Disturbing the Peace (Vintage Classics) (24 page)

Pamela wrote letters to both of them, addressed in care of the production company, and while waiting for answers they explored the city. Beverly Hills looked suitably rich, but the houses – at least those that could be seen from the road – were too close together. The Hollywood hills were prettier and some of them commanded nice views, but the canyons led too quickly into the enormous suburban waste of the San Fernando Valley. Downtown Los Angeles held no surprises and seemed to promise that the best parts of town must lie to the west, but when they drove out to the beaches they found only sandy, weatherbeaten slums. Time and again they came home weak with hunger and the need for a drink, feeling oppressed. They had plenty of time and plenty of money, but neither was much consolation.

“Go home for a drink,” Pamela said one afternoon. “That’s all we ever do. We go home for a drink, or three or four, and then we try a new restaurant and have two or three more, and then we go to bed. If only there were someone to call; someone to go and see – just anyone.”

He might have reminded her that the whole crazy idea of coming out here with no prospects had been hers, but he didn’t
want to risk a quarrel. It was bad enough being in this together; it would be unendurable if they were at each other’s throats.

“Take it easy, baby,” he said. “Something’s bound to turn up.”

A letter from Jerry came at last, with a New York postmark, and she tore it open with trembling fingers.

And they were still counting the days before it would be safe to call Carl Munchin when Carl Munchin called them – the nicest thing that had happened to them in Los Angeles so far.

“… Why don’t you drop a copy of your script in the mail to me, Mr. Wilder?” he said. “Then I’ll read it and get back to you.”

That meant a few more days of waiting, and of being afraid to leave the apartment because the phone might ring, but Munchin did get back to them.

“I think it has possibilities,” he said. “I knew it would be well written because Jerry Porter’s a good writer, but I didn’t expect the material to be so interesting in its own right. Listen: can you come out here this afternoon, so we can talk about it?”

He lived in a part of Malibu they could never have discovered on their hopeful visits to the shore – many miles north of the
public beaches, in a big house that was well hidden from the road. The house itself was a wondrous blending of out-and indoor luxury: there was so much furniture on the broad patio that it seemed like a living room, and so much vegetation in the living room that it seemed like a patio. He was a big, tan, bald man with a small tan wife, and they wore matching safari jackets. Helen Munchin never took her eyes off her husband’s face when he was talking, and she looked wholly absorbed. Only in the intervals of his speech did she allow her gaze to stray from him, and then it met the visitors’ eyes in a way that said Isn’t Carl wonderful? Aren’t I the luckiest girl in the world?

“… The way it stands now you’ve got a nice little art-house piece,” he said. They were drinking gin and tonic on the patio while the sun set in the gleaming Pacific. “It could fill out the bill with some short foreign film. Probably get a few bookings in New York, maybe one or two in San Francisco, and forget the rest of the country. Might do better in Europe, but not much. Whereas what I have in mind would be a selling proposition as well as an art piece; I mean a commercially viable property. Let me fill you in. First of all, there’s one central weakness in your script. Your protagonist – the man all this Bellevue business
happens
to – is never really characterized.”

“We planned it that way,” Wilder said. “We wanted him to be a sort of nameless observer, you see, a kind of Everyman.”

“Impossible. You can’t start with an Everyman.” And Carl Munchin wagged his forefinger from side to side, smiling cannily, like a high-school English teacher about to make a trenchant point. “Only through the particular can you find the universal.” He paused to let that sink in; then he got up and began pacing the flagstones in his clean desert boots. “I mean who is this guy?” he demanded. “What’s he like when he’s not in Bellevue? How does being in Bellevue change his life? I want
a revised, shortened version of this script of yours to serve as part one, you see. Then I want to see a part two and a part three. You follow me?”

“I’m not sure,” Wilder said. “What would happen in parts two and three?”

“We’ll have to get ourselves a good writer and work it out. Just as a guideline I’d say build him up for another breakdown – a real breakdown – in part two, and then in part three let him have it. Pull out all the stops. Oh, if this were Nineteen Fortyfive or Forty-six I’d say play it differently; put him in the hands of a brilliant psychiatrist, let part three be his struggle to a miraculous recovery – the analyst helps him remember some childhood experience that clears up all his problems – but people aren’t buying that stuff any more. Today’s audience is more sophisticated. I say let him go crazy. Wipe him out.”

“Would he commit a crime?” Wilder said. “Like assassinating Kennedy or something?”

“That might work except everybody knows who assassinated Kennedy. Besides, I don’t think he has to commit a crime. Just let him get so he can’t live in civilized society any more. Make him a real paranoid schizophrenic. If our writer doesn’t know how to handle that we’ll send him out to Camarillo with a tape recorder.”

“Where?”

“Camarillo. The state hospital. Go out there with a tape recorder, listen to the way those people talk. Might pick up some good ideas.”

“Mm,” Wilder said. “Well. What do you think, Pamela?”

She took a neat sip of her drink before answering, and then she addressed Munchin. “I’m afraid I still don’t see why something can’t be done with the picture as it is,” she said. “I don’t know if John made this clear to you, Mr. Munchin, but it’s
already been filmed. It was never finished – never cut, that is – but it was filmed and directed by Julian Feld, the man who did
Burn All Your Cities
. And even if it were limited to an art-house distribution, isn’t there a good chance that it might lead to other things? Bigger things?”

“Sure it might,” Munchin said. “You’d always have that hope. But just for now we’re talking about what’s of interest to me, right?” He smiled engagingly, displaying many clean, strong teeth. “The three-part version is of interest to me. The short version is not.”

She wouldn’t let him go. “Well then, do you know anyone – or know
of
anyone – who might be interested?”

“Honey,” he said, still smiling, “even if I did I wouldn’t tell you.”

She looked stung for a second, until Helen Munchin’s happy laugh announced that he was only teasing, and over the pouring of fresh drinks he went back to his plan.

Put a man in Bellevue, let him go back to whatever problems sent him there, let those problems work on him until he’s up to the breaking point and then watch him break – watch him go down beyond the reach of any psychiatric help – that, Carl Munchin said, was a story: the kind of material a good writer could sink his teeth into. And getting a good writer would be no problem. “This town’s crawling with writers. If we can’t get Jerry Porter we’ll go to an agent – I’m in touch with two or three of the top agencies – and we’ll have a first-rate writer working for us in no time.”

“Well, I don’t know, Mr. Munchin,” Wilder said. “We’ll have to think about it and talk it over some more.”

“Sure you will. You may not see the possibilities right away because you’re married to this short version, this Bellevue section, but keep an open mind. I think we have the makings of
a very distinguished motion picture here.” And when he said “a very distinguished motion picture” his wife gave a little shudder of pleasure. Then she stood up to indicate that the cocktail hour was over.

“We’ll get together on this again soon,” Munchin said. “Meanwhile, can you leave a copy of that script with me? I’d like to show it to a few people, kind of sound them out. Well, it’s been very enjoyable. Talk to you later.”

“… And we don’t even know who the man is,” Pamela said as they rode back along the Pacific Coast Highway. “Jerry says he’s ‘a kind of gentleman producer,’ but what’s
that
, for heaven’s sake? Besides, I think his Big Idea is lousy, don’t you?”

“I don’t know. Still thinking about it.”

“
Oh
, I’m so disappointed. I thought he’d want ‘Bellevue’ in its own right, and here he takes off on this whole new tangent. John, do you realize where we’d be if only Julian had finished this picture long ago? We’d have come out here with a whole finished
thing
to sell – we’d have been able to deal with distributors instead of groping around among the Edgar Freemans and the Carl Munchins.”

He told her to forget Edgar Freeman. He said Munchin was different. Munchin had said he’d show it to some people, and that could lead to almost anything. “I don’t think it was a bad day’s work, baby,” he concluded, and as he steered down the highway he planned other ways to cheer her up: they would go to the best restaurant they’d found and drink just enough to restore the dwindling glow of Munchins’ gin; then they’d order whatever looked best on the expensive menu, with wine, and through it all he’d make her see that Munchin’s idea wasn’t necessarily so lousy after all….

“Yes it is,” she insisted, turning the stem of her brandy glass between her fingers. “It’s asinine. It suggests that anyone who’s
spent a week in Bellevue is destined for a life of madness. What kind of nonsense is that?”

He felt as if he were trying to convince her, once again, that
Gunga Din
was the best boy’s movie ever made. “I don’t think it suggests that,” he said, “or at least it wouldn’t have to, if we got a good writer. Oh, I’ll agree Munchin was pretty silly today, but he was talking off the top of his head. A good writer could particularize the man, make him a flesh-and-blood character with problems uniquely his own. Then the story of his downfall would follow its own logic. Don’t you see?”

“No.”

“You’re just in the wrong mood. Look, I thought Munchin was kind of a horse’s ass too, but he could be valuable to us all the same. Let’s – you know – keep an open mind.”

“Okay,” she said. “I guess there’s not much else we
can
do.”

Within two weeks they were back on Carl Munchin’s patio, and this time four other men were there. One was a lawyer Pamela’s father had recommended, one was Munchin’s lawyer, and the other two – both short, dark men who seemed to look exactly alike – were introduced as Munchin’s business associates. And by the end of that afternoon, after the flourishing of several dense documents and the scribbling of several signatures, they had incorporated and formed a production company.

“Is that really how these things are done?” Pamela said. “It all seemed so easy.”

“It seemed easy because we have good lawyers,” Munchin said, tilting a martini pitcher toward her glass. “Now all we have to do is find the backing and make the picture.”

“… So we’re in business,” Wilder said as they drove home that night. “We’re producers.”

“I know; I suppose we ought to celebrate or something, but
I still don’t feel right about it. I still don’t trust Munchin’s idea.”

Soon – almost too soon, it seemed – there was a conference with the writer Munchin had secured from one of the two or three top agencies, a tall, fat, nervous man named Jack Haines.

“… I see him as a married man,” he said, soundlessly treading Munchin’s patio in a pair of desert boots that must have looked just like Munchin’s when they were new. “He’s unhappily married and he’s got kids he can’t relate to and he feels trapped. He’s solidly middle class. I don’t know what he does for a living, but let’s say it’s something well paid and essentially meaningless, like advertising. When he gets out of Bellevue he’s scared and lost but he doesn’t know where to turn. Maybe he gets involved with a quack psychoanalyst, that’d give us an opportunity for some humor – black humor – and then he meets a girl. The girl—”

“Hold it right there, Jack,” Carl Munchin said. “I can see you’ve given this a lot of thought, but I can’t help feeling there’s a quality of cliché about everything you’ve said so far. Unhappy advertising man, gray flannel suit and all that. We can’t have a character who meets his downfall out of some cockamamie, two-for-a-nickel
Weltschmerz
. This is a dark story. We need a man who’s
doomed
.” And Helen Munchin said “Oh, yes.”

Jack Haines blinked and looked wounded, but not for long. “Well, Carl, I think the quality you’re looking for will be there in the writing. All I’m giving you now is the briefest kind of summary; I don’t see how you can make a judgment like that on the basis of – look, can I go on? Okay. The girl tries to help him. She offers him hope, and for a little while it’s a happy affair – that gives us the upbeat flavor we need for the ending of part two; then, zap! In part three everything falls to pieces. He can’t handle the hope the girl’s given him; he’s emotionally tied to the past. He is a ‘dark’ character, as you’ll see, and he brings on his own—”

“Does he commit suicide?”