The cutting room, p.8
The Cutting Room, page 8
Milo clenched his teeth. That had been when he had thought the movie was going to be a smash.
“I had a concept, Howie, one that cut through the bounds and limitations of the novel. I wanted to raise the level of the material, but the producers stymied me at every turn.”
Actually, he had been pretty much on his own down there in Haiti. He had changed the book a lot, made loads of cuts and condensations. He had made it “A Milo Gherl Film.”
But somewhere along the way, he had lost it. Unanimously hostile one-star reviews with leads like, “Shut The Hut” and “New Gherl Pix the Pits” hadn’t helped. Twentieth had been pushing an offer in its television division and he had been holding them off—who wanted to do TV when you could do theatricals? But as the bad reviews piled up and the daily grosses plummeted, he grabbed the TV offer. It was good money, had plenty of prestige, but it was still television.
Milo wanted to do films and very badly wanted in on the new package Regenstein was putting together for TriStar. Howie had Jack Nicholson, Bobby De Niro, and Kathy Turner firm and was looking for a director. More than anything else in his career, Milo wanted to be that director. But he wasn’t going to be. He knew that now.
Well, at least he could use the job to pay the bills and keep his name before the public until The Hut was forgotten. That wouldn’t be long. A year or two at most and he’d be back directing another theatrical. Not a package like Regenstein’s, but something with a decent budget where he could do the screenplay and direct. That was the way he liked it—full control on paper and on film.
He shrugged at Regenstein and put on his best good-natured smile. “What can I say, Howie? The world wasn’t ready for The Hut. Someday, they’ll appreciate it.”
Yeah, right, he thought as Regenstein nodded noncommittally. At least Howie was letting him down easy, letting him keep his dignity here. That was important. All he had to do now was—
Milo screamed as pain tore into his left eye like a bolt of lightning. He lurched to his feet, upsetting the table as he clamped his hands over his eye in a vain attempt to stop the agony.
Pain! Oh Christ, pain as he had never known it was shooting from his eye straight into his brain. This had to be a stroke! What else could hurt like this?
Through his good eye, he had a whirling glimpse of everybody in the dining room standing and staring at him as he staggered around. He pulled one hand away from his eye and reached out to steady himself. He saw a smear of blood on his fingers. He took the other hand away. His left eye was blind, but with his right he saw the dripping red on his palm. A woman screamed.
“My God, Milo!” Regenstein said, his chalky face swimming into view. “Your eye! What did you do to your eye?” He turned to a gaping waiter. “Get a doctor! Get a fucking ambulance!”
Milo was groggy from the Demerol they had given him. In the blur of hours since breakfast, he’d been wheeled in and out of the emergency room so many times, poked with so many needles, examined by so many doctors, x-rayed so many times, his head was spinning.
At least the pain had eased off.
“I’m admitting you onto the vascular surgery service, Mr. Gherl,” said the bearded doctor as he pushed back one of the white curtains that shielded Milo’s gurney from the rest of the emergency room. His badge said, EDWARD JANSEN, M.D., and he looked tired and irritable.
Milo struggled up through the Demerol downgrade. “Vascular surgery? But my eye—!”
“As Dr. Burch told you, Mr. Gherl, your eye can’t be saved. It’s ruined beyond repair. But maybe we can save your feet and your hand if it’s not too late already.
“Save them?”
“If we’re lucky. I don’t know what kind of games you’ve been into, but getting yourself tied up with piano wire is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of.”
Milo was growing more alert by the second now. Over Dr. Jansen’s shoulder, he saw the bustle of the emergency room personnel, saw an old black mopping the floor in slow, rhythmic strokes. But he was only seeing it with his right eye. He reached up to the bandage over his left. Ruined? He wanted to cry, but Dr. Jansen’s piano-wire remark suddenly filtered through to his consciousness.
“Piano wire? What are you talking about?”
“Don’t play dumb. Look at your feet.” Dr. Edwards pulled the sheet free from the far end of the gurney.
Milo looked. The nail beds were white and the skin below the indentations was a dusky blue. And the indentations had all become clean, straight, bloody cuts right through the skin and into the meat below. His right hand was the same.
“See that color?” Jansen was saying. “That means the tissues below the wire cuts aren’t getting enough blood. You’re going to have gangrene for sure if we don’t restore circulation soon.”
Gangrene! Milo levered up on the gurney and felt his toes with his good hand. Cold! “No! That’s impossible!”
“I’d almost agree with you,” Dr. Jansen said, his voice softening for a moment as he seemed to be talking to himself. Behind him, Milo noticed the old black moving closer with his mop. “When we did x-rays, I thought we’d see the wire embedded in the flesh there, but there was nothing. Tried Xero soft-tissue technique in case you had used fishing line or something, but that came up negative, too. Even probed the cuts myself, but there’s nothing in there. Yet the arteriograms clearly show that the arteries in your lower legs and right forearm are compressed to the point where very little blood is getting through. The tissues are starving. The vascular boys may have to do bypasses.”
“I’m getting out of here!” Milo said. “I’ll see my own doctor!”
“I’m afraid I can’t allow that.”
“You can’t stop me! I can walk out of here anytime I want!”
“I can keep you seventy-two hours for purposes of emergency psychiatric intervention.”
“Psychiatric!”
“Yeah. Self-mutilation. Your mind worries me almost as much as your arteries, Mr. Gherl. I’d like to make sure you don’t poke out your other eye before you get treatment.”
“But I didn’t—!”
“Please, Mr. Gherl. There were witnesses. Your breakfast companion said he had just finished giving you some disappointing news when you screamed and rammed something into your eye.”
Milo touched the bandage over his eye again. How could they think he had done this to himself?
“My God, I swear I didn’t do this!”
“That kind of trauma doesn’t happen spontaneously, Mr. Gherl, and according to your companion, no one was within reach of you. So one way or the other, you’re staying. Make it easy on both of us and do it voluntarily.”
Milo didn’t see that he had a choice. “I’ll stay,” he said. “Just answer me one thing: You ever seen anything like this before?”
Jansen shook his head. “Never. Never heard of anything like it either.” He took a sudden deep breath and smiled through his beard with what Milo guessed was supposed to be doctorly reassurance. “But, hey. I’m only an ER doc. The vascular boys will know what to do.”
With that, he turned and left, leaving Milo staring into the wide-eyed black face of the janitor.
“What are you staring at?” Milo said.
“A man in big trouble,” the janitor said in a deep, faintly accented voice. He was pudgy with a round face, watery eyes, and two days’ worth of silvery growth on his jowls. With a front tooth missing on the top, he looked like Leon Spinks gone to seed for thirty years. “These doctors can’t be helpin’ what you got. You got a Bocor mad at you, and only a Houngon can fix you.”
“Get lost!” Milo said.
He lay back on the gurney and closed his good eye to shut out the old man and the emergency room. He hunted for sleep as an escape from the pain and the gut-roiling terror, praying he’d wake up and learn that this was all just a horrible dream. But those words wouldn’t go away. Bocor and Houngon . . . he knew them somehow. Where?
And then it hit him like a blow—The Hut! They were voodoo terms from the novel The Hut! He hadn’t used them in the film—he’d scoured all mention of voodoo from his screenplay—but the author had used them in the book. If Milo remembered correctly, a Bocor was an evil voodoo priest and a Houngon was a good one. Or was it the other way around? Didn’t matter. They were all part of Bill Franklin’s bullshit novel.
Franklin! Wouldn’t he like to see me now! Milo thought. Their last meeting had been anything but pleasant. Unforgettable, yes. His mind did a slow dissolve to his new office at Twentieth two weeks ago. . . .
“Some conference!”
The angry voice startled Milo and he spilled hot coffee down the front of his shirt. He leaped up from behind his desk and bent forward, pulling the steaming fabric away from his chest. “Jesus H.—”
But then he looked up and saw Bill Franklin standing there and his anger cooled like fresh blood in an arctic breeze. Maggie’s anxious face peered over Franklin’s narrow shoulder.
“I tried to stop him, Mr. Gherl, honest I did, but he wouldn’t listen!”
“You’ve been ducking me for a month, Gherl!” Franklin said in his nasal voice. “No more tricks!”
Maggie said, “Shall I call security?”
“I don’t think that will be necessary, Maggs,” he said quickly, grabbing a Kleenex from the oak tissue holder on his desk and blotting at his stained shirtfront. Milo had moved into this office only a few weeks ago, and the last thing he needed today was an ugly scene with an irate writer. He could tell from Franklin’s expression that he was ready to cause a doozy. Better to bite the bullet and get this over with. “I’ll talk to Mr. Franklin. You can leave him here.” She hesitated and he waved her toward the door. “Go ahead. It’s all right.”
When she had closed the door behind her, he picked up the insulated brass coffee urn and looked at Franklin. “Coffee, Billy-boy?”
“I don’t want coffee, Gherl! I want to know why you’ve been ducking me!”
“But I haven’t been ducking you, Billy!” he said, refreshing his own cup. He would have to change this shirt before he did lunch later. “I’m not with Universal anymore. I’m with Twentieth now, so naturally my offices are here.” He swept an arm around him. “Not bad, ay?”
Milo sat down and tried his best to look confident, at ease. Inside, he was anything but. Right now he was a little afraid of the writer stalking back and forth before the desk like a caged tiger. Nothing about Franklin’s physical appearance was the least bit intimidating. He was fair-haired and tall, with big hands and feet attached to a slight, gangly frame. He had a big nose, a small chin, and a big Adam’s apple—Milo had noticed on their first meeting two years ago that he could slant a perfectly straight line along the tips of those three protuberances. A moderate overbite did not help the picture. Milo’s impression of Franklin had always been that of a patient, retiring, rational man who never raised his voice.
But today he was barging about with a wild look in his eyes, shouting, gesticulating, accusing. Milo remembered an old saying his father used to quote to him when he was a boy: Beware the wrath of a patient man.
Franklin had paused and was looking around the spacious room with its indirect lighting, its silver-gray floor-to-ceiling louvered blinds and matching carpet, the chrome and onyx wet bar, the free-form couches, the abstract sculptures on the Lucite coffee table and on Milo’s oversized desk.
“How did you ever rate this after perpetrating a turkey like The Hut?”
“Twentieth recognizes talent when it sees it, Billy.”
“My question stands,” Franklin said.
Milo ignored the remark. “Sit down, Billy-boy. What’s got you so upset?”
Franklin didn’t sit. He resumed his stalking. “You know damn well what! My book!”
“You’ve got a new one?” Milo said, perfectly aware of which book he meant.
“No! I mean the only book I’ve ever written—The Hut!—and the mess you made out of it!”
Milo had heard quite enough nasty criticism of that particular film to last him a lifetime. He felt his anger flare but suppressed it. Why get into a shouting match?
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Billy, but let’s face facts.” He spread his hands in a consoling gesture. “It’s a dead issue. There’s nothing more to be done. The film has been shot, edited, released, and—”
“—and withdrawn!” Franklin shouted. “Two weeks in general release and the theater owners sent it back! It’s not just a flop, it’s a catastrophe!”
“The critics—killed it.”
“Bullshit! The critics blasted it, just like they blasted other ‘flops,’ like Flashdance and Top Gun and Ernest Goes to Camp. What killed it, Gherl, was word of mouth. Now I know why you wouldn’t screen it until a week before it opened: You knew you’d botched it!”
“I had trouble with the final cut. I couldn’t—”
“You couldn’t get it to make sense! As I walked out of that screening I kept telling myself that my negative feelings were due to all the things you’d cut out of my book, that maybe I was too close to it all and that the public would somehow find my story in your mass of pretensions. Then I heard a guy in his early twenties say, ‘What the hell was that all about?’ and his girlfriend say, ‘What a boring waste of time!’ and I knew it wasn’t just me.” Franklin’s long bony finger stabbed through the air. “It was you! You raped my book!”
Milo had had just about enough of this. “You novelists are all alike!” he said with genuine disdain. “You do fine on the printed page so you think you’re experts at writing for the screen. But you’re not. You don’t know the first goddam thing about visual writing!”
“You cut the heart out of my story! The Hut was about the nature of evil and how it can seduce even the strongest among us. The plot was like a house of cards, Gherl, built with my sweat. Your windbag script blew it all down! And after I saw the first draft of the script, you were suddenly unavailable for conference!”
Milo recalled Franklin’s endless stream of nit-picking letters, his deluge of time-wasting phone calls. “I was busy, dammit! I was writer-director! The whole thing was on my shoulders!”
“I warned you that the house of cards was falling due to the cuts you made. I mean, why did you remove all mention of voodoo and zombiism from the script? They were the two red herrings that held the plot together.”
“Voodoo! Zombies! That’s old hat! Nobody would pay to see a voodoo movie!”
“Then why set the movie in Haiti, f’Christsake? Might as well have been in Pasadena! And that monster you threw in at the end? Where in hell did you come up with that? It looked like the Incredible Hulk in drag! I spent years in research. I slaved to fill that book with terror and dread—all you brought to the screen were cheap shocks!”
“If that’s your true opinion—and I disagree with it absolutely—you should be glad the film was a flop. No one will see it!”
Franklin nodded slowly. “That gave me comfort for a while, until I realized that the movie isn’t dead. When it reaches the video stores and the cable services, tens of millions of people will see it—not because it’s good, but simply because it’s there and it’s something they’ve never heard of before and certainly have never seen. And they’ll be directing their rapt attention at your corruption of my story, and they’ll see ‘Based on the Novel by William Franklin’ and think that the pretentious, incomprehensible mishmash they’re watching represents my work. And that makes me mad, Gherl! Fucking-ay crazy mad!”
The ferocity that flashed across Franklin’s face was truly frightening. Milo rushed to calm him. “Billy, look: Despite our artistic differences and despite the fact that The Hut will never turn a profit, you were paid well into six figures for the screen rights. What’s your beef?”
Franklin seemed to shrink a little. His shoulders slumped and his voice softened. “I didn’t write it for money. I live off a trust fund that provides me with more than I can spend. The Hut was my first novel—maybe my only novel ever. I gave it everything. I don’t think I have any more in me.”
“Of course you do!” Milo said, rising and moving around the desk toward the subdued writer. Here was his chance to ease Franklin out of here. “It’s just that you’ve never had to suffer for your art! You’ve had it too soft, too cushy for too long. Things came too easy on that first book. First time at bat, you got a major studio film offer that actually made it to the screen. That hardly ever happens. Now you’ve got to prove it wasn’t just a fluke. You’ve got to get out there and slog away on that new book! Deprive yourself a little! Suffer!”
“Suffer?” Franklin said, a weird light starting to glow in his eyes. “I should suffer?”
“Yes!” Milo said, guiding him toward the office door. “All great artists suffer.”
“You ever suffer, Milo Gherl?”
“Of course.” Especially this morning, listening to you!
“Look at this office. You don’t look like you’re suffering for what you did to The Hut.”
“I did my suffering years ago. The anger you feel about The Hut is small change compared to the dues I’ve had to pay.” He finally had Franklin across the threshold. “I’m through suffering,” he said as he slammed the door and locked it.
From the other side of the thick oak door he thought he heard Franklin say, “No, you’re not.”
“Missing any personal items lately, mister?” said a voice.
Milo opened his good eye and saw the big black guy standing over him, leaning on his mop handle. What was wrong with this old fart? What was his angle?
“If you don’t leave me alone I’m gonna call—” He paused. “What do you mean, ‘personal items’?”
“You know—clothing, nail clippings, a brush or comb that might hold some of your hair. That kinda stuff.”
A chill swept over Milo’s skin like an icy breeze in July.
The robbery!
Such a bizarre thing—a pried-open window, a few cheap rings gone, his drawers and closets ransacked, an old pair of pajamas missing. And his toupee, the second-string hairpiece . . . gone. Who could figure it? But he had been shaken up enough to go out and buy a .38 for his night table.
