Ed McBain - The Last Brief

‘Gee, I don’t know,’ she said.

‘We’ll pay you an advance of one hundred dollars on signing,’ Ben said.

‘How long will it take to make this movie?’ she asked.

‘Twenty weeks,’ I said.

‘Twenty weeks is a long time for only a thousand dollars,’ she said. ‘I make more than that in the massage parlour.’

‘You can’t become a star in a massage parlour,’ Solly said.

‘That’s true,’ she said, ‘but...’

‘I can understand what she means,’ I said. ‘We’re offering her a thousand dollars for twenty weeks’ work. That only comes to fifty dollars a week.’

‘That’s right,’ she said.

‘And suppose we run over?’ I said.

‘We won’t run over,’ Ben said.

‘How do you know we won’t?’

‘What do you mean “run over”?’ the girl asked. ‘What’s “run over”?’

‘That means if it takes more time to shoot than we planned.’

‘More than twenty weeks? she said. ‘This must be some long movie you’ve got in mind here.’

‘We want to do a quality job,’ I said.

‘Well, I can tell you one thing,’ she said. ‘If it runs over twenty weeks, I want fifty a week for as long as it takes. That’s if I decide to take the job, which I haven’t decided I’ll take it yet.’

‘Well, take your time,’ Ben said.

‘Who’s going to be in this picture with me?’ she asked.

‘We haven’t found a leading man yet,’ I said.

‘How much will you be paying him?’

‘All we can afford is five hundred dollars.’

‘Mmm,’ she said. ‘So that’s fifteen hundred for both of us, right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And you guys expect to make millions on this picture, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I want a percentage,’ she said. ‘I want twenty-five percent of the profits.’

‘No,’ Ben said. ‘That’s out of the question.’

‘Just a minute, Ben,’ I said.

‘Out of the question,’ he said.

‘And also I want script approval.’

‘No script approval,’ Solly said.

‘Okay, I’ll forget about script approval, but I still want twenty-five percent.’

‘Make it five,’ I said.

‘Make it ten,’ she said.

‘Boys?’ I said.

Solly and Ben looked at each other.

‘This is highway robbery,’ Ben said. ‘There must be a thousand young actresses in this city...’

‘Ben,’ Solly said, ‘I want this girl for the part. She’s perfect for the part.’

‘Do you know what ten percent of a million dollars is?’ Ben asked.

‘Yes, it’s one hundred thousand dollars,’ Solly said, ‘and I’m willing to give her that if she turns out to be only half as good as I think she’ll be.’

‘I think she’ll be very good, too, Ben,’ I said.

‘I was hoping for a redhead,’ Ben said.

‘What do you say?’

‘All right, all right,’ Ben said. ‘Give her the ten percent.’

‘Have we got a deal?’ I asked her.

‘We’ve got a deal,’ she said, and grinned.

Powdered sugar was clinging to her lips.

We had budgeted ourselves very carefully because it simply wouldn’t have paid to undertake the project if it was going to come to too much of a weekly investment for the three of us individually. You have to remember that whereas this dream of ours had been taking shape over a long period of time, during which we’d had many meetings and discussions, we nevertheless knew very little about the movie business, and were a little bit afraid we wouldn’t be able to make the thing work. Ben, for example, though he had naturally taken a lot of photographs in his lifetime, both still and motion picture, made his real living as an accountant, and naturally had a lot to learn. Solly worked as a short-order cook in a delicatessen downtown, and had written his beautiful screenplay at night and on Sundays. And I personally was a lingerie salesman for Benjamin Brothers Apparel, but this doesn’t necessarily mean I did not have a feel for directing; I have always been very good with people, there are those who say I am maybe too sensitive when it comes to personal relationships.

What I’m trying to explain is that the project was a risky one for three amateurs, and we all knew it would require a great deal of concentration and energy to bring it off and make our dream come true. And also, it couldn’t cost us too much because then the economics of it would have been self-defeating, if you know what I mean. We were paying the girl fifty dollars a week, and we were planning to pay her leading man twenty-five dollars a week, and also we had rented a big empty loft for another fifty dollars a week, which came to a bottomline cost of positively one hundred and twenty-five dollars a week, which was maybe not expensive for what we had in mind, but which was a considerable sum for us to be splitting three ways. If you figure it out, it came to almost forty-two dollars a week for each of us. And if the girl didn’t work out, we would have lost our initial hundred-dollar advance, which was supposed to cover the first two weeks of shooting the scenes with her leading man.

The leading man we found was Harry.

Knowing what I now know, I wish we had never laid eyes on him. In fact, knowing what I now know, I wish Harry had got hit by a bus on the first day of shooting. Or even the second day. Or a falling safe from a high building. Or a catastrophe in the subway. Harry was a dope. He wasn’t even good-looking, but that was okay because we didn’t want her leading man to be too good-looking as that would run contrary to the intent of Solly’s script when it got to the play-within-a-play sections which were actually the major sections of the movie. Harry was working daytimes as an insurance adjuster, and he was reluctant to accept our offer at first because he was very conscientious about his job, and he didn’t want to get to work tired in the morning. I should tell you at this point, though I hold no hard feelings, that it was Ben who brought that dope Harry around. They had gone to high school together, and Ben remembered him from the locker room as somebody who was not too spectacularly built, which was also in keeping with the tone and the intent of Solly’s beautiful screenplay.

Anyway, we told Harry that our shooting schedule, as far as it concerned him, would be from eight p.m. to midnight, and then he could go home and get a good night’s rest before he went to his job at the insurance company. We told him that twenty-five dollars a week was really just a token payment, but the work was not exactly disagreeable, and besides we were willing to pay him five percent of the profits once the picture broke even and we were all on the way to becoming millionaires. We did this because we felt certain he would begin talking to the girl later on when they became acquainted, and we didn’t want any jealousy on the set about who was getting a percentage and who wasn’t. It was offering him the percentage that did the trick. Up to then, he was only mildly interested; we had shown him pictures of the girl — fully clothed, of course — which Ben had taken the minute we signed her, and though she was very nicely shaped, in fact very marvelously shaped, she wasn’t too beautiful in the face, though she did have a nice innocent and sophisticated look about her. Harry wasn’t too sure he wanted to make love to her in front of a camera. He said he had gone out with much prettier girls in his lifetime, which frankly I found hard to believe when you consider this was Harry the dope talking. But when we offered the five percent, he all at once decided that maybe it would be all right for him to lower his standards just this once, provided it really wouldn’t take more of his time than from eight to midnight. We told him that as the shooting went on, he would be required to perform even less and less, and he agreed to work for us. So there we were. We had our script, we had our leading players, we had this big old loft to shoot the movie in, and we had our dream.