Come on, you son of a bitch, Prentice thought. All your fucking movies are predictable. Out loud he said, 'It's a question of how it'll be carried off. They're on foot, they're part of the neighbourhood, and walking a beat is different to being in a cruiser, gives them a feeling of family with the people' they protect. And there'll be some plot twists. I've got an outline right now, hasn't got all the plot points but it's basically there. I see it as having the appeal of Alien Nation – only it's funnier, and it's men and women. Men and women are alien to one another when they're thrust into this kind of situation. We play it for laughs.' Alien Nation? A pretty dumb comparison. Get your shit together, Prentice!
