Shooting Script

Yet why? He'd been standing and talking and looking like that for thirty years and it had made him several million dollars. Even if it hadn't begun that way, by now it was no more phoney than the way a bank clerk who's been at the job thirty years looks like a bank clerk.

J.B. was looking at me sideways, with a gleam of knowing amusement. 'Impressive, isn't it?' she said softly. 'I felt the same way, the first time.'

'Him and the Eiffel Tower.'

Whitmore was talking to the man who'd shouted 'Let's go', presumably the director. About fifty, stoutish, with grey hair and moustache and looking like an English colonel with strong black market connections.

They broke off as J.B. went forward. Whitmore said: 'Hi. What's new at the courthouse?'

'I'vegot your flying boy. All signed up.'

He looked at me, then reached out a huge blunt-fingered hand. 'Hi, fella. ' We shook hands. J.B. passed him the contract and he studied it.

He was wearing a thin bush jacket, khaki drill trousers stuffed into high-laced paratroop boots, a webbing belt and army holster and a wide crumpled hat with a snakeskin band.

He cocked his head at me in a gesture I knew as well as he did. 'You were the boy out in Korea, right?'

Here we went again. 'That's right, Mr Whitmore.'

'How many d'you knock down out there?'

'Three.'

'How many d'you shoot at?'

Three.'

He let out a big bark of laughter. 'That's good enough for me. Anybody got a pen?' He reached and tweaked the top of J.B.'s bathing dress. 'Got anything down there? No, not much.'

Several people laughed. She grinned, quickly and vividly, unembarrassed. With him, the gesture had been a simple, boyish dirty joke.

Whitmore raised his voice to Chisholm trail level. 'I'm paying three writers and I can't find a single goddamned pen!' The director gave him a pen.

He was about to sign when Luiz came up behind him, squelching in his wet boots and holding his damp trousers distastefully out from his legs. He looked, saw the contract, then looked at me and said sadly: 'Don't sign up with the Boss Man, my friend. You only end up with wet feet.' Then, to Whitmore, he added: 'He's Commonwealth, I trust?'

Whitmore looked at me sharply: 'Youare a Commonwealth citizen, right?'

'Yes.' I was probably looking puzzled again.

He signed with a quick rasping scribble and gave the pen back to the director, who looked at the nib sadly and tucked it away. Whitmore handed the contract to J.B. 'Explain to him about Eady, honey.' To me, he said: 'Stick around for some chow, fella. We'll talk then.' Then he walked off with the familiar rolling stride, chatting to a distant group of raggedly-dressed actors in a voice that shivered the palm fronds.

J.B. was studying me thoughtfully. 'I think you just joined the club, Carr. The Boss Man likes that Korean stuff.' Thethought didn't seem to be brightening her day much.

I said: 'It was twelve years ago, for God's sake.'

'The Boss Man's been around a long time. Come on: I'll see if we can't find a drink. They'll probably break for lunch after the next shot.' We went back through the grove to the lorry park.

By then some of the drivers and helpers were setting up a number of long trestle tables and unfolding more canvas chairs, but not moving as if they were worried about the world ending first. J.B. went over to one of the station wagons, brought out a big Thermos bucket, and produced a couple of tins of American beer. I jabbed them with a pocket screwdriver and we sat down in the shade of the car.

After a while I asked: 'What's all this Eady thing?'

'Eady plan. It's the ground rules for qualifying a picture as a British production. One' – she raised a finger – 'you've got to have a British company producing it. Two, eighty per cent of your salary budget has to go to Commonwealth citizens. Three, any studio work has to be done in Britain or Ireland. Then you qualify for Eady.'

'Which is what?'

'Sort of legal kick-back. They take a levy on all movie-house seats sold in Britain and pay it back to the producer as a percentage of his gross box-office take. It's running about forty per cent, now.'

I closed my eyes and thought for a moment. 'You mean if he makes say, a bundled thousand he gets paid another forty? Two hundred thousand and he gets eighty?'

'Right.'

I stared. 'Good times are here again, aren't they?'

She looked at me coldly. 'Movies aren't a way of printing your own money, Carr, the way they were before TV.'

'I know: all that glitters isn't gold; some of it's diamonds. Who is Eady, anyway?'

'Some guy in the British Treasury, I think.'

'He knew his Bible, didn't he? "To him that hath shall be given" and so forth.'

'It works out that way. I guess it was originally supposed to help the small producers.'

I thought for another moment. 'Just explain to me how you makethis picture an Eady one. Apart from these boys' – I nodded at the men setting up the tables – 'the place isn't exactly crowded with Commonwealth citizens.'

'They're there. The crew's mostly British: director, camera, sound, lights, the grips. We got the script done in London. And you're allowed to hold out two salaries when you come to figure your eighty per cent. Naturally you make them the highest ones: we made it female lead and Luiz.'

'What about Whitmore?'

'He's not on salary. He takes a percentage of the picture.'

I nodded. 'I'm beginning to see the strategy. And to be a British company, I suppose you set one up specially in London?'

'Nassau. The Bahamas count as British.'

'So this is why you didn't bring in an American pilot. I suppose I'm really quite a help to you: if you find you're running under the eighty per cent, you can put up my pay and balance it out again.'

'Don't hope too hard. If we run under eighty, I'll be fired the next day.'

'Are you really going to cart everybody across the Atlantic to do the studio stuff?'

She shook her head. 'Pictures like this you don't do studio work if you can help it. You script it so most of it's outdoors, and when you got to have an interior you do that on location, too: with fast colour film you can do it with the lights you bring along anyway. We're only doing inside a couple of native huts and a hacienda: we'll build that in the hangar up on the airstrip.'

A larger-than-usual lizard with a light-green body, blue hips, and a bronze tail scuttled out from under the car, nodded several times, belched and puffed out his throat in a bright orange sac.

J.B. frowned at him. 'Whatever he's doing, I wish he wouldn't.'

'Mating call. They call them Croakers. Belch back and you'll have a new boy-friend.'

'Another Method actor in blue jeans. Them, I can do without.'

I got out my pipe and started to pack it. 'Which reminds me -1 didn't notice the feminine interest in the picture.'

'Boss Man did all her scenes first and sent her back to the States to get her picture in the papers. They didn't hit it off.'

'Don't tell me he prefers horses.'

She shrugged. 'Horses, guns, dogs, whisky, men. He's not against women; he just thinks sex and thirst are itches you scratch. You buy a whisky in a bar, a woman in a cat-house. In his time off he goes hunting with the boys – and I mean in the mountains.' She frowned down at her beer can. 'I don't know what damn business it is of yours.'

I put a match to the pipe and breathed smoke away from her. 'But he's been married, hasn't he?'

'Three times. I got him out of the last one a few months ago. He didn't exactly notice any of them; it was just the fashion. In those days it didn't matter who you laid as long as you were married. Does movie gossip really interest you?'

'He's the man I'm working for. Same as you.'

She nodded anddiensaid slowly and thoughtfully: 'Don't get him wrong, Carr. He's a pro: he doesn't act much, but he doesn't need to. He's never got an Oscar and never will and he honestly doesn't give a damn. He knows what he's selling and he doesn't sell short: if he wasn't in pictures he'd be busting horses in rodeos and going hunting and whoring and…' She took a deep breath, 'Christ, I don'tapprove of the big sonofabitch, but I like him.'