The Hollywood Trilogy (74 page)

Then he got a phone call from the David Novotny Agency. Not from Novotny himself, of course, but from a subagent named Harriet Hardardt. Could Jerry please come and get his script, Harriet wanted to have a chat with him. Tomorrow would be fine.

Jerry was pretty excited, but he said nothing to anyone about the appointment. After all, she had said, “pick up your script.” Maybe she just wanted to tell him to give up. Maybe she had taken pity on him and wanted to stop him before he wasted any more of anybody's time.

But no. When Jerry arrived at the luxurious offices on the twelfth floor of 9255 Sunset, dressed in his best dark blue suit even though it was eighty-five degrees out, he was quickly led by a beautiful secretary into a small office filled with books, where a handsome woman of fifty, red-haired and strong-chinned, reached across her desk and shook hands with him. Jerry's script was right there on top of her desk. It looked much thumbed.

“I'm Harriet Hardardt,” she said, “and I'm
very
pleased to meet you. I'm always pleased to meet somebody who can
really
write.”

Jerry sat, numbed by this greeting. “Thank you,” he said, and numbly waited.

“Look,” she said. “Let me get right down to business.” But her phone buzzed, and with a wave to Jerry she answered it, talking in a low tone for at least ten minutes to somebody who seemed to be threatening to kill himself, or threatening to come to the office, Jerry couldn't tell which. She was soothing and firm, and finally got off the phone.

“You don't have what we consider a salable script here,” she went on with Jerry, as if the telephone call had never happened. “But as I said, you write extremely well, and I just thought it would be a shame to let you go on submitting scripts that can't be filmed.”

There was another interruption. This time, she sat there toying with a pencil and going, “Uh-huh.” At last it was over.

“Tell me a little bit about yourself,” she said. Jerry gave her a capsule biography. She nodded with approval when she heard he was gainfully employed, and as a writer and editor.

“That editorial experience,” she said. “I knew it. Your work shows the fine Italian hand of a good editor.”

“Thank you,” Jerry said. “What's the matter with my stuff?”

“What's the matter is, to be blunt, you are writing expensive stories for small, discerning audiences. A movie has to earn an enormous return to make back the cost of filming, two and a half times as much as it cost to make. So one of the criteria for evaluating an original screenplay is, what will the picture cost, and who will go see it?”

Jerry's heart sank.

“Don't look sad,” she said with a nice smile. “Just learn to incorporate that kind of thinking into your decision to write a particular script . . .”

“I'm afraid I don't know what makes an audience come into a theater,” he said. “I just have to write what I think I can do best.”

“Oh, phooey,” she said. “Come off that. What do you really know about bank robbers and black prisoners?”

So she had read the first script, too. Jerry fought his depression. There were things to be learned here.

“Nothing,” he said. “You're right, I'm acting like a jerk.”

Her buzzer buzzed again, and Jerry waited without listening. At last she said, “I have an appointment now, but I want you to keep writing. Just try a little harder to evaluate what an audience, a very
large
audience, would pay to see.”

He came out of the building, his script in his hands, his mind racing. This had been his first real brush with the real Hollywood, and he hadn't come off so badly, not so badly at all. He found a pink parking ticket tucked under the windshield of his Porsche, but it did not bother him. Cheap enough at the price.

HARRIET HARDARDT'S advice was good. There was no reason for Jerry to go on writing scripts that wouldn't get made, no matter how “good” or “interesting” they were. That word
interesting.
It used to be one of his favorite words. Now it made him think of people leaning forward slightly in their theater seats. These people were not wide-eyed or laughing or holding hands, they weren't even scared. They were watching an “interesting” movie.

“How did you like the picture?”

“Uh, it was very
interesting
. . .”

Jerry thrashed around for a project. While he thrashed, he stayed pretty much at Barbara's. There was no point in sitting at the typewriter when he didn't even have a project. And besides, their love life was improving. Maybe Jerry was just getting better used to her timing; whatever the reason, they were more in synch, and there was less reason for him to fake. This took much of the pressure off him, and he began enjoying himself more. It got so that during the day, at odd moments, he found himself staring off into space, thinking about Barbara sexually. He had never had erotic daydreams about somebody he had been going with. Always before they had been about hopelessly unobtainable women, whose images stared at him from the pages of magazines or shone down on him from theater screens. Now he was fancying, in his mind, catching her in an elevator, a full elevator, and crowding her over into a corner and actually fucking her, while she looks over his shoulder, her face reddening as she knows she is going to cry out . . .

And others. An open-field fantasy. One about love in a rainstorm, with mud and thunder . . .

“What's on your mind?” Richard might say to him. Pulling him back to reality.

“Oh, daydreaming different ways to fuck your sister,” he definitely never did say.

“Dreams of lust and avarice,” he would and did say.

Richard, with his fresh white shirt for every workday, all in bad taste, with backs that bulged out, instead of being tapered to Richard's waist. Jerry was getting pretty clothes conscious, since his figure had improved. Barbara loved to take him to a small men's store on Sunset, where the clerks, all gay as rats, fussed over him and acted as consultants. Jerry's wardrobe was definitely getting classier, a bit more color, European cuts, silk ties . . . Richard was getting on Jerry's nerves, with his assumption that Jerry was now “family,” that Richard was the matchmaker and therefore entitled to eternal gratitude. One day when they were the last two in the office (they would dine at Richard's with the family and the television), Richard brought out a yellow-orange packet of Polaroid prints and started to show them to Jerry. Jerry could not believe his eyes. Badly photographed, with horrible highlights and shadows, red-eyed people, pornography that included not only Richard but his wife. And, Jerry recognized numbly, some of their neighbors.

“Just a little hobby of mine,” Richard said proudly. “We belong to a swing group and I'm the official photographer.”

Later Jerry asked Barbara if she knew about it, and she thought Jerry was making a bad joke. Finally he got mad at her.

“I'll steal some of the goddamn pictures and show them to you,” he said.

“Oh, no, please don't!” she said. She didn't want to know.

So the pictures were an intimacy between Richard and himself. The first of a long line of confidences, he imagined. Well, what about it? Barbara was perfectly wonderful, and he could imagine that being married to her would be wonderful as well. Barbara would immediately want children. They could start a family, and with their combined incomes, live pretty well, nice house, good big enclosed yard, swimming pool, hot tub, grapefruit tree, the works.

But it would mean an end to his Hollywood ambitions. No, he thought furiously, it doesn't have to be that way! If he could succeed in Hollywood before getting married or making any foolish moves, then he would be in the driver's seat. That was the way to do it.

Then, at the donut shop one morning, he ran into Toby.

“A little late for you, isn't it?” Jerry said. He hadn't seen much of Toby lately.

“I'm trackin' you down,” Toby said. Now that Jerry noticed, Toby was a really shabby dresser. Plaid yellow shirt, green pants with grease stains on them. Played-out tennis shoes. Jerry already was wondering why he had spent so much time with this man, only a little while before. Lonely, I guess.

Toby's eyes were glittering. “I got a connection for you,” he said. “Remember Elektra Soong's brother? Karol Dupont? The little drag queen?”

Jerry remembered. He looked away from Toby with some embarrassment, and found himself staring into the eyes of Helen, the waitress. Helen smiled. Jerry looked back at Toby.

“She's makin' some goddamn movie down the street here, in the basement under one of those scum theaters.”

“Yes?” said Jerry.

“Don't you get it, man? You could meet her!”

Toby was convinced that such a meeting would result in Jerry getting a “connection” with Richard Heidelberg. Jerry was not so sure, but Toby was all over him.

“You don't know Jack shit about how this town works!” He got a paper cup of coffee to take back to the bookstore.

“Meet me right here on Saturday morning, around ten,” he said to Jerry. “We'll hit the set.”

But Jerry did not show up. Although he was fascinated by the idea of watching a pornographic film shot, even with transvestites, he really could not spare the time. He didn't think Karol Dupont was a “connection” anyway.

His new idea was a good one, if he did say so himself. Instead of trying to write another original, he would adapt a novel. And not just any novel, one that had been made into a movie already, so that he would learn what worked and what didn't. It took him two weeks to find the right project, and then it was almost by accident. He was standing in the drugstore looking over the paperback rack for a copy of
The Big Sleep,
thinking to adapt it. Then he could compare it with the existing screenplay. There was much to be learned from such a process. But there were no copies of
The Big Sleep,
only some short stories and
The Lady in the Lake.
After some hesitation, he bought the novel and took it home to Barbara's house.

He stayed in the living room reading until after two. The book was fascinating, but what was more, there had not been a remake from the rather experimental movie of the mid-forties, in which the camera was Philip Marlowe. This picture did not make money.

Jerry thought he saw something in the story that had been ignored. His idea held all the way through the novel, and even held up when he got back
to his own apartment and looked through his film books and confirmed what he had guessed.

The really successful detective movies, the ones that still played after thirty years, were the ones in which the detective had a strong love interest. Often bittersweet, often tragic.
The Big Sleep
was a terrific example of this, Bogart and Bacall, for Christ's sake! In the novel the love story was smaller, almost a by-product. In the movie it was everything, and nobody really cared who killed Rusty Regan. And even a better example,
The Maltese Falcon!
What was the greatest line in the picture, the one that got all the hankies wet?

“I'm sending you over, sweetheart!”

Tragic love in a detective story setting.

Marlowe has no love interest in
Lady in the Lake.

Jerry would give him one. And not just a love interest. The villain of the novel is a woman, Muriel Chess, AKA Mildred Haviland, AKA Mildred Degarmo, a desperate woman who has killed and will kill again. Why couldn't Marlowe fall in love with her? He thinks she's somebody else, somebody dead, that he's falling in love with a murder victim, not the killer herself.

It ain't Chandler, he thought in the deep of the night, still so wrought up he knew he would not sleep without whiskey. It ain't Chandler, but it's sure Hollywood. My God, it takes elements from
Laura, The Big Sleep
and
The Maltese Falcon.
Not exactly petty larceny.

And then he remembered that it was only an experiment, just something to learn on. Nevertheless he tossed and turned. There was something about that scene, as yet unwritten, where Marlowe finds himself facing not just the woman he has come to love even though she was supposed to be dead, but the woman he must turn in for the murders. What a moment!

The next day at the office Richard held up the telephone with his hand cupped over the mouthpiece and said, “Richard Heidelberg, for you.”

Jerry thought it was Toby, angry that Jerry had not shown up. He took the phone with a sinking heart. Everyone in the office was staring at him.

“Jerry Rexford,” he said.

“Mister Rexford, will you hold for Richard Heidelberg?” said a warm confident female voice.

“Hello, my friend,” came a warm male voice before Jerry could react.

“Hello, there,” he said inanely. He grinned in a sickly way at Richard standing in front of him.

“I'm told you have a terrific idea for a movie,” he heard the voice on the telephone say.

“Uh, yeah,” he said.

“Tell me this. Suppose your idea got made into a movie. And that movie is sold to television. What's the one-sentence description of the movie that appears in the newspaper?”