The Movie (42 page)

Megan felt desperately tired and unhappy. She ran one sticky hand through the platinum-blonde mop she’d been regretting ever since she had it done; yet again, she’d been twisting herself into something she wasn’t in the hope of pleasing a guy, only to find it was all for nothing. That short-skirted, blonde-haired designer bitch thing was a mil/ion miles from the real Megan Silver, and suddenly she felt a sharp pang of remorse. As soon as she got home it was back to brown hair, cornfyjeans and Veruca Salt Tshirts. Because, as she now realized, David Tauber wasn’t worth it.

She admitted to herself she didn’t love him.

‘David, please. I’m knocked out. I just need some sleep, a little time to breathe.’

‘No. No way, lady. You’ll be in our room tonight as usual.’ David was bristling with anger. ‘You wanted to be

with me so bad? Fine. But you play by my rules.’

She admitted to herself she didn’t like lfim.

‘It’s over, David,’ Megan said wearily. And it was; yet

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another brilliant Megan Silver waste of energy, romantic dreams and hope. Because David Tauber, no matter how hard she’d tried to kid herself, had never been any substitute for.., for…

She suppressed that idea as soon as it surfaced, tkeality check, girl, he’s way, way out of your league, and you know it. No amount ofmakeovers are gonna turn you into tkoxana Felix.

‘You’re just hysterical, you stupid little bitch!’ Tauber’s smooth features were purple with fury. Megan thought she could dump him! ‘You don’t know what you’re saying!’

Megan picked up her laptop. ‘Well, David, that’s where you’re wrong,’ she said calmly, and then she turned on her heel and walked away, leaving him standing on the beach ‘ spluttering with rage and disbelief.

Tom Goldman sat perfectly still in the air-conditioned comfort of his oce, wondering if there was any way out of this situation. His normally resourceful mind would once have known exactly how to handle it; it would have p}esented.him with several options, it would have offered him some kind of a get-out, some excuse not to do what Jake Keller was suggesting. The trouble was that right now he couldn’t think of a single one.

Everything the vice-president said made perfect sense. You couldn’t argue with it; he had a 95-million-dollar movie that was already a month behind schedule, nine million over budget, and by all accounts turning out to be a creative turkey.

See She Lights had been his big rescue package for Artemis Studios. If it failed, Eleanor Marshall was history. And since he had pushed for her appointment, he wod be history.

‘Eleanor Marshall took over the production on this project,’ Keller was saying, his nasty weasel face looking smug. ‘You heard her, Tom. She threatened to have me

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barred from script meetings. And she forced me to draw up all my objections to the ftlm in a long memo, sign it and copy you on it.’

He fished about in the document wallet he was carrying and placed a copy of the memo on Tom’s desk. ‘At the time I was somewhat offended.’ A beat, an unpleasant smile. ‘But on reflection, maybe the little lady was doing me a favour. Once I finished this, I submitted a copy to Mr Thorn, too. After all, he is the chairman of the board. I felt I should have the courage of my convictions.’

Keller leaned back in his chair, enjoying the effect his words were having. At the mention of Mr Thorn his boss had gone pale.

Thanks for the tip, loxana, he thought.

‘I see,’ Goldman said.

‘Do you, Tom?’ Keller packed sarcasm into the words. ‘I wonder. leanor has been responsible for buying a weak script, using unnamed actors in a terrible miscasting, and for a series of location and logistical errors that are sending costs spiralling out of control. This studio doesn’t even know what’s going on over there. As of last week, Florescu has stopped sending me the dailies. And without rushes how are we supposed to know if there’s something worth using coming out of this mess? You must admit that what we’ve seen so far isn’t encouraging. And word is out amongst the industry, Tom.’

‘Already?’ Goldman asked, his expression stricken. ‘Well… rumours are starting up. I have the publicity department working flat out to-counter them, but…’ Keller shrugged. ‘You know how it is.’

Yeah, Goldman thought. I know exactly how it is. If I don’t give you what you want, you’re gonna put word on the street yourself, and that could be fatal for us.

On the rumours of a smash with See the Lights, Artemis stock had soared. They’d gone so long without a hit that it had been cruising along at the bottom of its price range,

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undervaluing the company when you considered its software library and real estate assets. The Mason/Florescu project had been seen as a sure-fire smash, and given Eleanor’s reputation for accuracy and tight budgeting, nobody had figured it would do worse than break even. The stock price had responded accordingly. But if news of this fiasco got out…

My God, Goldman thought, experiencing a renewed burst of panic. How many shares have I got? Preferred stock options had been a big chunk of his salary package over the last twenty years.

He did a quick calculation and felt ill. Forget about losing his job. He could lose his house. Millions would be wiped offthe value of his portfolio…

How would he explain that to Jordan? ‘Oh gee, honey, I’m sorry, but you won’t be able to throw that Save the Painforest bash after all. And I think we should talk about selling one of the cars, to see the baby through college?’ Jesus H. Christ, he could see her face now. And it wasn’t e.xacdy wearing a supportive Stand by Your Man expression!

Eleanor would stand by me, Tom thought.

No! Screw Eleanor! She got us all into this mess!

‘Jake, I hear what you’re saying,’ Goldman told him, reluctantly . He didn’t want to have to cooperate with the little prick, but Jake had been right all along and he and Eleanor conspicuously wrong. Who had a choice?

‘Good,’ Jake Keller smiled thinly. He had Goldman by the balls, and they both knew it. ‘So it’s settled, then. I’ll bring my plan to save the movie and a revised budget along to the big production meeting next week. I intend to challenge Eleanor on every point in this memo.’ He tapped the document arrogandy. ‘That way, if she’s got a defence or a better idea, she’ll get a chance to counter. But if she doesn’t, you pat me in charge of the fdm, effective right away.’

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Goldman sighed. Such a move would be the same as firing her. No president could accept a demotion like that from the CEO; Eleanor would have to resign, right then

and there, in front of the entire management team.

‘Do we have to do it so publicly?’

Keller smiled again. ‘That’s the only way I want to do it. Out in the open. You know how I hate sneaking around behind people’s backs.’

He stood up to leave. ‘Do we have a deal, Tom?’

Goldman took the limp hand thrust towards him and shook it without enthusiasm. ‘I guess so,’ he said.

‘Jesus,’ Zach Mason muttered, looking around him.

‘Impressive, don’t you think?’ Fred Florescu asked, pleased by his star’s awestruck reaction. ‘I wanted you to take a look at this place tonight, get a feel for it before we start shooting tomorrow.’

The two men were standing on the side of a dusty mountain road, at the entrance to a tourists’ walking path carved out of the vegetation by the Seychellois government. Photographs of the mist forest were what had made Florescu choose Mah6 for his jungle, and now he was showing Zach Mason the real thing. As they climbed out of their battered four-wheel truck, the emerald slopes of Morne Blanc had looked pretty ordinary, just a dense, impenetrable tangle of trees. But two steps into the pool of green shadow and Mason’s mouth hung open in astonishment.

They were standing on the edge of a mountain ridge, the path dropping away downwards and to their left. The woodland before them was a mass of open space, creepers and small green plants growing under the verdant canopy, shafts of bright sunlight piercing through here and there, illuminating the mist and the tropical palms. Gnarled bwa rouz trees dripping with damp red moss crowded the sides. of the path, orchids curling round some of them. There

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was a thick scent of wild cinnamon and albazia, vast ferns were everywhere, and coco matron palms sprouted across the slopes. Zach saw a small electric-blue bird swoop down from some perch and flit through a sun-dappled glade. The whole jungle was alive with movement and noise; insects humming, frogs piping…

‘It looks like something out of Raiders of the Lost Ark,” he said.

Florescu clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Exactly, amigo. Got it in one. This is the most atmospheric backdrop I ever saw, I swear. Which is why I refuse to give up on this thing,

despite what David Tauber is telling me.’

Zach’glanced at him sharply. ‘What?’

The director shrugged. ‘He says that Artemis may be about to pull the plug on the project.’

‘Bullshit. Why would they do that?’

‘According to your agent, because of the weather.’ Zach looked up at the dazzling blue sky behind them, burning hot and clear without a single cloud. ‘The weather looks OK to me.’

“‘It’s the end of September. We should have wrapped here by now. Which would matter a lot less except that the rainy season apparently starts up round about now.’ Florescu shrugged. ‘Tauber says Eleanor Marshall made a huge miscalculation in picking the Seychelles; she didn’t take any delay into account, and the result is that the longer we stay here the more likely we are to get caught by the

rains. And I ain’t talking about a little drizzle, either.’ ‘You mean we’ll be trying to fdm in a monsoon?’

‘You ever seen a monsoon? We’d be packed up. It would break my equipment like matches.’

Zach shook his head. ‘I don’t like it, man.’

The neither!’ the director said, laughing. ‘My movie is turning into a fucking disaster area.’

‘No. I mean I don’t like all this stuffgoing wrong. I don’t buy it. Eleanor Marshall seemed like an intelligent woman

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to me. Savvy. Not the type to authorize fdming in a hurricane.’

‘If we were on schedule, that wouldn’t have happened.’

‘She’d have factored in delays. All those corporate types

do stufflike that; always covering their asses.’

‘Possibly.’

‘And I’ve been watching David. He’s been way too

‘He’s the smooth type,’ Florescu said, but he was watching his star closely, intently. He knew Zach Mason now, and he sensed a picture crystallizing. Mason was uneducated, but he had a keen intelligence buried under all that ferocious sexuality. That was what made the screen come alive; that was what ignited the footage they had managed to shoot, what made it such compulsive viewing. Zach Mason was a natural. He could sink so deep into his character that when Florescu called ‘Cut!’ Zach would sometimes just stand there, a little dazed, taking a few seconds to snap back into the real world. Zach had been Florescu’s hero, and after months of filming together the guy still overawed him; he had the soul of a poet and the aggression of a Samurai, and those deep, savage eyes that mesmerized everybody he gazed at.

God, Florescu thought, I have to show that on screen, I’ve got to be the one to .do it. Nobody’s blended beauty and masculinity like that since Marlon Brando.

‘He’s more than smooth, he’s calm,’ Zach said. ‘See the Lights was the big break for hirri, right? He has P,.oxana, Megan and me. He should be totally panicked to see it slipping away, but he’s not - he’s just hanging around Mary and Seth and Jack, always providing little solutions for them.’

‘Jesus,’ Florescu said slowly. ‘You’re right. He’s acting like somebody who doesn’t need to worry ‘

‘Because he knows everything is gonna be OK.’

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‘Jesus!’ exclaimed the director. ‘You think all this is deliberate?’

‘Why would the studio cancel the project? They must have spent a ton of money already ‘

‘You got that right,’ Florescu agreed grimly.

‘So they have to finish it. Maybe somewhere else, but they have to. We’re nearly done filming, we’ve got under a month to go. They’ll need something to show to set off their losses, right? They can’t afford to kill us offnow.’ ‘How would Artemis know we’re in trouble? I haven’t sent them any rushes for months. Unless loxana Felix is phoning in.’

‘Ioxana’s with David,’ Zach said. ‘He’s the only guy on the set she never gives a hard time to.’

‘ ‘It has to be something to do with Jake Keller,’ Fred butted in, excited. ‘He hates Eleanor Marshall. He got passed over for her job.’

‘I’ve heard David call that guy from the production oflfice a few times.’

They stared at each other.

‘Speculation,’ Florescu said finally. ‘We’re just guessing. Pretty left-field stuff.’

‘But we’re right,’ Zach countered. He brushed a strand of long black hair out of his eyes. ‘You know we are. You can feel it.’

‘So what do you want to do? Confront David? Confront

toxana? I don’t see what good it would do. They won’t admit jack, trust me.’

‘I’m. gonna confront Megan,’ Zack said. ‘She’s weaker than the other two. She’ll talk.’

The director did a double-take. ‘Megan Silver? Now I know you’ve lost it, amigo. She’s been working her butt off, rewriting the script every day. She does what I tell her and she does it fast. There’s no way she wants this movie to fail. The kid works harder than anybody on the set.’

Zach nodded. ‘And that’s something I don’t understand.

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But she’s fucking David Tauber, she’s been his girlfriend for months. She thinks the sun shines out of his ass. She must know what he’s doing.’

Florescu noticed that his tone was suddenly sharp with contempt.

‘All right. When we climb up to the top of Mome Seychellois to shoot the hideout sequence - that’s for just you, me, Jim and Keith with a high-eight camera - I’ll ask Megan along. That’s scheduled for tomorrow afternoon; you can talk to her then.’ ‘Good.’ The singer stared into the tropical forest before him, his handsome face dark with anger. ‘She’s gonna have some serious explaining to do, and then we should know what the fuck’s going on. Because she’s gonna tell me everything, Fred. Megan is the key.’