[2] Sc. 290
[3] p. 49
[4] 2 shot D. and L., D’s dialogue. Scrubbed. (Takes 1–3.)
I shrugged. “So they adiosed the seventh setup,” I said. “It happens. The director sets up a shot and then changes his mind, or an actor gets uncomfortable, and the director kills the setup to let the actor have time to cool off.”
I glanced at Perkins, who seemed singularly unimpressed.
“I’ll bet this setup was just before lunch,” I said. “Franklin broke for lunch after doing three takes and then decided to do something else. He came back and scrubbed the setup.”
“Franklin can’t afford that,” Perkins said. “You heard him last night. He has a slow cameraman, and he needs every setup he can get. He struck me as an extremely well-prepared director.”
“Here’s the person to ask,” I said. Across the way, Millie Pink, the script supervisor, was tripping into the breakfast room. Literally tripping. She stumbled and banged against a table, dropping her stopwatch on the floor. She bent over to pick it up and dropped her notebook, papers fluttering across the linoleum. A couple of electricians stopped eating to help her get organized.
You should know that script supervisors are a very strange breed. Some of them are sloppy and dress like hobos, and some of them are extremely prissy, neat, and proper. Millie was actually good-looking, if a little overdone. She tended to wear too much makeup, and short skirts, and stiletto heels that she must have gotten from Frederick’s of Hollywood. She was married to a male makeup man who was always working on another production, and she wasn’t exactly opposed to a little excitement on location.
Millie’s trouble was that she was badly organized in person. Her script notes were perfect—she always knew how far down an actor had smoked a cigarette before delivering a line, and whether the actor had held the cigarette in his right or left hand—but her personal life was a mess. Her miniskirts invariably showed legs all black-and-blue from banging into tables, camera tripods, car doors. Her notes were dusty from being dropped countless times, and even her makeup was often a little askew, one eyebrow heavier than the other, and so on.
I guess the crew liked her because she was so vulnerable. A crew can easily get down on a script supervisor because it’s not exactly a popular job. But everybody liked Millie.
When she had her notes collected again, I beckoned for her to come over and introduced her to Perkins.
“Please join us for breakfast,” Perkins said, in his most polite banker’s manner.
“Thanks, only coffee,” Millie said, blowing a wisp of streaked blond hair out of her eyes. “I’m on a diet. It’s starting to spread south of the border.Whew! What a morning.”
Perkins poured her coffee from a plastic pot that sat on the table. “I understand,” he said, “that you had the unfortunate distinction of being the person who found Mr. McDougall.”
“Oh, sothat’swho you are,” she said. “I was trying to place you. Yes, I found him.” She lit a cigarette, leaving the filter edge dark red from lipstick. “Is that what you want to talk about?”
“Not exactly. But it must have been an upsetting experience.”
Millie blew a stream of smoke. “Well, look,” she said. “I’m not going to kid you. I’ve been around movies all my life, and I’ve seen a lot of strange things. The truth is, I really just didn’t believe it. I kept thinking, ‘They finally got the blood to look real; that makeup man’s a genius.’ I’m married to a makeup man, you see, so I know about those things. Anyway, it was a couple of seconds before it hit me that McDougall was really eighty-sixed.”
“His door was open, is that right?”
“Yeah, it was open. That struck me as funny. And the bed wasn’t slept in. That struck me as funny too. I mean, he wasn’t the most popular guy around, so I wondered who had put him up for the night, you know what I mean?” She paused. “Then I found him in the bathroom.”
“You had gone to his room for script revisions?”
“Yeah, I stopped there every morning to get the changes. I have to do that; otherwise, nobody will tell me there’s a change until we’re actually shooting, and then it’s a mess.”
“So this was routine for you.”
“Yeah. About five thirty, like always.”
“Was the door always ajar?”
“No,” she said, “but sometimes it was. I don’t want to say anything bad about the dead, Mr. Perkins, but Arthur was a heavy drinker. My father was a heavy drinker, too, so I know about these things. Arthur drank alot, and he was forgetful. The door was open several mornings when I came by, and I used to come in and see quite a mess from the night before, I can tell you.”
“But yesterday the room was neat?”
“Neat as a pin. Unusually neat.”
“Was Mr. McDougall a neat person?”
“Not when he drank.”
