Ben turned to me. “How about you, Jason?”
Now do you see? Even goddamned Ben calls me by my last name, like I was nobody. “Beer,” I said.
“Coming up,” Ben said.
We were alone for a minute. Perkins said, “Make a note of this.”
I got out my notepad.
“First, tell Greenblatt I will see him at his hotel suite at seven p.m., and that is the only time I will be able to see him tonight. Second, have that film that I ordered set up in the projection room, but don’t tell anybody about it. I will run it at eight p.m. Third, I want to see the still man at eight thirty. By the way, do you have a still book?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Where is it?”
“In the production office.”
“Fine, we’ll go look right now.” He pushed away from the bar.
Ben came back with the beers. “Don’t want your drinks?”
Perkins pushed a ten-dollar bill across the bar. “Keep the change,” he said, and we left the room.
* * *
Alice, the production secretary, made us some coffee while Perkins pored over the book. The still book consists of a fat loose-leaf collection of all the contact sheets for all the thirty-five-millimeter film shot by the still man during the production. A still man will probably take about four or five thousand photos in the course of a picture. These are all for publicity.
The reason is you can’t use regular footage from the film, because the quality isn’t good enough for stills. Or, in our case,Bloodrockwas Panavision, which means that all the filmed images are squeezed skinny vertically, requiring a special “unsqueezer.”
Larry McBroom was our still man. He was a very nice guy in his late forties who was stoned all the time but a good photographer. And very diplomatic—he always made sure that he took lots of candids of the stars and had them printed up and placed in their dressing rooms every few days. Stars love to have pictures of themselves. They can’t get enough. So Larry was well liked by everyone.
It was clear to me that Perkins wasn’t looking at pictures of stars. He scanned the images rapidly with the help of a magnifying glass. It made him look even more like Sherlock Holmes.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“McDougall.”
“There are several pictures of him posing with the cast.”
“I saw those. That’s not what I want.” And he kept scanning.
“What do you want?”
“I want to see him writing.”
He kept looking for several moments more. Alice came back with our coffee. I sipped mine. Perkins ignored his.
Finally, he said, “Aha!” and sat back. He tapped one frame.
I looked. It showed McDougall making some script changes on location, with Mann and Franklin looking on. It was, frankly, pretty phony. It looked staged. I said so.
“Undoubtedly,” Perkins said. “But he’s writing.”
“So?”
“He’s using his right hand.”
“So? Most people are right-handed.”
