"What?"
"I already spent the money. A deposit on a condo in Malibu."
I was stunned.
"And the money isn't the worst of it," I said. "Your reputation. That's worse. Ballard gave you an incredible break. He decided to take a chance on the bright new kid in town. He allowed you to jump over all the shit. But if you don't deliver, he'll be furious. He'll spread the word all over town that you're not dependable. You won't be hot anymore. We won't be able to sell another script as easily as we did this one."
"Look, I'm sorry, Mort. I know I bragged to you that I could do the job on my own. I was wrong. I don't have the experience. I admit it. I'm out of my depth."
"Even on a piece of shit like this."
Ric glanced down, then up. "I was wondering… Could you give me a hand?"
My mouth hung open in astonishment.
Before I could tell him no damned way, Ric quickly added, "It would really help both of us."
"How do you figure that?"
"You just said it yourself. If I don't deliver, Ballard will spread the word. No producer will trust me. You won't be able to sell another script through me."
My head began to throb. He was right, of course. If I wanted to keep selling my scripts, if I wanted to see them produced, I needed him. There was no doubt in my mind that as old as I was, I would never be able to sell another script with my name on it. I finally had to admit that all along, secretly, I had never intended the deception with Ric to be a one-time-only arrangement.
I swallowed and finally said, "All right."
"Thank you."
"But I won't clean up your messes for nothing."
"Of course not. The same arrangement as before. All I get out of this is fifteen percent."
"By rights, you shouldn't get anything."
"Hey, without me, Ballard wouldn't have offered the job."
"Since you already spent the first half of the payment, how do I get that money?"
Ric made an effort to think of a solution. "We'll have to wait until the money comes through on the spec script we sold. I'll give you the money out of the two hundred thousand that's owed to me."
"But you owe the Ferrari dealer a bundle. Otherwise Linda's responsible for your debt."
"I'll take care of it." Ric gestured impatiently. "I'll take care of all of it. What's important now is that you make the changes on The Warlords. Ballard has to pay the remaining fifty thousand dollars when I hand in the pages. That money's yours."
"Fine."
It wasn't until later that I realized how Ric had set a precedent for restructuring our deal. Regardless of his promise to pay me what I was owed, the reality was that he had pocketed half the fee. Instead of getting fifteen percent, he was now getting fifty percent.
The script for The Warlords was even worse than I'd feared. How do you change bad junk into good junk? In the process, how do you please a director, a star, and a producer who ask for widely different things? One of the rules I've learned over the years is that what people say they want isn't always what they mean. Sometimes it's a matter of interpretation. And after I endured reading the script for The Warlords, I thought I had that interpretation.
The director said he wanted more action and less characterization. In my opinion, the script already had more than enough action. The trouble was that some of the action sequences were redundant, and others weren't paced effectively. The biggest stunts occurred two-thirds of the way into the story. The last third had stunts that suffered by comparison. So the trick here was to do some pruning and restructuring – to take the good stunts from the end and put them in the middle, to build on them and put the great stunts at the end, all the while struggling to retain the already feeble logic of the story.
The star said he wanted less action and more characterization. As far as I could tell, what he really wanted was to be sympathetic, to make the audience like the character he was playing. So I softened him a little, threw in some jokes, had him wait for an old lady to cross a street before he blew away the bad guys, basic things like that. Since his character was more like a robot than a human being, any vaguely human thing he did would make him sympathetic.
The producer said he wanted more humor and a less expensive budget. Well, by making the hero sympathetic, I added the jokes the producer wanted. By restructuring the sequence of stunts, I managed to eliminate some of the weaker ones, thus giving the star his request for less action and the producer his request for holding down the budget since the preponderance of action scenes had been what inflated the budget in the first place.
I explained this to Ric as I made notes. "They'll all be happy."
"Amazing," Ric said.
"Thanks."
"No, what I mean is, the ideas you came up with, I could have thought of them."
"Oh?" My voice hardened. "Then why didn't you?"
"Because, well, they seem so obvious."
"After I thought of them. Good ideas always seem obvious in retrospect. The real job is putting them on paper. I'm going to have to work like crazy to get this job done in four days. And then there's a further problem. I have to teach you how to pitch these changes to Ballard, so he'll be convinced you're the one who wrote them."
"You can count on me," Ric said.
" I want you to…" Suddenly I found myself yawning and looked at my watch. "Three a.m.? I'm not used to staying up this late. I'd better get some sleep if I'm going to get this rewrite done in four days."
"I'm a night person myself," Ric said.
"Well, come back tomorrow at four in the afternoon. I'll take a break and start teaching you what to say to Ballard."
Ric didn't show up, of course. When I phoned his apartment, I got his answering machine. I couldn't get in touch with him the next day, or the day after that.
But the day the changes were due, he certainly showed up. He phoned again from his car outside the gate, and when I let him in, he was so eager to see the pages that he barely said hello to me.
"Where the hell have you been?"
"Mexico."
"What?"
"With all this stress, I needed to get away."
"What have you done to put you under stress? I'm the one who's been doing all the work."
Instead of responding, Ric sat on my living-room sofa and quickly leafed through the pages. I noticed he was wearing yet another designer jacket. His tan was even darker.
"Yeah," he said. "This is good." He quickly came to his feet. "I'd better get to the studio."
"But I haven't coached you about what to say to Ballard."
Ric stopped at the door. "Mort, I've been thinking. If this partnership is going to work, we need to give each other more space. You take care of the writing. Let me worry about what to say in meetings. Ballard likes me. I know how to handle him. Trust me."
And Ric was gone.
I waited to hear about what happened at the meeting. No phone call. When I finally broke down and phoned him, an electronic-sounding voice told me that his number was no longer in service. It took me a moment to figure out that he must have moved to the condo in Malibu. So I phoned Linda to get the new number, and she awkwardly told me that Ric had ordered her to keep it a secret.
"Even from me?"
"Especially from you. Did you guys have an argument or something?"
"No."
"Well, he made it sound as if you had. He kept complaining about how you were always telling him what to do."