Free What Movies Made Me Do by Susan Braudy

the startled salesman. “Jack had me on the phone for hours,” he said proudly. “Jack has had it with her. And what Jack wants, Jack gets.”
    He spotted a bigger black watch in the case. “That’s it,” he said. My mind whirled. If he flew to Israel, he’d miss his fancy black-tie five-hundred-dollars-a-plate dinner where they were honoring him in two days as humanitarian of the year.
    “What’s Jack’s problem?” I asked crisply.
    “She’s toying with him, making him stand by while she shoots the baby getting circumcised.” He slapped his American Express card on the counter. I bet he’d return this watch. He had two just like it.
    “Then Jack confronts her and she walks off to sulk. She’s throwing sixty thousand dollars of my money down the toilet every day.”
    “Michael, he’s fine, I spoke to him, it’s under control.”
    He cracked the knuckles of both hands. “You are in defiance of your studio. You have lost touch with your picture.”
    “She’ll be back,” I said. “I know her as well as I know myself.”
    “She is back.” He clenched his teeth. He smoothed his flattened hair; not a strand moved. “You don’t know what the hell is going on. Jack called me an hour ago. He told me she limped back into camp with a very sore hip.”
    He had me there.
    He extended his wrist, admiring the new black watch. Then he counted my offenses on his fingers. “She ran away, you failed to report it, she’s back and you don’t know it. Not much of a supervising executive.”
    I tried to look smug while I lied. “Oh, don’t be silly, I knew exactly where she was. Nobody disappeared. There was nothing to tell you. She went to an artists’ retreat near the King David Hotel to write a few more women into the script.”
    I put on my sunglasses to hide the fright in my eyes.
    “Don’t cry.” He shook his head. “This is why I don’t work with women.”
    I whipped off the sunglasses. “I have nothing to cry about.”
    He slipped his American Express card into his lizard wallet. “I’m flying over to fire her. She’s a million over budget, she’s shot two hundred thousand feet, and she’s got only half the film in the can.” He was spitting his
t
’s like little threats. “She keeps a fucking superstar waiting for weeks and refuses to shoot his face.”
    “Michael, I see dailies, they’re great. Jack’s just frightened because he’s stretching as an artist.”
    “You forced this project on me,” he said, putting a full second of time between each word. “You got the idea, you pushed your pal Anita into it, you never thought about it from the studio’s position. You got too much ego in it. Anita never directed a big star before—and I warned you, I never wanted to make this film.”
    “You never want to make any film,” I snapped.
    “You’re out of line,” he said coolly. “I’d make
The Exorcist
tomorrow.”
    “They already made it, and they made the money too.”
    He marched for the door, a little shopping bag over one wrist. “I’m closing her down,” he told me over his shoulder. “Jack won’t work with her, he’s the money. I’m not subsidizingthe Sistine Chapel. All I want is a commercial movie, and she’s gone nuts.”
    I caught up with him at the revolving door. “Who’s slated to take over?”
    “Sam Falco.”
    I couldn’t believe it. “He’s all wrong!” I cried. “He’ll make it a horror film with everybody good or evil. He has a fundamentalist view of the Bible. It’ll cost a fortune, he’ll reshoot everything bloody, and he’s even anti-Semitic.”
    “We shook hands on it,” Michael said.
    “Is he signed?” I gulped.
    “Yeah.”
    But I saw the nervous dance of his pupils. He was lying. He couldn’t move that fast. My mind jumped ahead. Without Anita nobody needed me. Michael would fire me to prove to his boss he’d eliminated the source of his problems. He’d also be showing Jack Hanscomb things were going his way. The movie would never