Rough Cut Read online

  Maybe she’d look up Lesley Banks. That would be a good place to start. Someone who had made the same journey and could share some pointers. Surely Lesley would help a fellow Pennsylvanian break into the big time.

  Nora shut her eyes, leaned back, and imagined cameras capturing her peaceful slumber. She imagined opening credits for the scene. Nora Hurley starring in Nora´s New Life. Best Picture, for sure.

  It would be another two-and-a-half days until she reached her destination, but Nora was patient. She could savor the transition. Every mile was progress and made her happy.

  She squeezed People magazine. All of a sudden, she wanted to shout out loud to release the excitement swirling inside. She wanted to stand on her seat, unleash a whoop, and thrust a fist in the air — imagining a Golden Globe, Emmy or Oscar in her grasp.

  Wild applause. The whole world watching. Ugly clouds parting. Lenny and the rest of the doubters slack jawed, whipped into a brand new reality. She was something special.

  Hooray for Hollywood!

  2

  H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D.

  As Harry Tuttle drove his silver Audi up Beachwood Drive, the majestic sign in the hills hovered like a caption. Palm trees lined both sides of the street; the open sunroof warmed his bald spot, and today was going to be a very good day.

  The investors were going to see a rough cut of Harry’s new film, and he felt confident —no, absolutely certain —that they were going to be blown right out of their seats. This was his best work in years.

  It would be the beginning of Harry Tuttle’s comeback. At one time or another, every director hits a bad streak, he told himself. Even the greatest sports athletes can have a down year. Harry’s down year just happened to stretch over a decade.

  But today he would be reborn. To start the morning, Harry had meditated in his Eagle Rock bungalow, thinking only positive thoughts, cleaning out the clutter. Now, as he drove, his mind was fresh, the toxins rinsed away. The sky had opened up as bright and blue as it could get in L.A. The Carpenters’ “Top of the World” played on his car stereo.

  The screening of his new movie wouldn’t take place for another two hours, allowing Harry to follow his regular morning routine. This included a stop at his favorite hangout, the Village Coffee Shop. Located at the foot of the Hollywood Hills in Beachwood Canyon, six miles from his house, the spot offered an opportunity to kick back with Daily Variety or The Hollywood Reporter, and enjoy a raisin bagel and frothy strawberry Frappuccino. He usually ran into film and TV people he knew—or wanted to meet.

  Harry parked, pulled off his wraparound sunglasses and stuffed them in a shirt pocket. He waited for a pokey car of tourists to pass, crossed the road, and entered the coffee shop.

  Inside, the good smells gave him an instant buzz. His eyes scanned the room for familiar faces. Other eyes scanned him. He realized he was hoping to be recognized.

  Nobody in this town wants anonymity, he thought.

  “Harry, good to see you man.”

  It was Kim Choi, a local musician who had scored several of Harry’s films. Choi had a home studio in Glendale with an amazing assembly of computerized keyboards that could emulate an orchestra. He was a wizard and always delivered, on time and cheap.

  As Harry waited in line, he chatted with Kim, who was fishing for work. He had just finished scoring a documentary about windmills for a cable channel and was eager for another feature.

  “I’m putting the finishing touches on a new script,” said Harry. “You know we’ll keep you in mind. We always do. Love your work. You’re the man.”

  After Harry got his coffee and bagel, he secured a table and started flipping through the Production Listings in Variety. After a few minutes, a young man with disheveled hair approached, cautiously, clutching a bound screenplay.

  “I couldn’t help but overhear, um, you make movies.”

  Harry looked up, smiled politely, and already had a sense of where this was going. “Yes...?”

  “I’ve got a script.”

  Of course, thought Harry, you and everybody else in this town. “You’re a writer?”

  “Yes.” And the young man’s pitch rolled out, accelerated, with an urgency to release as much information as possible before getting cut off.

  “It’s a drama about an ice-skating competition, the up-and-comer against the veteran. There’s action, a love story, and a dilemma—the main character, Ginny, has a little brother in a wheelchair who needs an operation; and she needs to win the competition to pay for his operation. Along the way, she falls in love with her rival’s boyfriend, and it leads to a big finish that’s like Rocky on ice.”

  Harry nodded. “Very dramatic, I love it, really do, but,” he said, “it’s not the kind of movie I make. It’s the wrong genre. I’m sorry.”

  The young man’s shoulders slumped from the news. “What kind of movies do you make?”

  Harry grinned and put down his paper. It was time to do a little bragging. “Well, you’ve probably heard of Slash?”

  The young man thought hard. “I don’t know... Maybe...”

  “Schizo Sisters?”

  “I don’t know. Who’s in it?”

  “Chandra Palermo. Ferguson Slatts.”

  The young man shrugged. “Sorry.”

  “You must have heard of Ghost House?”

  “No.”

  “Ghost House II?”

  “Um, no.”

  “Valley of the Zombies?”

  “Yes!” exclaimed the young man. “I think I saw part of that once on cable. It’s old, right?”

  Harry winced. “One of my earlier films, yes.”

  “Cool. You did Valley of the Zombies.” The young man mulled this over for a moment, and then said, “Well, I gotta go.”

  “Good luck with your screenplay,” said Harry, and the young man moved into the coffee house crowd, gripping his rolled-up script.

  Harry watched him leave. He really did wish the young man luck. For every motion picture released there were thousands of unproduced screenplays, and not all of them were written by amateurs. Every year, the hopefuls streamed to Hollywood, young men and women with a common bond: a passion for movies. Many of them were very skilled and creative, but the number of opportunities never came close to matching the availability of talent.

  Don’t get down, Harry wanted to call after the young writer. I’ve been in your shoes. Just keep at it. Never give up.

  Harry had embraced movies for as long as he could remember. He grew up in an inconspicuous middle-class town in Massachusetts, without brothers, sisters, or a deep stock of friends. Movies became his companionship. His family lived close enough to walk to the local, single-screen cinema; and Harry attended as many movies as possible. First he loved watching films, then he wanted to make them. He wanted to merge with the magical world that came to life on the silver screen.

  Harry’s father bought him a Bell & Howell Super 8 camera for his 13th birthday, which excited Harry more than a ten-speed bike. He made silent, ultra-low-budget one-reelers. The earliest efforts were crude attempts at stop-motion animation, using household objects. His first mini-epic featured an army of toy soldiers being consumed by a rolling blob of clay. When the animation became too tedious and time-consuming, he focused on live action. He crafted short movies about monsters and superheroes, delirious juvenilia featuring anybody he could rope in from the neighborhood. One of his frequent cohorts was Tim Keneally, a 14-year-old from down the block who also had ample imagination and few friends. Tim was a pyromaniac and designed stunts and explosions, dipping into his older brother’s stash of smoke bombs and M-80s.

  Harry developed a soft spot for horror films. He liked being scared within the safe confines of celluloid. His exposure to horror pictures began at a young age, when his parents would take Saturday night excursions into the city for symphony concerts and stage plays. Harry’s babysitter minimized her responsibilities by turning on the TV the instant Harry’s parents backed out of the driveway. She discov
ered that she could effectively bolt Harry to the couch with “Creature Features,” a weekly monster movie showcase out of Boston, hosted by Ghoularie, a pasty-faced beatnik-vampire-zombie concoction who emerged from a coffin and made cornball quips. Harry was later disappointed to discover that Ghoularie, out of makeup, was Jerry Simmons, the weatherman on morning newscasts.

  Through Creature Features, Harry discovered the classics: Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, and Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolfman. When Creature Features’ weekly broadcasts left him hungry for more, Harry scanned the TV listings for any horror movie airings, no matter how good or bad. He subscribed to Famous Monsters of Filmland. He wrote short stories about attacks from outer space and vengeful mummies.

  After high school, Harry studied film at Boston University, creating short, experimental films accompanied by music from his Tangerine Dream and Pink Floyd LPs. His final student film — a surreal, 16mm black-and-white effort about a haunted bed that provoked nightmares —impressed his professor enough to earn him an internship at an L.A. production company after graduation.

  Fresh out of BU, Harry stuffed everything he owned into his Volkswagen Bug and drove to Los Angeles with a head full of dreams. When he first encountered the Hollywood sign, he made an attempt to scramble up to the letters to touch them. He parked his car and hiked the trails of Griffith Park. However, the seemingly accessible sign proved unreachable. It was a tease.

  The internship was a whirlwind of changing duties and hands-on experience, helping out a production company that specialized in network television specials. It was a low-level Production Assistant’s job — assisting crew, fetching coffee, answering phones, helping to schedule meetings, and running errands on a moment’s notice. Occasionally, he wrote coverage for scripts in the slush pile; and the readings offered lessons in formatting and pacing, a valuable reference for his own future screenplays.

  Unfortunately, when the internship was over, it was over. There was no offer of a full-time gig, and Harry was left without a job and very little money. He accepted low-paying, menial jobs that disgraced his college degree.

  Then one day he was saved by a strange old man named Max Argas.

  Argas was a grizzled hack or Hollywood legend, depending on whom you asked. But there was general consensus that he was the granddaddy of the B film. Since the early ’60s, he had been cranking out exploitation pictures of every shape and size: biker films, martial arts imports, LSD documentaries, slapdash teenage comedies, blaxploitation, women’s prison melodramas, soft-core porn, and horror. Lots of horror.

  In the 1980s, horror became Argas’s bread and butter. In the wake of enormous successes like Halloween, Friday the 13th , and Nightmare on Elm Street —and all of their profitable sequels —Argas was efficiently pumping out his own “slasher” flicks at bargain basement cost. The audiences kept coming. Kids looking for an adrenaline fix filled the theaters and drive-ins, while the home video boom delivered a new source of cash flow. Argas, accustomed to a skeleton crew of cronies, found that he needed more manpower to keep supply up with demand.

  Instead of placing trade ads, he simply nabbed the eager young people who crossed his path. Harry served Argas soup one day at a restaurant in Burbank. Four days later, he was a second assistant director on Hell’s Hookers, yelling “Quiet on the set!” Harry always felt that his film degree from Boston University made no difference to Argas.

  In fact, Harry learned far more working under Argas’s wings than he ever did in school.

  Argas was not a warm man. He barked orders and had little patience. But he did shift tremendous responsibility and opportunity to rookies who were eager to learn. He launched dozens of careers.

  After his first few pictures with Argas, Harry graduated to first A.D., becoming more involved with the crew and organizing the elements of each day’s shoot. He also began offering script input, and impressed Argas enough to become his unofficial script doctor.

  Finally, Argas said, “Why don’t you just write one of these things?”

  So Harry wrote Screamers, a thriller about deadly aliens that grew in size and strength by feeding off the screams of their victims.

  Screamers did good business and even received begrudging positive reviews, the three-star kind, from critics willing to accept a fun, hokey B film.

  Argas was impressed. He was also dying of cancer. A lifetime of chain smoking, bundled with workaholic stress, had taken its toll.

  Max Argas’s final two films, The Christmas Killer and Demonic Possession, featured Argas’s name as director in the credits; but Harry did most of the work. On Demonic Possession, Harry took over on the second day of shooting, after conducting extensive rewrites on the script. The film became a critical and commercial smash, while Argas remained bedridden, deteriorating and frustrated. Harry accepted the lack of credit, given the circumstances. He tended to Argas, provided production updates, screened rushes for him, and remained near his bedside through the final days of his life when the old man turned gray and withered, like something inhuman out of one of his films.

  “You’re going places,” croaked Argas to Harry the day before he died.

  “Thank you, sir,” said Harry. “I want to do you proud.”

  Later, as the afternoon light dimmed, and he dipped in and out of consciousness, Argas said, “I’m being pulled to the other side. I can see it. They’re expecting me.”

  “In heaven?” said Harry.

  Argas chuckled dryly. “My dear boy, you know the content of my films. Why would I be going to heaven?”

  Harry felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

  “I’m not afraid,” said Argas. “My films probably win Os-cars where I’m going...”

  After Argas died, Harry discovered he was in demand. Perhaps his years of quality work on Argas’s pictures had not gone unnoticed, or more likely, he was simply experienced in a profitable genre. Nevertheless, in short order Harry acquired a well-connected agent and a two-picture deal with Universal. The budgets weren’t big, but there was a promise of creative freedom and wide distribution.

  “We need more scary shit for the teenagers,” a pot-bellied studio executive told him outright. “And we need it today. I don’t know how much longer this horror fad is going to last.”

  Harry’s first film for Universal, Grip of Terror, about a babysitter-stalking maniac, was a modest success, bringing in healthy box office receipts and good reviews. One national critic even called it, “one of the best scare fests of the year.” Another reviewer enthused, “Tuttle is a talent to watch.”

  Harry was on cloud nine. Grip of Terror also marked a momentous occasion in his personal life: he met and married Julie Kramer, the beautiful young brunette with long eyelashes who portrayed the babysitter killer’s first victim. They had dinner one night after her character was decapitated, and Harry fell head over heels in love.

  After they married, her career took off. She landed a plum role on a popular TV series about a San Diego private investigator. She kept busy in the off-season with made-for-television movies. Meanwhile, Harry’s second picture, The Thing in the Attic, performed okay; but two opposing factors troubled his bosses at Universal: the film’s budget was bigger and the box office was smaller. Most of the critics were kind to the picture, but even the good reviews opened with lines like “If you’re in the mood for something mindless...”

  Soon, the horror movie craze came to an end. Harry’s final horror film for Universal, Gouge, was a huge flop. By then, his biggest champion at the studio had gone elsewhere, so Harry was unceremoniously cut loose.

  That was the beginning of Harry’s dark period. He wrote and directed an independently produced horror film that also flopped. He wrote a few movie and TV scripts that never emerged from development hell. Then, in short order, he lost his agent and his wife.

  Julie’s departure particularly devastated him because it seemed to be in direct correlation with the downfall of his career.

 
“I thought we were together through thick and thin,” he said.

  “It’s not about your career,” she responded. But then she revealed she had been cheating on him with a hotshot British director, and had accepted a role in the director’s next film.

  Harry argued pointlessly to keep the marriage together, but she had turned it off, like a light switch.

  “We have reached a fork in the road of life,” she said. “This is where we go our separate ways. I’ll always treasure the love we shared. But now we must free ourselves to find our true destiny.”

  When he recognized it was dialogue she had lifted from one of her TV movies, he knew it was the end.

  Harry spent money on therapy, attended self-help groups, and tried to regain his self-esteem. He taught screenwriting for a while at a community college. He wondered if he would ever write or direct again.

  Then one April morning he received a call from Paul Jacobs.

  “I apologize for calling you direct,” spoke the smooth and youthful voice on the other end. “I wanted to contact your agent, but I have been unable to get your agency from the Guild.”

  “I’m between agents,” said Harry.

  “Then it’s okay if we deal direct?”

  “I would prefer it.”

  Paul talked and Harry listened to a long, organized and very slick pitch.

  Jacobs held an MBA from Stanford and had spent several years at a downtown brokerage firm selling variable annuities and mutual funds. He was great at it, but found the job boring. He wanted to get involved in the movie business. “I don’t want to sell annuities anymore. I want to sell fun.”

  Jacobs express-mailed Harry a detailed proposal to create an independent film production company, funded by private investors, which would produce low-budget feature films for international home video and cable television. Theatrical release would be a bonus, but not the focus.