Black River

FIFTY-FIVE

O’Brien followed a college-aged man with a pizza delivery. He walked quickly through the Hilton Hotel parking lot, two large pizza boxes in his hands, and keys on a ring attached to his belt and rattling as he stepped across the lobby and into the elevator. O’Brien slipped in before the doors closed and said, “Smells great. Those for the film editors?”

“Yep. You an editor?”

“Not yet. I do what they tell me.”

“I know how that goes.”

“I’ll pay for the pizzas now and take them in. What do we owe you?”

“Twenty-one even.”

O’Brien handed the man three ten-dollar bills. “Keep the change.”

“Cool. Thanks dude.”

The elevator doors opened and O’Brien stepped out. He walked down the hall to the penthouse suites. The sign on one door read:

O’Brien knocked, opened the door and said, “Pizza delivery.”

“Come on in,” came a voice from somewhere in the back.

O’Brien entered and walked around tables set up with monitors, cables, computers, keyboards. The door was open to an adjoining room, which had even more equipment. O’Brien could hear the voices of actors, the fast stopping and starting of the same scene. One man stood from the long table and said, “You can set the pizzas down there. What’d the bill come to?”

“No charge. It’s on me. A small price to pay for an introduction into the world of editing. I’m Sean O’Brien. Are you Oscar?”

“Yes, named for the golden and elusive statue. My dad was a movie buff. Come on in, Sean, and sit down. You got here fast.”

“I was sort of in the neighborhood.”

Oscar Roth’s gray hair was pulled back in a short ponytail. His hazel eyes were playful. A diamond earring in one ear. He wore a white, button-down oxford shirt outside his jeans. Soft loafers. No socks. He said, “Sean, this is Chris Goddard.” Roth gestured toward a slender man in a black T-shirt with a sharp face sitting in front of two large, sixty-inch monitors, light from the screens reflecting off his glasses. He glanced up and said, “Nice to meet you. Thanks for lunch.”

“You’re welcome. I appreciate you guys giving me the opportunity to sit in and watch. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to a career internship, even if it’s only for a couple of hours. I’ll know if I’m having a creative mid-life crisis or a career change.”

Roth said to Goddard, “Sean’s a friend of my old pal, Shelia Winters. He’s a charter boat captain out of Ponce Marina.”

“Cool.”

O’Brien said, “What you guys do is what’s really cool. Catching fish is mostly luck.”

“Let’s eat and chat,” said Roth, opening a pizza box and lifting two slices to a paper plate.

As the men ate, O’Brien asked questions about the editing process, skillfully leading the conversation closer to the day Jack Jordan was killed on set. O’Brien smiled and said, “I’m fascinated by the whole filmmaking process from script to screen. Do you have any behind-the-scenes footage you can share, something that might show how a stunt was done?”

Roth swallowed a bit of peperoni pizza and said, “We have more BTS footage than movie footage.”

“I was recently at the old antebellum home, Wind ‘n Willows, the crew is using for some interior and exterior scenes. Do you have any BTS from there?”

“We do have some.” Roth used a paper towel to wipe the pepperoni grease from his lips and gestured toward an entire table filled with external hard drives. “Chris, look that up. Mark was cutting that BTS for the studio’s marketing department yesterday. We had a young publicist, all legs and ass, in here yesterday from the studio. She was putting together a social marketing campaign for the film and was pulling some of the BTS from that plantation. This girl was batting around phrases like, not since Gone with the Wind has there been an epic film like Black River, blah, blah, blah. Cue it up, Chris.”

Chris Goddard nodded and played scenes shot in and around the Wind ‘n Willows. O’Brien recognized some of the actors, most out of costume and make-up, going over the script with the director. Other shots captured crew moving lights and equipment into the mansion. The camera shot panned to the left as a black limousine was pulling up in front of the stately white columns. Two men dressed in dark Armani suits and darker glasses got out of the car. A silver-haired man in a light pink polo shirt, gray slacks and wrap-around sunglasses followed them. Another man with a bad comb-over on a scallion-shaped bald head, wearing a navy-blue sports coat, white T-shirt, pair of five-hundred-dollar washed-denim jeans, led the man in the pink shirt into the great house.

O’Brien looked at Roth and asked, “What’s the parade all about? Who spilled out of the limo?”

“The gents in the dark suits are security…bodyguards. The guy in the pink shirt employs them. Name’s Frank Sheldon, a software zillionaire who’s got skin in the game on the film. He’ll get a producer or an executive producer’s credit. That’s what putting up twenty million will buy you. If the movie’s a blockbuster on the order of Titanic or Avatar, he’ll make a bundle, in spite of studio accounting. If it flops, he has a stack of Blu-ray DVDs he can play for his rich buddies and point out his name in the credit roll. Money to freakin’ burn, and that’s the name of that tune. The dude in the jeans and jacket is the CEO of Triton Global Films. Name’s Timothy Levin.”

“Do you have shots inside the house?”

“Of course. Roll them, Chris.”

O’Brien watched closely as the entourage entered the great house. The director joined the CEO as they showed Frank Sheldon around the film set. Sheldon paused by the baby grand piano and pointed toward the far wall. The camera slowly panned up.

On the wall was the painting of the woman that O’Brien now knew was Angelina Hopkins.