Screen Savers

Chapter 43

I was useless for the rest of the day after that. We did a few more runs through of the narration script, but Sly’s interruption had broken my concentration. Eventually Weir called it off.

‘I don’t know what that agent said to you, kid,’ he told me, ‘but from now on, if he wants to talk, he calls you back at the house, not here. In studio you focus on the job, not the dough.’

This annoyed me, just a bit, since I had never been in it for the money, not at all — well, not much, anyway — but I recognised that the assistant director had his own pressures, and that every hour in that sound studio cost seriously large bucks, so I bit my tongue.

By the next morning, with some help from another master-work by the chef, I had forgotten all about it. You may think it strange, but over the last few years I’ve discovered that I don’t actually care about money. Sure I seem to be a human magnet for the stuff, and I like having it, yet it doesn’t dominate my life. Of course winning the lottery was an amazing moment, but there was something surreal about the whole thing, and afterwards, I left it to Prim to decide what we were going to do with it. The thing is, I’ve had a few surprises in my short life; some have been pleasant, but others — and one in particular — have been very, very bad. Since then, I’ve been pretty blase about good news. I remember hearing, years ago, some pompous political prick declaring grandly on television that all the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of one small candle. From where I stand, there are some things so bad and so black that not even the brightest sunshine can ever blind you to them, or make you forget.

So as I walked into the studio for my first full day of recording, there was nothing on my mind but my lines and the way I would deliver them. I had been driven by Mark Kravitz, and so I had arrived ahead of Weir. The only two people in the sound suite were Pep Newton, the engineer and Stu Queen, our sparks.

‘Ready to do it for real?’ asked Pep, a dark stocky man whose looks hinted at Spanish ancestry.

‘Ready and able.’

‘That’s good,’ said Stu, a bit foreign-looking himself, but taller and fairer. ‘Let’s hope Dobbs is ready too. He was getting a bit precious at the end, yesterday.’

‘Weir’ll be fine,’ I assured him. ‘He had a couple of relaxers after dinner last night and declared himself happy with the way things went.’

As it turned out, he may have had one or two more that I didn’t know about; when he arrived he grunted his good mornings like a small, ill-tempered, grizzly bear. I haven’t had many hangovers in my life, but I know the signs when I see them. When we got to work, it was as if everything we had done the day before counted for nothing. The little swine took me back to square one; what had been right was now wrong, what had been virtue was now vice, where I had been doing fine I was now worse than useless. I began to wonder if Weir had been told about my half point, and didn’t like it.

I took it for just over two hours; until, after the eleventh abortive take, the seventh consecutive burst of abuse came through my headphones. ‘Blackstone!’ the assistant director screamed. ‘You’re so fucking dense, I’ll bet that light bends round you. When will you ever get this right?’

A strange feeling swept over me. The Oz temper is usually kept pretty well under control. In fact I can only remember losing it three times in my whole life. The first time was at secondary school in Anstruther, when some pompous little twat of a French teacher accused me of pronouncing the word ‘soldier’ without the letter L.

‘You’re betraying some Glaswegian ancestry there, boy,’ he smirked.

‘No, sir,’ I replied, straight-faced, because he was wrong; I knew it and the whole class knew it. But he had decided that he was going to have a laugh at my expense.

‘Oh, yes,’ he insisted.

I was never a sensitive kid; I never minded when one of my peers took the pee out of me, so to speak. But this guy hadn’t earned that privilege. As I glared at him, I felt a sudden uncontrollable wave of outrage erupt within me. Looking back now, I suspect it was perhaps the first truly adult emotion I ever experienced.

I left my desk and walked to the front of the classroom, to where Mr Clark, the teacher stood. I was sixteen; by then I had almost reached my full height, and my weekend labouring on farms for pocket-money had made me stronger than I looked. I stopped in front of the now uncertain Modern Linguist, seized him by the lapels and lifted him off his feet until his eyes were level with and locked on to mine.

‘No, sir,’ I repeated, loud enough for the whole class to hear. Then, with satisfaction flushing the anger away already, I put him down and walked back to my desk.

That was all I could think of as I took off my cans and walked out of the soundproof studio, round and into the production booth. It had been a long time since I had forked up a bale of hay, but when you work out with wrestlers a couple of times a week, it keeps your muscles in trim. Mind you, Weir’s a bit heavier that Mr Clark, the wee French teacher, so when I picked him up I slammed him against the nearest wall.

‘I’m told that movie people are supposed to be temperamental, ’ I growled at him. ‘Will this do?’

His eyes stood out in his pudgy wee face. ‘What have you got against me, pal?’ I demanded. ‘What have you got against me?’ As I blurted the words out, I had a sudden vision of Weir Dobbs skulking in my car park, of Weir Dobbs on a motorcycle, of Weir Dobbs creeping up behind my nephew. .

I suppose that I knew all the time that it couldn’t have been him who was stalking me. He had been with the unit all the time, he came nowhere near matching the physical description of the man who had hired the Neames brothers, and if he had been in that bar in Auchterarder I’d have spotted him straight away. But right at that moment I wasn’t thinking straight. All of it, the close shaves, that scary day in the cell in Perth, it all caught up with me as I glared at the little New Yorker; it was his bad luck to be in my sights at the time.

‘What’s your problem, eh?’ I shouted, slamming him against the wall, hard, once, twice, three times more.

‘Nothing, Oz, nothing,’ he squeaked, but I wasn’t listening.

Happily, just at that moment two exceptionally strong hands gripped my arms and pulled me off him. ‘Easy, man,’ said Mark Kravitz. ‘That’s supposed to be my job. Let’s take a coffee break, eh.’

Dobbs, mouth hanging open, nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, yes,’ he agreed. ‘Thirty minutes,’ he shouted then rushed from the room.

‘Good idea,’ Pep Newton drawled. ‘I need to load more tape anyway.’ I had forgotten about him and about Stu Queen. When I turned to look at them, they both avoided my gaze.

‘Sorry about that, lads. I lost it there, I’m afraid.’

Pep flashed me a smile which suggested that his views on assistant directors might not be all that different from mine. ‘Ah, that was nothing, boss,’ he said. ‘I worked on a movie once where one of the actors took a shot at the AD when he started acting like that. Sure, there were only blanks in the gun, but that didn’t stop the guy from pissing his pants.

‘There was another project, too, where the AD wound up a girl so bad they had to take her off set and sedate her. The trouble with these guys, you see, is that deep down they all think they should be the Director, yet most of them never will; not on big projects anyway. Sometimes — like when they’ve got a hangover — they take it all out on the supporting cast, like Weir tried today. There’s a lot worse than him though; he’s not like that usually.’

I sighed. ‘Ah, shit. I’d better apologise to him.’

‘No!’ Pep retorted. ‘Never apologise to an AD for anything. Ain’t that right, Stu?’ Queen nodded, emphatically. ‘No, when you go back into studio, you look at him through the glass like you’d like to do it again. Come on, let’s get us a coffee; maybe you can give him the evil eye across the canteen.’

As it turned out, he wasn’t there. I bought the coffees, and three Wagon Wheels, and took them to a small table in the corner.

‘Thanks, Slugger,’ said Stu, with a light laugh, as I set a coffee before him. ‘Here was me thinking that all that wrestling stuff was fake, too.’

‘It is,’ I told him. ‘But the guys, now they’re for real. Wrestling’s a very controlled business; what they do looks like mayhem, but if they ever lost their tempers in there, you’d really see some stuff. I broke ring rule number one back there; I let the red mist come down.’

‘Ah, we all ’ave our red mist moments,’ said Pep. ‘I’m an Arsenal supporter, so mine are usually about Spurs — or Spurs fans. ‘ ’Ow about you, Stu?’ he asked.

The spark stirred sugar into his coffee. ‘I don’t know if I have any,’ he began, then paused. ‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘Someone hurt my sister once. That made me very angry.’ He looked across the table in a way that made me glad I’d never met his sister.

When we resumed work I didn’t follow Pep’s advice about the evil eye to the letter. Instead, I simply ignored the guy, and read my lines as I had rehearsed. For the rest of the day, just as that French teacher had been after the event, Weir was as good as gold, and nothing required any more than two takes. When we finally broke, he even apologised, and, since Pep and Stu were in earshot, I let him.

By Thursday afternoon, all the narration recording was in the can, a day ahead of schedule. When we were finished, and Pep and Stu had left, Miles came to the studio and reviewed the tapes scene by scene, against the rough film edit. He looked at them solemnly and in silence, with Dobbs, Mark and me standing behind him, waiting. He ran them through twice then swung round on his chair and grinned at the assistant director.

‘Fine job, Weir,’ he said, jerking a thumb towards me as he spoke. ‘You sure got the best out of this guy. Well done.’

‘Thank you, Miles,’ the New Yorker replied, without a flicker of a smile. ‘I won’t pretend that it was easy, working with a beginner, but I seem to have managed.’ I’ll swear I could hear Mark Kravitz flex his biceps beside me.

I felt myself getting hot under the collar again, until Miles turned to me. ‘All credit to you though, buddy,’ he told me. ‘It’s always a damn sight easier in the production booth than it is when you’re stood up there doing it. As a bonus you’ve got us an extra day to rehearse those end scenes. That’s what we’ll do tomorrow.’

And that’s what we did, all bloody day. The final scenes began with Miles and me, in a light motor cruiser, approaching the North Sea oil platform on which the kidnapped Dawn was being held, mooring it alongside, and climbing a long steel ladder up one of its legs, to the accommodation module. Most of the authentic location footage had already been shot, using standins, but a section of the ladder had been duplicated in the studio so that we could be seen in close-up during the climb, exchanging a couple of lines of dialogue.

We rehearsed those scenes in the morning, then after lunch we moved on to the outdoor set which replicated the platform deck and the accommodation below. It was a massive, cross-sectional structure, open on one side for the cameras, and big enough for a Jet Ranger chopper to be parked on the helipad, just like the real thing. According to the storyline, Miles and I were expecting to find Dawn held prisoner by Nelson Reed, but when we got there, Dawn wasn’t anyone’s prisoner. In the scene, Nelson sat in a swivel chair in the rig’s command cabin, with a silly smile on his face, only he was dead, and she was standing behind him holding a gun.

‘Thank God you’re safe,’ was Miles’ last line in the movie, for as he dropped the case which contained the details of the account in which the ransom money was waiting and moved towards her, arms outstretched in relief, she raised the pistol and shot him twice in the chest, then once in the head for luck; without as much as a ‘Goodbye, sucker’.

Even without the blood capsules which would be used in the takes, Miles’s astonishment as the first two bullets hit him almost had me convinced. I was supposed to be anyway; the script called for me to have a look of shock on my face. . but only for a few seconds, before it turned into a conspiratorial grin. That was the hardest part for me, getting that change of expression right. We rehearsed it again and again, videoing and playing back over and over, the camera close up on my face, until eventually, it began to come good.

‘You see Oz,’ said Dawn, ‘you really can be an evil bastard when you set your mind to it.’