Hollywood Tough

Chapter 26

Shane slept badly.

Every time a car passed the house, he would wake up thinking it was Chooch's. Twice, he got up to check the garage. During one of these occasions he went outside to the pool, away from the listening devices, and attempted to reach Amac on the cell phone, calling the same number Chooch had given him, leaving a message with a Chicano who barely spoke English. He tried to go back to bed.

At two-thirty in the morning his cell phone rang. Shane snatched it up, swinging his feet out of bed, wide awake in less than two seconds. Alexa was also rolling into a sitting position.

"Yeah," Shane said.

"Scully." It was Amac.

He got out of bed and headed back out onto the pool deck, away from Valentine's bugs. Alexa grabbed a robe and followed.

Shane could hear folklOrica music in the background. "Chooch is missing," he said once he was away from the house.

"Just a minute," Amac said. Shane heard a door close, then the sound of the party disappeared and Amac came back on. "Orale. He called me."

"Where is he?"

"He wouldn't say. You remember Delfina Delgado?"

"Who?"

"You met her, homes… when you came to mi tia's house. The beautiful chavala with the long black hair." "Yeah, yeah, I remember… your niece."

"Well, kinda. She's in my family. Mi Ma's her comadre. It's like a godmother. Delfina is my aunt's brother's daughter, whatever that is… my second cousin or something."

"What about her?"

"Hey, Scully, she's Chooch's jiana. He's in love with her. He's been seeing Delfina for almost two years now. You ain't heard about this?"

"He never told me," Shane said softly.

"Delfina disappeared two days ago. We been looking all over for her. Don't know where she is. I can't give it much time 'cause I got this pleito with the mayates to run. When Chooch couldn't reach her, he called me. Now he's out looking for her."

That was the missing piece. "Has Delfina been kidnapped?" Shane asked.

"If the mayates know about her, then maybe, but you want my guess… I don't think so."

"Then what? Where is she?"

"I don't know, but you gotta let go of Chooch, ese. Asi es, ast sera. This is how it is, how it's going to be."

"I can't just do nothing."

"What you gonna do, man? Get in your carrucha an' drive all around up in The Hills, looking? He'll come home."

"Have you checked your aunt's house in Lomas?"

"My aunt is back in Cuernavaca. Estados Unidos was not her thing. Maybe it's not for any of us. We'll have to wait and see. If I hear from Chooch, I'll call you try and get him to go home."

"Thanks, Amac… and thanks for the heads-up in that restaurant."

"Don't know what you talkin' about, homes…" But there was a smile in his voice. Then he hung up.

"What?" Alexa said.

"Chooch has a girlfriend. I met her when I went up to talk to Amac two years ago. She's Amac's second cousin, a beautiful girl with long black hair. She's missing and it seems Chooch is out trying to find her."

Alexa reached out and took Shane's hand. "You gotta admit, that's exactly what you'd be doing."

The remainder of the night was strangely more restful. Maybe it helped knowing that Chooch had not signed up to be a soldier in Amac's pleito.

Shane woke early, with a headache. He showered for a long time, standing in the strong, hot spray of the drug dealer's luxuriously tiled stall. The hot water relaxed his neck muscles and eased his headache. When he finished, he looked for a towel. Not finding one, he used Alexa's hair dryer instead. Then Shane slicked his hair back with his fingers, put on clean underwear with yesterday's clothes, and left. He didn't wake Alexa because it was the first time she had been able to sleep in two days.

Shane drove to Hollywood General Studios and waved as he pulled past his buddy, the retired motor cop. He had to park in a guest spot in front of the administration building because a Jag Roadster occupied his newly assigned parking space.

When he arrived at Cine-Roma Productions, he ran into a firestorm of activity. People he had never seen before were milling about in the halls, running in and out of Nicky Marcella's office, which now had a piece of paper stuck to the door that read: DIRECTOR.

Nicky was sitting on the couch and Paul Lubick was behind the desk. The director was a tall, fortyish man with a beefy build and a flushed complexion. There was too much tangled yellow-blond hair matting his large head and it had been fastened into a ponytail with a thick rubber band. He was wearing a safari vest with all kinds of shit in the pockets. Lens finders and fog filters dangled from chains around his neck; on his feet, he wore an ultrahip pair of lace-up Doc Martens.

"I don't give a shit if he thinks he can get them or not. He's gonna come through, or he's gonna get fired." Lubick was ranting as Shane ducked into the office unnoticed. "That neural flashback is pivotal. It's tits! This whole Civil War sequence is the seminal event of the entire film the idea of disenfranchised people, slaves to a repressive system, trapped in a world gone mad… the social symbolism of a nation torn in half. This is the neural manifestation of Rajindi's religious philosophy, right, Raji?"

Rajindi Singh was seated in a chair by the window, a pale ghost in a white suit. He was meditating or tripping, but either way he was in situ, eyes closed, legs crossed on the seat in the lotus position. He opened his eyes and nodded solemnly.

"It's just, where are we going to get three hundred pairs of authentic Civil War underwear?" Nicky whined. "Since it's underwear, and not being seen by the camera, it seems to me that trying to locate something that may not even exist is both time consuming and economically wasteful."

Paul Lubick got up from behind the desk and moved toward Nicholas. "You've obviously been so busy making your little skin flicks you don't understand A-list movie making. So let me lay this down for you once and for all. Reality, my little friend, comes froth everywhere. It comes from the sets, the wardrobe, and from my mouth to God's ear. It isn't just some concept of acting, where you say to a performer, 'Okay, pretend you're a Civil War soldier. Pretend you're about to die from those twenty-pounders thundering on that ridge.' Sure, the performers I'll cast as principals will have some ability to conjure up these feelings, but what about the extras? Ever think about them? A bunch of nineteen-year-old California surf bums. How do I put the spirit of Gettysburg into those pot-smoking assholes? I'll tell you how. We're going to have a Civil War school. We're going to hire as many of these extras as possible, by today or tomorrow, and we're going to make them live in tents out in Reseda, at my brother Peter's farm. We'll work something out with him, pay him a few bucks-I don't know, maybe it'll have to be a lotta bucks. It's gonna be a huge imposition on Pete, but he shares the vision, thank God.

"The extras are going to wash in buckets and shit in ditches. They're gonna wear honest-to-god, lace-up, Civil War underdrawers, so every time they gotta take a piss for the next eight weeks, they gotta unlace the damn things and do it exactly the same way those poor fucks in the Georgia brigade did it a hundred and forty years ago. Only then will they begin to metamorphose from California beach boys into my Georgia rebels. When we roll, and I'm shooting in some sixteen-year-old surfer's face, he's gonna goddamn sure believe he's a fucking Confederate soldier."

After this tirade, silence fell like ash from Mount Vesuvius. Then Paul Lubick leaned down even closer, until his nose was just inches from Nicky's. "I assume you hired me because you've seen my work, and want me to bring my unique style and vision to this project. Translation: I'm gonna shoot this my way. You wanna win a real Oscar and throw all these rentals away? Then you better buy or make three hundred pairs of Confederate soldiers' undies, circa 1864." He grabbed a costume book and flipped it open to a picture. His face was so red he looked like he had been working out on a StairMaster for an hour.

"Okay, got it," Nicky said. "I'll get right on it."

"And who the fuck are you?" Paul Lubick had finally spotted Shane in the office.

"Co-owner of Cine-Roma Productions. I'm also the guy who's gonna feed you every pair of those Civil War long johns if you think you're gonna waste our money on shit like that," Shane said calmly.

Paul Lubick moved toward him, but Shane took a step forward and the director saw something menacing in his eyes and stopped. The two of them stood a few feet apart, glaring at each other.

"Paul," Nicky said softly, "maybe you should tell my partner about the trees."

"That's one of my best ideas. It's tits!" Lubick picked up a drawing on the desk. "When we build the dragon's lodge, I think it's important that the ceiling beams on that set be massive. In the neural storm that follows, old Isom, the slave, says they symbolize the overbearing structure of society that hangs over us, dwarfing our freedoms, or dialogue to that effect. Excuse the paraphrase, Raji."

The writer nodded his head.

"Anyway, we'll have to find massive redwoods-I've got a guy up in Oregon looking. Once we've marked them, we'll cut the trees down and bring 'em in on double flatcars, by train. Then we'll get a construction crew into Stage Three across the lot, hoist those suckers up, and knock them into place."

"You ever hear of papier-mache?" Shane countered. "You could make those for one-tenth the cost and no one would ever spot the difference."

"But we'd know the difference, wouldn't we?" Lubick cracked a tight little smile. "Any other way is simply dishonest. Translation: I'm gonna shoot this my way."

He turned away from Shane and faced Nicky. "I'm going to walk the stages, see if I want to use Stage Three or Stage Six, so we can notify the studio and. Tie one of them up. We need to get going on construction." He started toward the door, then stopped and looked at Shane. "For your information, Mister Whatever-your-name-is, though slightly expensive, what I'm suggesting should be of no consequence when creative gold is being mined. Let me give you a little lesson on how we do things in Hollywood. During the filming of Bonfire of the Vanities, Brian DePalma needed a shot of a Concorde jet landing. Of course he didn't want to buy used stock footage at five hundred dollars a shot, because it would have been film already seen in someone else's movie, and like me, Brian insists on cinematic purity. He knew it needed to be original footage because he also wanted a setting sun in the background. So he sent a second-unit film crew out to get it. He rented the entire airport and a Concorde jet. It took him three nights, three sunsets to get the shot, but in the end that Concorde landed at exactly the right second into the setting sun. That piece of film cost the studio four hundred and fifty grand, lasted ten seconds, and was worth every fucking nickel. Here's another one. Michael Cimino saw a tree growing in London that fulfilled the symbolism he envisioned for a shot in Heaven's Gate. He knew he would never find another tree that perfect on his location, so he had the tree uprooted. He had every leaf cataloged and preserved. Then he sent the entire thing to a courtyard at Oxford, where it was hoisted up, and the leaves were reattached to the exact same branches. Fucking brilliant, too. The tree was awesome. This is the way directors conceive. A director's dick gets hard, he ejaculates, and it becomes cinematic creation. If any of this isn't working for you, speak now, and I'll be in my Jag and gone."

Paul Lubick picked up his briefcase and turned to Rajindi Singh. "You want to walk this with me, Raji?"

Singh got up and left the office on Lubick's heels, without so much as a look at either Nicky or Shane.

"I think you ticked him off," the little grifter commented.

"Three hundred pairs of Confederate underwear? Tree trunks you've gotta ship down from Oregon on double flatbeds? This lunatic is gonna bankrupt us in two hours."

"You haven't met his staff. He brought a whole crowd of people who think just like him. Wait'll you meet Buzz, the UPM."

"The what?"

"Unit Production Manager. We also have an assistant director, a director of photography, an art director, a casting guy, and two costumers and their staffs down the hall. They're all sharing the new offices we rented, making phone calls. It's a flicking madhouse in there."

"Nicky, we've got less than a hundred grand left in the bank. That's it. After that, all our checks are coming straight from Goodyear Rubber."

"Shane, whatta you want me to do? The minute anybody criticizes Lubick, he threatens to leave and Rajindi goes with him, Fallon follows Singh, then Valentine splits and I'm back auditioning bimbos in short-shorts."

"We gotta slow him down, Nicky. We gotta find a way to build a time loop into all of this. Maybe we can put all the purchase orders on this picture through a pay office… hold everything, all the accounts payable, for two weeks."

"Shane, if Lubick tells these vendors to begin working, they'll start spending our money on his say-so alone. He's an A-list guy. Nobody's gonna tell him no."

"Whatta we do?" Shane was beginning to panic.

"I think we oughta consider getting the LAPD to really make this film. We're already in over two hundred grand on holding deals and preproduction costs. Once we factor in Fallon's step-option deal, plus Lubick's, we're gonna be pushing half a mil by Monday. The only hope we have of getting any of your money back is to shoot this thing and release it."

"Are you outta your Inind?!" Shane was almost shouting.

"Shane, a strange and wonderful thing is happening." Nicky lowered his voice confidentially. "My phone hasn't stopped ringing since this morning. Thing about Hollywood is: Activity is its own endorsement. We're rolling here. We got A-list people signed. Everybody who read this script a year ago and hated it now thinks maybe they misjudged it and missed its hidden brilliance. I've got studio guys calling and offering us slots in their distribution schedule, maybe even some P and A participation." Off Shane's puzzled look he added, "That's Prints and Advertising. I think I can actually sell a piece of this film to a major studio-Warner or Universal. We got offers for housekeeping deals at two major studios. That's a deal where they give us an office and some overhead, maybe a development fund. It's like I finally broke through because of this thing, and I love you for it."

"Nicky, we are not gonna make this movie, okay?" Just then, the door flew open and Champagne Dennis Valentine walked in. "Is Michael Fallon around?" he asked, smiling.