Thomas Hoover: Life blood

"You're welcome. I guess." Balls? I adored those vulnerable male bits, but I preferred not to think of myself in those terms. Truth was, Nicky Russo played a large part in my personal anxieties. "But I mean it. N. O."

"I hear you," he said, sighing. Then he snapped back to the moment. "So where do things stand otherwise?"

I'd come for an after-the-fact green light of the day's shoot, but already I was thinking about Hannah Klein. "David, I'm going to find out in about an hour whether Steve and I are ever going to have a baby. But truthfully I don't think I'm pregnant. I think it's over." It hurt to say it. He knew about Steve and me-I'd written some language on maternity leave into my contract-and I think he was mildly rooting for us. Or maybe not.

"Could be it's all for the best," he declared. He'd sat back down, picked up a pencil off his desk to distract himself, and was whirling it pensively, one of his few habits that made me crazy. "Maybe you were destined to make movies, not kids."

I listened to his tone of voice, knowing he often hid his real feelings with safe, sympathy-card sentiments. He rose to eloquence only when nothing much was at stake. He'd even sent me flowers and a mea-culpa note twice as a makeup after we'd had a disagreement over costs and scheduling. And one of those times, I should have sent him flowers. Sometimes I wondered why we worked so well together. The truth was, we operated on very different wavelengths.

Some history to illustrate. Over the past eight years, before I teamed up with David, I'd done three "highly praised" documentaries. But getting to that point meant busting my behind for years and years at the lower end of the professional food chain. After NYU, I toiled as a script supervisor on PBS documentaries, about as close to grunt work as it comes. Eventually I got a fling as a production assistant, assembling crews, but then the money dried up. (Thank you, Jesse Helms.) Whereupon I decided to try capitalism, working for three years as an AD on the soaps: first Guiding Light, then As the World Turns, then Search for Tomorrow. I can still hear the horrible music. Then a connection got me a slot at A amp;E as a line producer. Eight months later the series got canceled, which was when I decided the time had come to take my career into my own hands. I hocked every last credit card, went to Japan, and made a documentary. The result: I was an "overnight" success. Men started addressing me by my name.

My first film was about the impact of Zen on Japanese business. As part of my research, I shaved my head and lived three months at a Kyoto temple, eating bean curd three meals a day, after which I had enough credibility to land long interviews with Tokyo CEOs. I then sold the edited footage to A amp;E. When it became a critical hit, they financed a second film, about the many gods of India and how they impact everything about the place. There, I also got caught up in the mystical sensuality of ragas, Indian classical music, and took up the violin (one of my major professional mistakes). Next I moved on to Mexico's southern Yucatan to film a day in the life of a Maya village for the Discovery Channel. They wanted me to add some footage from Guatemala, but I scouted the country and decided it was too scary. Instead, I spent several months in Haiti filming voodoo rituals, again for A amp;E. And met Steve.

Then one day I checked my bank account and realized that, financially speaking, I was a "flop d'estime." I was doing the kind of work that does more for your reputation than your retirement plan. I decided to go more mainstream and see what happened. But to do that I needed a commercial partner, a backer.

Ironically enough, when I first teamed up with David, he had bottom-line problems too, but from the opposite direction. He was busy disproving the adage that nobody ever lost money underestimating the taste of the American public. He knew something was wrong, but what?

Apparently, when he started out, somebody told him cable audiences possessed an insatiable appetite for bare-skin-and- jiggle. Hey, he figured, that stuff he could grind out in his sleep. His first, and last, epic in the skin genre was Wet T-Shirt Weekend, whose title says it all. He explained the economics to me once, still baffled why the picture hadn't worked. He'd assumed all you had to do was find a bunch of nineteen-year-olds who looked like they're sixteen, go nonunion someplace down South with a beach, and take care the wardrobe trailer has nothing but string bikinis. "Cost only a million-eight to make," he declared with pride, "but every penny is on the screen."

He insisted I watch it, perplexed that it was universally regarded as a turkey. It was a painful experience, so much so I actually began to wonder if his heart was really in it. (The great schlockmeisters secretly think they're Fellini; they're operating at the top of their form, not consciously pandering.)

Chastened financially, he decided to move into low-budget action-adventure. His efforts, most notably Virtual Cop, had car chases, blue-screen explosions, buckets of fake blood. Somebody died creatively in every scene.

They did business in Asia and Southern Europe, but he was dumbfounded when nobody at HBO or Showtime would return his calls. It gnawed at his self-esteem.

That was the moment we found each other. He'd just concluded he needed somebody with a quality reputation to give Applecore an image makeover, and I'd realized I needed somebody who knew more than I did about the mechanics of making and distributing independent films.

We were an odd couple. I finally shook hands on the partnership after he caved in and agreed I could do anything I wanted, so long as it looked mainstream enough to get picked up by Time-Warner or somebody else legit. Well, quasi-legit. We both agreed on no more bikinis and no more films about places that required cholera shots. It was something of a compromise on both our parts.

Thus far, though, we were getting along. Maybe luck was part of it, but Baby Love was still on schedule and on budget. And I already had a deal nearly in the bag with Lifetime, the women's channel, that would just about cover the costs. Everything after that would be gravy. Again, hope hope. Maybe not the theatrical release I'd been praying for, but good enough-so he had to smile and not give me a hard time about the money I'd just spent. Had to, right?

I took a deep breath.

"David, I did a little extra shooting this morning that's kind of… outside the plan. But it's really important. Want to hear about it?"

"What! I thought you were finished with principal photography." He looked disoriented, the deer in the headlights. Hints of extra crew time always had that effect on him. "You're saying this wasn't in the budget?"

"Just listen first, okay?" Like a politician, I avoided giving him a direct answer. I told him about the interview with Carly and the reason for it.

"Nice of you to share the news with me." His eyes narrowed. "I think we've got some big-time communication issues here."

"Look, don't worry. I'll figure out how to save some money somewhere else."

"Morgy, before we continue this unnerving conversation, we've got to have a serious review of the matter of cash flow." He frowned, then went back to whirling the pencil, his hair backlighted from the wide window, his eyes focused on its stubby eraser as though he'd just discovered a new strain of bacteria. "So let me break some news regarding the current budget."

He put down the pencil, adjusted its location on his desk, and looked up. "I didn't want to have to upset you, since the picture seems to be going so well, but we've drawn down almost all our cash. I actually think that's why Nicky was here today, sniffing around, wanting to see a rough cut. He's got a keen nose for indy cash-flow trouble."