HOWL AND THE PUSSY-KAT.2

Chapter Two: REWRITES

‘The Big Time beckons for Eldorado superhunk Jason Howl,’ DeeDee Delfein informed readers of the LA Times at the end of June. ‘Cable viewers can catch him with a lot more than his shirt off in a steamy HBO thriller called Reckless Endangerment tomorrow night, starring Soft-Core Queen Janet de Jong.

‘But don’t get your hopes up too high, girls and gays. Despite a trio of disappointing TV movies Jason isn’t going permanently down Porn Alley. This reporter can exclusively reveal that he has signed to play opposite Dolores Delano this fall in veteran producer Isaac Hunt’s remake of the Bette Davis three-hankie weepie Now Voyager.

‘Reprising the Paul Henreid role will be Jason’s big-screen debut. Last year he worked for Hunt TV with Hugh Grant’s ex, Liz Hurley, in The Man from Nowhere, the pilot for a western series that was cancelled after low ratings.

‘Hollywood sources tell me the role of Jerry Durrance was turned down by Harrison Ford, Michael Douglas and Harvey Keitel, which makes Jason a surprise choice. Ben Burns, Head of Hunt’s Writing Department who is scripting Now and Then, Voyager, is having to make changes to accommodate the 12-year difference between 25-year-old Jason and ageless diva Dolores.’

* * *

‘Ageless but thirty-seven,’ said Ben, reading the item to ‘veteran producer’ Isaac in the latter’s marble mausoleum of an office on Wilshire. ‘Thirty-seven going on fifty!’ Isaac shook his bewigged head.

‘I forget how old she was when I picked her out of the gutter.’

‘Well, if she’s thirty-seven now, she’d have been twelve when you made her first Lady from Mexico picture! Did you okay this leak to DeeDee?’

‘Sure I did.’

‘Nobody told me we approached Michael Douglas.’

Isaac chortled. ‘We didn’t, but it never hurts to talk up a change of cast!’

‘I wish Keitel had stayed onboard.’ Ben unthinkingly scratched his crotch. Crabs from an agency hooker; the treatment left a phantom itch.

‘Me too,’ said Isaac, ‘but every movie actor wants to do London stage plays these days. I can’t see Harvey as this Archie Rice guy, though. Who was it in the movie? Richard Burton? What’s it called - Entertaining Mr Sloane?’

‘The Entertainer. So, how much are you paying the Howl kid?’

Titus straightened the Louis Vuitton blotter on his gleaming maple desk. ‘Half a million. Titus is tap-dancing at the saving on Keitel. Howl was his idea, remember. Bring in the kids – and soap fans. Even Dolores is all in favour.’

‘Why wouldn’t she be? She’s gonna be banging him on-screen!’

‘No dirt on her in the tabloids lately. I wonder who she is banging.’

‘The pool guy?’ Ben offered. They shared a dirty laugh.

Isaac got back to business: ‘So how’s the script coming along?’

‘I’ll have the new scenes finished within a coupla days.’

‘Nothing too drastic, I hope. Even with the Howl kid let’s try to stay close to the original. Remember, you can’t –’

‘- “improve on perfection”. Yeah, yeah, Isaac. But this kid’s a hunk. I’m gonna have to spice up the love scenes.’

‘No.’ Isaac’s tone was firm. ‘No nudity – nothing below the waist.’

‘Maybe some ass,’ Ben pleaded. ‘Remember how good Howl and Hurley looked in The Man from Nowhere - his pecs, her tits and two killer asses! We’ll have to watch this porno thing tonight.’

‘I don’t want any porn action in Voyager,’ Isaac reiterated. ‘Paul Henreid didn’t have to rely on showing his ass.’

‘Paul Henreid didn’t have an ass!’

This time Isaac declined to join in Ben’s laughter. ‘And Bette Davis didn’t need to flash her tits to get people into a movie theatre,’ he persisted.

‘She would today, otherwise Crawford would be beating her at the box office – pants down!’ Ben was still in a mood for levity even if Isaac wasn’t.

The discussion went on. Isaac fought Ben every inch of the way.

* * *

Ben knew he was rewriting a near-sacred text. His screenplay for Now and Then, Voyager – it had taken Isaac two weeks to come up with a title Ben could have provided in five minutes – adhered in essence if not in detail to the original’s ‘perfect’ parameters. Charlotte Vale is still the stay-at-home daughter of a pain-in-the-ass mother; she gets institutionalised; she meets Jerry Durrance, an architect who can’t (or won’t) leave his wife; they fall in love and manage to live happily ever after despite not being able to marry.

* * *

‘We can’t use Boston,’ Ben had said.

‘Why not?’ demanded Isaac. ‘It’s only a set, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Yeah, but nobody outside of Boston thinks Boston is chic.’

Isaac conceded the change of locale. The Vales now live in the Hamptons.

* * *

‘An audience that watches Jerry Springer won’t accept that a grown woman would be driven neurotic by her bitch of a mother,’ Ben had argued. ‘With Charlotte’s money she’d hire a hit-man or put her mother in a home, or else she’d move to the Big Apple, rent her own apartment, screw some guys.’

‘We’re not making The Godfather here,’ said Isaac. ‘Or Mr Goodbar.’

‘We need to find a motivation that works for a modern audience.’

‘Such as what?’

Such as a woman who finds out that her boyfriend is a fag. Elliot Livingston is now brought in at the beginning. The handsome commodities-broker son of East Hampton neighbours seems an implausibly good catch for ugly-duckling Charlotte; and so he is. Charlotte’s younger sister has become a brother and she catches Elliott in bed with this teenager. (Isaac had diluted on-screen sodomy in Ben’s first draft to two male heads on adjacent pillows with the sheets pulled up. At the very least Ben intended to lower the sheets.) Charlotte takes refuge in pills and booze (six months compressed to three minutes of screen time). Her mother sends her to an upstate upmarket detox centre.

Isaac’s jaw had dropped when Ben revealed this. ‘Like – Betty Ford’s?’

‘Exactly, Isaac.’

‘Not a sanitarium?’

‘Betty Ford’s is a sanitarium, by today’s standards.’

‘But – can’t she just have a little trouble with her nerves, like Davis did?’

‘If that was her only problem, her doctor would just prescribe her some Prozak. Unless you want her to go totally psychotic and get sent to some sort of Bellevue-type crazy-house?’

‘No, no – a Betty Ford-type place is okay, I guess. So what’s Tina Durrance gonna be there for? … I know – anorexia! That’d be good and topical.’

Ben shook his head. ‘Where’s the edge for the audience watching Charlotte help force-feed some skinny brat? I’ve gone back to the original. Tina had the same problem as Charlotte – she was emotionally underdeveloped.’

‘So we’re keeping that in, right?’

Ben’s ponytail shook. ‘This is a Women’s Picture, Isaac. Most women today if they had a neurotic daughter like that would give her a good smack in the face. But a teenager with addiction problems will have a strong appeal to the maternal instinct. And it’ll give her a valid reason to be at the clinic.’

‘You mean – like - chocolate addiction?’ Isaac almost managed a laugh. ‘You think some lard-ass kid is gonna win hearts?’ Ben shook his head again.

‘No, Isaac. Now she has the same new problem as we’re giving Charlotte: booze and pills. Well, maybe not booze. She’s only a teen. Glue or E - that kind of thing. Something today’s parents worry about their kids getting into.’

It took Isaac a few moments to find his voice. ‘Jerry Durrance’s daughter is a glue-sniffing junkie?’

Worse was to come. Much worse.

* * *

‘Doctor Jacquith is black? You’re giving Claude Rains’s part to – a man!’

Political correctness was flushed down the toilet over which Isaac frequently toiled and groaned. He still believed in calling a spade a spade.

‘Careful, Isaac. That kind of talk costs big bucks in legal fees.’

‘Big buck mans!’ cried Isaac, as if he hadn’t said enough already.

‘There has to be a black character.’

‘Give Mrs Vale a black maid. Give Charlotte an old black mammy.’

‘Isaac, Isaac - she isn’t Scarlett O’Hara. We’ve been through this already. Having maids would be seen as exploitation. Mrs Vale has a housekeeper.’

‘Then let her be a n-’

‘She’s Hispanic.’

Isaac almost wept. ‘But – Dr Jacquith?’

‘That name’s kind of phoney. Doctor Jackson is less of a mouthful.’

‘My picture, my picture –’ Isaac moaned.

* * *

Neither Dr Jackson nor Mrs Vale had been cast when Jason was invited to replace Harvey Keitel in the last week of June. The casting director was in touch with the agents for Sidney Poitier and Richard Roundtree, to see if they were available – and affordable. If they weren’t, Myra Mae had plenty of less well-known blacks on her books.

Titus’s stinginess with the budget ruled out Maggie Smith or Judi Dench for Charlotte’s mother, an English actress to provide a link with Gladys Cooper in 1942. The part might end up going to some ageing American has-been like the Broadway Bitch who could do a ‘patrician’ accent – and came cheap.

Clearly Jason was too young to have a teenage daughter with addiction problems. A kid sister? Suddenly the picture was getting crowded with kids.

Then Ben had his brainwave.

* * *

‘Tina’s his wife? His wife is in the sanitarium?’ Just in time Isaac remembered not to tear his hair off. ‘We never see his wife - except in a photo, looking like a guard from Cell Block H. And her name is Isabel.’

‘No one’s called Isabel. Her name is Tina. And she’s in the picture now.’

‘But – why, for Christ’s sake?’

‘Think about it, Isaac. She’s paraplegic because of a car smash which Jerry is responsible for – he was driving the car. That puts guilt in the frame.’

‘But what’s she doing in a detox joint?’

‘I’ll think of something - she could be addicted to painkillers. Anyway she’s beautiful – beautiful but broken … She and Charlotte bond at the sanitarium … She pushes Charlotte and Jerry together – sends them on the cruise, because –’ (ideas were coming thick and fast now, Ben loved it when this happened) – ‘she wants them to get involved … She’s choosing her own surrogate, one she thinks she can control.’

‘“Surrogate”?’ Isaac floundered.

‘It still needs work,’ Ben admitted.

‘Who’s gonna play the wife? She’ll cost more than some movie brat.’

‘She doesn’t have to be anybody special. Some bimbo off of television. I won’t give her many lines.’

‘Dolores won’t like it either. All these women.’

‘She’s gonna steal this woman’s husband, steal the picture from all these ladies. What’s not to like?’

If only.

* * *

Dolores had script approval in her contract. Myra Mae – on her client’s behalf - had seen each draft of the screenplay.

‘Dolores doesn’t do plain,’ Myra Mae had announced in his ear less than 24 hours after Ben sent her the first outline.

‘So?’

‘Those early scenes. No dowdy dresses. No flat shoes. No glasses.’

In San Francisco Dolores emerges from the earthquake in a Donna Karan gown, hair unmussed, singing (miming) ‘One Fine Day’, with just one small smudge on her left cheek to indicate the ordeal she’s been through.

Ben wasted breath on a protest: ‘But – the whole point of Charlotte is that she’s a caterpillar who emerges from her chrysalis as a butterfly.’

‘The whole point of Dolores is that she’s always a butterfly.’ Myra Mae’s voice had an edge beyond steel. ‘She doesn’t play caterpillars. Costume-wise we’re thinking Cecil Beaton. We’re thinking Edith Head.’

‘Aren’t they dead?’

‘Of course they’re dead, schmucko. But that’s the style we’re thinking.’

‘I’m not re-writing My Fair Lady, for fuck’s sake.’

‘Maybe you aren’t. But Dolores is.’

* * *

She didn’t quite get her own way. Charlotte’s post-chrysalis frocks wouldn’t be Donna Karan (if Titus had his way they’d come from Wal-Mart). The costume department would create outfits ‘inspired’ by John Orry-Kelly’s 1942 originals.

In the early scenes Dolores would be a tad frumpy, a tad plump (padded, since lipo had left her on the scrawny side of gamine). Glasses for reading. If the swan who captures the heart of the prince with the killer ass doesn’t exactly start out as an ugly duckling, at least she is, initially, a bit of a goose.

* * *

Ben wished, fervently, that Dolores could break both her legs. How much would it cost to arrange this? There were a dozen – a hundred - actresses who would play Charlotte Vale better than she could. This too he’d argued:

‘Kim Basinger. Debra Winger. Michelle Pfeiffer. We’re talking Star Quality, Isaac. Stars who can act.’

‘Dolores is a star. Dolores can act.’

Ben was unrelenting. ‘Kathleen Turner. Glenn Close. Glenn would give you a Charlotte who went from bag-lady to Cruella De Vil.’

Isaac sighed. ‘You’re probably right.’ Ben twisted the knife.

‘Meryl Streep. She can act the socks off Dolores.’

‘Sure she can,’ Isaac agreed, ‘but she doesn’t have Dolores’s looks.’

‘Dolores hasn’t got Dolores’s looks any more. Meryl can act the transition to beautiful, like Bette Davis did.’ Ben trumped his own ace: ‘Helen Hunt.’

‘Sigourney Weaver!’ Isaac tried resorting to The Game. But Ben was on a roll:

‘We’d be looking at Oscars. Davis didn’t win an Oscar.’

‘Only because of Barbara Stanwyck and her Mrs shitting Miniver.’

‘Helen Hunt as Charlotte Vale would guarantee you an Oscar, Isaac.’

‘Where am I gonna get the money for her? Titus has got me by the balls.’

It was Dolores and Myra Mae who had Isaac by the balls. Isaac knew that Ben knew it. And Ben wasn’t going to let Isaac have the last word.

‘There are actresses out there who’d play Charlotte for no more than you’re paying Dolores. Some of them would kill to play this part.’

Isaac had the last word: ‘I wish one of them would kill Dolores.’

**********************************

TRAILER for HOWL AND THE PUSSY-KAT.3

Chapter Three continues with tribulations for Isaac. His mistress wants a wedding ring. Then Titus Q. Nunns is arraigned on tax evasion charges.