“Don’t go to sleep on me, okay?”
“I got a headache, that’s all. Who’s Frank DePhillips?”
“He’s to some part of L.A. what Jimmy Cap is to South Miami. But I don’t meet with him, he’s on a level only talks to certain people. I meet with one of his lawyers down at the courts, criminal division. Young guy, he comes running out of a courtroom loaded down with papers and shit, looks at me, says, ‘What do you want?’ Fuckin lawyers, they’re always rushing around the last minute. I remind him Mr.
DePhillips set this up, also I happen to represent one of the biggest casinos in Vegas. That gets me about two minutes of his time. He says, ‘I’ll see what I can do. Gimme a phone number.’ I tell him I’ll call him, otherwise I’d never hear. Also I don’t want him to know I’m staying at this dump on Ventura. Two days later I meet him and another lawyer in a restaurant in a hotel that’s Japanese. I mean the entire hotel, not just the restaurant, a Japanese hotel right in the middle of downtown L.A.”
Harry said, “Yeah, the Otani.”
“Right by the city hall. These two lawyers eat there all the time. I watch ’em dig into the raw fish, suck up bowls of noodles . . . The noodles weren’t bad. So this other lawyer gives me addresses and phone numbers, yours and anybody you ever been intimate with on a single sheet of paper. He says, ‘You’re not the only one looking for old Harry Zimm,’ and mentions your investors have been trying to find you for two months. I said, ‘Oh, what’s the problem?’ Guy says, ‘It looks like Harry skipped with two hunnerd thousand they put in one of his movies.’ ”
Harry was shaking his head. He looked worn out.
“That doesn’t surprise me. This town loves rumors, everybody knows everything, just ask them. My investors have been trying to find me for two months? I spoke to them, it wasn’t more than two weeks ago.”
Chili said, “You mention the Piston–Lakers game?”
Harry said, “Look, these guys came to me originally, I mean before. They already put money in two of my pictures and did okay, they’re happy. Which you can’t say about most film investors, the ones that want to be in show biz, get to meet movie stars and they find out, Christ, it’s a high-risk business.”
Harry was easing into it, watching his step.
Chili said, “Yeah? . . .”
“These guys already know movie stars, celebrities; they run a limo service. So they come in on another participation deal—this was back a few months ago when I was planning what would be my next picture. About a band of killer circus freaks that travel around the country leaving bodies in their wake. The characters, there’s a seven-hundred-pound fat lady who wouldn’t fit through that door, has a way of seducing guys, gets them in her trailer—”
Chili said, “Harry, look at me,” and waited to see his watery eyes in the kitchen light, fizzed hair standing up. “You’re trying to tell me how you fucked up without sounding stupid, and that’s hard to do. Let’s get to where you’re at, okay? You blew their two hunnerd grand on a basketball game and you haven’t told ’em about it. Why not?”
“Because they’re not the type of guys,” Harry said, “would take it with any degree of understanding or restraint.”
“They scare you.”
“What’d I just say?”
“I’m not sure. You want to say something to me, Harry, say it, don’t beat around the bush.”
“Okay, they scare me. I keep thinking the first thing they’d do is break my legs.”
“You got that on the brain. What’s the second thing?”
“Or they’d have it done—you don’t know these guys. They’re not exactly financial types.”
“Harry, I prob’ly know ’em better than you do. What you’re telling me,” Chili said, “they got more out on the street than limos. They’re dealing, huh? Selling dope to movie stars and using you to launder their dough. Put it in a Harry Zimm production, take it out cleaned and pressed.”
Chili waited.
Harry eased back. The chair creaked and that was the only sound.
“You don’t know or you don’t want to or you’re not saying,” Chili said. “But from what you tell me, that’s what it sounds like.”
He smiled, wanting Harry to relax.
“You have my interest aroused. I wouldn’t mind knowing more about these guys, if they’re real hardons or they’re giving you a buncha shit. Or what their connections are, if they have any. But what I want to know first,” Chili said, “is why you took their two hunnerd grand to Vegas, put yourself in that kind of a spot. I mean if you’re scared of these guys to begin with . . .”
“I had to,” Harry said, sounding pretty definite about it. “I’ve got a chance to put together a deal that’ll change my life, make me an overnight success after thirty years in the business. . . . But I need a half a million to get it started.”
“A movie,” Chili said, wanting to be sure.
“A blockbuster of a movie.”
“You don’t want to ask your limo guys?”
“I don’t want them anywhere near it,” Harry said. “It’s not their kind of deal, it’s too big.” Harry was hunching over the table again. “See, what happened . . . This’s at the time I’m getting Freaks ready for production. I’ve got a script, but it needs work, get rid of some of the more expensive special effects. So I go see my writer and we discuss revisions. Murray’s good, he’s been with me, he wrote all my Grotesque pictures, some of the others. He’s done I don’t know how many TV scripts, hundreds. He’s done sitcoms, westerns, sci-fi, did a few Twilight Zones . . . Only now he can’t get any TV work ’cause he’s around my age and the networks don’t like to hire any writers over forty. Murray has kind of a drinking problem, too, that doesn’t help. Likes the sauce, smokes four packs a day . . . We’re talking— get back to what I want to tell you—he happens to mention a script he wrote years ago when he was starting out and never sold. I ask him what it’s about. He tells me. It sounds pretty good, so 1 take the script home and read it.” Harry paused. “I read it again, just to be sure. My experience, my instinct, my gut, tells me I have a property here, that with the right actor in the starring role, I can take to any studio in town and practically write my own deal. This one, I know, is gonna take on heat fast. The next day I call Murray, tell him I’m willing to option the script.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You pay a certain amount to own the property for a year, take it off the market. It’s an option to buy. I paid Murray five hundred against twenty-five thousand if I exercise the option, then another twenty-five at the start of principal photography.”
“That doesn’t sound like much.”
“It’s an old script, been shopped around.”
“Then why do you think you can get it made?”
“Because on the other hand it’s so old it’s new. The kid studio execs they have now had just come into the world when Murray wrote it.”
“So you don’t buy it,” Chili said, “till you know you have a deal. Is that right?”
“Or raise the money independently,” Harry said, “which is the way I prefer to go. You retain control. But with the actor I have in mind, I know I’m looking at a twenty-million-dollar picture, minimum, and that means going to one of the majors. Otherwise I wouldn’t go in a studio to take a leak.”
“You’re so sure it’s a winner,” Chili said, “what’s the problem?”
“I told you, I need a half a million to get started,” Harry said. “See, the guy I want is the kind of star not only can act, he doesn’t mind looking bad on the screen. Tight pants and capped teeth won’t make it in this one. If I could get Gene Hackman, say, we’d be in preproduction as I speak. But Gene’s got something like five pictures lined up he’s committed to, I checked.”