Stahr looked at him impatiently, gave a short nod.
“That’s not under discussion,” he said. “The premise of this story is that the girl did have dumb admiration for her boss if you want to call it that. And there wasn’t any evidence that he’d ever been jittery. When you make her doubt him in any way you have a different kind of story. Or rather you haven’t anything at all. These people are extraverts—get that straight—and I want them to extravert all over the lot. When I want to do a Eugene O’Neill play I’ll buy one.”
Rose Meloney who had never taken her eyes off Stahr knew it was going to be all right now. If he had really been going to abandon the picture he wouldn’t have gone at it like this. She had been in this game longer than any of them except Broaca with whom she had had a three day affair twenty years ago.
Stahr turned to Rienmund.
“You ought to have understood from the casting, Rieny, what kind of a picture I wanted. I started marking the lines that Carroll and MacMurray couldn’t say and got tired of it. Remember this in future—if I order a limousine I want that kind of car. And the fastest midget racer you ever saw wouldn’t do. Now—” He looked around. “Shall we go any farther? Now that I’ve told you I don’t even like the kind of picture this is? Shall we go on? We’ve got two weeks. At the end of that time I’m going to put Carroll and MacMurray into this or something else—is it worth while?”
“Well naturally,” said Rienmund, “I think it is. I feel bad about this. I should have warned Wylie. I thought he had some good ideas.”
“Monroe’s right,” said Broaca bluntly. “I felt this was wrong all the time but I couldn’t put my finger on it.”
Wylie and Rose looked at him contemptuously and exchanged a glance.
“Do you writers think you can get hot on it again?” asked Stahr, not unkindly. “Or shall I try somebody fresh?”
“I’d like another shot,” said Wylie.
“How about you, Rose?”
She nodded briefly.
“What do you think of the girl?” asked Stahr.
“Well—naturally I’m prejudiced in her favor.”
“You better forget it,” said Stahr warningly. “Ten million Americans would put thumbs down on that girl if she walked on the screen. We’ve got an hour and twenty-five minutes on the screen—you show a woman being unfaithful to a man for one-third of that time and you’ve given the impression that she’s one-third whore.”
“Is that a big proportion?” asked Rose slyly, and they laughed.
“It is for me,” said Stahr thoughtfully, “even if it wasn’t for the Hays office. If you want to paint a scarlet letter on her back it’s all right but that’s another story. Not this story. This is a future wife and mother. However—however—”
He pointed his pencil at Wylie White.
“—this has as much passion as that Oscar on my desk.”
“What the hell!” said Wylie. “She’s full of it. Why she goes to—”
“She’s loose enough,” said Stahr, “—but that’s all. There’s one scene in the play better than all this you cooked up and you’ve left it out. When she’s trying to make the time pass by changing her watch.”
“It didn’t seem to fit,” Wylie apologized.
“Now,” said Stahr, “I’ve got about fifty ideas. I’m going to call Miss Doolan.” He pressed a button. “—and if there’s anything you don’t understand speak up—”
Miss Doolan slid in almost imperceptibly. Pacing the floor swiftly Stahr began. In the first place he wanted to tell them what kind of a girl she was—what kind of a girl he approved of here. She was a perfect girl with a few small faults as in the play but a perfect girl not because the public wanted her that way but because it was the kind of girl that he, Stahr, liked to see in this sort of picture. Was that clear? It was no character role. She stood for health, vitality, ambition and love. What gave the play its importance was entirely a situation in which she found herself. She became possessed of a secret that affected a great many lives. There was a right thing and a wrong thing to do—at first it was not plain which was which but when it was she went right away and did it. That was the kind of story this was—thin, clean and shining. No doubts.
“She has never heard the word labor troubles,” he said with a sigh. “She might be living in 1929. Is it plain what kind of girl I want?”
“It’s very plain, Monroe.”
“Now about the things she does,” said Stahr. “At all times, at all moments when she is on the screen in our sight she wants to sleep with Ken Willard. Is that plain, Wylie?”
“Passionately plain.”
“Whatever she does it is in place of sleeping with Ken Willard. If she walks down the street she is walking to sleep with Ken Willard, if she eats her food it is to give her strength to sleep with Ken Willard. But at no time do you give the impression that she would ever consider sleeping with Ken Willard unless they were properly sanctified. I’m ashamed of having to tell you these kindergarten facts but they have somehow leaked out of the story.”
He opened the script and began to go through it page by page. Miss Doolan’s notes would be typed in quintuplicate and given to them but Rose Meloney made notes of her own. Broaca put his hand up to his half closed eyes—he could remember “when a director was something out here,” when writers were gag men or eager and ashamed young reporters full of whiskey—a director was all there was then. No supervisor—no Stahr.
He started wide awake as he heard his name.
“It would be nice, John, if you could put the boy on a pointed roof and let him walk around and keep the camera on him. You might get a nice feeling—not danger, not suspense, not pointing for anything—a kid on the roof in the morning.”
Broaca brought himself back in the room.
“All right,” he said. “—just an element of danger.”
“Not exactly,” said Stahr. “He doesn’t start to fall off the roof. Break into the next scene with it.”
“Through the window,” suggested Rose Meloney. “He could climb in his sister’s window.”
“That’s a good transition,” said Stahr. “Right into the diary scene.”
Broaca was wide awake now.
“I’ll shoot up at him,” he said. “Let him go away from the camera. Just a fixed shot from quite a distance—let him go away from the camera. Don’t follow him. Pick him up in a close shot and let him go away again. No attention on him except against the whole roof and the sky.” He liked the shot—it was a director’s shot that didn’t come up on every page any more. He might use a crane—it would be cheaper in the end than building the roof on the ground with a process sky. That was one thing about Stahr—the literal sky was the limit. He had worked with Jews too long to believe legends that they were small with money.
“In the third sequence have him hit the priest,” Stahr said. “What!” Wylie cried, “—and have the Catholics on our neck.” “I’ve talked to Joe Breen. Priests have been hit. It doesn’t reflect on them.”
His quiet voice ran on—stopped abruptly as Miss Doolan glanced at the clock.
“Is that too much to do before Monday?” he asked Wylie. Wylie looked at Rose and she looked back not even bothering to nod. He saw their week-end melting away, but he was a different man from when he entered the room. When you were paid fifteen hundred a week emergency work was one thing you did not skimp, nor when your picture was threatened. As a “free lance” writer Wylie had failed from lack of caring but here was Stahr to care, for all of them. The effect would not wear off when he left the office—not anywhere within the walls of the lot. He felt a great purposefulness. The mixture of common sense, wise sensibility, theatrical ingenuity, and a certain half naive conception of the common weal which Stahr had just stated aloud, inspired him to do his part, to get his block of stone in place, even if the effort were foredoomed, the result as dull as a pyramid.
Out the window Rose Meloney watched the trickle streaming toward the commissary. She would have her lunch in her office and knit a few rows while it came. The man was coming at one-fifteen with the French perfume smuggled over the Mexican border. That was no sin—it was like prohibition.
Broaca watched as Rienmund fawned upon Stahr. He sensed that Rienmund was on his way up—not yet. He received seven hundred and fifty a week for his partial authority over directors, writers and stars who got much more. He wore a cheap English shoe he bought near the Beverly Wilshire and Broaca hoped they hurt his feet, but soon now he would order his shoes from Peal’s and put away his little green alpine hat with a feather. Broaca was years ahead of him. He had a fine record in the war but he had never felt quite the same with himself since he had let Ike Franklin strike him in the face with his open hand.
There was smoke in the room and behind it, behind his great desk Stahr was withdrawing further and further, in all courtesy, still giving Rienmund an ear
