Stars Screaming (13 page)

“It’s just drizzling.”

“But the roads are slippery.”

“I’ll be careful. I promise.”

Louie turned his head as Burk walked into the living room. His arms were folded tight across his chest. “Daddy’s gonna miss you.”

“I’ll miss Daddy.”

“Will you call us?”

“Every night.”

“You promise?”

“Swear to God.”

“I bet she comes back tomorrow,” Louie said to his father, looking around expectantly after he hung up the phone. “She’ll be sitting right here on the couch when I come home from school. Right, Daddy?”

“Maybe.”

“I bet.”

Louie kept his eyes closed on the ride home from nursery school the following afternoon. “She’s probably stuck in traffic,” he said when he saw the empty driveway on Valley View Lane. “She’ll be home in a little while.” And before he went to bed, in a voice that Burk could barely hear, Louie said, “Wake me when she calls. Okay?”

Burk said, “For sure,” but Sandra didn’t call that evening like she’d promised, or the next. Two weeks went by and Louie stopped looking for her car when he came back from school, and by week three he didn’t dash to the phone each time it rang.

Still, every night he got down on his knees by the side of his bed and asked God to bring his mother home safely, and then he would get underneath the covers and lie motionless, moving his lips silently as he replayed their last conversation, wondering why she would lie to him like that.

Once she did come home, in a dream, and Louie threw off his blankets and shouted, “She’s here, she’s here!” repeating these words over and over as he ran through the darkened house. When Burk finally found him, he was standing on the front lawn with tears rolling down his face, staring into the outer dark. “She’s here . . . I know it,” he said in a tiny voice. “I saw her.”

Burk felt a terrible sadness sweep through his chest as he reached for his son’s hand. “No, Louie, you were just dreaming,” he said, and he led him back to bed.

Louie’s nursery school day ended at three o’clock, the same time Burk finished writing, and most afternoons on their way home they would stop at a small park on Balboa Avenue near Encino. There Louie would ride his Big Wheel or play on the monkey bars while Burk sat at a picnic table and edited the script pages he’d rewritten that morning.

One day a young woman took a seat on the bench across from Burk. “You write?” she said, and Burk nodded. “So do I,” she said, and from her purse she removed a professionally typed screenplay with the Columbia Pictures logo on the cover.

Her name was Loretta Egan. She was in her early thirties, pretty but thin, with bold eyes and dark, curly hair. Her script,
Cold as Ice
, a sexy thriller starring Clint Eastwood, was set to begin filming in the fall. “It’s my fourth original but my first sale. I can’t believe it’s really gonna happen,” she told Burk. “What about you, any credits?”

“No. Not really. Actually I just started writing six months ago.”

“You have an agent?”

“Maria Selene. She’s with Rheinis and Robins.”

“They’re good. You must know what you’re doing.”

Burk shrugged. “I thought I did,” he said, then he told her about
Mr. Plastic Fantastic
, the negative response he’d received.

“What’s it about?” she said.

Burk started to explain the plot. Halfway through, Loretta said, “Stop. I can’t follow it.”

“I guess it is pretty complicated,” Burk laughed, not altogether surprised by her bluntness. “When I’m done with this draft it will be a lot clearer. Maybe you could look it over before I turn it in. I mean, if you’re not too busy.”

Before Loretta could reply, Louie rolled up on his Big Wheel. Following him on a tricycle was a little girl with pale yellow hair that hung in front of her shoulders.

“This is Emily,” Louie said. “She’s five too. Say hello to my dad, Emily.”

Emily said hello; then she pointed behind her to a bench by the swings. “That’s my mom with the pink sweater. She’s crying. Yesterday was her birthday.”

Louie said, “Emily’s dad left her like Mom did. Tell my dad how long he’s been gone.”

“No.”

“Please?”

“No.”

“Pretty please.”

“All right,” she said, and her lips began to shake. “He’s been gone a million trillion billion years.”

Burk said, “That’s a long time.”

That night while Burk lay awake listening to Radio Ray Moore, Louie tiptoed into his room and slipped into bed next to him. In a few minutes he was asleep, so he didn’t hear the call Radio Ray took right before he signed off for the news. The caller, a woman, would not reveal her name, but she told Radio Ray that she was a regular listener. “I’ve never called in before,” she said, “but my husband did once.”

Radio Ray kept her on the line when he went into a station break, and during the network news that followed she told Radio Ray that she was staying at the Silverado Motel in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Off the air, she said, “I’m lying here in bed on my back, and across from me, on the wall above the TV, is a painting of a little girl seated at a small wooden table with her ankles crossed and her hands folded neatly in her lap. Through the window in the picture a horse can be seen grazing in a field filled with yellow daisies. And beyond the horse, on the horizon, is a single gray cloud.

“Right now I can’t see the picture because it’s pitch dark, but once in awhile a car will pass by and the headlights will flash across the wall of my room—and for an instant I might see the little girl or the horse or the cloud that is getting ready to rain.”

The caller stopped speaking and began to hum a melody that sounded familiar to Radio Ray Moore. A moment later, he heard someone pounding on her door. The caller continued to hum, louder, and the man in the background yelled, “Open the fucking door, Sandra, you goddamn cunt!”

The
ON THE AIR
light blinked on inside Radio Ray’s booth, flashing red like blood spurting from a vein. At that moment Louie rolled over and whispered something in his sleep. To Burk, who was half awake, it sounded like “Come home,” but he wasn’t sure. It may have been only a long deep sigh.

On the morning of August 15, 1970, Burk accepted a collect call from his wife. She explained that she was in jail in Victorville, a city in the high desert one hundred and fifty miles northwest of Los Angeles. She said she’d shot a man named Shay Carson, a cowboy from Bozeman, Montana, and the nation’s finest calf roper, and that she’d been charged with murder.

That was the bad news.

The good news came later that afternoon when Maria Selene phoned Burk, informing him that Jerome Sanford, the head of production at Paramount Pictures, had finally read his script,
Zoomin
’. She’d sent it over as a writing sample, and he liked it enough to pass it along to Jon Warren, a protégé of John Houston and the hottest young director in Hollywood. Warren told Sanford that he wanted it to be his next project.

All this came out of the blue, because Burk had not spoken to Maria in four months, since he’d turned in his third rewrite of
Mr. Plastic Fantastic
. By this time all the money he’d borrowed from his
father had run out, and whatever writing career he thought he had was over. In fact, he’d just taken a job that day selling men’s shoes at a department store in Westwood. He was walking out the door when Maria called.

“That’s amazing,” Burk said, after Maria told him the news.

“There’s only one problem,” she said, making it sound minor. “He wants to set the story in 1969. Can you make that work?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you can’t, there’s no movie. Warren’s the key. Think it over and I’ll set up a meeting.”

Jon Warren lived on Alta Way, a narrow private road that corkscrewed into the hills off Benedict Canyon. The house, shaped like an L, sat high on a cliff and was surrounded by evergreens and a ten-foot-high white sandstone wall that was made even whiter by the bright sunlight.

“William Morris sends me ten scripts a week. They’re all dogshit. But I read yours in one sitting,” Jon Warren told Burk. They were sitting under an umbrella on the pool terrace. Not too far away a slim and supple blonde lay topless on an air mattress floating in the water. “It moved like a fucking gun. Only one problem: your story. It’s dated,” Warren said, and he stood up. He was wearing a clean white T-shirt, khaki shorts, and beaded Mexican moccasins that he kicked off his feet when he stepped up on the diving board. “The fifties are fucking square compared to the social revolution that’s going on today. You dig what I’m saying?” Warren stripped off his T-shirt. His body was lean and muscular, and the diving board creaked and bent under his weight when he walked out to the end and flexed his knees. “Think about it, man. The Beatles, the Dead, Hendrix, Warhol, Leary, Antonioni. These cats are fucking explorers that are sailing into the unknown. We’re all zooming today.”

“What I wrote about really happened,” Burk said. “Most of it, anyway.”

“Desire and denial! That’s what drives a story,” Warren said, springing high in the air, and the loud snap of the diving board echoed
across the canyon. “Goals,” he said, landing hard. “Immediate or long-range, but your characters must be moving in a particular direction.” Warren looked down at the beautiful blonde floating beneath him. Her eyes were closed and she was very lightly massaging her nipples with the tips of her fingers. “What I liked about your script was the originality,” Warren said, shooting Burk a smile before he unzipped his khaki shorts and threw them by the side of the pool.

Burk looked away, embarrassed, directing his gaze toward a slender palm tree in the center of the lawn. Nonetheless he found himself becoming aroused as Warren bounced lightly on the board with his erect penis straining toward the ice-blue sky.

“I liked the energy, the craziness, the unpredictability. But you were way too close to your material, too close to shape it dramatically, too close to free that part of your unconscious that pulls the reader along on a journey they never want to end. A story has to get me here,” Warren said, pointing to his erection. “Yours didn’t.” Warren grabbed his cock and jerked it fast several times. “You dig what I’m saying?”

Before Burk could reply Warren was already in the air, his body arched gracefully, his stiff cock causing a large ripple as he knifed through the surface of the water. When he reappeared in the shallow end, Burk said, “I have an idea.”

“Of course you have an idea. You’re a fucking writer,” Warren said, a bemused smile on his face as he watched the blonde strip off her bikini bottom and paddle toward him on the raft. “And a damn good one, I might add.”

FROM: Jerome Sanford

TO: Robert Evans

DATE: October 26, 1970

Received the first draft of
Pledging My Love
, an original screenplay by Raymond Burk that Jon Warren is committed to direct. I finished it last night and thought it was wonderful. The plot (which I don’t want to ruin for those who have yet to read it) concerns the surprise arrival of two former high school classmates at their ten-year reunion.

(1) Ricky Horton—a once-gifted athlete who suffered a mental breakdown on the field during his first major league game.

(2) Barbara
St. Claire (Sinclair in high school, with the emphasis on the “sin")—a B-movie actress whose career was derailed when a scandal sheet revealed that she’d appeared in a stag film while she was a senior in high school.

What brings these two together is their obsessive need to find Eric Baldwin, another classmate of theirs who has dropped out of sight. Their search takes them on a journey through the bloody heart of Los Angeles, beginning on the night of the reunion and ending on the morning of the Manson killings, when the painful event from the past that unites this threesome is finally revealed.

I found this to be an incredibly compelling script, with relationships and situations that are unique and speak to today’s marketplace. That Jon Warren wants to direct makes this project that much more exciting. I am recommending that we move forward quickly to get this in production.

Below are just a few of the casting ideas I jotted down this morning:

Ricky	Barbara	Eric
Bob Redford	Jane Fonda	Jack Nicholson
Warren Beatty	Diane Keaton	Bruce Dern
Jon Voight	Sally Kellerman	Al Pacino
Jeff Bridges	Ellen Burstyn	Dennis Hopper
James Caan	Tuesday Weld
Peter Fonda

From
Daily Variety
, November 9, 1970: