18
Dailies from Hell
Parking in Hollywood is a nightmare: No PARKING WITHOUT A SPECIAL PERMIT; NO PARKING BETWEEN THE HOURS OF TEN AND TWO ON TUESDAYS FOR STREET CLEANING; NO OVERNIGHT PARKING. Why not just put up a concrete riot barrier around the entire city?
That’s why I took a cab to 6000 Santa Monica Boulevard, the address of the Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery.
“You know, Mary Mon-roe is buried here,” my Pakistani driver informed me, counting out the change from my twenty.
“Do you mean Marilyn Monroe?”
The driver looked at me like I was a fool. “Tha’s wha I say — Mary Mon-roe.”
I stuffed the change in my pocket and stepped out of his gypsy cab. There it was before me, the cemetery that housed the tombs of Hollywood’s greatest old-timers: Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, John Huston. It was a classic cemetery, built in 1899, with Gothic tombstones, and giant mausoleums for the long-forgotten elite. The only time I saw it before this was on an episode of Charmed.
I glanced at my watch. The time read 5:30 p.m. — half hour until closing. I was to meet Lanny at 5:45, so I paid ten bucks to get in, and consulted the free map they included. From the main entrance, I turned left and headed toward the pond. Lanny’s secret gate was on the far side. As I walked along Lakeview Avenue, I began to pass the final resting places of well-known showbiz people. Cecil B. DeMille, the Steven Spielberg of his day, was housed in a giant tomb.
And it probably went over budget, I reasoned.
Around the corner was Jayne Mansfield, a blonde bombshell made prominent as a studio threat to Marilyn Monroe. Marion Davies, a forgettable actress from the 1920s and ‘30s, had a massive tomb as well — but then again, her sugar daddy was William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate.
Just beyond Marion, my man Tyrone Power was laid out in a fine memorial. Ty was a man’s man from the old school, with dark, penetrating eyes, and a cigarette-enhanced voice. This dashing leading man had a permanent place in my friend Sam Raimi’s household. His mother, Lu-Lu, was so crazy about him, she hung framed portraits everywhere. Sam even faked his autograph on one picture, convincing Lu-Lu to this day that it was real.
Tyrone’s hypnotic powers were still in evidence. A woman in her sixties was standing silently by his grave, cradling an old black-and-white glossy of the handsome star, and dabbing her glistening eyes. As I got closer, the fan spotted me, but she didn’t try and hide her sorrow — or rage, for that matter.
“Damn you. We could have had such a life together. Why did you have to leave me so young, so virile? You bastard!”
Assuming she was talking to Tyrone Power, I offered my condolences. “Rumor has it, ma’am, he died of a heart attack while in the act of bedding a much younger woman. At least he went with a smile on his face.”
“That’s not true,” the fan shot back defiantly. “We made beautiful love in the afternoon. Ty told me he was tired, so I let him drift off to sleep. I tried to wake him several hours later, but he…he was gone….”
The grief etched on the woman’s face seemed real, not some delusional story.
“You’re the woman?” I asked incredulously.
“Not everyone in this town is a phony, mister,” she said bitterly.
I decided against baiting her further, and headed north to Rosemary Avenue. Near the end of the poorly maintained street, I spotted an overgrown, rusted gate with a simple lock. There were no others like it in this part of the park, but Lanny was nowhere in sight.
Then, through the thick foliage, I heard the secret call: “Where do you think you’re goin’?”
It was one of Lanny’s favorite lines from Death of the Dead, when his redneck character takes control of a group of people in an isolated cabin and forces them outside to certain death. I walked over to the gate as Lanny was unleashing the padlock. With a quick look around, I ducked into an obscure, overgrown section of the Paramount back lot.
“This is it — the outback,” Lanny said, gesturing around.
“It’s creepy as hell.”
“And this is during the day” he added, leading us along a footpath through this overgrown area. “Try being here at three o’clock in the morning, when the freaks have Marilyn Monroe parties in the cemetery. My job was to keep fans of dead actors from getting into the studio that once employed many of those same actors. How sick is that shit?”
Lanny and I arrived at the edge of the “New York City” portion of the back lot. One particular brownstone seemed oddly familiar.
“Was that Ally McBeal’s apartment?”
“Sure was. Hell of a nice gal.”
We walked past Ally’s place in silence, mainly because Lanny was still stewing about his situation. “See, the payback is to stay, Bruce,” he said, rubbing his hands slightly, “and to stick their noses in it by excelling.”
We got to the end of the “block.” To our right, administration buildings began.
“We cut through Eddie Murphy Plaza,” Lanny said, indicating the route with his hand as he walked. “Turn left at the Gene Kelly Building, and the DeMille Building is all the way down on the right — that’s where the screening room is.”
The Eddie Murphy Plaza was very tidy, and the early evening light, refracted through the Los Angeles smog, bathed the area in a warm glow, which I’m sure is exactly how Eddie would have wanted it. As we approached the Gene Kelly Building, the plaza narrowed to a two-person pathway. Just ahead, a sunny courtyard revealed the immaculately maintained Cecil B. DeMille Building, a vintage complex from the ‘40s.
“This is it,” Lanny said, gesturing to the building. “When DeMille was working, he insisted on his own private screening room, so they put one in the basement. Now, it’s an execs-only situation. We, of course, will go in the service door.
Lanny rifled through his ring of keys and opened the door. Inside, typical of all the old office buildings on the lot, the décor was faded plaster, rounded edges, and a myriad of hallways.
“Just keep heading down,” Lanny said, pointing to a stairwell on our left.
A dark doorway at the bottom posted a cheery sign: Authorized Personnel Only. Lanny selected a new key, and the door opened easily.
“Angelo’s the projectionist. He’s been on the lot since time began — a little crabby, but a great old geezer.”
Lanny arrived at a nondescript metal door. He knocked lightly.
A gruff voice came from behind the door: “Just a fuckin’ minute!”
Lanny smiled at me, as if to say, “See?”
The door swung open, and we were greeted by a bald, cigar-chomping, cardigan-wearing curmudgeon.
“Angelo, this is that fellow I wanted to bring by — Bruce Campbell, one of the actors in Let’s Make Love!”
Angelo looked at me, rolled his eyes, and shooed us inside. “Okay, hurry up, the execs don’t like the smell of my cigar, and we’re ready to roll.”
Inside, Angelo led us toward his projection booth. “The smell of my cigar,” he repeated derisively. “Let me tell you something, the executives who used to sit in this screening room smoked nothing but cigars. I couldn’t get two feet out the door before Zukor, or one of the top brass, would shove a Del Fuego in my hand the size of a ham sandwich. You could tell how much work a picture needed by the amount of cigar smoke in the room. Now, these little pricks are playing Nintendo during reel changes — sheesh.”
We rounded the corner to Angelo’s “lair.” The large room was encrusted with fifty years of movie-projection-booth stuff — some of it work-related, like strips of film hanging above an editing bench, and some of it just items that piled up overtime, like posters, clippings, and notes pinned to an overflowing bulletin board.
Anchoring the room were twin Peerless movie projectors. I had seen a few over the years, hanging out in projection booths during theater appearances, but never this pristine.
“Holy cow,” I exclaimed, “Peerless.”
“The originals,” Angelo said with pride. “Carbon arc. You gotta adjust ‘em every fifteen minutes as they burn, and replace ‘em every two hours. You got sixteen different lube spots to keep oiled, so you can’t just walk away like they do in the multiplexes. These should be in a museum. A hundred and two thousand hours projecting dailies, rough cuts, final cuts, first trials, trailers, recuts — you name it — without a major problem, and that’s only since ‘52, when I got here.”
I was enjoying Angelo’s crusty ranting, but I was more interested in saving my movie from the scheming of the man I had begun to think of as my nemesis.
“Dailies are when?”
“Right now,” Angelo huffed. “Back off while I crank this sucker up.”
The Peerless came to life and it purred smoothly as the film fed through its sprockets. I walked over to one of several viewing windows. A small speaker, held up by a coat hanger, broadcast the accompanying sound.
“Turn it up if you want,” Angelo said, jamming his stub of a cigar out in an overflowing ashtray. “Don’t know why you would bother. No offense, but this picture is a stinker.”
I looked back to Angelo in horror. “Really? Why do you say that?”
Angelo cracked a wizened, jaded smile. “Kid, I can tell a stinker from the first take of the first reel of dailies. It’s not about the star, or the writer, or the director, it’s the whole ball of wax. You make a picture, and it’s a collision of elements — sometimes it’s magic, and sometimes it, well, it’s this,” he said, jerking a thumb at the dailies, now playing.
I turned up the volume and watched. Stylewise, Mike Nichols was indeed going ape shit. His footage, while gorgeous to look at, was frenetic, choppy, and full of gags. Something comic and ingenious might emerge once assembled, but currently, the dailies had the feel of a Roger Corman movie with a bloated budget.
“A 75-million-dollar movie, and they’re throwin’ fuckin’ dummies around. That never would have happened when Zukor ran this place. The execs now, they’re more worried about stock options, golden parachutes, and production deals than making pictures. The punk screening these dailies is a classic example,” Angelo said, pointing to Rob Stern, lounging in one and a half seats, with his feet draped over the back of the leather chair in front of him. Looking at him was the visual equivalent of chewing on tin foil.
“He’s on the cell phone half the time, or he’s dictating some B.S. to his big-tittied secretary. Listen to this….”
Angelo turned up an ambient speaker. “We use this to check the sound in the room itself. We also use it to listen in on the schmucks. The things I’ve heard, kid.”
Through the speaker, we could hear Rob spouting off: “You know what, Kari? Move my detailing to tomorrow morning. I’m sorry, Johnny, go ahead.”
“He’s watching dailies, dictating, and talking on his cell phone — all at the same time,” Angelo said with disgust.
“When you’re good you’re good,” Lanny interjected.
Angelo tended to the Peerless as the last of the dailies threaded through. “Thank God they’re over.”
Rob Stern could be heard swinging into postdailies, high-gear executive mode:
“Okay, memo to Mike: ‘Mike — saw Tuesday’s dailies. While I enjoyed the handheld stuff, I think it’s too confining. Suggest more crane use and wide-angle lenses to give us more of a sense of scope. General note: more extras, the streets look too empty — maybe we could add digital people in post? In addition, please talk with Bruce Campbell re: his first day of shooting. Loved the barf — a great DVD extra, but suggest reshooting the shot — too stilted. He looked like he was waiting to get pulled back. Not organic. More notes later. Yours in making a classic, Rob.’ Okay, memo to Kevin Jarre, re: dialogue….”
I turned the volume down and glanced into the screening room below. Rob was dictating, and punctuating his long sentences with frenetic hand gestures. His legs, as if working an invisible Thigh-Master in fast motion, never stopped wobbling open and closed.
“The worst part,” Angelo complained, “is that the punk leaves the biggest mess you’ve ever seen — candy wrappers, memos, Doritos. What am I, his mother? And let me ask you: how the fuck can anyone drink sixty-four ounces of anything? In two reels of dailies, he can go through an entire Big Gulp. Go figure.”
Down below, Rob gathered his things and headed toward the exit, still blabbing on the cell phone. “Hey, Kari, is the conference call still on with Mike and Terry?”
I glanced at Lanny. “I’m assuming ‘Mike’ is our Mike. Who’s Terry?”
“Executive vice-president of production at Paramount,” Lanny explained matter-of-factly.
“Could be interesting. Think we can tail him?” I asked.
“Who do you think you’re dealing with, amigo?” Lanny asked in return, a little put off.
We said our good-byes to Angelo (I even got a free cigar, though Ida doesn’t abide them) and slipped out the side door. The difference between Angelo’s dungeon and the afterburner brilliance of the late-day California sun was something like a thousand percent, and I stumbled about blindly, trying to spot Rob Stern before my eyes adjusted.
Lanny, smart enough to slip his shades on before exiting the building, kept the fledgling executive in his sights. “He’s on the move — let’s take a short-cut.”
“Where is Rob’s office?” I asked.
“On the third floor of the Sturges building,” Lanny said. “His boss, Terry Feingold, is on the fourth — dead ahead.”
Lanny and I headed toward the southeastern corner of the lot, taking a shortcut through every building we encountered.
“See, the heavy, dark keys are part of the original lot. Those will get you into the older buildings on the older parts of the lot. The next generation, between ‘37 and ‘79, used these silver jobbies. Brand-new buildings have swipe cards that can be reprogrammed. Either way, there isn’t a door I can’t get into.”
“So, Lanny, Rob is about to have a conference call with this guy Terry. Any way to listen in?”
“As long as you’re not claustrophobic there is,” Lanny acknowledged, using his second-generation key to open a loading door of the Sturges building, then a smaller key to activate a service elevator inside.
We arrived on the fourth floor and Lanny led us hurriedly to an unmarked door almost vibrating from the hum of machinery behind it.
“The old air duct routine,” Lanny said, smiling as he produced yet another odd-shaped key.
“You bet,” Lanny said, throwing open the door, revealing a metal stairway. “You can have a bird’s-eye view of any office built after ‘43.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked, sizing up the ladder and the network of metal ducts looming above.
“Sunday nights are usually pretty slow on the lot,” Lanny said. “Me and a buddy used to play Dungeons and Dragons. This is the one place he could never find me. Now look, you’ll see a vent at each office. Terry’s is three vents down. Good luck.”
“Wait, you’re not going with me?”
“Hell no. Last time I was up there, I drank a can of Coke and my belly swelled up enough to trap me for an hour. That’s why now I carry Tums wherever I go.”
Lanny undipped a small, rubber-coated flashlight, and flipped it on. “You’ll need this.”
“Okay, see you soon,” I said, ascending the rusty ladder.
The duct system was very tight indeed. I cursed every bacon cheeseburger ever consumed as I dragged my carcass thirty horizontal feet to the first grate. I peered into what looked like a casting office. The walls were lined with actor headshots, and a heated negotiation was under way.
“Look, I could give a shit if Corey got a pinball machine in his trailer on Trancers III. After the third failed drug test, he’ll be lucky to get per diem!”
I didn’t need to hear the rest of that tragic conversation, and dragged myself to the next grating. Down below, a money guy of some kind was deep in the middle of a convoluted explanation:
“It’s very simple, actually,” the man continued. “The first eight hours are straight time. The next four are time and a half, and every remaining hour after that is double time. No, that doesn’t include night premiums, meal penalties or forced calls….”
Before I fell asleep, I hauled myself forward, to what would hopefully be the office of Terry Feingold, who was one of about ten executive VPs at Paramount. When I arrived, Terry was on the phone:
“No way. Look, you blew a big deal for me because of it, and I’m not going to let it happen again….”
This Feingold is a tough cookie, I thought. But his conversation continued:
“No, next time, you’re taking him to soccer practice. Yeah, well, whatever — talk to the lawyer.”
Terry slammed the phone down and stared at it in silence. The downward tilt of his head revealed a substantial bald spot that was in the process of being “restored.” Pressing my face against the metal slats in the vent, I could see that his office was typical of a midlevel executive, decorated in a Southwestern theme, with a faux stucco fireplace and generic tapestries.
Bzzzzzz! Terry’s intercom came to life, and the slightly bored voice of his secretary came across the speaker phone. “Terry? Rob’s here for the conference call. Should I send him in?”
“Do me a favor, wait five minutes, then let him in.”
“Sure,” his secretary responded.
With that, Terry leaned in his relax-the-back executive chair and put his feet up on the desk. Was he finishing an important call before Rob came in? Freshening up? No, he was simply making his subordinate wait because he could.
After wasting exactly five minutes, lying on the cold metal duct, I watched as Rob entered Terry’s office. The dynamic between studio executives was usually cautious, to say the least, but even accounting for the usual Hollywood paranoia and ambient venom, “warm” is not a word I would use to characterize their relationship.
Unlike Terry, Rob was hired as a “creative” guy at the studio. He’d be making movies instead of “overseeing” them if he had a creative bone in his supersize body. Rob was all about “development.” I was told by a writer I knew that the kid had many failings, but was nonetheless regarded as a sort of Wunderkind who could “develop the hell out of a script.” I wasn’t sure if that was a compliment or not, since far too many decent scripts have been shanghaied in “development.”
The subject of the day, of course, was Let’s Make Love!, the film assigned to the two execs. Mike Nichols was about to call in for a status conversation, and they wanted to get their stories in sync.
“Well, financially, he’s going ‘Kurtz’ on us,” Terry said, rifling through a stack of paperwork on his desk. “He’s projected to go over by 25 percent, and that’s after burning through a 10 percent contingency already.”
Even from my ridiculous vantage point, I could see Rob’s eyes suddenly ignite. “Listen, Terry,” Rob spat, “Mike is attempting to do something really special here, and I think we should all be cheering him on rather than…than….”
For just a moment, Rob had appeared to be in danger of stating an actual opinion, but his deeply ingrained sense of self-preservation returned just in time, assisted by Terry’s withering stare. Interesting, I thought to myself. Stern seems to have an awful lot invested in Mike’s new “vision.”
“This is a romantic comedy, asshole, not Arma-frickin’-geddon,” Terry barked. “Can’t you creative guys rein him in?”
“Hey, whoa, whoa, there,” Rob said, putting his hands up, trying to erase any hint of his previous backbone. “You bean counters say the same thing every time a creative force — and this is Mike Nichols, mind you — changes his mind or enhances a script.”
“Shooting entire sequences green screen isn’t enhancing, Robbie, it’s reinventing the wheel.”
“I was brought here to breathe some life into these old Paramount walls, Terry. Personally, I have enjoyed watching Let’s Make Love! blossom into a higher-concept, albeit slightly more expensive, story. It’s gonna appeal to a much younger, and broader audience than Mike Nichols ever had before, and marketing will back me up.”
“We already got our slate of high-tech action flicks, Rob, we don’t need another one to kneecap us when we’re down.”
“Wow, that’s a real hard line,” Rob said, dabbing the sweat along his hairline.
“It’s my ass, is what it is,” Terry said, poking his own chest. “Glick gave me the max I can spend under the new cap — remember the one we all agreed on in writing? I can’t let this, or any picture, go over it, and I’m putting the onus on you, to bring your genius director around.”
“But the new stuff is really cool,” Rob protested, weakly.
“No, the new stuff is really expensive. Can’t we have cool stuff that isn’t expensive? When I first read this script, it was three people in a room talking, 95 percent of the time. Who’s been taking growth hormones here? How did this one get away?”
A buzzing sound prevented Rob’s answer. “Mike’s on the line, Terry.”
“Okay, tell him to hold just a sec,” he said, turning his attention back to Rob. “I’m always bad cop. Can you be bad cop for once?”
“I’m no good at being bad cop,” Rob said, shaking his head no. “And as the creative exec, it isn’t really my job.”
“But you always complain that when I’m bad cop, I’m too bad,” Terry reasoned. “Maybe if I play good cop, and you’re bad cop, we might get somewhere.”
“Okay, I’ll try it, but no guarantees,” Rob warned.
The two wary allies nodded, and Terry stabbed at a blinking phone button.
“Hello, Mike,” Terry said, warmly. “Rob Stern is also here on speaker.”
“Hey, Mike,” Rob feigned cheerfully, “how’s everything going?”
“Not bad, but I’d like another week of shooting,” Mike said flatly.
Terry and Rob exchanged a panicked look, then broke into laughter. “Hey, Mike, you’re a funny guy!” Rob said, smiling, as a fresh drop of sweat rolled along his sideburn.
“Is that a no, then?” Mike asked, not joking.
As the reality of the request sank in, Terry signaled to Rob to be quiet, and a stony silence followed.
“You still there?” Mike asked over the speakerphone.
“Oh, we’re here, Mike,” Terry said, now pacing in front of his desk. “That’s a pretty tall order, particularly after all the new expenses, like a storyboard artist, helicopter shots, forty new digital effects, and a special armature dummy. I could go on.”
Rob shot Terry an “I thought you were going to be good cop” look. “But, Mike, make no mistake,” he urged. “It’s all terrific stuff, it’s just starting to add up, heh-heh.”
Rob tried to continue, but Mike interrupted him.
“You know, fellas, I haven’t exactly been making this movie in a bubble,” Mike said, as politely as he could under the circumstances. “I’ve got enough memos from Rob alone to fill a book — and not one of them was to tone it down, they’ve all been about making this movie bigger and bigger. Now, I haven’t heard a bad word from corporate on any of this, so, until I do, I’m going to continue to make a great movie for this studio. I’m sure you bright young men have it in yourselves to help instead of hurt. Good day.”
And with a faint click, the three-way conference suddenly dropped to two. Terry immediately turned his wrath on Rob.
“You call yourself ‘bad cop’?!”
“Hey,” Rob countered, having sweated through an undershirt, a dress shirt, a tie, and an outer jacket, “your ‘good cop’ shouldn’t have been worse than my ‘bad cop’!”
“I had to do that, numb nuts,” Terry hissed, “because your ‘bad cop’ was such a pussy!”
The two fell into silence, Terry slumping into his chair behind the desk, and Rob blotting his shiny forehead with a hankie.
“Now what?” Rob asked forlornly.
Terry leaned back, plopped his feet on the desk, and shrugged. “It’s up to you, Rob. As I recall, you brought this project to the studio, not me.
“What?” Rob protested. “We did it together, don’t you remember, Terry?”
“As my e-mails and interoffice memorandums will prove, I fought against this project, yet you continued to champion it.”
Rob flinched at the mention of a paper trail. “Are you saying you’re not going to cover my back on this?” Rob asked, incredulous…
“Not this one, amigo,” Terry confirmed. “If Let’s Make Love! tanks, you’re taking the fall. Life’s too short. I’m going to fiddle while the whole thing burns.”
Rob’s eyes turned arid and reptilian. “Terry, I couldn’t agree more with your assessment of this project. It’s flatlining. But that’s no more my fault than it is yours, or even Mike’s. No, I think that once everyone has had a chance to review the facts they’ll see that this entire fiasco can be laid at the feet of one man: Bruce Campbell. Just check out the Internet Movie Database — everything he touches turns to straight-to-video crap. He’s like a carrier for a B-movie Ebola virus. I heard he almost brought down Spider-Man 2 and he was only in that for five minutes. He’s in Let’s Make Love! for, what, almost thirty? We gotta make him disappear,” Stern said definitively.
“Well, do what you gotta do,” Terry said in a dismissive tone. “This baby is yours now.”
I began to shiver, not only because of the chilling scene I had just witnessed, but because the cold metal duct was lowering my body temperature to a dangerous level.
Shimmying backward to the access ladder, which was much harder than forward, my mind reeled.
So, I wasn’t going crazy — that little prick Stern was the evil puppet-master after all! First he tries to keep me out of the movie, now he’s trying to blame all of his dum bass decisions on me. I should have guessed he was a troublemaker from the first time I saw him smelling his puffy fingers.
Lanny and I rode back across the lot in silence. He had upgraded our means of travel to a golf cart, mainly because he felt sorry for me. At the vine-riddled back gate we shook hands.
“Well, Lanny, I almost wish I hadn’t seen that,” I said, finally.
“Yeah, kids today,” Lanny said, jingling his ring of keys. “He came over from New Line. He was their ‘franchise’ guy. He has a lot to prove, I guess.”
“He’s proven a lot to me already,” I said.
“Well, watch your back,” Lanny urged grimly, closing the gate between us. “Say hi to Ty for me.”
With a wink, I vanished into the cemetery, en route to the Los Angeles Airport. I was due back in New York in two days.