Temptation (7 page)

So
The Last Chance
was made on some godawful little island off the coast of County Clare, with interior work shot in a Dublin studio. Though it was a disaster for all involved, at least Bobby Barra came away with a major prize: his friendship with Philip Fleck.

‘Believe it or not, we talk the same language. And I know he respects my financial judgement.’

Enough to let you play with his money?
I was about to ask – but I held my tongue. Because I was pretty certain that a man of Philip Fleck’s mega-means probably had twelve Bobby Barras on his payroll. What I couldn’t figure out exactly was what such an isolated figure saw in a hustler like Barra. Unless, like me, he found him diverting, and considered him potential material.

‘What’s the new wife like?’ I asked Bobby.

‘Martha? Very New England. Very bookish. Not bad looking, if you like the Emily Dickinson type.’

‘You know Emily Dickinson?’

‘We never dated, but . . . ’

I had to hand it to Bobby. He was fast.

‘I’ll tell you this,
entre
-fucking-
nous
,’ he said. ‘No one was surprised when Phil decided she was the one. Before that, he was into arm candy in a big way – though he always looked awkward with some model who had trouble spelling her own name. Despite all the money, he’s never been much of a babe magnet.’

‘How nice that he met someone then,’ I said, thinking that, despite her alleged Belle of Amherst credentials, this Martha woman must be one shrewd gold digger.

‘Anyway, the point of this invitation is a simple one,’ Bobby said. ‘As I told you before, Phil loves
Selling You
, and he simply wants to meet you, and he thought you might like a couple of days with your lady under the Saffron Island palms.’

‘Sally can come too?’

‘That’s what I just said.’

‘And this is simply a meet-and-greet, nothing more?’

‘Yeah, that’s right,’ Bobby said, a slight note of hesitancy slipping into his voice. ‘Of course, he may want to speak with you a bit about the business.’

‘That’s okay by me.’

‘And if you wouldn’t mind reading a script of his before heading out there.’

‘I knew there was a catch.’

‘It’s not much of a catch. All he’s asking for is a “courtesy read” of a new script.’

‘Look, I’m not a script doctor . . . ’

‘Bullshit. That’s exactly what you do on all the episodes of
Selling You
which you don’t write.’

‘Yeah – but the difference is: it’s
my
series. Sorry to sound up-my-ass, but I really don’t administer CPR to other people’s work.’

‘You
are
up your ass – but the thing here is: no one’s asking you to play doctor. Like I said, it’s a courtesy read, no more. More to the point, the writer in question is Mr Philip Fleck. And he is willing to fly you in his own private jet to his own private island, where you will have your own private suite with your own private swimming pool, your own private butler and the kind of six star service you will never find anywhere else, and in exchange for this week of absolute sybaritic luxury, all that is asked of you is that you read his screenplay – which, I should point out, is a mere 104 pages, because I have the damn thing in front of me – and after you read it, you simply have to sit down with him sometime under the Saffron Island palms, sip a Pina Colada, and talk for around an hour to the eighth richest American about his screenplay . . . ’

He paused for breath. And also for effect.

‘Now I ask you, Mr Armitage – is that such a fucking stretch?’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Messenger the script over.’

It arrived two hours later . . . by which time Jennifer had pulled the
Esquire
profile off the Internet, and I was definitely intrigued. There was something so irresistible about the paradox that was Philip Fleck. So much money. So little creative ability. And – if the
Esquire
writer was to be believed – such a desperate need to show the world that
he was a man of genuinely creative gifts. ‘Money means nothing without validation,’ he told the journalist. But say it turns out that, for all your billions, you are actually talentless? What then? And I guess there was a schmucky part of me that thought it would be rather amusing to spend a few days observing this supreme irony.

Even Sally was intrigued by the idea of spending a week in the proximity of such extreme wealth.

‘Are you absolutely sure this is not some ruse that little Bobby Barra has cooked up?’ she asked me.

‘For all his big time talk I doubt that Bobby actually has access to his very own 767, let alone a Caribbean island. Anyway, I did get a copy of Fleck’s script – and I had Jennifer run a WGA check on it. Fleck is registered as the author – so, yeah, the whole thing seems perfectly legit.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘Don’t know. I only got it right before leaving the office.’

‘Well, if we’re leaving on Friday, you’d better find the time to do some serious notes on it. You are going to have to sing for our supper, after all.’

‘So you are coming?’

‘A free week on Phil Fleck’s island idyll? Damn right I am. I can dine out on this for months.’

‘And if it all turns out to be utterly tacky?’

‘It’ll still be a story worth telling around town.’

Later that night, after insomnia sprung me out of bed at two in the morning, I sat in our living room and cracked open Fleck’s screenplay. It was called
Fun and Games
. The opening scene read:

INT. PORNO SHOP, NIGHT

BUDDY MILES, fifty-five, lived-in face, cigarette permanently screwed into the side of his mouth, sits behind the counter of a particularly scuzzy porno shop. Though pin-ups and the lurid covers of assorted magazines bedeck the area where he sits, we quickly notice that he’s reading a copy of Joyce’s
Ulysses
. The opening movement of Mahler’s Symphony 1 is being played on the boom box next to the cash register. He lifts a mug of coffee, tastes it, grimaces, then reaches below the counter and brings up a bottle of Hiram Walker bourbon. He unscrews the top, pours a shot into the coffee, replaces the bottle, and sips the coffee again. This time it passes muster. But as he looks up from the mug, he notices that a man is standing in front of the counter. He is dressed in a heavy winter parka. A balaclava helmet covers his face. Instantly BUDDY notices that the hooded figure is pointing a gun at him. After a moment, the hood speaks.

LEON
That Mahler you playing?

BUDDY
(nonplussed by the gun) I’m impressed. Ten bucks says you can’t guess the symphony.

LEON
You on. It’s Symphony Number-the-one.

BUDDY
Double or nothing you can’t guess the conductor.

LEON
Treble-or-nothing.

BUDDY
That’s a little steep.

LEON
Yeah, but I’m holding the gun.

BUDDY
Can’t argue with that. Okay, treble or nothing. Who’s the guy waving the stick?

LEON
pauses for a moment, listening carefully to the recording.

LEON
Bernstein.

BUDDY
No sale. Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony.

LEON
You fucking with me?

BUDDY
Check it out yourself.

LEON
– still training the gun on
BUDDY
– opens the top of the boom box, pulls out the disc and studies its label with distaste, eventually chucking it away.

LEON
Damn. I never get that Chicago sound.

BUDDY
Yeah, it takes a while to adjust your ears to it. Especially all that big brass. Listen, are we going to get done whatever you want to get done?

LEON
You read my fucking mind. (He moves closer to Buddy). So go on, open up the register and make me happy.

BUDDY
No problem.

BUDDY
opens the register.
LEON
leans over, using his free hand to grab the cash. As he does so,
BUDDY
slams the drawer on his hand and simultaneously pulls out a sawed-off shotgun from beneath the counter. Before
LEON
knows it, he has a shotgun at his head and his hand trapped in the cash register. He moans in pain.

BUDDY
I think you should drop the gun, don’t you?

LEON
does as ordered.
BUDDY
lets go of the drawer of the cash register, but still keeps the gun at
LEON
’s head as he reaches over and pulls off his balaclava helmet.
LEON
is now revealed to be an African-American, also in his mid fifties.
BUDDY
stares at
LEON
, wide eyed.

BUDDY
Leon? Leon Wachtell?

Now it’s
LEON
’s turn to look wide-eyed. Suddenly the penny drops for him too.

LEON
Buddy Miles?

BUDDY
lowers the gun.

BUDDY
Sergeant Buddy Miles to you, asshole.

LEON
I don’t believe it.

BUDDY
And I don’t believe you didn’t recognize me.

LEON
Hey, it’s a long time since’Nam.

CUT TO:

I stopped reading. I put the script down. Immediately I was on my feet, heading towards the large closet off the entrance of our loft. After digging around assorted boxes, I found what I was looking for: a footlocker, crammed with my old scripts from all those years in Nowheresville. I opened the locker. I plunged into the deep pile of failed screenplays and never-produced television pilots and eventually I unearthed
We Three Grunts
– one of the first scripts I wrote after Alison took me on as a client. I returned to the sofa. I opened my script. I read page one.

INT. PORNO SHOP, NIGHT

BUDDY MILES, fifty-five, lived-in face, cigarette permanently screwed into the side of his mouth, sits behind the counter of a particularly scuzzy porno shop. Though pin-ups and the lurid covers of assorted magazines bedeck the area where he sits, we quickly notice that he’s reading a copy of Joyce’s
Ulysses
and the opening movement of Mahler’s Symphony 1 is being played on the boom box next to the cash register. He lifts a mug of coffee, tastes it, grimaces, then reaches below the counter and brings up a bottle of Hiram Walker bourbon. He unscrews the top, pours a shot into the coffee, replaces the bottle, and sips the coffee again. This time it passes muster. But as he looks up from the mug, he notices that a man is standing in front of the counter. He is dressed in a heavy winter parka. A balaclava helmet covers his face. Instantly BUDDY notices that the hooded figure is pointing a gun at him. After a moment, the hood speaks.

LEON
That Mahler you playing?

BUDDY
(nonplussed by the gun)
I’m impressed. Ten bucks says you can’t guess the symphony.

And the scene went on exactly as it was written in Philip Fleck’s screenplay. I grabbed Fleck’s script. I balanced it on one knee, while opening my own script on the other knee. I did a page-by-page comparison. Fleck had completely copied my original screenplay, written some eight years before the one he had registered with the Screen And
Television Writers Association last month. This wasn’t mere plagiarism; this was
word-by-word
,
punctuation mark-by-punctuation mark
plagiarism. In fact – given that the two scripts were printed in the same typeface – I was pretty damn certain that he simply had some minion type a new title page with his own name on it before submitting it to the Association.

I couldn’t believe it. What Fleck had done wasn’t simply outrageous; it was downright scandalous – to the point where, with SATWA backing, I could have easily exposed him publicly as a literary pirate. Surely someone as hyper-conscious of his privacy as Fleck would realize that the press would love to draw-and-quarter him on a plagiarism charge. And surely he also knew that, by sending the script to me, he was inviting (at best) my outrage. So what asshole game was he playing?

I glanced at my watch. Two forty-one. I remembered something Bobby once said to me: ‘I am here 24/7 if you need me.’ I picked up the phone. I called his cell number. He answered on the third ring. In the background, I could hear blaring techno-music and the sound of an accelerating engine. Bobby sounded buzzed out of his head: either nose candy or something from the Ritalin school of pharmacology.

‘Dave, you’re up late,’ he said.

‘Is this a good moment?’

‘If I told you I was doing ninety on the 10 with a Hawaiian babe named Heather Fong copping my joint as we speak, would you believe me?’

‘No.’

‘And you’d be right. I’m just heading home now after a
long night discussing the Nasdaq with a couple of very bright Venezuelans . . . ’

‘And I’ve been up reading. What the fuck does Fleck think he’s doing, copying my script?’

‘Oh, you got that, did you?’

‘Oh, I got it all right – and Mr Fleck’s in big trouble. To begin with, I could get Alison to file a lawsuit . . . ’

‘Hey, I know it’s almost three-in-the-am, but get an irony check, huh? Fleck was paying you a compliment, asshole. A major compliment. He wants to make your script. It’s gonna be his next project. And he’s going to pay you big time for it.’

‘And is he also going to palm the script off as his own?’

‘Dave, the dude is worth $20 billion. He ain’t no dumb cracker. He knows that your script is
your script
. All he was doing was telling you, in his own skewed way, that he really digs it . . . ’

‘Wouldn’t it have been just a little bit easier if he had simply called me up and told me how much he liked the script . . . or if he’d done the usual thing of having his people talk to my people?’

‘What can I say? Phil keeps everybody guessing. But hey, if I was you, I’d be pleased. Alison can now screw vast amounts of money out of him for the script.’

‘I’m going to have to think about this.’

‘Oh, bullshit. Now listen – go take a sense of humor pill and get some sleep. This will all seem pretty damn amusing in the morning.’