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  "I'm not sure what you mean."

  "The action. I can feel the action."

  "Don't get fooled by Linda's optimism. Nothing might come of this."

  Ric shook his head. "I'm close."

  "I've got some pages I want to do tomorrow, but if you'll come around at four with your own new pages, I'll go over them for you. I'm curious to see how you're revising that script you showed me."

  Ric kept staring out at the sunset and didn't answer for quite a while. "Yeah, my script."

  * * *

  As things turned out, I didn't get much work done the next day. I had just managed to solve a problem in a scene that was running too long when my phone rang. That was around ten o'clock, and rather than be interrupted, I let my answering machine take it. But when I heard Ric's excited voice, I picked up the phone.

  "Slow down," I said. "Take it easy. What are you so worked up about?"

  "They want the script!"

  I wasn't prepared. "Warners?"

  "Can you believe that this is happening so fast?"

  "Ballard's actually taking it? How did you find this out?"

  "Linda just phoned me!"

  "Linda?" I frowned. "But why didn't Linda... ?" I was about to say "Why didn't Linda phone me?" Then I realized my mistake. There wasn't any reason for Linda to phone me, except maybe to tell me the good news about my friend. But she definitely had to phone Ric. After all, he was supposedly the author of the screenplay.

  Ric kept talking excitedly. "Linda says Ballard wants to have lunch with me."

  "Great." The truth is, I was vaguely jealous. "When?"

  "Today."

  I was stunned. Any executive with power was always booked several weeks in advance. For Ballard to decide to have lunch with Ric this soon, he would have had to cancel lunch with someone else. It definitely wouldn't have been the other way around. No one cancels lunch with Ballard.

  "Amazing," I said.

  "Apparently he's got big plans for me. By the way, he likes the script as is. No changes. At least for now. Linda says when they sign a director, the director always asks for changes."

  "Linda's right," I said. "And then the director'll insist that the changes aren't good enough and ask to bring in a friend to do the rewrite."

  "No fucking way," Ric said.

  "A screenwriter doesn't have any clout against a director. You've still got a lot to learn about industry politics. School isn't finished yet."

  "Sure." Ric hurried on. "Linda got Ballard up to a million and a quarter for the script!"

  For a moment, I had trouble breathing.

  "Great." And this time I meant it.

  * * *

  Ric phoned again in thirty minutes. He was nervous about the meeting and needed reassurance.

  Ric phoned thirty minutes after that, saying that he didn't feel comfortable going to a power lunch in the sneakers, jeans, and pullover that I had told him were necessary for the role he was playing.

  "You have to," I said. "You've got to look like you don't belong to the Establishment or whatever the hell it is they call it these days. If you look like every other writer trying to make an impression, Ballard will treat you like every other writer. We're selling nonconformity. We're selling youth."

  "I still say I'd feel more comfortable in a jacket by..." Ric mentioned the name of the latest trendy designer.

  "Even assuming that's a good idea, which it isn't, how on earth are you going to pay for it? A jacket by that designer costs fifteen-hundred dollars."

  "I'll use my credit card," Ric said.

  "But a month from now, you'll still have to pay the bill. You know the whopping interest rates those credit card companies charge."

  "Hey, I can afford it. I just made a million and a quarter bucks."

  "No, Ric. You're getting confused."

  "All right, I know Linda has to take her ten percent commission."

  "You're still confused. You don't get the bulk of that money. I do. What you get is fifteen percent of it."

  "That's still a lot of cash. Almost two hundred thousand dollars."

  "But remember, you probably won't get it for at least six months."

  "What?"

  "On a spec script, they don't simply agree to buy it and hand you a check. The fine points on the negotiation have to be completed. Then the contracts have to be drawn up and reviewed and amended. Then their business office drags its feet before issuing the check. I once waited a year to get paid for a spec script."

  "But I can't wait that long. I've got.

  "Yes?"

  "Responsibilities. Look, Mort, I have to go. I need to get ready for this meeting."

  "And I need to get back to my pages."

  "With all this excitement, you mean you're actually writing today?"

  "Every day."

  "No shit."

  * * *

  But I was too preoccupied to get much work done.

  Ric finally phoned around five. "Lunch was fabulous."

  I hadn't expected to feel so relieved. "Ballard didn't ask you any tricky questions? He's still convinced you wrote the script?"

  "Not only that. He says I'm just the talent he's been looking for. A fresh imagination. Someone in tune with today's generation. He asked me to do a last-minute rewrite on an action picture he's starting next week."

  "The Warlords?"

  "That's the one."

  "I've been hearing bad things about it," I said.

  "Well, you won't hear anything bad anymore."

  "Wait a.. .Are you telling me you accepted the job?"

  "Damned right."

  "Without talking to me about it first?" I straightened in shock. "What in God's name did you think you were doing?"

  "Why would I need to talk to you? You're not my agent. Ballard called Linda from our table at the restaurant. The two of them settled the deal while I was sitting there. Man, when things happen, they happen. All those years of trying, and now, wham, pow, all of a sudden I'm there. And the best part is, since I'm a writer for hire on this job, they have to pay some of the money the minute I sit down to work, even if the contracts aren't ready."

  "That's correct," I said. "On work for hire, you have to get paid on a schedule. The Writers Guild insists on that. You're learning fast. But Ric, before you accepted the job, don't you think it would have been smart to read the script first - to see if it can be fixed?"

  "How bad can it be?" Ric chuckled.

  "You'd be surprised."

  "It doesn't matter how bad. The fee's a hundred thousand dollars. I need the money."

  "For what? You don't live expensively. You can afford to be patient and take jobs that build a career."

  "Hey, I'll tell you what I can afford. Are you using that portable phone in your office?"

  "Yes. But I don't see why that matters."

  "Take a look out your front window."

  Frowning, I left my office, went through the TV room and the living room, and peered past the blossoming rhododendrum outside my front window. I scanned the curving driveway, then focused on the gate.

  Ric was wearing a designer linen jacket, sitting in a red Ferrari, using a car phone, waving to me when he saw me at the window. "Like it?" he asked over the phone.

  "For God's sake." I broke the connection, set down the phone, and stalked out the front door.

  "Like it?" Ric repeated when I reached the gate. He gestured toward his jacket and the car.

  "You didn't have time to... Where'd you get... ?"

  "This morning, after Linda phoned about the offer from Ballard, I ordered the car over the phone. Picked it up after my meeting with Ballard. Nifty, huh?"

  "But you don't have any assets. You mean they just let you drive the car off the lot?"

  "Bought it on credit. I made Linda sign as the guarantor."

  "You made Linda..." I couldn't believe what I was hearing. "Damn it, Ric, why don't you let me finish coaching you before you run off and.. .After I taught you about screenplay t
echnique and industry politics, I wanted to explain to you how to handle your money."

  "Hey, what's to teach? Money's for spending."

  "Not in this business. You've got to put something away for when you have bad years."

  "Well, I'm certainly not having any trouble earning money so far."

  "What happened today is a fluke! This is the first script I've sold in longer than I care to think about. There aren't any guarantees."

  "Then it's a good thing I came along, huh?" Ric grinned.

  "Before you accepted the rewrite job, you should have asked me if I wanted to do it."

  "But you're not involved in this. Why should I divide the money with you? I'm going to do it."

  "In that case, you should have asked yourself another question."

  "What?"

  "Whether you've got the ability to do it."

  Ric flushed with anger. "Of course, I've got the ability. You've read my stuff. All I needed was a break."

  * * *

  I didn't hear from Ric for three days. That was fine by me. I'd accomplished what I'd intended. I'd proven that a script with my name on it had less chance of being bought than the same script with a youngster's name on it. And to tell the truth, Ric's lack of discipline was annoying me. But after the third day, I confess I got curious. What was he up to?

  He called at nine in the evening. "How's it going?"

  "Fine," I said. "I had a good day's work."

  "Yeah, that's what I'm calling about. Work."

  "Oh?"

  "I haven't been in touch lately because of this rewrite on The Warlords."

  I waited.

  "I had a meeting with the director," Ricsaid. "Then I had a meeting with the star." He mentioned the name of the biggest action hero in the business. He hesitated. "I was wondering. Would you look at the material I've got?"

  "You can't be serious. After the way you talked to me about it? You all but told me to get lost."

  "I didn't mean to be rude. Honestly. This is all new to me, Mort. Come on, give me a break. As you keep reminding me, I don't have the experience you do. I'm young."

  I had to hand it to him. He'd not only apologized. He'd used the right excuse.

  "Mort?"

  At first I didn't want to be bothered. I had my own work to think about, and The Warlords would probably be so bad that it would contaminate my mind.

  But then my curiosity got the better of me. I couldn't help wondering what Ric would do to improve junk.

  "Mort?"

  "When do you want me to look at what you've done?"

  "How about right now?"

  "Now? It's after nine. It'll take you an hour to get here and - "

  "I'm already here."

  "What?"

  "I'm on my car phone. Outside your gate again."

  * * *

  Ric sat across from me in my living room. I couldn't help noticing that his tan was darker, that he was wearing a different designer jacket, a more expensive one. Then I glanced at the title page on the script he'd handed me.

  THE WARLORDS revisions by Eric Potter I flipped through the pages. All of them were typed on white paper. That bothered me. Ric's inexperience was showing again. On last-minute rewrites, it's always helpful to submit changed pages on different-colored paper. That way, the producer and director can save time and not have to read the entire script to find the changes.

  "These are the notes the director gave me," Ric said. He handed me some crudely typed pages. "And these" - Ric handed me pages with scribbling on them -"are what the star gave me. It's a little hard to decipher them."

  "More than a little. Jesus." I squinted at the scribbling and got a headache. "I'd better put on my glasses." They helped a little. I read what the director wanted. I switched to what the star wanted.

  "These are the notes the producer gave me," Ric said.

  I thanked God that they were neatly typed and studied them as well. Finally I leaned back and took off my glasses.

  "Well?"

  I sighed. "Typical. As near as I can tell, these three people are each talking about a different movie. The director wants more action and less characterization. The star has decided to be serious -he wants more characterization and less action. The producer wants it funny and less expensive. If they're not careful, this movie will have multiple personalities."

  Ric looked at me anxiously.

  "Okay," I said, feeling tired. "Get a beer from the refrigerator and watch television or something while I go through this. It would help if I knew where you'd made changes. Next time you're in a situation like this, identify your work with colored paper."

  Ric frowned.

  "What's the matter?" I asked.

  "The changes."

  "So? What about them?"

  "Well, I haven't started to make them."

  "You haven't? But on this title page, it says 'revisions by Eric Potter.'"

  Ric looked sheepish. "The title page is as far as I got."

  "Sweet Jesus. When are these revisions due?"

  "Ballard gave me a week."

  "And for the first three days of that week, you didn't work on the changes? What have you been doing?"

  Ric glanced away.

  Again I noticed that his tan was darker. "Don't tell me you've just been sitting in the sun?"

  "Not exactly."

  "Then what exactly?"

  "I've been thinking about how to improve the script."

  I was so agitated I had to stand. "You don't think about changes. You make changes. How much did you say you were being paid? A hundred thousand dollars?"

  Ric nodded, uncomfortable.

  "And the Writers Guild insists that on work for hire you get a portion of the money as soon as you start."

  "Fifty thousand." Ric squirmed. "Linda got the check by messenger the day after I made the deal with Ballard."

  "What a mess."

  Ric lowered his head, more uncomfortable.

  "If you don't hand in new pages four days from now, Ballard will want his money back."

  "I know," Ric said, then added, "But I can't."

  "What?"

  "I already spent the money. A deposit on a condo in Malibu."

  I was stunned.

  "And the money isn't the worst of it," I said. "Your reputation. That's worse. Ballard gave you an incredible break. He decided to take a chance on the bright new kid in town. He allowed you to jump over all the shit. But if you don't deliver, he'll be furious. He'll spread the word all over town that you're not dependable. You won't be hot anymore. We won't be able to sell another script as easily as we did this one."

  "Look, I'm sorry, Mort. I know I bragged to you that I could do the job on my own. I was wrong. I don't have the experience. I admit it. I'm out of my depth."

  "Even on a piece of shit like this."

  Ric glanced down, then up. "I was wondering... Could you give me a hand?"

  My mouth hung open in astonishment.

  Before I could tell him no damned way, Ric quickly added, "It would really help both of us."

  "How do you figure that?"

  "You just said it yourself. If I don't deliver, Ballard will spread the word. No producer will trust me. You won't be able to sell another script through me."

  My head began to throb. He was right, of course. If I wanted to keep selling my scripts, if I wanted to see them produced, I needed him. There was no doubt in my mind that as old as I was, I would never be able to sell another script with my name on it. I finally had to admit that all along, secretly, I had never intended the deception with Ric to be a one-time-only arrangement.

  I swallowed and finally said, "All right."

  "Thank you."

  "But I won't clean up your messes for nothing."

  "Of course not. The same arrangement as before. All I get out of this is fifteen percent."

  "By rights, you shouldn't get anything."

  "Hey, without me, Ballard wouldn't have offered the job."

  "S
ince you already spent the first half of the payment, how do I get that money?"

  Ric made an effort to think of a solution. "We'll have to wait until the money comes through on the spec script we sold. I'll give you the money out of the two hundred thousand that's owed to me."

  "But you owe the Ferrari dealer a bundle. Otherwise Linda's responsible for your debt."

  "I'll take care of it." Ric gestured impatiently. "I'll take care of all of it. What's important now is that you make the changes on The Warlords. Ballard has to pay the remaining fifty thousand dollars when I hand in the pages. That money's yours."

  "Fine."

  It wasn't until later that I realized how Ric had set a precedent for restructuring our deal. Regardless of his promise to pay me what I was owed, the reality was that he had pocketed half the fee. Instead of getting fifteen percent, he was now getting fifty percent.

  * * *

  The script for The Warlords was even worse than I'd feared. How do you change bad junk into good junk? In the process, how do you please a director, a star, and a producer who ask for widely different things? One of the rules I've learned over the years is that what people say they want isn't always what they mean. Sometimes it's a matter of interpretation. And after I endured reading the script for The Warlords, I thought I had that interpretation.

  The director said he wanted more action and less characterization. In my opinion, the script already had more than enough action. The trouble was that some of the action sequences were redundant, and others weren't paced effectively. The biggest stunts occurred two-thirds of the way into the story. The last third had stunts that suffered by comparison. So the trick here was to do some pruning and restructuring - to take the good stunts from the end and put them in the middle, to build on them and put the great stunts at the end, all the while struggling to retain the already feeble logic of the story.

  The star said he wanted less action and more characterization. As far as I could tell, what he really wanted was to be sympathetic, to make the audience like the character he was playing. So I softened him a little, threw in some jokes, had him wait for an old lady to cross a street before he blew away the bad guys, basic things like that. Since his character was more like a robot than a human being, any vaguely human thing he did would make him sympathetic.