Beverly Hills Is Burning: A Rail Black Novel Read online

  BOOKS BY NEIL RUSSELL

  Rail Black Novels

  Beverly Hills is Burning

  Wildcase

  City of War

  Non-Fiction

  Can I Still Kiss You? Answering Your Children’s

  Questions about Cancer

  NEIL RUSSELL

  BEVERLY HILLS IS BURNING

  A RAIL BLACK NOVEL

  ROTHINGTON HOUSE

  An Imprint of Site 85 Productions

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ROTHINGTON HOUSE

  An Imprint of Site 85 Productions, Inc.

  PO Box 10509

  Beverly Hills, CA 90213

  Copyright 2014 © by Neil Russell

  ISBN 978-0-9915991-0-3

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Rothington House, an Imprint of Site 85 Productions.

  First Rothington House printing: March, 2014*

  Rothington House is an Imprint of Site 85 Productions, Inc. Trademark application pending.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  For more Neil Russell books visit the World Wide Web at www.Neil-Russell.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is dedicated to my sons, Andrew and Trevor.

  It’s hard to believe your childhood is in the rearview mirror.

  I’m proud of the men you’ve become, but I sure do miss those two tireless, always laughing, little boys.

  And without you, this novel would never have reached publication.

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  I was born into a theatre-owning family that goes back to my grandfather and sawdust-floor nickelodeons. In our house, it was always theatre, not theater, and my birth was announced from the stage of one by Desi Arnaz who was just a bandleader then.

  Desi and my impresario father had spent the previous night singing and tap dancing their way through after-hours clubs, then at sunrise, still clad in tuxedos and bearing champagne, they arrived at the hospital where my mother lay awaiting her call to the delivery room. I’m told the Sisters of Mercy (the nuns, not the rock band) loved the hallway show, and the monsignor came by for an autograph and a glass of bubbly. Family legend has it my mother held her applause.

  Conversations around our dinner table were about grosses, holdovers and which stars were touring and might be coming to dinner. From the time I was old enough to sit upright, I saw every motion picture released, whether in a conventional theatre, drive-in, screening room or someone’s home. Looking back, I can’t believe how lucky I was. I loved everything about the movies and the dark, smoky rooms where grizzled movie men ran new pictures and made sarcastic remarks far funnier than anything onscreen. Those experiences turned out to be more important to my future than my college degree.

  As a kid, I met many of the original moguls: Zanuck, Zukor, Cohn, Goldwyn, two Warners and both Schencks. (Regrettably, I never got to meet Mr. Mayer.) Walt Disney used to send birthday presents to my sister and me. I also met some of the major producers and directors of the time: Howard Hawks, Sam Spiegel, Otto Preminger, Stanley Kramer, Hal Wallis and a slew of others. What struck me was that the studio bosses and the moviemakers spoke more about material and rights than about stars.

  I have worked for some exceptional people. Frank Yablans and Barry Diller were the smartest and toughest. Kirk Kerkorian, the shrewdest. Mario Kassar, the most creative. Andy Vajna, the most no-nonsense. Then there was David Begelman… the smoothest, but the most deeply flawed.

  I have also had the privilege of negotiating against some of the brightest minds in the business and working alongside exceptional talents. Others I got to watch from a good seat. One of those was Jeffrey Katzenberg. Jeffrey arrived at Paramount when he was twenty-five. I had been there three years and was twenty-seven. Jeffrey was a young assistant to the president in New York, and I was Chicago branch manager. I considered myself a wily veteran and very smart. A couple of months later, Jeffrey knew more than most of the people running the place. What he subsequently did at Disney and Dreamworks has earned him a worthy place in the history of Hollywood. In another time, he would have been the equal of Mayer.

  Here is probably a good place to explain how the people who run the industry talk—other than with considerable profanity and irreverence. First, unless you’re talking about celluloid, the word film belongs to critics, college professors, artists and those pretending to be any of the three. The correct term is motion picture or just picture. Movie will do. Film business is fine, but don’t forget the business.

  Second, the guys who bust exhibitor (theatre owner) balls getting money in the door so everybody from the gate guards to the stars to the stockholders get paid are called motion picture distributors. And if you’re one of the respected ones, they call you a film man—not for what’s on the screen, but for the crap that’s in the can. You hustle goods, not art.

  Third, theatre owners and film men don’t give two hoots in hell about producers, directors, actors or studio heads. As far as they’re concerned, exhibitors and distributors are the only constant in the business, because, going back to cavemen, kings and consorts come and go, but nobody screws with the guys who bring home the meat.

  Fourth, a greenlight is the Holy Grail of the movie business. It comes when a suitable screenplay and all of the difficult personalities and rampant egos that have been fighting for months pretend to be collaborative long enough for somebody to write a check. Immediately afterward, the real ugliness begins.

  Fifth, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked the difference between a producer and a director—or how often I’ve seen the terms misused in print. In theory, it’s simple. Producers are businessmen; directors are talent. One makes deals and finds money; the other spends it.

  From the inception of a project until greenlight, the producer is mostly in charge. While unexposed film is spewing through a camera, the director is. A producer sees this transfer of power as passing a vial of nitroglycerin to a guy he doesn’t trust then having to stand next to him while he ignores all the safety precautions they agreed upon. In process, these are seldom backslapping relationships.

  Now, here’s where it gets tricky. Producers work for somebody else. Executives. Those names rarely go across a screen, but they control the entire process because their companies own the nitro. And they’re just as terrified of what the director is about to do with it as the producer is.

  Motion pictures are financed by borrowing. Studios do this on the basis of their assets, which are usually their film libraries. Each of the majors owns several thousand titles, but only a few hundred drive the revenue train. They also own television series, which can be wildly more valuable, especially dramas with stand-alone episodes (CSI, worth a fortune; Lost, pennies) and sitcoms that attract young adult demographics. Reality shows are crack cocaine. Low cost, immediate high and no residual value, so tomorrow, you have to do it all over again.

  When I left theatres to join Paramount, the term intellectual property was not in common usage, but because of my upbringing, I knew it was the lifeblood of the business. (I actually bought my first IP while I was in college.) Later, I spent every free moment poring through the archives of Paramount and each subsequent studio at which I worked (Columbia, MGM, United Artists,
Carolco) reading contracts and picture P&Ls. For better or worse, I can tell you Gable’s Mogambo location package—which is interesting but not important—and the James Bond deal between the Broccolis and United Artists—which is both interesting and important. (Broke or not, Harry Saltzman should never have sold.)

  Eventually, I began buying IPs for studios and later for myself. In the past three decades, I have purchased hundreds, if not thousands, including the life story rights of commandos flying out of a hot zone (bought while they were still on the plane), bestsellers by world-class authors and manuscripts from first-timers. I have also acquired television formats, trademarks, song and magazine titles, documents found by a researcher working inside an Iron Curtain secret police archive—a phone connection I’m sure awakened the night shift at the NSA—and scores of stories from the victims of crimes. (I don’t buy rights from criminals.)

  I’ve purchased large and small movie libraries to obtain television and remake rights and commissioned reporters, private investigators, civil servants, housewives and taxi drivers to chase IPs I thought would make good filmed entertainment or entertainment brands. Sometimes, I picked right.

  Once, I also audaciously attempted to buy a portion of a major studio’s IPs. Since I was an executive at the studio at the time, this did not have a happy ending in dealmaking or my future with the company. It did, however, change the trajectory of my career beyond anything I could have blueprinted. Sometimes you can fill an inside straight.

  Hollywood is always changing, yet always the same. And it is always seemingly on the verge of disappearing because of some new technology, lack of money or radical shift in audience behavior. Not once in all my years in the business have I ever sat in a meeting where the collective opinion about the industry was upbeat. It’s always doom and gloom. I think this insecurity is why we adapt so quickly. If the wildebeests move to new grazing lands, it’s in our interest to already be there, waiting.

  Lately, the fanboy surge has sidelined many previously highly-regarded filmmakers. Not since the conversion from silents to sound have so many commercial producers, directors and writers been involuntarily “aged out” of the mainstream. And United Artists, once the place where the best from all creative walks could turn, is only a hollow logo inside a company that in the past twenty years has had more owners than hits. Yet, last year, there were just as many pictures made, grosses were up, and though I am no longer privy to internal studio financials, I am certain every single company raised the book value of its library. Hollywood is alive and well. It’s not going anywhere.

  But for all that’s written about the entertainment business, very little of how it really works is ever seen by those not in it. The following novel may pull back the curtain a little. It is fiction, of course, but people in the industry will have little trouble recognizing the machinery. And if there is one thing Hollywood knows how to do better than make movies, it is to live lives as extraordinary and dramatic as its pictures.

  This book is not for the timid. It contains raw language, graphic violence and sex—the kind, that as a kid, you read under the covers with a flashlight. All the things that have been a part of books—and movies—from the beginning. And always will be.

  However, society lurches, slides and grinds its way through its relationship with fiction, so I offer my thanks to Harold Robbins and his seminal lawsuit for making it possible for this story and so many others to appear in print.

  Neil Russell

  Beverly Hills, CA

  The biggest sin in life is to have leverage and not use it.

  Frank Yablans, 1972

  President, Paramount Pictures

  CHAPTER ONE

  Diamonds and Parachutes

  It was just after midnight when the girl in the blue diamond necklace fell out of the sky.

  I was sitting on the flybridge of my Benetti, seven miles off the ritzy hills of Newport Coast, drifting without power on a dead calm, starlit sea. Sam Cooke’s “Another Saturday Night” was adding just the right smoothness to a perfect California evening, while I put a dent in a tall Japanese beer and a good cigar.

  After a trying few weeks among my land-dwelling brethren, I was enjoying a meteor shower and looking forward to a long weekend of snagging fish without enough IQ to avoid the world’s worst angler. Mostly, though, I just wanted to be alone. Not that I don’t revere my fellow man, just that I hadn’t seen the best of him lately—with the exception of Geraldo, the Dolphin Bay Yacht Club bartender, who had packed my cooler with 22-oz cans of iced Sapporo Reserve.

  A 102-foot cruiser is not a one-person boat, however, I grew up around much larger ones and can handle the Sanrevelle alone when I need to. She’d been custom-built for a well-known, NBA big man who was having some acute alimony trouble, and when you’re my size and find a doorway you don’t bang your forehead against, you buy what’s around it. Tonight, the ocean was so serene a four-year-old could have run something twice her size.

  I was just about to open another Sapporo when I heard the unmistakable, firecracker-like staccato of popping nylon. The sound every special operator and skydiver dreads. The one a parachute makes when it’s not all the way open.

  I was running dark except for emergency spots at the bow and stern, but when the woman rushed past me, she was so close I could see her tight black dress was ripped up the side, and she was wearing only one silver high heel. You couldn’t miss the necklace either, but flashy as it was, the terror in her eyes outshone it.

  I also recognized its wearer. Valentine Jones, the movie star, who I’d just seen on some awards show, sullenly applauding whoever had beaten her for Best Actress. I couldn’t remember the name of her picture only that it wasn’t one of the smash-and-crash, special effects flicks she was known for, but something arty that was supposed to make this nomination THE ONE. Luckily for the tabloids, she’d missed again and treated them to turning over a table and pulling the winner’s hair at some fashion magazine’s after-party.

  Then Miss Jones was gone in a whoosh of spray, her tangled orange and green chute following her into the deep.

  I hadn’t heard a plane, but a couple of minutes earlier, there’d been a noticeable splash in the distance off my starboard side. I’d assumed it was a sounding gray whale. Maybe not.

  I probably should have climbed down to the deck before diving in, but instinct took over, and I grabbed a pocket-sized Maglite off the chart table and went. It seemed like a week before I hit the water, then, adrenaline notwithstanding, the shock of the cold Pacific wrenched away my beer glow and reactivated the Delta Force part of my brain.

  The first rule of sea rescue is to never leave an untended boat without a static line. The second is to angle away from an emergency until you can assess the situation. I ignored the first because there wasn’t time. I remembered the second when my dive carried me into the chute’s rigging, and I became ensnared like a tuna.

  Fortunately, the Mag-Lite came on underwater, and though it only took a few seconds to untangle myself, they were precious seconds of breath I wouldn’t get back. I kicked hard downward and quickly came to the girl. She was fighting like a wildcat, which was accomplishing nothing, but there was no getting her back from blind panic.

  I came in from behind, grabbed the right side of her slender neck and squeezed my fingers tight. Sleeper holds are more effective if you use a forearm, but despite the disparity in our sizes, I didn’t want to get into a wrestling match. Powerful men have lost their lives underestimating the hysteria-induced strength of smaller victims. Miss Jones was at the point where she had no idea my hand was even there, and I got a good enough grip on her carotid that ten seconds later, her head lolled, and I could unclasp the harness.

  As I did, she slipped out of my grasp, and I had to grab her by the hair, which I used to pull her upward behind me. The drag from the chute had kept her from sinking like a stone, but with Murphy’s Law timing, the canopy had now opened fully, and without her weight, it was spreading with the
current. I had to swim laterally to escape being bundled into it, which not only took me further from the Sanrevelle but used up the rest of my oxygen.

  By the time I broke the surface, I was choking seawater, and it took several seconds for the pulsating red flashes behind my eyes to fade. I used to do this kind of thing for a living, and I’m still in very good shape, but I was suddenly conscious of no longer being twenty-five.

  Miss Jones had a heartbeat, but she had stopped breathing. I put her on her back and turned her chin toward me. After checking her throat for obstructions, I squeezed her nose shut, clamped my mouth over hers and blew a long breath into her lungs. I then drove my open palm up under her ribcage—not textbook and not recommended, but when time is critical, sometimes effective.

  I had barely disengaged when she ejected something sickeningly sweet and rancid. Jagerbombs was my guess, laced with stomach acid. Tomorrow, if she survived, her head wouldn’t be anyplace you’d want to visit.

  Then, without warning, she raked my face with her nails and sank her teeth into my shoulder. When I tried to push her away, one of her thrashing knees caught me in the solar plexus and hurt like hell. Worse, I dropped the Mag-Lite. I grunted something unintelligible, released her and dove after the light.