HOWL AND THE PUSSY-KAT.3

MORE TRIBULATIONS FOR ISAAC HUNT

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Chapter Two: REWRITES (Part Two)

Isaac was having a series of what the secretaries called ‘bad hairpiece days’. Hunt Studios was having a bad hairpiece year.

Lady Van-de-Meer’s Wind had gone back into theatres for an extra week or two. Dame Joan had strutted her stuff and her Oscar on talk shows. Receipts increased negligibly, but not enough to satisfy Isaac - or Titus.

‘The Prancing Queers’ had opened in April. Isaac wore his best wig and a frozen smile on Letterman and DeeDee Delfein’s Hollywood Tonight to sing the praises of Hunt Studios’ embarrassing first foray into bisexuality. But the movie needed a bigger choir than Isaac and all of its stars.
Mr W.H., directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh, tells the story of Shakespeare’s relationship with his patron Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, the presumed subject of many of the Sonnets. Branagh’s Bard is plainly less comfortable in the gauzy gay love-scenes than Jude Law’s Henry (Law having had prior experience as a Queer of the Realm in Wilde).

For the heterosexual audience (who stayed away in their millions) there are some comic love-scenes with Anne Hathaway (a camp turn by Kathy Burke) and some high-octane ones with the Dark Lady (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who is Southampton’s sister in Anthony Minghella’s screenplay. Joan Collins’s Queen Bess leans more to Dynasty than to Shakespeare in Love.

Only Kathy Burke emerged with any credit from the reviews. Critics who’d lauded Stoppard’s liberties in Shakespeare in Love now decried those taken by Minghella. The literati denounced the movie as a slur on the greatest poet/dramatist in the English or any other language. Teachers and parent-groups attacked it. Homophobia was rampant. Middle America simply wasn’t ready for a mainstream movie about guys getting it on with guys. Hanks and Banderas don’t get it on in Philadelphia, so why must Will and Henry? Even the gay press was dismissive: ‘pink but bleached,’ said the Advocate.

It wasn’t – quite - a turkey, but it wasn’t going to make the money that Windbag had. From Isaac’s – and from Titus’s - point of view, it was a flop.

It hadn’t helped that two more serious biopics had come out. Paramount’s 3-hour hagiography Ronald and Nancy attracted not so much audiences as pilgrims. Willem Dafoe’s actor-president is calculatedly wooden but uncannily right, and Cate Blanchett finds meat on the bony role of Nancy Davis Reagan. Less reverential and more enthralling was MGM’s Not Made in Heaven, on the career – and turbulent matrimonial life – of another actor, James Mason, whose eerie reincarnation by Colin Firth is totally eclipsed by Julianne Moore’s teeth-and-claws portrayal of Pamela Kellino Mason.

But what really did for Mr W.H. at the box office was the year’s surprise comedy hit, Poor Nellie, also featuring a largely British cast but produced, in an even bigger surprise, by porn-king Al Kazman. The script, credited to one ‘J.J. Gatz’, was variously attributed by the rumour-mongers to Gore Vidal, Salman Rushdie and Brit-pack comic Ben Elton.

Pitched midway between Caligula and the Carry-On series, Poor Nellie is a sex-romp take on the life and times of Nell Gwynne who here cavorts not only with King Charles II (Peter O’Toole), but also with Richard Cromwell (Stephen Fry), James II (Hugh Laurie) and Judge Jeffreys (John Cleese). Jamie Lee Curtis’s hilariously starchy Catharine of Braganza was Oscar-worthy, but the real revelation (albeit unlikely to win any awards) is Katharine ‘Pussy-Kat’ Kane in the title role. Both in and out of her clothes ‘the Beaver Queen’ can actually act!

Shot in England and released with only limited advance publicity – and an unbelievable NC-17 certificate that showed just how lax censorship was getting – Poor Nellie put more asses (and certainly more come-stains) on theatre seats than the James Mason movie and ran Reagan a close second.

Also stiffed by the competition from other studios were the first of this year’s Hunt slasher movies and teen sex-comedies (after Nellie no comedy stood a chance). They ran in multiplexes for a dismal week and would be on video and DVD by fall. Gratifyingly for Isaac, The Bates Motel, Zola Gorgon’s second attempt to mine the Psycho seam, also bombed.

‘Waterbabies’ was scheduled for the second week of July. For Isaac, for Hunt Studios, everything was riding on it.

* * *

Making movies was Isaac’s lifeblood, the air in his lungs, the wind beneath his ever-more-feebly flapping wings.

And if, right now, casting/scripting/financing Now and Then, Voyager was the most of his woes, it wasn’t the sum total of them.

* * *

‘I want to get married.’

As she made this electrifying announcement, Graziella’s face, below tumbling titian L’Oréal curls, was glum, almost grim. It was a pretty face, not quite beautiful. She had a nice nose, which wasn’t original, and good cheekbones, which were. Her body was curvaceous but it fell short of voluptuous.

‘Baby, I’m happy for you,’ said Isaac magnanimously and with relief. Who needs a mistress at 75? He could phone in the occasional hooker. And he ought to spend more time with poor Yetta. The air at the Ranch was hot as Lucifer’s breath but at least it was clean. ‘Who’s the lucky guy?’

‘You are, Isaac. I want to get married to you.’ Isaac’s bowels spasmed.

‘Grazzi - baby – you know I can’t marry you. I’d have to sell the studio to give Yetta what she’d take me for in alimony.’

‘You don’t love me,’ Graziella said with as much emotion as she might have sung these words to a tune by Giuseppe Verdi. What she actually said was ‘Yo dohn’t lorve me’ in an accent that combined hip-hop with immigrant Italian.

The combination would have surprised, among others, Graziella’s British mother, a cook at the Ford Motor plant in Dagenham. Her daughter had been born – literally – in the Essex marshes in a bleak midwinter 30-some years ago when the ambulance rushing the two of them, one still inside the other, to the maternity hospital skidded on black ice and overturned into a dyke. Graziella Prato’s real name was Doris Daze – unusable professionally on at least two counts. Graziella had left the name of Doris far behind her, along with her original nose, mousy hair, ‘estuary’ English, her parents’ Methodist morality and, indeed, her parents.

‘Of course I love you, baby,’ Isaac said, automatically.

He wondered, often, what she saw in him, an old bald Hollywood Jew with a paunch and more fire in his bowels than in his belly, president of a studio long teetering on the brink of insolvency. She liked older men, of course, had married and discarded two - one in London, one in New York – in the course of her not-exactly meteoric rise from the chorus of the English National Opera to the middle of the second rank of international sopranos.

Did she see Isaac as Onassis to her Callas? But she was no Callas and Isaac no latter-day Croesus. And anyway, by the logic of this scenario, if he did divorce Yetta it would be to marry Pat Nixon or Nancy Reagan.

Graziella’s colour rose. It was not the colour of a natural redhead. ‘If –’ (eef) – ‘you really loved –’ (lorved) – ‘me, you would marry me.’

Isaac suppressed a sigh of impatience but not an ominous rumbling below the waistband of his cream linen suit-pants. ‘Grazzi – baby – even for you I can’t sell my studio at a fire-sale price.’

‘If you really loved me, you would burn it to the ground.’

With his guts churning into warp-drive at this heinous heretical proposal, Isaac missed a moment of slippage in Grazzi-baby/Doris’s accent. ‘Ground’ came out as 24-carat Essex-girl ‘grahnd’. Excusing himself, he made haste to his grey-marbled latrine for the best shit he’d had in two weeks.

One good thing about Grazzi: she did more for his bowels than any amount of Ex-Lax.

* * *

True to his word Ben got the next batch of revisions back to Isaac within two days. Isaac read the entire script over the weekend. He read it over and over. The love-scenes between Dolores and the Howl kid were going to be steamy, but sex was good for the box office and Isaac accepted that Now and Then, Voyager could not be as demure as its flawless progenitor. Everything had to be spiced up these days. A remake of The Nun’s Story (now that was something to think about – Winona Ryder?) would need to have screwing outside the convent walls and probably some lesbian or candle action inside.

Dolores would require a body-double. Her tits might stand up on camera with some caking over of the stitch-marks, but her ass couldn’t be a pretty sight (not that this had ever stopped Michael Douglas).

‘One thing,’ he said on Monday morning after grudgingly acknowledging that the script was ‘beginning to look halfway decent’.

‘What’s that, Isaac?’ Ben felt chipper. ‘Halfway decent’ was high praise from the old bugger. Ben knew the script was better than this, possibly his best yet. Was Now and Then, Voyager going to be his break-through movie? He tried not to think Oscars. It probably helped that a new girl from his usual agency had practically blown his socks off last night. He’d stopped itching.

‘I don’t know how I missed it before, but you’ve left out the business of Jerry lighting two cigarettes and handing one to Charlotte.’

‘That’s right. I nixed the cigarettes.’

‘But – but - it’s only the defining image of the entire movie. Henreid and Davis on the hotel balcony in Rio. Steiner’s theme surging like the moonlit sea. Jerry lights two cigarettes. She takes one.’

From memory Isaac could have storyboarded every frame of this scene and its reprises: Davis looks into Henreid’s eyes as she takes the lighted cigarette and places it between her own moist lips. At the end of the movie, in the Vale house, they blow mingling clouds of smoke at each other. The erotic symbolism is stunningly simple. But today’s audiences wouldn’t recognise an erotic symbol if you poked it up their ass. And Ben Burns’ generation of screenwriters doesn’t do symbolism.

‘This is a relationship movie, Isaac. Smoking sends out a bad message.’

‘Let me get this straight.’ Isaac was genuinely flummoxed. ‘We can see Dolores falling-down-drunk. We can show her and the Howl kid bare-ass on a bed. But we mustn’t have two shitting cigarettes?’

‘Isaac, we can’t. Let’s don’t forget we have a duty of care to the public.’

Isaac so far forgot himself as to tear his hair off. There was a shlucking noise as the adhesive offered only momentary resistance. He looked at it in his hands with a kind of bewilderment: what is this? what is it for? Then he slapped it quickly – and askew – back onto his bald adhesive-smeared scalp. Once again he resorted to Episcopalian profanity to express feelings that were almost beyond expression.

‘Jesus H. Christ,’ he said.

* * *

On July 4th the IRS arraigned Titus Q. Nunns on over a hundred counts of tax evasion, together totalling almost three hundred million dollars. Criminal association was also part of the indictment.

Thus the plug was pulled on the man who had kept Hunt Studios afloat these many years. As the nation celebrated - with marching bands and nubile baton-twirlers - its Independence, Isaac saw his slipping down the toilet.

He watched the arrest on the evening news in his Crescent Drive mansion. Titus’s hands were cuffed behind his long black funeral-director frock-coat.

‘Christ on a crutch,’ Isaac murmured, although with the Puerto Rican cook gone to her own more modest home in East LA there was no one in the house to hear him.

* * *

But (let’s keep the cauldron of blasphemy bubbling) an unlikely Saviour was about to ride in from the desert horizon. Reader, you shouldn’t think donkeys and King of Kings. Think camels and Lawrence of Arabia.

For, as we shall see, this Saviour was neither Christian nor Jew.

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