Chapter Twenty-Seven
Work on the shoot had all but stopped. Everyone who wasn’t on set had their mobile phone on them, and they’d all received an anonymous group message with a link to an internet news site and the words, ‘please share’, at the same time as I had.
Top story on the site, underneath the lurid headline ‘Award-winning Producer in Sex-for-Roles Scandal’, was a video, secretly and inexpertly filmed. It was slightly blurred and out of focus, but still clear enough to recognise the man at the centre of it. Mike Mancuso, clad in a loose-fitting bathrobe, sitting on a sofa in a tastefully bland but expensive-looking hotel room. There was an ice bucket with a bottle of champagne in it on the coffee table in front of him. Also on the table was a small heap of white powder. And opposite him sat a handsome young man in his early twenties.
The young man held some pages of a script in his hand. He read from them, pouring emotion into every line; he had real presence and professionalism, which can’t have been easy with the sweaty New Yorker sat across from him, his legs open wider than any middle-aged-man-in-a-bathrobe’s legs should be. At the end of the reading he stopped, expectantly. You could almost sense his feeling of hope, that his dreams might be about to come true. But underneath that, in his demeanour, in his body language, seemed to lie the unwelcome realisation that it wasn’t going to be as easy as that. Or was that just the old cynic in me? Because I had the horrible feeling I knew what was coming next.
‘You did good,’ said Mancuso, on the screen. ‘You got that quality, kid. You could be a big star.’
‘Do you really think so?’ said the young man. His eagerness was almost heartbreaking.
‘I do.’ Mancuso shifted, moving his legs further apart, and I really, really wished he was wearing underpants. ‘But you know, I know a lotta young guys like you – great actors, good-looking guys. Why should I give you the part and not one of them?’
The young man also shifted, but instead of spreading out he looked like he was trying to physically withdraw into himself. ‘Well, I-I got great reviews when I played Romeo—’
‘Yeah, these other guys got great reviews too,’ said Mancuso, inspecting his fingernails, bored. ‘That ain’t how it works though, is it?’ He looked up with a frank expression on his face. ‘Come on. You know how it goes. You scratch my back…’
‘You want me to scratch your back?’
Mancuso laughed. ‘You know what I want.’
The young man was still for a moment, and I thought, Tell the big fat bully to stick his part where the sun don’t shine! Get up and leave!
But obviously the young man hadn’t left, otherwise we wouldn’t have been here watching the video. I won’t go into details about what followed. Unless you’re terribly sweet and innocent (sweeter and more innocent than me, anyway), you can probably guess. The Hollywood casting couch might have suffered a dent with the advent of #MeToo, but the video showed that it hadn’t completely gone away after all. Underneath the video was a quote from the ‘unnamed source’ who had sent in the video:
The games played by the powerful men in this industry continue, despite our best efforts. The younger generation of actors and creatives should not have to go through what we did.
Nathan and I watched the video – or enough of it, anyway – open-mouthed with shock. We weren’t the only ones. The whole crew were glued to their phones, many of them tapping away – sharing it, I assumed. Daisy and Jade ran over with their phones in their hands, but thankfully they hadn’t clicked on the link (I had instilled in Daisy a fear of cybercrime, online bullying, and hacking that had really come into its own today) and I was able to delete it before they did. There was no way I wanted them to see it.
Mike Mancuso stepped out of the production-office trailer, phone in one hand, car keys in the other. He was obviously planning to get out of there as quickly as he could, away from the shocked, judging eyes of the cast and crew who were even now turning to look at him.
Nathan approached him and I followed at a trot, after asking Jade to call her mum to pick them both up. I might be here a while…
‘Excuse me, Mr Mancuso, sir!’ called Nathan. Mancuso ignored him, but we could see where he was heading. Nathan reached the car first and stood in his way.
‘Mr Mancuso, I think you and I need to have a little chat, don’t you?’ And there wasn’t much that the producer could do, other than agree, especially when Matt Turner emerged triumphantly from the dumpster behind the office clutching an empty sake bottle wrapped in a plastic bag.
Faith opened the door to her trailer. She looked quite happy to see me, but her smile slipped a little as she spotted Nathan behind me.
‘Jodie, DCI Withers, you do look serious. I think you’d better come in.’
She sat down and gestured to us to take a seat. I did, but Nathan stayed standing. Power move, I thought.
‘Ms Mackenzie,’ said Nathan, ‘we’d like to ask you about your relationship with Mr Mancuso.’
‘I didn’t have one,’ she said. She smiled at me, but there was a hint of sadness behind it. ‘You of all people know I have much better taste in men than that.’
‘We don’t mean a sexual relationship,’ I said. ‘We mean—’
‘You mean, you want to know if I blackmailed him or not?’
Nathan and I exchanged surprised glances.
‘Well, yes,’ he admitted. ‘Although it’s really a rhetorical question, because we’ve just spoken to him and we know you did.’
‘Does it still count as blackmail if I never actually asked for money? Or for any type of personal gain?’
‘Technically, yes,’ I said. ‘But you did ask for
