Girl of My Dreams (21 page)

Mossy's next meeting was a ream. Poor Jim Bicker was in to hear instructions on the adaptation of a novel he'd taken over from another writer. Bicker was difficult and surly. He and Mossy were like animals genetically programmed to fight, but Mossy knew Jim gave his scripts an edge that made gritty pictures. He was stuck with Poor Jim anyway because of his two-year contract.

“Story has no charm,” Bicker said.

As if you have, Mossy wanted to say but held back because he needed the work out of Jim. “Charm's not what it needs. It needs pace, action, toughness.”

“This picture and I can't find each other.”

“Good,” Mossy said, “keep looking. That'll make whatever you do find better. The novel's okay, for a novel anyway. I bought it for the characters, the ex-con, his wife and daughter, the detective, the teacher who drinks, the crooked lawyer, the bowling alley guy. Now we're going to have those people do what it makes sense for them to do in a motion picture. They're no longer going to be staring at each other while they think and we read what they're thinking. They're going to be doing, playing, fighting. They need visible energy. The characters are still the meat, but we need gravy badly, and mashed potatoes, beans, then ice cream. Gravy comes from what's already inside them, like a turkey's gravy from giblets—heart, gizzard, liver. Part of this gravy is the ex-con maybe wants to prove he was innocent in the first place. Shut up for a minute. I know in the novel he
is
guilty, but the people who go to pictures really like a man who's been, pardon my French, butt fucked, so we watch him come back against the odds and right the wrong. We don't know that at first, everyone just assumes he's guilty, his wife and daughter included, but he wants to clear his name, so naturally he has to find out who actually pulled off the robbery he did time for. See?”

Mossy and Poor Jim were mirrors of each other. Though inherently hostile, both believed in happy endings. One saw Shirley Temple's smile in every sunrise, the other the destruction of the old order, replaced by the new order where greed was abolished. One saw everyone saluting the flag, studio profitability, and the pure virtue of American life. The other saw a tomorrow with a motto: to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability. No one was selfish in this vision, not really.

“But you've stuck me on a story without a heart,” Jim Bicker said.

“Not every story needs a heart, goddammit,” Mossy said. “This one has
kishkas.
All you have to do is push the bittersweet relationship, more bitter if you want, give me some mystery about why the detective hates the ex-con so much—are they long lost brothers? Or did the detective see someone who looks like the ex-con kill his mother? Gimme a chase, underground maybe, in the sewers, I don't know, then punch up the ending. Meeting over.”

For a later draft of the same screenplay, Mossy would tell another writer to give the story heart, but heart happened not to be what he valued in Poor Jim Bicker.

Mossy left his office by his private door to go across the building and give a confidential instruction to Dunster Clapp, no doubt a threat only Clapp could deliver with the menace his boss wanted. Then he stopped in the design room to see what Hurd Dawn, the head set designer, had on his easel. He told Dawn to change a living room into a dining room so the characters would have something to do while they argued.

Meanwhile, Elena ushered in a small squad of writers with their flustered director. The mirrored corridor stretching from the outer office to the inner sanctum gave pleaders time to become even more nervous, and when they achieved the sanctum itself they might be trembling. Finding Mossy gone, one of the writers said it was like a reprieve from the governor just before an electrocution. In this case, the meeting was with all the writers who had worked on a script along with the bewildered director who was trying to turn their work into ninety minutes that would hold together. A week of shooting had produced an indecipherable mess.

The first writer, a former reporter, had been brought in to adapt a current novel. Writer number two came for scene construction and continuity. Writer number three, a playwright, was enlisted to brighten dialogue. Writer number four added physical and visual tension, screen pacing. Writer number five came for gags, despite the fact that the story was fairly serious. Then writer three had returned to touch up the dialogue just before shooting, after which number two came back to tighten the structure. Before all this happened, a reader had synopsized the novel, giving it three pages plus a recommendation, which was don't touch it. It got touched anyway because Dick Powell loved it, or said he did, or someone said he did.

As the writers fidgeted, a door slammed in the outer office as Mossy returned from his errand and charged down his corridor. He began speaking while no one in his inner office could yet see him. “Over and done with, cut our losses, this is a baby only a mother could love, and I'm no mother. Picture's canceled.”

They still couldn't see him and he'd already executed them, especially the director. The writers looked at each other, then at the director, who had his head down, making sounds—
“Wha, wah, whaaa”
—and nobody knew whether he was starting to cry or trying to say something but couldn't push out his words.

At last Mossy was visible—double-breasted and gold cuff-linked, dark reddish hair shining, nose pointing like the prow of a ship—in the office itself. One of the writers, who had been in the Army, stood as though an officer had entered.

Another writer thought hopefully, desperately, perhaps Mossy was referring to a different project. “What's that you're talking about, Chief?” he asked.

“This picture's finished,” Mossy said. “The dailies are dreck.”

Trying to come to the director's aid, a third writer said, “We've just been clearing our throats so far. The best stuff starts getting into the can tomorrow.”

“No, not tomorrow, not ever. Picture's done.”

“We can fix it, Boss, fix it fast,” said the youngest writer in the room, who happened to be number four.

Now Mossy had heard something he could pounce on. “Tell me, tell me right this minute. And a minute is just what you have.”

This writer, whose ideas had been routinely rejected by his senior colleagues, asserted himself. “The pilot,” he said, “shouldn't be a pilot but the captain of a cargo ship that's being taken away from him unjustly after he's rammed by a Coast Guard cutter driven by a man who hates him for having won the girl they were both in love with.”

At the word “love,” Mossy's ears almost literally pricked up. He leaned forward, saying nothing, always the sign for a writer to continue.

“Meanwhile, the girl herself, a morsel everyone wants but only the captain has, is being blackmailed by another guy she rejected who happens to know her father was also once involved in a shipping scandal of his own. The father—I'm thinking of Walter Connolly, maybe Roscoe Karns—did smuggle arms to the English when they were first in the war and we weren't, but it was a good cause. His daughter—a Bebe Daniels kind of woman, sympathetic but put upon, married to the disgraced captain—wants to save the two men she loves, her husband and her father, but doesn't have the money the blackmailer demands to keep quiet about the father, who's also running for mayor … ”

“Stop!” Mossy yelled.

Something had happened to change the room from a funeral parlor to the starting gate at a race track.

“I can get Connolly, rest of the cast stays as is,” said Mossy. “Stop shooting. Have the new script by Friday, do you understand? Do all of you understand?”

Eagerness is a poor word to describe the joy, gratitude, alacrity and enthusiasm with which the entire room leaped to “Yes!” their chief.

“One more thing,” said the chief. “I'm not in the complicated-picture business on this one, I'm in the love business. The father, the captain, the guy in the boat, the blackmailer, they all love the girl. Go type me some love.”

Before they had even retreated to the other end of Mossy's corridor, the director was kissing the young writer. “Salvation,” he cooed. “It's a different picture, but you saved it and I owe you my firstborn.”

Control was not only Mossy's goal but his gift. He could smell when a picture was going bad, and this was most often because he could smell the people on it losing confidence. He didn't so much understand films as he did filmmakers: writers, directors, producers, stars. Not that he didn't know what he liked and, with even greater decisiveness, what he disliked; but his gift was in knowing who to hire and when to fire. If a writer groused to Mossy about being made to write a script that was only a reworking of a standard formula, Mossy would say, “Formula! Formula? Do you know what formula is? It's what works, what will work. Okay, I'm a baby and I'm crying, so go out and make me some formula. But make it new and fresh, the stale stuff gives me indigestion.”

Loving his pictures and the audiences he made them for, Mossy also loved having power over his audiences. Once we walked together into a theater playing a Jubilee movie. “Look at this,” he said as the opening credits finished. “In four minutes I will cause the people in this theater to laugh. In twenty-two minutes they will be scared out of their wits, and in thirty-seven minutes I will make them cry.” And so it came to pass.

It was Yeatsman, Mossy's favorite writer, who best characterized the birth and death of a project at Jubilee. “Ponder the temperament of a bubble,” he told me. “A bubble is bewitching as it floats upward, catching the sunlight, displaying the rainbow on its surface, appearing both two and three dimensional, membrane-thin yet spherical, and it rotates exquisitely on some hidden axis, full of promise of other bubbles as well. Then, with no warning, it pops. You don't ask why.”

Yeatsman could go toe to toe on scripts with Mossy, one of the few who dared confront the boss. Towering over Mossy, Yeatsman, with Princeton and early service on the
New York Herald Tribune
behind him, could fight bare-knuckled, using no educational advantage but referring only to pictures or stories that worked. When Yeatsman wanted to pitch a story he sometimes needed a few paragraphs about characters and plot wrinkles, but that morning he needed only four words to convince Mossy. “Madame Bovary. Palmyra Millevoix.”

“Jesus Christ! That'll be our biggest picture in 1935. Maybe '36. It'll take time.”

When Yeatsman was talking to young writers like me, he would tell us he preferred originals, but he knew his three thousand a week salary wasn't supported by screenplays he dreamed up. “I'll do a rewrite if I need to buy a car or put in a new kitchen,” he said, “while an original will only pay for swimming pool repairs or minor renovations. A new house or a divorce requires the adaptation of a best seller.” In a puckish mood he could twit his Irish idol, whose lines he'd garble. Yeats wouldn't have been amused, but Yancey once finished a drink in the commissary and said, “I must arise and go now, and go to the industry, the labile industry, a small garden of words to tend there as I type alone in the fee-loud glade.”

Late morning, when two more writers burst in, it was because Colonel DeLight had been unable to pacify them. After weeks of struggle, separately, on two problematic scripts for which neither could find a solution, Sid Croft and Reggie Chatwynd had just discovered Mossy had put them both on the same story to see what each could make of it independently. Sid, a bluff Midwesterner, had written silents and their title cards, while Reggie was a radio playwright brought over from England because of what was supposedly a demand for literacy in talkies.

“So what's on your mind, gents?” Mossy said pleasantly.

“You know good and goddam well what's on our minds,” said Sid.

“I asked Sid's help this morning with a plot point,” Reggie said, “he asked my help with an enigmatic character, and we discovered—
mirabile dictu
—that you have us working on the same blasted script.”

“Ah, this kind of thing happens,” Mossy said as though consoling one for having fallen off a ladder, the other for a broken romance.

“It's not exactly a freak of nature,” Reggie said. “You had a few names and details changed, gave us the same picture to write. Utterly dishonorable.”

“You're a deceptive bastard,” said Sid.

“Now wait a minute, boys. I thought I'd shorten the process, that's all. Sid, you're in the construction business, none better. Reggie, your dialogue's razor-sharp. You both like to work alone. Thought I'd take the best of what you both turn in and maybe have Jamie McPhatter touch it up.”

“Keep that illiterate drunk off my work,” Sid said. “Reggie, us together maybe?”

“Don't mind if I do, old boy.”

Mossy smiled. “I'll never lie to you, boys,” he lied, which he knew they knew. He'd deceived them, been found out, and talked his way around it until he got what he wanted in the first place. “Give me a weeper. Think of a rickety ladder—he climbs, he falls, he climbs back up—only this is about a girl who has to support her family. She—”

“She's a hooker,” Sid interrupted.

“Don't interrupt me when I'm interrupting myself,” Mossy said. “Actually, a hooker would have been fine before the Code. No, she's a, a, an assistant curator at a museum, everything's swell, she gets a promotion. Then she gets blinded in the accident, and I don't like the car crash so give me something else, I like fires. Life is hard but she's plucky. She lands a job—”

“As a radio announcer,” Reggie broke in, remembering his earlier career.

“That's right,” Mossy said. “They give her stuff in Braille, you'll figure it out. Loretta Young will be perfect. And the radio station owner falls in love with her.”