“And on your left,” the voice announced, “is the compound where the head of Grove Pictures, Emerson Waldie, has his offices and if you look out of your windows, you’ll see none other than your favorite Hollywood star and mine, the beauteous, the glamorous, the talented Miss Maggie Graym. There she is coming out of the main door.”
The voice belonged to the driver of the Hollywood Tours Comfortliner which passed, eight times daily, the huge sculptured hedge surrounding Emerson Waldie’s ornate pink and yellow twelve room chateau on the Grove Pictures lot.
Judging from the way the passengers were now frantically craning their necks to catch a glimpse of Maggie Graym, who’d disappeared into a powder blue convertible with the top up, it was apparent to the driver of the tour bus that his usual spiel would fall upon deaf ears.
He moved past the chateau with its inescapable adornment of concrete cupids, and then turned down a street lined with sleazy tenement buildings. These were the tenements of Stage A, built by Waldie in the mid-1930s when the studio had tried to romanticize the poverty and hopelessness of ghetto life. And had succeeded in doing so.
If anybody had known what ghetto life had been like, it was Emerson Waldie. He’d come from the real tenements of New York’s lower east side. To avoid eye-contact with this dismal reminder of his youth, he’d had a huge hedge grown outside his windows, blotting it out. Just because he had exploited an American tragedy for all it was worth in terms of box office receipts didn’t mean that he had to stare at it from his window.
But now that the studio focus was on making war movies and musicals—these two forms of entertainment being the most profitable to the studio—the tenement set wasn’t used quite as often as it had been during prewar days. Not that it was totally deserted. Waldie, as a sort of monument to himself and his own humble beginnings, insisted that Grove Pictures produce at least one tenement picture a year.
Which was the reason why Tom Driscoll was now standing on the roof of one of the tenements, poised for the scene in this new production called Born In The Bowery, in which he was to rescue a little boy from a raging sixth floor fire. Tom had been called in at the last minute after the previous stuntman assigned to the picture had walked off the set in a huff about something.
The action called for Tom, doubling for yet another of Hollywood’s so called he-men, Whitney Paris, to inch his way, hand over hand, along a rope leading from one decrepit building to another, where he was to harness the boy onto his back and then carry him back to safety. The boy, a stand-in for the cute little child star, Bunkie Milligan, was looking pretty annoyed by the time Tom reached the perch he was standing on.
“Do you realize this is the fifth fucking take this morning?” the child asked.
“Hey, partner,” Tom said gently, “don’t you know that kids your age shouldn’t use swear words?”
“So who the fuck is a kid?” the stand-in said. “I’m twenty-fucking-seven years old. You think I like standing in for some pimply-faced little actor? If I’d grown to my full height, I would have been a tail gunner on one of those big flying fortresses over Germany or I would have been navigating a PT boat out in the Pacific. I would have been taking on those fucking nips and krauts, that’s for damned sure. But here I am, a 4-F dwarf working for these crackpot second-unit directors like the guy they put on this flick who makes you do take after fucking take on the same fucking shot. That’s why the stuntman before you took a powder.”
Tom harnessed the agitated dwarf onto his back for the hand over hand trip back to the other tenement building, taking note of the fact that this, indeed, was no lightweight child, but a rather heavy short adult with a corpulent stomach and long, ape-like arms.
The stand-in was silent for a minute or two until about a quarter of the way back when Tom was asked the inevitable question, the same question he was asked day in and day out by either gas station attendants or air raid wardens or people on the street he’d never seen before or bartenders or kids or grandmothers or grocery clerks or barbers or newspaper vendors or traffic cops or waitresses or studio personnel:
“Say, why the hell ain’t you in an Army or Navy uniform doing your bit to win this war?” the dwarf asked vehemently. “What’re you, afraid of getting hurt or something? What’re you, yella, fella?”
Tom said nothing as he continued slowly toward the other tenement, but he wondered how the dwarf he was carrying on his back would enjoy bouncing off the safety net 60 feet below.
“It makes me want to puke every time I see guys like you avoiding your duty as Americans,” the dwarf continued. “And believe me, buddy, if I had anything to say about all this, I’d line the whole bunch of you lily-livered cowards up against the nearest wall and shoot you.”
Having experienced this kind of verbal abuse as often as he had, Tom just let his passenger have his say and proceeded along. As he was nearing the other tenement he heard an announcement from below. It was coming over a loud speaker and it was the call to break for lunch.
“Well, that’s the best fucking thing I’ve heard all day,” the dwarf said. Half a minute later Tom reached the building and gladly unsaddled the dwarf who scrambled like a monkey down off the tenement rig. Tom followed and once on the ground, headed for the exit, certain that he wouldn’t be needed for any more shooting on this particular scene, there now being five takes, more than enough. But Bradford, the second-unit director, beckoned him back.
“Okay, we’re all gonna report back here in an hour for a reshoot, got that?” Bradford said.
He was a tall, gaunt, humorless man who was considered the reigning second-unit director at Grove, a second-unit director being the person who shoots all the scenes in a movie that the main director doesn’t have time for or simply can’t be bothered with: long shots, secondary angles, extreme closeups, scenes in which the actors don’t have to be directed, and all of the lesser important shots such as the tenement rescue scene.
Until working with the guy on Dixe-Bomber Rendezvous, nobody had ever heard of Bradford, certainly Tom hadn’t. He’d just sort of popped up all of a sudden in the position he was in. The grapevine had it that he’d been installed in the job through the influence of Marcus Wood.
Wood wasn’t just one of the most powerful producers and businessmen in the film industry, but was thought of as a personage in the sense that he was highly respected in all the right circles, a friend of Warner, Meyer, Cohn, Goldwyn, Zanuck and other studio moguls as well as the official advisor on Hollywood matters to the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Tom stood at the exit for a moment wondering whether or not to make a comment to Bradford about the reshoot. After all, there had to be more than enough film in the can to cover the scene which would eventually appear on the screen for no more than three or four seconds tops. The closeup scenes of the child’s rescue had already been shot with the actual stars of the film. The work that Tom and the previous stuntman and the stand-in had done was merely a long shot filler. Tom approached Bradford.
“Got a problem, stuntman?” Bradford asked, not completely looking up from his paperwork.
“No problem,” Tom answered, “but maybe you can tell me what’s wrong with the last five takes?”
“I don’t like them,” Bradford said. “That’s what’s wrong with them.”
Tom considered for a long moment what Bradford had said. “Okay,” he said, “but is there anything you’d like us to do that we’re not already doing?”
“Nah. Just keep doing what you and the little guy are doing. We’ll get the shot I’m looking for in two, maybe three more takes.”
Tom was doing his best to be helpful. “Yes, but if you can point out exactly what it is you want, maybe we can get the shot you’re looking for in less. Tom paused and then remembered what Erne had said. He echoed Erne’s words: “Film’s scarce these days.”
Bradford regarded Tom icily before speaking. Tom could almost tell what was coming.
“So since when are you directing this segment?” Bradford asked sharply.
“I’m only trying to understand what you’d like us to do in order to get this production wrapped up,” Tom said, unable to figure Wilson. “I mean, why would you want to go on shooting the same thing over and over again when you know the results aren’t going to be any different than what you already have in the can?”
Tom waited for an answer from Bradford, but none was forthcoming. He continued talking: “The audience isn’t going to see anything but a couple of small figures in the far distance for just a few seconds. This is just like the situation we had on Dive-Bomber Rendezvous when you had me jumping out of that plane a dozen times for no apparent reason.”
“Keep it up, wiseguy,” Bradford said, his face rapidly flushing a deep, angry red. “Just keep mouthing off and not only will you be off this picture, but you’ll be off this lot so fast you won’t know what hit you. I don’t have to take this kind of crap from some dumb stuntman who doesn’t know how to mind his own business.”
Tom let it pass just as he’d let what the dwarf stand-in had said pass. He’d worked on all kinds of pictures with all kinds of directors in all kinds of difficult situations, but he couldn’t recall this kind of thing ever happening before. Most directors Tom had worked with had just wanted to get the shot in the can and go home. At least the second-unit directors had. And as a stunt-man, he usually kept his comments to himself. Even if he was being told to do something fairly stupid. As was the case here.
It was now starting to occur to Tom that maybe he was a little out of line. After all, Bradford was the guy in charge and that was that. If Bradford wanted him to do a hundred takes, he’d do a hundred takes. It was up to Bradford to decide.
“Okay,” Tom said, “have it your way.”
Leaving the sound stage, he thought he’d grab a sandwich at the studio commissary, but he didn’t feel hungry. Underneath it all, the abuse that the dwarf had hurled at him had seeped in. No matter how many times he heard it, he couldn’t get used to practically everybody he came into contact with thinking he was a coward.
And if he really wanted to get himself depressed, he only had to consider that he’d probably have to put up with this until the war was over.
He felt like going over to Jimmy’s Tropical Bar and Grille and having a few. Except that the place would be empty this time of day and there’d be nobody to have a few with.
Tom walked over to where his car was parked. It was a shiny black 1941 Packard Clipper Deluxe, a beauty of a machine with its fenders flowing gracefully into the door panels, its innovative lack of running boards, and its sleek vertical grill.
Getting into the car, he noticed three or four of Bradford’s men standing nearby watching him. They didn’t look anything like film guys. They looked more like ordinary street thugs.
They weren’t in the Army or the Navy, either. And it flashed through Tom’s brain just why. From the sneers on their faces and the deadliness in their eyes, he realized that they weren’t the kind of guys the Army or Navy would want. Even in an all-out war like the one being fought right now. Stories of prisons emptying out the cells so that the Armed Forces could have more manpower were just that. Stories. As Tom well knew, the services were pretty damned fussy.
So these were the kind of people he got to sit the war out with: undesirables, rejects, petty thieves, ex-cons, punks.
He started up the engine and moved out of his space. The clock on his dashboard told him he had about forty minutes before having to report back to work, and he was trying to decide where to spend them. He decided to spend them over at Erne’s.