Ciggy couldn't sleep that night. It was the same night that Robby had checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel, the same night that Trudy had thrown him out of the house.
He got out of bed to pee, and it burned him like the fires of hell. He did his best not to shout profanities as the pain persisted because he didn't want to wake Cheyenne. She had a pivotal scene the next day and he wanted her well rested.
So he masked his loud cursing with muffled whines of "shit" and "fuck."
"You okay, Cig?" he heard Cheyenne ask from the other side of the bathroom door. Apparently, he hadn't succeeded in hiding it from her.
"Yeah, fine," he moaned through gasps. "Go back to sleep."
"What's going on?" she asked, concern dripping out of her voice.
"Nothing," he said. "Minor prostate problem. Go back to sleep."
"I'm already up," she said. "Can I get you anything?"
"Water," he admitted. "I'm supposed to drink lots of water to flush out the infection. And I got half a cigar in the TV room. Would you get it for me?"
"Be right back," she answered.
She was quite a girl, he thought. Ciggy had been watching movies about "the hooker with a heart of gold" since he was a kid, had made many of them himself, but in all the years he had been hiring prostitutes he had never actually met one. Cheyenne was it.
"FUCK!" he shouted up to the heavens. Now that the girl was up anyway, he had no reason to suppress his true feelings.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck you!" Ciggy yelled at the Deity that cursed his legendary organ that He had once blessed with size and joy.
Cheyenne returned with a large glass of water and a look of empathy. She was naked, since that's how she slept. Ciggy still couldn't stop himself from being mesmerized by her sensuous body, her playfully round ass, her exquisitely-shaped breasts, perfectly proportional to her curvaceously thin frame, her dark, silky legs, and the rich, thick hairs that provided a gateway to his own personal heaven.
But as much as he didn't want to, he had to turn away because he was getting an erection and it was causing the pain in his member to increase.
So he grabbed the glass and thanked her, then guzzled down half of its contents.
"Where's my cigar?" he asked while staring at the glass.
"I ain't getting you no cigar," she said. "Shit, a cigar's the last thing you need."
"I'm a grown man, honey," he said. "If I want to smoke, I'll smoke."
"So, smoke," she said. "Just don't expect me to get it for you."
Then she blocked the door and smiled.
Ciggy couldn't stay mad at her, no matter how much he wanted to. She knew it wasn't too late for him to fire her off the picture and jeopardize her one shot at stardom. Yet her insolence was born entirely out of her concern for him, as well as common sense. No one had ever put his interest before their own -- except for his immigrant mother and his second wife, the only of his three wives that he had wished he had stayed with.
Without thinking, he looked back at her to smile, grew once again infatuated with her delicious physique, then got an erection and screamed again.
"SHIT!" he yelled. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!"
Cheyenne only sighed, sadly.
"Get the damn cigar!" Ciggy demanded. "You work for me! That was the deal!"
"I know our deal," she answered. "You want me to suck that shriveled little thing of yours, okay. But I ain't getting you no cigar 'cause that shit'll kill you."
"Thanks," he said, suppressing his smile. "You ought to go to bed."
"No," she insisted. "Cause if I do, you just gonna make a beeline for the smoke."
"No, I won't," he said.
"I don't believe you," she answered. "I know you too well."
"I promise."
"Then why do you want me to go to bed so bad?"
"Because when I look at you I get a woody, and it fuckin' kills."
She laughed, then moved toward him to kiss him good night on his bald spot. Ciggy tried to imagine toothless hockey players to spare himself the imminent pain, but it did no good. The second her lips touched his scalp, up went the periscope.
"Shit!" he cried.
"Sorry," she said, regrettably. "I didn't know it could happen so quickly."
"From now on you must use your powers for good instead of evil," he joked.
She laughed once more, said good-night, and headed to bed.
Ciggy remained hunched over the toilet in excruciating agony, doing his best to muffle his screams so that Cheyenne could get a good night's rest.
But this wasn't the reason he couldn't sleep that night.
About a half an hour later, as the pain subsided to a tolerable level of anguish, Ciggy sat back in his poofy chair in the TV room and reached for his stogey and a book of matches. He looked at the cigar for a few seconds as he considered his promise to Cheyenne. Of course, he lit it anyway, but the mere consideration surprised him.
The dailies from "Gun Butt" were still in the VCR, so he picked up the remote and flipped it on to watch them once more.
"Dailies," also known as "rushes," are the take-by-take footage filmed each day. Once upon a time, they were viewed in projection rooms at specified times. Today, they're merely transferred to videotape for all the principals to watch at their leisure.
Ciggy studied the various takes of the various shots, and he grew increasingly confused. He had made many movies in his lifetime. A few were great -- most were shit. But he generally had a pretty fair idea going in of how they were going to be coming out. "Gun Butt" was not one of those.
Like all "shlock-meisters," (German for "masters-of-shit,") Ciggy always hoped for that one great indie-classic that would be remembered forever. He came close a few times. In fact, a significant handful of the fifty-plus films he had made during his forty-plus-year career were damn good, arguably great. But classic? Classics are "Casablanca," "Lawrence of Arabia," "The Godfather." If nothing else, Ciggy was honest enough with himself to know that even his best work wasn't in that ballpark. But even at sixty-six, that was never going to diminish his hope for the next one.
For Ciggy knew exactly what made a classic. Enough of his rivals and proteges had done it. He himself had made enough good movies to know it, and more than enough flops to see it as clear as day. If this seems counter to what I just said about him earlier, you must understand something about show business.
The brilliant screenwriter, William Goldman, in the most accurate non-fiction novel about Hollywood I've ever read said it best: "No one knows anything."
Many people find this amusing -- many others see the truth in it. Ciggy lived by it.
A great movie occurs when all the elements somehow, magically, work together. That's not to say all the people involved get along. What goes on behind the scenes has no bearing on what ends up on screen. There are countless accounts of the most horrendous, abusive sets producing some of the greatest films the world has known. Similarly, some of the most harmonious sets with the most brilliantly talented people in the world have harmoniously joined together to produce complete dreck.
So because of Robby, "Gun Butt" was going to be a miserable experience, but that didn't concern Ciggy at all. It wouldn't be his first, probably wouldn't be his last. In fact, everyone down to the wardrobe girl had complained to him about Robby.
Actually, everyone except Cheyenne. She alone had defended him.
"He's got demons," she had said sadly. "And we don't even know what they are. This ain't drugs and shit. This is something altogether different."
The irony was that Robby was more abusive towards Cheyenne than anybody.
Talk about the whore with the heart of gold.
But the thing that plagued Ciggy about "Gun Butt" was that, as bad as he had expected it to be, it suddenly had the potential of being "the one."
Ciggy only bought "Gun Butt" because Norman guaranteed financing if they could find a black writer and a black director. Ciggy never hired anybody who had already made it, so the Spikes and Singletons were already out.
The "Gun Butt" story was good enough. A kind, poor, smart yet uneducated black kid with a single welfare mom and a sister who will die if she doesn't get an operation that the family can't afford is seduced into the drug trade by an evil white doctor. The boy knows it's wrong, but he sells the drugs for his sister. The boy makes just enough money to pay for the operation, then he wants out. But the doctor won't let him out. In the end, the sister lives, the boy gets the girl, and, in total self-defense, he kills the doctor.
In that order. Life, love, death, the end. It was the perfect formula.
But the dialogue was stilted, and the characters had no dimension. None of this worried Ciggy at all. Norman had guaranteed financing on three films, with the promise of additional financing on future ones if any one of them made a profit. "Gun Butt" was the perfect beginning. To play the boy, they cast a talented African-American dancer who had dominated four of the top ten R & B videos that year. I'll call the young dancer Axel Lincoln, and no one cared that he couldn't act. Based on his MTV success alone, Ciggy was able to pre-sell the film in foreign markets, domestic cable, and a very lucrative straight-to-video deal.
But as he watched the dailies, something was happening. Robby, the son-of-a-bitch, was making it all work. He took the dialogue, which was written so street it was almost a parody, and he played it AS parody. Every word, every syllable, came out of his mouth as a sarcastic attack on the entire African-American street culture. It was ugly, it was scornful, and it was utterly breath-taking.
So far, Robby had only shot scenes with Cheyenne, and Cheyenne was utterly thrown. She knew the dialogue was phony from the start. In her scenes with Axel, before Robby had started, she had simply done her best. But with Robby, she grew insecure, timid and confused. She spewed out the street-talk as someone who was questioning her entire identity, and one could only think of a young Audrey Hepburn -- Holly Golightly faking her way to the top in "Breakfast at Tiffany's."
It was the greatest set of dailies Ciggy had ever seen.
So he switched tapes and rewatched the videos of days prior. Axel and the woman portraying his mom -- a highly respected character actress who knew better -- were trying hard to make sense of the stereotypical lines. But Axel and the girl playing his sister -- a budding teen star who had already made a pilot deal with UPN -- simply didn't have the chops.
Then Ciggy rewatched the scenes with Robby and Cheyenne. It was night and day. Savannah was an okay director -- no dePaulo, but her shots were good, albeit uninspired. She had studied hard at her film school and ripped off the best.
Ciggy had long ago realized that being the mentor to the great directors of the time was to be his legacy, so he had every intention of teaching Savannah how to succeed. He had done so with many, although none as great as dePaulo. But as a young, black woman, she was competent enough. Given the best available screenplays, the top Hollywood script doctors, great actors and I.L.M. special effects, Savannah Jones could be as big as anyone.
But PRODUCING was what this movie needed. They needed a new writer, a great writer, to make this thing work. They needed to give Robby a bigger part, make him the lead, with Cheyenne as his co-star. This had to be a movie about the bad guy winning. Michael Douglas in "Wall Street." It would be sad when the good guy lost, and THAT was precisely what would get them the awards.
So he needed a new writer. A top-notch writer who could take this 1940s cliched story and turn it into a symbol of our times. A writer who could take the bullshit stilted dialogue and make it valid and real. A writer who could understand that the sappy, happy Hollywood ending should be turned into a sad, poignant, indie one.
But, believe it or not, that was not what kept him up all night either.
What kept him up all night was watching the takes of Robby and Cheyenne over and over. Yet it had nothing to do with Robby's Oscar-caliber performance, nor Cheyenne's glowing, ambivalent, emotional confusion.
It was simply this: Ciggy couldn't take his eyes off the girl. He had given roles to whores more beautiful, although not quite as talented. He had given roles to whores more talented, although not as pretty. But get this, and this was the clincher -- he had given roles to whores more beautiful AND more talented -- and none of that mattered.
He had never felt for another woman, with the possible exception of his second wife, what he felt for Cheyenne. He wanted nothing but the best for of her. It was why he had started nagging Gloria Abrams, the hungry neophyte at the Mammoth Agency, to represent her. Cheyenne was good, she was talented, she was sweet and she seemed to love him, and he wanted her for the rest of his life.
The fact that his three ex-wives and the bulk of his children would claim him insane didn't matter.
The fact that the trades would make him a laughingstock didn't matter.
The fact that he was pretty sure she would leave him for a handsome movie star the second she made it big didn't matter either.
All that mattered was how and when he asked her to marry him so that she didn't laugh in his face.
*** Up Next: "Robby And Lisa's First Date" ***
The main characters in this e-novel are fictional and are not intended to portray or resemble any actual individuals, whether living or dead (except for Jeff Abugov who is a real screenwriter, director and producer.) Although certain real people and companies are mentioned in this e-novel, all of the events are fictional and are not intended to portray or resemble any actual events.
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