Low Angles

Low Angles

  A Stoney Winston Mystery

  by

  Jim Stinson

  Low Angles

  Copyright 2012 by Jim Stinson

  ISBN 9781476110506

  ISBN: 9781476110516

  Corrected and reformatted text, August, 2012

  (Hard cover edition originally published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1986.)

  Ah, the romantic, primitive 1980s! No Internet, Facebook, or Twitter. Telephones tied to the wall. Music on vinyl or flimsy cassettes - and don’t even start on the fashions! Hollywood wandered in the desert between the lush studio days that were gone and our flush modern times full of cable and Netflix. Work for film people was scarce in those days, and Stoney Winston just barely scraped by. If the 1980s were romantic, Stoney was far too busy surviving to notice....

  Chapter 1

  Our own little Jackie Coogan shifted from foot to foot in the shadows just beyond the lit kitchen set, basking in the attentions of the makeup girl, the property master, and the teacher dispatched by the Los Angeles Unified School District to ensure that his thirst for knowledge was slaked even while performing in this soap commercial.

  “Lift your face, honey.” The boy obeyed the makeup girl reluctantly, since he was three years older than he looked and his eye level was perfect for inspecting her chest.

  He favored her with a melting gaze - one of his better models. “Not too much powder.” His incipient baritone would put him out of business in about six months.

  “And keep his front curls high; we don’t want a shadow on his eyes.” His mother hovered too, skinny and tight as a banjo.

  As production manager, I hadn’t much to do now that the shoot was almost over, so I wandered toward the sound stage door, winding around Century stands, director’s chairs, lights, and foam cups full of cigarette butts pickled in coffee. As I ambled into the corridor, the massive door thunked behind me like the hatch of a walk-in meat locker.

  Ken Simmons, the commercial’s producer, visible through the doorway of the lounge he was using as an office, clamped a phone receiver between chin and shoulder and waved me in. He mimed “be just a minute” and resumed his conversation.

  “What’s so bad about them?” Pause. “Alan, dailies are hard to judge without experience. They looked okay to....” Pause. “Well....” Longer pause. “Well, Alan, I hear what you’re saying, but....” Very long pause.

  I collected two half-donuts and my tenth foam cup of coffee from a side table and sat down to watch Ken through a foreground of Italian loafers propped on the table. Even Ken’s soles looked glossy, as if he shined them nightly. He dresses for the Polo Lounge in the perpetual hope that one day he will be big enough to do business there.

  But not quite yet: “Alan, where am I going to get the budget for that?”

  Ken is fifty, with a body that looks forty and eyes that no longer admit their age or very much else. While he listened, he smoothed his curly black beard with a rubber oval set with stubby teeth, like the pad that holds bathroom soap.

  “If you want to pay for it, you got it; it’s your money. I’ll find someone.” He looked at me as he said this. “Talk to you later, Alan.”

  He hung up, sighing, and pulled his feet off the table. “Got a sec, Stoney?”

  “More like an hour, unless Fauntleroy decides to learn his lines.”

  “Can’t the kid read cards?”

  “Not in a tight two-shot; his eyelook’s wrong.”

  Ken sighed again, then glanced at the phone as if his recent caller were somehow inside it. “Know Alan Greystoke?”

  “If his nickname’s Tarzan.”

  “Yeah, he did change it from something else. Alan’s got a lot of money from, well, someplace and he likes to play with business ventures.”

  I dunked a donut, which disintegrated in the coffee.

  “Import-export, mail order houses, things like that. Now he’s backing a movie. I packaged it for him.”

  “And he doesn’t like the dailies he’s seeing.”

  “He doesn’t know what he’s seeing, but yeah, he doesn’t like them.”

  “What’s he want you to do, fire the director?”

  Ken stood up, shaking his head impatiently. “He says he wants to help her.”

  “Help. Her.”

  “Name’s Diane LaMotta - out of New York, I think.”

  “I don’t know her.”

  “You wouldn’t; it’s her first feature. Anyway, Alan wants someone to go up there and bail her out.”

  “Where’s up there?”

  “In the San Gabriel mountains about an hour away.” He parked his eighty dollar pants on the front edge of the table. “Want to take a shot at it?”

  Did I want to walk into the middle of a production, tackle an unknown director, work twenty four hours a day on a nickel budget to finish a fire sale picture? Masochism is not among my many vices. “Let’s just say my enthusiasm knows bounds.”

  “It’s seven-fifty a week for three weeks.”

  Visions of rent money danced in my head. “All right; for twenty-two-fifty I’ll fake it.”

  “Thanks, Stoney. I don’t like it either, but Alan calls the shots.”

  I nodded.

  “And keep out of trouble, right?” When I repeated the nod, Ken opened his anorexic briefcase, the type that proclaims its owner too important to carry anything thicker than a bank book. “You better run down and see him. Here’s his office address and oh, here’s your check for today’s shoot.”

  “‘Preciate it. I hope you’ll call me again, Ken.”

  “Don’t get greedy.” He flashed his hey-just-kidding smile. Ken never makes a joke without scoring underneath. We’ve been friends for years, but he’s the one who gives the work and I’m the one who takes it. Occasionally he likes to remind me.

  On my way out, I strolled up the hallway, guessing the identities of the “stars” hanging there in 8x10 frames; each actor posed with the eager, chubby owner of the little studio; each print inked with showbiz greetings. To my pal Jack. Best regards to fabulous Jack. Snappy clothes three decades old and faces as forgotten as a dead bookie’s. Jack too had gone to his Reward one day during the fourth race at Santa Anita, and now they all hung together in the perpetual fluorescent glare of the hallway, a necropolis of Hollywood also-rans.

  But who was I to criticize? Stoney Winston: failed actor and unsold writer, marginal freelance editor, production manager, and even director if the film was safely short, cheap, and trivial. I’d never worked in a big studio like Warners or Universal and never seen a budget over two hundred thousand. It’s hard to be more also-ran than that.

  * * * *

  Half an hour later I was chugging south on the San Gabriel Freeway in my antique Beetle, the latest partner in my perverse affair with Volkswagen. This ‘63 bug is really a step up from my ‘75 Rabbit because it seldom breaks and when it does, I can fix it.

  The uncertain glory of an April day, even down here in the industrial flats: bright lemon sun splashing on factories and warehouses, rim-lighting oil tanks, glazing the wall of the flood control channel like egg on an endless tan bread loaf. No helping the palms, though: reluctant little smog-shot fronds high in the air, as if the trees had thought, “After all that sweat to get up here, I guess I oughtta sprout something.”

  My nicotine city. So different from gray Bristol and the green English valleys around it. They grow greener in my memory every year - sixteen, to date since me mum divorced my sergeant major father and took her teenage boy to California. If I went back to England now, I’d be just another tripping Yank, homogenized by half a lifetime in the true cultural heart of America, L.A., God help us all. Suddenly film making in the green April mountains seemed seductive.

  Greystoke’s office w
as in Downey, a little town impacted in L.A. that might have lent its name to the fabric softener: a fuzzy, bland jumble of light industry, hopeful commerce, and middling homes. The one-story stucco building labeled “A.G. Enterprises” could have housed a job printer, a maternity shop, or an employment agency; and over the years it probably had.

  Now it commenced with a reception area done up in the plastic Gay Nineties decor favored by pizza parlors. Greystoke’s secretary, a slim girl with a button nose and delicate hands, announced me on the ‘com line and, after the usual California custom, offered coffee, which I refused. She had the ambivalent manner of some modern, pretty women: offended if you ogled and resentful if you didn’t. She fiddled at her desk as if she hadn’t much to do, while I inspected the carpet.

  The office door was opened by a slender man not five feet tall, in a business suit he must have bought at a shop for preteen executives. “He’ll see you now.”

  As I entered, the tiny man stepped aside and seemed to disappear. Alan Greystoke stood behind a desk the size of a plywood panel and over three feet high. It hid him from the chest down, and when he marched around it to shake my hand I saw why: Greystoke was only two inches taller than his assistant.

  “Sit down - not that chair, this one.” The chair was scaled to fit the assistant and I perched my gangling six feet-two on it like an adult visiting a kindergarten.

  Greystoke posed with arms akimbo, doing George C. Scott doing Patton; but the stance pushed his padded jacket upward until it separated from his body like a camel’s hair cuirass. It spoiled the effect.

  “Stoney Winston, huh? Should I know you?”

  “Nobody else does.”

  “Give you a tip: never run yourself down. You want people to hear, you make a noise. Shannon! Get him a drink.” He strutted toward his desk as spectral Shannon coalesced beside me.

  “Coke is fine.”

  Shannon’s fluty alto matched his looks: “We’ve got some Pepsi.” He disappeared at his master’s wave.

  Greystoke climbed into an executive chair raised to where he looked normal behind his desk, lit a cigarette from a gold desk box, and struck a magisterial pose. “I want you to listen; when you work for me, you listen, because I got a lotta things to do and I never say things twice. Clear? Okay: I got a two million dollar picture up there.”

  “Ken said he had two hundred thousand.”

  “I said listen. Yeah, but that’s just the cash. Know what points are? You do. Okay. I got a big nut to make on this one, so I got to have a winner, and that’s exactly what I’m gonna have.” He spoke in a harsh tenor, as if pushing authority into his voice by main force. “Simmons talked me into this director. No credits, no rep; but okay, she did some PBS shit - American Playhouse or something. It put me to sleep, but it had class, and this picture has to have class because it’s my picture.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Outlaw motorcycle creeps.”

  Shannon appeared with a glass of cola and a neat pink party napkin. I nodded thanks.

  Greystoke blinked his popping lizard eyes and shot his cuffs. The links were diamonds set in gold. “Now how is that class? It isn’t; it’s box office. The class comes from the way we handle it. That’s why I went with this bimbo director. Are you starting to get it? Okay, they ship the film down every day and I look at the dailies and I don’t like what I’m seeing.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m seeing the class but not the box office. Pretty pictures with nothin’ goin’ on. You follow? Okay, then you see what I want you to do: go up there and goose the picture. Get me more action stuff.”

  “Is the shoot on schedule?”

  “Who knows schedule? They keep sending film, but does it add up to a movie? How the hell should I know? You make movies; I make money. That’s your division of labor, right? That’s efficient.”

  And in my case, typical. “Mr. Greystoke, I can’t walk in on a production without clear authority.”

  “You’re working for me; I’m clear authority.”

  “You can’t do it that way.”

  “You’re telling me what I can do?”

  “Of course not, but you want me to ghost-direct that film.”

  “Yeah, that’s the word.”

  “The director won’t accept that unless you tell her. You’ll have to put it in writing.”

  Greystoke looked annoyed at being told he had to do something, but he saw the logic of it and nodded. “Write the letter. Dictate it to Kimberley outside. She’ll fix it up and I’ll sign it. You take it up there.”

  “And Ken Simmons ought to phone her too.”

  “I’ll take care of it.” Having regained the initiative, he looked pleased again. “Now you want to know about money.”

  “Ken said seven-fifty a week for three weeks.”

  “I’ll do better: I’m giving you that plus four points.”

  Oh joy: four percent of profits in an industry where “profits” are defined by the most acrobatic accounting this side of the Pentagon. No one would ever see a penny.

  “Shannon’s got your contract and your first week.” He waved a hand like a monarch bestowing a largess. “In advance.”

  My plans for supper hotdogs switched to steak. “Can I have a script to study?”

  “Shannon: get a script. You’ll like it. I got it cheap but I, uh, fixed it up some. You’ll see.”

  “Have you looked at dailies today?”

  “Not ‘til six o’clock at the lab. Meet us there. Get details from Shannon.”

  “I’ll drive to the location tomorrow. Where are they shooting?”

  “Near Bouquet Canyon, up back of Newhall. Shannon will show you on the map. He drives me. Kimberley!” The secretary entered as if she’d been lurking behind the door. “Take a letter from this guy. Shannon, give him his contract and the money. And show him where the hell to go.”

  As I hauled myself up to adult height and started for the door, Greystoke yelled at his tiny assistant: “Shannon, wash that glass up when you’re done out there.”

  * * * *

  I roared homeward through the ozone, boxed by eighteen wheelers: a silver and burgundy Peterbilt tractor climbing my tail pipes, front view blocked by a furniture van bearing a bumper sticker from L.A.’s best fast food chain:

  IN ‘N’ OUT BURGER

  abridged, by local custom, to

  IN ‘N’ OUT URGE

  A shower, early supper - hotdogs after all - then down to the little Hollywood film lab that was processing Greystoke’s footage.

  I slumped in a screening room seat, Shannon to the left of me, Greystoke to the right of me, peering over the seat backs at yesterday’s rushes of Cycles from Hell.

  Actually, it was good stuff: strong compositions, energetic truck shots, good actor blocking. Hard to judge performance, since Greystoke watched the dailies before the sound was synced, but the footage moved crisply.

  At the start of the final shot, the actors paused and looked off-screen; then a striking woman with a dark tan and auburn hair in flying pigtails ran into the frame. She adjusted the position of one actor, then turned to look at the camera. Her deep eyes were a cool gray, the eyes of a hyper-intelligent cat. Her lips formed what looked like “Okay” then she loped out of the frame and the action began.

  Greystoke rasped, “That’s her.”

  There was nothing the matter with the footage and the woman I had glimpsed looked smart, decisive, and in control. So what was Greystoke worried about?

  When the lights came up, I studied the empty seat backs while the wannabe mogul studied me.

  Finally, he lost patience. “See what I mean?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  Greystoke wagged pudgy hands as he searched for words, then gave up. “I don’t like it.”

  Something funny here. “Is the footage really the problem, or is there something else?”

  Greystoke looked affronted. “What else? The only problem’s right there.” He
stabbed a stubby arm at the now blank screen. “It’s... blah; it’s....” The phrase he wanted finally surfaced: “It’s got no balls.” He looked pleased with this critical insight.

  I pushed my luck: “So the production’s going smoothly?”

  His irritation burst into full bloom: “Who knows? I’m not paying you to worry about production, understand? You go up there and make me an action picture!”

  “Why are you worried about how the picture’s going?” At first I couldn’t place the voice; then I realized that Shannon had actually volunteered a sentence. He’d been invisible again.

  “There’s nothing obviously wrong with these dailies. So what is the problem?”

  Greystoke looked at me, at Shannon, at me again. Then his lizard eyelids flickered, as if in embarrassment. “Like I said, you make movies; I don’t, understand? I got a lot tied up in this, an’ speaking frankly, I don’t know what I’m lookin’ at. Is it a movie or what? Know what I mean?”

  “Then you want me to see if the footage will make a good film.” Greystoke jerked his head up and down. “I can do that better in a cutting room. Why don’t I start putting it together?”

  Shannon surprised me again: “Because we need some eyes up there.”

  Greystoke and Shannon were “we”? Interesting. “Okay, then. I’ll leave first thing in the morning.”

  Greystoke resumed the helm: “You better. And starting tomorrow, I want balls!”

  An ambiguous statement, considering.

  Chapter 2

  Clear, lemony light again this morning, under the hard blue dome of an April sky - the same breathtaking weather that a sadistic God bestows on every Rose Parade, to taunt the TV viewers in Vermont. The San Gabriel mountains tumbled beside me along the freeway, their dumpy, slag heap contours softened by a fresh coat of green.

  I was roaring northwestward in the Beetle toward a tiny mountain village - a flyspeck on the map northeast of Newhall which was now playing host to the production of Cycles from Hell.

  The film’s story was old enough to grow mushrooms on:

  Framed by crooked citizens, charismatic biker returns from slammer to lead outlaw gang in wreaking vengeance on town. After crowd-pleasing pillage and rapine, evil villagers are punished, bikers ride into sunset, charismatic leader achieves mythic death and ascends to sit at right hand of Harley-Davidson - or something.

  While the Beetle struggled into the foothills, I revolved the trite plot in my mind as if studying a rock; but I could find no place to cut - no angles that would turn it into a gem. If you try to carve a clinker, you just get a smaller clinker.