Chapter 1111: Forty Million
June 1997
The two weeks before it opened, he did whatever could be done from a chair.
They brought a microphone out on a boom stand and hung it over the bed, and he cut the radio spots himself. Thirty seconds and sixty, urban format, a hundred and ninety stations.
The sixty took all afternoon, because the last four words had to land on the beat and he wouldn't let the engineer move the beat.
"Look, I can slide the bed two frames and nobody on earth is going to—"
"I'll hear it. The kids in the car on Seventy-Ninth will hear it. You slide that bed and it sounds like a Pepsi ad. Run it again."
The engineer had his hand on the fader and took it off. "It's your lungs, man."
Eventually Alex had to stop for a while, breathing like he'd run a mile, and the engineer sat out in the hallway with his headphones round his neck and told Tony that he'd worked with Prince and Prince was easier.
Then the telephone, with Yeremov's booking list on the blanket. A man in Kansas City who had nine screens across three towns and had put the picture in one of them.
"It's a vampire movie," the booker said. "With a rapper's money in it. What do you want from me?"
Outside the comic shops nobody had heard of Blade, and Marvel's name on a movie had mostly meant cheap flops.
"It's my face on the one-sheet, it's the widest print we've ever paid for, and you've got it in your smallest house!"
The booker had the grid in front of him, two weeks of it in pencil. "I've got Men in Black coming on the second, son."
Men in Black was Sony's big Fourth of July picture, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones in black suits chasing aliens around New York. Will Smith had blown up the White House in Independence Day the summer before, the biggest movie of 1996, and every theater owner in the country had been waiting for his next one since.
"Give me three screens for two weeks and I'll eat the guarantee on the second one."
He got two, after a long haggle over the guarantee, and at the end of it the man asked him, kindly, how he was feeling.
A theater owner didn't care what a picture was about. He cared what each of his screens made per seat per showing, and every Wednesday he shuffled the titles between his houses. The booker in Kansas City had been doing it since before Alex was born.
He put the phone down and told his wife he'd just been shouted at by a man who couldn't raise his voice, that he'd given him the two screens, and that he didn't completely know why.
Alex turned down a dozen interviews and gave one, by telephone, to a morning show that had kept playing his records the whole time he was under.
The week before, it had gone like this.
Sunday. Compaq's people came and left with a handshake and a press release, and by evening the trade had it: Compaq to continue using 3dfx in new systems.
Monday. Icahn Capital, through a spokesman, called on the SEC to look into trading in 3dfx. The SEC, through a spokesman, said it didn't comment on ongoing matters. 3dfx opened at thirty-four and closed at thirty-eight.
Tuesday. A columnist at the Journal called him the kneeling chairman for the second time and suggested that somebody who'd woken up from a coma two weeks ago and flown to Tokyo to cry in public might not be the right man to run a semiconductor company.
Alex had Sloane send the columnist a very good bottle of sake with a note that said Thank you for the coverage. The columnist kept the bottle, showed the note around the newsroom, and wrote about something else the next week.
Wednesday, the Preston Gates lawyers walked in with a box.
"From McGill and Hamlin," the senior one said. "Or what's left of them. Every file, in order, with an index she typed herself. Hand-delivered to our office at ten past eight this morning by a Ms. Wexler, along with the executed releases signed by both partners, a wire confirmation, and a schedule of the accounts that haven't unwound yet."
Sloane was on her feet before the box was even opened. "How much?"
"Thirty-eight million cleared as of this morning, into the Northern Trust account, no conditions attached. Another fourteen when the Delaware and Cayman accounts unwind, which she puts at the end of the month." He turned a page. "That's fifty-two in total, against the fifty-nine we estimate was taken. The difference is Icahn's commission and whatever the two of them have already spent."
"Well, that's better than—" Sloane began.
"That's what I asked for. Seven million short, and I'll eat it, because I'm not paying lawyers two years to chase seven million." Sloane squeezed his shoulder hard enough to hurt, and grinned, and didn't let go. Alex looked at the box. It was a banker's box, taped once, with a label on the end in small square capitals. "Did she say anything?"
"She said Mr. McGill was, and I'm quoting, 'relieved to have it done.' And she asked whether the offer of a telephone number still stood."
"Jimmy!"
Jimmy came down the stairs at a run, in a shirt that actually fit him now. "Call her. Give her Alicia's number," Alex said.
Jimmy had been carrying the number around in his wallet for days. "What, now?"
"Now. And take her to dinner. Sloane'll give you the card."
"Somewhere nice," Sloane said. "Not a hot dog stand, Jimmy. I'll know."
"Yes, ma'am! I'm going right now."
Blade opened on the Friday. Saturday night the tracking had it at forty million for the weekend, first place.
Yeremov had spent the evening in an office in Century City with three telephones, a fax machine and a newspaper he hadn't read since Thursday, and he'd gone out into the corridor more than once to smoke by the fire door where nobody could see him.
He called at ten-thirty Chicago time, sounding like he'd been running.
Forty million was a monster number for any opening. Fewer than a dozen pictures had ever done better, and the record was The Lost World over Memorial Day, seventy-two million in three days, with Spielberg and dinosaurs behind it.
Blade had cost forty million dollars to make, put up by A+ Film Studio and Kathleen Kennedy's KM Films. Universal was distributing it, and Universal had spent about twenty million more on prints and advertising to open it on twenty-seven hundred screens. Of the forty million the theaters took in that weekend, roughly twenty-six would come back to Universal as film rental once the theaters settled up. Universal took its distribution fee and its advertising money back off the top, and everything after that went to the two producers. One weekend had covered the advertising and more.
"Forty! Forty, boss! Number one, twenty-seven hundred screens, and the Friday number alone was fourteen. And the exits are— okay, the critics are killing it, Ebert gave it two stars and the Times called it noise, but the exits are—"
"Good. Now hold the screens."
"Hold them how? Men in Black opens a week from Wednesday, wide, on more screens than we have, and every exhibitor I've talked to is already planning to bump us to the small houses!"
"I know what opens on the second. Call every booker on that list yourself. Anybody who keeps us in the big house through the third weekend gets five more points on the split for the third. Put it in writing."
The split was how the ticket money got divided between the studio and the theater. In a picture's first weeks the distributor took the lion's share, often seventy percent or more, and the theater's cut grew the longer it kept the film. Five more points to the theater in week three came straight out of A+'s share.
The exits Yeremov kept trying to talk about were the exit polls, cards handed to audiences on the way out. A research outfit called CinemaScore graded opening-night crowds from A to F, and a good grade meant people would tell their friends.
"Five points? Boss, that's—"
"That's cheaper than losing the screens. Twenty-seven hundred screens, and if half of them bump us to the shoebox houses for Men in Black we lose ten million in the third weekend. Five points on the third week is maybe two. Do it."
"Okay. Okay. Boss, uh — one more thing. Cameron."
Alex shut his eyes. "Let me guess. He's over the budget again."
"Two hundred million now, maybe more. The sinking sequence, the effects houses, they're working weekends. He wants a letter from you to Chernin saying A+ won't complain about the new budget, in the trades or anywhere."
"Give him whatever he asks for." He shifted the phone. "Don't call Fox. I'll be out there in September."
Silence on the line. "Boss. It's a boat. It's a three-hour movie about a boat everybody already knows sinks."
"And Blade's a vampire movie with a rapper's money in it. How'd that go?"
"...Forty million."
"Give him the letter."
It wasn't A+'s money anyway. Under the contract Fox started the picture and Fox carried the overruns. What Cameron wanted from A+ was a letter to Chernin saying the partner with sixty million in wasn't going to scream about the budget in the trades or ask for anything back. The letter cost nothing, and Fox kept track of which partners signed letters like that and which didn't.
Back in Chicago, long before anybody shot him, he'd had a Revelation for a different picture: Catch Me If You Can, the version Spielberg would make in 2002, with Leonardo DiCaprio older and sharper as Frank Abagnale and carrying two hours and twenty minutes on his own face against Tom Hanks. Alex had made his own Catch Me If You Can in 1995, with Jared Leto in the lead and John Malkovich as the FBI man, because Leo had been booked solid. But he'd watched that kid hold a whole picture, and Cameron had built a three-hour love story around the same kid. That was the sixty million. It was a judgment, he'd made it with his eyes open, and on a night like this it didn't feel like much. There was no way to explain any of that to Yeremov at ten-thirty at night.
"Whatever you say. I'll write the letter myself so nobody sees my hands shaking," Yeremov said.
"And hold the screens. I mean it, Yeremov, go wake up Kansas City," Alex said, and hung up.
Halle stayed on for Saturday. She'd come back to the house with him after the premiere the night before, with a driver and a bag, and this morning she kissed Aunt Susie in the kitchen, asked Tony about his knee and got the whole saga, with the MRI.
Then she came up the stairs to the rehab room, where Deneen, who didn't care who Alex was and had never cared who Halle Berry was either, had him lifting a two-pound weight.
"Well, well," she said from the doorway. "Look at you."
He had the two-pound weight in the bad hand and didn't stop lifting it. "Look at me what? Two pounds. I'm a monster."
"You're a noodle, baby. Ha."
She came and sat on the edge of the massage table and watched him do three more. Deneen glanced at her once and went on counting.
"I called and called, you know. I called Sloane's own line. I think she hates me now."
"She doesn't hate you. She's jealous of your legs."
"And you didn't call me back."
"I was in Tokyo, crying on television."
"Oh, I saw. You cried on television, baby."
"Half of Japan saw."
"And then your little chip company went from nine to thirty-six in one afternoon. It was on the TV in the makeup trailer. The makeup girl said, isn't that the guy who cried? And I said, that's the guy, honey, and he owes me a phone call." She narrowed her eyes at him. "Thirty-six. Did you know it was going to do that?"
"I bought it because it was cheap."
"You bought it because you bowed." Halle laughed. "Next time you're going to bow to somebody, call me first. I want to buy whatever it is before you get down there."
She reached over, took the two-pound weight out of his hand, looked at it and put it back. "Did you mean it?"
"About half of it."
"Hm." She looked at the window a while. "When you were under — they said on the news you might have been hearing people the whole time. Was that true?"
The window was open and somebody on the lawn was dragging a hose over gravel. "Some of it."
"I came in January. They let me in for ten minutes and I talked the whole ten. Did you hear me?"
He didn't answer that one.
"Okay, that's a no. Good. I said some embarrassing things," Halle said. "You missed a lot. They gave McVeigh the death penalty last week, the Oklahoma City bomber. Everybody in the makeup trailer argued about it for days."
The therapist finished counting and left them. Halle swung her feet up onto the table beside him. She'd kicked her shoes off somewhere between the stairs and here.
She took his wrist, turned it over and looked at the inside of his arm, at the bruises where the IV lines had gone in and out. Then she put it down again. "You've been up since five."
"How do you know that?"
"The coffee pot's been emptied twice." She tipped her head at the window. "Two men on the lawn, a man downstairs in front of eight screens who hasn't said a word all night, an old man asleep in a chair in the hall with his shoes on. So what are you actually doing at five in the morning? Because don't tell me it's rehab."
He watched the two men cross the lawn and didn't look at her while he said it. "It's for the arm."
"Uh-huh. Sure it is."
She let it go. She'd known him since 1990, long enough to know that if she left a thing alone, it usually came back on its own.
He turned his head and looked at her, sitting there on the massage table with her bare feet up and her hair pulled back.
"All these years," he said, "and they still cast you as somebody's girlfriend."
She'd been offered a girlfriend part in April and another one in May, and she'd taken the May one. "Don't start with me. The May one pays for the new kitchen."
"I'm just saying you're better than that."
"You're just saying, from a bed, holding a two-pound weight. Hahaha!" She flicked his wrist with one finger. "Why are you looking at me like that? You've got a face like you just ate something."
"Next time somebody offers you a woman with a mouth on her, take it. Cut your fee if you have to."
"Who's offering me that? Name me one person in this town who's offering me that. Go on, I'll wait."
"Nobody. So say no to the girlfriends and let me go find you the crazy one."
"You haven't even seen a script. There isn't a script, baby."
Her hand was flat on the table beside his knee and stayed there. "Why are you so sure I'd be any good at it?"
"I know you. You're funny and you're angry, and nobody in this town lets you be either one. I'd let you. Give me a year and a picture and I'd let you."
"You've lost your mind, you know that? They took a bullet out of your ass and your brain came with it."
"Mimi says the same thing."
She was quiet a moment. Then she leaned down and kissed him, not gently, and sat back up. "I'm staying the weekend. Sherilyn knows." She stood. "Guest room. I'm not sleeping in here with that liniment."
"You asked Sherilyn? Or told her?"
"I asked her. Standing up, in her own kitchen, in front of the nanny, and I called her Ms. Fenn." Halle put a shoe on. "She said of course and offered me the green one, which is at the other end of the house and has a bathroom you have to go outside to get to."
"Oh, she's good. What did you say?"
"I said the blue one, thank you very much." The other shoe. "I'm not going to be rude to a woman with a two-week-old baby. But I'm also not sleeping in a shed."
"It doesn't matter what room you're in. I can't even get down a hallway yet."
"Next Friday, the therapist said." Halle picked up her bag. And at the door, without turning round: "Eat something. You haven't had a thing today and your wrist's the size of my thumb."
She didn't wait for next Friday.
Eleven o'clock. Dark hallway. She came in on bare feet with a plate in her hand, held out in front of her.
"Eat. Don't argue with me."
"Halle, it's eleven o'clock at night—"
"There's a whole egg in this. Your wrist looks like a chicken bone and I am not going to sit here and watch a grown man—"
"Put it down and come here."
She narrowed her eyes at him. The plate went on the nightstand. She also swept Yeremov's booking papers off the blanket onto the floor. "Kansas City can wait till Tuesday."
"Kansas City gave me two screens, you know. I had to beg."
"Then Kansas City can beg for once."
[Spicy scene: Alex and Halle — the Highland Park bedroom, eleven at night, the egg plate on the nightstand]
She didn't give him a single instruction the rest of the night, which for Halle Berry was a personal record. He apologized for the leg once.
"One more word about that leg," she said, "and I'm sleeping in the shed."
At four in the morning she sat him up and made him eat the egg anyway.
At eight they hung the boom mike over the bed again and he nailed the sixty on the second take. The engineer looked at him, looked at the guest room door, and decided he was being paid by the hour to hear the take and nothing else. "That's the one. Don't touch it."
In the morning the guest room's bed was made. It had never been unmade. Deneen stripped it anyway and didn't tell anybody.