The Merry Month of May by James Jones Read Free Book Online Page A

Islands Review, which indeed he had.
    The Frenchman fought him back valiantly that night, with that over-loquacious, over-adrenalized valor which the French are addicted to, and could not avoid even if they wanted. The American, who was a former distributions executive for Warner’s or Fox or M-G-M and looked like one of those hairless pink cupie-dolls you win at a village fair, listened and watched everything keenly in pregnant silence and did not say more than one or two words all evening. I found out later that he was not smart at all. That was just his gimmick. As I was Harry’s. And loquacious valor was the Frenchman’s.
    This thing of a film-job thing is a complicated matter. Nobody tells anybody anything. It is like pulling teeth to get anything out of somebody.
    The mechanics themselves are complex enough. Harry’s writing job was only a part of it. The whole thing entailed a lot of film world high-finance shenanigans, a lot of reputational jockeying back and forth, demanded much talk about markets and distribution deals. I tried to understand it as they tossed it all back and forth between them after dinner, but I’m afraid I did not understand it at all well.
    The trouble seems to be that nobody knows or can figure out ahead of time what will sell. So most film makers (and I don’t mean just the small fry) are copiers. That is, if a Broadway musical is a hit, they will rush to make a Broadway musical; if a Western is a hit, they will make a Western; if a Pinter play is a hit as a film, they make a Pinter-like film.
    Harry’s Frenchman and American were after making an Italian Western in Spain. Mainly this was because Italian Westerns had become a big hit in America and therefore now were big business. Italian Westerns (I found out) were distinguished by the fact that they were made in Europe at a cost the Americans with their high union wage could not compete with; they were also different in that the Italians had thrown out the classical American morality-play angle, done away with the concept of hero and villain, and were making their Westerns into an entirely new thing: tough, extremely violent, and totally amoral. And American audiences were loving it. Our two producers thought they could compete with the Italians on their own ground, and even beat them at it, by making the films in Spain where it was even cheaper than Italy. The American had a deal to use the Dupont-Bronston studios and facilities. They had a great deal of money behind them to do it. They wanted Harry to write the first one for them. And if the first one was a hit, there was no reason there couldn’t be a series of them.
    All this was not only just for the money and profit, mind you. Even moreso the film maker wants the notoriety a big hit brings, the fame of being famous, a globetrotting celebrity, the right of success which is the right to give lots of people lots of orders and spread much largess, and be like Mr. Darryl Zanuck or one of those. You could almost smell it oozing, exuding from our two.
    But there were further complications. For example, almost all films today are what they call “packaged”. This presents another problem. “Packaging” means that the “independent” producer (who isn’t really independent at all) must first set up all of his whole film production ahead of time, before going to his major studio or big-money people who are advancing the million or millions required to actually make the film.
    Thus a producer must first get a “property”, which means a story, then find a writer who will write it as a script, and then a director, and if possible a star actor who will agree to act it,—all the while laying out out of his own pocket, the producer, the 20 or 30 or even 50 thousand dollars to bring all these people together, while hoping against hope as he does so that they all can get along together and work together congenially, something which according to Harry apparently happens very rarely.
    I