Free Slick by Daniel Price Page A

she entered the hotel. It was 11:30. Over the past two days, I’d gotten a total of five hours sleep. And yet I felt fine. I was content.
     
    ________________
     
    At 12:15, I reached Marina del Rey, where Ira greeted me from the dock of his floating home and sanctum. He looked like a proud slob in his untucked button-down shirt and black jeans. He carried a huge binder filled with data. He wasn’t big on self-maintenance, but he always kept his numbers pretty.
    “Don’t even tell me to change,” he said without greeting me. “If this guy’s going to write me off just because he doesn’t like my wardrobe—”
    “Relax. He wont care. He’ll just think you’re too brilliant to be stylish.”
    “I don’t even know why I have to go.”
    “Because it’s your project. I’m just helping you sell it.”
    He locked up the yacht. The Ishtar was a 1984 Gibson Executive, fifty feet long. Fiberglass hull. Flush-mounted exterior deck and 385 square feet of living space, including full galley, salon, and two tiny state rooms. He had bought it two years before, for seventy five thousand dollars. The seller claimed to have purchased it straight from Warren Beatty, who apparently had a sense of humor about his previous flops.
    I checked the story. It was crap. Warren may have a self-effacing wit, but he was never a yachtsman. Ira didn’t care. He just wanted respite from loud neighbors and evil landlords. He went through apartments like he went through jobs.
    Half an hour later, we arrived at Lulu’s, a casual eatery on Beverly Boulevard. We had a lunch date with Keith Ullman. He was extremely late, of course. In Los Angeles, tardiness was treated as a sign of status and chic. Not only was it standard not to offer an explanation, it was considered rude to ask. I reminded Ira several times to hold his tongue when Keith finally did arrive.
    “So what’s the name of this thing again?” he asked after fifteen minutes of idle banter.
    “Move My Cheese,” I replied, sending Keith into a fit of puzzled laughter. He was a stylish, silver-haired player, part of Hollywood’s old guard. He held a diploma from the Robert Evans school of name-dropping. His favorite story, told ad nauseam, was how he had personally led Universal’s effort to make Jaws the first summer blockbuster to premiere nationwide. Oh, he met resistance from every one, especially Dick Zanuck, blah blah blah. There was simply no way to turn off his audio commentary.
    As a silent partner in this burgeoning venture, I had advised Ira to act interested and to never ever disparage Spielberg in front of Keith. They were landsmen and (according to Keith) good friends. Ira, however, had harbored a mad-on for Spielberg ever since Jeff Goldblum’s offensively simplistic and incorrect portrayal of a chaotician in Jurassic Park . Whatever. All I cared about was selling Keith on Move My Cheese, a virtual paradigm that could revolutionize the movie industry. And that wasn’t just hype.
    “Explain to me again how it works,” said Keith, through a mouthful of Chinese chicken salad.
    Ira looked to me. His explanation usually caused massive bleeding from the ears.
    “It’s simple data-fusion software,” I told him. “You plug all your movies in to a calendar. All your competitor’s movies. You add the number of screens, and presto. The Cheese chews it up and spits out the projected box-office totals for everything.”
    Of course, it wasn’t really that simple. Keith was understandably skeptical. “Come on...”
    “We’ve been testing it for fifteen months now. It has eighty-two percent accuracy in predicting first-weekend grosses, and seventy one percent accuracy for final domestic.”
    “But not international,” said Keith.
    “No,” said Ira, annoyed. “It doesn’t give you a blow job either.”
    Keith laughed, assuming the joke was inclusive. “Then what the hell am I doing here?”
    I opened Ira’s binder to an earmarked page. “Look, while everyone