"Morgan, Cynthia - The Hitmaker" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morgan Cynthia)

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THE HITMAKER

By Cynthia Morgan

The town was perfect, .Jordan Barrett had sensed it when he saw the spec films, and his first visit to the town had confirmed his feelings. Now a month later, standing beside the network limousine parked across the center line of the highway bisecting the town, he felt the same certainty. There were none of the doubts that sometimes cropped up after he'd made a decision, irrevocably committing the network's money and his own reputation. The town could go public; it was perfect for a CV series.

He was glad he'd waited. He'd been looking for over five months, the longest search ever for a location for a continuous-viewing series. There'd been some pressure from Carl Martinson, ATN's programming chief, during the fourth month, when the other networks began to announce their CV locations for the new year. But Barrett had ignored the memos, the hints that he was setting his standards too high, and after a few weeks they'd stopped.
Barrett had given ATN five successful CV series in a row; all Martinson could do, finally, was sit back and hope that the producer would deliver again.

He wandered away from the limousine, walking on the shoulder of the road to avoid a pickup truck that drove slowly past and turned down a side street. There'd been no other traffic in the past half hour; the barricades had gone up when construction began on the liason center two kilometers outside of town. Twenty meters down the highway, Jordan stopped and looked around indecisively. There wasn't much to the town: fewer than a hundred houses, one tiny general store. A service station stood at one end of town, a fast-food joint at the other, stapling the community to the two-lane strip of blacktop that linked it to the rest of the country. But he didn't have any idea where his director, Sharon Pettet, had gone for the interviews she'd scheduled this morning, and the town was too large for him to go door to door looking for her. He should have waited at the liaison center until she returned, but he'd felt useless, superfluous, at the liaison center. Once a location was selected and the locals' approval had been won, he had little to do but take care of administrative details. Things ran too smoothly now. The first years of CV broadcasting had been chaotic, but he'd been more involved then. Happier. Almost as happy as he'd been in film school, two years earlier.

"Hey! Hey, kid! Can you lend me a hand?"

He turned. The pickup truck was parked in a

driveway half a block away. A burly, middle aged man stood beside it, watching him.

Jordan glanced back toward the limousine. The driver was standing outside, smoking; he'd overheard the request and was grinning. Jordan shrugged, laughed, and went to help the man.

There was a large console television in the back of the pickup. By the time they had it inside-and set in a corner of the living room, the older man was sweating and red-faced. He stood leaning on the television while he caught his breath. Finally he looked up at Jordan.

"You're from the network, aren't you?"

Jordan nodded.

"Some of your colleagues gave me a hell of a lot of trouble about bringing this set home. Had to show them proof that I'd ordered it two months ago, before any of you people got here."

"They were only doing their job."

The man snorted. He pulled out a wallet and opened it. Jordan retreated, shaking his head.

"No? Well, can I get you a drink?"

"Thanks, but no. I can't stay."

The man looked disappointed. Jordan knew that in a moment that expression would change to one of hurt, then anger at the aloofness of network people. "Some other time."

"Sure." He followed Jordan as far as the door. "Hey, thanks for the help."

"Anytime."

The heat was brutal. By the time Jordan reached the highway, he was regretting not having accepted the drink. Sharon was still
nowhere in sight, but he spotted a soft-drink machine, the squat, red shape tucked into a corner of the service station. He started toward it.

He could understand the man's anger at being forced to prove when he'd ordered the television, but Jordan's sympathies were with his staff. Despite the contract stipulations that no essential changes were to be made in lifestyle or environment during the year of the contract, locals were always trying to improve their image. The early changes were usually obvious new furniture, home repairs, painting-and easy to catch. Things got worse after the locals began to take the vacations guaranteed by the contract. They came back with designer clothes, expensive cars, jewelry, and other new luxuries that had to be confiscated at the liaison center for safekeeping. But what really gave the continuity people headaches were the inappropriate mannerisms they picked up, the expressions, the accents. Jordan sometimes wished they could return to contracts that restricted residents to location. They'd had such contracts for the first two years of CV, but during the second year there had been two deaths in one town during the contract period. It had been another network's show, but the resulting brouhaha, over the couple's never having enjoyed the financial rewards they'd sacrificed their privacy to obtain, had forced all the networks to guarantee vacations, giving up a crucial degree of control.