Bloody River Blues

creases—two short, vertical furrows, the result of a lifetime of squinting. “Tea. Herbal.” He tapped the script. “I must have been thinking of the first draft. Or the second. Or one of them. You rewrite a hell of a lot, John.”
    “Lipton?”
    Weller looked about, as if he might spot a box of Celestial Seasonings chamomile hidden nearby. “Okay,” he said with reservation. Then: “Honey?”
    “Domino.”
    “Well, this is middle America.” Weller smiled slyly and asked, “So?”
    “Yes?”
    “You know what I’m asking. What’s the scoop? On Sloan .”
    Independent producer Marty Weller was as much a gossip sponge as anyone in Hollywood—though he was not sufficiently powerful to use much of the gossip he absorbed. He had done a string of offbeat films that were lukewarm hits. This opened doors for him but did not automatically get his pictures made. Still, gossip about Tony Sloan, while not particularly useful to Weller, was platinum gossip. One wanted it the same way one wanted Taittinger or beluga.
    Yet Weller’s presence here in small-town Missouri now reminded Pellam of L.A. protocol and, cognizant of his obscenely large fee, he recalled the rule: Assume anything you say, even in strictest confidence, will immediately be transmitted to the Hollywood Reporter and attributed to you. Pellam gave Weller a diluted version of the film’s production woes.
    “Word is he’s cindering in the upper atmosphere,” Weller said with a frown that did nothing to mask his delight.
    Pellam shrugged. “Okay, Marty, don’t keep me in suspense. Go or no go?”
    Weller picked up the battered black-covered script he had just misquoted. The title was Central Standard Time. “We’re close, John. Damn close. I’ve got maybe eighty percent of the financing in place.” He fell silent for a minute and riffled the pages. In his former life—which in Hollywood meant only a few years ago—Pellam had both written and directed independent films. Central Standard Time had been the film he’d been working on when his career had been derailed in a big way.
    No one had been interested in the property until immaculately tanned Marty Weller had appeared on Pellam’s doorstep and told him, with as much sincerity as a Hollywood producer could muster, that he was going to get Pellam’s “vision” turned into a dark art-house classic.
    Finally, he said delicately, “There were some questions about what happened before.” He looked up uncomfortably. “You were actually in production?”
    “We were two weeks into principal photography.”
    Weller did not look up but intently read what happened to be the blank back cover of the script. “When he got sick, you mean.”
    Got sick. Pellam said, “That’s right.”
    Tommy Bernstein—the leading man in Central Standard and Pellam’s best friend—had not “gotten sick” at all but had died of a cocaine-induced heart attack during principal photography, which hadbrought the production to a halt and Pellam’s life as he’d lived it to a shattering conclusion.
    Weller was flipping through the script and sending a stale breeze up into the air. “Somebody . . . I’m just explaining why it’s taking so long. This is bullshit, I know. But somebody talked about a jinx.”
    Pellam laughed. “Like the Exorcist stories, that old crap?”
    “People are more superstitious about money than about their lives. More producers fly on Friday the thirteenth than write checks, you better believe it.”
    “Well, nothing I can do about that.”
    “And you directing, that’s still carved in stone?”
    Pellam noted that the cautious tone in the man’s voice was not going away. He said firmly, “Yep.”
    “The thing is, John . . . Well, you’ve been out of the loop for a long time.”
    “I direct or they don’t get property. It’s a deal-breaker.”
    “And they’re saying if they don’t get to pick the director, leads, and DP, we don’t get the money. They’ll—”
    “Mexican standoff.”
    “They’ll let you coproduce. I think they’ll even go gross points since you wrote it.”
    “Producing means nothing to me—”
    “It means a shitload of money is what it means. Look, John, the budget is seven million.” He tapped the script. “It’s got ‘film noir cult classic’ written all over it. We’re going to shoot in black and white, for God’s sake. This is going to make money. It cannot not make money—”
    “Marty,” Pellam said