Bloody River Blues

manager.
    “Keep talking,” Pellam said.
    “They’re bank robbers,” Sloan was explaining. “Young bank robbers. It’s a vehicle—for like Aidan Quinn and Julia Roberts before she was Julia Roberts. I don’t want to go with anybody who’s been on the cover of People . Nobody bankable. It’s got me scared, but I need to make this change. Between you and me I’m suffocating under the system. You know what I’m saying?”
    Pellam did and he told Sloan so.
    “They’re not understood, this couple. They’re angry, they’re disaffected—”
    Listening to Sloan back then, Pellam had seen what he believed were the Black Hills. They weren’t black at all, but were dark blue. They were very faraway, but in the awesome, undisturbed sky towering above, they looked both regal and unsettling.
    “It sounds vaguely familiar, Tony.”
    “I know, you’re thinking Bonnie and Clyde, ” Sloan said.
    Ah, right. That was what Pellam had been thinking.
    “This’s different,” the director continued. “It’s called Missouri River Blues. You hear about it? Orion was kicking it around a few years ago before it was belly-up time. These characters are real. They live and breathe. Dunaway and Beatty were . . . Dunaway and Beatty. What can I say? Good movie, one of my primal influences. But I’m going beyond it. Okay, Ross, that’s the boyfriend, he’s in prison and going crazy. He’s going to kill himself. He can’t take it anymore. We open on these incredible shots of a lock-down. That’s when . . . See, in prison—”
    “When they close up the maximum-security cellblock for the night.”
    “Right. How’d you know that?”
    “Tell me about the film, Tony.”
    “I’ve got the DP working on a special micro lens. Angles on the insides of the locks and bars clanging shut. It’s beautiful. So we get a sense of confinement. Everything closing around him. Well, Ross escapes, and he and Dehlia—”
    “Dehlia?”
    “. . . he and Dehlia drive around the countryside, robbing armored trucks mostly. They’re highwaymen, modern highwaymen. Ross’s driven by his fear of the lock-down. She’s driven by the social convention that forces women to be homemakers. Claustrophobia. The script plays off the risk of freedom versus thefear of imprisonment. Which is worse? Prison with its security, freedom with its dangers?”
    “It sounds a lot like Bonnie and Clyde. ”
    “No, no, the characters are all different. Also the freedom of love versus its confinement. Oh, and the kids’re concerned about the environment.” He added significantly, “This’s the early fifties. They’re concerned about A-bomb testing.”
    “A-bombs,” Pellam said. “That’s very socially conscious.” Sloan completely missed the irony and Pellam asked, “Set in Missouri, I presume?”
    “Medium-sized town,” Sloan said. “The postwar boom has passed it by. That sort of town.”
    “ Bonnie and Clyde was set in Missouri,” Pellam pointed out. “Part of it anyway.”
    “It’s not like Bonnie and Clyde, ” the director said icily.
    Pellam flipped through his mental Rolodex of locations he knew in the Midwest. “I did a job in Kansas a few years back. Small town on a river. How’s Kansas?”
    “I want Missouri. The title, you know.”
    Pellam asked, “Could you tell Kansas from Missouri?”
    “I grew up in Van Nuys. I can’t tell Ohio from Colorado. But that’s not the point. I want Missouri.”
    “Got it.”
    Sloan now paused. “The thing is, John, I’ve got some timing problems here.”
    The tail of the sentence wagged silently.
    “Timing.”
    “You know, I’ve had nothing but headaches with the project. You know the Time article about me? Last year?”
    “I missed it,” Pellam said.
    “When they called me the ‘High-tech Visionary’?”
    Pellam said that whatever they had called him, he’d still missed the article.
    “I mean, Sony or Disney would have written a check for the GNP of France if I’d made the sequel.”
    Son of Circuit Man, Pellam thought, then reconsidered. He said, “ Circuit Man Rewired. ”
    “Ha, John. Very good. Very funny. But Missouri River ? It was a battle to get the green light. It’s an action film, but it’s a period action film, and it’s an intelligent period action film. That scared people.”
    Perhaps competing with Kurosawa and Altman and John Ford—and Arthur Penn, the director of Bonnie and Clyde —scared people, too.
    “So what are you saying,