Winning is Everything (51 page)

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When, Ron wondered, did being a movie producer become such hard work? What happened to the glamour? Where were all those starlets falling at his feet? How come he no longer had any free time?

With
Nowhere Road
, Ron was not only producing, he soon found himself budgeting and juggling schedules and fighting with almost everyone on the set. Antwerp had been a nightmare.

Ron had arranged, rearranged, and executed most of the advance work before Dale Kirkland finally made a grand entrance the day before shooting began, bringing with him Scot and Jeanette Alexander. He dropped them off at their hotel, threw a lavish farewell party for himself, and as everyone began filming the following morning, he flew back to Los Angeles.

Soon after that, everything fell apart.

Jonathan Crawford, the director, immediately decided that
Nowhere Road
would become the perfect movie for the make-love-not-war generation, and so he proceeded to intellectualize every take, convinced he was shooting the most innovative piece of filmmaking since
Citizen Kane.

In no time,
Nowhere Road
was three weeks behind schedule.

Things got even worse after the company left Antwerp and moved back to Los Angeles. Scot Alexander became a pain in the ass. Taken in by his own media hype, he started strutting around the set, refusing to sign autographs, refusing to arrive at the studio on time, refusing to say certain profane lines which, though perhaps right for the character of Russ, were most assuredly not in the best interest of the four-glasses-of-milk-a-day image Scot Alexander planned to sell to his fans.

When Kirkland took a look at the first several weeks’ worth of dailies, he blew up at his star’s soft-sell treatment and announced that Talbot must be turning over in his grave.

And that was the least of their worries. True, Scot Alexander refused to say a few dirty words. The real trouble, however, was that
whatever
he said came out bland and monotone. After sitting through the first month’s worth of dailies, Ron realized Scot Alexander was best off when using no words at all. He could not act.

“He moves well …” said Ron with an apologetic shrug.

“Moves well!” La Gorda screamed. “If I wanted someone who moves well, I would’ve hired Nureyev! I want an actor who can speak the goddamn lines, not some dumb jock who sounds like he’s auditioning for the Mickey Mouse Club!”

Hoping to hold things together, Ron went down to the set himself. He fought with director Crawford about concept. He fought with Alexander about role interpretation. He fought with the production manager about budget. He fought with the set designers, with the editor, with the cinematographer, with the extras. He fought with everyone. The film was frighteningly over budget and ridiculously behind schedule. Nothing went right.

A group of limos was hired to carry crew and actors out to the San Gabriel Mountains for two days of location shooting. The cars got tied up in traffic for three hours on the San Bernardino Freeway because of an accident.

Costumes weren’t ready on time. Sets were improperly constructed. The other lead actor, a newcomer named Tim Hayes, caught the flu and was out for a week just at a time when they couldn’t possibly shoot around him—so production was shut down for three days.

The movie, in short, was soon the laughingstock of the industry. It was just as well Ron was working so hard he didn’t have time for the cocktail-party circuit, as he would have been mortified to overhear the vicious talk going around. When the filming finally ended, they were six weeks behind shooting schedule and five and a half million dollars over budget.

Kirkland sat through an early mounting of all the footage, the roughest of work prints, and turned ashen. When the lights in the small screening room came up, he turned to Ron and announced that he was thinking of removing his name from the credits and just listing Ron as sole producer.

Ron was visibly distressed by Kirkland’s thought. “Come on, Dale, we got a long way to go. The music still hasn’t been added. That’ll make a big difference in an action film like this. Why not wait the eight weeks, see how well we do with the sneak we’ve scheduled for Denver?”

Kirkland coughed and huffed and wheezed in his chair before standing up.

“Where are you going?” asked Ron.

“Where I always go when I’m depressed,” said Dale. “Straight to the Bistro for eight orders of chocolate soufflé. Want to come?”

“No, thanks. I, too, plan to do what I always do when I’m depressed—go home, take a Quaalude, and cry myself to sleep. What about the sneak preview?”

“What have I got to lose, right?” decreed Kirkland. “I’ll wait to see the audience reaction in Denver before I write it off. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough,” Ron agreed.

The sneak in Denver was, unfortunately, the disaster everyone had expected. The people at Warner Brothers weren’t pleased. Dale Kirkland was furious. And Ron wanted to slash his wrists.

“It’s yours, Zinello!” Dale shouted in the lobby of the Copper Theater as they finished thumbing through the consistently negative reaction cards. “I’m walking away from it. I got two musicals in preproduction, anyway. I haven’t got time to save this gobble-gobble.”

“But Dale …” Ron’s eyes were filled with tears.

“Hey, Zinello …” Dale swallowed a small glass of Scotch someone handed him. “Did you notice that I didn’t show up here in Denver with one of my pretties? Did you notice I happen to be by myself,
sans entourage?
No muscle boy for me tonight, Ron. And you wanna know why? Because I’m too goddamned embarrassed, that’s why. I’m going back to Los Angeles first thing in the morning. You got six weeks to deliver a final print.”

Early Monday morning Ron sat alone in Screening Room C at the Warner Brothers Studios and watched
Nowhere Road
from the first reel to the last.

Two hours later he pressed the intercom button and asked the operator in the control booth to run it for him again. Watching it the second time, Ron tried to figure out what had gone wrong. Talbot’s script was good, even if a bit overlong. The characters were interesting, and the plot moved with just the right amount of suspense and tension. So why was the whole thing such a mess?

The lights came up in the small room, and Ron, discouraged and depressed, stood up to leave. He drove off the lot, turned onto Burbank Boulevard, and kept driving until he saw a bar, five hundred yards from the studio.

“A martini, please,” he ordered from the bartender. “In fact, make it a double!”

Half an hour later, Ron was feeling much better. He reviewed the film in his mind again and was suddenly struck with an idea. He wasn’t sure if it was sheer inspriation or the gin talking, but hell, things couldn’t get any worse than right now, so Ron got up off the bar stool, hurried over to the pay phone near the entrance, and called Bill O’Donald, the film’s editor, asking if he would meet him in Screening Room C in ten minutes.

Ron and Bill O’Donald sat together in the screening room and once again watched all two hours of
Nowhere Road.

“It’s a mess, isn’t it?” asked Ron after the film had ended for the third time that day.

O’Donald scratched at his thick beard. “Well, it sure doesn’t look much like a winner.”

“I’m not so sure …” Ron stood up and began pacing back and forth in front of the first row of seats. “We may well have the biggest piece of shit here since Brando’s
Mutiny on the Bounty
… or we might just be able to turn this into a real film. I don’t know about you, Bill, but I’m not ready to write this nightmare off, not yet.”

“What do you propose?” O’Donald asked with interest as he lit up his pipe.

“Look. Kirkland has abandoned the project, right? And Crawford has shipped himself off to Australia to direct some shit about kangaroos in heat or something. He’s handed his final-cut approval over to Kirkland, and Kirkland’s handed it over to me. So that means it’s now up to us. And I say there must be something we can do. The chase scene, for example, when they get caught speeding. I remember seeing all of it in dailies and it looked pretty exciting.”

“Yeah,” said O’Donald. “But that was before Crawford cut it down to next to nothing.”

“Right!” Ron agreed. “So let’s put it back in. In fact, let’s take a look at all your footage again. What the hell—let’s send a second unit out, back to Antwerp, to film whatever pickup shots we might need. And another thing—that chase scene comes too late in the movie. Why do it in flashback when the audience has already seen them on the road for five reels? Let’s move it forward, into the first act, where it chronologically belongs. Maybe we can hook the audience sooner, make ‘em care!”

“Interesting idea,” O’Donald allowed, with another stroke of his beard.

“Thanks,” said Ron. “Here’s another one. I think the focus of the film is all wrong. Kirkland got Crawford all hyped up about Scot Alexander because he thought the track star was going to become some international sensation. Well, now we know better, right? So let’s put the spotlight back where it was in the script. And Tim Hayes does a fine job; he’s personable and attractive. I believe an audience might really get behind him.”

“Crawford cut most of Hayes’s stuff out because he thought it wasn’t shot dark enough,” said O’Donald.

“Right,” said Ron. “And that’s one of the reasons he’s now on his way to Australia to shoot pregnant kangaroos and may get horsewhipped if he ever shows his face in Hollywood again.”

“Go on,” said O’Donald encouragingly. “You may be a mile and a half off target, but at least you’re on a roll.”

“Bet your ass I am,” Ron agreed. “Okay, so we put back that stuff about Hayes and his girl back home—all that good stuff with dark lighting Crawford left on the cutting-room floor. His is a shorter story than Scot’s, so the film will come in maybe fifteen minutes earlier. Who cares? You ever heard anyone complain ‘cause a movie was too
short?”

“And what about Scot Alexander?’’ asked O’Donald.

“That jock strap? Easy. We hire an accomplished voice-over actor to come in, loop all of Scot’s lines—and we also put back all the realistic foul-language dialogue.”

“Scot’ll sue our asses off.”

“Let him!” huffed Ron. “He signed a contract to do
our
script, didn’t he? We can claim we restored Talbot’s original dialogue in tribute to a dead author’s script-as-written. Talbot would’ve liked that, and you can be sure the Writers’ Guild will back us up!”

“Anything else?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact!” said Ron. “The music stinks. Sounds about as exotic as a dentist’s drill. Let’s throw it out, hire someone new who can compose something a little more rousing. What do you think?”

“Wanna know what I really think?” O’Donald puffed on his pipe.

“Of course!” Ron raised his voice. “Why else would I have asked you to sit through another two hours of this crap!”

“Okay. In the first place, I think you’re crazy. You’re talking three, maybe four months’ heavy postproduction work that you have to cram into six weeks.”

“Anything else?” asked Ron.

“Yeah,” said O’Donald, standing up. “In the second place, there’s something we gotta do right away if you’re really serious about making all these changes.”

“And what’s that?”

“We gotta get to work!”

Ron Zinelli and Bill O’Donald saw a hell of a lot of each other during the next six weeks. O’Donald took on three other apprentice editors, all of them working practically around the clock as they tried to save
Nowhere Road.

O’Donald would put a new scene together and then he and Ron would watch it. Too often, the scene still played flat and had to be pieced together again. A new composer was hired to write a whole other score, and an actor with a strong, sexy voice came in and looped all of Scot Alexander’s dialogue.

By the time they were done, Ron and Bill had lost all sense of objectivity. Ron arranged for the studio to run another sneak of the film in San Diego so they could get some measure of another audience’s reaction to the many changes.

When Ron told Kirkland about the San Diego sneak, the fat man told him he was beating a dead horse.