Seidel, Kathleen Gilles Read Free Page B

great control over their productions. There were committees, budgets, contracts, a producer, a director, an editor. There were shooting schedules and call sheets. Even on location, there were daily reports from the unit manager and the director, giving California counts of how many pages had been filmed, how many feet of film had been used. There would have been no way to keep the studio from knowing what script was being filmed. Absolutely no way at all.
    "So have you read this other script?" Jill asked. "The one they supposedly filmed?"
    Doug shook his head. "No. Apparently all the copies were on the plane with Bix and Alicia when it crashed."
    Jill frowned. "That doesn't make any sense." She wasn't being argumentative. It just didn't make any sense. "They came out in August to film new material. There'd be no reason to bring the April scripts back with them. Maybe one copy or so, but certainly not all of them."
    "I don't know," Doug admitted. "And most everyone's dead—Bix, Alicia, and a lot of the crew died in the plane. Oliver McClay, the first director, Miles Smithson, the producer, and then your father... they've all died."
    "Your uncle Charles is still alive, isn't he? What does he say?"
    "He says it's all true, but he doesn't know what was in the script. He says he paid attention only to his own part; that was his technique as an actor."
    "That's not so unusual." At last here was something plausible. "That's the way Elizabeth Taylor worked, only reading her own lines. But without a script, without anyone who was a part of your 'little group,' how do you know the story's true?"
    "You can tell from the movie," he said. "Things that would have been filmed in April, had they been shooting the war-movie script, were obviously filmed in August."
    "Such as?" Jill could hear how cool her voice sounded. She was closing herself off, growing too polite, radiating disinterest. She didn't much like herself when this happened, but it was necessary sometimes, a rich girl's classic defense.
    "The depot scene," he answered.
    In the final version of Weary Hearts, Phillip rode with Mosby's Rangers, a Confederate guerrilla troop, only once as they looted and burned a Federal depot. But the original treatment—the "war movie" script Doug was calling it— had Phillip riding regularly with Mosby.
    "So surely," Doug said, "the depot scene, as part of the first script, would have been shot in April."
    "I'd think so," Jill responded.
    "Well, it wasn't. It was shot in August. I know the Valley, I grew up there. I know what April looks like, and I know what August looks like, and that was August."
    "Maybe they had to reshoot it for some reason." But as soon as she spoke, Jill knew that she was wrong. The burning depot was the most expensive scene in the movie. They wouldn't have reshot it. Maybe on a Heaven's Gate budget, but not on Weary Hearts'. Her father might have stood the scene on its ear in the cutting room, but he wouldn't have reshot it.
    "So what was the problem with the rough cut?" she asked. "Was it still that McClay did a terrible job?"
    "No, just the opposite. It wasn't bad. It was too good. The studio executives, the producer, all said it was too challenging, too innovative, that it just wasn't commercial enough."
    So the studio killed the film because it was too good? Jill couldn't believe that.
    Things didn't get suppressed because they were too good. The very literary, arty films might get scant distribution, non-existent promotion, but if they were truly fine, the films did get made. That something was too good was the excuse of people who had written boring screenplays. Agents had a whole vocabulary to avoid alienating new writers. "Too literate" meant a screenplay was too pretentious. "Too well-written" meant it had no plot. "Too intellectual" meant that the characters were uninteresting.
    If the rough cut really had been a masterpiece, the studio most likely would have let it go through. They hadn't spent much money;