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

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
diseased vermin.'
'I could murder a bacon sarnie,' the effects man's mate sighed.
'I could murder a Romanian caterer,' said the new-born.
Kate decided to go thirsty. There were enough Yanks around to make coming
by human blood in this traditionally superstitious backwater not a
problem. Ninety years after Dracula spread vampirism to the Western world,
America was still sparsely populated by the blood-drinking undead. For a
lot of Americans, being bled by a genuine olde worlde creature of the
night was something of a thrill.
That would wear off.

Outside the bunker, in a shrinking patch of natural sunlight between a
stand of real pines and the skeletons of fake trees, Francis shouted at
Harvey Keitel. The actor, cast as Jonathan Harker, was stoic,
inexpressive, grumpy. He refused to be drawn into argument, invariably
driving Francis to shrieking hysteria.
'I'm not Martin Fucking Scorsese, man,' he screamed. 'I'm not going to
slather on some lousy voice-over to compensate for what you're not giving
me. Without Harker, I don't have a picture.'
Keitel made fists but his body language was casual. Francis had been
riding his star hard all week. Scuttlebutt was that he had wanted Pacino
or McQueen but neither wanted to spend three months behind the Iron
Curtain.
Kate could understand that. This featureless WWII bunker, turned over to
the production as a command centre, stood in ancient mountains, dwarfed by
the tall trees. As an outpost of civilisation in a savage land, it was
ugly and ineffective.