We nodded. All of us in that room-Dean, Reed, Robin, Devon Converse, and me-were waiting to hear Option Two. Lefty chuggalugged his Tab.
"The other way is for y'all to just sandbag me and say, 'fuck you. Lefty!'
This way is more interesting, probably the way I'd personally go, but it'd be guaranteed to get you fired. Now, which way do you vote?"
"FIRST WAY!" four voices said at once. Lefty Armbruster smiled. Then, James Dean, who had said nothing, leaned forward with that little grin.
"How, about you, Reb?" the raider asked the star. "Which way do you vote?"
"I'll go with my friends," said Dean, very softly. Lefty smiled expansively in victory and got up, ready to leave. Dean stopped him with his voice. "But there is someone in this room who is acting unnecessarily like an asshole."
Suddenly, it got real quiet. "I don't want to name any names. But I've been at this too long,"
Jimmy continued, "so if that person doesn't knock it off, I'm gonna CLOSE HIS OTHER EYE."
James Dean was looking right at the blue velvet eye patch of Lefty Armbruster.
There were a few seconds, it could have gone either way. Neither man gave an inch. I was there, I saw it.
"I smell a hit, boys," Lefty said. "Get this thing down and we'll be champs."
When he went out, get this-he left the door open behind him. It was so cool, I've taken to doing it, although it doesn't look quite as bitchin'.
Robin and I got to Dean at the same time. The three of us hugged each other; he had just saved our life's project. Devon Converse was white. He had seen death and hadn't liked its face. But we were back on track.
We went back to the drawing board, determined to cut out the fat and save the fire. I had some experience with this from the old days, as I may have told you. But going Arough the script now, it was major agony time, because suddenly it wasn't some pompous, overpaid screenwriter I was carving up, it was me.
And when I had done the first draft, in love and happy in our new castle on the hill, I had given Blondie and Richard the Lion-Hearted everything I had. I was writing for the ages. I put all the poetry-the agony and the ecstasy of my whole and entire life-into the 700-page teleplay. It was incredible, even if I do say so myself. A real "read," a jaw dropper. I mean it I would show you some scenes ... but by law, I can't. It's too hard emotionally, anyway.
The director. Reed Savage, and I waded into the script with stump pullers and a buzz saw. We cut two major battle scenes, a masked ball for a thousand, the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor, and a passion play made up of trained dogs. We cut Eleanor and Henry, John and Phillip, Saladin and Berengaria. We were right at having to cut the storming of Acre, when I finally had to take a stand. Flat out, I drew the line. Enough was enough. If they kept cutting, they would have just about the right amount for a small, series of medieval greeting cards. Reed agreed with me-, now it was time to pull the loose ends together and see what we had. It wasn't much. I guess if you'd never read the first draft or ever heard of history or ever used a word with
"R" in it, it looked okay. Kind of like an infidel-bashing romance novel as seen by a meteor just before it crashes into the plot of a seventh-grade geography movie. But I knew the network wouldn't care. Their "wisdom" was that nothing mattered except the pre-sale, the ink, some spectacle, and a few good scenes. The , trailer department would cut a flashy two-minute teaser using all the good stuff, and then the sales department could get to work and sell all the spots.
It's like a weenie factory; sorry to have to tell you. How anything good gets done is usually by certified excitable A-types whose insane vision accidentally explodes (usually taking a twenty-year marriage with it) into a show that is only one tenth as good as the one they saw in their mind and yet it's still better than anything else on. They are generally rewarded with Emmys, a nice office, and fraudulent profit reports where they discover they have been cross-collateralized with a network series on the heroes of Canadian golf. About this time, the visionary gets canned because he tried to resist having the show's characters all go on Wheel of Fortune or something.
When Reed and I put all the scenes on those little 3 x 5 cards, it was obvious that something was going to have to be done. So I did the old trusty narration track (the TNT, we call it) and, given the legendary skills of Jimmy Dean and my Robin, I went ahead and wrote them a few more limbo-set love and sacrifice scenes that made tears run down your leg and chills run up your back.
The network loved it. This guy told me that his sec heard from her boyfriend in development that he heard from Chip Russell, who had been in the office that day, that Lefty Armbruster cried when he read it!
And STILL they were looking for cuts. I didn't remember them being this cold, this hard. They got down to nickel-and-dime stuff and, no matter what we did, it didn't seem to be enough. We were still over. It was starting to be panic time. Then, I sort of saved the day.
They had budgeted the castle interiors (both French and English) at nine million. That was just to build and paint. The continued rental of the space and refurbishing was hidden in another column. All of a sudden, it came to me.
I told them they could shoot at our house!
Not bad, huh! And it worked! That nine mil was just under their worst-case budget and they tentatively approved us. I think Reed wanted to adopt me and Jimmy was glowing. The only one who didn't seem too thrilled was Robin.
She was right, as usual. I learned the lesson and this is it: never, ever let your house or anyone's house you remotely know or like be used in the movies or TV.
I'd had this big vision of us getting paid a grand a day for the rental, plus which, we would just roll out of bed and start to shoot while everybody else had been up since four going to the network to be driven out to the location.
I thought they would be careful when they shot. I assumed, if anything bad happened, we would be reimbursed. I figured that our castle looked just like crusader stuff. Robin had warned me.
Still, it pissed me off royally.
First, they held the rental money in escrow (all accrued interest to them, of course) for the run of the show, which could be years! Next, because of a mob- ridden union stranglehold on the entire business, it turned out we would have to get up early and drive to the network, so we could be driven back to our own fucking house! And when the camera department first came in and was doing color balance tests, they broke a mahogany mantle. Then, the bastards spadded and painted it over, claiming it had never been there. Shawn, down in the little apartment below, had to move out when his ceiling fell in, knocked over his stereo, and almost electrocuted him.
Also, some prick or pricks unknown kept stealing everything that wasn't nailed down. On top of everything else, even in pre-production, it was so noisy with the skill saws, the electric nail-drivers, and the yelling and screaming, we couldn't ever get to sleep. Or cook. Or watch TV.
Or even go to the bathroom. You'd go in, close the door, and in the toilet would be floating yesterdays Hollywood Reporter, a styrofoam coffee cup, cigar butts, and half a prune danish.
There was never any toilet paper.
They tore out walls, they built walls. They lifted the roof, they moved furniture, they rolled rugs, they emptied closets, they hauled stuff away, and
I still haven't found out where they took it.
Our bedroom became Richard the Lion-Hearted's dining hall. The kitchen served nicely as Blondie's bathroom after they ripped out the Chambers range along with the St. Charles cabinets we'd just had put in. They tore up the deck outside so they could set in trees and stuff. Our trees weren't right. They brought in jackhammers and stone cutters so they could dig cable trenches; the dolly space had to be tabletop smooth. They dismantled the sauna and capped the plumbing to put in the sound guy's booth. They cemented up the flue in the walk-in fireplace because they had converted it to craft-services area and the coffee urn was getting chilled. Forty tons of fill dirt were dumped on our lawn because you couldn't take a chance and see mowed grass out a Crusader's window. The plasterers clogged up all our drains washing their trowels and boards.