"Janet Morris - Crusaders In Hell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morris Janet E)

the Writers Building, where he made phone calls, drank, coasted on his dimming
reputation, and tried to put together projects for which Warners got "first
look."
I started out as a reader for him. I read novels, magazines, plays-anything
with print, it seemed-to see if there was a movie idea in it Hollywood is the
only economic system I ever heard of that is this suicidal: They have the
basis for their life's blood-screenplays--read and analyzed by unqualified,
jealous, illiterate jerkoffs like me. Then, the studio's current high-rolling
bigshots scan the one-page "coverage" which, by the time they get it, has been
Xeroxed so many times it's dark gray. After they see whether it's a project
they might shoehorn one of their play-or-pay stars into, they then commit
somewhere between ten and thirty million dollars and two hundred lives to it.
All because some pear-shaped wimp in a windowless room who, basically, gets
paid by the cord, says yes or no. Smart, huh? And get this-the bigshots, who
may be buttholes but are not stupid, know exactly how kamikaze their system.
They chuckle about it to each other over sixty dollar hot lobster salads at
lunch. It's a great business. If you're a moron.
Anyway, after a while, I got bored reading; they never made one of MY movies.
I recommended this one to them-I did everything but go in and tap dance it-and
they passed. It went back to its producer on turn-around, he took it to
Universal who made it, and it grossed over a hundred million. By law, I can't
tell you which one it was, they could sue me. They would, too. Movie
executives can be real snakes, especially the piranhas in legal and business
affairs.
My office was nice and all. I made my own hours, I liked my boss, and the work
wasn't that hard. But it sucked in the rewarding department and the bottom
line is that you have to dig what you do, if you're going to do it well.
So when Bart Lopat, the famous old stunt gaffer-turned-director came in for a
meeting with my boss, I struck up a friendship. Time passes. One day, I get a
call from Lopat, who is shooting this flick in Portland.
I liked being a stuntman lots better than being in the story department. For
one thing, it was mostly outdoors. They started me off stow-fight scenes,
simple one-story falls, like that. I doubled Burt Reynolds up there in Oregon
and later, Jim Gamer down in Mexico. It was great. Real guys (none of your
Volvo-driving Alan Alda types) doing real-guy stuff like jumping off trains -
or falling off cliffs into icy rivers. Drink all night and sit around all day.
That's pretty much what studio moviemaking is all about. But it was good money
and that's where I met the Fatman.
He was a legend, even among the stuntmen. He had been one of the great ones,
way back when. But he'd fused half his spine on a high fall gag in How The
West Was Won and had to retire. That's when he discovered food and began
getting fat. He didn't begin to get rich until he discovered his housekeeper,
who had a real good set on her and the morals of a Moroccan goat. He changed
her name to Sheenya Deep and turned her into a porno star.
Now, the Fatman was (outside of the Mafia) the biggest producer of adult films
in town. He did Citizen Kum and The Maltese Phallus, among others. The guy's
famous.
One afternoon (he'd come down on location just to hang out with the old gang),
we were taking a whizz together in the honeywagon porta-potty, and - what can
I tell you - the next day, I was in pornos.