That’s the way it was with Jack and me. Once Herbie had planted the suggestion, there was nothing we could do about it. And anyone who knew Herbie, that’s Herbert A. Rothberger to those of you outside the business, probably wouldn’t blame us at all.
Where was I? Alien ideas in the brain are seriously distracting and some days I have problems putting my thoughts in order. Which is a laugh, being that Jack and I are professional wordsmiths. Arsen and Dutton — you can ask around — everyone knows us. We’re maybe not your top-of-the-line scriptwriters and script doctors — no auteur stuff, no Oscars on our shelves — but we’ve had a couple of pilots made, and we’ve written for most of the top cop shows and hospital dramas, and we’ve both made major money in the soaps. Several film scripts, too — one of them made — I want you to see we’re pros.
Nonetheless, even pros get the blues in the form of rejection slips from baby-faced execs with their feet on their desks and your script bound for the shredder. Jack and I’d hit a run of bad luck, which is why we wound up one wet day — a bad L.A. omen right there — in the offices of Distracting Productions, the bailiwick of Herbert A. Rothberger, a.k.a. Herbie, pitching an action yarn.
Slipstream was a solid piece of work with a nice role for the child phenom of the moment, a moppet with blue eyes and blond hair named Ashley Button. I kid you not. She was known around the studios as Cute-As, as in cute as a button, and she was a serious talent with a good memory and precocious eyes.
Our plot was watertight. That’s Jack’s doing. His dialogue is for the bin, but his plot construction is a thing of beauty, and I think Herbie got to him before he got to me. I think so.
Anyway, we’re sitting in Herbie’s big office beside a NordicTrack with zero miles on its odometer and a spidery Bowflex that looks carnivorous, and a decorative secretary who’s probably not as dumb as she looks. I usually do the talking, so I launch into our spieclass="underline" “A big-time hijacking goes bad when the cargo turns out to be nuclear fuel rods. The robbers go on the lam with the representatives of a rogue state behind them and both the CIA and the FBI bringing up the rear.”
“Think The X-Files without the aliens,” says Jack. “Advanced paranoia.”
Maybe wrong to mention a Fox show to Herbie, who had, I seem to recall, a death feud with the network.
“So what the hell is it?” he says, not waiting to find out. “Is this a heist picture?”
“Yeah, a heist picture, but not just a heist picture, because, see, along the way, they’re spotted by this little girl, who gets her father involved, plus we’ve got the subplot with the agents, kind of a father-son or brother-brother thing going...”
This goes nowhere with Herbie. To Herbie, Moby Dick is a fishing story, pure and simple.
“Heist pictures are dead. With Tom Cruise, maybe. Cast of unknowns and the little blond brat — no way.”
“We don’t have to cast unknowns,” I says.
Herbie snorts. He has a particularly repulsive nostril-clearing snort, like a pig with a fly up its nose, that brings his own porcine nature front and center.
“You guys bring me a Tom Cruise, a Cate Blanchett, a Will Smith picture, I’ll be the first to let you know.”
See the kind of guy we’re talking about here? Gratuitous, right? As if he wasn’t resident in the B-picture universe himself.
“However,” I says, “this is a heist picture with a difference. And the script’s like a clockwork toy.” I start to describe the novelties and beauties, the many ingenuities that Jack has concocted and which I have adorned with razor-sharp dialogue.
“Heists are dead,” says Herbie. “Plus, there’s no romance. How’re you going to pull in the date audience with no romance?”
“All right, all right,” says Jack, who’s quick off the mark plot-wise. I can see the wheels turning in his mind, clear as one of those old clocks with glass front and back so you can see the gears moving. “There’s the kid, we start from the kid, all right, and we add—”
He doesn’t even get the sentence out before Herbie says, “No kids. Kids are for Oxygen, Lifetime, housewives in the afternoon. Forget the kid.”
“Forget the kid,” Jack repeats.
“I wouldn’t touch the kid for an Oscar nomination — her mother’s poison and her dad’s a lawyer.”
“We make her an adult,” says Jack.
Herbie purses his lips. “A hot babe?”
“Combustible,” Jack says.
“Maybe with a thing for one of the robbers?” I suggest.
“Yeah,” says Herbie. “You try that and get back to me.” His hand’s already hovering over his intercom button.
Jack and I get out onto the street. We’ve forgotten umbrellas and it’s pouring. “Remind me never to buy a gun,” Jack says. “I wouldn’t trust myself.”
We go back and rework Slipstream. Cute-As has transmogrified into an eighteen-year-old bombshell who’s definitely trouble. She’s friends with one of the heist team, a fact her FBI agent father only belatedly registers. “We got parental angst, we got family, we got high drama,” I tell Herbie when we see him next.
“And we’ve sharpened up the suspense,” Jack says. “The guys on the heist are really pawns of terrorists. They don’t realize, and when they do...”
His Film Eminence frowns. “People don’t want to be scared,” says Herbie. “They want to be scared, but not of something that could really happen to them.”
“You want Godzilla?” says Jack. “You want Creature of the Black Lagoon?”
“Listen, I’m trying to help you guys.” Herbie’s all offended. “What’s her name, the broad with the father complex—”
“Heather.”
“Heather’s a dumb name, Heather’s been overdone.”
“We can change the name,” I says.
“So change it. She has possibilities. Fuel rods — who the hell understands fuel rods? See what I mean? That’s why I say, heist pictures are dead.”
“Slice of life? A smaller drama?” Jack asks. “Father-daughter conflict — strait-laced agent versus rebel daughter? Heist in the background?”
“Some small pictures have done well lately — good return on investment,” I says.
Herbie agrees to look at the rewrite.
By this time, we’re beginning to sweat. Jack’s been borrowing from me and I’ve been pawning stuff acquired in my palmy days. We buckle down, anyway. Like I say, we’re pros all the way. We lose most of the heist except the actual theft and focus on the conflicting loyalties of the father and daughter.
“We’ve got a different angle on the perpetrators, too,” I tell Herbie at the next meet. “No more professionals. Small-timers, desperate men. There might even be a role for a good kid actor — one of them has a sick child. See, it’s desperate men on both sides.”
Herbie listens to all this. At least this time we get through the whole pitch. “You know, you guys got no sense of the times,” he says when we’re done. “Sympathetic criminals — tricky at best. Okay if they’re rich, get what I mean? You redo Topkapi, professional thieves, glamour guys — women love outlaws — you’re okay. Poor and desperate — no way. Throw the book at them. Where’ve you been?”
Back to professionals. Back to square one, but we don’t mention that. “That can be done,” I says. I’m thinking that we have most of what’s needed back in version one.
But that’s not enough for Herbie. He basically doesn’t like the heist at all.
“Suppose it goes wrong even earlier,” says Jack. “Suppose our juvenile female winds up a hostage? Ropes and bondage,” he adds — Herbie’s tastes being well known.
“I’ll look at it,” he says, and then as an afterthought, he adds, “You get it done fast, drop it off at my house. I’m out of the office for a couple of days.”