Shooting Script

EIGHT

She put on her sunglasses, a white towelling jacket, and a pair of blackespadrilles, then led the way to a blood-red space-bomb that turned out to be a Studebaker Avanti.

Perhaps she felt she'd been trampling my masculinity a little, because she offered me the keys. I took one look at the dashboard and shook my head. 'Not me. I don't have an astronaut's licence.'

She drove. We went back east on the coast road for a little less than a mile, but even in that distance we managed to hit both verges and only just missed the sound barrier. Just where the road swings right to avoid the White River and it looked as if we weren't going to, she slid to a stop.

Just below the bridge on the coast road the river widens out and runs slow and shallow through a flat, soggy coconut-palm grove. Parked at the edge of it were a collection of lorries, jeeps, and station wagons, their drivers sitting in the shadows and drinking Red Stripe or just dozing. We parked alongside them and got out, although my knees would rather have sat quietly for five minutes after that drive.

At the very edge of the trees a generator truck was chugging softly away by itself; we followed the Uneof cables leading forward through the grove.

The first thing we passed was a collection of small trolleys, drums of rubber-covered cables, and heaps of tarpaulins; seated on one heap, half a dozen men were playing cards in that private grunting language of men who've spent most of their lives playing cards together. Next, a small group of people sitting in folding canvas chairs, reading or sleeping or talking quietly; a couple of them nodded to J.B. as we went past. Finally there was just one man alone, wearing a vivid beach shirt and headphones and sitting at a small desk of electrical equipment, turning knobs and swearing softly to himself. He didn't even notice us come past. After that we were at the holy place itself.

There was a crescent ring of more people in more canvas chairs, looking a little older and spreading out of the chairs a little farther. Inside them was another crescent of tall arc lights blazing down towards the river. Somehow I hadn't thought of anybody coming to Jamaica in high summer and bringing his own light, but I suppose there was a reason. And inside them, the camera itself.

It took a moment to recognise it. It was mounted on a trolley placed on about fifteen yards of rails laid over a plank floor parallel to the river. Several people were standing around poking bits of the camera; the rest of the trolley was covered with men playing cards. For an epic, it all seemed very quiet and peaceful.

'Are you sure I'm the man you want?' I asked. 'I'm lousy at cards.'

J.B. glared at me, then turned to the nearest chair. 'Where's the Boss Man?'

The man in the chair was youngish, with limp fair hair and a pale smile. He waved towards the river. 'Over the other side. They're just going to do the crossing-the-river-under-fire scene.' He went back to staring at the wedge of yellow typescript. 'Whatwould Spaniards shout while crossing a river under fire?'

'Caramba?'I suggested.

He looked up balefully. 'This isn't television, you know.'

The man next to him stretched his legs and said: 'How about "Thirty-five bucks a day isn't enough if I have to earn it by falling on my fanny in this goddamn river"?'

The young man said sourly: 'How does it sound in Spanish?'

'Most inspiring but rather long.' He looked up and gave me a very handsome but rather practised grin. I knew the face: he was one of the Latin lovers with a phoney-Spanish name like Luiz Montecristo or Montego or… yes: Monterrey. Luiz Monterrey. He'd had a few years starring in carnival-in-Rio type films just after the war, but by now the lean hatchet face was sagging a little, the neat black moustache had flecks of grey in it. He'd been playing the bandit chief or the aloof aristocrat in Whitmore films for the past several years.

This time he was wearing a frilly silk shirt that was torn and smudged, whipcord riding breeches, and a cartridge bandolier slung across his chest.

A voice by the camera shouted: 'Where's the dialogue?'

The young man called hopefully:'Viva el liberador!'

That fell on stony ground all right. The voice said: 'We'll think up something later and dub it in. Right, let's go. Luiz!'

Luiz called: 'Here,' and didn't move. Neither did anybody else.

Another voice shouted: 'Bill says he's getting wind noise in the mike.'

'There isn't any wind. Let's go.'

'We need a scrim on that brute or you'll have too much underlight by the tree."

'Put it up, then. Right? Let's go.'

'With that scrim you'll have to come up to five-six in the pan.'

'Okay. Let's go.'

'Bill says it must be the leaves rustling then.'

'The leaves don't rustle if there isn't any wind. Let's go.'

'This is a tracking shot ending in a pan and a tilt with a change of focus and aperture. You want to zoom in as well and make movie history?'

'Sell it to Hitchcock. Let'sgo.'

'Bill says he thinks it must be water running.'

'If he'd come out from behind that bloody tree he'd see we're taking a shot of a bloody river! Let'sgo! '

Suddenly Luiz put on a broad hat and walked down to the bank. The card players jumped off the trolley. It went very quiet.

Two people shouted: 'Quiet! '

Then the camera trolley, pushed by the card-players, started to move. A dozen men ran into the water from the far side of the river, waving rifles. Spouts of water spat up around them with gunshot sounds, and several fell down. The rest waded on and threw themselves into the cover of the first palms as the camera reached the end of its rails.

Although they'd only been some sort of waterproof fire-crackertouched off electrically, the gunshots had made me jump.

Several people shouted again, the lights went off, the dead men climbed ashore and shook themselves like wet dogs, the card-players settled down on the edge of the trolley. The river flowed quiet and peaceful.

J.B. said: 'That looked good; they probably won't want to go on that again. Let's get to the Boss Man while they're setting up the next one.' I followed her down to the camera.

You couldn't mistake Whitmore. You were just surprised, stupidly, to find he looked so much like himself. Maybe you'd read too much about five-foot Hollywood heroes riding tall in the saddle. Not this boy: he was a clear six-foot-four in low-heeled boots, with a chest like a banqueting table and a skin of tanned horse-hide. The eyes really were permanently half-closed against the sun, the mouth really was set in a grim-humorous line, his voice really could have shifted a thousand longhorns up the Chisholm trail on volume alone. Somehow, you'd expected all this to switch off with the arc lights.

Yet why? He'd been standing and talking and looking like that for thirty years and it had made him several million dollars. Even if it hadn't begun that way, by now it was no more phoney than the way a bank clerk who's been at the job thirty years looks like a bank clerk.

J.B. was looking at me sideways, with a gleam of knowing amusement. 'Impressive, isn't it?' she said softly. 'I felt the same way, the first time.'

'Him and the Eiffel Tower.'

Whitmore was talking to the man who'd shouted 'Let's go', presumably the director. About fifty, stoutish, with grey hair and moustache and looking like an English colonel with strong black market connections.

They broke off as J.B. went forward. Whitmore said: 'Hi. What's new at the courthouse?'

'I'vegot your flying boy. All signed up.'

He looked at me, then reached out a huge blunt-fingered hand. 'Hi, fella. ' We shook hands. J.B. passed him the contract and he studied it.

He was wearing a thin bush jacket, khaki drill trousers stuffed into high-laced paratroop boots, a webbing belt and army holster and a wide crumpled hat with a snakeskin band.

He cocked his head at me in a gesture I knew as well as he did. 'You were the boy out in Korea, right?'

Here we went again. 'That's right, Mr Whitmore.'

'How many d'you knock down out there?'

'Three.'

'How many d'you shoot at?'

Three.'

He let out a big bark of laughter. 'That's good enough for me. Anybody got a pen?' He reached and tweaked the top of J.B.'s bathing dress. 'Got anything down there? No, not much.'

Several people laughed. She grinned, quickly and vividly, unembarrassed. With him, the gesture had been a simple, boyish dirty joke.

Whitmore raised his voice to Chisholm trail level. 'I'm paying three writers and I can't find a single goddamned pen!' The director gave him a pen.

He was about to sign when Luiz came up behind him, squelching in his wet boots and holding his damp trousers distastefully out from his legs. He looked, saw the contract, then looked at me and said sadly: 'Don't sign up with the Boss Man, my friend. You only end up with wet feet.' Then, to Whitmore, he added: 'He's Commonwealth, I trust?'

Whitmore looked at me sharply: 'Youare a Commonwealth citizen, right?'

'Yes.' I was probably looking puzzled again.

He signed with a quick rasping scribble and gave the pen back to the director, who looked at the nib sadly and tucked it away. Whitmore handed the contract to J.B. 'Explain to him about Eady, honey.' To me, he said: 'Stick around for some chow, fella. We'll talk then.' Then he walked off with the familiar rolling stride, chatting to a distant group of raggedly-dressed actors in a voice that shivered the palm fronds.

J.B. was studying me thoughtfully. 'I think you just joined the club, Carr. The Boss Man likes that Korean stuff.' Thethought didn't seem to be brightening her day much.

I said: 'It was twelve years ago, for God's sake.'

'The Boss Man's been around a long time. Come on: I'll see if we can't find a drink. They'll probably break for lunch after the next shot.' We went back through the grove to the lorry park.

By then some of the drivers and helpers were setting up a number of long trestle tables and unfolding more canvas chairs, but not moving as if they were worried about the world ending first. J.B. went over to one of the station wagons, brought out a big Thermos bucket, and produced a couple of tins of American beer. I jabbed them with a pocket screwdriver and we sat down in the shade of the car.

After a while I asked: 'What's all this Eady thing?'

'Eady plan. It's the ground rules for qualifying a picture as a British production. One' – she raised a finger – 'you've got to have a British company producing it. Two, eighty per cent of your salary budget has to go to Commonwealth citizens. Three, any studio work has to be done in Britain or Ireland. Then you qualify for Eady.'

'Which is what?'

'Sort of legal kick-back. They take a levy on all movie-house seats sold in Britain and pay it back to the producer as a percentage of his gross box-office take. It's running about forty per cent, now.'

I closed my eyes and thought for a moment. 'You mean if he makes say, a bundled thousand he gets paid another forty? Two hundred thousand and he gets eighty?'

'Right.'

I stared. 'Good times are here again, aren't they?'

She looked at me coldly. 'Movies aren't a way of printing your own money, Carr, the way they were before TV.'

'I know: all that glitters isn't gold; some of it's diamonds. Who is Eady, anyway?'

'Some guy in the British Treasury, I think.'

'He knew his Bible, didn't he? "To him that hath shall be given" and so forth.'

'It works out that way. I guess it was originally supposed to help the small producers.'

I thought for another moment. 'Just explain to me how you makethis picture an Eady one. Apart from these boys' – I nodded at the men setting up the tables – 'the place isn't exactly crowded with Commonwealth citizens.'

'They're there. The crew's mostly British: director, camera, sound, lights, the grips. We got the script done in London. And you're allowed to hold out two salaries when you come to figure your eighty per cent. Naturally you make them the highest ones: we made it female lead and Luiz.'

'What about Whitmore?'

'He's not on salary. He takes a percentage of the picture.'

I nodded. 'I'm beginning to see the strategy. And to be a British company, I suppose you set one up specially in London?'

'Nassau. The Bahamas count as British.'

'So this is why you didn't bring in an American pilot. I suppose I'm really quite a help to you: if you find you're running under the eighty per cent, you can put up my pay and balance it out again.'

'Don't hope too hard. If we run under eighty, I'll be fired the next day.'

'Are you really going to cart everybody across the Atlantic to do the studio stuff?'

She shook her head. 'Pictures like this you don't do studio work if you can help it. You script it so most of it's outdoors, and when you got to have an interior you do that on location, too: with fast colour film you can do it with the lights you bring along anyway. We're only doing inside a couple of native huts and a hacienda: we'll build that in the hangar up on the airstrip.'

A larger-than-usual lizard with a light-green body, blue hips, and a bronze tail scuttled out from under the car, nodded several times, belched and puffed out his throat in a bright orange sac.

J.B. frowned at him. 'Whatever he's doing, I wish he wouldn't.'

'Mating call. They call them Croakers. Belch back and you'll have a new boy-friend.'

'Another Method actor in blue jeans. Them, I can do without.'

I got out my pipe and started to pack it. 'Which reminds me -1 didn't notice the feminine interest in the picture.'

'Boss Man did all her scenes first and sent her back to the States to get her picture in the papers. They didn't hit it off.'

'Don't tell me he prefers horses.'

She shrugged. 'Horses, guns, dogs, whisky, men. He's not against women; he just thinks sex and thirst are itches you scratch. You buy a whisky in a bar, a woman in a cat-house. In his time off he goes hunting with the boys – and I mean in the mountains.' She frowned down at her beer can. 'I don't know what damn business it is of yours.'

I put a match to the pipe and breathed smoke away from her. 'But he's been married, hasn't he?'

'Three times. I got him out of the last one a few months ago. He didn't exactly notice any of them; it was just the fashion. In those days it didn't matter who you laid as long as you were married. Does movie gossip really interest you?'

'He's the man I'm working for. Same as you.'

She nodded anddiensaid slowly and thoughtfully: 'Don't get him wrong, Carr. He's a pro: he doesn't act much, but he doesn't need to. He's never got an Oscar and never will and he honestly doesn't give a damn. He knows what he's selling and he doesn't sell short: if he wasn't in pictures he'd be busting horses in rodeos and going hunting and whoring and…' She took a deep breath, 'Christ, I don'tapprove of the big sonofabitch, but I like him.'

I said softly: 'Perhaps just enough to want to save him from those long dull evenings in the cat-house?'

Her head came round with a snap and her face was a hard, glittering glare. For a moment it looked as if I was going to be smoking my pipe from somewhere around my tonsils.

Then she suddenly flashed a wide grin. 'Maybe. Maybe – once. Women are suckers for wanting to save men from a man's world. Never works. I'm not too particular about wedding rings, but I'm damned if I'll settle for a brand on the backside.'

'I'm encouraged to hear it.'

Her voice got a little colder. 'Don't puff out your throat at me, Carr.'

We ate at the stars' table, which meant that the food got brought to us instead of queueing up for it. It was the same food; peas and rice with chicken, which is about as close to a Jamaican national dish as you'll get, apart from salt cod and ackee. Whitmore, Luiz, the director, J.B., four others, and me.

Whitmore said. 'We got to get somebody in to do the Spanish for us. You heard what that slob of a writer asked the boys to shout about just now? -"Viva el liberador", for Chrissake.' He looked at Luiz. 'You heard that?'

Luiz shrugged elegantly. 'To me, it seemed reasonably appropriate. Those of Spanish blood who rush across rivers under fire often shout the mostnaïvethings.'

Whitmore grunted. 'Well, we got to get somebody.' He turned to me. 'Anybody you know speak Spanish, fella?'

'I know one man. I don't know if he'd be free, though.'

'We can try him. Tell J.B.'

So I gave her Diego Ingles' name and a telephone number where you could sometimes catch him between beds.

Another man, who seemed to be head of the camera team, suddenly asked me: 'Have you ever flown a camera plane before?' His accent was English English, so I seemed to have struck another part of the eighty per cent.

I shook my head. 'I haven't agreed to fly this one, yet.'

J.B. said: 'He's worried about what we might get for him.'

The cameraman looked a little contemptuous. 'It'll be my neck up there, too, you know. So if I don't mind-'

'That's splendid,' I said, 'as long as your neck's as good as mine at recognising a crackedmainspar.'

Whitmore said calmly: 'What kind of plane d'you want, fella?'

'I'd've thought a helicopter was the most versatile. But I'm no helicopter pilot.'

J.B. said: 'Choppers are out. You know what they cost an hour?'

The cameraman said: 'Vibration.'

The director pushed away his plate and started fitting a cigarette into a stubby holder. 'We can do without the aerials, Walt.'

'Sure – you can cut any picture at the bone. So who pays to see dry bones?'

I said: 'There's a Harvard – what you'd call a Texan – on the Boscobel strip. A film company used it as a Jap bomber last year.'

The cameraman said impatiently: 'We're not looking for Jap bombers. And you can't do good aerials from a single-engined plane: it has to be hand-held stuff and you don't get the down-ahead tracking shots.'

Whitmore nodded, planted his elbows solidly on the table, and started to peel an orange in big tearing, sweeping strokes. 'Okay, fella. So what do you figure we should get?'

I said carefully: 'If you want to shoot down and ahead you need twin engines – and a glass nose. That wipes out my Dove. You'd better try and pick up an old bomber – B-25 or a B-26 – with a bomb-aimer's position in the nose. There's still a lot of them around, in Central and South America.'

Whitmore cocked an eyebrow at the cameraman, then the director. Then said: 'Sounds good. Can you find one, J.B.?'

'I can start people looking.'

'Fine, fine.' He ate a strip of orange. 'Hell, maybe we could write it into the picture. Say instead of where the government sends a patrol on horses, they send a bomber. That's where we're walking up the river. So I have a Browning or a Thompson and I'm standing in these goddamn rapids up to my knees and shooting hell out of this bomber overhead. Could make a great scene.'

The table went very quiet. The director slowly put both hands to his head and started muttering.

But itwould make a great scene – for Whitmore. Him standing to his knees in foaming white water, blazing defiance at the sky with a tommy-gun.

Just to be technical, a bomber doing 200 mph would be 100 yards ahead one moment and 100 yards behind two seconds later. Perhaps that's why so few bombers ever get shot downwith Browning automatic rifles and Thompson submachine guns.

It would still be a great scene – and everybody round the table knew it.

Luiz said: 'I think I see where we all get our feet wet once more.'

Whitmore ate another piece of orange. 'Fine. Tell the dialogue boys what we want.' He looked back at me. 'Now we got another problem. We need a location. We can do all the jungle, river, tin-roof village stuff here. But justa couplascenes, we need some real Spanish architecture. Something like those big two-peak churches you get in Mexico – you know?'

I knew. I'd seen him park his horse outside that type of church half a dozen times. It labelled the film Spanish New World faster than you could speak it aloud.

The cameraman said: 'Puerto Rico – I did a documentary there once. It's full of-'

J.B. said:'Not Puerto Rico. We'd be back in US labour laws. The budget'll blow to hell and we'll never make Eady.'

The director said: 'Walt – we can get Roddie down here and he'll build you one in a week.'

J.B. said: 'Roddie costs money. He's another American salary, Boss.'

'Will you let the man speak?' Whitmore roared. Everybody shut up. He nodded to me. 'You're the local boy, fella. Let's hear from you.'

'Nothing like that in Jamaica: we've been British too long.' I shut my eyes, pinned up a mental map of the Caribbean, and started touring. 'Cuba's the nearest, but… Mexico's seven hundred miles, the nearest point in South America's a good five hundred. There's Haiti just down the road, but I've never heard of anybody getting any work done in Haiti.'

The director said: 'Let's get Roddie down.'

'And there's the República Libra.'

Whitmore and Luiz looked at each other. Luiz gave another slow shrug. 'We could take a look this weekend.'

'Yeah. ' Whitmore looked at the cameraman. 'You wanted to do some servicing on the cameras anyway, right? So we won'tshoot Saturday and Sunday and our friend'll fly us down to the República. There'll be' – he counted round the table: himself, the director, Luiz, a delicately dressed young man who hadn't said anything yet, and J.B. "There'll be six of us. Fix a hotel, will you, J.B.?'

'Hold on,' I said. Everybody looked at me. 'The Republica's having a little trouble right now. I don't know how they're reacting to strangers: they may want to keep them out, they may want to let them in just to prove everything's nice and normal. I just don't know.'

Luiz said gently: 'But we can find out.'

'Yes. But you've got an extra problem with me. They seem to have taken against me: decided I've been helping the rebels. A couple of their jets bounced me the other day. So however they take to you, they may not be too glad to see me in Bartolomeo.'

'You don't wanna go?' Whitmore asked bluntly.

'Not quite that.' It might be the best thing to go – a chance to argue it out with the Repúblicaauthorities when I could offer them solid proof that I might bring profitable trade to the country. It might put the Republic back on my map – and I certainly needed places on that map.

'Not quite that,' I said again. 'Just that they might not think I'm adding tone to your business.'

'I guess they won't put me in jail,' Whitmore said. Then his face tightened into a thin, slightly crooked smile. I knew that expression: it came when the unshaven character at the far end of the bar announces that he can't stand the smell of lawmen. 'Just stick close to me, fella. We'll manage.'

The director caught my eye and took a deep, weary breath. He knew that expression – and the scene that came after it: the bar-room brawl.