Chương 172: CHAPTER 99 - With a Little Help from My Friends

"We are born to do benefits: and what better or properer can we call our own than the riches of our friends?" William Shakespeare, Timon of Athens NYC. Eighth Avenue. Tuesday, 8th July 2008. The small red LED blinked. That was the first thing Jack Ferroni noticed after the door closed behind the bobbing blonde—the little red dot on the PD170, patiently recording two men, three chairs and a second-hand fold-out table, ruminating as they did.

Rémy Aubert was sitting with an imaginary paper bag in his lap, still savouring the scene.

"Jack," said Aubert, in a French-accented voice.

"Yeah."

"Turn it off." Ferroni powered down the PD170, then sat back down.

"She played the milk," Ferroni said once he sat.

"She played the milk," Aubert repeated the observation.

"Did you say she got kicked out of theatre school?"

"She left. My sources tell me it's got something to do with the scandal at LAPA."

"... A scandal?" The Frenchman raised a critical brow.

"The… usual kind of theatre school scandal?"

"Yeah, a girl was assaulted, badly. The school tried to cover it up," the director said.

"Not our girl, of course. Her Theatre Chair helped expose it. He left willingly after a whole chain of firings. Woe betide the Fame High of the City of Angels. It was a big deal a month back."" Merde." Aubert rubbed his face with both hands.

"Is that where she gets it from? Was she involved in the scandal? Someone that talented doesn't just quit school." Ferroni shook his head.

"I don't know."

"She knows the floor. The space," Aubert pointed at the gaffer tape marks.

"That's object work." Aubert leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.

"The boring kind, the kind you learn from a very strict Theatre Chair. You do not learn that on a movie set. The pantomime, the walking, the pacing, the way she did the stairs. Lecoq, I suspect."

"She was in Antigone and their production of Titus Andronicus," Ferroni said.

"According to the papers, the show was a critical success, even if there are no real copies of it circulating because of the scandal. Senator Sanders' daughter was in it as well. I hear they're friends." Aubert shrugged, a full-body Gallic thing. He did not know nor care about some Senator's daughter.

"Well, our young mademoiselle has excellent facial control. She has impeccable body control. She's used to a singular, perfect performance."

"Because of theatre?"

"Yes, because of theatre," Aubert concurred flatly.

"On stage, when everything is live, you cannot do it again; you cannot do it smaller. The audience knows when you have failed instantly." He paused.

"It's terrifying, and thrilling. I did plays for a while. Molière at twenty, badly. Then the provinces, then a cellar in the fourteenth with forty seats where we did Beckett to nobody for a season, and I have never worked harder in my life for less money. I owe my film awards to that experience. I think that's what so many of your local actors are missing. Le théâtre." Ferroni was quiet.

"I've never been," he said.

"Never been where?"

"Theatre. Small theatre. Black box, forty seats, whatever it is you're describing." He turned his hands over.

"Twenty-six years, and I've only seen musicals. I've done cable, I've done movies-of-the-week, I've done four nominations and no award. No theatre." Aubert looked at him with something like pity.

"You should go," said the Frenchman.

"Go to be frightened. It is very good for a director to sit somewhere he cannot yell cut." Ferroni nodded. The light through the airshaft window had gone grey. It was raining again. Somewhere below them, the deli was having its lunch hour. Ferroni took out the notebook, and this time he opened it.

"Okay," he said.

"Next problem."

"Ah." Aubert crossed his legs in the way that the French liked to do.

"L'argent."

"Yes. Money." Ferroni turned the notebook round so the Frenchman could see the page, which was covered in a column of figures in pencil.

"By my projection, as of this morning, we are two point four million dollars short." There was a pause of the particular kind that exists between two men who loved their craft. The difference was that one was American, and the other was French.

"Jacques," said Aubert. He was not a stranger to Hollywood accounting.

"Do we truly need so much?"

"Yes."

"For what?" He gestured at the room—the folding table, the covered mirrors, the three chairs.

"Granted, I have not worked in America for a decade. Enlighten me."

"Right." Ferroni tapped the page.

"Stop me if you get bored; you won't."

"I am never bored by a backend I am not receiving." Ferroni waited until he stopped laughing.

"So, according to Bebe's script—twenty-four shooting days. Four weeks, six-day weeks, which is a premium week. Above the line's the cheap part. Script cost me a hundred and forty at auction. Bebe's on sixty, and she's giving me half her time for free out of spite. I'm on nothing—no fee, no deferment, nothing, and my line producer made me put that in writing… would you stop wincing? You're on scale and the back end... Whole cast, all in, one-ninety. Call it four hundred thousand, top to bottom."

He gestured to the bottom.

"Then below the line is two-million-three-hundred and fifty-thousand dollars." Aubert's eyebrows went up half an inch more, which for him was a shout.

"For what?"

"For forty-five warm bodies," Ferroni said it without any particular emphasis.

"Twelve-hour minimum call, benefits through the plans. I don't hire forty-five individuals, Rémy, that's not how it works here—I hire six people who each arrive with a crew and a truck. I call a gaffer, and I get his best boy, four electricians, and a five-ton with a generator on it. They're good for it—I've worked with them for over a decade." Aubert winced again.

"So that's camera, grip, electric; that package is two-twenty. Art department and construction, two-sixty, because a tenement that looks like a tenement is a tenement we built. Wardrobe and hair and makeup, one-ten. Locations— fees, permits, insurance, parking, cops —one-ninety. Trucks and drivers, one-fifty. Sound, fifty-five. Stock and data and dailies, sixty."

"You feed forty-five people twice a day for twenty-four days, and that is ninety-odd thousand dollars in sandwiches. Sandwiches, Rémy. That is more than Bebe is being paid to have re-written the thing."" Des sandwichs," said Aubert, with real horror.

"Quatre-vingt-dix mille dollars. Et vous mangez debout."

"What?" Aubert visibly shuddered.

"Continue."

"Er… sure. And then five hundred and twenty thousand for post and delivery. Then two-ninety for insurance, the completion bond, the lawyers, the payroll company and a room with a fax machine in it. And then four hundred and forty thousand dollars of contingency, so that a bond agent in Century City can sleep." He closed the notebook.

"Four million dollars. I have one point six, which is three houses, which is everything I own. We're two point four short." Rémy Aubert sat with this for a while. The Frenchman looked genuinely dislocated, the way a European does in a Walmart.

"In Paris we would make this film for a million and a half euro, and nobody would think we were being brave. Twenty-five on the floor, not forty-five. And the CNC gives us an advance against receipts, which is to say from a committee of people who read the script. Canal Plus buys it before it exists because of funding policy. There are the SOFICA. There is a system, and the system is riddled with bureaucracy—""But."

"But the system respects the auteur." Aubert opened one hand.

"So the money arrives after the artist, and it arrives because of him.

"Here—" he pointed to the city outside the window.

"—here you have built a magnificent film factory. Truly. The best in the world. And then you have gone out and hired artists as labourers. And the artist must go and find four million dollars before he is permitted to paint anything at all." If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"That's about right." Ferroni looked at the Frenchman, not sure if this was a compliment or a complaint.

"It is a strange way to love cinema. What if the factory doesn't do well? If he cannot find money? What happens to the artists?"

"I don't know… BUT, it's a great way to make a hundred of them a year."" Oui," Aubert conceded, sourly.

"You are not wrong." The Frenchman waved the disgust away.

"So. What is the plan?" Ferroni told him the plan. He would shoot in August. Nine days, eleven if the weather held: the corridor, the stairwell, two of the four apartment days, the bodega. He would cut it with Norbert on weekends, in Norbert's spare room, on Norbert's equipment. By the middle of September he would have eighteen minutes of finished picture with sound. Then he would take it to the bankers. He knew the managers by name. Two had already expressed interest. Aubert nodded slowly. Then he stopped nodding.

"Non," he said.

"No?"

"Shoot the corridor," said Rémy Aubert firmly.

"Only the corridor. Four pages. Three days if you are careful, two if you are not. Shoot it properly—the way you were counting it in your head this afternoon."

"…a oner." Ferroni felt conflicted. A oner is not so easy, even with Eppie. Who was he, Flint Westwood?

"You said it, not me." The Frenchman spread his hands.

"Then cut it, mix it, grade it. Put music on it or do not. You walk in with four minutes of a film that will blow them away." The room was very quiet.

"Bankers cannot imagine artistic value," Aubert said.

"Least of all… American bankers." Jack Ferroni looked at the strip of gaffer tape on the floor for what felt like a long time.

"That's," he said, "…a good idea."

"I know."

"That's a great idea." He stood up and held Aubert's arm. Rémy Aubert stood with him. His actor looked at his face, then at the hand on his arm.

"Calm down, monsieur, now you're making me nervous…" Sony Tower. Thursday, 10th July 2008. The tape came the same way the scripts had, via the same kid in a mesh singlet, which Eppie signed for at reception with the growing suspicion that Jack Ferroni had exactly one guy and used him for everything. Inside was a VHS cassette in a paper sleeve, labelled in fountain pen, in the same hand as the index card. FONTAINE. 8 JULY. NOT A COPY. — J. F.

"Not a copy," Eppie read out.

"Means it's the only one." Curon turned it over the way other men check fruit.

"He dubbed it off the camera once and sent it. Interesting gesture. Is he sincere or desperate?"

"Which do you think?"

"With that guy? Both."

"Got a VHS player?" she asked. Curon directed her to the wall. Curon's office had a rack of playback equipment going back to 1974. He was a great believer in the old formats, because they each had their own sound profile that could not be replicated by digital means. She found the VCR on the third shelf, hit it twice on the top, and fed the tape in. They sat together, his arm on the couch and her head against his forearm, and watched what Eric had already reported in vivid detail. The picture came up.

The gaffer tape. The covered mirrors. A girl bracing herself against a door that was not there. Oh my god… Eppie suddenly felt acutely the very feeling that prevented actors from watching their own work. She could… see all the instances where the [System] auto-corrected her failures: such as her hands moving too fast, the weight of the carton shifting being adjusted, and she saw [The Facial Landscape] run its correction over a face that really wasn't that skilled. It was an out-of-body experience.

Her father said nothing. Not when she walked. Not when she knocked. Not when she said those lines that would one day be a cult-classic memory. Hi—I… I am home. The chair moved. Aubert's arm came into frame, taking a weight that did not exist.

"Welcome home." Her father exhaled slowly through his nose. Then he picked up the remote, rewound forty seconds, and watched it again. He sat back with his arms folded and his chin up, glaring at the screen as though it owed him money. Then the scene ended, and the tape kept running. Nobody had turned the camera off. So what came next was an empty floor and Rémy Aubert sitting in a mismatched chair, miming himself holding the bag with the milk. Neither man moved. Neither said a word.

"Jack," said the tape, in a French-accented voice.

"Yeah."

"Turn it off." A hand came across the lens. The picture jumped, went blue, and stopped. Curon looked at the blue screen for a while.

"I am impressed," he said quietly, then he looked at her smugly, like a cat owner holding a big bag of shaved bonito.

"How much money does Jack need?" Ferroni called at four. Her father answered. Curon put him on the speakerphone and told him that he wanted some answers for his daughter. Rather than being offended, Ferroni sounded amused.

"Our Eppie got the role?"

"She got it. I sat through eleven more girls on Wednesday out of politeness. No one came close."

"Sounds about right," said Curon, who was grinning so broadly Eppie felt enough embarrassment for both of them.

"What's your planned schedule? Eppie's a busy gal." Sir. I am a NEET. Eppie looked at her faux-father while internally cringing.

"Ah… yeah. So the plan's changed. Rémy's idea." Ferroni talked. Curon took notes.

"We're not shooting nine scattered days in August. We're shooting one scene. The corridor. Four pages, three days, done properly. Then Norbert cuts it, we mix it, and by the third week of August I've got four minutes of finished film." Eppie's [Business Acumen] sat up and applauded. Her [Prophet of Profits] rang alarm bells.

"And then?"

"Then middle of September, I'll shop it to the financiers. I know enough people in the industry." Something went cold and flat through the middle of Eppie's chest, confirming her instincts. The fifteenth of September. Lehman Brothers, Chapter 11. Good luck getting funding, Mr Ferroni. Eppie licked her lips. Her director was about to walk into a fiscal abyss, and she couldn't say a word about it. If she did, they wouldn't believe her.

If she explained it too well and the notion leaked, Vaughan wouldn't be able to bail out the Met.

"You'll find the money?" asked Curon.

"The money's no problem." I have to do something. Otherwise, the film is stillborn after shooting four minutes of a corridor. Eppie leaned toward the phone.

"Jack. You're solving the wrong problem. Don't go shopping around. We know the film's good. I've got money." Her father looked at her, then raised both brows. Indeed, she did have the money.

"No, no, no…" Ferroni's refusal came like a tide.

"No, listen." Eppie didn't want to explain so much that she let the cat out of the bag. She fired up her [Persuasion] and slipped in a little [Larceny] as well for good measure.

"I've got a trust that I've been building. The deed is explicitly set up for investing in art. Right now, I've had ten mil sitting in T-bills since June, doing nothing." She kept her voice level.

"I can raise twenty per cent. That's two mil. Use it now, because… August money and September money are a world of difference." Ferroni was quiet. So was Curon.

"That's right, you penned Umbrella," Ferroni breathed out.

"Still. That's a very strange thing to say."

"You have to trust me."

"Eppie—""Hold on." Curon put a hand flat on the desk.

"Jack. Two questions."

"Go."

"Who's producing?" Curon asked.

"I am."

"And directing?"" And directing," said Ferroni. Curon closed his eyes for a second.

"Second question. What's your tally?"

"Four million."

"That's a problematic number," Curon noted. There was a pause of exactly the wrong length.

"Yes…Three million, seven hundred and fifty thousand, that's how much I am allowed to spend. Full stop. Are you familiar with the Union's low-budget compromise? Low rates while under cap. Over it and I'm a studio picture. That's assuming I am casting a certain way—half the parts, half the days, out of four diversity groups. It's the only ladder there is, and I'm on it."

"And if the casting doesn't come in?"

"It'll come in," Ferroni said defensively.

"I've been in TV for a decade." Curon tapped the table. There was silence on the line as the men pondered the matter of trust. Eppie felt strangely enlightened. She was finally learning on the job. I thought money was the limitation. But she was wrong. More money, more problems. Keeping the budget under two and a half mil without diversity requirements, or three point seven five with, was the problem. The more money. The better equipment. The more experienced the staff. The better the movie.

And then there's distribution—but she could… help with that. Especially if they had those four minutes down to perfection. But if the bill pierces the ceiling, the whole accounting goes belly up because Ferroni would lose the budget film incentives. It was… a side of cinematic accounting that actually involved art-making, rather than fiscal obfuscation. Of course, if they desired the latter, she had some ideas as well…

"So… Director… Mr Curon? What do you suggest?" asked Ferroni.

"Any advice from anyone you know in Culver City?"

"Where are you shooting?"

"Manhattan. There's a building on the Lower East Side I've checked out."

"How much?"

"…A lot."

"How much, Jack?"

"More than the scene is worth," Ferroni admitted.

"The fee, the insurance certificate, the board, the lawyers. It's… It's NYC, alright."

"So go where the buildings don't have boards." A pause.

"Meaning what?" Curon gave her a smug look.

"For my dear daughter…" Eppie's face glowed. Curon's dad-manship was truly cringe. Endearingly so. Across the city, Ferroni clearly shared her embarrassment.

"... I can call in some favours. I know people who will fill your quota. Maybe there's a place you can rent as well—tenement, authentic. Rough neighbourhood though, but I can make it work."

"Mr Curon, that would be amazing, but—""Call me Fred."

"Fred, I'm not asking you to—""I know you're not. That's why I'm offering." Her father leaned closer to the speakerphone, like a mafioso speaking to a mark.

"Jack. You're paying yourself jack shit, and you're putting my daughter in your film as the co-lead. It's only right that I help you balance the budget. Besides, my favour's not money. If you need money, take it from Eppie. She won't take payment anyway—no, don't ask me why—allergy to profit is her thing. She's been that way since I found her abandoned in a hospital in a cardboard box…" Eppie's face was so hot she wondered if she should just tear the phone from the wall.

The rant, the sheer, shameless gall of it, was enough to stun Ferroni into silence.

"... I'll ask around and send you some addresses. It's Eppie's first outing. What kind of parent would I be if I didn't pack her bento?" + Karmic Causality