Hollywood is an All Volunteer Army by Steven Paul Leiva Page A

Reflex wanted me to lunge out to pull it back, but I conquered Reflex, which is a dark and impulsive god.
    ~ * ~
    Several weeks passed during which I did not dream or think of Bea Cherbourg. Nor did I give any thought to the fact that I wasn’t dreaming or thinking of her. I forgot the matter.
    A few small commissions came our way. The most interesting one was from Bill Baker, a film producer who had been hoping to direct his first feature. He had line produced the last three pictures of Joe Waugh, a current hot one in Hollywood, the last two films being the first two of a planned fantasy trilogy. Waugh had directed the first, he had turned over the reins to another director for the second, and had promised Baker the third. Although Waugh was the acknowledged genius of these high box-office grossing films, much of their story and elemental details came from creative jam sessions Waugh and Baker had had when they were near nobodies working on their first film together: a low budget road picture that became a sleeper hit. Baker felt that being able to direct the third film was his justified reward, but, unfortunately, the second film had gone way over budget, mainly due to the demands of the director, but Waugh blamed Baker. As Waugh was himself financing the second film out of the profits of the first, that blame carried weight. Waugh decided to direct the third film. Baker was devastated, but he swallowed his pride—or, rather, squirreled it away in his cheek—and begged to, at least, stay on as the producer. Waugh agreed and preproduction began for a shoot that would spend 16 weeks in the Brazilian rain forest, which was to double for the fantasy realm of Thunnorak. That’s when Baker decided to find the Fixxer. He had heard of me, but wasn’t sure I really existed. He decided to believe. It was important to him to believe. It took him eight weeks of searching before someone clued him in to Norton Macbeth.
    Baker explained everything to me in a meeting Norton arranged at the Children’s Museum in Downtown Los Angeles. This was three days before the production was to move to Brazil. I knew a lot about Waugh. Anybody who had become as famous as him, I get to know a lot about. I immediately told Baker that I could, for a price, fix his problem. That by the time he left for Brazil in three days, he would be the director of the film.
    The solution was simple. I didn’t even have to go into the computer database. It had been reported that Waugh never made a move without consulting Mary Anne Richardson, the all-American homemaker psychic/astrologer who worked out of her house in the Encino Hills, and had quite a list of “A” talent clients, who had all spread the word about her remarkable, natural gifts. This is not unusual in Hollywood, it is, indeed, far too usual, but such Hollywood normality was useful if you knew how to take advantage of it—and I did. For I happened to know that Mary Anne Richardson of Encino started life as Clara Brown of Southampton, England. She left her native land ten years before when her New Jesus evangelical message wasn’t really bringing in enough sucker donations there to make it pay. So she came to America for the fruitful fields of the local suckers she had always heard about. Unfortunately, she found a preponderance of evangelicals running around sucking on the suckers. Too crowded. She tried to make ends meet by running a pyramid scam. Unfortunately the ends met in prison for eighteen months, where she picked up various American accents. Looking for a new gig, once she was out of prison, she had a revelation standing in a supermarket checkout line. She saw the stars—the ones in the zodiac and the ones on the big and small screens. She saw them merging under the protection of a spreading tabloid banner headline. Just converge the two star groups , she thought, and let the brilliance illuminate the path to gold . It worked. Another immigrant made