Take Fountain Read online

  This is a Genuine Rare Bird Book

  A Rare Bird Book | Rare Bird Books

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 531

  Los Angeles, CA 90013

  rarebirdbooks.com

  Copyright © 2015 by Adam Novak

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For more information, address: Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 453 South Spring Street, Suite 531, Los Angeles, CA 90013.

  Set in Goudy Old Style

  ePub ISBN: 9781940207766

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Novak, Adam.

  Take fountain : a novel / by Adam Novak.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 9781940207759

  1. Podcasts—Fiction. 2. Cold cases (Criminal investigation)—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 4. Motion picture industry—California—Los Angeles. 5. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)—Fiction. 6. Suspense—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3614.O9253 T35 2015

  813.6—dc23

  Contents

  CRIME WAVE SURFERS

  LEAVING LAUGHLIN

  TEA IN THE SAHARA

  BOX OF CHOCOLATES

  I HEART SHAKESPEARE

  THE GREY AREA

  SCRIPT A

  SHOOT THE DOG

  NO TELL MOTEL

  WARLORDS OF ARKADIA

  BOMB ON BOARD

  NEON MONEY

  SATANIC

  LIFT OFF

  A laptop computer is reported stolen from the Santa Clarita Police Department evidence room.

  In Los Angeles, Rare Bird Books receives an e-mail containing a folder titled Take Fountain with a disturbing interview between screenwriter Dollars Muttlan and Omniscience script guru Larry Mersault.

  The transcript of that interview is approved for publication by the Santa Clarita Chief of Police.

  About Larry Mersault

  b. November 21, 1968 – d. March 15, 2013

  As a film student at USC, Larry Mersault played a ruthless drug dealer in John Singleton’s senior thesis video of Boyz N The Hood, which prepared him for the motion picture industry.

  His 2008 novel, Schadenfreude, was called “a gripping thriller” by Midwest Book Review.

  Head of the story department at powerhouse talent agency Omniscience for two decades, Mersault was named by Smash Cut magazine as one of the “Top 100 People You Need to Know” in Hollywood.

  About Dollars Muttlan

  Dollars Muttlan wrote the major motion picture Warlords of Arkadia, released in 2003 by Paramount Pictures.

  In 2009, he wrote, starred, produced, and directed the award-winning independent film The Last Wedding, which premiered on Time Warner Cable VOD.

  An adjunct professor of screenwriting at College of the Canyons, his current whereabouts remain unknown.

  [recording begins]

  Dollars: Is this thing on?

  Mersault: It’s your show, Dollars.

  Dollars: Tell us the best advice you ever got.

  Mersault: First of all, thank you for inviting me to speak to your online screenwriting class and thanks to all of you out there for listening. Twenty years ago, I met Paul Newman in Connecticut at Uncle Ray’s house for Thanksgiving. There was a pool table in the basement and I was shooting nine ball by myself waiting for the turkey when Uncle Ray’s best friend Paul Newman came down the stairs with a beer and chalked up a cue stick. I asked Newman if he wanted to break. He nodded, and took a gulp straight from the can. Newman broke, and then the two ball, the eight ball, and the five ball fell in. The movie star had no idea I played pool every night in LA at a dive bar against a one-armed Vietnam vet called the Vulture who would let you beat him for a Michelob then place a crumpled twenty-dollar bill in the side pocket and hustle you for all your money. Newman chugged his Budweiser and missed his shot. I sank the one ball and the three ball and he asked me what I did for a living and I told him I was in the movie business and he said, “Tough racket.” I said I read scripts for Omniscience and he said, “I used to be represented by them, now I’m with Ovitz.” I knocked in the four ball and the six ball and he asked me if I wanted to know the key to the movie business and I said, “Absolutely.” I banked in the seven ball and he said, “Longevity,” and I thought to myself, That’s it? That’s your nugget? I drilled the nine ball in the corner and said, “I just beat Fast Eddie Felson,” and Newman said, “Rack ’em,” and I never won another game until it was time to eat the bird.

  Dollars: Longevity? Interesting nugget.

  Mersault: Newman was right. I’m living proof.

  Dollars: How did you get named by Smash Cut magazine as one of the “Top 100 People You Need to Know” in Hollywood?

  Mersault: To get on that list you have to give a speech in front of three hundred aspiring writers at a Smash Cut screenwriting convention.

  Dollars: Elaborate, please.

  Mersault: The publisher needed a keynote speaker at the magazine’s pitchfest event where industry people agreed to hear five-minute pitches from desperados around the world. Some ridiculously famous screenwriter had bailed on Smash Cut and the publisher asked me if I would step in at the last minute and do a Q&A about the state of the union of the industry. When I got to the Roosevelt Hotel, the air conditioning was on the fritz, and everyone walking around the lobby looked violently happy. I was the only one wearing a suit and tie. I entered the Lincoln Ballroom and saw three hundred people sitting in rows listening to director Eben Gillespie showing clips of his Sylvester Stallone movie Officer Down and discussing his creative process at the convention. Somebody told me I was next and when I bounded up to the stage I was met with total silence. I began by telling the room I’d had some trepidation coming as a script reader to speak to a room full of writers about the business. I said it must have felt the same way when a Christian first stepped into the Coliseum. No one laughed. I sensed their hostility and told them, “Wow, I didn’t realize the hotel bathrobes came with hoods.” A few chuckles. Then I lit into them like a fiery Baptist preacher and told them blaming the script reader for their failure was not acceptable. I had agreed to speak at this convention for one reason and one reason only: I wanted every one of them to win. How many scripts have they written? Did they think this business was easy? What did they think buyers were looking for in a screenplay? I told them I was there to answer their questions until they had none, and then I would get off the stage. I told them a little bit about myself, but for the most part everyone there was handed a microphone and each asked me a question which I did my very best to answer, and if I didn’t have an answer, if I didn’t know where somebody could find international distribution for their paraplegic zombie film, I said, “I have no fucking idea.” I answered their questions for two hours straight. When I left the stage they were still applauding. In the parking lot of the Roosevelt Hotel, a woman thrust her thick screenplay into my chest and said, “Please, please help me. I’m the next Vietnamese Billy Bob Thornton. Will you read my script?” The publisher was so impressed with my talk she declared I was one of the “Top 100 People You Need To Know” in the movie business.

  Dollars: In the Smash Cut article, it says one of the highlights of your career was Woody Allen thanking you for finding him a script?

  Mersault: Omniscience signed Woody Allen and the first thing he said to his new agent was, “Is my old agent still there?” A legend at age ninety-two, Methuselah Gwartz went to work every day in his office on the first floor. Whenever I saw an ambulance in front of the Omniscience building my immediate reaction was always, “Gwartz!”
Anyway, Woody Allen wanted to do a movie where he would only act, preferably a comedy, for a payday. Woody turned down some suggestions, expressed interest in starring in a Dreamworks movie but that picture was in development and wasn’t anywhere near production, so his agent asked me if I had any great scripts on the shelf. I suggested a dark comedy I’d read years ago called Rest in Pieces that Polygram Pictures had developed for Julien Temple to direct after he did Earth Girls Are Easy. Nicolas Cage was attached at one point to play a butcher who chopped up his cheating wife and buried her pieces in Mexico. Unfortunately for Cage, his wife’s severed hand is discovered by an old, blind Mexican woman who trips over the hand and miraculously regains her sight when she stands up. Convinced the appendage is the hand of the Virgin Mary, she takes the hand, middle finger still extended at her killer, back to her village where a shrine is built and quickly thereafter more miracles start to occur in the village: the sick are healed, the illiterate can read, acne goes away, and word of mouth spreads, creating a tourist frenzy. The local priest, enduring a crisis of faith (while enjoying a torrid affair with the town’s stunning prostitute), starts to believe again in the existence of God when the butcher returns to the Mexican village to steal the severed hand since it is the only evidence linking him to the heinous crime. Shenanigans ensue. The priest was going to be played by Raul Julia, but he died of a stroke and the movie never got made. I gave the script of Rest in Pieces to our director client Alfonso Arau, who made Like Water for Chocolate, because his agent asked me to find Alfonso a contained comedy that could be shot in Mexico for two million dollars. I got a phone call from Alfonso saying, “Thank you for the script. It is no longer with Polygram Pictures. I am now in preproduction.” Alfonso Arau then received a phone call from Woody Allen’s agent suggesting Woody wanted to play the butcher. Alfonso’s blasphemous no-budget movie became this hulk of an independent Woody Allen comedy financed through sold-out foreign presales around the world with the US distribution rights available for auction when the picture was completed. Woody was set to play the butcher for three weeks and casting began for the other roles. Everybody’s first choice, Andy Garcia, passed. The producers settled on David Schwimmer to play the Catholic priest even though he was from TV and happened to be of the Jewish persuasion. Alfonso convinced the stunning Bond Girl from The World Is Not Enough, Maria Grazia Cucinotta, to play the lovely prostitute and Cheech Marin agreed to play the Mayor. When the start date was announced, Woody Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi, came to Brentwood for a party in his honor, which I was invited to attend. This was truly an A-list party, Barbara Streisand and James Brolin canoodling on an outdoor couch, and a long line of stars and agents waiting to congratulate Woody Allen on his upcoming movie. My date and I were about to get in line when my classmate from film school, John Singleton, tapped me on the shoulder and asked, “Larry, what are you doing here?” We bumped fists and I asked him, “What are you doing here?” Our dates looked at each other with seething hatred. We laughed and then Woody Allen’s agent pulled me away from Singleton and his date, saying loud enough for John to hear: “Larry, this way, Woody wants to meet you.” So the agent brought us to the very front of this long receiving line to meet Woody Allen and Soon-Yi. The agent told Woody I was the one who found the screenplay and Woody reacted like he’d been shot, touching his chest while shaking my hand, telling his wife, “Soon-Yi, this is the guy, thank you, that was the most subversive script anyone’s ever sent me.”

  Dollars: Your date wanted to jump in the bushes with you. John Singleton probably wanted to kill you. How come I never heard of this movie?

  Mersault: Eight people saw it and they were divided. Alfonso hired the Oscar-winning cinematographer Vittorio Storaro to shoot the picture. It was a tight shooting schedule and since most of the budget went to Woody Allen’s fee there wasn’t much money left to put on the screen. Cheech described the movie as “The best ingredients in the world mixed in a cup of vomit.” Some of the romantic moonlight compositions between Schwimmer, the priest, and Cucinotta, the prostitute, were so beautiful they looked like Rembrandt paintings. Some shots were out of focus. The sets looked cheap. Schwimmer was miscast. The only actor who really shined in this terrible movie, the one hilarious performance, was Woody Allen. The financier sold Rest in Pieces to Cinemax, where it premiered into oblivion.

  Dollars: If you were stranded on a desert island with a volleyball named Wilson and one script to read, what would it be?

  Mersault: True Romance. I remember when I first read it, how my hair felt about it, and to this day, I can pick up Quentin Tarantino’s script, revisit any part, and it still holds up magnificently. Even the title page was different, it said: “When you’re tired of relationships, try a romance.” Omniscience signed Quentin before anybody knew who he was, so I got to read all of his screenplays, and this was before Reservoir Dogs had even come out yet. At the time, my father, Richard Mersault, was in business with Walter Yetnikoff, the legendary head of CBS Records who had signed Springsteen and Michael Jackson, and Yetnikoff and Dad were starting a movie company together. The music mogul had just left CBS Records and couldn’t work in the record business for two years because of a noncompete clause in his contract. Dad and Yetnikoff came to Los Angeles with a P&A fund to pitch companies that needed money to pay for prints and advertising in order to theatrically distribute their movies, and one of the companies that had a slate of finished movies but no money to release them was a company called Live Entertainment. Dad and I went to Morton’s on a Monday night with an executive at Live who invited a movie star to join us: Emilio Estevez. While Dad and the executive from Live were talking shop, I was sitting next to Otto from Repo Man, telling him how my mom went to UCLA film school and her professor was Peter McCarthy, who produced Repo Man. I told Emilio I was a story analyst at Omniscience and we talked about this script I had just read called Freejack (Emilio would star in the picture years later for Morgan Creek). By the end of the meal, Dad and the Live executive agreed to set a screening at the Carolco building on Sunset so they could consider their slate of movies for the P&A fund. Outside Morton’s, Emilio asked me what was the best script I’d ever read and I said True Romance. Emilio suggested Omniscience messenger the script to him in Malibu but he told me under no circumstances was I to put his name on the envelope. He suggested I use the name Gordon Bombay which I realized later was the name of his character from Disney’s Mighty Ducks franchise. A week later I got a call from Emilio who said he loved Quentin’s script but he had this hockey movie in the can for a family audience and couldn’t see himself doing True Romance. At the Carolco screening room, Dad and Yetnikoff and I watched an entire weekend of bad movies that Live had financed: A Gnome Named Gnorm, starring Anthony Michael Hall, about a cop who’s partnered with a troll; Iron Eagle III, with Louis Gossett, Jr.—pretty much unwatchable; The Dark Wind, directed by acclaimed documentarian Errol Morris—I think Yetnikoff took a power nap halfway through that one; Light Sleeper, a new film directed by Taxi Driver writer Paul Schrader, starring Willem Dafoe, about an insomniac NYC drug dealer—better than the other movies but had no audience. I waved my finger in the air, mimicking Dad and Yetnikoff, who had made the gesture to the projectionist all weekend, and the last film of the Live slate flickered on the screen: Reservoir Dogs. When the movie was over, Yetnikoff and Dad were so excited they went back to the executive at Live and declared they were not interested in A Gnome Named Gnorm or Iron Eagle III, they wanted to put up the P&A to support a theatrical release for Reservoir Dogs. The executive turned them down, saying they couldn’t cherry-pick Quentin’s movie, which was about to premiere at the nineteen ninety-two Sundance Film Festival. They would have to take all of the Live movies. Everybody knows Miramax picked up Reservoir Dogs for distribution, but what nobody knows is Dad and Yetnikoff had a meeting with Harvey and Bob Weinstein and in that meeting Harvey told Yetnikoff he thought the world of him and suggested a “Walter Yetnikoff Presents” credit at the front of the film an
d a producer credit for my father. Live objected to this suggestion. Dad and Yetnikoff went to Sundance thinking they were going to be credited with championing the festival’s great discovery, only to be told at the Reservoir Dogs Sundance party it wasn’t going to happen. Paul Schrader was at that party discussing Light Sleeper with my Dad when Roger Avary came up to them and said he was best friends with Quentin Tarantino and that Quentin was too shy to ask his idol, Paul Schrader, what he thought of Reservoir Dogs, so he put Roger up to the task. Schrader told Roger Avary two things: one, “Tell Quentin he liked the film very much”; two, “When Quentin is back in LA he should pick up the phone and call Larry Mersault at Omniscience.” Roger Avary, who later shared the best screenplay Oscar for Pulp Fiction with his best friend, reported what Paul Schrader said and a week later Quentin Tarantino called me at my office and we had a fantastic half-hour phone call about our mutual love for the nineteen seventy-nine horror film Phantasm.

  CRIME WAVE SURFERS

  Screenplay by Rand Quevera

  COMMENTS: Shocking pulp fiction presented in a masterful, innovative screenplay that defies convention and offers up gallows humor with blood-soaked violence. Sort of like a trilogy of short stories, this is actually one narrative with overlapping characters. Young fella RENO figures in all of them. One story has Reno going out with crime boss wife HAYLEY when she accidentally overdoses on heroin. Reno and his smack dealer have to inject her heart with adrenaline—if she dies, Reno dies. She makes it. Another story has a prizefighter named SHARIF on the run from the crime boss. Sharif has to risk his life to retrieve a family heirloom from his apartment. Instead, he murders Reno, who’s been sent to kill him. Third story has Reno and his buddy GOMEZ shooting a guy’s brains out in their car. And then racing against the clock to clean the blood and bone and dispose of the body. These three tales are bookended by a pair of armed robbers named CHRISTMAS and PUDDY TAT, who hold up a Denny’s and meet Reno and Gomez in a Mexican standoff that ends the script on a hugely satisfying note. By mixing up the narrative, Reno can get killed in the middle—and still walk out alive at the end of the standoff. Script’s strength lies in its conversational, hilarious dialogue, and memorable cast of cool characters. In part to its unusual structure, narrative is consistently entertaining, whether it’s Hayley and Reno having a get-to-know-each-other dinner or the intense scenes of violence that seem to follow the characters like their shadows. The intensity of this crime drama is definitely not for the faint of heart (i.e. there’s a rape sequence in a pawn shop that’s so brutal and excessive it makes the Ned Beatty scene from DELIVERANCE look like ALADDIN). The excesses may be shocking, but the characters and dialogue and script’s fiendishly funny sense of humor should override our instinct to look away. Casting for this dark material looks enticing, with many memorable roles here for our clients.