"Kim Newman - Coppola's Dracula" - читать интересную книгу автора (Newman Kim)

over
the unappetising craft services table. 'You're dead, you don't have to
eat
this shit.'
Kate showed teeth, hissing a little. She knew that despite her
coke-bottle
glasses and freckles, she could look unnervingly feral when she smiled.
Francis didn't shrink: deep down, the director thought of her as a
special
effect, not a real vampire.
 In the makeshift canteen, deep in the production bunker, the Americans
wittered nostalgia about McDonald's. The Brits - the warm ones, anyway
-
rhapsodised about Pinewood breakfasts of kippers and fried bread.
Romanian
location catering was not what they were used to.
Francis finally found an apple less than half brown and took it away.
His
weight had dropped visibly since their first meeting, months ago in
pre-production. Since he had come to Eastern Europe, the insurance
doctor
diagnosed him as suffering from malnutrition and put him on vitamin
shots.
Dracula was running true to form, sucking him dry.
A production this size was like a swarm of vampire bats - some large,
many
tiny - battening tenaciously onto the host, making insistent,
never-ending
demands. Kate had watched Francis - bespectacled, bearded and
hyperactive
- lose substance under the draining siege, as he made and justified
decisions, yielded the visions to be translated to celluloid, rewrote
the
script to suit locations or new casting. How could one man throw out so
many ideas, only a fraction of which would be acted on? In his
position,
Kate's mind would bleed empty in a week.
A big budget film shot in a backward country was an insane proposition,
like taking a touring three-ring circus into a war zone. Who will
survive,
she thought, and what will be left of them?
The craft table for vampires was as poorly stocked as the one for the
warm. Unhealthy rats in chickenwire cages. Kate watched one of the
floor
effects men, a new-born with a padded waistcoat and a toolbelt, select
a
writhing specimen and bite off its head. He spat it on the concrete
floor,
face stretched into a mask of disgust.
'Ringworm,' he snarled. 'The commie gits are trying to kill us off with