Fools die

Chapter 32

Malomar had had a hard day and a special conference with Moses Wartberg and Jeff Wagon. He had fought for Merlyn’s and his movie. Wartberg and Wagon had hated it after he had shown them a first draft. It became the usual argument. They wanted to turn it into schlock, put in more action, coarsen the characters. Malomar stood fast.

“It’s a good script,” he said. “And remember this is just a first draft.”

Wartberg said, “You don’t have to tell us. We know that. We’ve judged it on that basis.”

Malomar said coolly, “You know I'm always interested in your opinions and I weigh them very carefully. But everything you’ve said so far strikes me as irrelevant.”

Wagon said appealingly, with his charming smile, “Malomar, you know we believe in you. That’s why we gave you your original contract. Hell, you have full control over your pictures. But we have to back our judgment with advertising and publicity. Now we’ve let you project a million dollars over budget. That gives us, I think, a moral right to have some say in the final shape of this picture.”

Malomar said, “That was a bullshit budget to begin with and we all knew it and we all admitted it.”

Wartberg said, “You know that in all our contracts, when we go over budget, you start losing your points in the picture. Are you willing to take that risk?”

“Jesus,” Malomar said. “I can’t believe that if this makes a lot of money, you guys would invoke that clause.”

Wartberg gave his shark grin. “We may or may not. That’s the chance you will have to take if you insist on your version of the film.”

Malomar shrugged. “I’ll take that risk,” he said. “And if that’s all you guys have to say, I’ll get back to the cutting room.”

When he left Tri-Culture Studios to be driven back to his lot, Malomar felt drained. He thought of going home and taking a nap, but there was too much work to be done. He wanted to put in at least another five hours. He felt the slight pains in his chest starting again. Those bastards will kill me yet, he thought. And then he suddenly realized that since his heart attack Wartberg and Wagon had been less afraid of him, had argued with him more, had harried him about costs more. Maybe the bastards were trying to kill him.

He sighed. The fucking things he had to put up with, and that fucking Merlyn always bitching about producers and Hollywood and how they all weren’t artists. And here be was risking his life to save Merlyn’s conception of the picture. He felt like calling Merlyn up and making him go to the arena with Wartberg and Wagon to do his own fighting, but he knew that Merlyn would just quit and walk away from the picture. Merlyn didn’t believe as he, Malomar, did. Didn’t have his love for film and what film could do.

Well, the hell with it, Malomar thought. He’d make the picture his way and it would be good and Merlyn would be happy, and when the picture made money, the studio would be happy, and if they tried to take away his percentage because of the over budget, he’d take his production company elsewhere.

As the limousine pulled up to a stop, Malomar felt the elation he’d always felt. The elation of an artist coming to his work knowing that he would fashion something beautiful.

He labored with his film editors for almost seven hours, and when the limousine dropped him at his home, it was nearly midnight. He was so tired he went directly to bed. He almost groaned with weariness. The pains in his chest came and spread to his back, but after a few minutes they went away and he lay there quietly, trying to fall asleep. He was content. He had done a good day’s work. He had fought off the shanks and he bad cut film.

– -

Malomar loved to sit in the cutting room with the editors and the director. He loved to sit in the dark and make decisions on what the tiny flickering images should do and not do. Like God, he gave them a certain kind of soul. If they were “good,” he made them physically beautiful by telling the editor to cut an unflattering image so that a nose was not too bony; a mouth not too mean. He could make a heroine’s eyes more doe like with a better lighted shot, her gestures more graceful and touching. He would not send the good down to despair and defeat. He was more merciful.

Meanwhile, he kept a sharp eye on the villains. Did they wear the right color tie and the right cut of jacket to enhance their villainy? Did they smile too trustingly? Were the lines in their faces too decent? He blotted out that image with the cutting machine. Most of all, he refused to let them be boring. The villain had to be interesting. Malomar in his cutting room truly watched every feather that fell from the tail of the sparrow. The world he created must have a sensible logic, and when he finished with that particular world, you usually were glad to have seen it exist

Malomar had created hundreds of these worlds. They lived in his brain forever and ever as the countless galaxies of God must exist in His brain. And Malomar’s feat was as astounding to him. But it was different when he left the darkened cutting room and emerged into the world created by God which made no sense at all.

Malomar had suffered three heart attacks over the past few years. From overwork, the doctor said. But Malomar always felt that God had fucked up in the cutting room. He, Malomar, was the last man who should have a heart attack. Who would oversee all those worlds to be created? And he took such good care of himself. He ate sparingly and correctly. He exercised. He drank little. He fornicated regularly but not to excess. He never drugged. He was still young, handsome; he looked like a hero. And he tried to behave well, or as well as possible in the world God was shooting. In Malomar’s cutting room a character like Malomar would never die from a heart attack. The editor would excise the frame, the producer call for a rewrite of the script. He would command the directors and all the actors to the rescue. Such a man would not be allowed to perish.

But Malomar could not excise the chest pains. And often at night, very late, in his huge house, he popped angina pills in his mouth. And then he would lie in bed petrified with fear. On really bad nights he called his personal physician. The doctor would come and sit with him through the night, examine him, reassure him, hold his hand until dawn broke. The doctor would never refuse him because Malomar had written the script for the doctor’s life. Malomar had given him access to beautiful actresses so that he could become their doctor and sometimes their lover. When Malomar in his early days indulged in more strenuous sex, before his first heart attack, when his huge home was filled with overnight guests of starlets and high-fashion models, the doctor had been his dinner companion and they had sampled together the smorgasbord of women prepared for the evening.

Now on this midnight, Malomar alone in his bed, in his home, phoned the doctor. The doctor came and examined him and assured him the pains would go away. That there was no danger. That he should let himself fall asleep. The doctor brought him water for his angina pills and tranquilizers. And the doctor measured his heart with his stethoscope. It was intact; it was not breaking into pieces as Malomar felt it was. And after a few hours, resting more easily, Malomar told the doctor he could go home. And then Malomar fell asleep.

He dreamed. It was a vivid dream. He was at a railroad station, enclosed. He was buying a ticket. A small but burly man pushed him aside and demanded his ticket. The small man had a huge dwarf’s head and screamed at Malomar. Malomar reassured him. He stepped aside. He let the man buy his ticket. He told the man, “Look, whatever is bothering you is OK with me.” And as he did so, the man grew taller, his features more regular. He was suddenly an older hero, and he said to Malomar, “Give me your name; I’ll do something for you.” He loved Malomar. Malomar could see that. They were both very kind to each other. And the railroad agent selling the tickets now treated the other man with enormous respect.

Malomar came awake in the vast darkness of his huge bedroom. His eye lenses narrowed down, and with no peripheral vision, he fixed on the white rectangular light from the open bathroom door. For just a moment he thought the images on the cutting-room screen had not ended, and then he realized it had only been a dream. At that realization his heart broke away from his body in a fatal arrhythmic gallop. The electrical impulses of his brain snarled together. He sat up, sweating.

His heart went into a final thundering rush, shuddered. He fell back, eyes closing, all light fading on the screen that was his life. The last thing he ever heard was a scraping noise like celluloid breaking against steel, and then he was dead.