That’s all I’ve ever done whenever I’ve stood in front of a mike with a script in my hand, or stood up in a wrestling ring with a prepared text and a list of circus names in my head. If anyone wants to call it performing, that’s fine by me, but I know what it is; it’s just like being back in Mary’s class, reading or reciting in front of the other kids.
If the money is silly for television ads, then for movies — especially American projects — it’s positively insane. Late in my first day in studio, most of which I had spent wearing headphones and rehearsing my narration lines, getting them, without too much difficulty, just as Weir Dobbs wanted them, Mark Kravitz called me to the phone.
It was Sly Burr. ‘Hi kid,’ he oiled down the line. ‘How’s it going in Hollywoodland?’
‘It just feels like Surrey to me,’ I told him. ‘You know what I mean. They still have Tory MPs, every dustbin has its own fox, and all the kids belong to the pony club. A bit like Neverneverland; the PR girl here even looks like Tinkerbell.’
‘Is that right?’ said Sly, almost blankly. Like many showbiz people, unless he is haggling over money — or maybe especially when he’s haggling over money — Sly has no ear for anyone’s voice but his own. ‘To business, kid, to business,’ he went on. ‘I had a call from Miles this morning, about the new scenes he wants you to shoot.’
‘Bloody Hell!’ I exclaimed. ‘I was joking when I told him to speak to you.’
‘What for? I know you’re going to be brothers-in-law and such, but this is business, serious business — and not just for you. I get a piece as well, remember. Okay, so he calls me and he tells me what he plans to do with you, so I tell him, “Wait a minute there, Miles, this changes the whole deal. You hire my boy as narrator, now you want to give him a key part. It can’t be for the same money.”
‘Then he tells me I’m a chiselling bastard and I tell him “Sure, I am; that’s why guys in your business hire guys like me”. Then he laughs and we get down to the nut-cutting. At the end of the day, I’ve got you feature billing below the titles, and you’re in for half-a-point.’
‘Fine, Sly,’ I said. ‘Now tell me what that means.’
‘It means that in the movie credits, on the posters and in all the promo material, you’ll have separate billing. You’ll come after Miles, Dawn and the guy Steele, and you’ll be billed separately. “Introducing Oz Blackstone”, that’s how it’ll read.’
‘Didn’t you think about consulting me on that?’
‘Shit no, kid; you do your business and I’ll do mine.’ The old gormer’s good at his business, I have to admit.
‘So what’s this half-a-point thing then?’ I asked. ‘Type-size on the posters?’
‘You kidding me? You’re a Scotsman and you’re asking me that? Scots and Jews, we’re brothers in the pocket-book. I’ve negotiated us half a percentage point of the gross, on top of the deal we agreed earlier.’
‘And what does that mean?’
‘It means that of every ten dollars that goes across the box-office, you get fifty cents.’
‘Fifty cents for every ten dollars?’ I gasped.
‘Ahh, sorry kid,’ Sly chuckled. ‘My Jewishness again; I meant every hundred.’
‘And what’s Snatch liable to make?’
When I heard Sly sucking his teeth at the other end of the line, I knew we were still talking big bucks. ‘We can’t be certain,’ he said, ‘but none of Miles Grayson’s movies ever gross less than a hundred.’
I knew, but I asked the question anyway, just to hear the pride in Sly’s voice. ‘A hundred what?’
‘Million, kid, million. I’d say those extra scenes are going to net you at least half a million dollars. . less my cut, of course.’
Chapter 43
I was useless for the rest of the day after that. We did a few more runs through of the narration script, but Sly’s interruption had broken my concentration. Eventually Weir called it off.
‘I don’t know what that agent said to you, kid,’ he told me, ‘but from now on, if he wants to talk, he calls you back at the house, not here. In studio you focus on the job, not the dough.’
This annoyed me, just a bit, since I had never been in it for the money, not at all — well, not much, anyway — but I recognised that the assistant director had his own pressures, and that every hour in that sound studio cost seriously large bucks, so I bit my tongue.
By the next morning, with some help from another master-work by the chef, I had forgotten all about it. You may think it strange, but over the last few years I’ve discovered that I don’t actually care about money. Sure I seem to be a human magnet for the stuff, and I like having it, yet it doesn’t dominate my life. Of course winning the lottery was an amazing moment, but there was something surreal about the whole thing, and afterwards, I left it to Prim to decide what we were going to do with it. The thing is, I’ve had a few surprises in my short life; some have been pleasant, but others — and one in particular — have been very, very bad. Since then, I’ve been pretty blase about good news. I remember hearing, years ago, some pompous political prick declaring grandly on television that all the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of one small candle. From where I stand, there are some things so bad and so black that not even the brightest sunshine can ever blind you to them, or make you forget.
So as I walked into the studio for my first full day of recording, there was nothing on my mind but my lines and the way I would deliver them. I had been driven by Mark Kravitz, and so I had arrived ahead of Weir. The only two people in the sound suite were Pep Newton, the engineer and Stu Queen, our sparks.
‘Ready to do it for real?’ asked Pep, a dark stocky man whose looks hinted at Spanish ancestry.
‘Ready and able.’
‘That’s good,’ said Stu, a bit foreign-looking himself, but taller and fairer. ‘Let’s hope Dobbs is ready too. He was getting a bit precious at the end, yesterday.’
‘Weir’ll be fine,’ I assured him. ‘He had a couple of relaxers after dinner last night and declared himself happy with the way things went.’
As it turned out, he may have had one or two more that I didn’t know about; when he arrived he grunted his good mornings like a small, ill-tempered, grizzly bear. I haven’t had many hangovers in my life, but I know the signs when I see them. When we got to work, it was as if everything we had done the day before counted for nothing. The little swine took me back to square one; what had been right was now wrong, what had been virtue was now vice, where I had been doing fine I was now worse than useless. I began to wonder if Weir had been told about my half point, and didn’t like it.
I took it for just over two hours; until, after the eleventh abortive take, the seventh consecutive burst of abuse came through my headphones. ‘Blackstone!’ the assistant director screamed. ‘You’re so fucking dense, I’ll bet that light bends round you. When will you ever get this right?’
A strange feeling swept over me. The Oz temper is usually kept pretty well under control. In fact I can only remember losing it three times in my whole life. The first time was at secondary school in Anstruther, when some pompous little twat of a French teacher accused me of pronouncing the word ‘soldier’ without the letter L.
‘You’re betraying some Glaswegian ancestry there, boy,’ he smirked.
‘No, sir,’ I replied, straight-faced, because he was wrong; I knew it and the whole class knew it. But he had decided that he was going to have a laugh at my expense.
‘Oh, yes,’ he insisted.
I was never a sensitive kid; I never minded when one of my peers took the pee out of me, so to speak. But this guy hadn’t earned that privilege. As I glared at him, I felt a sudden uncontrollable wave of outrage erupt within me. Looking back now, I suspect it was perhaps the first truly adult emotion I ever experienced.