Extract From Smokescreen
CHAPTER ONE
Sweating, thirsty, hot, uncomfortable, and tired to the
point of explosion.
Cynically, I counted my woes.
Considerable, they were. Considerable, one way and another.
I sat in the driving seat of a custom-built aerodynamic sports car, the cast-off toy of an oil sheik's son. I had been sitting there for the best part of three days. Ahead, the sun-dried plain spread gently away at some distant brown and purple hills, and hour by hour their hunched shapes remained exactly where they were on the horizon, because the 150 mph Special was not moving.
Nor was I. I looked morosely at the solid untarnishable handcuffs locked round my wrists. One of my arms led through the steering wheel, and the other was outside it, so that in total effect I was locked on to the wheel, and in consequence firmly attached to the car.
There was also the small matter of seat belts. The Special would not start until the safety harness was fastened. Despite the fact that the key was missing from the ignition, the harness was securely fastened: one strap over my stomach, one diagonally across my chest.
I could not bring my legs up from their stretched-forward sports car position in order to break the steering wheel with my feet. I had tried it. I was too tall, and couldn't bend my knees far enough. And apart from that, the steering wheel was not of possibly breakable plastic. People who built spectacularly expensive cars like the Special didn't mess around with plastic wheels. This was one of the small-diameter leather-covered metal type, as durable as the Mont Blanc.
I was thoroughly fed up with sitting in the car. Every muscle in my legs, up my spine and down my arms protested energetically against the constraint. A hard band of heaviness behind my eyes was tightening into a perceptible ache.
It was time to make another determined effort to get free, though I knew from countless similar attempts that it couldn't be done.
I tugged, strained, used all my strength against the straps and the handcuffs: struggled until fresh sweat rolled down my face; and couldn't, as before, progress even a millimetre towards freedom.
I put my head back against the padded headrest, and rolled my face around towards the open window beside me, on my right.
I shut my eyes. I could feel the slash of sunlight cut across my cheek and neck and shoulder with all the vigour of 15.00 hours in July at 37° North. I could feel the heat on my left eyelid. I let lines of frustration and pain develop across my forehead, put a certain grimness into my mouth, twitched a muscle along my jaw, and swallowed with an abandonment of hope.
After that I sat still, and waited.
The desert plain was very quiet.
I waited.
Then Evan Pentelow shouted 'Cut' with detectable reluctance, and the cameramen removed their eyes from the view-finders. No whisper of wind fluttered the large bright-coloured umbrellas which shielded them and their apparatus. Evan fanned himself vigorously with his shooting schedule, creating the breeze that nature had neglected, and others in the small group in the shade of portable green polystyrene sun-shelters came languidly to life, the relentless heat having hours ago drained their energy. The sound mixer took off his ear-phones, hung them over the back of his chair, and fiddled slowly with the knobs on his Nagra recorder, and the electricians kindly switched off the clutch of minibrute lamps which had been ruthlessly reinforcing the sun.
I looked into the lens of the Arriflex which had been recording every sweating pore at a distance of six feet from my right shoulder. Terry, behind his camera, mopped his neck with a dusty handkerchief, and Simon added to his Picture Negative Report for the processing laboratory.
Further back, from a different angle, the Mitchell, with its thousand-feet magazine, had shot the same scene. Lucky, who operated it, was busily not meeting my eye, as he had been since breakfast. He believed I was angry with him, because, although he swore it was not his fault, the last lot of film he had shot the day before had turned out to be fogged. I had asked him quite mildly in the circumstances just to be sure that today there should be no more mishaps, as I reckoned I couldn't stand many more retakes of Scene 623.
Since then, we had retaken it six times. With, I grant you, a short break for lunch.
Evan Pentelow had apologized to everyone, loudly and often, that we would just have to go on and on shooting the scene until I got it right. He changed his mind about how it should go after every second take, and although I followed a good many of his minutely detailed directions, he had not yet once pronounced himself satisfied.
Every single member of the team who had come to southern Spain to complete the location shots was aware of the animosity behind the tight-reined politeness with which he spoke to me, and behind that with which I answered him. The unit, I had heard, had opened a book on how long I would hang on to my temper.
The girl who carried the precious key to the handcuffs walked slowly over from the furthest green shelter, where the continuity, make-up, and wardrobe girls sat exhaustedly on spread-out towels. Tendrils of damp hair clung to the girl's neck as she opened the door of the car and fitted the key into the hole. They were regulation British police handcuffs, fastening with a stiffish screw instead of a ratchet, and she always had some difficulty in pushing the key round its last few all-important turns.
She looked at me apprehensively, knowing that I couldn't be far from erupting. I achieved at least the muscle movements of a smile, and relief at not being bawled at gave her impetus to finish taking off the handcuffs smoothly and quickly.
I unfastened the seat harness and stood up stiffly outside in the sun. It was a good ten degrees cooler than inside the Special.
'Get back in,' Evan said. 'We'll have to take it again.'
I inhaled a lungful straight from the Sahara, and counted five in my mind. Then I said, 'I'm going over to the caravan for a beer and a pee, and we'll shoot it again when I come back.'
They wouldn't pay out the pool on that, I thought in amusement. That might be a crack in the volcano, but it wasn't Krakatoa. I wondered if they would let me take a bet on the flashpoint myself.
No one had bothered to put the canvas over the Minimoke, to shield it from the sun. I climbed into the little buggy where it was parked behind the largest shelter, and swore as the seat leather scorched through my thin cotton trousers. The steering wheel was hot enough to fry eggs.
The legs of my trousers were rolled up to the knee, and on my feet were flip-flops. They contrasted oddly with the formal white shirt and dark tie which I wore above, but then the Arriflex angle cut me off at the knee, and the Mitchell higher still, above the waist.
I drove the Moke without haste to where the semicircle of caravans was parked, two hundred yards away in a hollow. An apology for a tree cast a patch of thinnish shade that was better than nothing for the Moke, so I stopped it there and walked over to the caravan assigned to me as a dressing-room.
The air-conditioning inside hit like a cold shower, and felt marvellous. I loosened my tie, undid the top button of my shirt, fetched a can of beer from the refrigerator, and sat down wearily on the divan to drink it.
Evan Pentelow was busy paying off an old resentment, and unfortunately there was no way I could stop him. I had worked with him only once before, on his first major film and my seventh, and by the end of it we had detested each other. Nothing had improved by my subsequently refusing to sign for films if he were to direct, a circumstance which had cut him off from at least two smash hits he might otherwise have collared.
Evan was the darling of those critics who believed that actors couldn't act unless the director told them inch by inch what to do. Evan never gave directions by halves: he liked to see his films called 'Evan Pentelow's latest', and he achieved that by making the gullible believe that step by tiny step the whole thing stemmed from his talent, and his alone. Never mind how old a hand an actor was, Evan remorselessly taught him his business. Evan never discussed how a scene should be played, how a word should be inflected. He dictated.
He had cut some great names down to size, down to notices like 'Pentelow has drawn a sympathic performance from Miss Five-Star Blank...' He resented everyone, like me, who wouldn't give him the chance.
There was no doubt that he was an outstanding director in that he had a visual imagination of a very high quality. Most actors positively liked to work with him, as their salaries were generous and his films never went unsung. Only uncompromising bloody asses like myself believed that at least nine-tenths of a performance should be the actor's own work.
I sighed, finished the beer, visited the loo, and went out to the Moke. Apollo still raged away in the brazen sky, as one might say if one had a taste for that sort of thing.
The original director of the glossy action thriller on which we were engaged had been a quiet-spoken sophisticate who usually lifted the first elbow before breakfast and had died on his feet at 10 am, from a surfeit of Scotch. It happened during a free weekend which I had spent alone in Yorkshire walking on the hills, and I had returned to the set on Tuesday to find Evan already ensconced and making his stranglehold felt.
There was about an eighth of the film still to do. The sly smile that he had put on when he saw me arrive had been pure clotted malice.
Protestations to the management had brought soothing noises but no joy.
'No one else of that calibre was free... can't take risks with the backers' money, can we, not as things are these days . . . got to look at it realistically . . . Sure, Link, I know you won't work with him ordinarily, but this is a crisis, dammit . . . it isn't actually in your contract in black and white this time, you know, because I checked . . . well, actually, we were relying on your good nature, I suppose...'
I interrupted dryly, 'And on the fact that I'll be collecting four per cent of the gross?'
The management cleared its throat. 'Er, we wouldn't ourselves have made the mistake of reminding you... but since you mention it... yes.'
Amused, I had finally given in, but with foreboding, as the location scenes of the car all lay ahead. I had known Evan would be difficult: hadn't reckoned, though, that he would be the next best thing to sadistic.
I stopped the Moke with a jerk behind the shelter and pulled the canvas cover over it to stop it sizzling. I had been away exactly twelve minutes, but when I walked round into the shelter Evan was apologizing to the camera crews for my keeping them hanging around in this heat. Terry made a disclaiming gesture, as I could see perfectly well that he had barely finished loading the Arriflex with a fresh magazine out of the ice box. No one bothered to argue. At a hundred degrees in the shade, no one but Evan had any energy.
'Right,' he said briskly. 'Get into the car, Link. Scene 623, Take 10. And let's for hell's sake get this one right.'
I said nothing. Of the nine previous takes, three had been fogged: that left today's six; and I knew, as everyone else knew, that Evan could have used any one of them.
I got into the car. We retook the scene twice more.
Evan managed to shake his head dubiously even after that, but the head cameraman told him the light was getting too yellow, and even if they took any more it would be no good, as they wouldn't be able to match it to the scene which went before. Evan gave in only because he could come up with no possible reason for going on, for which Apollo had my thanks.
The unit packed up. The girl came limply across and undid the handcuffs. Two general duty men began to wrap up the Special in dust-sheets and pegged-down tarpaulins, and Terry and Lucky began to dismantle their cameras and pack them in cases, to take them away for the night.
In twos and threes everyone straggled across to the caravans, with me driving Evan in the Moke and saying not a word to him on the way. The coach had arrived from the small nearby town of Madroledo, bringing the two night-watchmen. Coach was a flattering word for it: an old airport runabout bus with a lot of room for equipment and minimum comfort for passengers. The company said they had stipulated a luxury touring coach with air-conditioning, but the bone-shaker was what had actually turned up.
The hotel in Madroledo where the whole unit was staying was in much the same category. The small inland town, far from the tourist beat, offered amenities that package holiday operators would have blanched at; but the management had had to install us there, they said, because the best hotels on the coast at Almeria were booked solid by hundreds of Americans engaged on making an epic western in the next bit of desert to ours.
In fact I much preferred even the rough bits of this film to the last little caper I had been engaged on, a misty rock-climbing affair in which I had spent days and days clinging to the ledges while the effects men showered buckets of artificial rainstorm over my head. It was never much good my complaining about the occasional wringers I got put through: I'd started out as a sort of stunt man, they said, so what was a little cold, a little heat? Get out there on the ledges, they said. Get out there in the car. And just concentrate on how much lolly you're stacking away to comfort you later through arthritis. Never fear, they said, we won't let you come to any real harm, not so long as the insurance premiums are so high, and not so long as almost every film you make covers its production costs in the first month of showing. Such charming people, those managements, with dollar signs for eyes, cash registers for hearts.
Cooler and cleaner, the entire unit met for before-dinner drinks in Madroledo's idea of an American Bar.
Away out on the plain in the warm night the Special sat under its guarding floodlights, a shrouded hump, done with the day. By tomorrow night, I thought, or at least the day after, we would have completed all the scenes which needed me stuck in the driving seat. Provided Evan could think of no reason for reshooting Scene 623 yet again, we only had 624 and 625 to do, the cavalry-to-the-rescue bits. We had done Scenes 622 and 621, which showed the man waking from a drugged sleep and assessing his predicament, and the helicopter shots were also in the can; the wide-circling and then narrowing aerial views which established the Special in its bare lonely terrain, and gave glimpses of the man slumped inside. Those were to be the opening shots of the film and the background to the credits, the bulk to the story being told afterwards in one long flashback to explain why the car and the man were where they were.
In the bar Terry and the Director of Photography were holding a desultory discussion about focal lengths, punctuating every wise thought with draughts of sangria. The Director, otherwise known professionally as the lighting cameraman, and personally as Conrad, patted me gently on the shoulder and pressed an almost cold glass into my hand. We had all grown to like this indigenous thirst quencher, a rough red local wine diluted by ice and a touch of the fruit salads.
'There you are, dear boy, it does wonders for the dehydration,' he said, and then in the same breath finished his broken-off sentence to Terry. 'So he used an eighteen-millimetre wide-angle and of course every scrap of tension evaporated from the scene.'
Conrad spoke from the strength of an Oscar on the sideboard, and called everyone 'dear boy', from chairmen downwards. Aided by a naturally resonant bass voice and a droopy cultivated moustache, he had achieved the notable status of 'a character' in a business which specialized in them, but behind the flamboyance there was a sharp technician's mind which saw life analytically at twenty-four frames per second and thought in Eastman-colour.
Terry said, 'Beale Films won't use him now because of the time he shot two thousand feet one day at Ascot without an 85 filter, and there wasn't another race meeting due there until a month after they ran into compensation time...'
Terry was fat, bald, forty, and had given up earlier aspirations to climb to Director of Photography with his name writ large in credits. He had settled instead for being a steady, reliable, experienced, and continually in-work craftsman, and Conrad always liked to have him on his team.
Simon joined us and Conrad gave him, too, a glass of sangria. Simon, the clapper/loader of Terry's crew, had less assurance than he ought to have had at twenty-three, and was sometimes nai¨ve to the point where one speculated about arrested development. His job entailed operating the clapper board before every shot, keeping careful records of the type and footage of film used, and loading the raw film into the magazines which were used in the cameras.
Terry himself had taught him how to load the magazines, a job which meant winding unexposed film on to reels, in total darkness and by feel only. Everyone, to begin with, learned how to do it with unwanted exposed film in a well-lit room, and practised it over and over until they could do it with their eyes shut. When Simon could do this faultlessly, Terry sent him to load some magazines in earnest, and it was not until after a long day's shooting that the laboratory discovered all the film to be completely black.
Simon, it appeared, had done exactly what he had been taught: gone into the loading room and threaded the film on to the magazine with his eyes shut. And left the electric light on while he did it.
He took a sip of his pink restorer, looked at the others in bewilderment, and said, 'Evan told me to write ''print'' against every one of those shots we took today.' He searched their faces for astonishment and found none. 'But, I say,' he protested, 'if all the first takes were good enough to print, why on earth did he go on doing so many?'
No one answered except Conrad, who looked at him with pity and said, 'Work it out, dear boy. Work it out.' But Simon hadn't the equipment.
The bar room was large and cool, with thick white-painted walls and a brown tiled floor: pleasant in the daytime, when we were seldom there, but too stark at night because of the glaring striplighting some insensitive soul had installed on the ceiling. The four girls, sitting languidly round a table with half-empty glasses of lime juice and Bacardi and soda, took on a greenish tinge as the sunlight faded outside, and aged ten years. The pouches beneath Conrad's eyes developed shadows, and Simon's chin receded too far for flattery.
Another long evening stretched ahead, exactly like the nine that had gone before: several hours of shop and gossip punctuated by occasional brandies, cigars and a Spanish-type dinner. I hadn't even any lines to learn for the next day, as my entire vocal contribution to Scenes 624 and 625 was to be a variety of grunts and mumbles. I would be glad, I thought, by God I would be glad, to get back home.
We went in to eat in a private dining-room as uninviting as the bar. I found myself between Simon and the handcuffs girl, two-thirds of the way along one side of the long table at which we all sat together haphazardly. About twenty-five of us, there were: all technicians of some sort except me and the actor due to amble to the rescue as a Mexican peasant. The group had been cut to a minimum, and our stay scheduled for as short a time as possible: the management had wanted even the desert scenes shot at Pinewood like the rest of the film, or at least on some dried-up bit of England, but the original director had stuck out for the authentic shimmer of real heat, damn and bless his departed spirit.
There was an empty space around the far side of the table.
No Evan.
'He's telephoning,' the handcuffs girl said. 'I think he's been telephoning ever since we came back.'
I nodded. Evan telephoned the management most evenings, though not normally at great length. He was probably having difficulty getting through.
'I'll be glad to go home,' the girl said, sighing. Her first location job, which she had looked forward to, was proving disappointing; boring, too hot and no fun. Jill – her real name was Jill, though Evan had started calling her Handcuffs, and most of the unit had copied him – slid a speculative look sideways at my face, and added, 'Won't you?'
'Yes,' I said neutrally.
Conrad, sitting opposite, snorted loudly. 'Handcuffs, dear girl, that's cheating. Anyone who prods him has her bet cancelled.'
'It wasn't a prod,' she said defensively.
'Next best thing.'
'Just how many of you are in this pool?' I asked sarcastically.
'Everyone except Evan,' Conrad admitted cheerfully. 'Quite a healthy little jackpot it is.'
'And has anyone lost their money yet?'
Conrad chuckled. 'Most of them, dear boy. This afternoon.'
'And you,' I said, 'have you?'
He narrowed his eyes at me and put his head on one side. 'You've a temper that blows the roof off, but usually on behalf of someone else.'
'He can't answer your question, you see,' Jill explained to me. 'That's against the rules too.'
But I had worked with Conrad on three previous films, and he had indeed told me where he had placed his bet.
Evan came back from telephoning, walked purposefully to his empty chair, and splashed busily into his turtle soup. Intent, concentrated, he stared at the table and either didn't hear, or didn't wish to hear, Terry's tentative generalities.
I looked at Evan thoughtfully. At forty he was wiry, of medium height and packed with aggressive energy. He had undisciplined black curling hair, a face in which even the bones looked determined, and fierce hot brown eyes. That evening the eyes were looking inwards, seeing visions in his head; and the tumultuous activity going on in there showed unmistakably in the tension in his muscles. His spoon was held in rigid fingers, and his neck and back were as stiff as stakes.
I didn't like his intensity, not at any time or in any circumstances. It always set up in me the unreasonable reaction of wanting to avoid doing what he was pressing for, even when his ideas made good sense. That evening he was building up a good head of steam, and my own antipathy rose to match.
He shovelled his way briskly through the anglicized paella which followed, and pushed his empty plate away decisively.
'Now...' he said: and everybody listened. His voice sounded loud and high, strung up with his inner urgency. It would have been impossible to sit in that room and ignore him.
'As you know, this film we are making is called Man in a Car.'
We knew.
'And as you know, the car has figured in at least half the scenes that have been shot.'
We knew that too, better than he did, as we had been with it all through.
'Well...' he paused, looking round the table, collecting eyes. 'I have been talking to the producer, and he agrees...I want to change the emphasis . . . change the whole shape of the film. There are going to be a number of flashbacks now, and not just one. The story will jump back every time from the desert scene and each desert shot will give an impression of the days passing, and show the man growing weaker. There is to be no rescue, as such. This means, I'm afraid, Stephen...' He looked directly at the other actor, '. . . that your part is out entirely, but you will of course be paid what was agreed.' He turned back to the unit in general. 'We are going to scrap those cool witty scenes of reunion with the girl that you did at Pinewood. Instead, we will end the film with the reverse of the opening. That is to say, a helicopter shot that starts with the car in close-up and gradually recedes from it until it is merely a dot on the plain. The view will widen just at the end to indicate a peasant walking along a ridge of hill, leading a donkey, and everyone who sees the film can decide for himself whether the peasant rescues the man, or passes by without seeing him.'
He cleared his throat into a wholly attentive silence. 'This of course means that we shall have to do much more work here on location. I estimate that we will be here for at least another two weeks, as there will have to be many more scenes of Link in the car.'
Someone groaned. Evan looked fiercely in the direction of the protest, and silenced it effectively. Only Conrad made any actual comment.
'I'm glad I'm behind the camera, and not in front of it,' he said slowly. 'Link's showing wear and tear already.'
I pushed the last two bits of chicken around with my fork, not really seeing my plate. Conrad was staring across at me: I could feel his eyes. And all the others', too. It was the actor in me, I knew, which kept them waiting while I ate a mouthful, drank some wine, and finally looked up again at Evan.
'All right,' I said.
A sort of quiver ran through the unit, and I realized they had all been holding their breath for the explosion of the century. But setting my own feelings aside, I had to admit that what Evan had suggested made excellent film sense, and I trusted to that instinct, if not to his humanity. There was a lot I would do, to make a good film.
He was surprised at my unconditional agreement, but also excited by it. Visions poured out of him, faster than his tongue.
'There will be tears... and skin cracks, and sun blisters . . . and terrible thirst... and muscles and tendons quivering with strain like violin strings, and hands curled with cramp . . . and agony and frightful despair . . . and the scorching, inexorable, thunderous silence . . . and towards the end, the gradual disintegration of a human soul... so that even if he is rescued he will be different . . . and there won't be a single person who sees the film who doesn't leave exhausted and wrung out and filled with pictures he'll never forget.'
The camera crews listened with an air of we've-seen-all-this-before and the make-up girl began looking particularly thoughtful. It was only I who seemed to see it from the inside looking out, and I felt a shudder go through my gut as if it had been a real dying I was to do, and not pretence. It was foolish. I shook myself; shook off the illusion of personal involvement. To be any good, acting had to be deliberate, not emotional.
He paused in his harangue, waiting with fixed gaze for me to answer him, and I reckoned that if I were not to let him stampede all over me it was time to contribute something myself.
'Noise,' I said calmly.
'What . . .?'
'Noise,' I repeated. 'He would make a noise, too, at first. Shouting for help. Shouting from fury, and hunger, and terror. Shouting his bloody head off.'
Evan's eyes widened and embraced the truth of it.
'Yes,' he said. He took a deep ecstatic breath at the thought of his idea taking actual shape. '...Yes.'
Some of the inner furnace died down to a saner, more calculating heat.
'Will you do it?' he said.
I knew he meant not Would I just get through the scenes somehow, but Would I put into them the best I could. And he might well ask, after his behaviour to me that day. I would, I thought; I would make it bloody marvellous; but I answered him flippantly.
'There won't be a dry eye in the house.'
He looked irritated and disappointed, which would do no harm. The others relaxed and began talking, but some undercurrent of excitement had awoken, and it was the best evening we had had since we arrived.
So we went back to the desert plain for another two weeks, and it was lousy, but the glossy little adventure turned into an eventual box-office blockbuster which even the critics seemed to like.
I got through the whole fortnight with my temper intact; and in consequence Conrad, who had guessed right, won his bet and scooped the pool.