Franklin frowned. “Can you see a man standing over there, do you think?” He pointed at the man who was standing no more than eight feet away.
“What man?” she said, still squinting.
“Oh my God,” Franklin said.
I looked over at Mann to see how he was reacting to all this. But Mann seemed to be deep in conversation with Al Chadney, and paying no attention to Sally at all.
“Spray a flag and set it up for her,” Franklin said. He turned to Claude. “How fast can we get her fitted with contacts?”
“Probably a week.”
“A week? Christ.”
“Oh, I always wanted contacts,” Sally said, and clapped her hands.
“Arrange it,” Franklin said. “And in the meantime, we’ll do the best we can.”
Claude nodded. He was about to arrange it, when Mann walked over to him. “I think we should keep Chadney on past tomorrow,” he said.
Claude moved closer to Mann and spoke quietly. I wouldn’t have heard the conversation except that I happened to be near them. “We don’t need him past tomorrow,” Claude said.
“I know that,” Mann said.
“We have no more stunts after the wire gag. It isn’t necessary to carry him.”
“I know that, but I think it would be useful to have him.”
“I don’t want to argue with you,” Claude said in his most respectful voice, “but you’ve got him as stunt gaffer on a thousand-dollar weekly. If you carry him for the rest of the picture, it’s another fifteen thousand dollars, and we don’t have any stunts.”
“I’d just feel better if he was here.”
“Fine, but the studio will never approve that expenditure.”
“Let me worry about the studio,” Mann said.
“Fine,” Claude said. “We’ll carry him. I’ll tell Ed.”
“Good,” Mann said, and walked away with a nod to Chadney, who was standing and watching the conversation across the set.
Now, I heard the whole thing, and I thought it was damned strange. Mann was a freak about wasted money. Early in the production he’d even gotten on my back about the multilith costs I’d run up putting out releases. I mean, he was petty. And now he was authorizing an unnecessary fifteen-grand expense. That’s a lot of multilith press releases.
I looked over at Perkins, who was sitting next to me.
“You hear that?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. But he didn’t act surprised. Franklin, meanwhile, was setting up another shot with Sally, and then there was a voice shouting, “Mr. Franklin, the snake wrangler is here for you.”
Franklin turned to Claude. “Take care of that, will you?”
“Sure,” Claude said. “How many do you want?”
“Get about four strikers, and three or four crawlers.”
“Fine,” Claude said. “Big?”
“As big as you can get.”
“Fine,” Claude said, and went off to see the snake wrangler’s wares. I could just see the wrangler’s station wagon pulled up at the end of the street. The wrangler himself was pulling out several large wooden boxes from the back of the wagon. Even from where I was sitting, I could hear the hiss of the rattlesnakes.
