The Cutting Room: Dark Reflections of the Silver Screen (10 page)

With that, he turned and left, leaving Milo staring into the wide-eyed black face of the janitor.

“What are you staring at?” Milo said.

“A man in
big
trouble,” the janitor said in a deep, faintly accented voice. He was pudgy with a round face, watery eyes, and two days’ worth of silvery growth on his jowls. With a front tooth missing on the top, he looked like Leon Spinks gone to seed for thirty years. “These doctors can’t be helpin’ what you got. You got a
Bocor
mad at you, and only a
Houngon
can fix you.”

“Get lost!” Milo said.

He lay back on the gurney and closed his good eye to shut out the old man and the emergency room. He hunted for sleep as an escape from the pain and the gut-roiling terror, praying he’d wake up and learn that this was all just a horrible dream. But those words wouldn’t go away.
Bocor
and
Houngon
. . . he knew them somehow. Where?

And then it hit him like a blow—
The Hut
! They were voodoo terms from the novel
The Hut
! He hadn’t used them in the film—he’d scoured all mention of voodoo from his screenplay—but the author had used them in the book. If Milo remembered correctly, a
Bocor
was an evil voodoo priest and a
Houngon
was a good one. Or was it the other way around? Didn’t matter. They were all part of Bill Franklin’s bullshit novel.

Franklin!
Wouldn’t he like to see me now! Milo thought. Their last meeting had been anything but pleasant. Unforgettable, yes. His mind did a slow dissolve to his new office at Twentieth two weeks ago. . . .

“Some conference!”

The angry voice startled Milo and he spilled hot coffee down the front of his shirt. He leaped up from behind his desk and bent forward, pulling the steaming fabric away from his chest. “Jesus H.—”

But then he looked up and saw Bill Franklin standing there and his anger cooled like fresh blood in an arctic breeze. Maggie’s anxious face peered over Franklin’s narrow shoulder.

“I tried to stop him, Mr. Gherl, honest I did, but he wouldn’t listen!”

“You’ve been ducking me for a month, Gherl!” Franklin said in his nasal voice. “No more tricks!”

Maggie said, “Shall I call security?”

“I don’t think that will be necessary, Maggs,” he said quickly, grabbing a Kleenex from the oak tissue holder on his desk and blotting at his stained shirtfront. Milo had moved into this office only a few weeks ago, and the last thing he needed today was an ugly scene with an irate writer. He could tell from Franklin’s expression that he was ready to cause a doozy. Better to bite the bullet and get this over with. “I’ll talk to Mr. Franklin. You can leave him here.” She hesitated and he waved her toward the door. “Go ahead. It’s all right.”

When she had closed the door behind her, he picked up the insulated brass coffee urn and looked at Franklin. “Coffee, Billy-boy?”

“I don’t want coffee, Gherl! I want to know why you’ve been ducking me!”

“But I haven’t been ducking you, Billy!” he said, refreshing his own cup. He would have to change this shirt before he did lunch later. “I’m not with Universal anymore. I’m with Twentieth now, so naturally my offices are here.” He swept an arm around him. “Not bad, ay?”

Milo sat down and tried his best to look confident, at ease. Inside, he was anything but. Right now he was a little afraid of the writer stalking back and forth before the desk like a caged tiger. Nothing about Franklin’s physical appearance was the least bit intimidating. He was fair-haired and tall, with big hands and feet attached to a slight, gangly frame. He had a big nose, a small chin, and a big Adam’s apple—Milo had noticed on their first meeting two years ago that he could slant a perfectly straight line along the tips of those three protuberances. A moderate overbite did not help the picture. Milo’s impression of Franklin had always been that of a patient, retiring, rational man who never raised his voice.

But today he was barging about with a wild look in his eyes, shouting, gesticulating, accusing. Milo remembered an old saying his father used to quote to him when he was a boy:
Beware the wrath of a patient man.

Franklin had paused and was looking around the spacious room with its indirect lighting, its silver-gray floor-to-ceiling louvered blinds and matching carpet, the chrome and onyx wet bar, the free-form couches, the abstract sculptures on the Lucite coffee table and on Milo’s oversized desk.

“How did you ever rate this after perpetrating a turkey like
The Hut
?”

“Twentieth recognizes talent when it sees it, Billy.”

“My question stands,” Franklin said.

Milo ignored the remark. “Sit down, Billy-boy. What’s got you so upset?”

Franklin didn’t sit. He resumed his stalking. “You know damn well what! My book!”

“You’ve got a new one?” Milo said, perfectly aware of which book he meant.

“No! I mean the only book I’ve ever written—
The Hut
!—and the mess you made out of it!”

Milo had heard quite enough nasty criticism of that particular film to last him a lifetime. He felt his anger flare but suppressed it. Why get into a shouting match?

“I’m sorry you feel that way, Billy, but let’s face facts.” He spread his hands in a consoling gesture. “It’s a dead issue. There’s nothing more to be done. The film has been shot, edited, released, and—”

“—and withdrawn!” Franklin shouted. “Two weeks in general release and the theater owners sent it back! It’s not just a flop, it’s a catastrophe!”

“The critics—killed it.”

“Bullshit! The critics blasted it, just like they blasted other ‘flops,’ like
Flashdance
and
Top Gun
and
Ernest Goes to Camp
. What killed it, Gherl, was word of mouth. Now I know why you wouldn’t screen it until a week before it opened: You knew you’d botched it!”

“I had trouble with the final cut. I couldn’t—”

“You couldn’t get it to make sense! As I walked out of that screening I kept telling myself that my negative feelings were due to all the things you’d cut out of my book, that maybe I was too close to it all and that the public would somehow find my story in your mass of pretensions. Then I heard a guy in his early twenties say, ‘What the hell was
that
all about?’ and his girlfriend say, ‘What a boring waste of time!’ and I knew it wasn’t just me.” Franklin’s long bony finger stabbed through the air. “It was you! You raped my book!”

Milo had had just about enough of this. “You novelists are all alike!” he said with genuine disdain. “You do fine on the printed page so you think you’re experts at writing for the screen. But you’re not. You don’t know the first goddam thing about visual writing!”

“You cut the heart out of my story!
The Hut
was about the nature of evil and how it can seduce even the strongest among us. The plot was like a house of cards, Gherl, built with my sweat. Your windbag script blew it all down! And after I saw the first draft of the script, you were suddenly unavailable for conference!”

Milo recalled Franklin’s endless stream of nit-picking letters, his deluge of time-wasting phone calls. “I was busy, dammit! I was writer-director! The whole thing was on my shoulders!”

“I warned you that the house of cards was falling due to the cuts you made. I mean, why did you remove all mention of voodoo and zombiism from the script? They were the two red herrings that held the plot together.”

“Voodoo! Zombies! That’s old hat! Nobody would pay to see a voodoo movie!”

“Then why set the movie in Haiti, f’Christsake? Might as well have been in Pasadena! And that monster you threw in at the end? Where in hell did you come up with that? It looked like the Incredible Hulk in drag! I spent years in research. I slaved to fill that book with terror and dread—all you brought to the screen were cheap shocks!”

“If that’s your true opinion—and I disagree with it absolutely—you should be glad the film was a flop. No one will see it!”

Franklin nodded slowly. “That gave me comfort for a while, until I realized that the movie isn’t dead. When it reaches the video stores and the cable services, tens of millions of people will see it—not because it’s good, but simply because it’s there and it’s something they’ve never heard of before and certainly have never seen. And they’ll be directing their rapt attention at your corruption of my story, and they’ll see ‘Based on the Novel by William Franklin’ and think that the pretentious, incomprehensible mishmash they’re watching represents my work. And that makes me
mad
, Gherl! Fucking-ay crazy mad!”

The ferocity that flashed across Franklin’s face was truly frightening. Milo rushed to calm him. “Billy, look: Despite our artistic differences and despite the fact that
The Hut
will never turn a profit, you were paid well into six figures for the screen rights. What’s your beef?”

Franklin seemed to shrink a little. His shoulders slumped and his voice softened. “I didn’t write it for money. I live off a trust fund that provides me with more than I can spend.
The Hut
was my first novel—maybe my only novel ever. I gave it everything. I don’t think I have any more in me.”

“Of course you do!” Milo said, rising and moving around the desk toward the subdued writer. Here was his chance to ease Franklin out of here. “It’s just that you’ve never had to suffer for your art! You’ve had it too soft, too cushy for too long. Things came too easy on that first book. First time at bat, you got a major studio film offer that actually made it to the screen. That hardly ever happens. Now you’ve got to prove it wasn’t just a fluke. You’ve got to get out there and slog away on that new book! Deprive yourself a little!
Suffer!
”

“Suffer?” Franklin said, a weird light starting to glow in his eyes. “I should suffer?”

“Yes!” Milo said, guiding him toward the office door. “All great artists suffer.”

“You ever suffer, Milo Gherl?”

“Of course.” Especially this morning, listening to you!

“Look at this office. You don’t look like you’re suffering for what you did to
The Hut
.”

“I did my suffering years ago. The anger you feel about
The Hut
is small change compared to the dues I’ve had to pay.” He finally had Franklin across the threshold. “I’m through suffering,” he said as he slammed the door and locked it.

From the other side of the thick oak door he thought he heard Franklin say, “No, you’re not.”

“Missing any personal items lately, mister?” said a voice.

Milo opened his good eye and saw the big black guy standing over him, leaning on his mop handle. What was
wrong
with this old fart? What was his angle?

“If you don’t leave me alone I’m gonna call—” He paused. “What do you mean, ‘personal items’?”

“You know—clothing, nail clippings, a brush or comb that might hold some of your hair. That kinda stuff.”

A chill swept over Milo’s skin like an icy breeze in July.

The robbery!

Such a bizarre thing—a pried-open window, a few cheap rings gone, his drawers and closets ransacked, an old pair of pajamas missing. And his toupee, the second-string hairpiece . . . gone. Who could figure it? But he had been shaken up enough to go out and buy a .38 for his night table.

Milo laughed. This was so ludicrous. “You’re talking about a voodoo doll, aren’t you?”

The old guy nodded. “It got other names, but that’ll do.”

“Who the hell
are
you?”

“Name’s Andre, but folks call me Andy. I got connections you gonna need.”

“You need your head examined!”

“Maybe. But that doctor said he was lookin’ for the wires that was cuttin’ into your legs and your arm but he couldn’t find them. That’s because the wires are somewheres else. They around the legs and arm of a doll somebody made on you.”

Milo tried to laugh again but found he couldn’t. He managed a weak, “Bullshit.”

“You believe me soon enough. And when you do, I take you to a
Houngon
who can help you out.”

“Yeah,” Milo said. “Like you really care about me.”

The old black showed his gap-tooth smile. “Oh, I won’t be doin’ you a favor, and neither will the
Houngon
. He’ll be wantin’ money for pullin’ you fat out the fire.”

“And you’ll get a finder’s fee.”

The smile broadened. “Thas right.”

That made a little more sense to Milo, but still he wasn’t buying. “Forget it!”

“I be around till three. I keep checkin’ up on you case you change you mind. I can get you out here when you want to go.”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

Milo rolled on his side and closed his eyes. The old fart had some nerve trying to run that corny scam on him, and in a hospital yet! He’d report him, have him fired. This was no joke. He’d lost his eye already. He could be losing his feet, his hand! He needed top medical-center level care, not some voodoo mumbo-jumbo . . .