Blue Movie (23 page)

“‘Trouble before’!” Sid blustered, forcibly tapping his watch, then the first assistant’s chest. “Three-fifteen, and you haven’t got the first shot! You’re in trouble now, buster!”

Only Boris’s arrival kept the admonition from becoming more severe. “Lay off, Sid, it’s not Freddie’s fault.”

“Awright, awright, can we please get the first shot now?”

“We have to wait a few more minutes.”

“Wait? For what?”

“For Hadj,” he nodded in that direction, “the big one with Nicky.”

“You mean it’s not working?”

“Oh yeah, it was working great. A little too great, I guess.”

Sid’s brow furrowed. “You mean . . .”

Boris nodded. “Didn’t stop in time . . . I guess Nicky just got carried away.”

“Why that . . . that dirty little . . . cocksucker!” Sid was raging. “Of all the . . . rotten . . . selfish . . . why, I’ll kill the little bastard!” and he moved as if to actually rush toward them, but Boris restrained him.

“Just take it easy, Sid—he’ll have it up again in a minute.”

Tony joined them, looking relaxed and affable. “Hello, Sidney, how’s the boy?”

Sid glowered at him. “Where the hell have you been?”

“What? Oh, I was over in one of the trailers, uh, working on the script.”

“Like hell you were! You were in there getting your cock sucked! Ha! I saw you!”

“How was that, by the way?” asked Boris.

“Oh . . . I think I’d rate it good to excellent.”

Sid was not amused. “Ha! And how would you rate the work you’ve done on the script today?”

Tony gave Boris a quizzical look. “What’s with him?”

“He’s a little uptight about the schedule.”

“Plus,” Sid added, “plus the fact that Les Harrison is liable to drop in here any minute—and we’re two days behind schedule, and no script to show him! What if he had walked in today? Huh? Not one shot since lunch, and a lot of crazy cocksucking going on all over the place!”

“That reminds me,” said Boris, looking around, “I better check on Nicky.” He started to go over, then stopped short, seeing that they were no longer embraced but were walking to the set, hand in hand. “Well, I guess we can shoot,” he said, and signaled the first assistant to get everyone ready.

“Holy Christ,” muttered Sid, “look at the whang on that coon!”

Boris left them to go to the camera, and Sid glanced at his watch. “Three-thirty—I hope to Christ he can finish that scene today.” He seemed much more at ease now that work was about to resume. He and Tony walked slowly along the row of trailers, approaching the one Boris sometimes used as an office. At the window the silhouette of the girl inside could be seen moving about.

Sid coughed a couple of times, and looked at his watch again, before speaking: “You say that broad gives pretty good head, huh Tone?”

T
HE AFTERNOON’S WORK
had extended into evening, but it had gone extremely well—the Around the Clock sequence was completed, and another begun. In addition, the three “finalists” for the job of doubling for Angela were auditioned, and a decision reached. The “audition” had consisted merely of scrutinizing each girl’s anatomy in the appropriate areas to determine which of them most closely matched Angie’s, and finally, in ascertaining that she was fully and realistically aware of what she would be required to do in the “scene.” As in the case of the double for Arabella, it was Lips Malone who had once more prowled mean streets and. delivered the goods—scoring on this occasion, not from Paris, but from the infamous port city of Hamburg, where he had succeeded in procuring half a dozen extraordinary, although somewhat cynical, nifties.

Ordinarily, it would be necessary to employ only
one
double, but because of the strenuous nature of this particular role, Boris had asked for
two—
and Sid was even
more
cautious. “Christ, let’s take
all
of them—those fucking boogs may turn
cannibal
any minute! Then we’d
really
be up shit creek!”

So the three were engaged—but Sid’s problems on this count were not at an end. He was flabbergasted, then furious, when the doctor who represented the insurance firm the company was using, upon seeing the horde of giant blacks, and being informed of the details of the sequence, had flatly refused to insure the girls at all. “Why, the fucking
quack!”
Sid stamped about the set in a rage which turned to apprehension. “Christ Almighty, if Les Harrison finds out we’re working uninsured actors, he’ll blow his stack! Holy Christ, man, he could even shut us down!”

“We just won’t
tell
him,” said Boris.

“Okay, but what if something
does
happen to one of the broads? I mean, suppose one of those big boogs flips his wig, and does something screwy?”

“Listen,” said Tony, sounding serious and confidential, “why don’t you get the First to wear a
pistol?
Clyde Beatty style, right? Animal-trainer time. One of the boogs blows his stack, goes for a broad—
pow
, you blast him!”

The mere image seemed to excite Sid terrifically. Christ, that’s it! Where the hell is he?” And he rushed off to find Fred, while Boris and Tone enjoyed a hearty guffaw.

D
URING THE PAST TWO
days, in another part of the studio, a second unit had been shooting the “Maude, as a child” footage with Jennifer Jeans—supported, of course, by the two great veteran thesps, Louise Larkin and Andrew Stonington, as Mom and Dad—neither of whom had any real notion of what was taking place on the neighboring set. The footage being prepared here was thoroughly conventional, even wholesome—including the occasional pseudo-artistic use of a partially smeared lens to render the image in an impressionistic style of things dreamed or remembered. Visiting this set gave Sid a warm, nostalgic feeling and a comfortable reassurance, suggesting as it did, with its cliché treatment of extremely genteel material, a certain normalcy of film-making. He even took a sympathetic interest in the material itself, feeling that, after all, this was just the sort of childhood
he
would have liked—with its huge, white-pillared manse, servants in livery, and a back-projection of countless rolling acres. So he visited the set often. “An island of sanity and decency,” he called it, and only once was this appraisal briefly shaken—when he happened to notice, sitting on top of a lens case, a small jar of Vaseline, and his face contorted in anger and confusion, while his eyes raced frantically around the set.
“What the hell’s going on here!?!”
he demanded, with feverish urgency, of the unit director, thinking that somehow the weirdness and corruption of Boris’s set had spread plaguelike to his own sanctuary—but then was enormously relieved to realize that the jar of Vaseline was, of course, merely being used,
and
in almost infinitesimal quantity, to haze the camera lens and soften even more the already very romantic image.

“Frankie, my boy,” Sid had grown fond of saying to the unit director, “let’s do another
take,
” and he would snap his fingers with what he assumed to be the
largesse
of the
grand seigneur,
“better safe than sorry, eh Frankie? Ha-ha,” while the crew looked on in irate wonder, some of them knowing him from Hollywood days as “Mr. Shorts,” a reference to penury and avarice based on his use of “short ends” of film—that is to say, the last bit of film remaining on the spool after the shot is finished, generally discarded as of no use, but often snipped by lab assistants, prior to processing, and sold for little or naught. One of the less apocryphal of the Bev Hills after-dinner anecdotes was the story of how Sid Krassman had tried to structure an entire shooting script on the use of “short ends.” But, unbeknownst to the grips and gaffers, scowling in confusion, was that this apparent foible of Krassman’s—this absurdly tremendous
overshooting—
was, in fact, boss relevant . . . because it was
this
footage which they intended to show to Les Harrison, or, for that matter, to anyone else who might suddenly drop by, and insist on seeing “just what the heck kind of motion picture they were sinking their hard-ready into!”

And now, of course, he
had
arrived. Tony was up all the night before, writing some fairly conventional—and wholly arbitrary—scenes and dialogue, supposedly representing Angela’s Casbah sequence. For the purposes of this subterfuge, the locale had been retained, since a tour of the handsome Casbah set was planned as part of Les Harrison’s diversion. What had been changed, quite basically, were the characters in the sequence: the protagonist was no longer a decadent, drug-crazy nymphomaniac, but a sort of Eva Marie Saint type Peace Corps worker, who had come to the dark continent in search of “inner values,” or—“and I hope this doesn’t sound too darn pretentious,” Tony had written in a marginal note—“what I like to think of as ‘the eternal verities,’” while, for the dozen or so black ravishers, he had substituted a single lover—an ofay Frenchie Pepe le Moko type. Les perused it with considerable interest, even making an occasional suggestion.

“I think we can play this love scene pretty
hot,”
he would say, boldly thumping the script at an open page, “you know, the whole bare-tits bit—naturally, we’ll do a cover-shot on it, so there won’t be any hassle about a TV sale. Too bad, though, we couldn’t get Belmondo—what’d you say this other kid’s name is?”

“Uh, Lamont,” said Sid, “yeah, André Lamont . . . I mean, when we couldn’t get Jean-Paul, we decided what the hell, let’s go with an unknown . . . get a fresh face up there—right, Les?”

Les nodded wisely. “‘If you can’t get the
best,
go with the unknown every time!’ Dad told me that when I was nine years old, Sid, and I remember it like it was yesterday.” He glanced at his watch. “Hey, sun’s over the yardarm—you know, I wouldn’t mind
having
that drink about now.”

Sid beamed. “Coming up, Les!” and he poured out the bubbly.

“And I’ll tell you something else, Sid,” Les hit the script again, hard but curiously affectionate, slapping it the way a businessman might smack a good-natured whore on the ass, or like the football players do each other, “you know, this is
pretty damn good
. . . I mean, I don’t say it’s Stan Shapiro, but, Christ, when Tony’s
hot,
he can really wrap up the old ball game, right?”

Sid had to cough for a second, but quickly recovered. “Yeah, oh yeah, he’s . . . well, he’s . . . well, I mean,
you
know how
he
is . . . right?”

Then he took him to see some footage—six hours of Jennifer Jeans, playing Angie as a child.

There was a moment when Jen—as an eight-year-old with pigtails and innocently short schoolgirl hemline—back to camera, slowly bent over to tie her shoe.

“Say, said Les, next to Sid in the darkened projection room, “how
is
Jen, anyway?”

“Oh she’s fine, Les, just fine—she’ll sure be glad to see
you,
I bet.”

“Hmm, said Les, returning his scrutiny to the cineramic stretch of back-of-calf, back-of-knee, back-of-thigh, right up to back-of-straight-edged-simple-snow-white-young-girl-panties, “uh, you know, she might be just right for . . . well, uh, see if you can get her up to my room, Sid, in, say, half an hour after we finish here.”

“Take it off your mind, Les,” Sid assured him, “she’ll be
there.”

“That’s beautiful, Sid, and, uh, have her in that
same outfit,
okay?
‘Little Miss Marker’
. . . I mean, we’re thinking about doing remakes of the whole Shirley Temple series. Be a hell of a break for the girl who’s right for it—know what I mean?”

Sid nodded vigorously. “I’m with
you,
Les.”

By the time they came out of the screening room, it was about seven o’clock.

“What I see,” said Les, tight-lipped, nodding his head firmly, “I
like.
I like the
look
of it. Dad used to say, ‘Show me eight frames of film, and I’ll tell you what your picture’s going to look like!’” He repeated his, wise firm nod.
“This
I like the look of.”

Sid’s spirits were soaring, and his heavy gait took on the sort of prancing bounce which, on good days, he had used to saunter in and out of the executive dining room at the Metro commissary, every step reflecting outrageous confidence. He glanced at his watch. “Say, tell you what, Les—Jenny will be up to your room at eight . . . that gives you about half an hour to kill, why don’t you have a look at the terrific Casbah set we had Nicky Sanchez do for Angela’s sequence?”

Les nodded. “The kid’s a genius. I’ve said so for years. Dad discovered him, you know.”

Although it was Saturday, Sid knew that they had been shooting—but he also knew they had wrapped at five-thirty, because at about that time he had seen Helen Vrobel and a couple of the technicians come into the hotel bar when he went there to pick up Les. He was somewhat surprised, therefore, to find the heavy sound-stage door unlocked, and then inside, to see light from a distant set.

“What the hell,” snapped Les, looking at his watch and frowning, “don’t tell me you’re into
overtime
already!”

“Uh, no, no,” Sid assured him, falteringly, straining rather wild-eyed to see what was happening on the set beyond, “it’s probably the, uh,
cleaning woman . . .
”

“Cleaning women, my ass—
that
set is
lit!”
He looked furiously at his watch again, “Christ, man, it’s seven-ten Saturday night—that’s
one hour and forty minutes golden time!
What kind of operation
is
this, anyway?!?”

Then there was the unmistakable echoing snap of the clapboard, and the indistinct murmurs of: “Turning” . . . “Speed” . . . “Action” . . . and Les surged forward toward the set, only to be slammed back by the sheer visual impact of what confronted him there. It was the “double work” in progress, and all three girls were being used—or, more properly,
ravished
—by a dozen schwartzo-starkers in a spanking new “orgy version” of the so-called Around the Clock number, as devised by Boris and Tony that very afternoon. Three cameras were turning—the big Mitchell on the medium master-shot, taking in the entire scene, while the two Arries moved about freely, from one crotch and full-pen shot to the next . . . in and out, so to speak.