The Light's on at Signpost by George MacDonald Fraser

Author:George MacDonald Fraser [Fraser, George MacDonald]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780007325634
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2002-07-11T22:00:00+00:00

SHOOTING SCRIPT 6

“Thirty Years in Hollywood and You Can still Learn Something New”

I KNEW THAT Burt Lancaster and I were never going to be soul-mates the moment he suddenly exclaimed: “What the hell d’you think we’re paying you for?” Annoyed, I hesitated between “You’re not paying enough to take that tone,” and “Up yours, Lancaster!”, but discarded both: I knew his knees were hurting him, we’d had a long hard session in which my ideas had risen farther and farther over the top, I didn’t want to walk out on an excellent project on the spur of the moment, and even at the age of sixty-four he looked as though he might still be able (in his own words) to “throw Ernie Borgnine out the window.”*

So I took my time and replied: “For ideas which you don’t seem to like. So d’you want me to quit? I might as well if you’re going to start talking that way.” He growled: “Ah, for Christ’s sake!” and we resumed our search for a plot for a sequel to The Crimson Pirate. Perfectly amiably, but with no intention on my side of prolonging our association beyond the next few days, which he had paid handsomely for in advance. I was still prepared to write him a screenplay if our discussion went well and the price was right, but I wasn’t going to commit myself to working with him on set and location for three months, which was what he wanted; that, I realised after the momentary exposure of his hairy heel, would inevitably end in strong language, explosion, and me on my way to the nearest airport.

It wasn’t that we didn’t get on; quite the reverse. In the time we had already spent discussing the project, I’d found myself closer to him where ideas were concerned than to his partners, Harold Hecht and Jim Hill. He was the one who really wanted to make that sequel, he was intelligent and well-read (surprising me by his admiration for Mervyn Peake) and was not only an anglophile but a romantic one: in childhood he had devoured Jeffery Farnol, “Lady Charmian and Black Bartlemy’s Treasure, the whole lot. Used to buy ’em for ten cents from a stall in Little Italy, sell ’em back for seven, then buy another for ten.”

It was easy to understand why, although he had built a reputation as a serious actor with an Oscar to his credit, he had made good old-fashioned over-the-top swashbucklers like The Flame and the Arrow and The Crimson Pirate, and having read Flashman he had decided that I was the man to write his sequel for him.

I was enthusiastic, but I guessed before we met that he would not be the easiest man in the world to work with. His screen persona suggested a formidable, probably overbearing character, and I recalled seeing a quote in which he had said: “If I’m working with frightened people, I tend to dominate them. I’m no doll, that’s for sure.” Never mind frightened people, he’d have tried to dominate the Duke of Wellington.

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