“Does that happen often?”
“You mean, he changes a setup at lunch? About once a week, I’d say.”
“Why didn’t he print anything from that setup?” Perkins asked.
Millie leaned toward him in a conspiratorial manner. “You know, he should have. I told him that. It looks bad when the camera report goes in and one of the setups has been dropped. And if he just prints one take—even if he isn’t going to use it later—then it looks much more efficient, you know, back at the studio.”
“But he printed nothing.”
“Yeah. I don’t know why. I told him, but he just kept shaking his head, no, no prints.” She shrugged. “It’s no skin off my nose. If anybody catches it from the studio, he does. I was just trying to protect him. Even if he’d said hold a take from that setup. But he wouldn’t.”
“Is that typical of him?”
Millie leaned closer and dropped her voice. “No,” she said, “and I’ll tell you, I think it was pretty strange, the whole thing. It was like he felt he couldn’t print one of those takes.”
“Do you remember anything unusual about the setup?”
Millie shook her head and opened her notebook. “Let me just check,” she said. Papers spilled out, corners dipping into her coffee. “Damn,” she said. “You have a tissue?”
I gave her my paper napkin. She wiped off the coffee. “Now let’s see,” she said. “That was scene two-ninety, wasn’t it... now... uh-huh, uh-huh.” She was looking at her script, which was covered with fine notes in pencil. “Nope,” she said, finally. “I have no record of anything wrong. Three pretty good takes. Oh, wait a minute. Here, on take three, we have a question about the governor. Ran another several hundred feet of film.”
She slapped her hand on her thigh. “That’sright,” she said. “I remember now. We were going along fine, and just around lunchtime the camera operator began to worry about the governor, so Tom said let’s break for lunch and let the crew check the camera. It was fine.”
“The governor?”
“The thing on the camera that controls the speed, so it goes exactly twenty-four frames of film a second.”
“I see.”
Claude came into the room and said, “The bus is waiting.”
“That’s me,” Millie said. She joined the crew, all getting up from their tables and filing outside to the waiting bus to go to location.
I looked over at Perkins to see if he wanted to go as well. He just sat there. Finally, he said, “What time does the lab print?”
“The lab at the studio?”
“Yes.”
“They start about six in the morning and print until they run out of material. Ten or eleven, maybe.”
“Then there’s time,” Perkins said. “I wonder if you could call them and get this material printed up.”
“What material is that?”
“The seventh setup. Scene two-ninety, takes one to three.”
“You want them all?”
“Yes. All.”
“Sure,” I said.
“And have them put it on a separate reel,” Perkins added. “Don’t put it in with regular dailies.”
“Okay, fine,” I said. “I should be able to get it here by six tonight.”
“Excellent,” Perkins said. “But make sure the reel is marked as special for me. Nobody else can see it, and whatever you do, don’t say a word.”
